Growing your practice doesn’t have to cost the earth. Marketing is an opportunity to engage with the community and educate future patients, and you can do it with a pretty small budget.
Here are five marketing ideas that can create a dynamic impact without draining your bank balance:
- Get discovered online
- Build trust with potential patients
- Increase appointment conversions from web traffic
- Keep patients committed
- Ask patients to refer their friends and family
Despite your primary focus being healthcare, owning a Physiotherapy practice makes you an entrepreneur. Therefore, marketing is one of the most important things you should do. It can make a massive difference in total patient visits even if practice owners dedicate an hour or two a week to consistent marketing.
Let’s look at those strategies in a bit more detail:
1. Get discovered online.
The first step in any physical therapy marketing plan is to make sure you get found online by people looking for treatment.
Most online marketing will lead you back to your practice website. A well-designed site can boost your Google ranking, improve local search results, and even improve paid advertising.
Focus on the patient experience by asking yourself these questions:
- Is your website loading quickly?
- Is the copywriting compelling?
- Are you targeting the right keywords?
- Does the page have high-quality images?
- Can the patient find information about your practice or services?
If you need to dig into what your patients are searching for, check out free versions of tools like SEMrush to determine your area’s most relevant physical therapy keywords.
Answering these questions nudges Google in the right direction to display your website on page one. The idea is to bring value to your patients, even before you’ve scheduled them for a visit.
Blog posts are an excellent way to boost your website’s Google rank, provide great content, and share it with your audience. You could appear in a new search whenever you write a new blog article!
Focus on creating content about conditions that physiotherapists can help with. After all, 70% of consumers prefer to find out about a business via articles rather than ads.
Ensure your practice has a Google Business Profile. Doing so will make you more visible on maps and in local searches. Like SEO, local search focuses on the physical locations of local businesses (like yours).
2. Build trust with potential patients.
Take a look at these statistics:
- 89% of customers won’t take action until they read reviews
- 52% of consumers won’t use a business if it has less than a 4* rating
- Positive reviews encourage 68% of consumers to use a local business
People are more sceptical than ever, so physios need a specific plan to build trust with clients looking up their practices online.
Would you expect a patient to do three sets of 15 bridges a day at home before doing an evaluation or explaining why? That’s what it’s like trying to convert a patient before you’ve earned their trust.
63.6% of people visit Google to check local business reviews, and 77% trust reviews no older than three months. Ask patients for a Facebook or Google review at the end of each appointment. You could even send this request out with their invoice.
Creating an online brand presence is also a great idea. It means your brand (colours, logo, message, etc.) is easily identifiable anywhere a patient finds you on the web. When finding information about you is difficult, consumers will give up and go elsewhere.
Make sure your brand is high-quality and consistent, so you’re not perceived as “sketchy.”
3. Increase appointment conversions from web traffic.
Having built trust in your expertise, it’s time to get potential clients in for an evaluation. Your website is great for many things, but new patient conversions should be its top priority!
The primary call-to-action button on your homepage should be “Book An Appointment,” so make sure you enable online appointment booking.
Online physical therapy marketing works best when potential clients can book an appointment immediately without picking up the phone or waiting until you are free to book them in.
4. Keep patients committed.
Physiotherapy has a pain point, and that’s patient retention. As many as 50% of patients fail to complete their treatment plan… yikes!
To recoup any marketing expenditures, you need your patients to remain.
The smartphone has become a central part of people’s lives more than ever before. Your engagement, compliance, and retention will increase if you can “live” in your patients’ pockets throughout their care.
Remind them of exercises via SMS, provide video instructions, share health blogs, and even request online reviews.
Keep them engaged and coming back for more.
5. Ask patients to refer their friends and family.
86% of consumers would consider writing a review for a business. That’s huge!
The goal is to get the most value from your current and past patients. Your customer list is your goldmine! They should be passionate fans of your practice, telling others about you and returning when necessary.
As a physical therapist, word-of-mouth marketing strategies are the most effective way to expand your business. Reviews and testimonials are extremely powerful word-of-mouth messaging. Leveraging them on your website can help you attract more patients.
Word-of-mouth marketing is about getting people to talk; discounts are a great way to achieve that. In the current climate, potential clients are looking for a bargain. A discount might just be the good deal you need to grab their attention, spark a conversation, and have a client waitlist in your business.
And don’t forget social media. You can use social media to encourage conversations that engage your potential customers, build awareness about your services, and grow your revenue.
Engaging content that helps people or improves their lives matters most when posting on social platforms, and it’ll get shared.
Now it’s over to you!
There are clever and affordable ways for practice owners to increase search visibility, generate leads, and grow their patient base without being marketing experts.
Choose one of these strategies to focus on this month:
- Get discovered online by building a website
- Build trust with potential patients
- Increase appointment conversions from web traffic
- Keep patients committed
- Ask patients to refer their friends and family.
Each technique will help you generate more new patients or reactivate past ones.
Getting referrals from doctors is great, but you should primarily focus on marketing directly to local patients.
If you have any questions or want to chat about what an integrated practice management solution could do for you and your practice, grab us for a live chat.
The button is just there in the bottom right corner of your screen.
