As a physiotherapist, you are skilled at curing people of physical pain to improve their body mobility. But your healing skills are of no benefit if you have no patients to work on. It is understandable that you may not be as adept at crafting the best physical therapy marketing strategies as you are with your medical skills. So, if you want to improve your patient count, you need to pay attention to refining your marketing campaign.
No matter how small or big the clinic is, publicizing is essential for the business to grow. Therefore, you need to know what marketing materials will work the best for you.
This blog is a mini guide for physiotherapists who want to build a robust name in the healthcare industry. Whether it is through newspaper pamphlets or Google Ads, the strategies discussed here will surely help you in your marketing endeavor.
What is Physical Therapy Marketing?
A physical therapy marketing campaign is a strategy exclusive to rehab specialists who seek to promote their business far and wide. It is the process of using several advertising tactics to make your target audience aware of your physical therapy services.
This type of advertising method attracts new patients to the clinic by increasing online visibility. It also helps to enhance brand awareness in the physical therapy industry.
SEO, PPC advertisements, email, and social media marketing are key components that drive traffic to your website. These strategies can exponentially amplify your physical therapy marketing efforts.
5 Factors to Consider while Creating a Physical therapy Marketing Strategy
To make an effective PT marketing strategy, you need to keep in mind certain points. Focusing on them will help to achieve better results. Let us take a look at the factors you should consider while crafting your physical therapy promotional strategy.
- Target Audience
Before you begin formulating your physical therapy marketing campaign, ensure you understand your audience to the core. You need to identify what your target market needs.
Gather data based on demographics such as age, gender, location, etc. This helps you streamline your strategies in order to reach your primary audience precisely. Not only this, you will also be able to enhance the overall patient satisfaction.
For instance, most women over the age of 35 suffer from major back pain. So, if you can prepare ad campaigns or service pages addressing that issue, your business will likely receive more attention from them. This will improve your market presence significantly.
- Define your Services Clearly
Beating around the bush about your business will create confusion among viewers. It may lead to higher bounce rates, thereby negatively affecting your business growth.
To avoid such misfortune, you have to be pretty transparent in sharing your business details. Create relevant and compelling content that aligns with the issues of prospective patients. Make sure to highlight the USPs that set you apart from other physical therapy clinics or physiotherapists.
Mention the treatment facilities, team and staff members to build the trust of the viewers. You can also add online reviews of your existing customers.
Never make the mistake of adding false claims about the services you offer. This will affect patient satisfaction thereby hampering your marketing success.
- Build a Robust Online Presence
Any physical therapy marketing strategy is incomplete without a solid online presence. If you want more people to know about your physical therapy practice, make sure you create a professional website.
Optimize it with SEO guidelines, PPC, ORM and content marketing strategies. Use relevant keywords on physiotherapy to enhance your organic search engine results rankings. This is a great way to spread brand awareness to boost online presence.
- Community Engagement
Community engagement refers to the activity where you connect with other wellness professionals, physical therapists including healthcare providers. This will help you build patient referrals.
Marketing your business to other people in the healthcare industry is a great way to increase patient referrals. You can promote your business to everyone from gyms, yoga centers, local sports teams to massage clinics and chiropractors. It is a great way to attract prospective patients to your clinic.
- Patient Experience
An important aspect of PT marketing strategies is to ensure a positive patient experience. If you can provide excellent service to them, it will lead to better word-of-mouth referral sources.
You can even encourage your current patients to leave feedback on platforms like your website and social media pages. This will allow you to modify your services and marketing strategy based on their reviews. You can work on the points addressed by the majority of your patients.
Physical Therapy Marketing Strategies for Growth
It is essential to have a proper idea of which strategies will offer the best outcome. This is why we have listed below a few physical therapy marketing ideas that will promote your business to your target audience precisely. Let us take a look at the strategies.
- Create Your Own Website
You cannot start online marketing unless you have a website of your own. A website is an important asset that gives your digital marketing efforts a strong foundation. They act as the representatives of what services you offer to your clients.
Most interested clients expect the business to have an official website. It builds a sense of credibility among them. Hence if you do not have a website already, you are missing out on a bunch of potential patients.
Having a website implies a 24*7 online presence. Even if your clinic is closed, patients can still get in touch with you seamlessly. Additionally, it offers enhanced exposure to your physical therapy practice near and far. So, anyone from anywhere can contact you for your professional help.
However, simply having a website will not suffice. You need to make sure it is discoverable to prospective patients. It has to rank well on the search engines’ result pages. Otherwise, you are back to square one.
Therefore, make efforts to optimize your physical therapy website. Have a responsive webpage design. You can have separate landing pages for your different services. Highlight your USPs, doctor qualifications along with clinic specialities.
Do not forget to add the positive reviews of your existing patients. Patient testimonials play a vital role in building trust in new customers. Also, if you have a direct call-to-action text on your website, more viewers are likely to be attracted.
Therefore, creating a website is an effective start for any physical therapist who wants to build a strong online presence.
Checklist
- Create a search engine-optimized website for better ranking
- Make your webpages responsive to boost user navigation
- Have a clear call-to-action message on your website
- Make sure to keep your websites mobile-optimized
- Use SEO to Drive Organic Traffic
What do you do when you have to search for a service online? You immediately Google it or use other search engines to find your answer. That being said, statistics show that search engines account for 68% of all website traffic. So, if your website is SEO-optimized, you can benefit in several ways.
Search engine optimization refers to the process of boosting the quantity of organic traffic to a website. It optimizes the website’s technical arrangement along with its content alignment. It also takes care of link structures and their popularity to make webpages discoverable and navigable. SEO can prove to be one of the effective marketing strategies for ranking your webpages on physical therapy higher in SERPs.
You can begin with SEO by running a website audit to check its current standing. It forms the first step in SEO, as without it, you will not have a clear picture of how to proceed with your marketing strategy.
Keyword Research forms the next step which lays the foundation of SEO. You can study the terms and phrases that your target audience searches the most. Then, use those keywords to create high-quality relevant content. This will increase the likelihood of pushing your webpages to the forefront.
A robust backlink portfolio can significantly boost your SEO for physical therapy efforts. This can help you gain better domain authority among competitor physical therapists. You also have to pay attention to the other core web vital metrics for the smooth functioning of your website.
So, if you want a continuous inflow of patients to your physical therapy clinic via your website, SEO is a powerful weapon in that case. If you find it difficult to manage your clinic and SEO together, you can hire an expert SEO agency to take over the reins.
Checklist
- Use simple sentences in the content for better understanding
- Use H-tags and Metadata for enhanced content structure
- Optimize your Google business profile for local SEO
- Acquire backlinks naturally to avoid penalties
- Keep a regular track of your SEO performance
- Leverage Email Marketing for Direct Communication
The primary motive of email marketing is to intrigue customers through direct communication. It is a strategy that uses emails to contact existing patients as well as connect with new ones. Advertising via email increases the chances of more conversion of potential clients.
Promotion through email is a great physical therapy marketing strategy. Email Marketing campaigns are a cost-effective advertising tactic with the guarantee of a higher return on investment. And, 41% of marketers admit that email is a powerful tool in marketing any product or service.
Email marketing allows you to give a personalized touch to your physical therapy marketing plan. By this we mean that you can send customized messages to your target audience. Existing patients will receive different emails from prospective ones.
It also allows you to send follow-up emails to your past patients. In case you want to keep them updated with your services, email is always a great option.
A physical therapist must include a distinct Call-To-Action button or message in the email that redirects the receiver to the official website. They can also add links to their social media handles. This helps to increase patient retention, count of new patients as well as business growth. You can also build patient loyalty by reaching out to them via email.
Checklist
- Understand your target audience based on demographic data
- determine your business goals
- Build an organic email list with website sign-up forms
- Have one clear CTA for your target audience
- Increase Presence on Social Media
Social media optimization involves employing social platforms like Facebook, Instagram and YouTube to reach out to a wide audience base.
It is no surprise that most people are active on social media platforms. That is why 77% of businesses use them to reach a wider audience. Social media can be a revenue magnet for your business.
Physical therapists can use Facebook and Instagram to create business pages. It allows them to present the audience with an open platform where they can hold online discussions on physical therapy-related topics. You can even invite your target audience to join these discussions.
Twitter can help you build connections with wellness professionals in the physical therapy industry to learn more about this field. Tweeting your thoughts as a physical therapist on X with retweeting other relatable tweets helps to build brand awareness.
Statistics say that short videos are the most viewed content on social media nowadays. So, you can post a small tour of your physical therapy clinic for your audience. Use relevant and trending hashtags to maximize the impact.
Checklist
- Make your post visually engaging
- Upload real-time images of physical therapy practices
- Use location tags in every post
- Don’t forget to use relevant hashtags in the right amount.
- Get help from a good social media marketing company for better results.
- Leverage Paid Ads for Better Revenue
A physical therapist can also use a paid marketing strategy along with SEO, email and social media marketing campaigns. Paid advertisement is an auction-style marketing technique that brings inorganic traffic to your business website. It has a targeted approach that will enable you to reach your audience precisely.
PPC form of advertising generally has a higher rate of conversions of leads into patients. It is because of the clear CTA messages in the ad campaigns. This method can help your business rank easily on search engines. Moreover, its geo-targeting aspect lets you reach your core audience within the service area.
With a nominal investment, it generates a lot of leads in a short time. It also builds a strong online presence that results in an exponential spike in return on investment.
PPC ads have a higher customer engagement rate because of their streamlined approach. The visually compelling video ads, discovery and display ads grab the attention of the ones who are actively searching for physiotherapists.
You can begin with Google Ads. This advertising program allows you to use its search engine platform to reach potential patients. Use social media ads for those who are more active on social media. Other than this, there are Bing Ads that will help you promote your physical therapy business on Microsoft’s search engine.
In case you want professional help in building a paid advertisement strategy, you can seek help from an expert PPC management agency.
Checklist
- Understand your core audience to set clear campaign goals
- Set your PPC marketing budget before bidding
- Use high-resolution images in the display, discovery, multimedia ads
- Add relevant keywords in these ad campaigns
- Get your business on Google Business Profile for Local service ads
- Don’t Forget Traditional Marketing Techniques
Relying solely on online marketing of your PT practice will not suffice. You must also depend on traditional marketing techniques to accelerate the promotional process.
It is a fact that most of the population has access to online sources. But, there is still a section of the world that remains behind in digital terms. Additionally, out of 5.44 billion internet users, only 62.6% of users are active on social media platforms. So, you need to use offline marketing techniques to promote your physical therapy practice to them.
You can use print advertising like brochures, flyers, pamphlets in addition to newspaper ads. Moreover, running promotional ads on television is also a good marketing tool.
Use direct mail methods like postcards and newsletters to potential patients in your service area. Other marketing materials include sharing business cards with other wellness professionals and clinics.
- Partner with other brands
You can start by collaborating with fitness centers that offer yoga services.S Connect with the local sports team to offer your medical services in physiotherapy to their players.
You can also build a relationship with local hospitals where orthopedic, spinal, neurological and amputation surgical patients require physiotherapy to cure. Furthermore, reach out to medical stores and doctors who refer patients to your clinic for physical therapy treatment.
This cross-promotion technique increases your brand awareness across the community. Not only this, but it also helps you to build a strong network with other professional health specialists.
Wrap Up!
As you can see, an effective physical therapy marketing strategy is crucial to bringing your clinic to the forefront of your target audience. From the blog, it is understandable that if physical therapists can leverage online marketing campaigns along with traditional ones, it will lead to extremely favourable results.
Using SEO, email marketing campaigns, social media, along with paid ads helps reach the right audience at the right time. Additionally, partnering with healthcare professionals and other medical businesses will boost your reach, credibility and revenue.
However, if you are stuck or find it difficult to start with online promotion, you can always rely on an expert digital marketing agency. They will help you out in building a strong marketing campaign that will amplify your overall business growth.
Additional Resources:
- The Ultimate Guide to Physical Therapy SEO: Attract More Patients Online
- SEO for Spas: Easy Tips to Boost Ranking
