It’s no secret that it’s much easier to keep a customer than it is to obtain a new one. If that’s the case, what are the best ways to market specifically to previous customers? It doesn’t always involve direct marketing; much of it has to do with simple follow-up.

MESSAGES PATIENTS – GENERATE REPEAT BUSINESS BY STAYING IN TOUCH

People like it when you remember things about them. Mailing goodwill messages to your patients for events and milestones, like birthdays or anniversaries, can go a long way in keeping you top of mind. If they like you, they’re more likely to choose you again if they have a need for your PT services.

PHYSICAL THERAPY EMAIL NEWSLETTERS – THEY’RE AFFORDABLE, AUTOMATED, AND EASY

Creating an email list of your past patients is as simple as asking them to provide their email when they visit your office. Gather those emails, input them into your E-Rehab Control Panel, and we will send your patients a welcome, a thank-you, and monthly messages. Information about how to improve or maintain health, special offers, and reminders about follow-up services are all fair game.

NEW TREATMENTS – LET YOUR PATIENTS KNOW ABOUT NEW SERVICES

Some patients will no longer need your services because they’ve reached their goals, and that’s fantastic. But some patients may not be so lucky, and they will be looking for new ways to heal. So, when you have new treatments to offer, you should go back to this pool of patients and let them know. Even those who feel 80–90% normal might be interested in your new services.

TEXT MESSAGING – THE BEST WAY TO COMMUNICATE

Texting is becoming the easiest way to communicate with clients, both past and present. It’s fast, direct, and easy. Just as you would with email, keep a database of cellphone numbers and send text messages as necessary. Your previous patients will appreciate how quickly they’re getting useful information.

PRINT NEWSLETTERS – FOR THOSE WITH LARGER BUDGETS

If you’ve spent time reading this newsletter, you know it can be effective for staying top of mind. Newsletters put your business in your patients’ thoughts, provide information, advertise, and show personality. For some, a print newsletter is more effective than an email newsletter because there’s simply more impact when you hold something in your hand.

Need help getting your PT Online Marketing Right?

We can help. Click here to schedule some time with David Straight, DPT & co-owner or call 760-585-9097

Physical therapy online marketing is affordable and doing it right is a must. Contact us today!

Spring is here, and that means you may be gearing up to do some hefty cleaning at home or in the office. But spring cleaning can be accomplished in other ways as well. This is a great opportunity to revamp your marketing strategies by cleaning out some of the “marketing cobwebs” you’ve been ignoring for too long.

The best way to start is by approaching your business from the position of a prospective patient.

It’s practically impossible to know the exact number of times your business is showing up online, but we can safely estimate it’s more than 300. There are so many online reference points for your physical therapy practice that if you aren’t optimized across a variety of different channels, you risk getting lost in the weeds. So how can you possibly know where to start? In order to get a handle on what potential patients are seeing and how best to cater to them, you should start with the most important web properties.

Begin with what I like to call the Big Five: Google, Yelp, Facebook, Apple Maps, and Bing. These are the essential online places that prospective clients use to help make decisions about who they want to see for PT care. If your business isn’t optimized on these sites, then it makes it that much harder for people to find you. They may go to the wrong location, or they may miss various services you offer.

Use these sites as though you’re a patient looking to find a new physical therapist. Each site has its own unique features that are slightly different than the others, but in general, they offer many of the same functions you should thoroughly explore.

First, do a simple search in their main database or search engine for your brand name (e.g., Acme Physical Therapy).

Type it into the search bar and take notes about what appears on the page. Where are you listed? What catches your eye? Are the images up to date? Is the information accurate? How difficult or easy is it to navigate to sites that are connected to your business?

Next, do a geographic search for physical therapy in your city. All of the Big Five sites I’ve mentioned have features that allow users to search for businesses based on location. When you navigate to these pages on each site and search for your business in your city, what do you see? Is the listing accurate? Is it displayed in a way that’s easy to understand?

How many reviews do you have compared to your competition? Are the small details (metadata and images) useful and representative of your practice?

Also do a general search for your physical therapy business and look at your maps listings. What comes up then?

The third step applies specifically to Google, Bing, and Apple Maps. These three sites have functionality that provides driving directions by way of Google My Business, Bing Places for Business, and the Apple Maps app on iPhones. When you navigate to each of these sites and search for your business, how does it appear? Ask yourself the same questions you did for a normal search engine site, and remember that for businesses, these subsequent sites are just as important as Google and Bing natural/organic listings.

Understanding exactly what your potential patients are seeing when they look for you is critical to keeping business coming through your doors. Potential patients want a fast and friction free experience when they are searching for a PT practice. Optimizing your online presence is the key to doing that. But you don’t know what your potential patients will experience until you try it yourself.

Need help getting your PT Online Marketing Right?

We can help. Click here to schedule some time with David Straight, DPT & co-owner or call 760-585-9097

Physical therapy online marketing is affordable and doing it right is a must. Contact us today!

The 5 Best Offline Tools that You Should be Using

So far in this blog series (click here for Part 2 and click here for Part 1), we’ve covered a variety of inbound and outbound marketing methods that revolve primarily around a web-based strategy. Our last blog evaluated the merits of an outbound approach and offered a few tips to get you started on some of the most commonly used advertising platforms. But it’s important to realize that this is only part of the full potential of outbound.

In our digital age, it may be easy to forget that there was a time when the only way to reach people was through print, television, and radio. Offline advertising—which is essentially any form of marketing done without the internet—doesn’t seem to get nearly as much attention as online marketing these days, but you certainly shouldn’t neglect it. In fact, an offline campaign can prove to be a major boon to your private physical therapy practice by getting your name in front of a larger number of prospective patients in your area.

One of the biggest problems private practices face is convincing individuals in pain that physical therapy will address their problems, and that you specifically can make their lives easier if they complete a comprehensive treatment program. We’ve already discussed how someone with neck pain might do an internet search to find answers and possibly come across your name, but what about those who don’t even make it to that step? Or better yet, what about the demographic that hardly uses the internet?

As you can see, every effective marketing strategy must consider these populations, too, and offline marketing is the best way to reach them. Offline tactics give you the control to introduce your practice and what you offer to anyone in your region that opens their mail, reads local publications, or attends community events who may not have otherwise known you exist. Over time, these methods can help to reinforce your values, build confidence and trust, and—when done successfully—convert more new patients. Here are the 5 best offline marketing tools that we recommend and some tips to guide you:

• Local ads
  • Get your name out to the local public by running an ad or series of ads in your community newspaper or magazine
  • Be sure to use this valuable advertising real estate wisely by carefully deciding on the message you want to send and choosing words that best represent your values
  • TV ads are another option, but these are often expensive and may only be worthwhile in smaller communities
• Local media article
  • Another way to utilize local media is to write an article for a newspaper or magazine in your area
  • These articles will provide you with more room to explain what a physical therapist is and how you can effectively manage a wide variety of painful conditions; this will in turn help to create a favorable reputation and keep you fresh in the minds of local residents
  • If the response is high, you may be able to become a regular contributor
• Direct mail
  • You can purchase a mailing list through a distributor and send out flyers or brochures about your practice to every address on the list
  • Direct mail is generally a cost-effective option, as you can reach a large number of individuals at a low cost
  • Most people at least briefly scan through their mail, so if you present them with a well-designed ad and engaging content, they may keep you in mind or consider looking into your practice
• Every Door Direct Mail (EDDM)
  • Another option for getting into local residents’ mailboxes
  • Unlike direct mail, no mailing list is necessary, as you can simply send it to all addresses in a particular zip code or region; EDDM is also even less expensive than direct mail and does not require a permit to disperse
  • There’s a great deal of flexibility in terms of size, format, and design to allow you to represent your private physical therapy practice in the best possible light
• Attend or Sponsor Community Events
  • Attending or sponsoring fundraisers, sporting events, or charity events is another great way to get your name out there and show that you care about the local community
  • It will also give you and your employees an opportunity to meet individuals and establish a relationship that may be considered if they decide to undergo treatment

In our final blog of this series, we present you with a wider view of your audience and make the case for a content marketing focus.

If you have questions about your physical therapy marketing strategy and need some help, contact us at (800) 468-5161

Facebook has become a powerful advertising platform for small businesses including physical therapy practices. The combination of being able to reach people by their interests, social connections, pages that they’ve visited, as well as by their location makes this ad platform a very effective option for PT clinics. Practices can reach potential new patients, grow their following, and increase revenue.

Facebook has four primary location targets available that allow you to create locally-focused ad campaigns.

Facebook’s Help articles define them as the following:

1. Reach everyone in this location

‘Reach everyone in this location’ is  the default option. This option allows you to reach people whose home or most recent location is within the selected area.

You set the parameters for the location.  Let us say, everyone in Encinitas, CA. It will automatically advertise to everyone in Encinitas.

2. People who live in this location

The second option is people who live in this location. This includes people whose home is within the selected area.

You might want to advertise a retail business. For example, to people who live in a specific location, perhaps, a real estate agent would want to advertise only to people that live in a certain location.

3. People recently in this location

People recently in this location, is the third option.

With this option, you’re reaching people whose most recent location is within the selected area to which you are advertising. You may want to advertise to people that visited health clubs or sports complexes.  For example, to people who are recently in the location that you choose, say, ‘People who are in CrossFit’.

4. People traveling in this location

Finally, people traveling in this location, is the fourth option.

This includes people traveling in the selected area who are more than 125 miles from their home location. This is determined by the device and connection information that Facebook collects.

This would be a powerful option for people that have “snowbird” populations or large college campuses.

Facebook is Very Powerful

That’s four different options that Facebook gives you for creating very powerful, targeted local advertising campaigns. Depending on your target audience, you should consider those four different options. Think about how you may use them creatively to reach the ideal prospects  with the ideal offers, while they’re in the ideal location.

We’ve all heard that we should be creating more content for our practice.  Physical therapy content marketing is a type of marketing strategy that you might want to consider.

Years ago, popular marketer Gary Vaynerchuk stated that all businesses are media businesses.  You’ve probably heard you need to create blog posts, videos, podcasts, and social media content which have all become a requirement of marketing and growth in just about every industry.

But creating content is definitely time consuming, and can be the last thing on your list of things to get done on an already busy day. So here’s a six step process for creating more content even when you’re really busy treating patients and running your business.

1. Create a Calendar of Content Topics

The first step is to create an outline. Simply outline the core ideas for your content on a notepad and transfer those topics to a Google Calendar or similar.   Here’s a good resource with free Excel sheets that you can use for planning.  You can use the Simple Marketing Worksheet to get started.

IMPORTANT: when creating a content outline, topics can consist of things like patients you want to see, the problems they have, how physical therapy can help them, and information on particular techniques-especially those that are known already to your community.  Examples include:

• McKenzie Method,
• Graston Technique,
• ASTYM,
• dry needling,
• myofascial release,
• manipulation, etc.

2. Create an Outline for each Individual Topic

You don’t want or need a ton of detail, just enough to give structure to your thinking as you do your content creation.  Think about this popular presentation format:

1. Tell them what you are going to tell them.
2. Tell them about the topic.
3. Tell them what you told them.
4. Add a Call to Action

Write out the outline as a cue card and then your off to the next step.

3. Record a Video

Step number three is to then record a video. I know you may not be comfortable on video – many people aren’t – but it’s something that you’ll get used to over time, and the value of video in marketing today is tremendous. So record a video of you speaking to the outline that you just put down on the notepad. For those that aren’t “off-the-cuff” presenters, a good teleprompter can help.  Here’s a link to a resource for you.  Don’t overthink it. You can use a camera or iPhone/Android and a shotgun mic (we like the Saramonic or Rode brands).  Make sure you get the iPhone connectors as well.  If you want to use your iPhone, here’s a cool mobile filmmaking case that we like.  Click here.  Then the KineMaster video recording app works well too.

Now that you have the gear, record it and you’ve got your first piece of content!

4. Want to Go Bigtime with Your Content – Create a Podcast

The fourth step is to then have the audio exported and edited as a podcast. Podcasts are one of the fastest growing forms of content in terms of consumer consumption because they can be listened to while doing other things, like driving, working out, walking on the treadmill, or running on the beach.

For these reasons, podcasts are experiencing incredible growth, and many people consider them to be the most important form of marketing now. So you definitely want to make sure that you’re getting your podcast created. A simple way to do that is to record your video first, and then export the audio content.  There are a number of resources to export the audio portion of a video.  I personally like Camtasia.  It’s a bit spendy but a quick search should enable you to find some additional resources.

Then you will need a service to upload your audio file.  This is called a podcasting platform.  Here’s a link to reviews of podcasting platforms and some are free.

5. Transcribe the Audio into a Blog Post

Next you’re going to take that audio content and have it transcribed into a post. I like to use an app called Rev for this. You simply upload your audio file or- even a video file – and the app will extract the audio and transcribe it for approximately $1 per minute of audio. I found that a typical blog post is five to 10 minutes long, so I can get the transcription done for $5 to $10.

The service is fantastic and creates a transcript that is very easy for me to put some final editing polish on, and use it as a blog post or use it as content for my social media posts and my YouTube video.

6. Have a Designer Create Images

Next is to have a graphic designer create images for every place that you want to post your content. Images are very important to go along with your content, regardless of whether it’s going up on YouTube, a podcast, Facebook, Instagram, or any other platform.

Images help sell the content and get the attention of your audience in the first place. Hire graphic designers from affordable services like Fiverr, UpWork, or Design Pickle and you can quickly get custom-designed image – often within 24 hours.

Your Turn!  Create your content and push it out to a blog, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and more.  You too can be a media company and get your name out to your community.

Want Some Help?

If this all seems a bit too much or you know you simply won’t be able to find the time, let us know.  E-rehab specializes in physical therapy content marketing and we can help you get your name out to your market.

Just give us a call at (760) 585-9097

When the path of a new patient appointment can begin at any time, in any location and on any device, it’s becoming apparent that physical therapy practices need to create a seamless experience across the entire process.

With so many devices available to complete a task, patients can switch between them to set their appointments. If they encounter problems across any of them, it could mean the difference between making the appointment and the potential patient moving on to someone or something different.

As a result, more and more practices should be nurturing leads through an omnichannel marketing strategy, which optimizes the experience across all patient touchpoints.

What is Multichannel Marketing?

Multichannel marketing is the concept of providing a seamless experience across all available channels relevant to the patient’s journey. This applies to the shifts and transitions in the way new patients progress through the appointment setting, treatment, discharge, and follow-up hourglass (for more on the marketing hourglass, click here).

Patients are more connected and have more control over who they choose for their rehabilitation needs than ever before, often using three or four devices to access the internet or make their first appointment. As a result, what used to be completed on one site, in one location, at one time is now completed over days, locations, times and channels. 

The Importance of a Unified Profile

The multichannel roadmap is achieved by building a unified patient profile that segments the content and offers provided to them. This can only be achieved through strong multichannel marketing.

One of the challenges of multichannel marketing is the isolation of channels, which all provide data in different times with the marketing automation platform. This may include different vendors for the development of a website, email marketing, search, automation, print newsletters, and social media. As a result, patients may not recognize these disparate channels as part of the same marketing effort, which can be confusing.

A rich and deep personalization is only achieved if the data from all the individual interactions is unified to deliver:

• Messaging content that resonates with the patient.
• A frequency of messaging that the patient will respond to.
• The services the patients need.
• The types of recommendations that patients will respond to.

A responsive marketing platform captures all this patient data, such as email addresses, phone numbers, promotion responses, appointment inquiries, therapy services viewed and other touchpoints.

Once this unified patient profile is achieved, campaigns can be automated to trigger marketing activities from all channels and lead the patient through the treatment journey.

Getting Started With Multichannel Marketing

Though many practices experience it with other brands or may even be aware of the value of multichannel marketing, many struggle with some of the obstacles to creating this strategy. These include:

• Lack of resources necessary to succeed.
• Lack of communication between marketing agencies.
• Lack of practice owner support and understanding of the value of multichannel marketing.
• Organizational silos (clinical teams, front office/reception, back office/billing as examples).

Creating an omnichannel marketing strategy isn’t as difficult as it seems, however. Here’s how to get started:

Emphasize Content

With potential patients connecting over various devices in many different situations, a practice marketers need to offer information and value to keep their attention. Without valuable content, your physical therapy omnichannel marketing strategy is nothing.

For this, you need to understand what kind of content your patients consume and when. Is your content giving them what they need? Is it optimized for the device they’re using? Are you offering suggestions based on their specific needs? Are you optimizing their health and wellbeing?

On top of that, are you reactivating and cross-selling to your patients? Are you sending follow up message to those that discontinued care? Are those messages optimized for different devices?

These are just a few of the questions that need to be answered about your ideal patient, which is why you need to know all you can about your patients.

Get In-Depth Understanding of the Patient

If you want to provide a truly multichannel experience, you must have intimate knowledge of your patient. You need to understand who they are and what’s important to them (fast access to care, insurance coverage, clinical excellence), what challenges or problems they face (what they really want to return to), and how you can solve them (e.g. which one of your clinicians is best equipped to help).

To get this information, welcome patient feedback, employ social listening tools and leverage condition and treatment specific pages to find out more about their needs. Even more than that, find out which channels they use most to access your content.  Your website analytics play an important role here.

Here are the channels most important for multichannel success, in order of value:.

• Brand websites.
• Mobile responsive site.
• Search engine listings
• Ratings & review sites – (Google, Facebook, Yelp, HealthGrades, etc.)
• Email marketing.
• Digital video.
• Print newsletters
• Social media marketing
• Live events.
• Local retail partners.
• Direct mail.
• Radio advertising
• Sponsorships with local schools or sporting programs.
• Coupons for free screenings.

Develop Agile Departments

One of the biggest challenges to multichannel marketing implementation is the organizational silo effect.  Marketing, therapy, and customer service support often “do their own thing”, which is an obstacle to creating a seamless experience.

Fortunately, a little training on what to do, how to do it, and restructuring of traditional roles can create shared responsibility across departments, letting each team know where they fit into the bigger picture and how they relate to the work of the other departments. This not only sets clear expectations for each team, but also streamlines the communication between them.

When communication is clear and transparent, the departments operate fluidly and create agile marketing strategies that focus on the patient experience.

Start by Optimizing Your Physical Therapy Website

When patients access your site across different channels and devices, your site needs to provide them with a user-friendly experience that’s highly “responsive” to succeed. All of your web pages should be designed to provide maximum usability to visitors and to allow them to access your phone number, location map, hours of operation, ratings & reviews options, social channels, online intake forms, and important content.

Final Thoughts

In today’s channel-rich environment, multichannel marketing drives the engagement of potential patients and compels them take action. Synchronizing every touchpoint of the patient’s journey for a seamless multichannel experience elevates your practice above the competition.

Need help implementing a multichannel marketing program?  Give us a call at 760-585-9097.

We’ve helped physical therapy practices generate more patients for over 15 years.  If you prefer, click here to schedule a free consultation.