If you don’t, then it’s time to take a good look at your overall physical therapy marketing strategy. We’ve compiled the best practices in the article below to guide you in improving your ability to generate new patients.
How many hours a week do you spend on your marketing your physical therapy practice?
How well are you creating systems, actions, tools, and content to attract new patients to your PT Clinic through both direct-access and physician referrals?
Focus your efforts on these main areas of attracting new patients:
You absolutely should have a huge focus on marketing to direct access patients.
However, many practice owners are too busy, or do not put the effort that they need into consistent and effective PT marketing, to keep a steady flow of patients coming into your practice.
Marketing is one of the most important actions you should be doing as an entrepreneur.
It is important to remember that while your main focus is healthcare, your practice is a local business. And just like any business, you need to market to your community.
That’s why we have many free marketing training tools available for PT Owners.
If you do decide to get help, make sure they have a core understanding of physical therapy – not all marketing agencies have the experience to succeed in this complicated arena.
Either way, you want to be educated on the subject, so let’s look at some ideas proven to work for our clients:
The biggest goldmine you are sitting on is your customer list. 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.
PT marketing should be at the core of your practice’s planning and business development.
Whether it’s maintaining monthly campaigns, such as patient newsletters, blogging, emails, and social media, or upgrading key assets, like your practice website or brochures, at least 5-8% of your practice income should be spent on marketing.
The best way for any business to grow, especially a physical therapy practice, is word-of-mouth.
You can increase word-of-mouth about your clinic with branding, marketing, and good public relations.
Keeping consistently in touch with your building customer base allows you to grow through repeat business and word-of-mouth.
For more tips on websites, newsletters, and patient growth download our PT Marketing Toolbox
You need past patients to be a key part of your team, coming back for care when needed and referring others.
Imagine if your current caseload was 50% returning patients, 25% patients referred by others, 15% referred by physicians and 10% from the general public.
This would create an impressive expansion of your practice and help you achieve your practice goals. It can be done with the right combination of high-quality care and professional marketing.
Many of our clients hit these numbers every month – and you can too! Your website is the hub of your marketing efforts and most online marketing will direct back to it.
In order to build a massive online presence, your physical therapy website should be compelling and full of useful tips and advice that prospects can use.
Blogging is an excellent way to build the SEO of your website, provide great content, and share that with your customers as well as prospects.
If you’re not sure where to start, check out this article on how to write blogs for physical therapists.
Social media is a great way to engage your customer base, build referrals, and advertise to the community.
However, there are tricks to know and going alone, can make for an expensive proposition, if it doesn’t work, or you don’t use it!
One special technique is to use your patient list, building a custom audience on Facebook. Then direct your posts, blogs, and ads towards that customer, custom audience for great exposure to the people that know you the best.
Start by setting a goal of how many new patients you want a month. Next, plan what it will take to advertise to key audiences including physicians, past patients, current patients and the community. Ask yourself:
Use this knowledge to craft a marketing plan that addresses your current and future business needs.
The first step in any PT marketing effort is to explain physical therapy. Many people, even physicians, might not know exactly what PT is or how it can help them.
Focus your efforts on educating prospects and referral sources on what problems you solve and how you can do so quickly and effectively.
Then, showcase yourselves as the experts to turn to for orthopedic and neurological problems by presenting useful and educational articles.
Use your website, social media, online ads, and print marketing to get the word out! Determine your budget for each of these areas and make sure each runs consistently every month to build success.
Add personal testimonials from past patients to build credibility and empathy with your audience. Lastly, be memorable and engaging with fun facts, relevant news, and outreach opportunities.
How you brand and market your practice is key to the success of your business.
There are several ways to target and engage patients, physicians, and community members and make them remember you as the PT experts.
Some options include:
“In my years of talking to hundreds of PT practice owners, I find that many owners are either too swamped or just don’t know enough about how to market to get good results. We went to school to be great PT’s!
However, most of our business training is self-taught. In this blog post, I’ll show you the critical areas to focus on to make a difference in your practice advertising and create an effective marketing plan.
If you do well here, you will have more control over your practice stability, expansion, and profitability.”
-Neil Trickett, PT
Founder of Practice Promotions
“I have nothing but positive to say about them. Their customer service is great.”
“I have had to hire another physical therapist and now looking at moving into a larger building!”
“We couldn’t be more thrilled with the quality of marketing materials. Highly recommend!”