A "life coach" once left a comment under a massage therapist's reel saying she'd never book with an MT who "posts about her clients personally." Cool story… except that's not even close to what was happening.
That mix-up is the perfect way into E in the PLACE framework: Emotion. This episode is about the difference between exploiting a client's story and simply understanding one - and why the second one is what actually gets your local content to land.
Takeaways
- Emotion means feeling, not diagnosis. You're not marketing the ache, you're marketing what it feels like to carry it.
- Specificity about an experience is not disclosure about a person. You can describe a feeling in vivid, exact language without ever naming who it belongs to.
- Pattern-recognition is your job. Psychoanalysis is not. This episode draws a clear scope-of-practice line: noticing what your clients' bodies and words tell you is within your lane. Prompting clients to process trauma or turning your table into a couch is not… that's out of scope for most massage therapists.
- "She gets it" is the whole strategy. When a caption makes someone think "wait, that's me," they're responding to feeling seen before they've ever met you. That's not a sales pitch. That's local marketing at its best.
- Privacy is non-negotiable. No identifying details, no traceable timelines, no "my client who just went through X" even softened. Speak to the pattern, never the person.
The Story
This episode centers on Jessica, a massage therapist who's been leaning hard into consistent, specific local content. Jessica posted a reel about something she does intentionally in her marketing: she uses her clients' own words (their language, not their names or stories) to describe what people are feeling when they walk through her door.
Her clients have told her, unprompted, that it's exactly why they booked. Some have repeated her own captions back to her almost word for word, because something she wrote described a feeling they hadn't been able to put into words themselves.
Here's the caption that sparked the whole episode:
"Massage is personal. That does not mean your personal business becomes my content.
My clients tell me all the time that they see themselves in what I post. Sometimes they repeat my own words back to me almost verbatim because something I said described exactly what they were feeling.
That is intentional.
I pay attention to people. I notice patterns. I speak to real experiences without sharing the private details that belong to someone else.
If you keep watching my content and thinking, 'She gets it,' you may already know who you need to book with."
The One Thing (Live Segment)
Think of a phrase…an actual sentence… you've heard from more than one client over the years. Not a diagnosis. A feeling sentence. Something like "I feel guilty even booking this for myself."
Strip out anything that ties it to one specific person, then hand the feeling back in a caption line:
"You are allowed to book something just for you. No milestone required. No permission slip needed."
No names. No timelines. Just the feeling, translated. That's Emotion in PLACE done in about fifteen seconds. Try it with your own phrase this week.
Up Next
We're closing out the series with P: Profession, the last letter in PLACE.
Ready to bring this whole series together? Comment TWO MILES on any of my Instagram posts and I'll send the free guide straight to your inbox.
Find me on Instagram: @massage_marketing_done_for_you
Nov 2 20268 mins