How Your PT Patients Can Help Grow Your Practice's BlogNowadays we see PT clinic owners scratch their heads in search of new marketing techniques to get more clients. Is there a new trick you have never heard of? How is possible your competitors are getting more visitors on their Practice’s Blog, and as a result: more clients?
Hold on; do not run after the next shiny object. No marketing agency can help you more than your patients can! Listen carefully to what we are about to tell you. Do not underestimate your patients. Only by forging relationships with them you can easily grow your Practice’s blog.
Think of this scenario for a moment: You have terrible pain on your back and you start searching on Google “The Best Physical Therapy Clinics Around Me”. You see a few results. Click and see these beautiful websites (that now look all almost identical), with super positive testimonials and people smiling.
The pain intensifies. You have to choose a clinic, but these look all the same. Your friend, John, calls you. He asks if you are free for a coffee at the usual place. You tell him about the back pain. “Oh, you gotta go to AwesomeClinic where I went last time after having a terrible headache. They literally make pain go away in seconds.”
What do you do now? Do you keep surfing the internet, lost in the random addresses and glimmering websites or do you listen to what your good friend, John, recommends you? Be honest, because your patients will be.
This scenario repeats itself in different ways and different platforms. What your customers say about you matters. In our case, John called for a coffee, but he will not always call your potential patients. However, John still can help you enhance your website’ converting power, and traffic. How?
Simply by focusing on these practices:
We all know the importance of patient testimonials, but the pretty little box with a profile picture and a few good words about your services it’s not enough anymore. People need more to be convinced, and adding video testimonials on your site is a great way to do so.
How is this going to bring you more patients for your practice’s blog?
This is backed up by researchers as well:
“Among the communication modalities, video generally plays the most important role for crowdfunding pitches. Appiah (2006) Online visitors prefer video testimonials to picture/text testimonials. Bi et al. (2017) Presenting more introduction words and videos can make backers believe the target crowdfunding project has a higher quality.”
Whatever it is that you may have planned for your next blog article, forget it! Sit down and create a piece of content that is all about your patients. Take a case you have treated recently. You can toot your horn around different platforms, but your blog should be the main focus. A long article about how you were able to help your patient recover from knee injury and get back running before a marathon connects with the audience.
Your patient would happily share the article across his channels and your clinic will stick in the minds of his friends for sure. No matter whether it’s a marathon or another occasion, as long as it’s a personal event your blog readers will love it, share it, and bring your more visitors.
Use images from sessions with your patients in your clinic, no matter how amateurish may look. The content will connect better with the audience when they see real patients instead of stock photos.
How much do you know your clients? Are you the type of therapist who speaks to his patients as a friend or you prefer to keep relationships as professional as possible? Being open to conversations and behaving in a human manner creates more trust and opportunities.
For example, one of your customers might be an Instagram influencer, Youtuber, or someone with presence in Social Media. He/she might even be a blogger. You never know. Caring more about your current patients helps you increase your clientele.
Negotiate a deal with them to give your opinion amongst their real and virtual friends and you will soon start receiving traffic in your site. Even researchers endorse utilizing social media to market your PT clinic.
“We propose that leveraging the power and utility of existing technologies, such as social media, could innovate the way physical therapists engage patients in rehabilitation and health promotion practices, thus contributing to the evolution of the profession: Physical Therapy 2.0.” –says a research paper from Knight, Emily et al. “Physical therapy 2.0: leveraging social media to engage patients in rehabilitation and health promotion.” Physical therapy vol. 95,3 (2015): 389-96. doi:10.2522/ptj.20130432
Next time you have a new patient in your clinic, get to know them better. You never know what opportunities they can offer. Your approach can be the main reason why you are missing lots of new patients.
4. Show that Your Clinic is UniqueRemember what we were looking for at the beginning of the article, before John called? We were looking at boring physical therapists’ websites which seemed almost identical. Be sure yours is not one of them. Copying competitors in one of the worst ways to advertise your blog to the world.
People are attracted by uniqueness and originality. If John was impressed by the service he received at AwesomeClinic, he will mention it every time someone talks about physical therapy. The same goes for your physical therapist website structure and your blog.
Your existing patients evoke the importance of word of mouth marketing. It has been and it will be a powerful marketing method because the audience is pretty well-targeted. We tend to trust people we know more because of the relationships we have built throughout the time.
John would never tell a friend who has tooth pain about your PT clinic, as most of the advertising campaigns online might do. He speaks about you to people who need physical therapy. Provide him with exceptional service, so that he would have an interesting story to tell.
Your patients will think of your clinic and your services only when they or a friend of theirs is in pain. The question is: have you given them a good reason to remember you and most importantly, are they aware of your availability?
People are being bombarded with more than 4,000 advertisements in a single day. It’s no surprise your patients may forget about your clinic after a visit. How to make sure they don’t? There are a few approaches you need to take, but nothing that great content can’t solve.
Send regular emails to your list about checks or other services you are offering at the moment. Nurture a relationship with your customers through emails, postcards and/or other mediums. Send free practical advice and gifts(e.g free consultations). At the end, clearly state your availability.
Show you care, but don’t overdo it. The mistake PT clinic owners keep doing is pushing their service with every email they send. This will make you look spammy and even lose your existing customers. More than 80% of your content needs to be informative and less than 20% of it promotional.
We have mentioned social media above, but let’s get a little more in depth.
After finishing posting on your blog, case studies for example, chop your content in pieces and repurpose it for social media.
The difference between your site and social media is the interaction. If you write an article about your patient case and share it on social media a few people will take the time to click and read it. (Unless it’s well-written content.)
People are familiar with commenting and sharing a Facebook or Instagram post, but the same cannot be said for an article. Include a CTA at the end of your post for people to visit your website.
Your patients will start sharing the content on their feeds and their friends will engage, like and comment, convincing the algorithm that this post deserves more exposure. Your post is pushed further, you reach more people, and get more clicks to your article.
The very first thing you should do now, it’s an examination of your blog and social media content. Skim through titles and see if your articles are about your patients or your clinic. Do not feel bad about removing a few of them.
The same goes for your social media channels. Are you focusing on your patients rather than yourself? If yes, change your content strategy. Do not forget CTA-as which should aim to drive traffic to your blog.
These are the first things we do to help physical therapy clinics that have decided to work with us. We craft a detailed strategy which focuses on representing the clinic with the words of its patients.
Being as transparent as possible on your physical therapist website and showing people real results with video testimonials, photos and articles on your blog should be your focus. No one wants to read scientific research papers! You patients want to see real results.
Do you want to supercharge your physical therapy marketing? Download our Free Evergreen Marketing Blueprint for Physical Therapists and start creating long-term assets that generate new patient bookings for years to come.