To run a successful Reiki practice you need to market your business. To effectively market your Reiki practice, it’s useful to have a marketing strategy that can help establish how you will promote your Reiki practice.

A marketing strategy also helps you identify the strengths and weaknesses of your Reiki practice so that you can successfully market to your ideal client. Developing a marketing strategy help you communicate the benefits of your Reiki practice to your target market.

Once you have defined your marketing strategy, you will have a clear purpose of:

• The financial budget required for marketing your practice
• The marketing content you need to market your practice
• The advertising outlets that you will use
• Your client demographics
• The time resources that are required to market your Reiki practice
• Any external resources you may need to hire to implement your marketing strategy
• Important metrics that you can analyse for evaluating your marketing strategy

Your marketing strategy provides you with control over the message you wish to express about your Reiki practice. Your marketing strategy allows you more control over financial and personal time resources that are required in marketing your Reiki practice.

Your marketing strategy can be defined by the following important components:

• Business goals – income, clients, products, services, and how to grow your business
• Marketing goals – developing your brand, promoting products and services that you have available
• Market research – understand the demographics of your region and the level of interest in your services/products
• Customer profile – understand the client demographics and specific physical and emotional requirements of your Reiki clients

UNDERSTAND YOUR MARKETING CYCLE

The marketing cycle can generally be defined in 3 important stages:

• Getting attention
• Positioning
• Selling

Within each of these stages, you should focus on marketing a specific part of your Reiki practice. These parts of your Reiki practice include:

• Marketing you as a Reiki practitioner
• Marketing your services/products in your Reiki practice
• Attracting your ideal Reiki client
• Selling your services/products
• Retaining your loyal customers
• Measuring and evaluating your marketing strategy

Before you develop your marketing strategy it is helpful to understand the business goals of your Reiki practice. These goals can include anything relevant to your business, specifically related to financial and professional goals.

Some of the most common business goals you may want to explore include:

• Your level of income
• Who is your ideal client
• The type of services you want to provide in your Reiki practice
• The types of physical products you wish to create that would help your Reiki client.

Once you have created these primary goals you can then develop your initial marketing strategy that will help support your goals.

When you create your Reiki business goals, it’s useful to focus on the skills and expertise that you can offer your clients.

Once you’ve created your Reiki business goals you can develop a strategy that will help achieve your goals.

KEEP YOUR STRATEGY SIMPLE

It is easy to become overwhelmed when you are creating an initial strategy that will hopefully establish your Reiki practice as a success. You may think that you need to implement every idea that you have in order to have success. The best approach is actually to maintain a simple and clear approach to who your client is what kind of help they need.

Your client is primarily interested in whether your service/product help addresses their problem and can they easily access your services or products. This involves online and offline location, pricing, and time availability.

ETHICAL MARKETING

Your marketing should be done ethically and ensure that you do not make promises with regard to cures or solutions to your client’s potential health problems.

You may belong to an association that provides guidelines and regulations around advertising for your Reiki service. Additionally, you may be regulated by government requirements on how you can market your Reiki practice.

The below guidelines are recommended for most natural health services:

• Do not engage in false, misleading or deceptive advertising
• State the terms of your services clearly
• Do not create an expectation of a “cure” or benefit of treatment that cannot be substantiated
• Do not oversell your professional Reiki skills

BASIC MARKETING STRATEGY

An example of a basic marketing strategy is shown below:

INCOME GOAL

• 60% of income from women with chronic pain through individual sessions
• 30% of income from elderly group sessions
• 10% of income from conferences doing public speaking

Based on the business goals above, the key issues to address in this marketing strategy are:

• Marketing for women with chronic pain (individuals)
• Marketing for the elderly (individuals and groups)
• Marketing for public speaking opportunities

The above goals have identified 3 main core groups – women, elderly, and conference networks. Your marketing strategy should be developed based on where you can find opportunities to introduce your Reiki practice to these different core groups. These opportunities will include marketing both offline and online

After you’ve created your business goals around the idea client you would like to work with, you can then create a more defined marketing plan to include:

• Client demographics (age, gender, location)
• Advertising material that you require – graphics, copywriting, budget
• Professional networks to connect with or aim your advertising through

Using the business goals mentioned above, the marketing plan should focus on your specific skills and the wellness services that you offer at your Reiki practice. You should also include administrative information such as types of payment, operating hours and how to locate your practice. These are all important considerations for your clients to know about working with you as a Reiki practitioner.

If you choose to market your Reiki practice to organizations who run conferences, your strategy will be more focused on marketing your professional skills, expertise and accomplishments.

Based on the previous goals mentioned in the above Reiki practice goals, it’s important to remember that you have different income goals that are ranked in priority:

• 60% – women with chronic pain
• 30% – elderly groups
• 10% – public speaking

If your time and financial resources are limited then you should focus on marketing the service that will provide you with the most income. After you have implemented a successful marketing plan for the highest income stream, you can then focus your attention on developing strategies for the next level of income. This is not to say you should ignore all income streams other than those on your goals.

You should remain open to running your business for all interest Reiki clients, however, in terms of an effective marketing strategy, it is helpful to remain focused and purposeful about how you use your business resources.

It is important to review the effectiveness of your marketing strategy based on the response to your actions and adjust your strategy where necessary in both your advertising material and across various marketing platforms. It’s useful to be flexible with your goals and plans as you learn how the market you are working in responds to your marketing message.

Your marketing strategy should remain adaptive to your circumstances and the changing market so that your services and product stay relevant to what clients are actually looking for.