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Perhaps you’ve recently had a new staff member start at your private practice that you’re especially excited to let your clients know about – a real leader in their field. Or you might have started offering new services to reach out to a whole new group of potential clients. How are you going to let everyone know? You need a marketing plan that includes effective, simple methods.
So – what are the best marketing methods you can use to tell people about your updated repertoire of services or new staff members?
The Clients you Treat
When talking to clients, therapists should recommend complementary products or services/classes to assist with a client’s treatment and recovery. It’s essential to establish a great rapport with clients for this reason – you need your client to trust that you know what you’re doing and also have their best interests in mind when discussing treatment options. This is an easy marketing strategy because you are serving your clients, not selling to them directly.
If your practice is offering an exciting new service or staff member, you can casually mention this to your client. Say something like “a (insert new service here) would be really beneficial for your condition – we actually have a new staff member who specialises in (this service), I’d recommend trying them out to complement our sessions”. Keep it casual, goal-focused and not too sales-y, so your client understands why you’re recommending an additional service or therapist and doesn’t feel like you’re trying to up-sell to them.
This is a totally free way to market new staff and services to clients you already know are interested in what your practice has to offer.
Your Existing Client Base
As always, you should start with your existing client base. Any one whoever received treatment from you qualifies as an existing client. There are many reasons why it’s important to foster good relationships with your clients – they already have brand awareness for your business, if they believe you provide a good service they are likely to stay loyal to your brand and you know they already have an existing need for your services among many other reasons. Most importantly, it’s much cheaper to market to your existing client base. In fact, invespcro.com estimates it costs approximately 5 times more to attract a new client versus maintaining an existing one.
Luckily, you already have the contact information for your client base, so this substantially reduces the amount of work you’ll need to do to get your offer in front of people already interested in your services. This means you don’t have to dip too deep into your marketing budget to let people know about what’s going on in your practice.
Your clinic management software will be able to provide you with a list of your client’s contact details for mass communication so you can use email marketing or content marketing your services to communicate to your existing client base that your clinic is expanding and adding fantastic new staff members and services.
Those who Visit your Website
All allied health practices should utilise Google Analytics to monitor website traffic and to view the behaviour of website visitors. Google Analytics is a great way to see how many people visit your website, where they navigate to when they visit, what pages they visit and how long they stay on each page. It’s also great to analyse if potential clients visit your website but then leave before booking an appointment.
You can mitigate this by providing potential new clients a reason to book an appointment – such as providing them with a discount code, advertising a new service or staff member at a special rate, or another call to action so your client recognises that they’re getting a great deal that they can’t miss out on. Don’t be afraid to use some savvy online marketing to create a bit of urgency with your offers. You already know that the average website visitor is interested in the services you provide, so ensure your website is primed to send the message to those visitors that they’re getting a fantastic service or price if they book an appointment with your practice. This might be in the form of a popup on your website alerting potential customers to available deals.
You can chat to your web developer about ways to optimise your website to get as many new customers booking appointments as possible, as this is another relatively low-cost measure to market to clients who are interested in the services you provide. Of course, if you have a bit more of a time + money budget you can start branching out into google ads, search engine optimisation etc…
Social Media
It’s hard to overstate the importance of having a social media presence – even as an allied health practice.
Firstly, everyone is on social media, so the reach you can have with a Facebook or Instagram account is extremely wide. With Facebook or Instagram, you can also set the locations in your area that you want to market to, so you won’t unnecessarily market to potential clients who are too far away to visit your practice.
Secondly, basic social media accounts are free, so it is difficult to find a more cost-effective marketing solution that has a greater reach.
Thirdly, social media marketing offers a direct line of communication between clients, potential clients and your company. This way, you are receiving feedback from your existing and potential clients in real time – and clients love to discuss what you’re doing well (or not!) on social media. If a client is happy with your service, they will definitely let you know. This is invaluable market research which again, at the basic level is free.
When you have an exciting new service to promote, or a star practitioner starting in your practice (hint hint, they’re all stars), ensure that you post it all over social media so that all of your followers see this, and are able to engage with your post. Make sure you tell your followers all of the benefits of the services, or the experience and expertise of the new practitioners to get them excited, and sweeten the deal with a discount code or other perk so your client gets the best value possible and you help build your new practitioner’s client base as a great start to their career with your practice.
The 4 methods above are only a few of many low-cost methods you can implement to let people know about exciting additions to your practice. Effective, low cost marketing is crucial these days to allow your clinic to stand out amongst considerable competition, so ensure you promote your point of difference to establish trust and confidence that your practice is a smart choice for your existing and potential clients.
Nookal is a provider of Practice Management Software for the allied health industry. They offer practice management solutions to help health clinics streamline their administration systems, effectively manage their business and improve efficiency and productivity.