LinkedIn Marketing for Therapists: Best Practices & Client-Getting Strategies
While Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are all fantastic for marketing your practice, it’s important to not forget about LinkedIn. Once seen simply as a place for job searches and resume updates, in recent years LinkedIn has become one of the most effective tools for marketing your business online.
As a business-first Social Network, LinkedIn has many benefits that Facebook ,Twitter and Instagram do not. Because of this, it’s rated the top social network for lead-generation.1
Why is LinkedIn Great for Therapist Marketing?
LinkedIn is particularly well suited for therapists’ social media marketing because its benefits are two-fold: you can network with potential clients AND network with possible referral sources.
With the integration of a news feed on LinkedIn it’s now quite common to see posts regarding work related stress, career advice, work-life balance, and more. This presents a great opportunity for Mental Health Professionals as you can create content to cater to these topics and let potential clients know you are there to help.
In addition to connecting with potential clients, there are also many opportunities to connect with other professionals in (or adjacent to) your field. Building business connections can open the door to new sources of client referrals you otherwise may not have had access to – for example Medical Providers, Coaches, or other Therapists.
Best Practices for Therapist LinkedIn Marketing
Fill Out a Detailed Company Page for Your Practice
While having a detailed profile on LinkedIn is important and will help you personally look more professional, they’re not very well designed to show you off as a therapist to your ideal clients.
In order for you to come off as an expert on the struggles of your potential clients and gain their trust (as well as their business!), you’ll want to create a professional and well-detailed company page for your practice.2
One of the biggest mistakes companies make with their LinkedIn company page is not filling it out completely. In fact, company pages with complete profiles have double the visitors of those with incomplete profiles.2 When filling in your company page, you’ll want to make sure you clearly define your business in the ‘About Us’ section.
Need help writing your ‘About Me‘ section? Signup for our How to Write a Kick Ass About Page email course!
Link Your Personal Profile to Your Company Page
Now that you have a powerful company page for your practice, it’s time to show it off a little!
A great way to help market your newly published company profile is by officially linking to it in the resume portion of your personal LinkedIn profile.1 If you are part of a group practice, you should highly encourage all employees to do the same!
Each one of those links back to the company page helps to boost its visibility across the site, and effectively showcases your business’s brand on individuals employee profiles.
Create a Content Strategy for Your LinkedIn Posts
A great company page is the cornerstone of any LinkedIn marketing strategy, but your job doesn’t stop there! In order to start building your image as an expert, and in order to bring much more attention to your company profile, you’ll want to start posting or linking to valuable content through your LinkedIn company page.
Use Content with Visuals
One of the quickest ways to start standing out from the crowd of LinkedIn posts is to make sure your content includes an attractive visual. According to LinkedIn, posts on their platform that include images get more than 6x the engagement (comments, likes, shares, and clicks) of posts that are text-only.3
Create Thought-Leading Content
When it comes to content that excels on LinkedIn, the best performers are content that promotes the author as a thought leader.1 Thought leaders excel by producing content that demonstrates their expertise and understanding for their target audience. In your case, ‘target audience’ can simply be replaced with ‘ideal client’.
To create thought leading content for your ideal client, consider the issues they may be going through and come up with posts that speak to this. On LinkedIn, it can also be a good idea to combine some aspect of work / business. For example, if your ideal client is new mothers you could write a post about returning to work after maternity leave. If couples are your ideal client, you could discuss how to effectively manage work / life balance.
Learn more about the science of social media and the best time to post on LinkedIn.
Need help engaging your ideal client? Take our Ideal Client Quiz now and receive custom marketing tips!
Sponsor Your Best LinkedIn Posts
One of the only negative pieces of news about LinkedIn marketing is the same sad news for all online marketing nowadays: the field is a lot more crowded now than it was ten years ago, and so it’s also becoming harder to have your voice heard than it was “back in the day.”
However, an excellent way to cut through the noise even further is to set aside a small budget to pay to promote (or “sponsor”) your LinkedIn posts that have already been proven to be successful with your audience. Not only does sponsoring your posts help them get seen by more people, as well as the right kind of people, but it also gives you access to cool features like tracking the number of leads that particular content has brought you.3
Use LinkedIn Groups to Network for Referrals
A great way to increase the number of referral contacts you’re making on LinkedIn is to start networking with LinkedIn Groups that relate to your field or specialties.1 This is especially advantageous to your networking efforts because becoming involved in a group can expand your potential connections far beyond the ones you currently have.
Work diligently to make a good impression on other members of the group by staying active with comments and posts, and you never know who may share one of your posts to their audience of new potential clients!
Now that you know how to really bring your “A” game to your practice’s LinkedIn marketing, it’s time to put it to the test. Work through our list of tips above and maximize the returns for your LinkedIn marketing this year!
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1. Newberry, Christina. “LinkedIn for Business: The Ultimate Marketing Guide.” Hootsuite Social Media Management, 13 Nov. 2018, blog.hootsuite.com/linkedin-for-business/.
2. Peters, Brian. “5 LinkedIn Marketing Tips to Grow Your Company page 600% Faster.” Resources, Buffer Social Blog, 10 Sept. 2018, buffer.com/resources/linkedin-marketing-strategy.
3. “How to Advertise on LinkedIn in 7 Simple Steps | LinkedIn Marketing Solutions.” How to Use LinkedIn for Marketing: Top 10 Tips, business.linkedin.com/marketing-solutions/how-to-market-on-linkedin#tip-2.
