No offence but your clients don’t care about you

Stop talking, thinking, writing about yourself on your website and/or promotional material. On top every potential client’s mind is one question and if you can answer that question, you’re in business.

It’s an ongoing struggle, one I am constantly working and tweaking with my own website but to my mind, we as therapists and counsellors spend far to much time coming across as too self-involved. And, yes, while we are trying to run a business, assert ourselves as experts and just plain old earn a living, we’re ultimately providing a service to our clients.

The result is that we tell our prospects how long we’ve been around, how many qualifications we have and so. Our potential clients are savvy, smart people and they don’t care.

The number one question on every client’s mind when they’re visiting your site is “can you help me?”. Think about this in terms of your own time spent online, I’m sure the vast majority of my readers out there have shopped at Amazon. When you get to their site, you don’t want to read about many books they sell a month, how long they’ve been in business and how they totally shred the competition. You’re thinking “I need the new Harry Potter. I want it delivered tomorrow. Can Amazon do that?”.

So before a client picks up the phone to call you, they want to know what’s in it for them, what service can you offer that others can’t, they want to know in plain and simple language how they are going to benefit from seeing you. If you can communicate that to them, you’re in business. (There’s an obvious caveat here…as therapists we can’t offer cast iron guarantees of improvement but I think we can be much more straightforward about the benefits that are available to clients who want to put the work in a therapeutic relationship).

So if your website or brochure (or both) read like a CV, think seriously about giving it an overhaul. No one wants to read a CV because, frankly, its boring. With marketing you don’t have that much time to capture your potential client’s attention, so don’t use what little time you do have to bore them with factoids. Instead, share with them how you’re going to help them.

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