Possible Second Wave? Here's How It'll Affect Your Marketing

For the last few years there have been big changes in how people find and purchase personal healing, personal growth, and personal development services.

What’s happening at the moment is that COVID is speeding these changes up. 

A lot.

What do I mean by this?

I’ve spent the last five years helping and watching experts such as therapists, life coaches, healers, and consultants market their services online.

And a new, billion-dollar industry has sprung up around them selling their personal healing and personal growth programs to an online audience and serving their clients in groups.

There have been several years of hyper growth in this area, while during these years therapists have seen only a modest increase in demand for services.

A lot of this billion dollars SHOULD be going to therapists, But it is not. Why? Because the traditional model for marketing therapy does not transition online very well, and because marketers (like me) have been teaching the life coaches behind online group programs how to market in a more effective way.

If we do go into a second wave, and social distancing is prolonged through 2020 and even into 2021, what I see coming is another big and very rapid shift in how therapeutic services are marketed - or a heavy loss of clients to life coaches who serve online.

Why do I think this?

Because I'm hearing daily from life coaches that many of them are having their biggest revenue months ever right now, and that they’re seeing a massive growth in new clients coming through the door.

While at the same time therapists seem relieved because a %age of their client base converted to teletherapy.

Why is there hyper growth in life coaching programs, while therapists appear to be treading water or losing revenue during social distancing? 

1. People are stuck at home, and unable to run away from their personal problems and those in their families
2. People are searching for, and buying, solutions to these problems online. And that's where these life coaching programs are being marketed.

This presents a problem for therapists who continue to market in the same way that they always have done. From my perspective, if social distancing continues through a second, more prolonged wave of the virus then therapists will have to rapidly change their approach to attracting and serving new clients or face losing them to online group programs run by life coaches. 

It's a logical prediction because a local website that looks very similar to every other therapists’ local website, and a psychology today profile, do not help you stand out from the crowd when the location of your office is barely a factor in who a person decides to come to. When looking for a therapist, these websites and profiles all blend into one. As a result, the market is going to become more commoditized than ever and it’s going to get harder and harder to compete for new clients on anything but price.

Luckily, there’s a billion dollars per years’ worth of industry validation that serving online with an online group program works extremely well.

The online group program approach comes with huge benefits that take the limits off therapists' traditional model for practicing and marketing, and these benefits are the reason why they are so successful online:

1. They specialize in helping people solve one particular problem in one particular area of their lives (the niche).
2. They are group-based, which dramatically cuts the clinical hours needed to serve your client base, and dramatically increases the money you can make and the number of lives you can make an impact on at once.
3. They are marketed 100% online, and delivered 100% online.
4. People are paying $2,000-$15,000 out of pocket to participate in them.

An online group program helps you stand out as a specialist in whichever area you choose to focus on with your program. It allows you to serve the same number, or more people than you are currently serving, with far fewer clinical hours necessary. It focuses your marketing on one particular niche, which makes it MUCH easier to get new clients than presenting yourself as a generalist, and you can make a lot more money with your program as people are paying an upfront lump sum to participate rather than a per-session fee.

Interested in knowing more? Check out my video at www.leveragedgroupprograms.com/watch-this-video where I give an overview of the model in more detail.