On your website, should you be building relationships or triggering a one-time call? In your practice, the answer is likely to be both. Unfortunately, much of the information on digital marketing is oriented towards impulse purchasing when you need to be thinking about building relationships that result in new clients.
The relative weight that you should assign to relationship building versus just getting the appointment, depends on who you need to engage with on your site to grow your practice. Let’s look at three examples:
- Dr. W. provides group therapy for substance abusers. On his website, he wants to generate professional referrals from local mental health providers who will refer their own clients to John’s groups.
- Dr. M. provides couples counseling and marriage therapy. On her website, she wants appointment requests from potential clients.
- Dr. K. works with children who are being bullied and their parents. On his website, he wants to engage with parents in support groups for bullied children, and with school psychologists who will refer potential clients.
In which example do you need to engage in relationship building? All of them. The difference is that Dr. M. needs to develop a relationship with the client, while Dr. W. needs to develop a relationship with local physicians and mental health professionals. Who does Dr. K. need to develop relationships with in order to generate new clients?
As an exercise, think about your practice, and your growth potential. Who do you need to be building relationships with?
Do you need to keep on marketing just to stay in place?
At this stage, you might be getting skittish. After all, we are trained for our helping skills, not for being marketing professionals. Not a day goes by when we don’t hear from one of our clients:
But I’m a professional therapist, not a marketing person!
Absolutely true. And, totally irrelevant. You need a steady flow of new clients to make your practice grow. Indeed, you need new clients just to keep you practice from shrinking. So, like it or not, your are in the marketing business. The better you become at marketing, the more time you will have to provide services and the more money that you will have at the end of the month. The worse you are at marketing, the less opportunities you will have to actually help people.
Get started building relationships
The good news is that you can be quite good at building relationships. After all, this is exactly what you trained to do. All that we need to do is apply your therapy and counseling skills to building relationships.
Potential clients, following a referral or search result, will first encounter you on your website or on social media, you need to start building relationships from the first digital encounter. If you miss that first encounter, you are unlikely to get a second chance. Reach out to Therapy Everywhere today to schedule a free consult. Start building the relationships that will result in new clients.