April 8, 2020
Read time:
2 minutes
When starting a private practice, you need to constantly attract new clients. As we all know, clients come and go, and when they do, you want systems in place to gain new clients.
You can attract clients through marketing. Marketing can be really expensive, but it doesn’t have to be.
Here, I go over my top strategies for affordably marketing your private practice.
Let’s dive in.
If you have a website set up, you can blog.
Blogs are great for attracting clients who are in the research phase of the hiring process. These potential clients are looking for answers about seasonal depression, coping mechanisms, and more online. Meet potential clients where they are in their mental health journey by answering these “top of funnel” questions.
When we talk about “top of funnel,” we are referring to the marketing funnel (animated below).
Potential clients researching their problems and then considering therapists are in the top two stages of the funnel. In these stages, they are asking questions that you can answer in blogs.
To find topics for blogs, head to alsoasked.com, answerthepublic.com, or other free keyword research tools.
You can write topics that you think people are searching for. But keyword research tools provide their suggestions based on data, so you know that people are definitely searching for these terms online.
Google My Business (GMB) is a free listing that you can claim on Google’s local map results (shown below).
These listings are huge opportunities for getting in front of clients. It can take a long time for your website to rank for your target “bottom of funnel,” high-transaction keywords like “therapist for anxiety.” But if you’re ranking in the local results, you actually appear above the organic results. All you have to do is set up and optimize your listing. Claiming it is easy. When optimizing, use keywords generously and make sure to fill out your whole profile. Include lots of images, and post regularly. The posts go away after two weeks, but by keeping your GMB fresh, you can rank higher.
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There are plenty of email marketing services that are free. I use SendinBlue and love it. SendinBlue is highly compliant with General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) and makes tracking, double opt-in, A/B testing, and other features easy. Their free plan suits my needs.
Although email marketing takes time to plan content, you can minimize this time considerably. I recommend sending a newsletter with links to recent posts and general inspiration to your clients and potential clients every other week to start.
Better yet, plan some funnels to automatically send out emails for you (even when you're sleeping!).
Links from other websites to your website are called backlinks.
Backlinks boost the authority of your domain, which helps you rank higher on search engines. Link building takes time, but it’s free!
You can start by making profiles on more obscure social sites like medium.com. If you have an office, you can also make profiles on local directories like Angies List or Yellow Pages. These links helps your Google My Business efforts as well.
You can also reach out to different associations and memberships, your school, or other institutions. Offer to write a post on your experience as a therapist and link back to your website on the post.
I’m always updating posts to keep them as relevant as possible. If you have any ways that you affordably market your practice, contact me!
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Hi, I’m Kristie Plantinga, the founder of Therapieseo. After working in the digital marketing industry as a content strategist, writer, website production manager, associate, and content manager, I decided to start my own business and serve a population close to my heart: therapists.
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