So you’re a physical therapy practice owner from , who’s looking to increase your number of patients, but just have absolutely no idea where to begin your physical therapy marketing campaign?
Don’t worry — you are not alone. Let’s face it: while school might have taught you how to become an excellent physical therapist, nobody ever taught you physical therapy marketing know-how which is essential to a successful, thriving physical therapy business. Without the proper knowledge of physical therapy marketing and how it works, most physical therapy professionals struggle to find a steady income and sustain a profitable practice.
I have no doubt that you are an excellent physical therapist who really care about your clients and seek to provide them with a great experience. However, without a solid background in physical therapist marketing skills, you would be hard-pressed to find new clients that could really use your services.
Why? Without a solid physical therapy marketing plan, most professionals end up doing what everybody else does: print advertising. They create a basic ad (or pay someone to do it for them) and rent out advertising space in newspapers and the Yellow Pages. While there’s no doubt that print advertising has its own place in your physical therapy marketing tools, one problem with traditional print advertising is that it’s continuing to decline in effectiveness today.
Why Traditional Print Advertising Is A Huge Problem With Physical Therapy Marketing
The 2009 comScore study, “Targeting Consumers In A Diverse Media Landscape” points out a few very interesting facts in this white paper. Let’s take a few of the shocking facts and how it specifically applies to your physical therapy practice:
- Usage of Yellow Pages and newspapers have been on a steady decline since 2006
- Only 27% of adults between 35-44 use the Yellow Pages and newspapers as their primary source of business information (it’s even lower for 25-34 year-olds, with only 15% relying on print mediums)
- An astounding 69% of adults are using the Internet to find merchants (it’s even bigger for the 25-34 year-olds, with 78% of them relying on online methods)
So if you’ve been running advertising on the Yellow Pages and have a sneaky feeling that they’re not as effective as they used to be — don’t worry, it’s not just you. You are absolutely correct: print advertising in general has been losing effectiveness and is continuing to decline.
Another reason why physical therapists like yourself cannot rely on print advertising is because prospects are more likely to use print for recovery searches — in other words, instances when they’re looking for a specific business they’ve already heard about. In most cases, the Internet is used during the research and discovery phase, which is when the consumer is looking for new businesses.
That means that if you’re a relatively small practice that’s looking to generate business from new clients that haven’t heard about you yet, chances are they won’t be using the Yellow Pages (or flyers, or any other print advertisements) to be looking for you.
Physical Therapy Marketing On The Internet Is Your Best Bet To Attract New Clients Today
We have helped plenty of clients in a wide range of industries take advantage of the Internet to attract more clients every month and grow their businesses (discover how you could get a free copy of our upcoming Internet marketing course by clicking here), and there is no doubt that you need to concentrate your efforts online when marketing for physical therapy services. Plain and simple:
- Hundreds of your potential clients are looking for your services everyday on the Internet — and you’re losing out on a lot of business if you’re nowhere to be found online
- A successful website can and will generate a ton of new prospects who are already looking for your services (the best kind of clients!) on a regular basis
- Physical therapy marketing on the Internet is most likely the marketing activity that will give you the highest return on your dollar investment
But before you start dreaming about growing your practice, let’s get one thing clear: if you think that simply setting up JaneSmithPhysicalTherapy.com will deliver you with a flood of calls from people dying to get service from you… Unfortunately, that’s not the way online physical therapy marketing works.
The BIG PROBLEM is that there are hundreds of other physical therapists all competing for your prospect’s attention in your local area, and chances are they’ve been doing this much longer than you have. You can’t just ignore the online medium, especially since it’s such a crucial factor that rightfully belongs in any physical therapy marketing plan.
So what can a physical therapist like you to do? There’s a right way and a wrong way to approach your Internet physical therapy marketing strategy, and fortunately, it’s not all that difficult to carve out your own space on the Internet in no time at all. Here’s how.
Attracting More Clients Using The ACIO™ Approach To Internet Physical Therapy Marketing
What is the ACIO™ Approach? It’s our personal 3-step strategy which focuses on the most critical elements of Internet marketing which guarantees the success of your physical therapy practice. ACIO™ stands for Attract, Convert, Improve and Optimize.
- Step 1: Create a website that successfully ATTRACTS prospects from search engines.
Having best website in the world with all the right physical therapy marketing elements will do you no good if your prospects cannot find you on the Internet. People are using major search engines like Google, Yahoo! and Bing everyday to look for physical therapy services in your specific area, and it is your job to put your website in front of these people.
By targeting keyword variations such as “physical therapy “ or “ physical therapy” on your website, you could make your website show up on top of the search results whenever someone searches for this phrase on a search engine. How do you do that? You have 2 options. The first is to enroll in a pay-per-click program (otherwise known as PPC) for each specific search engine — your options would be Google AdWords, Microsoft AdCenter or Yahoo! Search Marketing. Others choose the second option, which is to focus their efforts on natural search traffic through search engine optimization (otherwise known as SEO).
Both methods have their own distinct advantages (PPC offers instant results, but SEO traffic is free) and it is up to you to decide which search marketing tactic fits in with your overall strategy.
- Step 2: Make sure your website successfully CONVERTS visitors into clients.
Once you’re successful in getting your prospects to visit your website, your next task is to make sure that your presence on the Internet is actually generating new business for you. A website with all the fancy graphics and state-of-the-art videos would be completely useless if it doesn’t succeed in turning your visitors into paying clients.
Most physical therapy websites make the mistake of only talking about themselves, and emphasize the wrong aspects of their business. Be sure that you do not make this mistake! A crucial element in physical therapy marketing is telling your prospects the reasons why they should choose YOU as their physical therapist. Your prospects do not particularly care about where you studied physical therapy — they want to know whether you can help them with your problem or not.
List the benefits they’ll get from doing business with you instead of your competitors. If you manage to answer the question that lingers over your prospect’s head (“what’s in it for me?”) then you will successfully turn your website into a lead-generating machine that works for you day in and day out.
- Step 3: Continually IMPROVE and OPTIMIZE your website for better results.
One thing that you have to realize is that physical therapy marketing is a process, not an event. The beauty of using the Internet for the purposes of marketing for physical therapists is that you can continually improve upon the results that you get. Even if your first-time results end up being amazing, the chances are very high that you could get better results by making tweaks to your physical therapy marketing strategies.
Maybe you could improve your visitor-to-call ratio by emphasizing being stress-free rather than saving money with your low hourly rates. Maybe adding audio testimonials from satisfied clients can dramatically boost your calls than regular text testimonials. Maybe there are additional keywords that you could target with your website that would bring you even more visitors.
The point is, why be satisfied with 5 new clients every week when you can handle double the amount? By testing and tweaking the different elements in your website, you’ll be able to improve your response rates on a continuing basis.
Proven Physical Therapy Marketing Strategies That Grow Your Practice
The ACIO™ Approach (Attract, Convert, Improve and Optimize) is a proven straegy that we have personally tested to successfully market a wide range of local service businesses on the Internet, and we have absolutely no doubt that the same concepts can work for your physical therapy practice as well. By applying the above principles to your physical therapy marketing tools, you will no doubt start off your Internet marketing campaign on the right foot.
To further help physical therapists like you, we are creating a 3-part course based on the ACIO™ Approach that teaches you the exact techniques and tactics we use for our clients to create websites that rank on search engines and get clients calling to book an appointment with you.
We are almost finished with it, but for the finishing touches we have decided to get help from a limited number of physical therapists in exchange for a free copy of the course as soon as its finished — click here to discover how you can be one of them.
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