Shiatsudo Blog

This Saturday (12 July), my wife and I will be offering free shiatsu massage taster sessions at the Harrow NCT Healthy Summer Fun Day.  The event is being held at the Pinner Parish Church on Church Lane between 2:30pm and 4:30pm. There will be lots of things going on including face painting for the little ones, children’s books on sale and various complementary and alternative therapies (tots and adults yoga demonstrations, homeopathy, baby massage, aromatherapy) and of course, shiatsu!

Dinah and I will both be there, and while one of us offers free 10 minute shiatsu mini-treatments, the other will be looking after our daughter and available to chat to anyone who wants to find out a little more about what shiatsu is, or hear about our experience of using shiatsu and acupressure for pain relief during labour.  Our little one can be quite talkative so you might get a few gurgles and squeaks thrown in

Drop by and say hello.

Tags:shiatsu tasters

This was reported back in April in The Times….I’ve only just found it, but it’s pretty cool - farmers are doing Tai Chi in front of their cows in the morning and apparently increasing milk production because the cows are happier.  I’m not kidding!  Check out the article here.

That has to make you smile.

Tags:cows, Tai Chi

The Shiatsu Society has its own publication called the Shiatsu Society News.  It is distributed to everyone who is a paid-up member of the society, and according to the publication itself, it has a circulation of about 2000.  I’m not sure if you can buy it anywhere - I doubt it, and I’ve never seen it on sale.  I don’t expect the Shiatsu Society News would be of any interest to anyone outside of the shiatsu world anyway.

It is a nice, glossy magazine that comes out quarterly and usually features some articles on shiatsu and related topics, a Letters section, a bit of advertising…..the usual sort of thing.  My wife had a book review published in it a while ago that I published ages ago on my old blog.  I’ll repost it here soon.

The most recent issue has an article called “Attracting Clients: What Really Works?”,  which obviously caught my eye.  Marketing is not really my strong point.  My wife is better in this department and a while ago, sent out a questionnaire to some of her clients to find out why some clients who really enjoyed their shiatsu never rebooked a shiatsu treatment.  She followed up and noted that one client “just put shiatsu on the backburner for a while”.  Finally, she noted the results from the feedback she got.

Back to the Shiatsu Society News article - which interviewed several shiatsu practitioners and asked them what marketing and promotion techniques worked best for them and what didn’t work.

The Best List includes general networking and word-of-mouth, taster sessions, having a good flier or postcard that describes what shiatsu is.  The Worst List includes paid adverts, listings in directories (because people don’t really look up “shiatsu” per se) and the piece de resistance: referrals from The Shiatsu Society - of the four practitioners interviewed, only one practitioner had had a referral from the Society…..in 10 years of membership!  That’s pretty sad.  I myself have never had a client referred to me from the Shiatsu Society; and I begin to wonder what the role of the Society is……

Any Shiatsu practitioners out there have a “best of” and “worst of” marketing list?  Any other practitioners have better results from referrals from the Shiatsu Society?  Any clients feel like commenting on what they found most effective and least effective?  I would love to hear about it; drop me a comment.

Tags:Marketing, Shiatsu, shiatsu society