Should You Market Your Spiritual Services? Only If You Want More Clients

If you are a spiritual advisor, ritualist, teacher, psychic medium, animal communicator, reiki healer, astrologer, or tarot reader you may have been told many times that spiritual services should be free. That poverty-consciousness mindset combined with your own reluctance to "sell" or engage in business networking among more conventional business owners can be a hurdle that prevents you from building a successful business. And it can be confusing and demoralizing to try to translate marketing advice that pertains to shop owners, and fast track entrepreneurs into useful action steps that will keep you in integrity with your soul.

But the reality is that marketing can be a form of being of service that fits right in with your other spiritual gifts -- when you approach it from the attitude of being a helpful resource for potential clients.

And to approach marketing as a form of being of service requires that you become detached from whether any singular activity will result in a new client in the short term.

In other words, dump the expectation that a blog posted this morning will bring a new client this afternoon.

In fact, in my experience as a spiritual services provider and as a psychotherapist, marketing tactics done with the intention of turning a conversation into a sale tend instead to drive people away. It's too aggressive and out of alignment with the spiritual and healing ethic. Those potential clients will feel the energy of a hidden sales agenda coming at them, and intuitively put up barriers of resistance and skepticism.

So what can you do instead?

Deah's Essential Tips for Marketing Spiritual Services

1. Define Your Service Outcome & Best Client Type

Here's secret number one -- if you aren't selling a tangible product, people will buy your service if the result does one of three things for them:

• gives a value -- such as new useable knowledge

• changes a situation -- due to advice rendered

• heals an emotional wound -- by shifting their perspective

So you have to know what outcome your services provide. And you have to know what your clients want as their result.

In order to know what your clients want, you have to define who they are. Elsewhere this is called determining your ideal client so that you know who you are marketing to, and how they are listening for help.

Don't make the mistake of thinking that your services help everyone. Of course, they might, but "everyone" is too vague a universe of potential clients to market to. Instead, decide the specific type of person with the particular kind of want that you can appeal to.

2. Find Your Tribe

Once you've decided who your ideal client is, you will need to find where they hang out or where they go to get information, so that you aren't wasting your marketing time, effort, and money.

These days a lot of spiritual services clients get their info from the internet. This means you need two things -- a website with a blog, and a social media business page. In my experience Facebook works better than Twitter as a platform for spiritual services business owners. Pick the one you are most comfortable with, and design a plan for having an active presence there.

One easy way to have an active social media presence is to join one or more private groups where there are spiritual seekers. Just be there to share your knowledge, and occasionally mention your blog or a result you were able to give to a client.

Don't overtly promote yourself, though, because most groups prohibit that and others find it obnoxious.

Another way to have a strong social media presence is to promote your blog post on your own business page. This helps generate traffic back to your website, which earns better SEO points with Google.

3. Show Up as Consistent & Trustworthy

If you are a business owner, it's useful, I think, to strive to show up in all aspects of your life as consistent and trustworthy. This includes when you are venting about a personal issue in any private forum or group, because you never know when those who are observing your behavior could become a referral source (or an unfavorable influencer).

A good way to demonstrate your trustworthiness is to look for opportunities to answer a question, lend support and comfort, and provide a resource -- even those that aren't yours. This kind of giving builds good will and helps you remain in others' consciousness as a helpful person. Soon or later that will translate into wanting to engage your services for more focused help.

Being a helpful resource always keeps you walking in integrity on your own path as a spiritual provider.

4. Create and Curate Resources

I'm a fan of creating resources. What that means for me is that I use my skill as a writer to create information products. Those can take many forms -- emails, give-away pdf ebooks, blog posts, the gathering of blog post into digital books for Kindle, and print on demand paperbacks.

As an introvert, I'd much rather spend my time writing info products than going to networking breakfasts with conventional business owners. And there is a lot of networking potential online in private Facebook and LinkedIn groups. I find it helpful to have several informative resources I can mention in conversation when the opportune moment arises.

By the way, curating means collecting links to resources that others have created so that you can promote or mention them too.

For example, I have a favorite set of experts in several fields whose work I follow. I frequently link to them in blogs and social media because I think my audience of past and future clients will benefit from their knowledge. Linking to others furthers that ethic of being of service, and helps build your reputation as a help resource as well.

5. Promote or Follow Up Gently

Our spiritual gifts are indeed a blessing -- but they don't pay the rent if we can't make a living offering our work in the world for a reasonable fee. The conventional language for persuading a person to become a client is "call to action".

Yes, spiritual services business owners do need to use calls to action, and it is possible to do so and stay in integrity with your own ethical path.

For example, place a gentle invitation at the end of your blog posts for how to get further details about your services. Tell forum or online group members how to reach you privately if they want your full consultation or reading.

6. Re-Envision How to Deliver Services

Don't forget to pay some attention to which of your services are popular and which aren't selling.

It can be useful to turn workshop materials into an information product instead of trying to enroll participants in a weekend class. Or break up a long training program into shorter, self-contained modules for less cost. Sometimes just changing the title and description of what you offer will make a difference.

In other words, being a spiritual services provider doesn't mean you have to avoid the analysis and redesign that every successful business owner does to know how to continue being relevant to their market.

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I hope these tips have sparked some ideas for you.

And if you'd like more knowledge and assistance about marketing your spiritual services business, take a look at my info product and consult opportunity by clicking on the picture above in this blog or on this link: Essential of Marketing for the Spiritual Service Business Owner. The table of contents is listed on the page the link will take you to. (See what I did there?)