Plan Your Space, Draw People In

At a typical fair, each business has a designated space. Vendors are usually are provided a table, a chair or two, and maybe an electrical outlet. The organizers may also put up a small sign with the business name at the back of the booth.

Beyond what is provided, it is up to you to make your booth a place that people want to come and visit. One way to get ideas is to go to some fairs and see what attracts you. You may notice that many exhibitors have their table at the front of the booth, right up to the aisle where people are walking. The exhibitor may have some items displayed on the table, perhaps some brochures, and they’re sitting at the table, available to talk to the people passing by. Most of the time, what happens? People keep walking. Especially if it is crowded.

Here are some ways to cozy up your space:

• Put your tables against the back of the booth and/or along the sides of the booth so people have to walk into it to see what you’ve got.
• Set up a couple of chairs so people can come in and sit down.
• Bring in a rug to warm up your space. In a conference center the floor is typically concrete.
• Make a space where little ones can sit and color or do some kind of activity while you speak to their parents.
• Bring in a plant or some flowers to brighten up your booth.

Get Their Attention

You’ll also need to have some eye-catching visual aids to get people’s attention and draw them into your booth. Many birth pros will have some of these props just lying around!

• A large banner to hang up, where people can see it from across the room.
• Props for demonstrations – Birth ball, pelvis model, posters, rebozos, baby slings with doll or real baby! With the props, you might put the large items, like the birth ball, toward the front of the booth, close enough to people walking by to have to watch out for it. That’ll get their attention!
• A video playing  on a laptop, talking about what you do or featuring video testimonials.

Carol Peterson, a Hypnobabies Childbirth Hypnosis Instructor and birth doula from Birth Journeys, recently attended a fair and shared her experience:

I have just returned from a local hospital’s Baby Fair, and in seven years of sitting at tables promoting childbirth classes, this by far was my best fair.  Here’s what I did:  pushed the table back and added a visitor chair, brought a stool for myself, took a birth ball and added birth related stuff to the table.  But, the single biggest thing that I can attribute the success of this fair to is my professional Hypnobabies sign.  People actually stopped and said “Enjoy your baby’s birth?!  Really?!”.  I used an inexpensive coat rack with wheels to hang the sign from and the large Hypnobabies logo really caught people’s eyes.  I put the sign behind the table, rather than hanging it in the front, which is what most people do.  Not everyone stopped, but many did.  I had several nursing students stop by, and the nursing instructor will be contacting me to discuss Hypnobabies with her class.  What an opportunity to shape the future!  I gave out packets of information to those who stopped and were interested enough to have a conversation with me and give me their contact information.

Have a Little Help from a Friend

Nicole King of Adventures in Childbirth suggests having someone else there to help talk to visitors, which especially comes in handy if you want to network with other vendors or are speaking with a prospective client.

In addition, a good way to reduce your costs of having a booth is to get together with other birth professionals. You can split the cost of the booth, have someone there to give you a break when necessary, and it’s nice to have somebody there to keep you company and even get to know better.

You could also share a booth with someone who offers a complementary service. I loved hearing from Leigh Short of BabyMine Birth Education, who shared the following:

I plan to join with a local massage therapist of chiropractor.  That way people are willing to linger a bit for a massage.  You can talk while they wait, or after they are in massage hangover mode.  Massage therapist is excited because it will also help her target a specific group.

Give Your Guests a Gift

So, you’ve attracted people into your booth, you’re telling them about what you do, and you want them to remember you.  More importantly, you want to keep in touch with them in the future. Make sure you have information they can take with them. Here are the basics to have available:

• Business cards
• Brochures or postcards
• A calendar of upcoming events
• Packets of more detailed information in case you’ve been hired on the spot!
• Samples of products you sell
• Packets of information for professionals you’d like to network with
• ***IMPORTANT*** – Be sure to have a sign-up sheet and collect their name, email address and phone number so you can email them additional information or do a follow-up call in a few days. If you want to add them to your mailing list, be sure you get their express permission. People get VERY annoyed when they receive unsolicited emails.
• Bribe ‘em with chocolate. Not really, but it’s nice to have a bowl with something sweet to eat available.

If you want to go the extra mile, you could consider some of the following:

• Another way to collect email addresses is to do a drawing for something cool and useful. On the slip, be sure to have a check box so they can choose to add themselves to your mailing list.
• Create some goodie bags, filled with freebie products you’ve accumulated, some candy, and some of your marketing material.
• Be mindful that people who attend these fairs will get a slew of paper from a zillion vendors, and that it’s highly likely these will end up in their recycle bin or the trash. To make sure your name sticks around with them, consider purchasing some useful, personalized products to giveaways. Some things to consider might be pens, a magnetic business card with some handy information about birth or breastfeeding, a stress ball, or a hand held massage tool.

Create Community and Offset Some of Your Costs

You can help out your birth professional community and spread the word about birth and services for women by offering to advertise for other businesses for a small fee. This takes some time and coordination, but it can help you in a few ways.

What you’ll do is to send an offer to your network of fellow birth professionals. What they do is pay you a small fee and deliver to you a specified number of flyers, brochures or samples. You then put together goody bags that you can give away to people who visit your booth. You could also waive the fee if they give you a door prize to give away!

Doing something like this can help to offset the costs of your booth and also help your community of birth professionals!

Get Out There and Do It!

These tips and tricks will help you look professional and attract people to your booth at any Baby Fair. If you have any tips to share, we’d love to hear them too! And, if you have a successful experience using some of the tips we’ve provided, please brag about it! You’ll encourage many more birth pros to get out and be more visible in their communities.

These posts may also inspire you:

1. Marketing in Small Ways Every Day
2. Resource – Hypnobabies Hypnosis CDs for Pregnancy, Birth, Postpartum, and Birth Professionals Too!
3. Resource: Natural Baby Pros – For Birth Pros and Parents

What I like most about WiseStamp is that you can include icons that link to your social media accounts. This helps shortens the signature considerably.

Here’s what my signature looks like in Gmail.

Is it worth it to have an email signature? Absolutely. And I even encourage using it with personal email accounts. You never know who will read your signature, end up on your website, and want to connect with you and hire you!

Go get your signature from WiseStamp today!

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Just for grins, I decided to submit it to DONA International to see if they’d include it in a future publication of International Doula. To my surprise, they accepted the article.

I waited. And waited. At the beginning of October, I received an email with an electronic copy of this Fall’s magazine, and my article was included! I contacted DONA for permission to share my article online, and received their consent.

So, here it is, “International Doula – Essential Marketing Strategies and Tools for a Successful Birth Business“, featured in this fall’s International Doula, Volume 18, Issue 3, September, a publication of DONA International. I hope this is helpful to some of you out there! Enjoy.

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I have, for several years, used Constant Contact for email marketing and have tried to be faithful in sending out monthly newsletters.  At $15 a month for a subscription, and the popularity of Facebook, etc, I am beginning to question if Constant Contact is still a good marketing tool.  It has allowed me to keep my name in front of past students, some of which have returned to become Hypno-mamas, but my time is limited and I am not sure if I am really getting the best bang for my buck.

So, my question is this…..  do you feel that e-mail marketing has now been replaced with blogs and Facebook, etc?  Or, do any of you do both?

Sheridan from Enjoy Birth shared her thoughts:

I think that it depends on what you use your newsletter for.  If it is just to keep in touch with older clients, then it probably isn’t worth $15, because you could do that by sending out a mass e-mail from your normal e-mail.  How many people do you have signed up to it and how many more sign up each month?

If you use it for more then that, then it may be worth it! For instance I wrote a book that I give away for free to my newsletter subscribers, and I went from 200 to almost a 1000 in a few months.  I include links to some affiliate links I have, like the MP3s from Hypnobabies, and Earth Mama Angel Baby stuff and make a bit of money each month (I think at least to offset the cost)  So for me it is a nice option right now.  For just local Hypnobabies Classes and doula services, I don’t think for me personally it is worth $15 a month.

Maybe do a survey of your readers and ask if Facebook works for them for updates!  They can be your “fan” and save $15 a month.

Here are some of my thoughts on the subject.

I think it’s going to depend on a few things:

• What’s your intent for having a newsletter?
• How many readers do you currently have and how do you attract new readers (do you have a free giveaway)?
• Are your newsletter subscribers now fans on your Facebook page?
• What content are you including in your newsletters?
• Are you currently able to keep up doing a monthly newsletter?
• Do you also have a blog?

I think an email newsletter can work for a local biz if some of the following apply:

• You have a freebie that can steadily attract more readers
• You offer products or services that can benefit readers past pregnancy, or your newsletters have content that can benefit readers after their babies are born.
• You are active in your community by doing shows, talks and events
• You have a blog, because the content will continue to change
• You do an auto-responder series (aWeber offers this capability to users) that will continue for a set period of time that you create once and let it do all the work for you.
• You can monitor your stats and know that your newsletter is translating to new business. If you get even one client from your newsletter, how many months does that cover your Constant Contact?

Facebook and newsletters can complement one another because you can refer readers/fans to subscribe/follow the other. Facebook requires a bit of regularity on both you and your readers – you because you need to post much more regularly than with newsletters to keep yourself exposed, and they would need to be on Facebook regularly to see you too. With Facebook, you can also periodically send email updates about your events via email, so that’s one way you can use email with your Facebook page. If they are also your personal friends, you could create a group and send monthly emails to just that group of friends.

Newsletters are nice because you can make them pretty, and they are easy to forward. They’ve opted in, so you know they want them, and you can track your readers’ activities too. You can also read a great article on ProBlogger listing 8 reasons to do a newsletter.

Because I have a blog, I have an option for readers to subscribe to my blog newsletter, which automatically sends them the blog post as an email. For my traditional email newsletter, I also include links to articles to bring them back to my blog.

What it really comes down to is, what do you want to commit time to doing and when are you going to do it? No matter which ways you choose to connect with prospective, existing and past clients, it takes consistency and posting/sending updates regularly for it to give you a good return.

If you publish a newsletter and have some thoughts to share about it, we’d love to hear it. Please add a comment below or start a discussion on the Inspired Birth Pro Facebook Page.

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Now, this is a great offer for mamas to take advantage of a discount for Get Babied! services. What was even better, though, was their offer to other childbirth professionals! For $15, Get Babied! would add that childbirth pro’s business name, logo, and summary of her offer to that coupon!

What a win-win! Here are some benefits of this offer:

1. Get Babied! builds connections with other community businesses.
2. Get Babied! has an additional income opportunity by offering this to other birth pros.
3. Childbirth professionals have a great marketing opportunity at such a great price.
4. Mamas can take advantage of a great discount and choose from a wider variety of local businesses.

This is good karma, that’s for sure! Have you participated in something like this? If so, share it with us in the comments. If this sounds like a great idea for your community, use it and tell us how it worked for you!

These posts may also inspire you:

1. Resource: Natural Baby Pros – For Birth Pros and Parents
2. Resource: Childbirth Education Class Materials by Plumtree Baby
3. Marketing Tip – Make One New Contact A Week

So how do you identify your ideal client? One way to do so is to write a story about your ideal client, answering some or all of these questions:

• How old is she?
• Is she a first-time mom or not?
• Is she in a relationship?
• Is she of a certain heritage/faith/belief system?
• Does she have a high-risk pregnancy?
• What kind of birth does she want?
• Where will she have her baby?
• How informed is she? Will she need a lot of informational support?
• How involved will her partner be during the birth?
• How much is she willing and able to pay?

While you do this exercise, try to really see, hear and feel your ideal client. Once you have this description, it will help you:

• Generate content for your website and other marketing materials.
• Screen people who visit your website. They will see from your website content whether they fit your description or not.
• Create your elevator speech and follow up statements.
• Know whether people who are interviewing with you will be the right fit.
• Remain focused on the type of people you want to work with. This will help you with your marketing efforts in so many ways.

As you gain more experience, you can refer back to your ideal client description and tweak it.

If you’ve developed your ideal client profile, I’d love to hear how it’s helped your business grow. Add a comment below!

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Focus on the unique benefits your customers will experience by hiring you. Sure, you can talk about what everyone else talks about in their marketing materials. However, in order for you to stand out, you want to be sure and highlight the problems and solutions that only you can solve for them.

How do you do that? If you’ve determined your niche (and even if you’re still working on that), you will want to create a clear picture of your prospective clients. Depending on your field, you will be asking different questions. Here are some questions a birth doula or childbirth educator may ask herself:

1. What is their age range?
2. What is their marital status?
3. What is their income level?
4. What is their faith/ethnic background?
5. Is this their first birth?
6. What is their birth philosophy? Do they have one? Does that matter?
7. Where do they plan to have their baby?
8. Is their birth high risk?
9. Does your client have specific needs or desires?

Once you have a  clear picture of who your ideal client is, make a list of problems they have, AND the ways you can solve those problems. Get really creative and draw upon your unique skills. What special gems makes you different from other practitioners in your area?

Finally, look at the solutions you have to offer. What unique benefits will clients experience by working with you? When creating your list, focus on how your solutions will affect them physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually. The more prospective clients can get a feel for you from your marketing materials, the more likely they will feel a connection with you.

Your prospective clients will likely want to know more about your background and training, but before they consider that, they will want to know how you can help them. In order for you to stand out from the crowd, identify that something special that only you can give, that your clients will really want and benefit from having you on their team.

So what makes you special? Things to consider:

1. Do you do home visits or private sessions/classes?
2. Do you offer additional services, like massage or nutritional counseling, or lactation support?
3. Are you a one stop shop, ie: you provide childbirth education, birth and postpartum doula services, and breastfeeding support?
4. Do you have special partnerships with other practitioners and can offer special discounts for their services if they purchase yours?
5. Do you work in a practice where clients get the benefits of being served by you and your fellow practitioners?

This is just a starting point to get you started. If you are just starting out, you may not have a clear picture of who your ideal client is or what makes you special. The great thing is, you can change your focus as you go along and gain more experience!

For your particular field, what questions have you explored to determine your niche?

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Image by profzucker via Flickr

I’ve been exploring a better-defined niche for my doula business. It’s evolved over the two years of my work with women, and it’s about to be transformed again pretty shortly. Today I’ll share with you what a niche is and why you should consider one for your birth business.

A niche is a specific group of people you want to attract and serve. It is a group that really fits YOU – what you know, what you’ve experienced, and what you’re really good at. Most importantly, a niche, your niche, should focus around what really drives you. Your PASSION.

What are examples of niches:

• Women who want to work with single moms/teens/certain heritage/certain fath/[insert particular segment of population]
• Women who want to use hypnosis/Bradley/[insert your method] during labor
• Women who want a massage therapist/yoga instructor/[insert your specialty here]
• Women seeking support through a planned Cesarean/induction/home birth/VBAC[insert type of birth]

There are birth professionals who enjoy working with all kinds of women and have no desire to limit themselves, and it works well for them. Others really want to specialize and are very clear about who they want to work with.

Here are some reasons why you should consider a niche for your birth business:

• Marketing becomes much easier because you know exactly who you want to target.
• Having a clear target makes it easier to focus your energy.
• You will be able to clearly define your niche to those who will refer business to you, making it easier for them to pre-qualify potential clients.
• Potential clients will be able to pre-qualify themselves when they visit your website by determining whether your philosophy meets their needs.
• You will be able to develop supporting classes, products and services that meet the needs specific to your niche.
• You will be seen as an expert by the women in your niche.

Before I go, I just want to talk about passion a bit more. When you are passionate about something, how does that feel in your body? How does that affect your energy? Passion provides your entire being with energy. You’ll find that words come easily to describe your work. You’ll know very quickly how to help someone or where to go to seek help. You will more likely feel driven to move forward than being stuck in place. Most of all, your niche will really be drawn to you. They will really feel it in their own bodies that you are the right person to work with because they will connect with your passion.

If you do have a niche for your birth business, please share in the comments what your niche is.

If you don’t currently have a niche, I encourage you to consider exploring some possibilities. Next week, I’ll offer some tips to help you identify a niche for your birth business.

Have a wonderful weekend!

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• Do you participate in any online forums or Yahoo Groups that have to do with birth? Look at old posts and emails that you have written.

• Have you written any handouts for your doula clients or childbirth classes? There is a wealth of information you can share.
• Do you maintain a blog? What blog posts can you use to create an article?
• Look for old emails to clients that offer useful information. What could be transformed into an article?
• Do you produce an email newsletter for a group of subscribers? Take that material and turn it into an article.
• If you have conducted any surveys regarding your work, write an article about your findings.

Once you have compiled material from these sources, put together some articles that are 250-300 words in length, think up some catchy titles and start submitting them to online article directories. If the original material you are using is much longer than 300 words, see how you can break it up into multiple articles. If you are starting from scratch and want some inspiration, here are some ways to find inspiration:

• Think about what you are passionate about.
• Make a list of topics you already know a lot about.
• Visit online forums for pregnant mamas and find some hot topics.
• Identify some trends about birth or that are occurring in the media, or find recent news stories that talk about a new study or statistics.
• Visit some online article directories like Ezine Articles or Associated Content and do a search on some topics you are interested in. Consider writing about a topic that you DON’T find on these sites.
• Choose a topic and create a Top 10 list.

I hope this gives you a good start. I’d love to find out what you’re inspired to write about. Please comment below!

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What’s in it for me?

Spend some time watching commercials on tv or ads in a magazine. Cosmetic ads promise you will look younger and have “radiant” skin. Clothes will make you look and feel thinner. The latest technological toy assures you will be more efficient, enjoy better quality sounds and sights, or just look cooler than the guy with the older model.

Services are little trickier. For certain products and brands, there is a level of expectation. I expect to have exceptional service and high quality accommodations if I book a hotel room at a Ritz-Carlton. If I decide to stay at a Best Western it’s because of the value-pricing, and my expectations are much lower in terms of the amenities and overall experience. For services from individuals, I want to be sure to receive timely and courteous service, an enjoyable experience, and I want to like, know and trust the provider.

So what about doula services?

Spend some time thinking and writing about the following:

1. What is my philosophy about birth?
2. Who is my ideal client? Create a mental picture of your ideal client.
3. How does your philosophy align with my ideal clients?
4. What is your personal style? Are you the grandmotherly type? More spiritually-based? Hip or crunchy?
5. If you were to hire a doula, why would you be looking for one? What problems do you have, and how will a doula solve them?
6. What benefits will your ideal clients receive from working with you?
7. How will they feel as a result of working with you? Confident? Empowered? Safe?
8. Where will you find your ideal clients?

How does all this translate into your marketing materials and marketing efforts?

• Your personal style will be communicated in the look and feel of your marketing materials. Your logo, your business name, your personality should come alive in your website business cards and brochure.
• Direct your marketing efforts to avenues that will reach your ideal clients.
• Connect with professionals and businesses who serve your ideal clients and see how you can help one another with referrals.
• Your goal is to make a connection with your ideal clients. When they read your materials, will they be nodding their heads in agreement with you because you have identified their problems? Are they relieved when they see how you can solve their problems? Are they looking forward to feeling the results you say your clients experience?
• Your experience and philosophy also play a part in their search and should be in your materials as well. This will help them learn more about you and get to know you.

In their search for a doula, women and partners are going to be looking for results. If you can pinpoint the results they are looking for and align with their goals, your marketing efforts will differentiate you from other practitioners. This will hopefully lead to an interview, where they will be able to make a face-to-face connection with you. Even in your interviews, continue to focus on what potential clients are looking for, and be authentic in your responses about your ability to follow through in order to meet their needs.

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1. The Number One Rule To Remember When Marketing Your Birth Business
2. 5 Questions To Ask When Setting Your Prices
3. Doula Client Attraction Tip #2 – Identify Your Ideal Client