5 Free Tips for Marketing your Physiotherapy or Chiropractic. At HMDG we run marketing for hundreds of clinics, it’s our speciality and we spend, well, every day looking at numbers, data points, metrics and what works for clinics and what doesn’t.
Working with physiotherapists, chiropractors, podiatrists and so on day in and day out, we see a lot of trends, whether it’s what a website needs to do to convert visitors into patients, what is needed from an SEO perspective to rank highly for say sciatica or how to best target potential patients through socials.
But one thing we seem to say to new clients every single day is…
DTB – DO THE BASICS!
We like to use an analogy. You know in the gym when you see some personal trainer with their client on a Bosu ball, standing on one leg holding a kettlebell in one hand, a Theraband in another tied to a bar and they’re in Vibrams attempting pistol squats? (I’ve actually seen this). The poor client just wants to lose a few kilos. What’s wrong with doing the basics? Push, pull, press, deadlift. Why complicate things?
If ever an analogy applied to marketing then that’s it.
It also actually applies to what we do on the paid side of things. If we’re going to build you a high-performing website then great but keep it simple, if we want to optimise your Google my Business Listing then we aren’t going to try ranking for 20 areas and every last type of product you might wish to sell.
We wanted to put together a DTB list, keeping it simple for things that are totally free and what our data says will help you. Will it turn you into a millionaire overnight? No, but we’ll guarantee you’ll get more patients and if it takes an hour and results in an extra booking or two a month then why not!
Here are our 5 tips!
1. Update your Google My Business
-Make sure that you’re listed as a physio if you’re a physio and not something irrelevant like ‘general practitioner.
-List the services you offer!
-Choose your service area wisely. If you’re in Stow in the Wold don’t just put in Oxford or Oxfordshire. List towns and villages close by.
-Add a picture of the clinic’s frontage.
-Make sure (and this is crucial) that patients leave reviews using a pain/treatment word AND a clinic type word. Eg
“Hannah’s a great physiotherapist, she helped me with my back pain”.
That’s ALWAYS better than:
“Hannah’s great, I felt like new again.
You want Google to list you as a physio and pick up on keywords like back pain. Not Hannah and great.
2. Be more personalised with your social media content. No one cares about another pic of a spine, your latest sports massage offer nor do they care about the average healing time for carpal tunnel. They care about you, your staff, who you are, what you do to have fun, what it’s like being in the clinic. I guarantee you, every time you add a post of someone’s puppy or your kids causing havoc in the waiting room, you’ll get more engagement. And STOP posting offers every 2 minutes. First, your social media will look like a pinboard for cheap stuff and second, offers mean nothing if people haven’t bought into you. HMDG gets more clients from the owner’s personal Instagram eg here and here than from our business Insta. Follow us and you’ll see the stupid stuff we get up to both in the office and out.
PS if you have more than 5 pics of a spine on your Instagram, we won’t work with you until you take them off. 😂 Well we might but I’ve just decided while writing this to introduce a spine fee of £500. You choose.
3. Be clever with your engagement. See what I just did above? I just encouraged you into following us. Now, of course, you should and I’m sure you’ll have a giggle from our posts but the point is to engage people with content and use that as a springboard. I saw a clinic recently post in a local group saying “we’re physios, our website is…”
Facepalm! It’s an area with homeworkers and yummy mummies. Why not write an article on something pre and post-natal? Why not set up a coffee morning for mums on a Friday and do a Q&A? Why not put something up about making sure you move when working at home instead of sitting motionless all day long?
Our physio website is…GAWD!
4. Use your staff. Everyone talks about referrals but forgets about their main asset, their staff. Get them to post a link in the socials for where they work. It’s simple and will drive traffic. How many have “working @clinicname on their Insta or have you listed on their Facebook as an employer? Indeed how many of you clinic owners have this on your profiles?!
Ask them to post funny stuff from the clinic on their socials, engineer funny stuff, interesting content that they can post.
Ask them for pics they’d like to put up on the clinic socials. Did they just run a marathon? Did they buy a new puppy?
There are a million ways to use staff, do it but stay away from “can you get your friends in as patients?” That will never work as well as posting great stuff from the clinic because they want to, their friends will be more engaged with a funny or interesting clinic story than “come to my clinic it’s great”.
5. Stop using nothing but stock images on your clinic website. A few are fine but we want to see you, your staff, your clinic, the clinic dog, even a picture of the local area.
People buy people. Patients want to know who you are. If one of your clinicians does ultra-marathons, use that info, add a pic of them running, even create a running injuries page – they’ll fill up with running patients and that will be much more attractive to a patient than knowing they got a 2:1 at Birmingham in 1982.
If one of your staff has children, make a point of that! If they’re willing to show pics of the monsters then great. Personality is key.
If you’ve been really clever and use your Instagram really well, you can even use a plug-in to embed it into the site to keep things feeling fresh. (On that note, DO NOT embed your Twitter. It’s likely boring, clinical and not one patient gives two hoots about the latest CPD talk you’ve been, your opinion on the latest research into bursitis or your arguments with other clinicians). One funny moment we had late last year was seeing an argument play out between two physios on Twitter and it being fed into “our latest Tweets” on their site.
6. Keep things simple! (I know I said 5 tips but we’ve come this far so may as well have an encore).
Think about a patient that comes to your site. What do they need to see? What might their issue be? What might they want to know or be concerned about?
Question. Does your homepage currently put patients at ease, explain fully what you do and actually ANSWER questions they might have?
I had to get my dishwasher fixed recently. What did I want to know when I hit the page?
1. Do you fix John Lewis Dishwashers?
2. How much does it cost?
3. Can I talk to someone if I need to?
4. How quickly can you come around?
5. What’s the process if you need a spare you don’t have?
6. Can I book a specific time?
The guys that won my business kept things simple. They had a page that essentially said:
We fix all types of dishwashers, It’s important to know that those over 10 years old can be problematic and often require replacing due to lack of spare parts.
The call out cost is £85 inc VAT. That gives you one hour. If you need a spare we’ll come back to fit it for free, you’ll only pay for the cost of the spare.We can be out the same day in these areas (SW19 etc etc).If you want to chat with us here’s our WhatsApp. Alternatively, you can call us, email us or book online directly here.
If your booking page/website doesn’t do this then you’re not being customer-centric and you’re losing out.
7. And finally…prizes for referrals.
We recently ran an email campaign to a clinic’s customers that said. “If you know anyone that you feel might benefit from our services or have a family member that has any sore bits then please ask them to give us a call. We’re offering a £20 Amazon gift voucher for any referrals that book with us”.
It cost £400 ish in Amazon Vouchers but you can work out how many patients that resulted in…
Tip. DO NOT run these every week. Don’t do that thing the gurus advise, “when something works do it 50m times a month’. Once every 6 months is fine. And mix it up. Maybe do an offer to older people eg “do you have an older family member struggling with mobility issues or pain? Please get them to give us a call. We’re giving away 30% of every new patient booking to Help the Aged” so we can help our community and those most in need”.
That’s it for now!
What’s next?
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