The Five Golden Rules for marketing success

The top 1% of therapy practices achieve results that are vastly superior to the norm.

When you look in-depth at what these practices are doing, it soon becomes clear that their therapy marketing success was no accident. They are using a series of advanced, yet remarkably simple marketing strategies that give them levels of success that their competitors can only dream of.

For years now, Therapy Marketing has been taking the ‘best of the best’ of these strategies and translating them into simple steps that any individual or practice can implement. We have implemented these rules with many practices around the country and the results have been dramatic and we can show you precisely how to implement the most effective marketing tools and skills available to grow your practice.

Over the last few years the advice that we offer our clients has been changing very rapidly, every few months it seems. But what is clear is that your online presence i.e. your website is becoming critical to achieve the steady flow of clients for your practise. Gone are the days of the yellow pages, leaflets and mailshots they are too expensive and just do not work any more.

Nowadays there are just some very simple rules you need to follow to achieve therapy marketing success. But first it is vitally important that you understand our 5 golden rules for therapy marketing success. So why don’t we start with the first of the Golden rules.

Rule 1. Purpose of Your Practice

On the home page we asked you to write down the purpose of your business. We have countless strategies that you can use immediately to grow your therapy practice and increase your income. But before you implement these strategies, you need to be clear what the purpose of your practice is.

When we ask therapists this we get a range of answers, including:-

To enable me to work when I want.
To have financial freedom.
To work from home to spend more time with my family.
To earn good money whilst helping others.
To do something worthwhile with my life

All of the above are perfectly acceptable and even admirable but unfortunately, they are doomed to failure. Because amazingly we discovered that all successful therapy practices tend to share similar values when it comes to their purpose for doing business.

Therapy practices whose highest purpose is to ‘add value to the lives of their clients’ are the practices that excel.

This passion to add value to your clients lives needs to come across in every ‘touch point’ i.e. every point of contact that the potential client may have with you and your practice. This means you have to have this consistent message on your website, leaflets, adverts and even on the phone. So, in essence, stop talking about you, your qualifications, how well trained you are, the initials after your name or the professional associations you belong to. The potential client is not interested at this stage they want to hear how you are going to solve their problem. Once you have convinced them of that then all the rest become relevant.

Why is This?

Because if your ultimate drive is to add value to peoples lives, you will look at Marketing and Sales in a totally new way. You will be driven, not just by a (totally acceptable) desire for money and profits – but also by a compelling desire to impact the lives of the clients you come into contact with. It is this mindset that creates stunningly successful therapists and therapy practices.

So you need to make sure that in every bit of marketing that you do the purpose comes across. Your prospective clients need to see that you have their welfare as the focus of everything you do. If you achieve just this one thing you will find clients beating a path to your door.

Rule 2. The Three Ways to Grow Your Practice

New therapists and even experienced therapists often have very little knowledge about how to grow their practice. Well why should they they have been trained to be therapists not marketers. But really it is simplicity itself there are three ways, and only three ways to grow your practice:

You can:

Increase the number of clients
Increase the transaction value of each client
Increase the referrals from each client

What would happen if you were able to increase each of the above by just 10%?

The turnover of your business will increase by 33%.

But that’s just the beginning…

Most of us limit the potential of our businesses because of unconscious beliefs about what we think is possible.

Those beliefs are based on the performance of others and the conditioning of our culture. We live in a society that tends to focus on problems and negativity as opposed to possibility.

Stop for a moment and Dare to Dream. Imagine that over the next year you implement a programme of continuous improvement on your marketing, using all the tools and information that you get from us. As a result, you are able to achieve the following:

Increase the number of new clients each week by 50%
Increase the income from each session by 10%
Increase the number of sessions by 25%

So how would this work in practise?

Let’s take an average therapist:

Seeing 2 new clients a week
Charging £70 per session
Seeing them on average for 4 sessions

This therapists annual income, based on working 48 weeks per year, would be £26,880 before costs and tax. but lets see what happens when we apply the formula above.

Seeing 3 new clients a week
Charging £80 per session
Seeing them on average for 5 sessions

This may seem like a tall order but believe me we helped many many therapists achieve this and a lot more. We’re not saying that it’s easy to achieve but with the right knowledge and a bit of effort (which costs nothing) and lets face it if you don’t have enough clients, time is something you have in spades.

This therapists annual income based, based on working 48 weeks per year, would now be £57,600 before costs and tax. This small change can more than double your gross income which could make a significant difference.

How good would your practice be and how many more lives will you change for the better?

How can this be done?

Well to increase the number of new clients is fairly straightforward and we will show you how to do this. But basically when you improve your visibility online and improve the message you give out, 50% is probably the least it will increase by. Remember just one extra new client a week makes a profound difference to your bottom line.

Increasing the income can be done by, obviously, raising your prices but that may not be appropriate or you could up sell your clients a product be that vitamins, a MP3 or some other product.

You could increase the number of sessions by having an after-care package for example.

Rule 3. Use Multiple Pillars to Support your therapy practice

If you want to really maximise your potential for therapy marketing success and rise above the mass of average therapy practice, it is essential that you test and implement multiple pillars of marketing. However most therapy practices that we have come across generally rely on very few revenue streams. Even if the revenue stream is working well, things change. What was traditionally a good source of clients can very quickly leave the unprepared very vulnerable.

When you rely too heavily one one particular source of clients you tend to get yo-yo type business i.e. good level of clients at some periods and dead quiet at others due to seasonal variations.

You should think of your practice in terms of the Parthenon

Mostly therapists and therapy practices use just one or two forms of marketing to support their business. This is known as the ‘diving board’ system of marketing and looks like this. Each pillar represents one method of marketing; i.e. Yellow Pages or local paper advertising.

Instead, you want the marketing strategy for your therapy practice to look like this, where it is strongly supported by multiple marketing approaches. This gives your therapy practice a more steady flow of clients.

The whole purpose of Therapy Marketing is to give you the knowledge and skills to turn your therapy practice into a multiple marketing profit generating machine.

A truly successful and thriving practice will use multiple marketing successful methods. No matter how good a source of clients one method is, you can not rely on it because should it fail then all of a sudden your source of new clients will dry up and you will be left desperately searching for a new source. When you spread your marketing around it reduces the risk of dry periods with only a few new clients coming along. We recommend at least 15 different pillars of marketing – hence the Parthenon analogy.

Some of the most useful ways to achieve therapy marketing success

It does need time…

There is no getting away from it to be an effective therapist part of the business is spending time to achieve your therapy marketing success. At the beginning you should be spending all your “empty” therapy slots doing your marketing. As time goes by and you get a steady stream of clients two hours a week should be enough.

This is probably the largest source of clients these days. A properly designed website that is optimised for the search engines can bring in a steady source of clients and the best thing is that apart from the initial cost it will produce year on year with just a little input from you. Key things for an effective website. Good quality content that engages the potential client with images and preferable video that builds trust. Regular fresh content on a variety of topics. Clean fresh look and easy to navigate. Content that is about the clients problems.

Email is useful to keep in contact with existing clients and to attract clients to your business. Part of the website’s role should be to capture email addresses from visitors. To be able to send them irresistible offers and make potential clients into paying clients. Guess what it’s free as well.

By the creative use of special offers you can create a great source of regular clients. You may have to give some discounts on your session price, however, as the the techniques is free to do you are saving on your marketing costs. It is a case of swings and roundabouts. With one client we worked with this method brought in 1800 clients over 3 years from local businesses.

By regularly writing articles and publishing them on your website you are creating good quality, unique and fresh content.

But more than that you are spreading your net wider and wider. Because the articles will cover lots of different aspects and viewpoints the search engines will be indexing them different to your website pages. The articles will not only increase your positioning on the search engines but they will also drive traffic to your website in their own right.

Rule 4. Testing, Testing and More Testing

You must continually TEST every aspect of your marketing

Running a therapy practice should not be a struggle. Many business owners struggle because they either lack marketing skills or they throw their money haphazardly at marketing, often with no idea of whether their efforts are working.

One of the fundamental rules of marketing, and this rule applies to therapy marketing as well, is to TEST and MEASURE everything.

As the world changes so does the methods of achieving therapy marketing success. In the last two decades the explosion of the internet has created new marketing methods and made other redundant.

Things like telephone directories, postal mailshots and even newspaper advertising is becoming obsolete. These are being replaced with search engines, email shots and pay per click advertising. But regardless of what marketing method being used the need to test is just as important.

These are just some of the areas that you can test:

Advertising
Internet Visitors and Sales
Prices
Offers
Mailings
Headlines
Leaflets
PR Campaigns
Online Marketing
Social Networks
Website Performance & Design

How do I test and measure?

There are many ways to test and measure where your leads are coming from. Here are a few clues as to how you can test and measure. Below are a couple of the most important ones.

Advertising that points to your website

This can be measured through Google analytics. Google analytics is absolutely imperative and it is completely free. With Google analytics installed on your therapy website you can see where any referrals come from. This includes search engines, professional associations, link partners, website advertising, online directories and many more. You can set-up any direct mail or paper advertising to go to a special page that will show up in Google analytics. It is an absolute must.

Incoming phone calls

I would recommend installing VoIP numbers. Having several VoIP numbers allows you to use different numbers for different campaigns.

For instance, if you were trying a leaflet drop, you would use a special VoIP number on the leaflet, then after a couple of months, you could identify easily how many calls you had received from the drop. VoIP numbers are cost-effective, with a typical set-up cost per line, and then you usually pay a low per-minute rate per call. This type of marketing information is critical for your therapy practice.

Testing let’s you identify what is a marketing success and what isn’t a marketing success.

Rule 5. Drop the concept of Marketing ‘budgets’

You cannot achieve therapy marketing success until you have calculated and utilised the long-term value of your clients. Once you have an idea of how much each client is worth to you it puts you in a unique position to control your marketing much more effectively.

Do you know how much a new client is worth to you over the next year, the next three years, and the next ten years?
To do this you need to think about the various factors that effect it.

How many times on average do you see a client?
How much is each session?
How many clients will they refer to you?

So having decided on these three things you are in a position to calculate what each new client you attract will be worth on average.

Once you know how much on average each client is worth, you are in a very powerful position.

A marketing budget is self-limiting. Once you break free from that mind set and structure your business so that instead you are allocating funds to ‘buy’ your new clients, your growth can be exponential.

So how do I achieve therapy marketing success by buying clients?

Lets say;

You see a client on average 4 times
Each session is £80
You have a 25% referral rate (i.e. 1 in 4 clients refers someone to you)

So the calculation is 80 * 4 * 1.25 = £400.

So in this case each client is worth £400 to you gross profit. So now you know this, how much would you be prepared to pay for each client? £50, £100, the choice is yours. We don’t know the answer, that is for you to decide.

But when you’re testing your marketing effort and discover, say, that your online directory advertising cost you £600 per year and you got, say, 7 clients from it, you are in a great position to decide if it is a marketing success for you. In this case your online directory adverts are costing you £85 per client. With this information you are in a position to decide if you are going to renew or possibly negotiate a better price for your ads.

Furthermore, now you know the average value of each client, you might decide to go to your local hairdresser/fitness gym/taxi driver and offer them £35 for every new client they send to you, or you could offer every client a free session for every new client they send your way.

These are just simple ways for you to grow your business that can be just one of your pillars of marketing that can help to send a steady flow of customers to your door with no upfront costs. Each time you have to pay out £35 you can feel happy because you have just earned £400 you would not have otherwise got. In my view that is a therapy marketing success.

Congratulations you now understand the 5 golden rules

Now you know and understand the 5 golden rules of therapy marketing success you are in a much better position than your local competitors unless of course they have read this website. But all of the information you have is useless unless you act upon it.

There is still a lot more information on this website that will help you to make intelligent business decisions that will make all the difference to your therapy practice. The more you know the more likely it is that you will make your practice a therapy marketing success. So keep reading.

Take massive action

If you take the information on this website and implement it by taking “Massive Action”, providing your therapy is effective, you can’t help but succeed.

What do we mean by “Massive Action”? You don’t achieve therapy marketing success by talking to ten people. You need to talk to a hundred or a thousand. Don’t make one phone call make fifty. Don’t email 5 companies with a great offer email 250 companies.

If you give it a really good shot even if it does not work you will know that it does not work. But therapy marketing success is a numbers game the chances are if you throw enough mud some of it will sick.

Now it’s time to find out how to market yourself effectively. Therapy Marketing Success.