Practice Marketing Plan and Checklist

Every physical therapy practice needs a marketing plan. Your practice marketing plan should include branding, public relations, patient reactivation and referrals, physician networking, patient communications, and staff recruiting.

The below infographic gives you a checklist to developing your own practice marketing plan and assets. For more information and to get started marketing your PT practice- call us today!

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Inside the Patient Funnel for Physical Therapy

Every consumer focused industry has a funnel or a process that maps consumer interactions and decisions prior to conversion. That might sound complicated, but at its core—the funnel can be your guide to analyzing and conquering that ever present goal of getting more new patients. We will be diving deeper into the patient funnel below and to learn more, sign up for a free download of our 7 Secrets to Attracting New Patients through Online and Social Media.

Think about a typical retail sales funnel: the customer first hears about your brand, company, or product via marketing, referrals, or organic searching. The customer might visit your website to see product details or learn more about your company’s mission and policies. They also often visit third-party websites or information sources to solicit reviews and make comparisons. Commonly, the opinions and experiences of friends and family can heavily influence customer decisions. Now the customer can make a choice whether to buy your product—if they do, you have continued opportunities to build brand loyalty; if they don’t, they might knowingly (or unknowingly) re-enter your funnel in a different way at a later date.

For physical therapy practices, the patient funnel has five key stages: Introduction, Investigation, Decision, Commitment, and Referral. Let’s explore each to see how your marketing can optimize that stage of the funnel.

Introduction: prospects (aka potential patients) find you via a friend, family member, doctor referral, social media share or online search engine. This introduction can be driven by a need “my back hurts and I need PT” or by a want “my back hurts and I want a way to feel better”. At this stage of the funnel, your practice’s marketing should be able to speak to both the need and the want.

Investigation: this is the researching phase of the funnel. The prospect will probably conduct auxiliary research. They have to think about whether or not physical therapy and your clinic are the right choice over medicine, physicians, tests, or surgeries. Once the prospect has decided that PT is the right treatment for them, then they will most likely check out a number of local clinics—both yours and your competitors.

One of the key elements in the investigation stage is visiting your website. We stress that website pages should explain the condition first; then demonstrate how PT can help the patient feel better. This strategy works! Those with a need can verify that PT is the right step for them, and those with a want can learn how PT can help them achieve their goal. Additionally, your brand has to speak to them and their emotions, getting them to decide that you and your clinic are the right choice. Patient testimonials, social media marketing, and online reviews can be very persuasive in this softer, more emotional research. Being able to relate to other patients, who have succeeded in their PT, helps drive the prospect into making a decision.

Decision: the decision making process flows from the investigation outputs. Both the informative and educational research about what is physical therapy and how it can help the prospect and the empathy research stemming from personal connections and emotions determine the next step. Once a prospect decides to make an appointment with your clinic for PT, your website can help affirm that decision. A Make Appointment form is critical to executing that decision—you need convert the prospect into a patient at the exact time that they make their own decision to come to your clinic. Converted prospects also want to be able to verify that their insurance is accepted and many prefer to complete referral and new patient forms in advance to save time at the clinic.

The patient funnel does not stop at the decision stage. Now, you need the patient to commit to your treatment plan and refer their friends and family to your clinic. These last two phases will be covered in depth in our next blog post!

To learn more about the patient funnel and how to best market your physical therapy practice, sign up for a free download of our 7 Secrets to Attracting New Patients through Online and Social Media.

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Best Practices for Direct Mail Marketing to Physicians

As the healthcare and insurance landscapes continue to change, physical therapy practices can struggle to secure and maintain referral relationships with physicians. We all know the story—your marketing manager calls the office to set up a visit and the receptionist says “I’m sorry we are no longer seeing medical or pharmaceutical representatives for office visits”. Now what? How can you keep the referrals flowing in when the front door has been shut?

If a physician’s office is no longer seeing reps, then you need to find another way to get your clinic’s marketing in front of the doctor. And guess who your new messenger can be—the good ole United States Postal Service! Come healthcare changes and insurance woes, the USPS continues to go…and delivers mail to the doctor offices. So why not ramp up your direct mail marketing campaigns?

Physician mailers can take a variety of forms from postcards to tri-folds brochures to mini-newsletters. The key objective is to mail a piece of practice marketing that has content and calls to action specifically tailored to a doctor audience.

Tips for Direct Mail Marketing to Physicians

Don’t send letters. Doctors’ office receive dozens of letters a week, usually from insurance companies, hospital groups etc. Adding one more letter from your practice to the stack does not guarantee that the doctor will even see it (or open it). Think beyond the white envelope and into a mailed piece that stands out.

Use a different paper size and weight. If there are 10 letters in the stack and one postcard, printed on a thicker material and in a different size and shape, the postcard will get noticed first. Practice Promotions uses this strategy with all our mailed marketing. From glossy, heavy weight postcards in non-traditional sizes to full-color, sturdy trifold physician mailers to silky, magazine-like newsletters, we know that our colorful, textural marketing pieces stand out.

Use targeted medical messaging and imagery. This might seem like a no-brainer, but using generic stock photos of doctors is only halfway there. Think about your physician mailer list—who will be receiving your mailer and what are their demographics. For example, if you are sending a mailer about post-surgical rehabilitation- consider using a mix of imagery that includes surgeons and physicians. Or if you are in a rural community that has mostly nurse practitioners, consider using more nurses than doctors in your images. People are more likely to open a mailer that they can relate and respond to. So by providing a visual image that is similar to the recipient, you increase the open rate for your campaign.

Be genuine and specific. Physicians are one of the more heavily marketed groups so your mailer needs to be unique to your PT practice. Consider adding real statistics to your content and finding testimonials that show how well you can make patients feel. Say you treat a lot of worker’s compensation cases—you know how many of your patients were able to return to work after leaving your care. Start marketing your practice as a “Worker’s Compensation Specialist” with a verifiable claim like “over 85% of our patients are able to return to work”. This gives real context and value to what doctors can achieve by sending their patients to you!

Physician mailers should take a variety of shapes and sizes, use appropriate content, and are effective at getting more referrals for PT. Call us today to see how our marketing experts can help you choose a mailer that meets your practice needs!

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How to Write Brand Guidelines for Your Practice

The mark of a truly exceptional brand is the uniformity and consistency that aligns all its marketing and assets. Think about brands that you can recognize anywhere like Coca Cola, Ford, Amazon, or even Starbucks. Whether or not you like and support these brands, you can identify them right away. There are even mobile apps and trivia games based solely around recognizing iconic brands’ logos and fonts.

Why Do PT Practices Need Brand Guidelines?

As a practice owner, you want to ensure that all representations of your business are accurate and on point (or “on brand”). This goes beyond just your marketing and includes marketing content from other organizations too. Say your practice pays annual fees to be featured in various local marketing—your Chamber of Commerce directory, church bulletin, YMCA program guide, and local community college registry. Each year you send them your business information and logo to be placed on their marketing, and usually that’s all the input. You don’t necessarily receive a rough draft of their marketing materials before they are printed, so it’s almost impossible to check for mistakes.

Now, if you had brand guidelines, then you could send those to the organization as a check point to ensure their marketing is on brand for your practice. Even if you don’t get to review the rough drafts, the organization has a document that shows exactly how you want your practice to be represented. (And if they don’t follow your brand guidelines, you might be able to ask for a reprint or refund).

What Are Brand Guidelines?

Brand guidelines can take a variety of forms, but the easiest is to create Word document with how your logo and business need to be presented. Typical brand guidelines will include:

• Logos: types, sizes, colors, and requirements. Be specific—a good graphic designer will know exactly what hex colors your logo uses, what the minimum size is (if your logo is too small or squished it could be hard to read), and how it looks best.
• Name Conventions: most practices have a full, legal business name and several variations of that name. Your brand guidelines should state which names can be used and how. For example, if you have a small or iconic logo, then you would typically want your full business name used so that people can identify your practice. Or, some practices often drop the LLC or other suffix to simplify their name. Lastly, if your practice uses an abbreviated name, then you want to be specific about what that abbreviation is and when to use it.
• Digital Media: website URL, social media accounts etc. For digital marketing, this could include links to your account profiles. For print media, this could include the platform’s icon followed by your account. A common mistake is printing a campaign with social media icons and not including your account profiles. For print campaigns, the icons should always be followed by the account (@PracticePromos for Twitter) or URL (http://ift.tt/1SoS5q2).
• Contact Information: address, phone number, fax number etc. By providing your contact information, you avoid that risk that someone could look it up and inadvertently insert the wrong information. If you address has a suite or unit #, be sure to include that in the correct formatting. For practice’s that have multiple phone numbers such as a dedicated appointment line or referral coordinator, you can include all relevant numbers in your brand guidelines. However, it can be helpful to say “for general marketing communications use: XXX-XXX-XXXX” to avoid any confusion. Keep the area code with the number to streamline calls. For fax numbers, generally these aren’t need for marketing purposes unless you are targeting physicians. Include a rule on when fax numbers are needed to avoid having too much contact information.

Creating your practice’s brand guidelines can provide internal marketing benefits as well. If you hire new marketing staff, they have immediate access to all your information and styles. Consider keeping separate internal brand guidelines that include a list of logins (usernames and passwords) for your website’s CMS, social media profiles etc. so that access can be maintained.

For help creating your brand guidelines and marketing plans, contact our expert team today! We can streamline your marketing and operations, saving you time and money.

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