Marketing Resources for Growing a Private Practice
Often times we think that marketing demands an investment of resources that we don't really have. After all, we are not huge companies with marketing departments staffed with professionals who know everything about SEO, Advertising, PR, etc.
We are not them, but we do have the resources we need to attract the clients that we want to work with. And we have those resources right now. Even if we have just opened the doors to our new practice and we have no budget.
I recorded this tutorial to show you what your marketing resources really are where you can find them.
Transcript
Hi, this is Avivit Fisher and you are tuning in to “Marketing Tips for Therapists”.
Make sure you subscribe to my channel if you want to learn how to use marketing for growing your practice.
Today I will be talking about marketing resources and where to find them.
So funny thing about resources... We always think that we don’t have enough of them. The main ones, time, money and our energy seem to be in a perpetual overdraft. Right?
If I only had more time, I would be coming up with new ways to promote myself and if I only had the money to invest in marketing, I would hire a person who does all of this for me. Sounds familiar?
Marketing your private practice does require time, some money and energy. I mean, that’s the cost of running your business, right?
But I want you to know that you already have these resources available to you now. Many marketers will tell you that when you are starting out, you should dedicate 80% of your time promoting and 20% doing the work. I think that it’s very rigid and although I do believe that you need to promote yourself to gain clients, I think that you can do it in a more organic way.
My first tip about your time is scheduling weekly time slots dedicated specifically to your marketing and if you don’t like this concept, call it "business growth”. If you’ve started out and your schedule is more open right now, schedule an hour or two on 3 different days. That’s a good start. And if you are busier make it an hour twice a week. And when you’ll do that, you’ll be able to see that marketing will shift from being a pesky afterthought to an important element in the growth of your private practice.
Now let’s talk about money. It’s true that some things cost money, like a listing in Psychology today or Theranest and these are necessary expenses because these websites have a lot of traffic. But besides that, you can do many things that cost you nothing except your time. And we have already solved that problem. For example, reaching out to other providers so you can create strategic partnerships. If you work with women, these providers might be OBGYN or paediatricians. If you work with divorcing couples, you might want to create relationships with lawyers.
Besides that, there are many tools that are free to use for digital marketing, like Buffer (to schedule your social media posts), Mailchimp (to create email blasts to your clients or former clients), Canva (to create easy designs for your posts and other graphics and Google My business (to create a free Google listing). I actually have a whole list of free or almost free marketing resources for you. So you can just download it in the link below.
My last tip has to do with your energy. If you want to avoid driving yourself crazy with trying different marketing tactics, you can look at the time you have available and the tools that you have at your disposal and choose a couple of things to focus on every week. You might want to decide that for the next 3 months, you are only focusing on expanding your network and optimizing your paid listing on Psychology today. The important thing is doing it methodically and consistently for a defined period of time.
These were my tips on marketing resources and where to find them. If you’ve just discovered me, you can listen to my previous audio on Setting the right goals to get you going and start growing.
