As much as competition serves as a potential risk to your physiotherapy clinic, it can also be turned into a substantial benefit when approached correctly. Think about world class sportsmen for a minute: all of them study their opponents before the day they have to face them. Why? Because analyzing the competition can give ideas on how to beat them or learn from them.
The same principal can be applied to your physiotherapy clinic. No matter how good you are doing, you can always find somebody else who is doing better and that can serve as a great opportunity to find and close any gaps in your own marketing strategy.
When starting your competitor analysis, it’s important to know what to look for. You don’t want to be copying their strategy or implementing the exact same approach as they do. Rather, you want to understand the strategy behind what they do, why do they do it and how beneficial it is.
One of the first and most important things to analyze is the content that your competitors create on their blog and website. Since both of you target practically the same audience (patients in need of physiotherapy treatment), you will be able to get plenty of new topic ideas and approaches you might have not thought of before.
Take a look at their website homepage, services page, pricing page and blog. On all of these pages, there is a lot of potential information that can be put to good use. For example, if you find a blog post that received a lot of engagement (comments, discussions, tweets and shares mainly) it means that patients are interested in the topic and it might be a good idea to create a post around that topic on your own physiotherapy blog.
Good testimonials carry invaluable information about your competitors. When patients share their experiences, most of the times, they describe exactly what their problem was and how the competitor clinic helped solve their issue. This can give you a good hint on what your patients want to get from you and what aspects of your physiotherapy clinic’s services need improvement.
Social media analysis
Check the social media accounts of your competitors and take a look at what kind of content they share. Also, keep an eye on the social media channels that your competitors use. This might give you a hint on whether you should tap into new social media platforms that you didn’t think your patients preferred, understand how often they share content on each social media channel, what times of day work best for them and whether their tactics are effective (based on the number of likes, comments, shares, etc.)
Apart from content, there may be other posts, for example motivational or promotional posts, that your competitors use. Take a look at how those work before implementing those tactics in your own marketing strategy.
Another good thing you can do is sign up to the emails and newsletters of your competitors. This will help you understand what kind of emails they send to patients, what their newsletter looks like, is the content worth it, what are the topics that they discuss, etc.
Keeping yourself updated on what kind of information your competitors create will give you the chance to use something similar, but better at the same time.
The secret to marketing your physical therapy clinic is very simple: track the activities of your competitors, see what works and deliver a similar experience to your own patients, but make it better at the same time. Likewise, understand what doesn’t work and avoid using it completely.
This kind of strategy paired with improving your own marketing strategy based on the information that you collect from your patients (feedback, suggestions, etc.) will help strengthen your physiotherapy clinic’s position in the market, drive more patients to your website and deliver better service to your existing patients. If you need help with competitor analysis, take a look at what PatientSites.com can do for your physiotherapy clinic.
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