If you’re in the healthcare sector, you know things change all of the time. From the latest treatment technique to following the latest insurance guidelines. The same is true for marketing healthcare services and it’s essential for your practice to thrive.
Pelvic health physical therapists play a critical role in addressing a range of pelvic dysfunction for both men and women. Unfortunately, there are barriers to the lack of education and understanding of this profession, impacting the success of some practices. This is where solid marketing comes into play.
During this post, I plan to provide you with invaluable healthcare marketing tips specifically tailored to the pelvic health physical therapist and their practice. By implementing the ideas provided, you can hope to see a boost in your practice’s success, increase caseload numbers, and overcome the barriers and challenges that are commonly faced by pelvic health practices and their patients.
Understanding the Landscape
Before we dive into specific healthcare marketing tips, I think it’s first important to talk about the current trends and challenges faced by the pelvic health industry. We can all agree that with a booming digital era, the way our patients seek healthcare services has changed tremendously from even ten years ago. By understanding this, it can help you, the pelvic health physical therapist create an effective marketing strategy that speaks to your target audience.
Healthcare Marketing Trends
Here are a few of the current trends that I feel are important for the pelvic health physical therapist to understand.
Embrace digital presence
Utilize educational content marketing
Consider telehealth services
Let’s break these three trends down, one by one.
Embracing Digital Presence
In a time primarily dominated by technology, having a strong online presence is critical for the success of any healthcare practice, not just pelvic health practices specifically. It’s important to have a professional website developed, whether by yourself or a professional, that is the digital face of your business.
It’s also beneficial to step into the social media world, utilizing these platforms to engage with your audience, share educational content, and build trust with your community in regards to the topic of pelvic health.
Utilize Educational Content Marketing
In that same token of leveraging your social media platforms, it’s important to create content deemed valuable by your target audiences. Create content that educates potential patients and answers questions that your ideal client might have in regards to pelvic health.
From video, audio, written, and social content formats, you are able to reach a specific audience but in a widespread manner. By providing content in various formats, you’re meeting your audience where they’re at and catering to various learning styles in the process. Learn about why every PT should be doing content marketing here.
Another great thing about creating content surrounding pelvic health, is that it helps to unpack certain conditions and treatment methods, as well as provide your potential patients with a sense of empowerment and hope. By doing this, you’re not only building a relationship with your audience, but also establishing trust and credibility, helping potential patients to feel more comfortable making the decision to work with you.
Consider Telehealth Services
Once again, in an age where our society relies heavily on digital platforms, considering offering telehealth services as a pelvic health physical therapist could benefit you. Take it from me, a physical therapist by trade and experienced pelvic health PT, when I first considered the idea of telehealth for pelvic health patients, it seemed strange to me.
How am I supposed to provide hands-treatment, manual interventions, etc.?
But in theory, we as pelvic health physical therapists strive to move the patient towards the ability to independently manage their symptoms. Whether this be with the purchase of pelvic rehab tools, such pelvic wands and dilators, or empowering the patient with the ability to perform self-massage for their c-section scarring.
When I began looking at it from the perspective of supporting patient independence, I could see where telehealth could successfully fit into the pelvic health practice.
If you’re not so sure about going completely virtual with your pelvic health patients, that’s okay too! Offering virtual consultations to screen if a patient fits your practice methods or offering virtual exercise sessions only but keeping more hands-on and manual sessions in-person are options too. Offering virtual sessions could potentially expand your reach beyond your local clinical, attracting an even larger client base.
Healthcare Marketing Tips
Now that we’ve addressed some of the current healthcare marketing trends, we can dive into healthcare marketing tips and some of the advice I can give you to help your practice thrive. Here are an overview of my key marketing tips:
Targeted advertising
Patient testimonials and success stories
Collaboration with other healthcare professionals
Community engagement
I’ve been providing marketing services for a little over a year now and have seen the wonders it has done for a pelvic health practice based out of Kentucky, simply by implementing these tips into her marketing strategy. Marketing in itself, not just healthcare marketing, is a slow-game of consistency, data collection, analysis, and implementation. Let’s dive in.
Consider Targeted Advertising
As a pelvic health physical therapist, you probably already have an idea of who your target audience is. You specialize in pelvic health dysfunction, and could even have a more narrow scope if you specialize in specific types of pelvic health dysfunction.
Because of your niche and target audience, developing target advertising becomes much more simple. Learn about the importance of your practice’s niche here.
Advertising platforms such as Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, and Google Ads can allow you to create highly targeted content that reaches the audience of your choice - specifically those of a specific age, location, and interests.
You want to tailor your content to address specific pelvic health issues and answer specific questions that your ideal client may have. It’s also handy to be able to utilize a specific piece of content you’ve created in the past that has done well with your audience to then turn into a targeted advertisement.
I’d like to mention that running ads is not for the beginner marketer. There are many steps that must fall into place when setting up an effective advertisement, which may be more appropriate for someone more skilled in marketing services.
This does not mean you can’t try ads on your own, but it would be wise to consult a marketing specialist to ensure you’re on the right track. After all, ads cost money, and you want your money going into something that is going to reap benefits.
Showcase Patient Testimonials and Success Stories
We all love a good success story, right? Our audience does too! Ensure that when finishing with a current patient’s plan of care that you ask them if they would feel comfortable providing a short written quote of their satisfaction, or even a short video clip explaining their success working with you.
Testimonials can be key to relating to your audience watching. If a potential patient can resonate with the struggles a former patient was going through and then see there is hope for their problem, this can be a really powerful way to drive potential leads to your practice.
Collaborate With Other Healthcare Professionals
We’re all in this together. As healthcare professionals, I think it’s safe to say that our goal is to benefit our patients and provide them with what they need to live a higher quality of life. As a pelvic health physical therapist, you have a specific patient population you are looking to work with, which also means there are a few specific healthcare professionals that also see these types of patients.
Establish relationships with your local obstetricians, gynecologists, and even primary care doctors. These relationships will not only benefit you, but those other healthcare professionals as well. Feeling confident in another healthcare provider’s treatment philosophy once getting to know them will allow you to confidently refer patients to them if the situation arises. The same goes with these healthcare professionals referring to you.
Building these relationships could significantly boost your caseload and build a network of trusted colleagues within your area, helping you all collectively to help patients get the services they need in the best way possible.
Engage With Your Local Community
This tip is especially helpful for brick and mortar pelvic health practices, or even virtual practices who seek to help patients in their local area.
Contact local fitness centers, get to know personal trainers in the area, and establish relationships with different community services. It’s a bonus if you can connect with local businesses that provide services specific to your ideal client. For example, if you can track down a personal trainer who specializes in working with moms, or a local fitness center that’s whole marketing strategy is to empower female fitness, these would be great connections to have.
Go to these facilities, become a member if you can and build relationships within these facility’s walls. It’s often important that you invest your time before requesting something in return. This could look like joining your local fitness center and working out there for a few months before approaching the manager or facility owner. Trust me, it seems a lot more professional if you invest your time and/or money in a facility before asking for something in return.
Once you’ve established relationships, offer to host workshops, webinars, or participate in the facilities annual health fair. Figure out how you and your services can fit into the community facility’s values and how you can add to that. Engaging with these community facilities not only helps to increase awareness about pelvic health, but could potentially put you directly in front of potential patient leads.
Breaking Down Barriers
As I touched on before, there are often barriers and poor stigma surrounding the topic of pelvic health. As a pelvic health physical therapist, I am certain you deal with this on a daily basis and strive to educate others to set them on the right track. I think it’s important to remember that people don’t know what they don’t know, but we can do something about that.
Implementing healthcare marketing strategies that benefit your practice helps to break down societal taboos surrounding pelvic health creating space for open conversations. That’s what we want after all, right? The ability for the people who need our services to feel comfortable seeking our services without fear of shame or disapproval.
We can promote a safe environment with our marketing strategies by addressing common misconceptions and providing education. This can be made possible by creating appropriate content, having conversations with community members or facilities, and so much more that has already been mentioned in this post. Learn more tips on marketing your pelvic health practice here.
If you’re serious about breaking down these barriers, consider providing free resources. This could look like free e-books, downloadable guides, and informative video content that empowers individuals to take control of their pelvic health.
Again, it’s important to understand that by providing these free resources, you are investing your time and efforts into helping others without expecting them to buy your services. A good phrase for this would be “YOGOWYPI,” you only get out what you put in. This builds your credibility and trust with your audience and long-term could potentially result in patients looking to address their pelvic health dysfunction.
Conclusion
In our ever-changing healthcare world, it’s important to consider effective marketing as a critical component for any pelvic health physical therapy practice. By embracing healthcare marketing trends, implementing specific strategies, and working to break down barriers faced by this population of providers and patients, you are on the right path to increase your caseload and make a positive impact on the well-being of our world. By following these healthcare marketing tips, the pelvic health physical therapist can pave the way for a thriving and impactful practice.
If you're interested in watching the video associated with this blog post, check it out here.
If you’re feeling stuck or overwhelmed as a pelvic health practice owner, or if you want to learn more about how I could help you and your practice, get in touch! I’d love to get to know you, learn about your practice, and help you meet your goals!
You can check out my website (linked here) to learn more about me and the services I offer.
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