Physical Therapist Marketing Ideas By PatientGain

How to market yourself as a physical therapist it requires a well thought out medical marketing plan for your company. GOLD solution costs $799/mon and is designed to provide you with a competitive advantage

When marketing yourself as a physical therapist, it requires a well thought out medical marketing plan. To be successful and grow your business, you must approach this challenge using several techniques. The experts at PatientGain.com can help you market yourself as a physical therapist and develop a robust plan to help get the word out in your community. Below are some areas you should consider concentrating on to promote yourself and the areas we can assist.

Below are some areas you should consider concentrating on to promote yourself and the areas we can assist.

1. Physical therapy website

If someone is looking for a physical therapist, your website will often seal the deal for them, choosing you as their physical therapist. A well written, unique, and professional-looking website that is easy to navigate will do wonders in converting a website visitor to a patient. Your website needs to be inviting, make it clear the services you offer, and be on-brand with the rest of your marketing efforts. A website that looks dated, loads slowly, or looks like it hasn’t been updated in the last decade will quickly cause visitors to check out your competitors.

A critical factor a website must possess is that it is responsive to the screen it is viewing. The majority of your visitors are not going to be viewing your site on a desktop computer. They will be viewing it on a tablet or a smartphone, which also has a variety of different sizes. If your website does not automatically resize to fit the screen it is being viewed on you are at a disadvantage and on your organic rankings will suffer. Another vital aspect of a website is its load speed. Studies show you have less than 3 seconds to make an impression on a site visitor, and if you can not get their attention or engage them within that timespan because your site is loading, they will move on to a competitor.

Finally, your website needs to be organized, so it is user friendly. A user-friendly experience will reduce the likelihood of someone abandoning your site out of frustration because they can not find the information they need. Consider the main reasons people visit your website and examine their journey from the home page to their destination. Regardless if it is learning about a service or placing a phone call to make an appointment, look at each part of their journey, each click, and determine if that is the most efficient way for them to accomplish their goal.

2. Content Marketing

Organic rankings depend on various factors, but one of the most significant determiners is your website’s content. It needs to be unique, authoritative, and informative. You do not want content that is all fluff and copied from somewhere else as search engines are now pretty good at identifying that kind of content. The goal of a search engine is to provide its users with organic results that are the most useful and relevant. If your website has 1,000 words about a physical therapy service that users spend 5 minutes reading and then clicking around the rest of your site, that will look very good for a search engine. A competitor with only 200 words on the topic reads in 2 minutes and results in a visitor returning to search results will have a hard time beating your rankings.

Content marketing is a continuous process that is not done once and revisited every year or two. For the best results, you should be continuously adding, updating, and revising parts of your website throughout the year. No, this does not mean rewriting your content every month or completely rearranging your service pages. Instead, throughout the year, take a couple of pages every month to see if they need to be revised, improved, or if more content could be useful to the website visitor. These constant updates will show a search engine that you keep your site as up to date as possible. A regularly updated blog is another good way to get new and fresh content onto your website.

3. SEO of your physical therapy website

Related to content marketing, search engine optimization is the process of improving your content to include the keywords and phrases your target audience uses when searching for the services you provide. Good SEO work sprinkles these words and phrases throughout your content. Be careful not to overload your content with keywords or phrases, which will often result in penalization from a search engine. You should also not put target keywords on pages where they are not relevant. For example, if you have keywords related to strains and sprains, they should be on pages that talk about those injuries and not on other pages, like fractures. The more relevant the keywords are to the pages, the better the results.

When selecting the keywords and phrases to focus on, you want to use some medical terms. However, it is just as important, if not more, to use the words and phrases your potential patients will use. They are likely unfamiliar with the precise medical terms for injuries and the treatments used to help people. If your website has the words, phrases, or even questions people are typing in to get search results, it will improve your site’s organic ranking. A search engine will highlight your site over competitors if it has the exact phrases and questions users are typing during their healthcare research.

4. Social media marketing

For physical therapists, social media can be a great marketing tool. Physical therapy lends itself to producing engaging and interesting posts with pictures and videos. While you need to get your patients’ permission to feature them in your posts, they do not have to be limited to just showing them. Your social media posts can highlight various staff members and the services they provide at your location. Posts can also show the typical equipment people use during their physical therapy, and staff members can even demonstrate them in videos. The nature of physical therapy, with different equipment, movements, and improvement in health over time, lends itself to many engaging social media posts that will interest followers.

Many social media channels also give businesses access to online marketing. You can target specific audiences in your community to make sure the people who see your ads are most likely to need your services. The best social media ads usually include a short video or an engaging picture to catch a viewer’s attention. Many physical therapists highlight services related to common injuries that may happen during that part of the year.

Some of the major social media channels you should have a presence on include:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Instagram
• Foursquare

Physical therapists may also find some success by making accounts on Snapchat and TikTok, but these should not be a priority compared to the others.

5. Referral Marketing

Referrals to your business are going to be crucial as a physical therapist. Physical therapy is not a service offered by a primary care doctor, pediatrician, or a specialist will provide to their patients. It is often the next, and in some cases, the final step in recovering someone who has suffered an injury. For example, a primary care physician, urgent care doctor, or orthopedic doctor will handle the initial treatment of a broken bone or a severe sprain or strain. Once the tissue or the bone has been repaired, strength, agility, and movement will need to be worked on to restore that area’s functionality altogether. These doctors will then hand that part of the recovery off to a physical therapist. Many of your patients will not come to you in the first step of the treatment but in the last step. With that in mind, you need to develop a referral network.

Developing a referral network requires some footwork and your ability to market yourself directly to other doctors. Essentially, you need to present yourself as the most logical choice for a doctor. Instead of a doctor trying to figure out if you are a good fit for their patients, do their homework for them. Research the type of patients they receive and then show how those patients can complete their recovery by receiving physical therapy from your location. Giving examples of the kind of patients they receive and showing your services fitting into their recovery plan is a powerful way to influence their decision. 

Many insurances require a referral from a doctor to receive physical therapy. Once a relationship is established, dedicate a part of your website that highlights the doctors and medical practices you work with to refer to your business. Someone may come across your site with a sprain they need to get worked on, after getting information about your practice, they can be sent to one of your doctors to get the initial referral. This mutually beneficial relationship will only strengthen the bonds between your two practices.

6. Email Marketing

For a physical therapist, email marketing is a great way to keep your patients up to date about the services you are offering at your business. You do not want to be emailing patients every day, highlighting your hours of operation. It would be best if you certainly informed them about any upcoming changes in your hours; your email should focus on other things. Some popular topics other physical therapists have used for their email marketing campaigns include:

• Introducing new staff members with a bio of their background and services they offer
• New equipment ready to be used by patients and the type of physical therapy that uses them
• Tips and health advice to maintain good health at home
• Information on how to avoid common injuries
• Information regarding what symptoms to look for if you believe you may have injured yourself and could benefit from physical therapy

Since physical therapy is often not the 1st step in the recovery process of an injury, it may be beneficial to engage with your referral partners. Coordinate with them to have their medical practice email their patients about your services. This will have you already in their minds as they visit the medical practice first for a diagnosis and then if needed, your clinic for physical therapy. Approaching email marketing this way can be tricky as you do not want to be approaching a medical practice every month, asking them to do this. However, doing it a few times during a year as the season changes and different injuries become more common could be a good idea.

7. Direct Mail Marketing

You may be surprised to learn that direct mail marketing is not dead! It is starting to make a comeback, and physical therapists are taking advantage of it. Reduced mail volume means your marketing materials have to compete with less and less, and it is easier to stand out in the daily arrival of household mail. For your direct mail marketing materials to stand out, it can not be just a white envelope that could get mixed in with the rest of the mail. Some ways to stand out in the mail include:

• Sending items that are unusual shapes and size
• Vibrant colors
• Flyers or pictures on thicker cardstock
• Promotional items, such as pens, pencils, magnets, or calendars.

Your direct mail marketing strategy’s top goal is not for your mailer to immediately end up in the trashcan. Ideally, you want it to be pinned to a corkboard or stuck onto a fridge for a household to see every day. Things like magnets or calendars are useful to people and are more unlikely to be thrown away. If your marketing material has a coupon attached to it, it will give people pause before they throw it away. When designing your mailer, make sure it is long-lasting and not useful only for a limited time. For example, you would not want to send something to a household with a coupon that expires the day it arrives or a couple of days afterward or sends a Thanksgiving-themed mailer the day after Thanksgiving.

Are you looking for help marketing yourself as a physical therapist? Come to the experts at PatientGain.com. Our top-notch team of website designers and marketers have worked with many physical therapists to help them grow their business. Set up a meeting with our team today and let us work with you hand in hand to make you go-to physical therapist in your community.