If you’re an SLP, ESL/TESOL instructor, voice professional, or other qualified practitioner using the P-ESL method, knowing how to teach pronunciation is only half the equation.

You also need clients.

And clients don’t appear simply because you’re good at what you do.

The P-ESL Marketing Playbook is a practical, action-oriented course designed to help you market your pronunciation services, attract the right clients, communicate the value of your expertise, and build a repeatable system for generating business.

In this Refresher Bundle add-on “course” you’ll learn how to identify your ideal client, position your services, create an offer people understand, demonstrate your expertise through useful content, build relationships with potential clients, generate leads, follow up effectively, and turn qualified prospects into paying clients.

You’ll learn how to:

• Define the specific clients you want to attract and understand what motivates them to seek help.

• Identify what makes your P-ESL services different and communicate that difference clearly.

• Turn features of your services into meaningful benefits and outcomes for your clients.

• Build a professional online presence that supports your marketing.

• Create content that demonstrates your expertise and attracts the people you want to work with.

• Develop a practical social-media strategy instead of randomly posting on multiple platforms.

• Use LinkedIn, YouTube, email marketing, and other digital channels strategically.

• Create a lead-generation system that moves people from discovering you to contacting you.

• Develop effective follow-up and consultation strategies.

• Convert interested prospects into paying clients.

• Generate referrals and maintain relationships with past and current clients.

• Build a realistic 90-day marketing plan and put it into action.

Throughout the course, you’ll complete exercises that build upon one another. By the time you finish, you won’t simply have a better understanding of marketing. You’ll have the foundation of your own 90-Day Marketing Playbook—a practical plan for getting your P-ESL services in front of the right people and turning attention into business.

Don’t expect much if you passively read your way through this course. Marketing requires action.

You can have exceptional expertise, an outstanding service, and years of professional experience. None of it matters if the people who need what you offer don’t know you exist. You can’t simply wait and hope for clients to find you.

Build your marketing system. Put it to work. And start creating the business you want.

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Welcome to the Marketing Playbook

If you are an instructor offering the P-ESL system, you already have something valuable: a specialized skill that can help people communicate more effectively, advance professionally, and participate more confidently in American English.

But having a valuable service and building a business around that service are two different things.

That is where the Marketing Playbook comes in.

This course is designed specifically for professionals like you who are offering P-ESL training and want to develop the business, marketing, and client-acquisition skills necessary to make that service visible, understandable, and viable in the marketplace.

This is not a generic marketing course with examples that have nothing to do with what you do. It was created specifically for instructors offering the P-ESL system.

Marketing Has Always Been Part of the P-ESL Story

ILP has been teaching marketing to professionals since the early days of teaching SLPs how to use the P-ESL method in the 1980s. The technology has changed dramatically since then. So have websites, social media, search engines, email marketing, online courses, client expectations, and the ways people discover professional services.

The fundamental challenge, however, has not changed:

You can be exceptionally good at what you do and still struggle to build a business if the people who need your services never find you—or don’t understand why they should hire you.

The original Marketing Essentials course provided a foundation in marketing strategies developed from established business and marketing principles, including approaches associated with Harvard Business School. This Marketing Playbook takes that foundation and completely updates it for the realities of 2026 and beyond.

It includes the principles that still matter, but applies them to the way professionals actually market services today.

This Is a Playbook, Not a Textbook

There is a lot of information in this course. You are not expected to sit down and read every unit from beginning to end before doing anything.

In fact, you shouldn’t.

The Marketing Playbook is designed to be used.

If you’re currently trying to figure out what to put on your website, go to the sections dealing with your professional online presence. If you’re struggling with what to charge, go to the pricing and packaging sections. If you need to attract more potential clients, explore the sections dealing with marketing, content, search, and lead generation.

Click on the section that interests you. Digest a small amount of information. Try something. Come back when you need the next piece.

That’s how a playbook is supposed to work.

At the same time, there is an important distinction between using the Playbook as a reference and completing the Playbook as a training program.

If your goal is to create a comprehensive marketing action plan for your P-ESL business, I strongly recommend completing the entire Playbook. The individual pieces are designed to work together, and completing the exercises will help you build something much more useful than a collection of marketing ideas.

Every Unit Gives You Something to Do

This course is intentionally action-oriented.

Each unit includes specific guidance about what you should do with the information you just learned. You’ll find step-by-step action guides, recommended resources, exercises, examples, and very specific accountability actions.

You will also encounter questions that require you to make decisions about your own business.

Don’t skip those questions.

A marketing course can give you excellent information, but information alone doesn’t build a business. The value comes from taking what you learn and applying it to your particular situation.

Some of the exercises may take five minutes. Others may require you to stop, think, research, write, or make an actual business decision.

That’s intentional.

You May Be Asked to Think Differently

If your professional background is primarily clinical or educational, some of the recommendations in this course may initially feel unfamiliar.

That’s okay.

Clinical and educational environments teach us to think about services in particular ways. Business requires us to think about those same services from another perspective.

Throughout the Playbook, you will encounter some strongly worded recommendations about what tends to generate business and what tends not to work. Some of those recommendations may push you outside of the professional framework you’re accustomed to.

That’s deliberate.

You don’t have to accept every recommendation simply because it appears in this course. Your job is to consider the principle behind it and determine whether it applies to your situation.

The objective isn’t to turn you into a traditional “marketer.”

The objective is to help you become better at communicating the value of what you already know how to do.

You’ll See Ideas That Go Beyond the Standard P-ESL Format

In some sections—particularly those dealing with packaging, pricing, and training formats—you’ll encounter examples that differ from the standard P-ESL program presented in the certification course.

Don’t let that concern you.

Dr. Arthur J. Compton experimented with different training formats and even published research examining the equivalency of results among different formats, including 13-week, 6-week, and 2-day intensive programs.

The point is not that there is one magical way to deliver P-ESL.

The point is that the training can be structured in different ways when the circumstances call for it.

If you identify a training format that you believe your particular market would prefer, don’t be afraid to experiment. Just make sure that changing the format does not mean eliminating the instructional modules or areas of focus addressed in a standard 12-week training program.

Think strategically.

The market you serve may have needs that are different from the market served by another P-ESL instructor.

You’ll Learn About Pricing and Packaging

One of the most uncomfortable parts of turning a professional skill into a business is deciding what to charge.

The Playbook addresses pricing directly.

You’ll explore how to think about the value of your services, how services can be packaged, and how different training formats can affect the way you present and price your offer.

You’ll also see examples of ways services can be structured that may be different from the way you have traditionally thought about P-ESL instruction.

The goal isn’t to give you one “correct” price.

There isn’t one.

Instead, the goal is to give you a framework for making better pricing and packaging decisions based on your market, your expertise, your offer, and the results you provide.

You’ll See Actual Marketing Examples

This Playbook isn’t limited to abstract marketing concepts.

Throughout the course, you’ll encounter examples of website copy, page structures, calls to action, service descriptions, content ideas, and other marketing components you can adapt to establish and strengthen your professional online presence.

Use these examples as starting points.

You don’t need to copy them word-for-word. In many cases, you’ll be encouraged to take the underlying structure and make it your own.

There’s an Entire Module on AI

Marketing cannot realistically be discussed without addressing artificial intelligence.

The Playbook includes an entire module dedicated to using AI in your marketing.

You’ll learn where AI can save you significant time, where it can improve your work, where it can help you think through marketing problems, and where you should not rely on it.

You’ll also learn how to use AI without allowing it to replace your professional judgment or your individual voice.

AI is a tool. Used well, it can make your marketing work faster, clearer, and more organized. Used poorly, it can produce generic content that sounds like everyone else’s.

The difference is how you use it.

Knowledge Checks Keep You Moving

Each unit includes a short learning assessment designed to reinforce the key concepts covered in that unit.

These aren’t designed to be difficult academic examinations. They’re quick opportunities to make sure you’ve understood the material and can recognize how the concepts apply to your own business.

Completing the required assessments also contributes toward completing each module.

Earn Your Marketing Playbook Badges

Yes, there are badges.

As you complete each module, you’ll earn a badge recognizing your progress.

To complete a module, you’ll need to complete the required knowledge checks in the units within that module.

Think of the badges as a little evidence that you’re not simply reading about marketing—you’re actually developing your marketing skills.

Collect them. Show them off. More importantly, use what you’re learning.

Don’t Expect a Formula

The Marketing Playbook is not a formula for building a P-ESL business.

There is no formula.

Your market may be different from someone else’s. Your professional background may be different. Your goals, schedule, experience, geographic market, services, and ideal clients may all be different.

Apply what is relevant to your current situation.

Add components as your business grows.

You may start with a simple website and one service. Later, you may add workshops, corporate training, online courses, group programs, individual coaching, or other offerings.

You don’t need to build everything at once.

Build what you need now, and use the Playbook again when you’re ready for the next stage.

Some Ideas Will Appear More Than Once

You may notice that certain concepts appear in more than one unit.

That’s intentional.

Marketing isn’t a collection of completely separate activities. Your positioning affects your website. Your ideal client affects your content. Your offer affects your pricing. Your pricing affects your messaging. Your messaging affects your marketing.

The repetition is designed to help you see those connections and use the various actions and resources strategically rather than treating each marketing activity as an isolated task.

One Final Thought Before You Begin

You don’t need to become a marketing expert.

You need to become capable of marketing your expertise.

You already invested the time to learn P-ESL. You developed a specialized professional skill. You earned the ability to provide a service that can make a meaningful difference for the people you serve.

Now you need to learn how to put that service in front of the right people, communicate its value clearly, create an offer they understand, and give them a reason to take the next step.

That’s what this Playbook is here to help you do.

So don’t worry about completing everything perfectly.

Start somewhere.

Do the work.

Test what you learn.

Pay attention to what happens.

Then adjust.

That is marketing.

And that’s why this is a playbook.

The Marketing Playbook was written and assembled by ILP Training Director Joe Comeau, MS, CCC-SLP.

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