There may be a million moving pieces to any given marketing strategy for your physical therapy practice, but one fact firmly remains: you cannot afford to skimp on digital advertising.

Even if you consider yourself relatively conservative in terms of how much you plan to spend next year, whether between 10% and 15% of your profits or something much, much more, it's crucial that you understand the importance of digital marketing for today's local businesses. For starters, consider the following:

• Brick and mortar businesses are seeing a massive ROI from digital marketing: from written content to video marketing and beyond, modern companies are keeping up with one-another by creating more content, not less
• As your potential patients are spending more and more time online, the more you're expected to allocate more resources toward Internet marketing
• Content marketing is arguably one of the biggest investments today's small and medium-sized businesses are making: with 80% of marketers already on board with regular blogging, are you doing everything you can to reach new customers via the web?

The numbers don't lie: a failure to effectively market your physical therapy practice online could ultimately leave you in the dust versus competitors who are.

DIY vs. The Expert Approach

The million dollar question for just about any business is whether or not to take a do-it-yourself approach to digital marketing or have an expert take the reigns.

Sure, a DIY marketing strategy may seem attractive when it comes to keeping money in your pocket; however, what about the potential pitfalls? For example:

• Marketing is incredibly time-consuming, especially in the case of content marketing: blog posts alone could take hours to write. Do you realistically have the time, resources and bandwidth to write such posts yourself on a regular basis?
• Time is money, after all: each minute you spend on marketing means that you're taking away attention from other avenues of your business, such as sales or other networking opportunities that could build your bottom line for the long-term
• Not everyone is a natural marketer: especially in the era of modern digital marketing that's constantly evolving, you need to know exactly what do in terms of best practices to avoid potential penalties to your website

In short, physical therapy marketing represents a specialty area. You can't simply put a band-aid on your marketing strategy and hope for the best. Besides, consider the time, money and energy you could save by hiring an expert to do the legwork for you.

But why does physical therapy marketing require an expert to be effective? Beyond peace of mind and saving time, consider the following reasons as to why it pays to have an expert on deck when marketing your practice.

Understanding Your Audience

Plain and simple, your audience matters most when building your business online: you must to nurture your traffic and deliver the right marketing message to make the most of your budget. Doing otherwise is flat out wasteful, especially given the competitive nature of medical marketing.

That being said, not all audiences are created equal. For example, physical therapy patients are particularly unique from a marketing perspective as they...

• Respond to marketing messages surrounding empathy, professionalism and understanding versus fear
• Want and need to be educated versus given yet another sales pitch: your marketing should center around the idea of becoming a resource for your traffic versus just another business
• Center around a number of niches which can unlock now potential business: for example, marketing a pediatric physical therapy clinic versus an athletic physiotherapist would be like comparing night and day

Unfortunately, we've seen many PT practices squander their success simply because they don't know their audience and out.

After all, you can't take a one-size-fits-all approach to reaching your audience: you need someone on deck that truly understand what makes your traffic tick.

Surefire SEO

Additionally, your practice needs someone who truly understands the elements of SEO that ensure  you get in front of as many new leads as possible.

Physical therapy represents an incredibly crowded and competitive market with plenty of potential niches to explore. If you take a general, blanket approach to SEO, chances are your site won't gain much traction; meanwhile, a hyper-specific approach to search marketing may cause you to leave potential traffic on the table.

If your want your site to thrive, you absolutely must tick all the right boxes in regard to SEO. For example, you need to keenly understand the following:

• Which keywords you can realistically target on-site: rather than punching above your weight, you're much more likely to dominate long-tail keywords over time
• The importance of local search when it comes to physical therapy: in order to rank, you simply can't afford to ignore local search queries and traffic
• White hat SEO techniques that are approved by search engines and represent best practices versus black hat techniques that could result in a penalty from Google, potentially sinking your site's performance for the long-term

Organic traffic is the ultimate goal for any business; unfortunately, you don't hope to rank for much of anything if you don't have a solid search strategy in place. We at PatientSites understand how to assess the competitiveness of your target market and ensure that your site is getting in front of as many potential patients as possible.

Credible Content Creation

Physical therapy content represents a key opportunity to educate your audience and dominate for keywords simultaneously.

As noted earlier, content creation can be incredibly time consuming; regardless, businesses today are expected to regularly blog and put out additional content beyond the written word. From infographics to videos and beyond, there's a lot of ground for your practice to cover.

While content creation can be a tedious process, the more content on your site means more opportunities for links and additional eyes on your business. Creating content for your physical therapy practice requires a certain degree of credibility and creativity to be effective, regardless of your niche.

Additionally, you need to make sure you're covering topics that with both drive traffic and be seen as useful for your readership. For example, readers may seek you out to understand pain management techniques or assess the severity of their symptoms. We can help audit your on-site content to make sure you're reaching readers and search engines alike.

Dominate with Design

Finally, you can't afford to leave your site design to just anyone. Even the most subtle elements of your PT practice's site could make or break whether or not your leads click and covert. Such elements include a combination of the following:

• Your calls-to-action, which should be loud and clear to your traffic
• Contact forms which are short, sweet and to the point, providing opportunities for visitors to reach you at a moment's notice
• Color schemes that build trust: for example, blues, purples and greens are incredibly popular for PT sites as they represent calmness and credibility

Think that improving your site's design is no big deal? Think again. If you suspect that something's off in terms of your design, chances are you're right. Thankfully, our free Style and Substance Guide can help put you on the right track in regard to what will keep your visitors on the page.

Bringing It All Together

As noted earlier, there are so many moving pieces of any given marketing strategy. Rather than let yourself be overwhelmed, consider why you should ensure the success of your site by relying on an expert versus trying to do everything on your own. Whether you want to understand how you can improve your site or are considering a complete overhaul of your marketing strategy, contact PatientSties to understand how we can help.

Get started with a Free Evergreen Marketing Blueprint to learn how you can create long-term assets that will attract new patients for years to come.