RSI Day: Raise Awareness and Promote Your Services 

This event is also something that we can use in our marketing and in the content that we produce. Ergonomists and healthcare professionals will have a whole day’s opportunity, or maybe even the whole month of February, to bring awareness of RSIs and how to prevent them. Let your clients know that ergonomics is an important aspect in our lives, and that there is a whole day dedicated to it. Promote your services by making them aware of the actions that they need to take in order to eliminate injuries in the workplace. In this blog, I will share how you can leverage the power of RSI Awareness Day to your benefit as a Consultant.

Using Promotions to Increase RSI Awareness

RSIs, also known as Work-related Musculoskeletal Disorders (WMSDs), are soft-tissue injuries that occur gradually and can limit your usual day-to-day activities and cause persistent pain. These injuries are commonly caused by repetitive or forceful actions, or working with incorrect posture. As Ergonomic professionals, we can prevent the injuries from occurring by raising awareness. And as we commemorate RSI Awareness Day, it’s also a perfect opportunity to do a promotion for your services. 

Through promotional marketing, you’ll be able to share knowledge of what you do professionally and the services that you offer. The goal of doing promotions is to present our services to the audience, letting them know that this type of service exists, and that we can help them with their ergonomic challenges. A promotion doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to discount your services. The risk of doing such promotions throughout the year is that you train your audience to constantly look for a discount before they move forward with you. When doing promotions that discount your services, you need to consider how such a promotion will affect your relationship with your clients, and how they will perceive your services. And I especially think that for corporate clients, a promotion isn't a requirement for them to move forward with you. 

Take, for example, those clothing stores like Gap or Old Navy who offer quarterly sales. They've trained their customers that if you're going to buy from them, you just have to wait until one of those quarterly sales comes up. It makes the customers wonder, “Why should I buy now if I can just wait for a month to get what I want and save a massive amount of money?” And this brings up the point of how your clients perceive the value of what you do. Those stores that provide regular sales to their customers give you a feeling of uncertainty of the true value of their product. And it also gives the same impression if we're constantly discounting our services. What then, will our clients think of our services, or the value that we bring to an organization?

So instead of a discount, opt for a strategy that will ensure your ideal clients will want to move forward with you. A better strategy is to use a concentrated effort over a given period of time for your promotions. You can use RSI Day at your disposal for this strategy, so whatever content you’re putting out there is on the basis of RSI Awareness Day.  Your clients need to be educated on why this event is so important, and it’s the perfect time to promote your services in front of the right audience. This will drive up that curiosity factor to your ideal clients. It’s a very clever marketing strategy that you should implement. Perhaps you don’t directly promote your services, but rather talk about RSI Day and how it’s something that we need to be made aware of, and what you can do to help your clients get started with their ergonomic programs. This is also a very good opportunity if you're a little bit hesitant about marketing yourself, it’s a good excuse to market yourself on RSI Day.

How To Promote Your Services

In order to effectively promote your services, there are 2 perspectives that you need to consider. First, you need to begin with the end in mind. Before you start promoting your services, you have to visualize your business the way that you want it to end up being. When you have a clear understanding of what you want to achieve for your business, you'll have clarity in how you want to promote it. When you start with the end in mind, it’ll also give you clarity as to what to avoid, so you’ll be able to strategize the best route to your goals. And the second perspective is picking a goal. Let’s say you want to promote RSI Day, so you have to pick what specific things you want to do and what services you want to promote. After that, reverse-engineer your content based on the services you offer to get there. 

Time to Take Action

There’s a short supply of ergonomic professionals out there, and it’s our duty to share the message that we bring a valuable service to the market. If we don't  promote our services ourselves, then someone else is going to fill that gap, or perhaps an employee who’s experiencing discomfort due to poor ergonomics isn’t going to get the help that they need. And not implementing proper ergonomic programs will only worsen the discomfort, which could then lead to a workers’ compensation claim. So I really believe it's our responsibility to share that we have this valuable service that can help profitability, retention, increase productivity, and improve employee morale. 

The perfect time doesn't exist, so I encourage you to take action now. Taking action can bring clarity in how you can continue to market your services in the future and how you can execute your services. But it doesn't necessarily mean that you have to take huge steps right away. Perhaps you just take consistent actionable baby steps, and you iterate while you're moving forward. Now is the right time to use RSI Awareness Day as your starting point in promoting your services. Leveraging the power of RSI Day is a really useful way to get to our end result of more clients, more revenue, and more impact in our profession.

I hope you gain some value from this blog on how you can promote your services as you raise awareness this RSI Day. If you’re interested in finding out how other healthcare professionals are already adding ergonomic expertise to their practices, I have a training for you. To learn more about the details, just click here.