Marketing Your Private Practice - Part I

 I often say in my marketing presentations that there is no secret formula or magic bullet to filling your private practice — the key to success is to select a few simple tactics and do them consistently.

I like to use the model developed by C.J. Hayden, author of “Get Clients Now!,” to help you understand how this works. Marketing is like a water system; it’s constantly “in flow.”

You start with buckets of prospects, contacts, leads, and referrals. The first stage is filling the pipeline. The second stage is following up. Then you get to the third stage — which is the “presentation” stage. For therapists, this is usually a phone conversation. Prospective clients either say “yes” or “no.” Yes is they book an appointment. No is “I’ll get back to you” or “No thanks.”

The key questions to ask yourself are: Where in this cycle are you stuck? Which stage needs more work? Do you need more people contacting you? Do you need help getting them to the point where you can talk on the phone for five minutes to see if what they need and what you offer is a good fit? Do you need help following up with folks who don’t say “Yes” right away?

Do you consistently capture the names and e-mail addresses of people who contact you? Few therapists bother to build a database of prospective clients to keep in touch with until they say yes. Even fewer actually keep in touch with those prospects. Yet it’s easy to send an informative quarterly e-mail newsletter to prospective clients who contacted you at one time.

There is also a mathematical formula at work here. The general guideline across all industries is that you need 30 people in your pipeline to yield 1 client. Because therapy clients “self-identify” themselves for the most part, I believe the ratio for therapy clients is actually closer to 6-to-1. For every 6 people who find you, one will become a client.

In order to effectively build your private practice, you need to cultivate relationships. These can be relationships with prospective clients, referral sources, insurance companies, EAP providers, or anyone else in a position to either become a client or send new clients your way.

Build your visibility in order to be in touch with enough people to convert into clients. To gain visibility, you need to market yourself.

Marketing is telling people what you do, over and over again. It’s a process where prospective clients get to know, like, and trust you.

More on this in Part Two.