A one-size-fits-all approach simply won’t cut it for many problems that need solutions, and this applies to your private practice’s marketing plan, too. While it may be easier to craft a single message and distribute it in a single way, you’ll fail to reach many potential patients and other individuals when you use this type of strategy. Instead, try to guide your physical therapy marketing strategies with segmentation.

Break It Down – Physical Therapy Marketing Segments

Marketing segmentation is the process of dividing your market of all the individuals you’d like to reach into unique groups – or segments—based on a variety of characteristics. The intended goal is that each segment created by this process can have a specific message that targets their needs and matches their needs with the specific benefits they’ll receive when they take you up on an offer.

In effect, segmentation will allow you to more easily personalize the content you’re distributing by individually targeting these specific groups rather than using a general, all-encompassing concept. Segmenting your market reduces the risk of an ineffective or unsuccessful marketing campaign, and research has shown that businesses that utilize this strategy typically turn better profits than those that don’t.

For example, you might offer a free myofascial treatment to a segment of people that have neck problems at work. You could offer a free balance screening to seniors as well.  You are simply creating an offer that would be most appealing to each of those segments.

Assumption: these should be your ideal target patients. I just wrote about ideal patients and physical therapy marketing segments last month because it was top-of-mind for me then as well.

Segment in ways that are most applicable to your private physical therapy practice

There are countless ways to segment your market, but some of the most common ones include doing so by age, diagnosis, or geographic location. If you’re not sure what will work best for your practice, a great first step is to study your patient population. Look into statistics from patients’ medical records to garner an idea of the average age of your patients, what regions most of them are coming from (this is a great way to know where to send direct mail), what types of conditions are most common, and what diagnoses are the easiest to get paid for. This can serve as a single segment, or if some characteristics appear in a bimodal or trimodal—or more—distribution—several segments can be created and targeted with your marketing content.

Other possible segments to consider targeting include:

• Individuals in need of a specific service: do some research in your area to see if there are any physical therapy services you offer (e.g., vestibular rehab, pelvic floor rehab, pediatric rehab) that are difficult to find locally; if so, be sure to highlight these services (on your website, blog posts, social platforms, and to your referral sources) and be sure to clearly state if you have specialists of any sort on your staff
• Potential patients vs. existing patients: individuals in need of physical therapy that hear about your practice will be looking for a different message than your current patients; cater your marketing content accordingly
• Patients vs. doctors vs. case managers: keep in mind that patients are not your only audience, and adapt some of your messages to those that are making decisions on what practice to choose for patients
• Individuals most likely to benefit from your equipment or modalities: if your practice features any unique equipment or treatments (e.g., aquatic therapy, high-intensity laser treatment, Biodex system), promote them in your marketing messages by explaining what conditions you are most capable of treating

Use the Media that a Majority of Your Segment Commonly Uses as Well

So many companies are selling tactics like Facebook advertising or postcards. One thing you want to make sure you do is to use the media that your market segment uses. So, continuing with our example above, it might not be the best idea to run Instagram ads for balance screenings to seniors that could really use your help. Why? It’s because people over 70, for the most part, aren’t on Instagram (at least a majority of them). You’d be better off mailing them something several times. Additionally, for people with neck pain at work, you might want to use Facebook ads to reach them since people in the workforce in your area are more likely to be on Facebook. So, just keep in mind the segment, the offer, and the media that you will be using when putting together your marketing campaign.

A good reference for this is available here.  The concept of Market (the segment you are targeting), Message (the offer), and the Media you are using (Facebook or direct mail in our examples) comes from Dan Kennedy.

Need Help – Get in Touch with Us

If you’re still not sure how best to segment your audience, we can help by providing some additional physical therapy marketing ideas and show you what we think will work best for your practice. Contact us to learn more.

Extra Training from YouTube

Here’s a good video that describes segmentation, targeting, and positioning if you’d like to learn more.

It’s 2020 – Happy New Year! Now’s the time to execute the planning you did last quarter. If you are like most, you may not have had the time to plan and feel behind. As such, you could be more susceptible to the latest and greatest marketing ad promising you massive growth and riches.

You may want to ask yourself the following:

• Do you ever find yourself jumping from one physical therapy marketing idea to the next?
• Do you see one social media post offering to grow your practice, then another email, and maybe a postcard?
• Do you often start several projects at once, only to see most of them fall by the wayside after a few weeks?
• Do new marketing suggestions make you feel like you need to stop what you’re working on and pursue the latest solution instead?

If you’ve answered “yes” to any of these questions, you may have some degree of “bright & shiny object syndrome”.

In the marketing world, bright & shiny object syndrome is essentially the tendency to be distracted by claims of the newest and best rather than focusing on what you’re doing at the moment. Those who are affected by it tend to begin projects based on new ideas without properly assessing long-term goals and whether or not the new pursuit is feasible and sustainable. As a result, very few marketing tactics—if any—actually get completed. Worse yet, if they do get implemented, they often yield little to no measurable return. As a result, you may fall into the trap of thinking that marketing doesn’t work.

Stop the Madness – Stop FOMO

Fear of missing out (FOMO) is one of the psychological tactics along with outrageous claims like “doubling your patient volume in 60 days”, that companies use to generate curiosity. These types of claims while possible, are not usually the average result of any one marketing tactic. Companies tend to promote the outliers to get your attention.

Strategy vs Tactics – In Most Cases, Tactics Should Come as a Result of Strategic Thinking and Planning

This brings up an important distinction that needs to be made between marketing strategy and marketing tactics. A physical therapy marketing strategy is the first step of the process in which you do the “big picture” planning for your practice prior to determining what tactics to use and how to use them. Individuals with bright & shiny object syndrome often try to implement their tactics before taking the time to lay out a strong strategy, which can wind up robbing you of your precious time and at worst, harming rather than helping your marketing efforts.

Here’s the problem: if you don’t think through and write up a marketing plan before implementing it, you may likely run into unexpected obstacles that you are not prepared to deal with. When confronted with these types of problems, it may then seem easier to abandon the project altogether and move on to the next, newer one instead. As you can see, taking this approach could lead to lots of unfinished business and can take a toll on your marketing budget over time.

Physical Therapy Marketing Planning Versus Taking Action

There’s a regular debate about strategy versus tactical implementation. The fact is, most small businesses (this includes PT private practices), don’t do much planning at all.

The flip side of the argument is that strategic planning is a way to delay action. The thought that you need a perfect plan that is going to guarantee results is enamoring but folly. It won’t happen. It’s best to do the following:

• Get help where you need support,
• plan,
• take imperfect action,
• measure the results,
• modify the plan and future actions, and
• continue to consistently implement!

Gary Vaynerchuk does a nice job of answering this question:

6 tips to help you stay focused and avoid distractions

If you’ve noticed any signs of bright & shiny object syndrome in yourself and want to change your ways, identifying the issue is the first step. In addition, keep these 5 tips in mind to help you stay focused with your marketing plan and block out the temptation to try the newest thing:

• 1) Take the time to set realistic short- and long-term goals for your physical therapy marketing campaign that will serve as the backbone of all future decisions
• 2) Try to commit to these goals no matter what, and only change them when you can realistically state that they are no longer serving your practice well
• 3) Understand that new does not necessarily mean better
• 4) Ask yourself if a new marketing tactic is feasible for your practice—both budget- and time-wise—before executing it
• 5) Discuss ideas with one or two at most, of your coworkers to get their feedback.
• 6) Avoid sharing ideas and developing strategy with everyone – that leads to “design by committee” in which you have too many ideas, too much criticism, and it slows down execution.

Need Help with Physical Therapy Marketing Strategy & Planning?

For additional suggestions on how to resist bright shiny object syndrome, we can help set you on the right track by analyzing your needs and capabilities to figure out what will work best for your practice.

Increasing business at your practice starts with a strong marketing plan

If you own a private physical therapy practice, getting more business is likely a primary goal that dictates many—if not most—of the decisions you make. To this end, you probably also understand how crucial it is to market your practice in order to reach both current and prospective patients, but how to market and what you need to get there may seem a bit more daunting. That’s why we’d like to offer some physical therapy marketing ideas to assist you with this process.

Marketing is essentially the process of getting someone who is in need of physical therapy to know, like, and trust you.  When you achieve these goals, there’s a high likelihood that people that know, like, and trust you will contact you.

The services that you offer, what separates you from your competitors, and presenting this information in such a way to show patients why they should choose to visit you instead of another practice are all important.

In today’s business world, with a seemingly endless number of marketing tactics—like e-newsletters, paid ads, a wide variety of social media platforms—it’s difficult to decide what combination of tactics will work best and be worth your time.

But as with much else in business, it pays to start with a plan.

Identify your ‘ideal patients’ and group them into segments to better define who you want to market to

Before beginning any sort of marketing, spend some time to create a clear marketing plan. Doing so will guide your future efforts and allow you to determine what approaches you’d like to take, and the amount of resources needed to make them happen. A critical first step in formulating a marketing plan is to identify your ideal patient, which is an individual whose problems you are most adept at solving. Ask yourself these questions to help identify your ideal patient types:

• What are the demographics of these individuals?
• What types of diagnoses do these individuals have that would lead them to seek out physical therapy (e.g. immobility, chronic pain, sports-related injury, pelvic problems, vestibular conditions)?
• What are the perceptions of these people with respect to using PT services (are they open to direct access or do they need a referral)?
• What types of media do these patients consume (e.g. Facebook, Google, Instagram, YouTube)?

Niche Down to More Specific Segments for Better Clarity and Physical Therapy Marketing Effectiveness

Once you successfully answer these questions, build a marketing campaign that attempts to reach these ideal patients directly, as those are the individuals most likely to come to you for care. Marketing plans are often more effective when you further segment your ideal targets into smaller groups or segments. Here are a few examples to consider when further segmenting your ideal patients into target markets:

• Past vs. current patients
• Patients referred by physicians vs. self-referred patients
• What types of insurance/payment do these patient types usually have available to pay for PT services?
• Individuals that are most likely to benefit from your services

Again, try to understand what it will take to get past patients (warm leads) with a need for your services to come back versus what prospective patients (cold leads that have never used you before) are looking for and would make them select you over competitors.

Why ‘done’ is better than ‘perfect’

A common problem that many private practices owners run into in their physical therapy marketing strategy is spending too much time trying to ensure that a marketing plan is perfect. This can lead to delays in launching the plan, which in turn, could mean less potential business for your practice. For this reason, we strongly recommend that you get something off the ground and “done” first, rather than getting too hung up on perfecting it. Marketing plans are meant to be tweaked and improved upon as you go, so work on erecting a strong base at the outset, and then building on it from there.