It’s no secret that CAM practitioners, on average, aren’t keen on marketing. It isn’t something most students desire (or get) training in during school, and as practitioners, there’s a sense that marketing is just a little bit dirty – that it’s the sleazy side of business that simply must be done to get ahead.

It ain’t true. Welcome to marketing with integrity, where everyone feels good about marketing and more people get healthier.

What Is Marketing With Integrity?
Marketing with integrity is the practice of promoting and selling products and services in a manner that raises the level of professionalism of your practice, fosters increased mutual respect between you and your clients, and allows you to match your marketing efforts with your personal and business beliefs.

In short, it’s marketing that everyone feels good about.

It’s also marketing that works better. Before we dive into how it works, here are a few reasons to consider it.

Reasons to Market With Integrity

It raises the level of professionalism for you and the industry
CAM is an extraordinarily diverse profession. As such, there are no industry standards, no single governing body, and no consistent regulations. This creates a seemingly never-ending struggle for acceptance by the larger population who has yet to embrace holistic practices. By marketing with integrity, you help raise the level of professionalism for the whole industry as well as your practice. That’s something that everyone can benefit from.

Reach more people
Marketing with integrity will help you reach new segments of the market that may have previously ignored your efforts. It helps to create a bigger pie, as opposed to slicing up the existing pie into smaller and smaller pieces to share with increasing competition. That brings new faces into your practice, and lets you help people you may never have helped before. Needless to say, more clients tend to create more revenue, too.

You’ll enjoy it
Marketing with integrity is about aligning with the vision for your business, and with your personal values. By doing that, you’ll create an environment in which marketing becomes something you can enjoy and look forward too. This creates a great positive cycle of better marketing, better results, even better marketing, even better results, and so on.

Make price changes more easily
If you’d like to change your prices, marketing with integrity will help. It changes the perceived level of quality of your practice, allowing price changes to be more readily accepted. If you’re competing on lower prices, it’ll help that too.

Principles of Marketing With Integrity

Clarify your vision and align your marketing
Perhaps the biggest marketing challenge for alternative health practitioners is that they’re not aligned with their marketing. You may perceive yourself as a smart, professional chiropractor, but you perceive marketing as lowbrow, sleazy and dumb. You may think of your acupuncture office as relaxing and soothing, but you have loud, busy advertising materials. With this kind of misalignment, you’ll never be terribly inspired by, or successful in, your marketing efforts.

Clarify the vision for your practice. What’s your unique offering? Are you a high-end boutique practice, or a volume business with lower prices? Are you at the fringes of holistic medicine, or integrating allopathic and alternative medicine in one place? What makes you different from other practitioners? Is it the atmosphere? The service? The price? A unique modality or health model?

Once you’ve determined the vision and unique offering of your practice, you’ll find it’s much easier to market what you’ve actually got as a means of getting to what you actually want. If you’re the professional practitioner with the soothing, tranquil office, you might find it actually enjoyable now to create an advertisement that expresses those values, instead of “BUY 2 GET 1 FREE!!!”

Don’t Mistake Advertising for Marketing
Advertising is one facet of marketing. But just one. Practitioners tend to be easily turned off by advertising and networking, but those are just a tiny part of marketing. For example, the best marketing you can ever do is to help heal a patient with a challenging, chronic and common problem. Do that, and their referrals will beat a path to your door. It’s exceptional marketing, but to apply it all you have to do is be exceptional as a CAM practitioner, not as a used car salesman.

Always offer value
Offering value means that your patients get something of equal or greater worth in return for their money. Ask yourself if you’d come to the office twice a week and pay what you’re asking your patients to pay. There’s nothing wrong with making a great buck, but don’t rip people off. Is the professional line supplement you’re selling in your dispensary really worth the sticker price? It may well be, but make sure you know.

Why? Because it bleeds through in all your marketing efforts. If you’re not offering genuine value, it shows, and eventually word gets out. Remember that part of marketing is getting referrals from your existing patients, and value is an important part of that. Even very sick people are value sensitive – they amount they’re willing to pay for relief may be much higher, but everyone is value sensitive at some point.

Believe what you’re selling
If you don’t believe the effectiveness what you’re marketing, it’ll come through in your efforts, too. Ads, brochures, letters, speaking opportunities, websites and all other facets of marketing tend to reflect the belief of the sellers. If you’re really not quite sure if your new bio-super-pulse-magneto-astral-ping machine is actually measuring what the company told you, you’re going to find it tough to sell it to your patients. Ask yourself if you’d recommend it to your grandmother if you knew she had to use her entire pension check to buy it.

Raise the level of your material
Regardless of your niche, be professional in your approach to marketing materials. Take the extra time, spend the extra money. Get someone to proofread. Graphic/media designers are a dime-a-dozen these days. Take a little time to shop around, and you can usually find someone quite good at reasonable rates. If you’re short on cash, stay away from larger shops and ask around until you find a reasonably priced freelancer with some real skills. You’ll discover some real joy in producing material that you’re proud to showcase. You’ll also find some real business in it, too.

Don’t Talk Dollars, Unless…
Forget about price in your marketing efforts. Discounts, buy one get two, bring a friend for free, 20% off for Valentine’s day, blah, blah. This approach reduces the professionalism of your practice, hurts the industry, and reduces the value patients place on your care, which hinders their healing and their referrals.

The exception to the rule is when price is your unique offering. If you’re one of 30 massage therapists in your neighborhood, and you’ve decided to compete by offering cheaper massages, then that’s what you’re selling: cheaper massages. If that’s not what you’re selling, stay away from numbers.

Coming next: using marketing with integrity to increase referrals