Did you know that psychiatry is actually a form of marketing?
When developing a strategic marketing strategy for your professional services firm, it’s important to think like a shrink – or so points out Melissa Karnaze in her recent Copyblogger post:
“Psychotherapy, a discipline intended to help people, is actually a form of marketing…American psychiatrist Jerome Frank put it eloquently over forty years ago: psychotherapy is the art of Persuasion and Healing…
To market like a psychotherapist, you can start with these five basic steps:
- Don’t think in simplistic terms of selling products or services. Find the ideas and attitudesthat you are really trying to sell. You’re not manipulating people to buy; you’re presenting them with ideas and attitudes that they can choose to adopt.
- Before you can persuade, you have to thoroughly understand your “patient.” With the web at your fingertips, you can conduct your own polls, take Twitter’s pulse, or use web analytics to study your traffic. Thoughtful research helps you to be more empathetic toward your prospects, because you listen to and care about their concerns, questions, and interests.
- Be mindful of the professional literature in your field. Psychotherapists go through years of professional training to learn the best-respected theories and modalities. Make an ongoing study of the best research and thinking on persuasion.
- Instead of viewing your work as selling or marketing, see it for what it is: a comfortable conversation on a couch, about topics that are important to everyday people.
- Share the ideas and attitudes that benefit your customers. Psychotherapists market “welfare” emotions because they want people to lead happier, more effective lives. Learn to market the ideas that you see helping your customers do the same.” read entire post here.
Susan Martin, Marketing Coaching
