Embark on a journey with me, Dr. Kate Walker, as we craft a powerful marketing plan for the year ahead that's designed to not only captivate clients but also to cultivate a community of enthusiastic supporters. Tired of the same old marketing tactics that don't yield results? Strap in as we traverse the landscape of strategic planning, wielding tools like Trello to chart a course that's as organized as it is creative. It's not just about the hard sell; it's about nurturing relationships and offering solutions, becoming an integral part of your community's fabric. Hear firsthand how I fuse social media savvy with business growth strategies, and how you too can measure your marketing success despite ever-evolving platform policies.
In this engaging session, we'll dissect the anatomy of setting and achieving your business goals, using Trello to keep our targets in sight and our performance on track. I'll reveal the secret to breaking down the year into phases of learning and growth, ensuring you're well-equipped in January and February before sowing the seeds of engagement come March. Pursuing a 10% conversion rate might seem daunting, but with tangible objectives like a weekly client count or an annual revenue target, the path to success is demystified. As we wrap up, I extend my heartfelt thanks to our community and remind you that the most significant investment you can make is in your own professional development. So, power up your ambition, and let's elevate your business to new heights together.
Get your step by step guide to private practice. Because you are too important to lose to not knowing the rules, going broke, burning out, and giving up. #counselorsdontquit.
Embark on a journey with me, Dr. Kate Walker, as we craft a powerful marketing plan for the year ahead that's designed to not only captivate clients but also to cultivate a community of enthusiastic supporters. Tired of the same old marketing tactics that don't yield results? Strap in as we traverse the landscape of strategic planning, wielding tools like Trello to chart a course that's as organized as it is creative. It's not just about the hard sell; it's about nurturing relationships and offering solutions, becoming an integral part of your community's fabric. Hear firsthand how I fuse social media savvy with business growth strategies, and how you too can measure your marketing success despite ever-evolving platform policies.
In this engaging session, we'll dissect the anatomy of setting and achieving your business goals, using Trello to keep our targets in sight and our performance on track. I'll reveal the secret to breaking down the year into phases of learning and growth, ensuring you're well-equipped in January and February before sowing the seeds of engagement come March. Pursuing a 10% conversion rate might seem daunting, but with tangible objectives like a weekly client count or an annual revenue target, the path to success is demystified. As we wrap up, I extend my heartfelt thanks to our community and remind you that the most significant investment you can make is in your own professional development. So, power up your ambition, and let's elevate your business to new heights together.
Get your step by step guide to private practice. Because you are too important to lose to not knowing the rules, going broke, burning out, and giving up. #counselorsdontquit.
You. Alright, we're live. Hi, I'm Dr Kate Walker. Welcome to your weekly Step it Up training. Today I'm going to give you your marketing plan for 2024.
Speaker 1:Now, last week I talked about the. If you don't make any other training, or if you don't watch any other replay or listen to any other podcast episode, listening to the call that books a client can be such a game changer for your practice. And what I talked about was this idea of improving your conversion rate. And who's the best person to tell somebody about your services? Well, it's you. And so if you're able to convert a potential client to one of two things, you're either going to convert them to an actual client and book that first appointment, or you're going to convert them into a raving ban, which means maybe it wasn't a good fit because of your cost or your schedule or your specialty, but you gave them so much helpful information that they are raving about you throughout their community, to their friends and families and colleagues. So that was last week.
Speaker 1:This week, I'm going to help you put it together with a strategic plan. Now, there are a lot of great episodes where we talk about strategic planning in different ways, so I wanted this one to be special because I know you're starting to think about the new year, starting to look at what's working and what's not working. And you guys, if you've listened to me before, if you've attended any of my trainings, you know I am a fan of I'm going to say the name wrong Mike McLewitt's and the Big Pumpkin. So this farming metaphor and I'm going to use that today, not necessarily the Big Pumpkin the Big Pumpkin is a great book. I highly recommend it and it's really better, I think, for folks who've been in practice for a while and you're trying to see which service is selling, which ones aren't selling, if you're doing a lot of things. So, yes, definitely go there.
Speaker 1:But my goal today is that you not only leave with a good plan for 2024, I want you to have a way to stay organized. And I'm a Trello fan, so I will be sharing my screen. So if you're listening to me driving the kids to baseball practice or volleyball practice, don't worry, I will talk you through everything that I put on my screen. Share. And Trello isn't the only thing out there. They don't pay me. I'm not an affiliate for Trello, it's just. After trying so many different organizational apps, trello is the one that just works, like my brain works. So I will walk you through how to create a strategic plan to at least get you going for 2024.
Speaker 1:As a rule, I don't know if this is a good thing or a bad thing, but I start strong in January with my Trello board and it tends to fall off about October, november, so this time of year, so this is actually a really really good time for me personally to go through my own Trello to make sure everything I do, starting out in Q1. Remember that stands for the first quarter of the year January, february, march. We want to hit the ground running. I know you're overwhelmed right now because it's the holidays. Hopefully you're listening to this in January, but if you're listening to this right now, I know, don't worry, you can do it later, but at least your brain will be operating.
Speaker 1:So the metaphor I'm going to use today is still a farming metaphor. If you're listening to me and you're thinking about practice, or you're in the very beginning stages of practice, or you're in the first couple of years of your practice. Think of that as you woke up one day and you said you know what I want? To grow potatoes. It's like, oh, you've never grown potatoes before, or maybe you've grown carrots. You've never grown potatoes.
Speaker 1:Well, the first part of your plan that counselors usually skip, at least in my experience, is learning about farming. Not just potatoes, but learning about farming. And the farming metaphor is really rich when you think about it when it comes to marketing, because what we're doing is we're cultivating an environment, we're cultivating a community. So when you farm, you enrich the soil. You're giving more than you're getting. You're putting things in the soil to enrich it, to make sure that whatever you put in there will grow. So that first part of marketing is really understanding. It's not going around with your palm open, going, hey, give me your business, can I have your business? Hey, will you listen to me so I can tell you about my business? Take, take, take, take. That's not marketing. Marketing is what can I do for my community? What do they need? What problem can I solve? I'm like a jigsaw puzzle piece. I'm going to fit in somewhere and help my community. So learning about farming is a huge first step that you can actually put in your strategic plan.
Speaker 1:I remember when I was getting started I won't say it was before the internet, but it was still. I read books, a lot of books, and the books about business that I read were by Napoleon Hill and Dale Carnegie and oh gosh, the other names kind of slipped my mind, but you know, it was like how to win friends and influence people and think and grow rich. So all of these kind of marmy titles, kind of icky titles, but they had amazingly wonderful, great information, like make eye contact when you shake hands, you know when you look up, smile, remember people's names, stephen Covey, the habits of highly effective people. So spinning Q1, just learning about farming, is an excellent goal. Now I'm going to add to that, though, because we're not back in the old timey days.
Speaker 1:We have to make sure that we understand the technology, and so what that means is understanding SEO. You have to understand search engine optimization, because you have to have a website, even if it's just a one-pager brochure website. If you want to be found and you want to convert clients, you must have a website. If this is just a hobby and you're like Kate, I don't care how many clients I have you could skip this whole training. I mean, this is for people who really want to make sure there is like a bus depot where you meet and your client meets and you connect and you go to your destination. See, I'm just full of metaphors today.
Speaker 1:Seo you have to learn about other forms of outreach, because we are connectors, right, we're not just sitting in an office and then, once a year, we do someone's taxes, or every once in a while, we're going to help somebody with a legal case. We're connectors, so people have to see our faces. We have to see people's faces. So outreach you have to learn who books the speaking gigs at your elementary school. Who is the one that works with first responders at your local volunteer fire department? Who's the person that's in charge of mental health outreach or connecting agencies to one another? Continuing education providers right, that didn't make sense. So think of an agency. They have to have a person there who connects continuing education providers to the providers. Remember, in Texas, anybody can be a continuing education provider, and that includes you.
Speaker 1:The technology, learning about marketing, means you have to have access to the back office of your website. You can do something super simple. It doesn't have to be complicated, but you're going to be making changes because of the next part I'm going to get to in a second and you have to be able to make changes fairly quickly, and so if you are hiring someone to do that for you and it takes them six weeks to get back to you or any number of things, right, the trend has passed and now nobody really is interested in this TikTok or this type of thing, right, you could miss some things if you don't have access. And I'm not talking about a coding expert. I don't know how to code, but I know how to look up hex color codes on the internet. So if I want orange and it is 019654, I can go over here and get the same hex code. And if you don't know what I'm talking about, that's okay. That's what you would learn in your season of learning how to farm.
Speaker 1:Now, when you get to the part of the year where you're actually farming, this is important because this is figuring out what you're good at, what you like to do. If you really enjoy SEO optimization and you're like, oh my gosh, I'm so excited. And you're like, oh my gosh, I'm such a techie and I never knew it, well, that would be great if you hate that. But you love going out and giving talks to the PTO and oh, by the way, you always get 10 phone calls every time you do a talk there, wonderful, right. You have to find out what you're good at and what the return is on your investment, because you are investing your time, you are investing your energy.
Speaker 1:So part of farming is understanding what's working, and thank goodness, we don't have to wait like 10 weeks, like a potato farmer has to do. Right, did the potatoes come up? By the way? I hate growing potatoes because I can't see. I think if I grew potatoes, I'd be constantly digging them up just to see okay, are they growing yet? So no, I don't do potatoes, but with our farming metaphor that we're doing today, you must have something that you can see on a very regular basis. Is my investment of my time, my expertise, my 10-minute consultations? Is it actually giving me a return on my investment? So we're going to count some things right. These are going to be called our KPIs or key performance indicators, and this is where something like Trello can really help you know if you're making any traction at all.
Speaker 1:One of the things I really, really hated so disappointing when I talked to a counselor and they're doing something like I don't know blogging, and so I'm like, oh, that's fabulous, I blog too. Let's talk about blogging and then I find out they don't have any idea what search engine optimization is. Well y'all, blogging without SEO optimization is like throwing rocks into the Grand Canyon and waiting to hear the splash at the bottom. It's frustrating. I mean, if you're a writer, and that's great and you're doing this as sort of a personal blog or you want to just kind of enrich people who already know you, but remember what I said earlier if you're not in this to build the client base and enrich your community, this probably is not the training for you. So, yes, what I'm trying to say is you have to understand if what you're doing is working or else stop it.
Speaker 1:I've talked before about things like social media. Right, social media is wonderful, but if you don't use it right or you don't know if it's working, it can be a huge time suck in the name of yes, but I'm on social media and I'm trying to you know whatever. No, you don't know what you're doing because you don't know if it's working. So I say that with all respect in the world. I know there are a lot of you out there planning your next Instagram or your next TikTok. Well, I jumped on that train too, right Instagram and I was like I don't know if this is working. And then somebody introduced me to something wonderful called Pretty Links. Pretty Links was a wonderful way for me to track who actually clicked on that particular Instagram thing. Now I don't think it works anymore. I think Instagram didn't like the idea that I was using another link to get them anyway. But it was so cool because I could actually see oh my goodness, this post with my dog, andy, got, you know, 40 clicks to the 40 hour training to become a supervisor in Texas. It was mind blowing.
Speaker 1:I do the same thing with my podcast, so I'm able to measure which one of my efforts or how, I shouldn't say which ones, because I kind of know now you know how the return on investment is looking. So I'm going to put my glasses on and I'm going to screen share to Trello. So if you're listening to me on a podcast replay, I will talk you through everything I am doing. So what you're looking at right now is a program called Trello. Trello is I think there are other programs out there, but it's a really neat way to have a linear sort of left to right or right to left whatever you prefer Organization of your goals. Plus, you can slide things to done, and I love sliding things to done.
Speaker 1:So I started this with a card. Just, it says 2024. So, on this 2024 card and we're going to put some goals in just a second, but I want to start off really broadly. So, remember, I talked about learning to farm, farming and then testing to see if what you're doing is actually working. So let's start January, let's make a list called January, and we'll even call it. This is when you're farming, I'm sorry, learning to farm. So, if you're listening, I just created a list called January-learning, and let's do February. We're also going to be learning Now. When we get to March, though, we're going to start putting some things in the ground. Incidentally, this is also when I plant my garden. So March, we are going to start farming. This is when we'll start measuring those KPIs.
Speaker 1:All right, so let's go back to 2024. I've got my list that says 2024, and I'm going to put my goals here. So, let's say, in 2024, by the end of 2024, so that's December 31st of next year I would like to have 10 clients, if I could spell, per week. Okay, now I just created a card on my Trello list 2024. Let's say I want to have an income goal, let's say for 2024, I would like to make $50,000 in income. All right, so that is now. I have two cards, so let's just do two cards for now. So, since January and February are just learning months, I can add cards like read for business books, take a online course on SEO and let's see talk with someone. No, let's leave it there, because that's a lot.
Speaker 1:February, I'm going to get a little bit more into the community. I'm going to contact four elementary schools and ask about PTO speaking. I'm going to contact four agencies and ask about CE live trainings I could provide. Oh, I just thought of another thing here we can do in January Make a list of all the CE's I could provide. If you're a supervisor, if you have your S, you fall under the 50% from a designated provider that both LMFT and LPC require now for our renewal. So your, your value just went up. You could go to an agency and say, hey, I offer this training on trauma response with adolescents and oh, by the way, I have my supervisor designation. So folks who take the training at your agency, they can fulfill that 50%. I will help fill that ratio of the 50% that they need to renew. That's wonderful. So you can start farming almost right here, because you're making. You made the list of all the CE's you could provide. You're going to now get this list of contacts.
Speaker 1:Now, here we are. In March we're going to start farming. This is when it's time to start understanding KPIs. So you are going to set up the software for the 10 minute consultation you will actually now let's leave that. In March you are going to return, let's say, 30 calls this month and let's stick with that. So if we're going to return 30 calls this month, oh, let's have a conversion. You're going to convert 10 percent of those calls, which is amazing, by the way. That's a really good conversion rate to actual clients.
Speaker 1:All right, now we're starting to have some KPIs things we can count. So I'm going to take us back to the 2024 list where it says Clients per week. Now we can open that card and there's a place for us to type January, february, march, april, may, june, july, etc. You can also do checklists, but for now we're doing this. So we know this will be now the number of phone calls we get each week.
Speaker 1:So we're farming in January and February. So zero, zero, but in March we want what's three times four 12. We want 12 phone calls in March, we want 15. We want in April. We want 20 in May. Remember, we're shooting for a 10 percent conversion rate. We want 25. And I'm just making these numbers up. You guys can put in whatever you want.
Speaker 1:So what you're doing now is you're able to see okay, these are my goals. I want to have 12 phone calls a week or 12 phone calls a month. You do you in March, I want 15 calls in April, I want 20 calls in May. Now you can start to see okay, if I go in in April and I did a speaking gig no-transcript at Jones Elementary PTO and I saw that that resulted in 30 or 40 phone calls for the month, well, when I go back to my 2024 goals, I'm blowing my goals out of the water. I'm gonna need to readjust and right away, in real time, I'm able to measure if going and doing PTO gigs is resulting in phone calls. Now I still don't know if those phone calls result in clients. Right, if I see couples and this is a true story I see couples or I did back when I was working full-time in my private practice. Achieve Balance in the Woodlands Texas, I would go do a PTO gig and of course I would have parents come up telling me about their kids and wanting to book sessions with me for their kids and I'm like, oh, no, no, no, no, I'm a couple counselor mismatch, right. But I learned right away. Okay, doing PTO gigs may result in a lot of phone calls for me, but not a good fit for my particular niche or the clients that I wanna serve, so I'm gonna stop the share right now. So you do have to understand these KPIs like oh my gosh, I got so many phone calls doesn't necessarily mean it's resulting in a paying client right Now. That doesn't mean you, if your goal is to create those raving fans, which mine was.
Speaker 1:I spent the first part of my career as a counselor really tilling that ground, cultivating that soil and positioning myself as an expert in the Woodlands Texas. In fact, even the color orange I wore the color orange everywhere I went. My website color was orange, so I had an orange button on my website where people could schedule that 10-minute consultation with me. So I spent a lot of time positioning myself as an expert and making myself available for those phone calls that put a lot of pressure on my conversion talk. If you will again go back and listen to the episode about the call that books a client. I really had to be excellent at screening that potential client and either booking that person if it was a good fit or making sure they had the most amazing, well-fitting resources. So that forced me to another KPI, which was getting out into the community and getting to know my colleagues on a first name basis, so I was able to refer confidently.
Speaker 1:All right, so let's wrap. What I've talked about today is creating a strategic plan for your marketing so that you know what you're doing is actually resulting in what you wanted to result in. Now there's a fabulous book I talked about the pumpkin plan already. There's another one called Atomic Habits, and we didn't really get into that today. But if you are going to now see, oh my goodness, my potatoes are out of control, I've got so many potatoes Well, now you have to be consistent and having a goal is great, but having a goal of consistent systems is better. Being consistent with SEO, being consistent with your social media presence, being consistent, getting out into the community and speaking. That's the piece that we didn't quite get to today, but it's a wonderful place to really understand and emphasize in your own practice.
Speaker 1:All right, that's it for today, guys. Let me check and see if we have any questions. All right, I think that's it. Thanks for watching, thanks for listening, and if you're listening on the replay, good for you, good on you. You are amazing. You're taking time out of your day to badass up your practice. I'm Dr Kate Walker. Have a wonderful week and I'll see you next time.