5-Step Physical Therapy Marketing Strategy

Do you see consistent results from your PT Marketing efforts?
If you don’t, then it’s time to take a good look at your overall physical therapy marketing strategy.

To get the best results, you need a simple physical therapy marketing strategy designed to market directly to consumers and strengthen retention & referrals.

Here’s how:

The 5 Critical PT Marketing Steps (in order!)

1. Get Discovered Online
2. Build Trust
3. Convert New Patients
4. Develop Committed Patients
5. Create Raving Fans

NOTE: These steps come directly from our popular Ultimate PT Marketing Funnel™  you can get here. Your goal should be to guide people through the steps in order.

Also, it is important to remember that while your main focus is healthcare, owning a practice makes you an entrepreneur. And as such, marketing is one of the most important actions you should be doing. Many practice owners feel too busy or do not put the effort that they need into consistent marketing, but even an hour or two per week can make a huge difference in total patient visits!

Now… let’s look at these 5 marketing steps in detail!

1) Get Discovered Online

Step 1 in every physical therapy marketing plan needs to be creating as many chances as possible to get found online by people looking for pain help.

Your practice website is the hub of your marketing efforts and most online marketing will direct back to it. That makes it a natural starting point when creating a new PT marketing plan. A well-made site can increase your Google rank, make you easier to find in local searches, and even improve paid advertising results.

4 Best practices for boosting online discoverability:

2) How To Build Trust (and why) 

Consider these recent statistics:

• More than half of consumers won’t use a business if it has less than a 4-star rating.
• A single business review can lift its conversions by 10%.
• 70% of consumers need to read at least four reviews before they can trust a business.

Consumers are more skeptical than ever, so PTs need a specific plan to build trust in people looking up your practice – it’s not going to happen automatically!

Imagine asking a patient to do 3 sets of 15 bridges per day at home before even doing an evaluation or telling them why. Would they be likely to listen to you? Some might, but not very many. That’s what it’s like trying to Convert (step 3) a patient before you’ve earned Trust.

Here are 4 ways you can build trust via marketing:

3) New Patient Conversion

Now that you’ve built trust in your expertise, it’s time to get the lead in for an evaluation! Most often, this happens on your website or over the phone:

4) Develop Committed Patients

If the physical therapy industry had a pain problem, it would be patient retention. The latest reports show as many as 70% of patients don’t complete their entire plan of care… ouch!

When you spend marketing dollars on patients, you need them to stay to make that money back.

We have several articles on patient retention, but the biggest, most innovative opportunity in patient retention today is Mobile Marketing.

More than ever, smartphones are at the center of people’s lives. So if through the course of care, you could “live” in your patients’ pockets – reminding them of exercises, offering video instruction, sharing health blogs and even requesting online reviews – you will absolutely increase engagement, compliance, and retention.

Mobile apps used to be complicated, but they are more accessible than ever especially for PTs. We believe in it so much, we now offer a custom app with our websites! Click here to learn more about patient retention apps.

5) Raving Fans Boost Referrals

The goal of past patient marketing is to get the maximum value from your current and past patients. Your customer list is the biggest goldmine you are sitting on! These should be raving fans of your practice, telling others about you, and coming back for needed care.

However, let’s face it, no one really wants to come back to therapy unless they have to. You have to coach, push, and prod them to stay in touch, and take action. And to do that, you need to stay on their mind each and every month.

After all, the best way for any business to grow, especially a physical therapy practice, is word-of-mouth.

How can you increase word-of-mouth about your clinic? It starts with a good experience, but it has to be backed by branding, marketing, and good public relations or even the best experience will be forgotten.

Keeping consistently in touch with your building customer base allows you to grow through repeat business and word-of-mouth.

Imagine if your current caseload was 50-60% returning patients and patient referrals…

This would create an impressive expansion of your practice and reduce the stress of finding new patients. It can be done with the right combination of high-quality care and professional marketing.

There are several ways to leverage print marketing, some options include:

• Send a monthly patient newsletter with informative articles and clinic updates
• Mailing postcards to promote special discounts or refer-a-friend programs
• Having professional brochures to distribute to the community
• Use condition-specific rack cards to connect with specific types of people. Give these to patients & local businesses to spread to friends, family, & patrons.

Of these, monthly patient newsletters are the most profitable method in our research.

The Bottom Line

As a PT Owner/Marketer, you face unique marketing challenges. What can you do to overcome these challenges and still treat patients?

Focus on these 5 essential pieces to a PT marketing strategy. Each piece will either help you 1) generate more new patients or 2) reactivate past patients.

Doctor referrals are nice, but you should primarily focus on marketing directly to local consumers.

Download This Strategy:

Download the Ultimate PT Marketing Funnel™ to get these 5-steps as a 2-page PDF download. You’ll also get instant access to a 10-minute marketing training video with PT & Former Practice Owner, Neil Trickett!