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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:
Here are the 5 steps we’ve found most successful working with over 700 clinics in North America:
NOTE: These steps come directly from our popular Ultimate PT Marketing Funnel™ that you can get here. Your goal should be to guide people through the steps in order.
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!
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.
Blogging is an excellent way to boost the Google rank your website, provide great content, and share that with your customers as well as prospects. Each new blog article is a new search you could appear on! So, focus on a variety of conditions that PT helps. Social media marketing is another great way to encourage your customer base to refer friends & get your website discovered more.
Local search is like SEO but more focused on physical locations of local businesses (like yours). Google Maps, Apple Maps, Yelp… these are all tools people used to find businesses nearby. The #1 way to get started – no tech skills required – is making sure your practice has a Google MyBusiness account. This will boost your visibility in maps & local searches.
Facebook ads are all the rage and for good reasons: It’s pretty simple to start out and has powerful tools for reaching the right audience. That said, there are some annoying healthcare rules as far as mentioning medical conditions. You can’t say “do you suffer from back pain?” but can say “Relieve Back Pain Naturally With These 3 Tips”. So paid ads are worth doing, but take some time to learn best practices or get professional help.
Search Engine Marketing is also a proven method for reaching new people in your local area. Be sure to advertise for pain conditions not just “physical therapy” (and remember to limit ads to your area!)
“Retargeting” refers to delivering ads to people who have already visited your website or your clinic. It takes some setup, but you can use Facebook, Google, or other tools to accomplish this. Alternatively, you can use your patient list to build a custom audience on Facebook. Then, direct your posts, blogs, or other ads towards that list for great exposure to the people that know you the best.
Consider these recent statistics:
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.
63.6% of people visit Google to check local business reviews and 77% of those people don’t trust reviews older than 3 months…
So, let me ask:
Are your therapists asking happy patients for reviews?
Does your staff have tools such as Review Cards to generate more reviews easily?
We recently wrote an article called the Top 5 Google Hacks for PTs. In it, we showed how Yelp often appears in the top 5 Google spots for searches like “physical therapy near me.” That means even if your site has trouble ranking, increasing your Yelp reviews could mean you “cheat” your way to the top of Google.
In fact, 94% of consumer-submitted feedback of websites is about how it looks.
Your website has less than 2 seconds to make a visitor decide if it’s worth staying. If it’s slow, confusing, or not visually appealing/up-to-date they are likely to leave immediately before reading any words. So… does your website WOW prospects?
“What is online brand presence?”
It means that anywhere a patient finds you on the internet, your brand (colors, logo, message, etc) are easy to find and always looks the same. If it’s difficult to find information about you, consumers will give up and go elsewhere.
In addition, if an email or Facebook ad invites them to an event but they can’t find that same event on your website, well… “Sketchy Senses” start tingling. That’s not a very fancy way to describe it but it’s true, right?
Consumers are always on the lookout for “sketchy.” So, make sure your brand is high-quality and consistent.
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:
Your website is good for a lot of things, but new patient conversions should be its #1 goal! “Request Appointment” should be the primary button, should be a high contrast color (red or green are best), and should appear 3-4 times on your homepage including the top right corner.
Online PT marketing without a way to schedule online will not work. Make sure people can schedule on your website, whether you use a scheduling software or just a simple form that alerts your staff to call the prospect.
When a potential patient has a question, they usually will do business with the first company that answers them. So, if a chatbot can answer website visitors’ questions INSTANTLY day or night… you will convert many more patients.
45-75% of visitors who interact with our clients’ chatbots Schedule Appointments!
Some people will still prefer to talk to a human – make it easy to do!
Ensure your website gives people a chance to call your front desk, especially on mobile devices.
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.
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:
Of these, monthly patient newsletters are the most profitable method in our research.
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.
The key to increasing patient flow is a marketing system that is consistent every month to avoid up-and-down results. Start by:
For more on this, check out steps 1-3 of our Ultimate 5-Step System.
There are 3 ways to increase patient visits:
Plan & budget for each of these areas! We find online marketing works best for new patients, while direct-mail is a must for reactivating past patients. Keep current patients engaged with welcome kits, an easy HEP Clinic App, and email marketing.
Getting more current patients to arrive & finish their care plan can be the trickiest of all marketing, but creates the most stable revenue! To do this, we recommend a combination of email marketing, print materials in the clinic, front desk training, and a mobile clinic app to make your HEP experience personal, easy, and highly impressive.
For more on this, check out step 4 of our Ultimate 5-Step System
Physician referral marketing can be done alongside patient marketing efforts without too much more effort. They key to success is much like patient marketing – be highly consistent each month. Monthly MD mailers, PT Prescription pads, and a dedicated referrals page on your website all make referring easy.
Here are some detailed physician referral tips.
The market for referrals has decreased drastically in the last 10 years (here’s a great example from a Practice Owner in California) and PT Practices should no longer rely on physicians for more than 10-30% of their volume. Therefore, we don’t recommend putting more than 10-30% of your marketing budget towards physicians.
You want to target the type of patients you get the BEST results for, who have the highest arrival rates, and are compliant. Consider doing a marketing survey on some of your best patients! Determine their age, interests, and unique lifestyle features such as tv shows and magazines – things you can use to target similar markets.
Here are a few tips to keep in mind promoting your PT clinic:
Learn more in this Free Training: The Ultimate PT Marketing Funnel™
The best PT Marketing solutions have 3 main things in common. First, they educate patients directly about PT. Second, they are condition-based since that’s how real people search the internet. Finally, marketing solutions work best when they are consistent month-to-month. If promotions are sporadic, your results will be too.
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“Working with Practice Promotions has been a dream… I wished we made the switch years ago.” -Madden & Gilbert PT
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