Step 1: Understand Your Potential Customers
You may live in a place where not many people know about Ayurveda. It's a common issue among practitioners. But to build a successful practice, a mind shift is necessary. Instead of trying to educate people on Ayurveda who may have no initial interest in alternative health, it's more effective to focus your practice on people who already have an interest in Ayurveda. That way you can serve your niche deeply, instead of trying to serve "everyone."
When you do this, your business can really start to thrive and referrals will start pouring in.
Step 2: Keep Your Clients Coming Back
Like all of us who have spent any time studying and practicing Ayurveda know, truly changing behavior and habits for the long term takes consistency in the new actions.
A common approach to offering consultations and trying to keep clients coming back is to offer healing therapies or consultations either in singular “sessions” or “session packages.” While this approach can work, as practitioners it's important to think of relationships with clients as long-term programs built around the specific eating or lifestyle habits they want to change over the next 3 months - or more likely, the next 6 months to 1 year, or even longer.
Instead of offering single consultations or the packages with three or four bought together, consider having your clients pay for programs in full or on a monthly basis, kind of like a subscription service. This may work better for you as a practitioner and your business to keep clients engaged long enough to see the dramatic results we know Ayurveda can bring.
Step 3: The Complimentary 1st Session
Building an attractive and simple, easy-to-navigate website is important to have successful practice, especially when you're just starting out and need to focus on marketing. The job of a website is to help a practitioner build an email list and encourage people to sign up for what most practitioners offer - a complimentary 1st session that typically lasts anywhere from 15 to 45 minutes.
While a practitioner can ask questions about the client's constitution to better understand them physiologically, the complimentary session is also about bringing more clarity to why exactly your client wants to delve into Ayurveda - for both the practitioner and the client.
These questions can cover what health problems are the most troublesome and how those problems are impacting their lives and relationships. These questions are not meant to create a bunch of negative emotions, instead it's to help the client to build up motivation to change.
Step 4: Advertising and Marketing
For most of us who are not trained in sales and marketing, efforts to increase interest and engagement with our business can prove useless and mediocre at best. For things like networking and advertising, you have to know your niche, your ideal market and have a simple enrollment system in place for people to sign up and begin their healing with Ayurveda immediately. Knowing where to look for potential clients is just as important as
