Therapy Marketing: READ THIS FIRST

Search online for therapy marketing or strategies for therapist marketing and you will see a long list of top tips on how to market your private practice. You will also find a lot of agencies clamoring for your pocketbook to outsource your marketing to them.

Article after article, forums and meetups with other clinicians will leave you with a plethora of options on how to market your private practice. Therapist websites, SEO, google and facebook ads, tik tok and social media posting, blogging, speaking, handing out flyers, meeting with doctors, and the list goes on and on. Take a moment and check in with your body as you read even that short list of options, how does it feel? You might feel a little pressure in your chest or your stomach sinking down lower. It’s overwhelming, right?

Why are we overwhelmed with therapy marketing?

Everyone wants your attention. “Buy this!” “Try this!” And gosh, life is hard enough along with the kind of work you do, you just want things to feel easy. You didn’t go to school so you could be on social media all day making reels and tik toks.

You don’t want to waste any effort. Our overwhelm comes from us wanting to choose the right thing to do for our private practice marketing plan and have all of our strategies work for filling our private practices. This belief is a lie that sets our course to creating a marketing plan off track. If you belief there is a perfect way, you are already lost. When it comes to marketing, it’s not about perfection, it is about action and refinement through learning over time.

In our fear of making the wrong choice for how to market our practice, we give away our power, ask someone to take over or lay it down at our feet because we don’t trust ourselves to make the right choice in marketing plan creation.

Many of us start our marketing from a disempowered place.

So, how do we take back our power and develop trust with ourselves?

Building Self Trust for Successful Marketing

Imagine how different decisions get made when they come from within, an inner knowing of your truth.

You may want to know what is working for everyone these days when it comes to marketing strategies, but you first want to develop a relationship with your inner knowing so that you can create a plan that works for you. Many marketing strategies are aligned to corporate greed, rooted in fear, or ask dependency from the therapist. We don’t want that for you. We want you to be able to use your own inner knowing as a guide for what marketing will work for you.

For example, take a moment and feel into your body. Now state some fact that you know is true. I usually say the name my parents gave me. Does that feel true to you? Where do you feel truth in your body? Next say something you know isn’t true. For me, I’ll say “I love white chocolate”. (Sorry, I think it’s gross) Then feel what untruth feels like in your body.

How often are you operating your business decisions, marketing, admin, all the things from a place of your inner knowing? If you don’t tap into this inner knowing, what can happen is you create a marketing plan that burns you out because it isn’t honoring of who you are. You will find yourself with more stress and resentment as well. No thanks!

Strengths as a Marketing Foundation

So, let’s boost that inner knowing by acknowledging the good in you! You have some innate strengths and gifts that can used as the foundation to your marketing plan. You may like to write or speak. You may be a person who uses humor or loves to nerd out on the data to explain a concept. One of our coaches, Becca, has an amazing way of giving real life examples to make complex ideas come to life and feel so easy to understand.

Ask yourself, what are your strengths? Write them down! What gives you energy? What drains you?

You might not want to be seen at all in a picture or video, but you don’t mind an audio recording of your voice. Social media may give you skin crawlies or it may excite you. As you start to consider all the ideas of how to market your practice, you can flip back to your inner knowing of “yes” and “no” and pair that with your strengths to make decisions on where to get started with your marketing plan, whether you are starting from scratch or need to pivot.

Your Therapy Marketing Strengths Checklist

So let’s put this into action. Below is a list of some of the strengths that you could also use in your marketing. Go through the list and feel into your body, that inner knowing and see what lands for you:

• Speaker

• Connector

• Empathy

• Humor

• Writer

• Organizing and Simplifying

• Ease of Use with Tech

• Consistency

• Honesty

• Visually Creative

• Idea Generator

• Community Builder

• Leader

• Private

• Justice Seeker

• Innovator

• Wisdom Keeper

This list could go on and on. But now we want to show you how these strengths can turn into marketing strategies for your private practice.

• Speaker: You may give lunch and learns or speak at conferences where others who work with your ideal client attend

• Connector: You could use your marketing to connect you with others in your community, for example a consultation group of other professionals who serve the same type of client

• Humor: Using memes or satire to educate and show how therapy works

• Writer: Write blogs that could lead into a book to help with your website being found and that can offer free support to those in need

• Organizing and Simplifying: Outsource a part of your marketing and keep things on track and organized, to make sure your outsourcing is working

• Ease of Use with Tech: Record audio for your blogs so you increase accessiblity to the information.

• Consistency: You might develop a marketing schedule that does a little every week over a long period of time vs explosive batching

• Visually Creative: Create and pin graphics related to your niche of therapy

• Community Builder: Network in your community, bringing people together to serve better. You could also volunteer or find ways your practice can serve the need of the community

• Visible: If you like to be more visible, making videos or social media posts with video could light you up

• Private: You don’t have to be an extrovert. Rely on the current relationships you have to get you connected with referral sources

• Justice Seeker: In your social justice work you can be a voice for mental health care, using your marketing as also advocacy

• Innovator: You can create you own ideas and try them on, who cares what other people are doing

• Wisdom Keeper: Share your wisdom, not just data and research, through your marketing

You can see how knowing your strengths and what feels good to you can influence what you choose to do in your marketing strategies.

Making You Therapy Marketing Work

But you may still be wondering, will it work? Not everything you try is going to work like you expect, but it will lead you to the right path for you. In our upcoming training on Smart Marketing for Therapists: Strategies That Fit You, Your Clients and Your Private Practice we will cover a lot of options for marketing. But what does make therapy marketing work is showing up authentically, from your strengths and meeting clients where they are in the world CONSISTENTLY.

It’s easier to be consistent with your visibility when you have a deep knowing of who you are and what you offer. This is what so many marketing tips miss. They miss you, the person, and what you are bringing to the table already. They would rather you just take their word for it that xyz tactic works. Maybe that tactic does work, but we want it to work for you, not drain you, shame you, or overwhelm you.

Imagine a practice that you market with authenticity and integrity. It’s time to ditch doing all the things and focus on what is your highest and best for YOU.