Are your postpartum care prices too expensive?
Usually, when it feels hard to get clients, we assume that it's because our prices are too expensive.
But what if I told you that money isn't the biggest thing stopping you from selling your postpartum products and services?
Ten years ago, I sold a sleep support program for $37 and was told it was too expensive! I was shook! It was a huge turning point for me. I decided to stop putting my time and energy into worrying that postpartum care is too expensive, and put that time and energy into figuring out exactly how to market and sell postpartum care instead.
And, now I want to share what I've learned with you.
There are four common mistakes that postpartum professionals make when marketing and selling, and in this free video lesson, I'll be sharing them all with you, and what to do instead.
If you feel like it's really hard to get postpartum clients, this free 13-minute lesson is for you.
Transcript
Julia Jones:
Hello, and welcome to this lesson on understanding the postpartum industry. What you'll learn. Understand the industry landscape that we are working in, and learn what's different about starting a business in postpartum care. There are plenty of potential clients spending plenty of money. Now, the first thing I hear everyone saying when they start their business is no one can afford me, people don't have the money, no one invests in postpartum care, I'm going to make my prices cheaper. But I want you to know that there are plenty of potential clients spending plenty of money, and here's exactly how many. In Australia, 300,000 babies are born every year.
In Australia, we spend $1.5 billion on online baby products, just in 2022. And globally, we spend $67 billion on baby care products every year. So there are a lot of new families looking for solutions and spending money, and so why not on your services? Meanwhile, many postpartum professionals don't have the skills to tap into the market. So first of all, I want you to really develop this mindset of people need postpartum care, families are spending money looking for health and happiness in the transition to parenthood, how can I get better at marketing skills? How can I get better at selling? How can I develop my business skills so that I can reach that market, I can support those people?
The question we get asked all the time is, is there demand for postpartum care? So when I started, there was no postpartum care available in my town. I learned about postpartum care when I was traveling overseas in Asia, and then I studied postpartum care online. It was an American course at the time, back when online meant printing out a binder and joining teleconferences. And there was no training available. There were no postpartum doulas in the town where I lived. And a business coach told me once that no competition meant there was no demand. He's like, "You haven't got a business." And often this will happen. People will say, when you start a business, the first thing you should do is look at your competitors.
And if there's no competitors in your market, that's because there's no market. Now, I knew this wasn't true. I disagreed because I really felt like there was a need for postpartum care. I knew there was a demand. So I was like, where's the market? What's happening? Why is no one selling this? I realized I was simply ahead of the market, and that requires a different business strategy. Postpartum care is still an unmet market. Maternal care is a huge untapped market, and you'll need to use your imagination. You're not going to be modeling your business on what already exists. You're going to be creating demand.
And I want to tell you about a book called Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne. Now, this book is about creating demand in a new market, so it's really relevant to what we do in postpartum care. It avoids the conventional business approach of fighting the competition for market share. So if you start a business in an existing marketplace, what you're doing is competing for the same customers, but that's not what we're going to be doing in postpartum care. Even if there is already some postpartum care services available where you live, I'm really sure that there are many more babies born than care available, and therefore the competition is still irrelevant. Really, we want to focus not on competing with existing postpartum services, but creating new demand, reaching those families who've not yet heard of postpartum care.
So red oceans are full of sharks. This is the opposite of a blue ocean is a red ocean. Red oceans are industries that are already in existence today, the known market space. And the industry boundaries are defined and accepted, and the competitive rules of the game are known. Companies compete to grab a greater share of the existing demand. And so that's not what we are doing. On the other hand, blue oceans are vast and deep. This is where we work. Blue oceans are industries that are not in existence today. They are unknown market spaces untainted by competition. Demand is created rather than fought over, and competition is irrelevant. The rules of the game are waiting to be set, which means you get to create them. You get to build the business that you want to build, and you get to meet the market in the way that you want to meet them. Some examples of blue oceans. Sydney mom of four, Kristy Chong, founded ModiBodi in 2013 and sold it for $140 million in 2022.
ModiBodi, in case you haven't heard of it, is a period underwear business. She actually started out creating a product for light bladder leaks because she wanted to exercise after having babies, couldn't find anything other than incontinence disposable nappies targeting elderly people. She knew there was huge number of mothers with the same problem as she did, an untapped market, a blue ocean. And she grew that business to $140 million in less than 10 years.
Fernwood Fitness was a women's gym that was started in 1989 by a Melbourne stay at home mom, and now generates $75 million a year. So again, back in the '80s, people probably said, "Oh, women don't want to go to the gym. Women don't go to the gym. There's no market for that. There's no demand." But when you could create a gym that targeted women that has a [inaudible 00:05:44], that has programs where women feel safe, that has things that are targeting people who have different goals and different barriers to participation, then you're creating a blue ocean.
You are creating demand and not competing for an existing market. More people will go to the gym. You won't be taking people from other gyms. So this is what I want you to think about with your business. You are creating a new demand. So some of the best marketing advice I ever received was people aren't looking for doulas, they are looking for solutions. So if you want to go and start a doula business and making your search terms doula, so people type into Google doula and your business comes up top, you're not going to find many clients, because most people aren't looking for doulas. But they are looking for solutions and you need to know what their problem is. Now, it's the same with plumbers. People aren't looking for a plumber. No one just wants a plumber to come over. They're looking for solutions. They want someone to fix their toilet.
So you really need to focus on what is the problem that you're solving. The difference is, and this is the blue ocean and the red ocean idea, the difference is people already know what solution to look for when they have a problem with their toilet. When their toilet is broken, they know that they should type plumber into Google. When their postpartum is broken, they don't know what to do. So you are creating the demand rather than competing for it. You're not competing against other postpartum professionals for demand in an existing market, you're creating demand by educating people on their problem, helping them to understand what postpartum problems look like, what possibilities and solutions could be available to them, and then telling them about the solutions and selling them those solutions. So let's just have a look at what that customer journey looks like.
When you're doing a blue ocean customer journey, then your customer journey will be a bit different, and that's because you'll be working a lot more on awareness. So awareness is when the customers realize they have a problem that could be solved. They have to know that there's a solution and that this problem isn't inevitable. And so a plumber doesn't need to do much to raise awareness. Everyone knows if their toilet's broken, it can be fixed, and they also know who can fix it. But when you're working in a blue ocean, you'll need to do a lot more awareness to start your business than other industries. So how do you create awareness and build demand? Don't assume pregnant families are Googling postpartum support. They are not looking for solutions yet, because they don't even know that they have a problem. So you need to meet your potential clients where they are, which is probably pregnant.
The vast majority of you will need to target people when they're still pregnant, even if you'll be working with them in postpartum. They need to be aware of you before their baby's born. So you want to get them thinking about the problems they might encounter after the birth, with content marketing and postpartum education. Now, this could be anything from pregnancy groups, pregnancy education, postpartum planning classes for people who are pregnant. You might create podcasts or blog posts. You might create templates, guides, worksheets. There are endless possibilities, and we'll talk more about content marketing in the future. But what you really want to be thinking of is how can I get people to understand the problem and know that there are solutions available whilst they're still pregnant? So you need to let them know that these problems can be solved, that they're not inevitable.
So, common mistakes. A lot of people, probably you, and that's fine, I did it too, will sell too early to people who don't even know they have a problem yet. So when you go in that customer journey, if you skip, if we go back and have a look at that, if you skip the awareness and the consideration and you jump straight into the decision with someone who's not ready yet, they won't understand what problem you're solving. And so you're selling too early and they won't buy it. The other problem that you might have is you're marketing too late to people who've already had their baby and now have so many problems that they don't have the resources to look for solutions, and they may even think that their problems are inevitable.
You might not want to scare or upset people, and so you want to avoid talking about the problem altogether. The problem is we have a huge culture of fear around birth, and people are really fixated on that, and they don't necessarily have a lot of energy to think about postpartum until they're already there, and then it's too late. And so I know you probably have this urge as a nurturing, caring person to tell people it's going to be beautiful, it'll be okay. But if they aren't aware that they're going to face potential challenges, they're not going to be aware that there are solutions if they come up against those challenges.
Another common mistake is not raising awareness of the problem with men and partners, and then you end up with a dad block, which you probably hear me talk about a lot. But often because the woman or the birthing parent is the one who's pregnant and feels the baby, and that connection and the life changes are happening so much earlier, whereas the other partner, usually a man, because I think in other kinds of shapes of families, then this kind of patriarchal beliefs aren't so solid.
So usually if there's a male partner, he's not going to be so aware of what the problems are around postpartum until too late. So if you are only marketing to the birthing parent, then the man might come along and go, "What a waste of time." We call this the dad block. It's surprisingly common. So you need to take him on the journey too. So what do you do instead? Focus on who you work with. They're probably still pregnant. Be very clear about the problem that you solve, using words that they understand, and spend a lot of your marketing energy on raising awareness of the problem. You have to go there. I know it's unpleasant, but you really are letting people down if you don't let them know that there is a problem and then a potential solution, because otherwise they won't get the help they need.
And meanwhile, instead of competition, you don't need to compete for demand in Blue Ocean. So you can work in a really cooperative way with anyone else who's offering products and services in your area. So you can cooperate with services providers who have the same audience as you and work together to provide postpartum education and content marketing, and raise awareness of postpartum problems and the existence of solutions. So, back to the beginning. It's not about money. I know that this will be the first thing that you will think when someone rejects you. Oh, they don't value it. They're not going to spend money on postpartum care. It's not about money. It's about creating demand in an emerging market. It's about identifying your audience and understanding their dreams and desires, and that's what we're going to do in the next lesson. Thank you so much for watching.
