PT Marketing Unleashed » patient referrals

My Physical Therapy Marketing Predictions For 2011

Samuel — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 15:42:35 +0000

2011 will be a great year for physical therapists in private practice if they go beyond their usual ways of marketing and advertising. When I say “Usual Ways” I’m referring to relying on yellow page ads, newspaper ads, radio advertising and other traditional means of marketing. These mediums are slowly becoming less effective in reaching the audience you want to target. Hopefully in 2010 you were able to avoid some of the physical therapy marketing mistakes that could have prevented you from seeing healthy profits last year in your business.

Moving forward into 2011 as my reader, I don’t want you to become one dimensional in your marketing efforts. An example would be to heavily rely on physician referral marketing as your only marketing strategy. What if the physician that refers to you one day decides to refer to another clinic? Do you have other marketing streams in place you can tap into? Hopefully you see where I am going with this and stick around to see where I want to take you.

In 2010 many physical therapy private practice owners have discovered new ways of marketing to potential patients using the internet. Some have obtained new patient referrals through their website using effective search engine optimization strategies that I teach on this blog. Others have done it using social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. One thing is certain is that using the internet as a way to obtain new patients and clients for your private practice will be something you cannot ignore moving forward into 2011.

How you market your physical therapy private practice in 2011 will determine the outcome of your future revenues and your overall profits. So below I have a few marketing predictions I feel will emerge in 2011 and that can position your physical therapy practice to receive some healthy profits in the future.

1. Mobile Marketing – Statistics have shown more people own a mobile phone than they do computers. People use their mobile phones as location devices, to receive text messages, search for local services in their area, and much more. What better way to get in front of your audience then through the device they use everyday! As a private practice owner you can send appointment reminders via text message, mobile coupons for cash based services, and create a mobile version of your website for those seeking out your services locally. This is only scratching the surface! There are a lot of things you can do with mobile devices in terms of marketing that can really help impact the growth of your private practice. More to come on this hot topic in future blog posts!

2. Online Reviews – More users are looking to online review sites like Google Places and Yelp to read what other patients have to say about their physical therapist. This is why it’s important to get your patients to write raving reviews about the PT services you offer. Good reviews written by your current patients will help build immediate trust between you and that potential patient who’s searching for a physical therapist. When a potential patient sees that other patients you’ve helped were very happy with the services you provided, they’ll trust that you can help them too.

3. Better Website Content – It is important that your website have quality content that provides the right information for your patients and to the public. Providing resourceful articles and informative videos helps potential website visitors view you as a trusted source of information and an expert in your field. The information you provide on your website could be a major pivotal point for a local website visitor to pick up the phone and call your office for an appointment.

4. Local Marketing – Optimizing your website for local keyword search terms will be vital to how people find you online. For instance, if your practice focuses on pediatrics and you are based in Marietta Georgia, then you want to make sure your website is optimized for the keyword phrase “Pediatric Physical Therapist in Marietta Georgia”. Placing your website in the local online directories also increases your visibility to the local community about your services.

5. Ebook Style Newsletters and Exercises Sheets – If you haven’t noticed, the sales of the Barnes and Noble Nook Reader and Amazon Kindle were a hot seller this past Christmas. This is a strong indication that users will soon choose these devices to consume books, magazines, and web content. I see plenty of opportunity here for you, the private practice practitioner, to create content like newsletters or exercise sheets for your patients to be viewed on these devices. Why not go with them when they are on the move? Creating content for them to use in these “on the go” devices is a great way to brand your physical therapy practice and stay in front of your existing patients that use your services. You will also get a lot of cool points for being on the cutting edge of technology.

6. Better Strategic Use of Social Media – Social Media is probably one of the best free marketing and advertising tools online you can use to promote your physical therapy services. It is the most simplest and cost effective way to introduce your services to a mass market without squashing your marketing budget for the year. Strategic use of sites like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter can really help you to reach out to more people and spread the word about your physical therapy services. Just keep in mind it takes time to see a return from using social media. Most of your time will be spent building relationships and providing value to your existing patients and those who inquire about your services. If you view it more as a communication tool vs a sales tool then you will have better expectations about the time spent using it and the returns it can provide to your private practice in the future.

Those are my marketing predictions for 2011. I will expand more on some of these topics in future blog posts. If you have any predictions of your own or want to share what your physical therapy business will be doing different this year, please share your comments below. Would love to hear from you!

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5 Reasons To Start A Physical Therapy Blog That Attracts Patient Referrals Than To Have A Boring Static Website

Samuel — Sat, 29 May 2010 06:09:29 +0000

If you haven’t noticed or payed any attention to the latest trends in the tech world, blogging has evolved quite a lot in the last few years. It has become a key part of Web 2.0. In fact, if you’re a super geek like me you probably are familiar with the more popular blogs like the Huffington Post, TechCrunch and Gizmodo, that have a huge user base, and are much larger than most websites. If not maybe you noticed sites in our own industry, like Advance For Physical Therapy starting to use blogs to manage more of their own content.

Why all the blog talk you ask? Well if your planning on building a website anytime soon for your physical therapy business, you may want to think about which direction you should be headed in.

With that said, I want to give you 5 reasons why you should consider starting a blog that can potentially generate patient referrals for your physical therapy practice versus having a boring static website. This can also be applied to those that have a physical therapy product and want to generate more buyers or if you have a physical therapy continuing education course and are trying to increase attendee enrollment.

So here are the 5 reasons to ditch your boring static website and get going with a new blog:

1. A blog is a more personal medium than a website: When your patients read your blog posts, they feel as if they are listening to your voice. They form a much deeper connection with you as they read more about what you write and learn more about you. The content on a static website can sometimes feel like it has no “voice”. It can come off like canned jargon with no personality. In my opinion static websites are dry, boring and can lose its appeal with your visitors.

2. Search engines like blogs: This is a known fact in the blogging community! By their very nature, blogs are updated frequently with new content, and search engines love websites with new content. Search engines, like Google, devour them like a slab of roast beef. Keep the content coming and you will have no problem having your content picked up by the major search engines.

You also have a lot of latitude about what you can write about, and can often leverage your patient’s common interests. I recently did a podcast interview with Monique Serpas, a physical therapist who blogs about injury prevention, conditions treated by physical therapists, descriptions of treatment techniques, and other helpful information mostly catering to the patients she treats in the clinic.

If you listen to the podcast, she mentions that she provides preventative tips, she references earlier blog posts she has written and uses the right keywords that is relevant to the search engines and her patients. Monique was able to do this all while providing valuable content to her readers. It’s a great combination that attracts patients and the search engines like bees to honey!

3. Interaction and community: Blogs are a lot better for interaction because they have a comments area below each post where people can leave comments. As a reader you can then respond to these comments and leave your opinion about the topic being discussed in the post. People are usually motivated to leave comments when they read something that strikes a chord with them. You as the blogger can respond to these comments and slowly build a community of loyal followers who will begin to like know and trust you based off of the interaction you have with your readers.

4. Blogging technology has come a long way: You can build a very professional looking blog with the technology that is around these days. I actually prefer using WordPress which has many benefits over the other blog software I have come across. In fact, you can achieve all the features of a static website using a WordPress blog. I have seen a lot of websites that look like static websites but were actually built using WordPress. So if you don’t like the blog look, you can build a “static-like” site using the powerful features of WordPress and still get all the search engine benefits that comes with having a blog.

5. Repeat Visitors: If your blog content is compelling and provides value to your readers, they will come back hungry for more. This is great because it increases your traffic and gives you a higher chance of converting your reader into a patient referral, a buyer for your physical therapy product or having them become an attendee for your CEU course.

Providing quality posts and content is a recipe for repeat visitors and website traffic. It’s very hard to get repeat visitors with a static website because there is no real reason to go back and visit. The blog content, interacting through comments, and the relationship readers have with the blogger is what drives blog readers back to a site. This can be a powerful physical therapy marketing strategy and what you ultimately want to achieve if you have a blog online.

Hopefully I have given you a reason to ditch the thought of creating a static website and move towards creating a blog. As I mentioned before, a blog will help you drive a lot more traffic to your physical therapy business and this could translate into increased revenues and growth in your private practice, physical therapy product or CEU courses.

If you want to create a strong presence for your physical therapy business online, getting started with a blog is a move in the right direction. I cover a lot of how to set one up and promote it in the PT Marketing Academy. I will even host it for free! You can go here now to enroll and get started.

If you have a blog or a website for your physical therapy business and would like to share your thoughts on this topic, leave your comments below to share with everyone else.Similar Posts: