12 Marketing Strategies For Physical Therapist In 2023

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Editorial Team

Therapy in any form is thought of as a specialty practice rather than a necessity. People tend to spend money on things that produce quick results. 

Physical therapy requires commitment in terms of money and time which often puts people off.

Like any other business, a physical therapist also depends on its customers to earn profit. Providing effective patient care, accelerating outcomes, and achieving excellence with evidence-based clinical practice is indeed a significant challenge.

To succeed in the field, Physical therapists must incorporate effective marketing strategies to create brand awareness, maintain trust and build customer loyalty. 

When it comes to physical therapist marketing efforts, it all demands consistency, sticking to the budget, connecting with your target audience as much as possible, and providing a pleasant experience to new patients. 

All these processes require unified goals, effective planning, consistency, sound execution, and frequency in communication strategies, as well as measuring, quantifying, and evaluating marketing performance so that you can make real-time adjustments.

This article is about drafting a physical therapy marketing plan with actionable strategies you can implement within your business. 

What Is A Physical Therapy Practice?

Physical therapy is a service-based profession provided by trained professionals for improving, maintaining, and restoring movement functions threatened by injury, aging, disorders, pain, diseases, or other environmental factors.

This profession involves interaction between practitioners, physical therapists, patients, healthcare workers, caregivers, and professionals using skills and knowledge unique to this service.

Licensed physical therapists work in several healthcare settings, such as private practices, outpatient offices, hospitals, nursing homes, rehabilitation centers, home health, sports and fitness settings, schools, hospices, government agencies, occupational settings, and research centers.

Basic Considerations For Your Physical Therapist Marketing Plan

While crafting your marketing strategy, there is a list of things to decide on, such as:

  • Analyze who your target market is. Draft your core demographics
  • What will be the marketing budget for your physical therapy clinic? Remember that your budget should be planned for the whole year because marketing is not done just now; you must be consistent with your marketing efforts to see the results.
  • Competitor research: how does your physical therapy practice differ from those around you?
  • What is your brand aesthetic and tone of voice? (This keeps all of your physical therapy marketing efforts focused and aligned)
  • Do you have a promotion you’d like to run?
  • Who will be manning the physical therapy marketing campaign (or campaigns)?

Physical Therapist Field Growth

The physical therapy field has a vast spectrum of audiences and many growth opportunities. In fact, Physical therapist practices have a more comprehensive range of services to talk about and more ways to generate revenue than many other medical and healthcare specialties.

There is accelerating demand for physical therapy in sports injury, personal injury, workers’ compensation injury, and traditional preventative and therapeutic physical therapy treatments.

From pediatric and geriatric patients to aquatic therapy and lymphedema management to acute care and sub-acute rehab hospital settings—few specialties provide such a wide range of value to patients and have as many prospective revenue streams.

The Physical Therapy Marketing Target Areas

Knowing your target market is very important for numerous aspects of your business. From designing, knowledge, skills, and marketing techniques and promotions, understanding your target audience right at the beginning is essential to moving your business forward.

You can focus your efforts on three market segments to get more patients. These are

1. Marketing To the General Public

This is simple. Your market to an audience of the general population. Customers who do not know you or heard anything about you. You could try any marketing channel, from SEO and video testimonials to Google my Business location and Patient reviews, Google AdWords, posting content, or running a page on Facebook…go to where your audience is!

2. Marketing to Past Patients

Your best target audience is your past customers with whom you have already built a relationship. Because they already know the quality of care, so they trust you.

3.  Marketing to Physicians

Marketing your service through physicians is a viral marketing target. Whether it is about in-person visits from sales reps, networking at conferences, or hosted dinners, they can be a great source of attracting potential patients.

Physical Therapist Marketing Plan- Who, When, What, And How?       

When starting to think about marketing your physical therapy practice, you should analyze four essential features of the marketing strategy- Who, When, What, and How will you promote your offering? It is vital to have an organized plan way before going ahead and implementing it. There is no one exact formula for marketing a physical therapy practice. 

To start, you decide WHO you are targeting with your marketing campaign. Gathering lists of information based on your target population can be helpful in the design and organization of future strategies. Researching and knowing these things about your target population will help guide your marketing plan in choosing factors. 

WhoWhenWhatHow
AgeFrequency of postsBrandSocial media
GenderMarketing TimelineServicesPrint media
Occupation MissionWord-to-word/ referral marketing
Marital status ValuesAdvertisements
Location  Business cards
Hobbies  Pamphlets
Purchasing budget  Business Websites

12 Marketing Strategies For Physical Therapists In 2022

Now that you have identified whom you want to target, what influences consumer behavior, and what your competitors are doing, start working on a physical therapy marketing strategy. Importantly, it must be a good fit for your patients and practice.

1. Define Your Unique Selling Preposition

Before investing money into any physical therapy marketing material, you should examine how your practice and approaches differ from your competitors.

It helps you recognize your Unique Selling Proposition or USP.

Your USP communicates to prospective patients how your practice, approaches, and working mechanism is superior and better than your competitors.

2. Gain Connections through Community Engagement

Community events and marketing campaigns can help capture potential patients for your physical therapy business. These interactions help create brand awareness for your clinic. By engaging with your community this way, you will be able to discuss deeper details about the valuable services you offer, which will earn your prospective patients’ trust.

Community events create a forum to address the public’s concerns and curiosities about what you do. Many patients need to be aware of direct access opportunities or the wellness services a PT can provide. A community event allows you to knock down barriers of perception in your industry and get FaceTime with your prospective patients resulting in trust equity and a likely conversion to becoming a patient in your clinic when a need for physical therapy arises.

3. Make Your Website

Nowadays, the internet is often the first place people look for almost anything they need. This includes healthcare. As much as 80% of people do health-related searches online.

You might have the most talented physical therapists and an excellent working staff, but if your website looks mismanaged and outdated, your first impression will disappear.

So what does this mean for your practice? It gives you the perfect physical therapy marketing opportunity!

It means that anywhere a patient finds you on the internet, your brand (colors, logo, message, etc.) is easy to find and always looks the same. If it’s challenging to find information about consumers will give up and go elsewhere if it’s challenging to find information about the young facility. 

Creating your user-friendly website will attract more new patients. You can share helpful information, reviews, and testimonials and offer patients the convenience of getting to know you.

As a physical therapist, you want your page visitors to have a smooth experience while navigating your website. To make that happen, you must have a fully optimized physical therapy website.

Below we have listed a few of the things you can incorporate to maximize your physical therapy website’s potential:

  • your website should be mobile-friendly
  • switch from HTTP to HTTPS
  • choose a good hosting plan
  • declutter unused widgets and plugins
  • Improve website speed by compressing image sizes, embedding videos on YouTube, reducing page redirects, etc.

4. Lean Into Content Marketing

The purpose of content marketing is to generate potential clients. Research shows that content marketing generated 3x the amount of leads compared to traditional marketing.

You need to develop a solid content marketing strategy to drive traffic and build a connection with new patients.

Does your website appear on the search engine when people search for physical therapy services? And what about targeting those who don’t yet know they’re looking for a PT?

Fortunately, content marketing provides an SEO-focused method of reaching people with the information they seek.

 Following are some content ideas for your marketing physical therapy services:

  • How can physical therapy help prevent injuries?
  • How physical therapy can help treat chronic pains like back and knee pain
  • What to expect from your physical therapy
  • How will physical therapy help senior citizens?

5. Take The Help Of Email Marketing.

Don’t ignore the value of email marketing – it’s a marketing tactic that can make you a lot of money if you leverage it correctly.

When a patient is already in your clinic, collect their email so you can continue to market to them and bring them back into your clinic, as well as help keep your clinic top of mind. 

Consider automating email campaigns that send emails to patients three months, six months, and one year after completing their plan of care to check on them. You can also include offers in those check-in emails for a free laser treatment, a 15-minute chair massage, or a discount on supplements in your clinic.

Retaining an existing patient is excellent for the growth of your clinic because they already trust you. Building great patient relationships means they will likely talk about their experience with their peers and refer business to you through word of mouth. 

Using email for these customers is a great way to do more peer-to-peer marketing because they are already big fans of your business and have had a positive outcome. Using this strategy, you might consider creating email campaigns with offers, like ‘Refer a friend who becomes a patient and get a free laser treatment’ or ‘Post a story to your social media about your experience with us.

6. Consider Paid Ads for A Physical Therapy Practice

Advertising can be a great opportunity, especially for physical therapy practice experts. After all, only a few PT clinics bother with advertising, which is such a missed opportunity.

60% of patients conduct online research before booking an appointment with a new provider—and yes, which applies to physical therapy providers.

With Facebook ads, Google Ads, and many more, you can set up an advertising campaign that’s within your budget and results-focused (meaning more happy patients).

When you’re looking to boost your physical therapy clinic’s presence online, give physical therapy marketing a go in the form of paid ads. They can work if you do it right.

You can choose between:

  • Print ads
  • Facebook ad
  • Google Ads (an easy win for search engine optimization)
  • Other social media marketing adverts, such as on Instagram
  • Podcast advertising
  • Direct mail advertising
  • Television advertising
  • Radio ads

7. Gather Patient Reviews

85% of consumers trust online reviews the same way as they trust recommendations from their family, friends, and colleagues. Local businesses with customer reviews have 3.5 times more conversions than those without. See how you can use reviews to generate leads and turn page visitors into actual customers.

So before your patients leave your physical therapy clinic, remember to ask your patients for reviews!

8. Give An Online Scheduling Facility.

Giving your customers a facility to schedule their appointment online can be a great initiative for a physical therapist, especially in this age and time when people look for convenience.

The need to call a physical therapist during business hours to make an appointment or hold on call for a long can put the patients entirely off.

Online scheduling aims to provide patients convenience so they can schedule an appointment at any time.

9.  Host A Free Workshop At Your Clinic

Hosting a free workshop is a great way to bring new potential patients to your clinic. Of course, this will take some preparation but can produce a favorable result.

Many people have no experience with physical therapy and may wonder what goes into a course of Physical Therapy treatment. Will it feel like a workout with a personal trainer? To solve these mindsets, you can demonstrate the types of treatments and their effects by hosting a physical therapy workshop. This will allow you to show prospective patients what it takes in action, share your expertise, and help them feel better, building community engagement and public relations for your practice.

10.  Conduct Physical Therapy Lecturing

This is one of the critical forms of physical therapy marketing when bringing new patients into physical therapy practice.

Here is what defines lecturing:

Lecturing — involves holding a seminar, at a public venue, on a specific topic to deliver value to your crowd in hopes of converting them into patients of your physical therapy practice.

Where can you lecture?

  • Schools
  • Businesses
  • Gyms
  • Yoga Studios
  • Invite people to your practice waiting room
  • Pharmacies
  • Holistic Shops
  • YMCA
  • Churches, synagogues, temples, religious headquarters
  • Wellness fairs
  • Food Establishments

11.  Enhancing Customer Journey At Your Clinic

One of the most effective marketing tactics is improving your patient experience. This is a great thought, but what are you getting from this?

Of course, when you give your patients the best experience, they will recommend you when there is a chance. If you use methods you see that you are the best at in physical therapy, promote them.

  • Treat your patients well
  • Doing the recovery process in the best way
  • If your patient recovers fast, they will recommend you.
  • Making them recover in a great environment where they are treated right will encourage them to talk about you.

12.  Word Of Mouth/ Referral Marketing

Regardless of your chosen marketing tactics, word-of-mouth marketing should be your primary consideration for every physical therapist’s marketing strategy. You can lose hundreds of potential patients without tapping into this source.

To spark this positive image of your brand, you need to ensure you offer the best possible experience for your existing patients because they will be an essential element to the success of your marketing efforts.

If your existing customers leave unsatisfied, they will tell their friends and family and may leave a negative review online. 

Prospective clients are then likely to read these reviews to learn more about your practice before making an appointment.

Conclusion

While you are an owner or marketer of a physical therapy clinic, you must face significant marketing challenges. Still, several ways exist to overcome these challenges and keep treating patients. 

You can choose one of these marketing strategies and start investing in those that align with your budget and convenience.

  • Get your online presence.
  • Build trust with potential patients.
  • Convert more web visits into appointments.
  • Retain committed patients.
  • Post content/blogs regularly.

You can focus on any of these elements for your physical therapist marketing strategy. Each aspect will help you generate more new patients or reactivate past patients. Doctor referrals and direct marketing can also work great in this regard.