7 Tips for Marketing your Private Practice on a Shoestring Budget

WARNING! By reading this article, you’ll learn how to market your practice while spending little-to-no money and how to position your private practice as the expert in its niche.

The thought of marketing your private practice can be overwhelming, especially when you’ve just started your practice and don’t have a large budget to spend. So we’ve come up with eight ways to market your private practice on the cheap, just for you.

And Here… We… Go….

#1 Add Your Private Practice Info to Your Email Signature

It’s not just an email, it’s a promotional tool.

Is your practice name, logo, website, and contact information in the signature of your email? If not, it should be.

Adding a little information about your private practice to the signature of your email is an easy way to promote your practice, and it can be updated whenever you’d like. It’s also a fun way to add a little color to an otherwise boring, text heavy email.

Write a new blog post? Win an award? Running a sale? Add a link in your signature to gain traction.

#2 Blog, Blog, Then Blog Some More

Your practice’s blog is the foundation of all your other marketing efforts. Your blog is where you’ll direct visitors, nurture relationships and capture leads.

Because Blogging….

Establishes Authority

• Blogging regularly helps establish credibility among your practice, and helps to establish yourself as the industry expert in your niche.
• The best blogs answer common questions their ideal client and leads have, positioning themselves as the go-to blog in the industry.

Fuels SEO

• Search engines love fresh, valuable, high-quality content. Brush up on your SEO knowledge here.

Creates a Two-Way Conversation

• Blogging opens the lines of communication and encourages a dialogue between your private practice and your audience. And the audience members you’re talking with can often convert into clients.

Is Super Inexpensive

• Relative to other traditional media advertising, blogging (especially when done by yourself) costs next to nothing. And we know that private practices love saving money.

With all of the benefits of having a blog, we don’t see a reason not to have one.

PSST – By the way, did you know that Brighter Vision has a tool to automate your blogging?

#3 Guest Post on Other Blogs

Guest posting is a great way to reach a completely new audience and gain traction back to your website. Team up with a local practitioner or practice, one that doesn’t specialize in your same niche. Write a guest blog post for them, and ask them to do the same.

Not only will you gain great new content for your own blog, but you’ll have created a new relationship with the practitioner you’re collaborating with, and by leveraging their audience, you’ll create new leads.

#4 Go to Local Networking Events

Break out of your comfort zone and network with other local industry professionals. Treat these events as an opportunity to build lasting relationships with new people and practices.

These contacts are the people you’ll reach out for for collaboration and networking in the future. Build a strong referral network with these contacts now for less stress in the long run. You’ll want to nail your elevator pitch during these interactions.

** Bonus How To: Crafting Your Elevator Pitch **

Learn how to tell people what you do.

Picture this: You’re at an event, mingling and having fun when someone asks what you do for work.

You reply with, “I’m a therapist… Uh… for teens,”… And you awkwardly await the asker to shout hurray and exclaim that you’re the answer to all her problems. But let’s be honest, that’ll never work. Your potential client or networking contact scurries away and finds someone else to talk with.

<< Let’s Rewind << and try that again.

Communicate your ideal client’s problem. Talk less about your process, and more about the solutions that you and your practice offer. Because people themselves are so immersed in their own problems, showing that you understand and provide a solution will grab their full attention in a heartbeat.

“I work with teens who are facing the challenges of growing up with social media” won’t get you the same response as “I work with high school-aged teens who are struggling with the anxieties and worries that come with growing up in the age of social media.”

Hey, we get it, talking about yourself can be tricky. Still having trouble? Check out our private practice mad-libs below.

#5 Join or Create Facebook Groups

Facebook is an awesome platform for private practice marketing, and there are more private practice, therapist, and niche therapy groups on Facebook than one can imagine.

Search through the different groups on Facebook, and join the ones that pertain to your practice, demographic and niche. Then, comment on posts, answer questions, and promote your practice as a solution to the issues brought to light in the groups.

Psst… here are a couple of our favorite groups:

• Abundance Practice Builders
• Selling the Couch Community
• Authentic Marketing for Therapists

#6 Create a Google My Business Account

Google My Business is a necessity if you want your private practice to show up more in local searches, on Google+ and Google Maps. Setting up an account is simple and free, and definitely something to take advantage of.

Take a look at how Google My Business functions below.

#7 Claim Your Practice on Yelp

According to a Nielsen Study, 82% of Yelp users, or Yelpers, visit the site preparing to spend money on goods and services, and 52% of Yelpers engage with the business by calling, visiting, or purchasing every time they use Yelp.

Meanwhile, 89% of Yelpers make a purchase decision within a week, and 39% buy within a few days of visiting the site.

Meaning, if someone’s looking for a therapist on Yelp, they’re going to read your reviews, visit your website, and then decide whether or not to contact your private practice. And it’s so easy to setup the account, you’d almost be crazy not to.

Show Us What You’ve Got

Whew! You’ve made it through our 7 cheap and easy tips, and they all sound pretty simple, huh? So take this knowledge, and let your marketing run wild while spending hardly any of your sweet, cold, hard cash. You’ve totally got this. 

And if you enjoyed the article, we’d really appreciate it if you shared it in your favorite Facebook group :).

You made it this far, so I’m sure you want more great marketing tips, right?

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About Wyatt Megla