Feel like your therapy practice is bursting at the seams with clients? Like if you blink, you might miss a booking? In the midst of that growth you might be tempted to hit the pause button on your marketing efforts.
If you’ve been building your own marketing strategy, this is understandable.
It’s going to be difficult to balance Google ads to target specific keywords, social media accounts, following up with potential clients, and creating valuable content, all while giving your clients full attention if you have a solo practice.
We’re here to help, and if you’re considering backing off on your marketing…
Here are 9 reasons (plus one bonus tip for marketing for therapists) to keep your marketing strategy in place even when you have a full client list:
1. Refine Your Client List
Whether you’re a therapist, a counselor, or a life coach, every private practice has a “difficult” client or two. This could be someone who resists your feedback, is hesitant to give feedback, or continually pushes back with the advice they’ve received from other therapists.
If you continue to market, you’ll attract more clients, giving you the option to let go of the more challenging ones gently. Or, on a positive note, a bigger pool may bring in clients who are happier, more appreciative, or simply the exact kind you enjoy working with.
With a larger pool of eager clients to work with you, you’ll be able to choose whether to expand your practice by growing your staff or refine your practice by working with the types of clients you resonate with.
Keep your practice’s calendar full by continuing your marketing
2. Maintain your Momentum
Busy times? Congratulations! That’s your momentum wave. This wave can take time and tweaking to get just right for mental health professionals, and the momentum can be lost if it’s not consistently applied. Marketing boosts your wave, confirms a client’s loyalty, and fosters a sense of “right choice” in your clientele.
3. Reduce the cost of Client Acquisition
Refined marketing strategies tend to lower the costs of acquiring new clients. So, instead of $200 to bring in a new customer, refining your marketing strategies could drop it to $100, so you’ll be making more out of each therapy session, counseling appointment, or coaching call.
Yes, we can help reduce the costs of marketing for therapists
Let’s imagine that your marketing strategy includes social media marketing. For us to create effective marketing strategies, we try multiple approaches with a portion of the marketing budget and see which works before increasing the budget of the digital marketing strategy.
Depending on a client’s online marketing goals, we might create a facebook ad that focuses on a free consultation, another one that pushes visitors to helpful website content (like a blog post) that increases your credibility with those potential clients, and a third ad offering introductory video sessions.
We’re not going to use all of your marketing budget on just one of those approaches until we see which one is getting the best response from ideal clients and the most efficient client acquisition cost.
Once we see which is performing best, we then increase the budget on those specific keywords or that specific ad to reach a higher number of prospective clients and reduce the spend on the less-effective online advertising bringing your costs down and your new leads up.
4. Embrace Growth and Scalability
Ready to increase your private practice’s impact? Scaling your practice relies heavily on continually attracting new clients. That’s where consistent marketing comes in, even when you think there’s no room left in your schedule.
Having a system that is proven to bring in new clients means you can start a waiting list while you find the right partner, employee, or apprentice to expand your private practice.
Grow your counseling or therapy practice with marketing
5. Stay Ahead Amid Market Flux
Economic and cultural changes can sneak up on us all and impact your practice. Consistent marketing efforts help build resilience against these unpredictable shifts. Knowing that you have a waiting list and a system for bringing in potential clients is a way to safeguard your practice from declines.
6. Stay “Top of Mind” for your clients and people who may refer clients to you
Think of a cola brand. Did you instantly think of Coca-Cola or Pepsi despite countless other brands? Maybe you haven’t even purchased soda in years, but those brands came to mind.
That’s brand awareness, and “Top-of-Mind” means being the first brand that comes to mind when someone asks for a referral from your clients or from people in your network of practitioners.
Staying Top-of-Mind With Your Clients:
Don’t let your brand slip from the minds of your clients just because you’ve reached capacity.
You may not have considered ‘secondary competition,’ but it exists. If your clients pay you monthly for your services, you’re competing with anything else they could spend that money on:
- Enrolling their child in private school
- Fixing the car
- A collection of streaming services
- Going on vacation
These expenses could all be competition that removes your practice from your clients’ monthly budget.
Keeping your practice top of mind even when your clients aren’t in your office reinforces the value you’re providing them to confirm their decision to prioritize working with you over other distractions.
Staying Top of Mind In Your Network
Staying top-of-mind is key to having a network of mental health professionals, people in your community, and other healthcare providers ready to refer clients to you.
When someone asks for a referral, you want to be the first therapy practice that comes to mind, so staying in front of those referrers with your online marketing is essential to being the first practice that comes to mind.
7. Keep Competitors at Bay
You’ve got your hands full with clients today, but your competitors are out there, using search engine optimization (SEO) to attract potential clients on Google (along with Google ads), social media marketing (like Instagram ads), and offline methods to reach clients – and sometimes to reach YOUR clients.
With the growing number of practices, marketing for therapists, mental health services, and other professionals is seeing an increase in spending and vying for attention.
Consistent marketing can keep your competition in check and ensure your schedule remains full.
Momentum is key to effective and efficient marketing
8. Safeguard Your Reputation
Just like you keep track of your clients’ progress, keeping an eye on your online reputation is essential. Consistent marketing strategies to bring in fresh clientele can help pad any negative reviews that might come your way.
You can’t please everyone, but have you ever noticed that dissatisfied people are often the first to leave a review? Having others who respect and appreciate your service to counteract that review (whether a Google review or a comment made on one of the social media platforms) is a helpful way to balance the opinion of someone looking for your services.
9. Boost The Comraderie On Your Team and Reinforce Vision
Your team needs to see you’re committed to growth to reassure their confidence in the long-term success of your business and their career with you. Regular marketing spends do just that, offering reassurance and motivation to your staff that a growing number of clients want and need your service, and fostering a shared vision by seeing a consistent stream of new clients coming in.
Marketing For Therapists BONUS: Capitalize on Past Efforts In Your Marketing Strategy
Imagine building a house without furnishing it because you’ve got walls and a roof and that’s enough to stay warm and dry. All that effort for half the results. The same logic applies to marketing for therapists and other mental health professionals.
Pausing your marketing strategy is like building a house but not furnishing it
Since therapists are a high-trust and often high-pricepoint practice, there needs to be a long-term approach to marketing to build rapport and trust with your target audience and potential clients to the point where they take the step of contacting you to learn about your services.
Halting midway can mean losing out on the full potential of your earlier marketing campaigns.
We love marketing for therapists:
So, yes, your hands might be full dealing with each day’s therapy sessions, and pausing marketing (and new incoming calls and emails) might seem like a breather. But these ten reasons show why it’s essential not to slow down.
Need some help keeping the marketing engines running? We would love to help you impact more people. Reach out to get started.
You might also like this article: “Does my therapy practice need a website?”