Are you ready to play a game?
Let’s play free association. If I say marketing what is the first word that comes to mind?
It is sleazy, unpleasant, distasteful, hate, salesmanship or maybe your word is a bit more positive such as; like, enjoy, fun, doable, easy.
If you are like many therapists your word probably didn’t make the positive list?
Why is that and why do you hate marketing so much?
Often when we think MARKETING we always think is EQUAL to SALES, right?
Or just maybe if you are brand new to this practice building stuff you just said, “I have no idea what marketing is about.” I am going to do my best to help you learn to market yourself and really like it or maybe just tolerate it better; after all, I am human and not a miracle worker
Marketing has been defined by The American Marketing Association as “the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.”
What does that mean in real words? It means you as the clinician must be able to communicate with you client how you can help them, you must convey a “set of institutions” aka in therapist speak: a set of ideas, interventions, and how the processes of therapy works. A therapist must be able to demonstrate to a potential client that that you understand the needs of that client and their pain.
Marketing ourselves is essentially telling our clients how we are different from other therapists without putting other therapists down.
Each of you reading this article is unique and different from other therapists because of your background, personality and how we use the techniques that were all taught in graduate school. We must be able to express to our client how working with us feels, how what we do can help them and what we do in the therapy room. When a client calls a therapist, they are looking to see if we can help them solve their problem. Clients have often Googled their symptoms before the call and will ask you specifically what you know about this problem(Fill in the blank) and what things do you do to help with this type of problem.
Clinicians need to be able to clearly state on their website how they help clients with these types of symptoms aka your niche or specialties. When you receive that first phone call you must be able to speak to that person’s pain point. One of my niches is working with victims of trauma. When a client calls me, I am able to quickly get to their pain points of anxiety, uneasiness, sleep disturbances, hyper-vigilance or fights with their partner by my knowing their concerns and expressing what I know quickly often makes the relationship with the client. Clients often will say “Oh yes, like when I cry my husband doesn’t know what to do” or they say, “You get me, that is exactly how I feel about it.” Clients want us to understand us them and they want us to really listen and hear them. This is not a new skill you must learn; this is just talking to our clients, right? This is what we clinicians do, we listen and reflect back to our clients. This is marketing!
I know it’s not selling a product but it is “selling us” to our clients.
In our therapy sessions, we work off our treatment plan and we persuade our clients to change their behavior or thoughts. We ask them to try on new behavior or to mediate or to role play how to talk to someone, again, we are encouraging, supporting, validating of their new behaviors, we may push them at times to give the new behavior a try. This can also be called that marketing. In fact, we often do this in session. Many of us give homework to our clients that too is “exchanging offerings” to help our clients feel better. We must be able to communicate the why of trying on new behaviors. That is marketing in the truest sense. Convincing over client objections to try a new behavior thus, having our clients feeling better in the process when our intervention helps.
I hope I have convinced you that we already are marketing by many of our interaction with our clients.
Now I am asking you to do the same type of behaviors outside your office. Be prepared to explain in 30 seconds or less who you work with, what problems do you solve? I explain that I work with people that have experienced trauma and that I work holistically to get the brain and body to communicate with each other again. If you look at my 30-second statement; it tells you who I work with, why I am different and what problems I work on. What does your 30-second “elevator speech” look like? What are your unique skills that you bring to the table? Who do you work with? If people you tell remember nothing but who you work with they are still more willing to refer to you when they hear of someone with that concern. Work on that 30-second speech; it is very valuable in explaining what you do and who you are.
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