Occupational Therapy Marketing and Advertising

Top Ideas for Occupational Therapy Marketing

Need new OT patients NOW?

In a perfect world, you could build your occupational therapy practice through simple word of mouth.

But unfortunately, in today’s highly competitive marketplace, attracting new patients isn’t as simple as being the best around. 

The challenges occupational therapy practices face in staying afloat these days include:

• Declining doctor referrals
• Low insurance reimbursements 
• Private practices increasingly undervalued in the modern healthcare economy

But here’s the good news: effective occupational therapy marketing can help you overcome those obstacles and THRIVE, even in today’s toxic healthcare economy.

Growth is not only possible using a combination of strong occupational therapy marketing ideas, it’s the most likely outcome!

Benefits of Marketing Your OT Business

There are a variety of benefits to marketing your occupational therapy business!

These include:

• Stable month-to-month income
• Financial freedom that comes with success
• Control of your clinic’s growth & future
• Hire & retain great staff
• More referrals from past patients
• Stop LOSING patients

Build a “Patient-Centric” Occupational Therapy Marketing Strategy

Guess what?

Your patients don’t care about when you were founded.

Your marketing (website, collateral, etc) need to focus on your PATIENT and their needs!

With as many as 20 percent of the U.S. population afflicted with chronic pain at some point, occupational therapy and adjacent treatments are clearly a pressing matter for those seeking help. 

Practice Promotions can help you translate what makes your practice so special to the average layperson, who only knows that he or she needs pain relief and increased functionality as soon as possible. 

Our main job is to help you attract more patients through the most targeted, effective occupational therapy marketing strategies. We’ve helped more than 1400 North American clinics not only increase their number of patients, but control clinic growth to the pace that works best for them. 

Our multi-pronged OT marketing concept will be tailored to meet your specific needs, including:

• Search engine optimization (SEO) to put your practice in the top tier of results for Google and other search engines.
• Google Ads PPC
• OT website design
• Physician marketing
• Email marketing
• Newsletter marketing
• Blog marketing
• Direct mail marketing

All of these components work together to attract potential patients, who may all have disparate problems, but are looking for pain relief. Effective occupational therapy marketing is all about reinforcing both name recognition and a strong sense of help and hope to those seeking relief from a multitude of challenges. 

That means that even the person who isn’t in need of your services today will be aware of you tomorrow, when they are looking for the kind of help that only your practice can provide.

Want to learn more? Click below to watch our instant marketing demo!

Digital Marketing Strategies For Occupational Therapy Clinics 

There isn’t a magic button for growing your practice.

But at Practice Promotions, we’ve developed a map to practice growth. The first step is to build your online presence through digital marketing for occupational therapy.

Building your online presence

Not getting the patients you should be?

You could be losing out because of your weak online presence.

The harsh truth is that appearing at or near the top of a search engine equates to credibility.

In fact, studies have found found that 86 percent of people searching a service or topic only clicked on a result in the top 10 – essentially, that magic “first page.”

Even within those top 10, the “clicks” aren’t evenly distributed. More than half go to the top three appearing on Google!

If you’re not in the top 3, you’re losing patients every day. You need SEO services to crack into that coveted top 3.

Search Engine Optimization for Occupational Therapy Clinics

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is so crucial to a business’ success that you hardly have to be a marketing strategist to know how important it is.

Yet knowing about search engine optimization and actually achieving high SEOs are two different things. 

The three pillars of SEO are:

• Your website (on-page SEO)
• Google Business Profile
• Listing, Directory, Back-linking

On-Page SEO

On-page SEO isn’t complicated. It simply means pinpointing the search terms that people who could benefit from your services would be typing into a search engine – and using those terms and their variations on virtually every page of your website.

But do you have all the conditions you treat listed on one page of your occupational therapy website?

That’s actually a BAD idea.

Instead, you should create a page for each condition or service you provide! For example, you could have one whole page on “Swallowing issues” or “Arthritis.”

Creating a separate page for key conditions and services helps you rank higher on Google for that specific keyword or key phrase (like “arthritis help near me”).

But what keywords are important for on-page SEO? Here are the top keywords for occupational therapy…

Best SEO Keywords for Occupational Therapy

People in need of help tend to search for both services and conditions. Here are just some of the SEO terms that you should keep in mind as you’re generating occupational therapy business ideas:

Condition-based keywords…

• Arthritis
• Hand pain relief
• Wrist pain relief
• Shoulder pain relief
• Work Injuries
• ADL dysfunction
• Post-surgical rehabilitation
• Spinal injuries
• Thoracic outlet syndrome
• Swallowing issues
• Feeding therapy

Geo-targeted keywords…

Geo-targeted keywords are also extremely important to have on your website, to drive more search traffic to you. These are the best geo-targeted keywords that you should have on your site:

• Occupational therapy in [city, state]
• OT in [city, state]
• pediatric occupational therapy [city state]
• Occupational therapy near me

If you found that useful, you’ll LOVE our SEO services! Click below to watch an instant demo…

Backlinks

Backlinks are when other websites link to YOUR website! That increases your website’s credibility. The more credible your website appears to Google, the higher your Google rank will be!

At Practice Promotions, we consistently work to improve our clients’ backlinks.

Google Business Profile

We’ll also talk to you about creating or improving your Google Business Profile. This seemingly simple step isn’t just about making your practice as competitive as possible. It also allows you to prevent fraud and to otherwise control the information that is out there. Say someone with bad intentions creates a profile just to leave a poor review about your practice. Lacking a legitimate Google Business Profile prevents you from being about to respond to that bad information.  

Content and Blog Marketing for Occupational Therapy Clinics

As with other elements of your marketing, when creating blogs and other content, it’s more important to think “patient-centric” than “clinic-focused” when it comes to marketing your OT clinic.

When it comes to blogs for OT clinics and other private practices, it’s important to create reader-friendly content that is both informative and reassuring. For example, are you planning to do some educational posts about arthritis? If so, be accurate about the challenges, but also offer reassurance about how occupational therapies and other treatments offer real comfort and quality of life enhancement. 

Most importantly, from an occupational therapy marketing point of view, each post should conclude with a “call to action.” In other words, once you’ve described a problem such as frozen shoulder, and how OT can help people living with it, your final section should remind people that the sooner they seek help from your practice, the sooner they can begin to see results.

Here are some GREAT occupational therapy blog titles!

• Fight Frozen Shoulder With Occupational Therapy
• 4 Ways Occupational Therapy Can Relieve Arthritis Pain
• Are You Recovering From a Sports Injury? Let an OT Provide Pain Relief!
• 6 Ways OT Can Improve Your Health
• Stop Feeling Anxious About Returning to Work! Occupational Therapy Can Help…

Online Reputation Management

Testimonials and reviews are a big part of establishing your digital reputation – which results in more patients. Service providers routinely offer incentives like a free or discounted extra treatment, in exchange for leaving an online review. In addition, within the healing industry, patients are sometimes so grateful that they themselves ask how they can leave a testimonial!

On the flip side, negative reviews are also a reality for any business or service provider. Even if you feel that the person leaving the review had an unrealistic expectation coming into their session, or is otherwise unjustified, it impresses those reading these poor reviews if they see the practice has left a diplomatic answer. 

If soliciting and organizing these reviews feels daunting, we can help!

At Practice Promotions, we provide review reputation management software, as well as advise you as to the best ways to highlight your positive responses. By the same token, we can help make sure that those rare negative reviews aren’t disproportionately boosted in places like Facebook and Google.

Email Marketing for Occupational Therapy

Using email is still a great way to capture current or prospective patients’ attention – as long as you’re going about it the right way. 

This is where the old adage “news you can use” comes into play. Provide a monthly email newsletter that’s chock-full of tips and easily-understood information. You could also offer an informational eBook on your website that will turn non-patients into email addresses.  

Keep in mind that all of our clients automatically obtain access to our unique ENGAGE email system, which provides literally hundreds of email templates from which to choose.

Online Advertising and Google Ads for OT

If you want to stay at the top of Google, you NEED Google Ads for occupational therapy. Here are a few reasons…

5 Reasons Your OT Practice Should Use Google Ads PPC

1. You’ll dominate the 1st page of Google in multiple places.
2. Google Ads target people who are already looking for a solution.
3. Google Ads are a cost-effective and fast way to get more appointments online.
4. Google Ads are location-specific, which can help a new or underperforming clinic.
5. It’s easy to track your results.

But aren’t Google Ads complicated?

Yes.

But our Google-certified experts are here to help. When someone does a condition-specific search for care in your area, we’ll ensure that your clinic appears in the search results. If someone searches for “back pain” in your city, Google Ads will pull up your clinic as one of the top choices.

The Google cost per click (CPC) tends to range between $2 to $3. This investment is well worth it, since the people who are most likely to click on your ad when they see it are already in pain and looking for relief. 

Practice Promotions stays on top of Google’s algorithmic changes, so you don’t have to. Our proven methods are already being used by hundreds of clinics across the country. We’ll even provide detailed monthly reports so that you will know your chiropractic advertising dollars are providing a great ROI. 

Social Media Marketing for OT Clinics

It’s certainly true that the most effective occupational therapy marketing ideas stem from focusing on SEO efforts and Google Ads. But you can also expand your results through social media outreach.

This is a way to get creative and have a little fun with your community, by tying your services in with things that are part of the local and national conversation. It should go without saying that keeping things positive is the watchword here.  In other words, ditch dicey areas like politics and religion in favor of tie-ins with nutritious holiday recipes or safer, healthier Super Bowl parties. 

Website Design for Occupational Therapy Clinics

The goal of your website isn’t to look pretty.

It’s to convert web visitors into patients!

The problem is: for most OT clinics, only about 2 percent of people who visit a website will make an appointment.

By contrast, Practice Promotions customers convert 8% of visitors to patients! That’s the kind of web conversion rate that makes website marketing worthwhile!

Click below to watch an instant video demo on our marketing services.

7 Web Design Tips for Occupational Therapy

Here are some important actions to accomplish in order to make sure your website engaging and user-friendly:

• Design it to be easy to make an appointment online or by phone, and outline what the steps will be (e.g. free consultation, etc.)
• Provide “social proof” on each page of your website. This is the kind of information that lends credibility, whether it’s highlighting the medical partners you have, patient testimonials, or industry awards. Logos and seals are a plus! 
• Set up a blog that provides tips and solutions for common problems, which of course includes OT treatment at your practice!
• Keep it reader-friendly. Choose a font type and size that’s easy to read, and don’t get bogged down in overly lengthy explanations.
• Make sure all the website’s elements work on mobile phones. Not only should the graphics and text be easy to scroll, but all the links and forms should be easy to fill out on a phone.
• Provide subscriptions as an alternative to appointment-making. Some people are more reluctant to commit than others. Offering subscriptions to an email newsletter, to note just one example, will keep your practice in that would-be patients’ minds for when the time comes to make that leap.
• Ensure that each page loads quickly. Whether using mobile or a laptop, patients will be easily discouraged if graphics, videos or other elements are causing a lag. Mainstream your design and upgrade your “widgets.” 

Marketing to Former OT Patients

Often former patients leave their OT practice not from dissatisfaction, but because they either saw significant improvement in their condition, or life issues got in the way. Yet those circumstances often change, and occupational therapy may be what they’re missing. In addition, they may have friends in need of treatment.

Obviously you can’t read those former patient’s minds, but you can work to maintain consistent contact even after a patient completes a course of treatment.

Emails and monthly newsletters are great ways of converting past patients to current ones, or to prompt them to recommend your practice to a family member or friend.

Don’t forget to train your team to ask their patients if they would like them to reach out to anyone in their lives who are experiencing problems for which OT could help.

Direct mail postcards and physical newsletters are another tried-and-true method for staying in touch. We can also work with you to make it easy for your patients and former patients to forward emails, newsletters and web pages to friends, family and coworkers.

Physician-Related Marketing 

While it can be competitive to actively pursue physician referrals for occupational therapy, don’t be shy about utilizing the contacts you have! In addition, some options to consider include:  

• Make your website so educational that doctors will suggest their patients with relevant health issues check it out.
• Establish a “physician referral” space on your website that makes it easy for doctors to use it when referring patients. Obviously, contact information should be prominent.
• Set up an extension dedicated to referrals. Busy doctor’s offices appreciate the streamlining!

Benefits of Working with a Marketing Agency

It’s understandable to assume that between yourself and one or two freelancers, you could achieve your marketing goals for a lower price than you would by using a professional firm. 

But in reality, working with Practice Promotions will ultimately streamline your budget, because you don’t have to hire separate professional services for copywriting, print marketing, Google advertising, graphic designing, SEO strategizing, and/or digital marketing.

For the thousands of clinics we’ve worked with, we’ve helped those practices generate more than half a million newsletters, and gotten hundreds of new websites launched!

Consider What Professional Marketing Can Do for Your OT Marketing Needs!

Practice Promotions is the professional marketing service of choice for more than 1400 practices like yours around the country. We not only offer specialized service, but we truly can do it all. That includes…

• Create a powerful OT website that converts visitors into patients
• Build your online presence by with SEO services & Google Ads
• Increase referrals and reactivations from former patients with email marketing & direct mail

Click below to watch an instant demo on our occupational therapy marketing services! They are sure to bring you the growth, stability and control you’ve been searching for!

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What if my practice is a pediatric occupational therapy clinic?

It’s most important to make your content attractive to both parents and kids – do a 50/50 split. Fifty percent of the content you create should be geared toward the parents and 50% should be geared toward their kids. Make sure both parties know that you feel compassion toward their plight and that you want to help them feel and function better.

Also, emphasize that you run a one-stop shop. In other words, you may offer occupational therapy, but you also physical therapy, health and wellness classes, and more. The more services you offer, the more likely the parents will stick with your service and not look for second and third providers for the services they need.

2. How do I market my multi-disciplinary clinic?

It’s important for you to realize that this isn’t a drawback at all. It’s an asset as the paragraphs above explain. Aside from occupational therapy and physical therapy, you can offer summer camps for the kids, health and wellness for the parents, and more.

The key to making this work is to create a separate page on your website for each service that you offer. This not only makes it easier for potential clients to navigate your website but it also allows you to build your SEO opportunities by creating dedicated pages for each service/ discipline.

3. What if I don’t have the time to market my OT clinic?

The short answer is to hire it out to people who are experts at occupational therapy marketing. Just as you’re a specialist in your field, we’re specialists in ours.

We know your business because we limit our client rosters to professionals in occupational and physical therapy. We know your clientele. Finally, we know the types of writing and design that your potential clients respond to.

Think of us as your off-site full-service marketing team for your occupational therapy business.