I was thrilled to be invited to a DPT to CEO Facebook live with Morgan Meese! Morgan is a cash-based physical therapist, business coach, and digital marketing specialist who is quite the guru in her field.
During this Facebook live, Morgan and I went into detail about the importance of content marketing for physical therapy practices.
In this post, I am going to build off Morgan & I's conversation and dive into the benefits of using content marketing to spread awareness about your practice, gain your audience's trust, and generate leads to grow your business. Read on to learn more!
Challenges Practice Owners Face Without Content Marketing
There are a few problems that practice owners run into when getting started with their business, and sometimes even into their first couple years of practice.
The first issue is that the concept of marketing and getting people to your business doesn't have a "quick fix." It's important for practice owners to understand that they're not just going to start a business and then have clients show up the next day. You have to put the work into marketing your practice to start seeing results, and even then, it can be a long process.
Another problem we see when helping practice owners is that they aren't communicating well enough about the problems that they can solve for their potential clients. They might be focusing too much on what I would call the "modalities" or the interventions that occur in physical therapy. Rather than that, they should be focusing on what problem it is they can solve for someone. Their content should speak to their audience in a very specific manner. For example "I help [person/ideal client] with [problem] so that they can [result]."
Lastly, without a consistent content marketing strategy and showing up for your audience, how do you expect them to get to know you? To like you? To trust you? Content marketing, done the right way, can break down these barriers between you and your audience.
Content Marketing to Spread Awareness About Your Physical Therapy Practice
Spreading awareness about who you are, what you do, and who you help has never been easier. A consistent content marketing strategy is a great way to introduce your practice, the services you offer, and how to get in touch with you to get started.
How are people supposed to know you exist if you don't tell them? Content marketing solves this problem.
On a different note, because you are spreading awareness about your practice, you also really start to fine-tune your "patient avatar," or the type of person you are really trying to reach. Creating content specific to this "patient avatar" is something that helps your audience to know whether or not you are what they are looking for. This comes back to your unique selling point or "I help [person/ideal client] with [problem] so that they can [result]."
Content Marketing for a Physical Therapy Practice is Cost-Effective
A barrier to most businesses at the beginning is finances. Sometimes, we will have practice owners so hesitant to start effectively marketing their practice, because they think they have to dump a ton of money into their marketing budget.
Social media is free. I'll be the first to say how grateful I am for free social media platforms (hopefully it stays that way😅). As a physical therapy practice owner, there's no excuse for not getting started marketing your practice via social media. We all use it and even the most technically challenged individuals should be able to easily figure out how to make a simple image + caption post on Instagram or Facebook. Other forms of free content marketing include a YouTube channel, LinkedIn, etc. What are you waiting for?
On a different note, if you have a business, you probably (or should) have a business website. Most website platforms have an internal blog builder included. This is another cost-effective and easy way to create content for your audience. This is called long-form content because it requires a bit longer attention than a social media post, referred to as short-form content.
With both social media and a simple blog that can be updated monthly, it's critical you are telling people to go look at your stuff. Direct them to your website, your YouTube Channel, your Facebook Group, your free resources, whatever it may be. Use these free means of marketing to keep your audience intertwined within your content!
Using a Content Waterfall to Repurpose Content for Your Physical Therapy Practice
Now that you're probably feeling overwhelmed by the thought of creating content on several different platforms. Let me give you some peace of mind. There is a concept called the Waterfall Content Strategy. Essentially, with strategy, you are able to repurpose a "top of the waterfall" piece of content (i.e. video) into several other forms of content. The benefit of this strategy is that you are not having to come up with new topics every single time you create a piece of content. In theory, you could use the same topic for an entire month's worth of content.
Let me break this down a little further. For example, as a pelvic health physical therapy practice, you create a video on the topic of "Kegels May Not Be The Answer." The diagram below shows how you can take this one piece of content and turn it into several forms of content over the month.
The cool thing about creating various forms of content is much of it will be available to your audience forever!
Meeting Your Audience Where They're At
To finish off this post, one of the other really neat concepts of content marketing across different platforms is that you are able to meet your audience where they're at. You can give sort of this "everywhere" presence when posting on several platforms, even if it's the same content you are posting.
For example, creating a social media post about "booking a free 15-minute consult" can be posted on Instagram on Tuesday and Facebook on Thursday. By doing this, you will reach different audiences on different platforms, broadening your reach.
It's also important to remember that not everyone learns the same way. Not everyone enjoys receiving content in the same capacity. As mentioned before, there is long and short-form content. Some of your audience is going to enjoy instant gratification by scrolling through your Instagram page, whereas others would prefer to digest a blog on your website. By creating various forms of content, you're catering to all preferences and learning styles.
To wrap things up, content marketing has many benefits for your physical therapy practice and is not as complicated as you may think. Get started today! If you're interested in checking out the Facebook live video with Morgan & I, check it out here!
Interested in learning more about the benefits of content marketing or need help getting started? Get in touch! I’d love to get to know you, learn about your business, and learn how I can help you grow in the digital world!
Check out my website (linked here) to learn more about me and the services I offer.
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