I absolutely know that you didn’t get into healthcare to think about sales and marketing. Neither did I. Just like you, I did it because I wanted to help get people better. I didn’t ever want to think about patient acquisition or patient visit averages. I just wanted to focus on delivering the best clinical care possible. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: in private practice, you have no choice. If you genuinely want to help the people in your town / city / village / community, then you have an ethical and moral imperative to make sure people can find you and choose you and complete their treatment plans. If you genuinely care about getting patients the best outcomes, then learning to market effectively isn’t optional. It’s your responsibility.
If you’re still telling yourself that good clinicians don’t need to do any marketing, or that word-of-mouth referrals will bring you all you need then you’re being naïve. And worse: people are suffering because of it, the very people you’re supposed to be helping! Because if they’re not coming to see you, they’re going to see someone else and that someone else might not share your ethics and skill.
There’s a simple pattern across most MSK healthcare – the providers with the worst clinical reasoning and the deliberately loose grasp of the evidence-base are often the loudest and most confident. They overpromise, underdeliver and yet still have full diaries. Whereas the clinicians who actually do follow evidence-based practice? Who don’t oversell, overdiagnose or overprescribe? They’re harder to find, have outdated websites, have social feeds full of anatomy quizzes and “glute med fire-up” tips that no patient asked for. No one is finding them and unfortunately no one is choosing them either.
People can’t book with clinicians they can’t find.
You might not like the clinical product the others are offering but unfortunately for you this isn’t actually a clinical problem – it’s a marketing issue. You’re losing patients to worse clinicians because they simply have better optics. And that’s the crux of this little paradox. The better you are clinically, the more important it is to market yourself properly because otherwise the ‘other’ providers win by default.
- When you don’t rank on Google, patients go to the person who does.
- When you sound vague and don’t clarify how you can actually help someone, people default to what sounds clearer – even when it’s nonsense.
- When your site looks like it was built in 2012, they wrongly assume you’re the worse option.
- When you don’t follow up enquiries, don’t chase DNAs, don’t automate follow-up communications, you’re not “focusing on patient care”, you’re running an inefficient system that actively reduces access to good care and most importantly patient outcomes.
“But I don’t like being too salesy”
Now I’m going to assume that by this point of the article I’ve made my case so well that your neck is getting sore from all the nodding. But I’m also going to assume that you are already coming up with reasons in your head why you can’t or won’t start to focus on your marketing for a while so let’s go through the most common pushbacks I hear every day from clinicians who are uncomfortable with marketing:
“Marketing feels manipulative”
Only if you’re doing it badly. If you’re lying, exaggerating, or pretending to offer guarantees you can’t keep – yes, that’s manipulative. But that’s not ethical marketing. Good marketing is just clear communication to the right people about how you help. If you can explain a treatment plan to the patient in the clinic room then you can write an effective landing page.
“I don’t want to sound salesy”
You’re already selling every day, you just don’t realise it. Every time you persuade a patient to commit to their rehab. Every time you explain why they need to come back for another session. Every time you give someone the belief that their pain can improve. You’re selling. Sales isn’t the problem, you’re just not realising what you’re already doing.
“Our clinic does well from word-of-mouth”
Great. That means you’re doing good work. But word-of-mouth referrals alone aren’t a strategy. They can be inconsistent and they’re very difficult to scale. The best clinics combine multiple referral streams to ensure no matter how a patient goes looking for help they can find you. Not everyone who needs help goes and asks a friend who to see so if word-of-mouth referrals are your only method of people finding you then you’ve actively chosen to stop helping more people than you could.
“We’re too small to need marketing”
Wrong. You’re too small to require £1000s of marketing a month. Marketing budgets should scale with your growth and size. You don’t need an entire marketing department, you just need to do the basics well and that does not need to cost you the earth.
“It’s just not us. We’ve never done any marketing.”
I’ve no doubt this is correct but it’s 2025 and things have changed. Patients Google before they call. They check your reviews before they trust you. They expect fast, frictionless websites and booking and they’re doing all of that on their mobile phone while sitting on the sofa. That’s the reality now. You don’t have to like it – but you do have to respond to it.
So what does ethical marketing actually look like?
This really isn’t that hard. Ethical marketing simply means getting the right people to the right clinician at the right time without overpromising, misleading, or applying pressure.
Here’s how:
- Be clear in your messaging: Tell people what you do, who you help and what outcomes are realistic. Skip the jargon and stop being vague. And definitely do not overpromise.
- Patient-centred content: You’re not writing things for you. Your website is not going to be peer-reviewed. The facebook post you just wrote isn’t for other clinicians. Focus your content on answering questions that real people actually have. If you’re not sure? Ask your patients.
- Evidence-based messaging: Don’t promise ‘miracle cures’ and gimmicks. Just give plain, honest explanations of what the patient can expect based on the current best understanding.
- Frictionless access: Make it easy to book. Make it easy to ask questions and follow up. This means answering the phone when it rings, responding to emails quickly, and providing a booking system that can be completed in as few steps as possible.
- Retain patients by support, not pressure: Your goal is to deliver the best possible clinical outcome and for that you will most likely have to see people more than once. Remind people to come back not to fill your diary, but because it will actually deliver the best recovery. Remind your other clinicians of this too. Gold-standard treatment plans only work when they’re actually completed.
- Use automations: Not to spam people but to make following people up easier so that you can actually support them properly in their recovery. If you genuinely believe that the follow-up is needed then it’s on you to make sure it is in the diary.
- Use Evidence-Based Marketing: Track your lead sources, measure conversions, and optimise around what delivers the best outcomes. That’s how you find and help more people.
Ultimately, ethical marketing isn’t about being the loudest. It’s about being visible and clear. And it’s about ensuring the patients who would benefit most from what you do don’t get stuck seeing someone who’ll sell them complete nonsense instead.
You don’t have to become a full-time marketer. But if you want to run an ethical, effective clinic – one that genuinely helps more people get better – then you do have to stop hiding. And you do have to start learning how to show the world that you are the best option. If you need help with that, we’re here.
