How to Promote Your Doula Business Without Spending a Fortune

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Doula Darcy Podcast – "How to Promote Your Doula Business Without Spending a Fortune"

Episode Details

• Title: How to Promote Your Doula Business Without Spending a Fortune
• Host: Darcy Sauers
• Release Date: August 9, 2025

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Introduction

In this episode of The Doula Darcy Podcast, host Darcy Sauers delves into effective strategies for promoting a doula business without incurring significant expenses. Combining her extensive background in advertising and her 14 years of experience as a doula, Darcy provides actionable insights aimed at helping doulas attract more clients and build sustainable careers.

Key Topics Covered

1. The Possibility of Free Promotion
2. Investing in a Professional Website
3. The Power of SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
4. Community Networking
5. Leveraging Social Media
6. Providing Excellent Client Service

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1. The Possibility of Free Promotion

Darcy emphasizes that promoting a doula business without a hefty budget is not only possible but also highly effective in the modern digital landscape.

"You can promote your business without spending any money." – Darcy Sauers ([00:45])

She contrasts this with pre-internet days, where costly advertising mediums like radio, TV, and newspapers were the only options. Today, the internet offers a plethora of free tools and platforms that can significantly reduce marketing expenses.

2. Investing in a Professional Website

Despite advocating for minimal spending, Darcy highlights the importance of investing in a quality website as a foundational tool for any doula business.

"The first thing I'm going to do is tell you to spend some money on a website. This is truly the only money that I think you need to spend to have a successful doula business." – Darcy Sauers ([01:45])

She likens a website to an employee that works around the clock to attract clients, asserting that the investment in a website pays for itself through continuous client inquiries without additional advertising costs.

3. The Power of SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

Darcy underscores SEO as a critical component that maximizes the effectiveness of a doula’s website.

"A good website actually pays for itself. [...] You have good SEO, good search engine optimization, which means your website shows up when someone in your town Googles 'doula near me,' you're in the top three results." – Darcy Sauers ([02:30])

She advises doulas to either learn SEO principles themselves or invest in professional SEO services, emphasizing that this investment yields long-term benefits by consistently bringing in clients.

4. Community Networking

Networking within the local community is presented as a free yet powerful method to promote doula services.

"The biggest thing you can do to promote your doula services is to network in your community. And that is free." – Darcy Sauers ([04:00])

Darcy recommends connecting with other maternity-related service providers such as chiropractors, prenatal yoga instructors, and maternity photographers. These relationships can lead to valuable referrals and collaborative opportunities, enhancing the doula’s visibility and reputation within the community.

5. Leveraging Social Media

While acknowledging the common reluctance towards social media, Darcy advocates for its use as a vital, no-cost promotional tool.

"Social media is a free platform to educate your community about your amazing services." – Darcy Sauers ([10:15])

She encourages doulas to actively post and engage on social media to reach potential clients who are researching doula services online. Darcy also shares her own practice of minimal social media activity, relying primarily on SEO and networking, but emphasizes that active participation is necessary for those who lack an established network.

6. Providing Excellent Client Service

Darcy concludes by highlighting that exceptional service is the most effective form of marketing, as satisfied clients become vocal advocates for the doula’s business.

"Provide excellent service to your doula clients. That is the best form of marketing when you have happy clients that are singing your praises out in the community." – Darcy Sauers ([15:30])

By ensuring client satisfaction, doulas can benefit from word-of-mouth referrals, which are invaluable and cost nothing.

Conclusion and Call to Action

Darcy wraps up the episode by reinforcing the simplicity and effectiveness of the strategies discussed. She encourages doulas to prioritize building a robust website and mastering SEO while leveraging free networking and social media tools. Additionally, she promotes her Doula Village community, offering resources such as website templates, SEO audits, and training sessions to further support doulas in their business growth.

"Please stop wasting time spinning your wheels on how to get the best website and just go get one of my doula website templates." – Darcy Sauers ([16:45])

She invites listeners to join her free Facebook community, the Doula Marketing Group, and to engage with her on Instagram for ongoing support and updates.

Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• [00:45] "You can promote your business without spending any money."
• [01:45] "The first thing I'm going to do is tell you to spend some money on a website."
• [02:30] "You have good SEO, good search engine optimization, which means your website shows up when someone in your town Googles 'doula near me,' you're in the top three results."
• [04:00] "The biggest thing you can do to promote your doula services is to network in your community."
• [10:15] "Social media is a free platform to educate your community about your amazing services."
• [15:30] "Provide excellent service to your doula clients. That is the best form of marketing when you have happy clients that are singing your praises out in the community."
• [16:45] "Please stop wasting time spinning your wheels on how to get the best website and just go get one of my doula website templates."

Final Thoughts

Darcy Sauers effectively outlines a comprehensive, budget-friendly approach to marketing a doula business. By focusing on essential investments like a professional website and SEO, coupled with free strategies such as community networking and social media engagement, doulas can build a thriving practice without financial strain. Her emphasis on excellent client service further ensures sustained growth through organic referrals.

For doulas seeking to elevate their businesses, this episode serves as a valuable guide filled with practical advice and inspirational motivation to leverage available resources efficiently.

Transcript

[A]

Welcome to the Doula Darcy podcast. I'm your host, Darcy, a business coach for doulas. And I love helping my fellow doulas master the art of marketing so that they can grow their businesses and help more families. On the podcast, I combine my decade of experience in Advertising with 14 years as a doula to empower other doulas with the marketing strategies and mindset shifts they need to attract more clients and create successful, fulfilling doula careers. Whether you're just starting out as a doula or you're looking to take your doula business to the next level, you're in the right place. Let's go.

[B]

Let's just dive right into one of the most popular questions that I get. The first question is, how do I get doula clients? The second is, okay, how do I promote my doula business without spending a fortune? And my answer is, you can promote your business without spending any money. And this just gets me all riled up because first of all, all the work that I do with doulas in my doula village in my one on one coaching is about how to promote your business without spending any money. You can have a very successful business without spending money. And this is just a true gift. You've heard me talk about this. But back in the day before the Internet, that was impossible. You had to spend money. You had to pay for radio ads, you had to pay for TV ads, you had to pay for ads in the newspaper, or you had to come up with some publicity stunt to get written up in the newspaper. Now with the Internet, there are so many free ways to get the word out about your doula business. This is just so cool. You pay to do your training and then you can have a career for life. So let's get into the just. That's another whole podcast episode that frankly, I probably already have done. But let's talk about how to get the word out about your doula services without spending any money. So the first thing I'm going to do is tell you to spend some money on a website. This is truly the only money that I think you need to spend to have a successful doula business. And at the end of the day, you're actually not. It's not costing you anything. A good website actually pays for itself. Imagine that your website is like an employee that pays for itself. It's an employee that is out 247 promoting your business, attracting in new dream clients. So whatever money you invest in a good website, and I'll get into what makes a good website in here in a second. But the money you invest in your website should be coming back to you tenfold every single month in terms of bringing you client inquiries without you having to pay for advertising. So it's so your website is like an advertisement for your business. And by good website, I mean that it's doing this for you. You have good SEO, good search engine optimization, which means your website shows up when someone in your town Googles doula near me, you're in the top three results. When people are googling for doulas in your area, that's really what it comes down to. Next is the biggest thing you can do to promote your doula services is to network in your community. And that is free. Yes, you have to pay for gas to drive around. Yes, you need a cell phone so you can accept incoming calls from clients, but also text and message and post on social media. But in essence, networking is free when you are well connected to all the other doulas in your community. The chiropractors, the prenatal yoga teachers, the maternity photographers, the all the other people in your town that are working with pregnant and postpartum families. If they're talking about you, if they know you, if they're referring to you, that is so powerful. And again, free. So you don't have to spend any money on ads. And you can skip the obs and the pediatricians because they probably won't recommend you. It'll be super hard to get in and network with them. And at the end of the day, they'll probably say, oh, you'll be at our hospital, the nurses are great, you'll be fine, you don't need a doula. Or they just don't have time to talk about doulas unless. Unless you have an incredible relationship with your OB or pediatrician, because certainly if they do recommend you, that's like a recommendation encased in gold. But don't waste your time trying to get into pediatrician and OB offices where you don't know, they don't know you, you don't know them. You'll have so much of an easier time and a more rewarding networking relationship with other providers who have a small business. So the photographers, the chiropractors, the doulas, all these people who are also working in the community. The other thing is social media. And social media is free. Yes, you need a phone, yes, you need a computer, but I bet you already have those things. If someone is pregnant and thinking about getting a doula, what they're going to do is Google about it, ask the other people they're interacting with in the community, and scroll on social media. So if you show up, if your doula business shows up in all three of those places, you're set. And all you've spent money on is your website. So I'm trying to simplify it, but also make you see that there's nothing you should be spending money on. Please don't. Especially if you're years in and whatever. Fine, if you have some money in an advertising budget, but when you're just starting out, there is nothing you should be spending money on except a website. You should not be paying to be in any guides or paying for ads anywhere or anything like that. You can absolutely spread the word about your doula business for free. So really, besides investing in your initial website, the only money that I think you should be spending is investing in good search engine optimization. So whether that's paying someone to do it for you, but it's honestly, if not that hard, paying to learn what to do. And I would highly suggest learning what to do because then you know how to use SEO to promote your doula business, you know how to use SEO to promote your childbirth ed classes, your placenta encapsulation, you know you can, you're going to use this skill over and over. So whether you join my doula village and have me do an SEO and website audit of your website and then come in and watch all the trainings on SEO, whether you spend all sorts of time watching YouTube videos and learning how to do it yourself, whether you hire an SEO expert, whatever IT money you spend on SEO again will pay for itself. It's. I don't even view it as an expense, but because it, the whatever fraction of your budget you spend on SEO, whatever. That's not even the right way to say it. Whatever small amount of money you spend on SEO, you will earn that back times 10. I'm making that number up, but an exponential number. You will earn back whatever you invest in SEO, because even if it brings you one client, but it will bring you more than one client. So the money you spend on SEO now is going to help you literally for years and years. So you can't go wrong with investing in a good website. Even the monthly. If the cost of a website, I pay Squarespace $200 a year for whatever the website, whatever you're spending on hosting and the backup and all that stuff, it is truly pennies on the dollar. I don't know the way to say it, truly, it's just Such a good investment and you have to do it. And then I'm telling you, networking and then social media, two free things. Yes, they take your time. But here's the thing. As a business owner, you have two resources to use to grow your doula business. You have time and you have money. And so most of you don't want to spend the money. So you're going to have to invest some time in networking and posting on social media. And again, that's an investment. Your time that you're investing in that is going to get you clients. If you go out and make a great connection, if you're a postpartum doula and you make a great connection with a birth doula or a photographer or whatever who starts to refer clients to you for the next 10 years while you both have these businesses, that was a good investment of your time. Yes, you're going to reach out to some people that it's going to flop and be a waste, but whatever. Collectively, the time you invest in networking is going to ultimately pay off in spades. So wake up every day being grateful that you're starting a doula business in 2025, not 1997 when there was no Internet and you had to pound the pavement and spend a lot of money to advertise your business. You are all here. You get to be doulas. It's the best job in the world. It is soul fulfilling. You get to witness honest to God miracles on the daily. You get to feel the satisfaction of having a highly purpose driven career. And all you need to do is get trained and get a website. And I was saying this on my Instagram stories earlier. Do you guys realize there's people out there that paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to go to university to become an accountant and now they sit in a cubicle and look at spreadsheets all day and they have carpal tunnel syndrome from just being at a keyboard. And you get to be out here being a doula. So get over yourself and invest in a website and get busy posting on social media. I said on my Instagram stories like I'm drawing a line in the sand. I no longer will entertain you all complaining that you don't want to put yourself out on social media. It's what you need to do if you're not getting enough inquiries already. We always tease Juanita in my doula village because she doesn't post on social media. I don't post on social media for my own in person local doula agency. I always say I'm riding on good SEO and 15 years of networking and word of mouth in the community. Oh, here is the I knew there was one more thing, one more absolutely free thing that you can do to promote your business without paying for something. And that is to provide excellent service to your doula clients. That is the best form of marketing when you have happy clients that are singing your praises out in the community. So that's what my doula business runs on. Good SEO. 15 years of happy clients and lots of networking in my community now. And a good website. I don't for my agency, I don't post on. I post on social media like once a month just to keep it looking active and like we're still in business anyway. If you are new and you don't have all that yet, you do need to be posting on social media and I'm not here to listen to you complain about it. Yes, people love to hate social media. But look when you look at it as a gift, a free platform to educate your community about your amazing services and about this career that you get to do for your whole life. They're serving you this platform on a golden platter where you can just talk about what you do for free and make connections with your dream clients. So that's my line in the sand peeps. And if you need to learn about SEO, highly recommend. Come join us in my doula village cause we're talking about it all the time. I will do an audit of your website, give you some personalized SEO tips. You can go in, watch the trainings. I have the leading experts on SEO who've done some trainings for us in my doula village. I have a few trainings of just me like talking through the points. Then if you still need a website, check out my doula website templates that I had my web design team create. Because I know this is such a problem for doulas is like how do you make a website? I'm not tech save savvy but how do I make a website? Who do I trust and just get one of our doula website templates. It's a template, it's there. You just go in and plug and play. You can make it your own, you add your own pictures, you can change the wording, you add your services. You if you want to change the font if you want, you can change the colors. You make it your own but like the the backbone of it is there. It has good SEO baked in. We tell you what you need to be doing in certain places for good SEO, we also teach you. There's video tutorials, short videos from me and mostly McKenna, my lead web designer, teaching you. That's the other thing with our doula website templates is you have full control, which I just love. Yes, you could pay big bucks for someone to design you a website, but then you don't. You can't go in and change it when you add a service or you raise your rates or you're teaching a new class or you learn something new about SEO. And I can't tell you how many doulas I talked to that paid big bucks for a website and now they can't get in touch with the guy who made it. So with our doula website templates, I really love that you have full control. We give you the video tutorials on how to do everything and you have. You're empowered to run your own doula website. So go check them out. At theduladrc.com, click on doula website templates. And again, it's a $297 investment, plus the $55 a month for the hosting and backup and access to McKenna, frankly. But that is nothing when you think of what's one doula? Think of it this way. What is one doula contract worth to you? So what are you taking a third of that and investing that in your website? Not even a third. What am I even saying? It's a small fraction of one contract. And then this website is going to bring you in multiple contracts every month, every year for the next however many years you want to be a doula. It's a no brainer, peeps. Please stop wasting time spinning your wheels on how to get the best website and just go get one of my doula website templates. Join my Doula Village. Reach out to me. Let me know you heard this episode. Send me a DM on Instagram. I hope that it was helpful to you. I hope this inspired you to not throw away money on pointless things trying to advertise your doula business. Because you just you. Frankly, you don't need to do anything other than what I've already talked about.

[A]

Thank you for tuning in to the Doula Darcy podcast. I hope you found this episode valuable and I'd love for you to join me on the next one. Let's keep the conversation going. Shoot me a DM on Instagram, Hedula Darcy. Or join my free Facebook code community, the Doula Marketing Group, where we dive deeper into growing your doula business. If you enjoyed the episode, please take a moment to rate and review the podcast on your favorite platform. Your feedback will help more doulas discover the show, which in turn helps more families find the doula support that they need. And I believe that that is how we save the world.