Hypnosis marketing has one job: help the people you can help find you, and let them see quickly that you’re the one to call. The channels you pick, the words you put on them, and the money you spend are all in service of that.
Someone has a few seconds in front of your ad, your card, your listing or the top of your website, and in those few seconds they’ll usually either decide you’re worth another minute, or move on. Your training, your certifications, your guarantee, your years in practice, all of that comes after, and only if the first few seconds worked.
So this covers the lot: the channels worth your time and what each one has to do, what your message has to say and who it has to turn away, what free and paid promotion actually cost, how to tell which of it is working, and the offers that arrive looking like marketing when they’re something else.
Your Marketing Has To Repel People, Too
Attracting the right client is half the job. The other half is letting the wrong one keep walking.
Your marketing should call out to your ideal potential clients and fall flat for everybody else. When your target reads your stuff, you want them thinking, “Yeah, this is for me.” When someone who isn’t your client reads it, you want their interest to die quietly.
That sounds wasteful until you count what the wrong inquiry costs. Phone calls that go nowhere. Consults with people who were never going to pay your fee. A schedule filled with folks who booked once because it was cheap.
Which is why “I do hypnosis” is a weak opening. It makes a stranger do the work of deciding whether you’re for them, and plenty of them won’t bother. “I help people stop smoking” does more work in fewer words, because it names the problem in the language the person already uses in their own head.
Pick something. You can widen later. There’s more on choosing that ground in building a hypnosis practice.
The Hypnosis Marketing Channels Worth Your Time
There are more places to promote a practice than any one person can keep up with, which is how a practice ends up half-keeping several of them. A short list you actually maintain tends to beat a long list you abandon in March. Here’s what each of the usual ones is for.
Your website. It has one job, and it’s not to be a brochure about you. It’s to turn a curious visitor into a booked appointment. That means the top of the page says who you help, there’s enough proof that you’re real and competent to be worth a stranger’s trust, and booking takes a couple of clicks rather than a phone tag negotiation. It has to work on a phone, because that’s how a lot of people surf the internet these days. Everything else on the site is secondary to that.
Local listings. If you see clients in person, a Google Business Profile and the local directories are how a good share of people in your area will find you at all. Fill yours in properly: what you work with in the words clients use for it, where you are, your hours, current contact details, a few real photos of the actual office. Make your business name, address and phone number match what’s on your website exactly, character for character, including the suite number and how you abbreviate the street. Search engines use those details to work out that the listing and the site are the same business, and a listing that disagrees with your site can quietly hold you back in local results. An abandoned listing with old hours can cost you the booking of someone who was ready.
Reviews. A stranger deciding between two hypnotists they’ve never met will often go read what other people said. Ask clients who got the result they came for. A natural moment is when someone tells you things have been better since you worked together. Handle this one carefully, though. Some people won’t want their name attached publicly to having seen a hypnotist, and that’s their call, not yours. Ask, take no for an answer, and keep privacy rules in mind.
Social media. Pick one or two platforms where the people you want already spend time, and post at a pace you can hold indefinitely. The value here is repetition, so the wrong question is which platform is best and the right one is which platform you’ll still be posting on next year.
Other professionals. Massage therapists, chiropractors, counselors, trainers and doctors all see people with problems you handle. What makes a referral relationship work is that they can tell, without effort, exactly who to send you. Give them something with that on it. The practical detail of building those relationships is in getting hypnotherapy clients.
An email list. A visitor who isn’t ready to book today is not the same as a visitor who’s gone forever, but you need a reason for them to leave an address. Something useful and specific that they can have right away, aimed at the same problem your practice is aimed at, tends to work better than “subscribe to my newsletter.”
Whichever of these you use, they all get judged by the same test.
Writing The Headline Or Slogan That Says They’re In The Right Place
I rarely see a good slogan for a hypnosis practice, and I think the reason is that people use them for the wrong task. They use a slogan to set the tone and personality of the business. That’s not a bad thing to want. But it tends to overestimate how much attention anyone is paying.
The line at the top of your website, on your card, at the head of your ad, has a more immediate task: tell your potential client they’re in the right place, so they read the next thing.
Slogans rarely do that. When I hear them, a lot of them remind me of how WWII was pitched to America. “Making the world safe for democracy.” A big idea, and a wide one, and a reader has to stand back and think about it to work out what it means to them. “Reinventing Your Positive Mind.” “Caring, Considerate Hypnosis For A Better You.” Same problem. The person reading yours isn’t standing back and considering anything. They want to sleep, or quit, or get through a presentation on Thursday without their hands shaking.
Or my favorite, “Get what you want.” That was mine, when I first started my practice.
Blech.
So run your own materials through the practical test. Read every part of your marketing with your ideal client in mind and ask whether it speaks to their specific, immediate need. Your education and your guarantees have a place. That place is after you have someone’s attention, not in the space that’s supposed to get it.
Getting that opening line wrong is expensive, and I have the receipts for it. The details of the tagline itself are in choosing a slogan for your practice, and what belongs at the top of your home page is in getting clients from your website.
When People Don’t Know Hypnosis Can Help Their Problem
There’s an exception to all that, and it’s a common one in this field. Sometimes hypnosis is an explanatory sale. The person has the problem, but it hasn’t occurred to them that hypnosis is where the answer might be. Naming the problem isn’t enough on its own, because they haven’t connected it to you.
I ran across a promotion for some candles once, and the line on it practically jumped out and slapped me in the face. “Because You Breathe What You Burn.” In one line, it told me what was different about the product and gave me a problem I’d never once considered. I’d never thought about breathing candle smoke. If I burned candles, that line would have stopped me.
That’s the shape to aim for when the connection isn’t obvious. Say the thing that makes the reader realize there’s a problem worth solving and that there’s an approach they hadn’t considered, in the same breath.
The related version of this is the reader who does know what hypnosis is and isn’t sure it’s real, or whose picture of it comes from a stage show. Arguing with that in your marketing copy tends to put the whole conversation on ground you don’t want. In my experience the thing that moves a skeptical person isn’t a defense of hypnosis, it’s a description of their problem so accurate that they want to know what you’d do about it. Your credentials, your explanation of what a session is like, the myth-busting, all of that can work on them, and it works better once they’ve decided you might understand what they’re dealing with.
Free Promotion And Paid Promotion
As a general rule, there are two ways to get new clients, free or paid. Free tends to take longer. Word of mouth, talking to people, showing up where your potential clients already are, writing something useful, none of that costs money and all of it costs time.
Paid is faster to turn on and easier to waste. If you buy advertising, make sure it’s tightly targeted at genuine prospects rather than a shotgun blast at the general public. The exception is when you have a genuinely cheap way to reach a lot of people at once, like signage where a large number of people walk or drive by.
Now, here’s the part that changed how I think about paid promotion. Even breaking even can build you a business.
Imagine you spend $1,000 on an ad and it brings in four clients. Two buy a three-session package, one buys two full-price sessions, one does a single session. Say that comes to $1,000 in revenue. You broke even. Nothing gained?
You now have four clients who have paid you money.
That matters because your client list is the business. Dentists sell their practices, sometimes for hundreds of thousands of dollars, and the attraction isn’t the chairs and the X-ray machine, it’s the patient list. It’s far easier to book a new session with someone who has already worked with you than to find someone new, and once you’ve seen a couple of hundred clients, a light week can often be filled by sending an offer to people who already trust you.
So a campaign that washes its face financially still leaves you with something you didn’t have. Just collect everyone’s contact information and keep it organized, with privacy rules in mind.
Running The Numbers On A Break-Even Ad
It’s worth doing the arithmetic, because the second half of the money doesn’t show up in the campaign report. Take round numbers to see the shape of it. Say that ad is worth running five times across a year: $5,000 spent, twenty clients through the door, $5,000 back. Level. On the books, a year of advertising that earned you nothing.
Twenty clients at $1,000 per four is an average of $250 a client. Now suppose one in five of them comes back at some point for something else, and one in five thinks enough of the work to send you three people.
- Repeat business. Four of the twenty return. At $250 each, that’s about $1,000.
- Referrals. Four of the twenty send three people each, so twelve referred clients. If they buy like the others, that’s about $3,000.
- The year, actually. Roughly $4,000 on top of a campaign that looked like it broke even, and none of it cost you another dollar in ad spend.
And it doesn’t stop there, because those twelve referred clients have their own fifths. Some come back, some send people, and the thing keeps paying in a way the original ad never gets credit for.
Those percentages are mine for the sake of the example, not a measurement of your practice. Yours might be far better, and they might be far worse, which is the argument for knowing your own numbers rather than borrowing anyone’s. The shape holds even when the figures move, though: a campaign that merely pays for itself can still be the best money you spend, provided you keep the list and actually do something with it.
What The Traffic Math Tends To Look Like
Numbers help here, because the gap between what people expect and what happens is where most of the discouragement lives.
When I started, I assumed most people who found my website would take me up on the offer. They wanted help, I could help, seemed obvious. In fact only a small percentage of visitors book, commonly put somewhere in the low single digits, which I’ve gone into in getting hypnotherapy clients.
Run that forward and it gets concrete. At 1%, ten clients in a week means about a thousand local visitors in that week. When I looked at the Seattle area, somewhere around fifty people a week were searching for “hypnotherapy,” and every hypnotist in town was competing for them.
That isn’t a reason to skip the website. It’s a reason to expect the first months to be slow, to know your expenses, your session fee, how many sessions a month you’d call a success, and how long you could keep going if nobody showed up. Plenty of hypnotherapists do the expensive version of the wait: rent an office, buy the furniture and the artwork, spend months getting everything looking right. Money goes out for months and none comes in, and the runway is gone before the marketing has had time to work. There’s more on that pattern in common hypnosis and NLP business mistakes.
Knowing Which Of Your Marketing Is Working
Guessing at which promotion is doing the work is how you end up paying for something that quietly stopped producing.
The simplest method costs nothing. Ask every new client how they heard about you, write the answer down somewhere you’ll look at it later, and read the list every few months. Given enough clients, patterns show up that you may not have guessed. Analytics on your website tells you a related but different thing, which is how many people arrived and how many took the next step, and that’s worth having too if your site is doing real work.
Two cautions on reading it. A channel can take a while to show up, especially the slow ones like word of mouth and anything you write, so give something a fair run before you judge it. And what you’re counting is booked, paying clients, not attention. Views, likes and visits are only interesting insofar as they turn into someone in your office.
Whether Your Prices Belong In Your Marketing
I get asked whether to post session fees on the website, and I’m suspicious of anyone who tells you there’s one answer. It depends on where you are and what you’re trying to do.
If you’re getting plenty of calls and you want to screen out people who won’t pay your fee, posting prices does that for you before the phone rings. If calls are thin and you’re good at talking with a potential client, consider leaving them off and having the conversation instead. Plenty of people are somewhere between those two, in which case you can try it one way and change it if it isn’t working.
Either choice can be framed well. Leaving prices off: “I tailor sessions to each client. It’s not a cookie-cutter process. After a free consultation, we’ll talk about what you can expect.” Putting them up: you’re being open about your business policies, and there’s no surprise waiting at the end of the call.
This is the repel half of the job again, in one decision. If your ideal client is someone for whom price isn’t the top concern, prices on the page do useful filtering. If your ideal client does have money at the front of their mind, then say what you offer about it, whether that’s a sliding scale, lower rates, or payment plans. The longer version is in should you post your prices.
The Promotion You Can Repeat Beats The Campaign You Do Once
New brochures and new ad campaigns are more fun than the quiet work of going back to people who already know you. The quiet work is usually cheaper and often converts better.
My rule of thumb: anything you do in your practice more than three times, systematize it. Have a procedure you follow every time, and automate it as far as you reasonably can. A few simple ones that don’t need any software:
- Your email signature. Add a line about referrals. Most clients don’t run businesses and don’t think about how yours works, so tell them referrals help, and tell them how to refer.
- A tickler file. Thirteen folders, one for next month and one for each month of the year. Every client you see goes into next month’s folder. Mid-month, open it and get in touch with everyone you saw the month before. “I was checking in to see how things have been going since we last met.” If they don’t book, move them to a folder six months out.
- Your intake form. Add a list of issues you like to work with, with checkboxes, under a heading like “other things you’d like help with.” It gives you a natural opening later. “Hank, I noticed you checked stress reduction. Is that something you’re ready to take care of?”
If you do use an email system, tagging clients by issue lets you send a relevant offer to the people who raised their hand for it. Some practitioners run the same schedule of offers every year, so it’s a repeat rather than a reinvention each time. Keep privacy rules in mind whenever you’re storing this or reaching back out.
Referrals deserve their own treatment, and they get it in getting hypnotherapy clients and in the easiest ways to book more sessions.
Deal Sites, Award Emails, And The Ad Rep Who Calls
Some of what arrives looking like marketing is a transfer of money from you to someone else. A few I’ve watched hypnotherapists walk into, sometimes friends of mine.
Discount deal sites. The arrangement is that you offer deeply discounted sessions, they sell them to their list, and you split the money. If they take half and you’ve already cut your price in half to get on the site, you’re working for about a quarter of your session fee. The pitch is that the discount buyers become regulars. Some do. I’d be surprised if it hits ten percent, partly because people who buy services from a deal site are often bargain hunters who may not be inclined to pay full price for anything.
I’m not saying it’s always a bad deal. If you’re starting out with an empty schedule, a handful of clients who stay and pay full fee is a start. What I am saying is know what you’re buying, and cap it. A friend of mine was told not to put a limit on the number sold, because it would sell better that way, and not to worry, they could shut it off any time. When the numbers got big, nobody was in the office to shut it off. She was obligated to honor more than a hundred sessions at less than a quarter of her rate, and the fine print let them run the whole thing again without asking her. Which they did.
Award emails. A hypnotherapist I know got word she’d been named the best local hypnotherapist. She asked what I thought. I searched the impressive-sounding organization’s name plus the word “scam,” and got a great many results. That isn’t proof of anything by itself, so ask the practical questions instead. How were you nominated? Did you apply? What were the criteria? How would anyone judge your work without talking to your clients, and how would they have gotten your client list? Then look at what happens next, which is usually an invitation to buy the plaque, or the crystal award, or both together for a couple of hundred dollars. Having an award in your office isn’t a bad thing. I’d want to know the organization was real first.
The overpayment. Someone’s coming to town, has heard wonderful things, and wants to book a block of sessions. They send a check or money order for too much, having “accidentally written an extra zero,” and since they’re traveling and short of cash, could you send the difference back right away? The money looks like it’s in your account, so you do. Then the bank tells you the payment was bad.
Advertising that’s pushed to you. Plenty of advertising methods work if you use them well. The thing to watch is when the offer arrives rather than when you go looking. Sitting there thinking “I need more clients, I wonder where I should advertise” is exactly the state you’re in when the phone rings with someone selling ad space. That’s the moment to say you’ll think about it. More on the general territory in hypnotherapists, you could be a target.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much should I spend on marketing when I’m starting out?
I can’t give you a figure that fits every practice, and I’d distrust one. What I’d work out first is the other side of it: your monthly expenses, what you charge, how many sessions a month you’d call a success, and how long you could keep the doors open if nobody came. That tells you what you can risk. From there, free promotion costs time and paid promotion buys speed. If you do buy, aim it tightly, and judge a campaign by whether it at least paid for itself, because the clients it brought are worth something after the campaign ends.
Do discount deal sites work for a hypnosis practice?
Used carefully, they can fill an empty schedule, and a few of those clients may stay. Used carelessly they can bury you. Do the arithmetic on what you’ll actually receive per session after the discount and their cut, decide how many of those sessions you’re willing to deliver, and put a hard cap in writing. Assume the sales team’s job is to talk you out of the cap.
Should I put my prices on my website?
It depends on whether you need more calls or fewer, better ones. Posting prices filters people out before they reach you, which helps when the phone is busy and you don’t want to spend time on people who won’t pay your fee. Leaving them off gives you the chance to talk with someone who might book if they understood what you do, which helps when calls are scarce and you’re good on the phone. Either way, frame the choice deliberately rather than letting it sit there by accident.
Where To Start
If you only change one thing this week, make it the first line a stranger reads. Take your homepage headline, your card, your directory listing, and ask whether someone with the problem you solve would know, in a couple of seconds, that they’re in the right place. Then ask whether someone who isn’t your client would keep walking.
Get that right and everything downstream works better, because the people arriving are the ones you can help.
Enjoy,
Keith
PS: If you want the longer treatment of where practices lose money on promotion, take a look at The Biggest Hypnosis Marketing Mistakes & What To Do About Them.
