Physical Therapy Marketing: Importance of Time Leveraging

It’s raining money for practices with automated marketing systems.

It’s hard to market your clinic and focus on patients at the same time, which is why many clinics have a dedicated marketing representative.  As a clinician, we often stick to what we do best; patient care.

Some therapists spend years knocking on doors with physicians and cold ‘prospecting’ in the hopes that someday, someone might listen. This is the wrong kind of physical therapy marketing.

What if you were to position yourself such that the physician actually wanted to communicate with you? What if you were the one they sought, as opposed to the other way around?

It’s possible, and it all depends on our own self esteem and self positioning. It’s a topic I will cover in great detail in upcoming blog posts, so be sure to check back in the next 2-3 weeks.

Regardless of the type of practice you work in, getting patients into your practice is not a game of chance, but a result of systems of action.

More importantly, the entire process of referral generation should leverage time and be semi-automated. This results in a powerful physical therapy marketing system that allows you to beat the odds.

We know that the best way for a practice to grow is by creating a steady system of acquiring new patients.

But there is a point where we go astray.

Managing the system to separate, identify, and encourage qualified patients and reinforce communication with those patients using an outstanding follow-up system is the most important component of physical therapy marketing, but is non existent in most private practices.

The best physical therapist in the world can struggle to acquire and treat patients in the absence of such a system.

So how do you create such a system? The first step towards the creation of a systematic private practice involves an understanding of the process of the referral in itself.  When a patient walks into your clinic seeking therapy, the new business is a result of a system, not necessarily a random event.

Imagine driving hundreds of miles in extreme heat and humidity along the desert.  Extreme fatigue, boredom and thirst leave you yearning for a diet soda.  The moment you see a rest stop, you immediately pull over to get something cool and refreshing to drink.

What happened here?

A complex sequence of events that teach us a thing or two about physical therapy marketing.

This sale was generated as a result of a combination of factors which constitute the pre-sale events.

• Summer
• Heat
• Humidity
• Thirst
• Boredom
• Frustration
• Need For Respite
• Desperation

When a patient walks into your clinic, a similar sequence of events has already occurred in the background.  The culmination of these events (patients’ injury, pain, frustration, physician referral, patient referral) has resulted in the patient standing in front of you.

The key to marketing your physical therapy clinic is understanding the why, how, and when the patient finally got to you, and positioning yourself in front of them at each step of the way.