6 good reasons mediation marketers should skip the brochure

I’ve just put up a new reader-only resource for those of you who’ve purchased my book, Making Mediation Your Day Job: How to Market Your ADR Business Using Mediation Principles You Already Know.

Reader-only resources are a special thank you for those of you who’ve bought the book and supplement some of the ideas discussed in its pages.

Here’s an excerpt of the new article:

Before you print up more or new brochures for your mediation marketing, consider the waste of most brochures:
 

• Brochures are static. They capture you for a moment in time only.
• If you’re new in the mediation business, the likelihood’s pretty high that your print materials will be out of date within 6 months. That’s because you’ll refine the way you describe what you do as you hone your practice and your marketing.
• Brochures tend to be generalist, trying to say everything to everyone, so you can use them for multiple purposes. If you’ve been a reader of Mediator Tech for 6 months or more, you know I believe that trying to be everything to everyone with a broad generalist market is the kiss of death for too many mediators.
• Brochures eat trees. At a time of growing interest in minimizing the environmental consequences of excessive paper use, more and more of us are printing only when we know the resource will serve someone effectively.
• Done well, brochures are not inexpensive. Paying for quality graphic design, quality printing, and perhaps even quality copywriting can add up quickly. The ROI with brochures is unclear enough to suggest your money may be better spent elsewhere.
• Done poorly, brochures do more to harm your ADR business than help it. Designing them yourself with stock logo and printing them on your home printer can convey an unprofessional image you don’t intend.

I usually advise mediators to forget printing brochures and take an alternative, much more effective marketing materials path instead.

Read the rest of the article at Forget the Brochure and Use Customized Resources Instead. You’ll need to own the book to gain access.

Odds and Ends

For those of you interested in joining one of my workshops or seeing me speak, I’ve got several gigs coming up around the country in the next month:

• Making Mediation Your Day Job, Maine Association of Mediators Annual Meeting, Augusta, ME, November 19
• The Sustainable ADR Career: What Mediators Can Learn From Hybrid Cars, Southeastern Mediators Summit keynote address, Nashville, TN, December 1
• Marketing Your Mediation Practice: Craft Your Plan for the Next 90 Days, Southeastern Mediators Summit 2-day workshop, Nashville, TN, December 2-3
• Client Relationship Management: How to Track, Groom and Grow Your Client Base, New England ACR Annual Conference, Shrewsbury, MA, December 11

Making Mediation Your Day Job by Tammy Lenski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at MediatorTech.com.

Micro-blogging goes mainstream says Wall Street Journal

Last summer I wrote Twitter 101 for Mediators, offering ideas for getting started with the micro-blogging platform and reasons Twitter could be an effective marketing tool for mediators.

If you’ve been considering Twitter, or have just started using it, check out this week’s Wall Street Journal article, Twitter Goes Mainstream. An excerpt: [Read more]

Southeastern Mediators’ Summit: A practice-building conference not to be missed

Have mediators limited their thinking too narrowly? Can mediation realize its potential for social change and economic viability? Is it possible to transform business disillusionment into making a decent living as a mediator?

These are some of the important questions that Lipscomb University’s Institute for Conflict Management is going to help answer on December 1-3 in the first annual Southeastern Mediators’ Summit.

With an inaugural theme of “In the Shadow and Out of the Box,” the two-and-a-half-day Summit in Nashville, TN will help mediators learn how to apply what you know as a mediator in new ways and in new markets. Workshops and general sessions include “Thriving Community Mediation Models,” “Managing Faith-Based Disputes,” “Mediation’s Future in Health Care,” “Advanced Commercial Mediation,” and “Sustainable Environmental Mediation.”

I think so highly of what the Summit wants to achieve that [Read more]