Physiotherapy Marketing

If you’re here reading this, you might be a physiotherapy business owner, freelance physiotherapist, or about to strike it out on your own.

Regardless of which category you fall in, any physio practice (or practice-to-be) needs one thing to get it going and keep it going.

Paying customers

How big you get, how far you can scale, and how fast you can grow is all determined by how full you can keep your schedule and keep the cash flow going.

If you’re planning to start your own practice, or if you’re a new owner, or even running a larger business with multiple clinics that employ dozens of physios – there are always risks.

• The uncertainty of whether new clients looking for treatment can find you in the crowd
• The need to ensure your upfront capital starts paying for itself as soon as possible
• The pressure to fill up empty slots with returning clients so your employees can keep working and generating income.

Throw in sudden lockdowns and social distancing restrictions into the mix, and the added risk of existing clients staying away can mean a slump in appointments and therefore revenue.

As you probably already know, there are so many uncontrollable factors that can determine the success of your physiotherapy practice.

On top of that, just keeping your practice running is a full-time job in itself. Admin can quickly suck up the best part of a day. Queries and complaints need to be addressed – as time consuming as they are. The rest of your time is spent making sure the day-to-day operations keep happening. In between little tasks like opening up shop and making sure everyone gets paid on time, it’s a wonder you get to see clients at all!

What you don’t need on top of all that is to spend those precious after-hours nights at home trying to drum up business.

If you’ve ever worried about:

• Trying to understand the inner workings of Facebook and getting people to notice your business page
• Why your website has a grand total of 5 visitors in the last month, and
• How to get your paediatric physios enough kids and your adult physios an ideal amount of cases that they specialise in

Well, don’t.

There’s a much easier way to do all that, by simply outsourcing client recruitment. So you can get your time back, focus on the actual clinical part you signed up for back when you took PHTY101, and steal away a little well-deserved “me” time.

If that sounds really good, it’s because it is.

Ready to get straight to the good stuff? Talk to me and let’s get you started on the road to a busy physio business that rakes in revenue and earns you more profit.

[Let’s Talk]

The fact is, your physiotherapy clinic needs clients to survive.

Clients can’t find your practice without healthcare marketing.

Unfortunately, your physiotherapy services can’t market themselves.

Solution? I’ll give you a hint:

• It’s not signing up for an Instagram account and posting smiling staff pictures once every never.
• It has very little to do with asking your clients to tell all their friends and family about you via word of mouth.
• It doesn’t even have anything to do with finally getting your website up and running.

What it IS, is a multi-pronged attack that requires specific and precise digital marketing efforts from all directions.

It is all about:

• Getting your website optimised for search keywords so people near you can actually find you when they google their particular physio problems.
• Using social media strategically so you’re posting when people are looking, and putting up the kind of content a potential patient is expecting to see and wants to engage with.
• Advertising what you do best and making sure your Facebook ad or Google adwords are landing in the hands of people who are actively trying to seek out someone exactly like you.

It sounds easy, the same way someone might say the exercises you’re telling them to do seem a bit simple and unlikely to fix their knee pain.

But, in that same vein, it’s a bit more involved. Because digital marketing is a science that requires lots of coordination, tons of scheduling, and loads of specialised skills in separate areas.

It’s the same way you internally roll your eyes when a client insists “But Google said!” Googling, “How to do physiotherapy marketing” is only a very, very small part of the real solution.

Enough with the reading, just tell me what my business needs already Casey.

Can do! Tell me all about you in a free, no-strings attached, marketing consultation. I can guarantee there will be ways to jump start your physio marketing that you haven’t been doing!

[Let’s Talk]

Don’t want to hear it from me? Let’s talk to Jerry and Priya. Two physios I’ve had the pleasure to work with. Both of whom have vastly different approaches to what they do and what they need to achieve to do it!

Meet Jerry

Jerry runs a chain of physio clinics situated around New South Wales. When business is good, it’s very good. When it’s slow, costs begin to ramp up and the 21 physios Jerry hires start to become more of an expense than an asset.

Jerry came to me with a straightforward, simple request.

“Here’s a spreadsheet of all my clinics, the kinds of physios in them, and 77 slots we need to fill up ASAP.”

The challenge here was that Jerry’s physiotherapists ranged in specialty areas from paediatric, to geriatric, to sports injuries. A strategy which simply funnelled leads to Jerry’s front desks wouldn’t work in this case. This is because if I sent him too many paediatric physio leads, his physiotherapists who work with kids would be run off their feet, while those who treat adults would be left twiddling their thumbs.

This called for some serious research into each individual, local area his clinics were situated at. Then, I targeted the ratio of client types he needed through a winning combo of paid advertising and dynamic landing pages.

Paid advertising, because it gives you the option to zoom into consumer attributes like suburb, age, and frequent activities like sports and gyms.

Dynamic landing pages because welcoming any potential client with their own search query is a sure-fire way to let them know that you’re listening!

A dash of super-engaging, empathetic, problem-solving copywriting to round it all off, and we were off to the races.

This tried and true strategy got lead generation bubbling and started some solid leads flowing in. A good amount of Jerry’s spots filled up within the first week of aggressive campaigning.

“Now, let’s just get your website invitingly updated, and start an organic social media marketing strategy to keep the free leads coming in,” I said to Jerry after a while.

“No can do Kace. I don’t have time to mess around on Instagram and put up shots of myself sipping on Mai Thais. I have 5 clinics to run!”

Instagram, Facebook, Youtube and even TikTok – all these social media platforms are so much more than showing off what you did last weekend!

Luckily, Jerry didn’t have the energy to put up much of a fight. So away we went!

I set up his accounts. Sat down and drafted out a social media digital marketing strategy specifically for the physiotherapy market, then went over to his main clinic one beautiful Saturday morning with my trusty Canon Mark II.

The early morning air was brisk, but the low-hanging sunlight was superb. So much so that within 3 hours and a few hundred shots later, we were good to wrap up with the first 2 months worth of marketing content safely tucked away in a memory card, ready to be edited at my computer.

As soon as Jerry’s posts started gaining traction and attracting comments and questions, it was time for me to step away and slide in one of my social media managers. Now, frequently asked questions could get answers. Jerry didn’t have to worry about content creation. And having 3 new channels to pull in different demographics of patients made Jerry and his business just that much easier to find!

Four years down the line and still going strong, seeing Jerry able to open a sixth – and according to him, final – physical therapy clinic (even amidst all the drama of the pandemic), is incredibly satisfying.

Next stop, he tells me – Telehealth!

Ready to roll when you are Jerry!

Do you run multiple physiotherapy businesses like Jerry? Let’s fill up your appointment book so you’re always running at capacity.

[Talk to me about it now]

Meet Priya

Hi, I’m Priya. Casey has been my marketing consultant for over a year now and it’s really helped me with keeping my small physiotherapy business going!

I’m a physiotherapist that is really keen on doing her own thing. After graduating, I had a very clear vision of what I wanted to do and who I wanted to help.

I’ve always been passionate about working with mums-to-be and new mothers. I also spent many of my school years volunteering with the differently abled.

Working in big physio clinics has never been fun for me. Being in a big machine with case managers that might not see eye to eye with you can get exhausting pretty quickly.

I knew I wanted to get out of a large, “clinical” environment as soon as I saved up enough to start my own physio business.

In 2018, I ventured out on my own. I had been letting friends and family know about my intentions to be my own boss for a while beforehand, so business started off with a bang. It would have been around mid-2019 when I started feeling that new patient acquisition was starting to slow to a trickle.

As a physiotherapist, one of your goals is to get people out of your clinic and back up and running as fast as possible. This means, good physios tend to not keep patients for very long. This was especially true for my mums’ network. Pre- and post-natal physiotherapy usually only lasts until the baby is born or becomes a toddler.

All of a sudden, I had a thriving disabilities portfolio but not much left in the form of the mommies that were such a joy to work with.

This put me in a bit of a quandary. I love working with different abilities – be it people with acquired brain injury, individuals on the spectrum, or with conditions such as dyspraxia, muscular dystrophy, and cerebral palsy; but I didn’t want to do this exclusively. It sounds a bit silly doesn’t it, since disabilities is a sector which tends to be very long term and there is a good amount of work to pick up in this area.

I don’t want to sound picky, but the whole reason I left the big physio circles was so I could work on cases I find interesting, fulfilling, and that bring me joy on an everyday basis. Having a balanced mix of patients is part of it. It’s like having ice-cream and crumble, instead of just one or the other.

I found Casey on Google and had an impression he really loved small businesses! I knew I wouldn’t be comfortable working with a giant social media company or digital marketing agency, so I took up his offer for a quick and painless free consultation. I signed up that same afternoon and my practice has been thriving since!

What Casey does is find people looking for your exact physiotherapy treatment, then sends them your way. When business was down, I would use that time to self-promote, put up social media posts, and I even gave Facebook ads a go. The ads especially, were such a money muncher. After experimenting with the complimentary $150 ad credit from Facebook, I received zero leads and therefore, didn’t feel confident going down that road alone.

Casey uses these very same tools, but the difference is he has years of data, experience, and know-how backing his methods. He knows what works, what won’t, how your physical therapy practice needs to be portrayed in those ridiculously complicated Facebook ads, who the potential patient is, and how to get new clients in your email inbox, calling up your office, and sliding into your DMs!

Today, he switches on ads whenever I need new clients in a hurry and they come in for around $16 a lead. That is not bad at all when each client has a lifetime value of anywhere from $2000 to $5000! Apart from that, we’re working on a long-term organic strategy which I absolutely love because it’s so collaborative.

While Casey does it all, from social media, to photography, to video marketing, and blog writing – he adapts to what I need. None of that cookie-cutter stuff that you’ll get with big marketing agencies.

This means I get to do my own photography, write my own blogs, and do my own Instagram posts – three things that I enjoy doing and want more control over. Casey eyeballs it all to make sure the content marketing is effective. He suggests a ton of SEO keywords to make sure my blogs get found, and gives me the feedback and direction I need to get my tags and overall social media strategy just right.

I can say with absolute certainty that Casey has been a god-send! I was incredibly grateful to have him throughout the early, scary stages of the pandemic that devastated tons of small businesses around the country. We couldn’t open our doors for therapy, but he had a strategy for that. Instead, we spent that time working on months and months worth of marketing content which now sits in a repository that we can draw from at any time. Now, I don’t have to worry about new emails for email campaigns, running out of blog posts, or stressing about what to post on social media.

I could go on and on but you’ll only reap the benefits if you take a leap of faith of your own. Have a quick chat to Casey today, you won’t regret it!

Are you a physiotherapist that’s freelancing, a solopreneur, or a small physiotherapy practice? Get all your ducks in a row so your business takes care of itself. So, you can focus on what’s important – actual physiotherapy with your clients!