Positioning Mistakes Wellness Practitioners Make (And Lovely Reliefs)
Ten ways practices blur into the wallpaper, and what happens when you stop.
Ten ways practices blur into the wallpaper, and what happens when you stop.
Your diary stays the same size You post, you mean well, you turn up to every networking breakfast with a clean lanyard, and the bookings hover at the same number they hit last spring. Positioning is the reason. Fix it and the right people find the door.
Your bio mentions the herbal tea. So does the practice two streets over, and the one that took the unit above the chemist.
A person with a bad back, hunting a nine-thirty appointment on a weeknight, cannot tell any of you apart by beverage preference.
Being likeable is not a position. A mum of two who loves herbal tea describes roughly four thousand women in your postcode.
The back pain doesn't care what you drink. It cares who's free on Tuesday.
Wellness marketing choices: some helpful comparisons to consider:
Better ways: practical guidance on this topic:
Nobody has ever chosen a physiotherapy practice for its taste in infusions.
Naming the exact problem out loud feels risky, as if it might frighten off everyone who doesn't have it.
It frightens nobody off. It draws nobody in either. It sits there, unplugged, like an iron nobody's switched on.
The cost of reaching a reader on a screen went up 22% since 2024.
That's the price of a decent winter coat, gone, every month, on adverts.
A vague post is now a pricier way of saying nothing to nobody in the room. You're paying premium rates for the privilege of being ignored by a wider circle of strangers.
Every pound spent on unclear positioning buys less than it used to. The maths hasn't been kind, and it isn't going to soften up out of sympathy.
You're not spending more to reach more people. You're spending more to reach the same nobody.
Plenty of practices build their own positioning, sitting round the kitchen table on a Sunday with a coffee going cold and a list of who they help best.
That's a fine way to spend a Sunday. It's also a proper job, done properly, every month, forever, on top of the clients already booked in.
Clear positioning takes hours to sharpen and keep sharp. You either give it those hours yourself or you hand it to a team whose whole week is built around exactly that.
No shame either way. The shame is doing neither, and wondering, come November, why the diary looks like it did in February.
Good to know: Whatever's on your mind here, and however your practice's specifics play in, this is what specialist agencies take care of - so you can get on with running your practice. Happy to help ease your mind, if it'd be useful.
"Wellness for everyone" reads like a jumper knitted to fit everybody. It fits nobody, and hangs off the shoulders like something from a jumble sale.
The tighter jumper, knitted for one shape and one set of shoulders, sells out first. It looks better on the shelf besides.
Narrow is not a limitation, it's the fit. Nobody buys the one-size cardigan when the one made for them hangs right next to it.
Your ideal client isn't browsing the sale rail. She's after the jumper with her name practically sewn into the label.
Self-check: score your practice:
Everybody's jumper fits nobody exactly. Somebody's jumper fits somebody exactly.
One message covering every possible client walking past your window feels like a good use of a Tuesday afternoon.
It costs you the booking. The person with sciatica keeps scrolling past a page that never once said the word sciatica.
Broad positioning loses you the exact reader who needed you.
Broad positioning quietly loses you the exact reader who needed you.
She was there, on your page, for four seconds, looking for a word you didn't say.
Say the word. She'll stop scrolling.
A practice posts three times a week for a whole year, birthdays to Christmas. The diary stays exactly as full as it was in January.
That's not a content problem. Nobody needs a fourth post a week.
It's a "nobody knows what you're for" problem, sitting there calm as you like, unbothered by the posting schedule.
More content never fixes unclear positioning. It just makes the unclear positioning more visible, more often, to more people who scroll past it.
Worth catching before another year does exactly the same thing to you.
Naming your ideal client out loud feels rude somehow, like pointing at a stranger across a crowded room and saying their name.
It's the opposite of rude. It's the only way the right person in that crowded room realises you were talking to them all along.
Naming the client is a courtesy, not an insult. Everyone else in the room simply isn't listening, which is exactly as it should be.
Think of the woman who's been meaning to sort her pelvic floor since the second baby, and has been ignoring every jumble-sale caption for three years.
The person you named heard you. Everyone else was never going to book anyway.
The fix for vague is not volume. Shouting the same soft message through a bigger megaphone doesn't sharpen it.
The fix is narrower. Say the one thing you fix, for the one person who has it, and stop.
Narrow positioning makes enquiries easier to answer. It also makes them easier to decline, politely, when they're not a fit. That saves everyone a getting-to-know-you phone call going nowhere.
Fixing this before it costs more isn't dramatic advice. Nobody needs a violin section for a spreadsheet.
Clear positioning stops that leak at the source. The reach you're already paying for starts landing on people who need what you do.
Clear positioning stops that leak at the source. The reach you're already paying for starts landing on people who genuinely need what you do.
Check your own numbers before you check anyone else's excuse.
That's the whole calculation. No violins required.
Fill your diary with clients who already know exactly why they're calling you. sort your positioning
A good sign. Practitioners who know something needs attention tend to love what the discovery call uncovers - our ecosystem, our listening wind, our story garden. Beautiful sense, over coffee. Oat milk?
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