The PT Marketing Newsletter | October

7 DIGITAL MARKETING

TRENDS TO GROW YOUR PT PRACTICE

Inside: • 6 Tips for a More Effective Website Homepage • 3 Easy Ways to Train Your Team to be Marketers • The Best Tax Deduction for Your Practice

Neil Trickett, PT

NEIL’S MARKETING CORNER

3 Easy Ways to Train Your Team to be PT Marketers Patients spend the majority of their time in care interacting with their therapist, front office staff, and administrative personnel. These team members craft the patient’s impression of your practice, embody your mission and sell your brand simply by doing their jobs. As a practice owner, you want these moments to be more than routine experiences—they are the foundations of your internal marketing. Your team needs to be PT marketers actively promoting your practice – and the physical benefits of each treatment to their quality of life to patients. Create Positive Memories Every time your staff brings a smile to someone’s face, they are being PT marketers. Those smiles equal positive memories of success, achievement, and healthfulness for patients. Your team has transformed the experience into a moment of personal triumph. Recall some of the best testimonials your team has received—what do they have in common? Patients remember their PT and how that person helped them to overcome a challenge and feel better. Build Relationships Beyond Treatments As your team works with a patient, they come to know things about them. Train your team to try and find at least one commonality with every patient. This cannot be forced but should be a meaningful result of active communication during care. Encourage Referrals A spouse or family member referral is the most common— followed closely by a friend or co-worker. But think about other word of mouth communications such as a personal trainer to a client, a parent watching a youth sports game or a referral from someone in a workout class. Your team needs to be equipped to grow the practice’s referral program. There are a couple marketing tools that can help: • Have your PTs distribute referral cards after each session. Try having ones with a variety of designs or messages to keep them feeling relevant. • Go digital and include a referral option in email communications. For example, say a patient mentions that their neighbor is also having knee pain. When you email out this week’s exercises, include a note telling the patient to forward the email to their friend. • Create an eye-catching promotional giveaway that makes sense for your practice’s demographics. Do you see a lot of

THE BEST TAX DEDUCTION FOR YOUR PRACTICE

How to Save and Make Money Have you planned out your tax reduction strategy yet? Now is the time to start thinking about reducing your tax liability for this year and how to maximize your ability to grow next year. The best tax deduction in any business is one that is 100% tax deductible while creating new revenue the following year. That is why marketing is your best investment, it is 100% tax deductible and generates you income. End of Year Benefits Postcards and Letters are a powerful way to get your new patient numbers up to overcome the holiday season slow down. Let your patients know that their insurance benefits will soon be expiring for physical therapy, and to act now to use them or lose them. Go online now to place your order and increase your patient reactivations while reducing your tax liability! www.practicepromotions.net/physical-therapy- marketing-store

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CONNECT WITH Neil Trickett, PT 3 Get PT marketing tips from our blog 3 Access to marketing training videos 3 Connect with other practice owners

athletes? Give away a reusable water bottle with your logo to catch eyes at gyms and events. If you treat mostly seniors, consider a tote bag that they can use while at PT and after when shopping around town. Remember, it’s best to think of marketing as not one person’s job—but as a core part of everyone’s daily responsibilities. Leverage the power of your fantastic team and have them become your internal PT marketers.

Practice Promotions Physical Therapy Marketing

Practice Promotions

frustrated. A patient’s first experience with your practice should never be remembered as a hassle. Make it easy for them to find your contact information straight from your homepage. Then, they can call to make an appointment, ask questions or get directions easily. 5) Add Your Blogs and Social Media Being current and relevant is important for PT practices. Patients need to believe that you are on the edge of care, treatments, and technology. Showcasing your blogs and social media feeds directly on your homepage keeps you looking on top of it. Especially if you see a lot of young professionals, it is important to be up to date. That means that blogs from 2 years ago and Facebook posts from months back won’t cut it. Professional websites are able to pull in the most recent blogs and Facebook posts directly onto your homepage. Patients can see that you are frequently sharing informative content and staying active in the community. As an added bonus, there is little to no effort on your part—just blog and post like usual and your homepage is automatically updated. For more on blogging and social media download your free social media marketing eBook today! 6) Think About Mobile Users Over 80% of website traffic comes from mobile phones (and that number continues to grow!). How does your current PT website look on your iPhone? Is it easy to scroll, click and navigate to key information? Do you have to zoom in and move around a lot to read the text? Are the images grainy or blurry? If 8 out of 10 people are seeing your website on their smartphone, you want them to have an ideal experience. Professionally developed websites are mobile-first and responsive while using the latest technologies. They will resize images, scale up text and reduce page load times to optimize the experience for mobile. Likewise, you should consider little things like click to call phone numbers (when you just tap the phone number and it initiates a call) and maps navigation to easily get directions on the go. Every chance that you have to improve a patients experience, whether in clinic or online, is key in attracting more patients to PT. YOUR WEBSITE HOMEPAGE IS THE DIGITAL FRONT DOOR OF YOUR PT PRACTICE.

6 TIPS FOR A MORE EFFECTIVE Website Homepage Your website homepage is the digital front door of your PT practice. When a prospective patient first comes to your site, you want them to be impressed with your professional design and informative content. Additionally, you want to provide an experience that functions flawlessly across all devices. It takes a combination of both PT marketing and web development to create a successful homepage. Let’s explore some homepage design ideas that have proven successful for other physical therapy practices. 1) Use High-Quality Full-Color Photos The first thing people will see when they visit your homepage is the imagery. You want them to be impressed! Professional, high- resolution photography is essential as it will be able to handle all devices from smartphones to large monitors. The photos also need to set the stage and mood for your practice. Images of patients receiving hands-on care, doing activities they love, and being active work well to show the improvement PT treatment can have on their life. 2) Feature Patient Testimonials Someone who is visiting your website may be visiting 3-4 other practices before choosing a provider. Therefore, it is important to make an emotional connection with them to start building a relationship beyond the screen. Reading what other people say about your practice provides a sense of reality and authenticity. It also shows that you value your patients enough to feature them prominently in your online experience. Similarly, prospective patients are also visiting review sites to see what past patients say about your practice. You validate those 5-star reviews by including some of your own on your homepage. 3) Describe Common Conditions and Benefits of PT An informed prospect is 10x more likely to become a patient because they can feel confident in their decisions. You need to educate website visitors about physical therapy and how it can help them. Now, this doesn’t mean a 500-word essay on PT. Your content still needs to follow website best practices and be quickly scannable. Focus on bulleted lists or short statements that get to the point. Additionally, this a chance to build some content for SEO (search engine optimization) so look for keywords or phrases that

arecommonlysearched.Werecommendconditions such as back pain, knee pain, shoulder pain or post- surgical rehabilitation. Incorporating a mix of text and icons or small thumbnail images also improves comprehension. PRO TIP: A list of conditions on a page does not rank well in Google. Instead, have a menu dropdown with a page for each condition. Remember to make sure each page then has at least 350 words, an image or two, and a testimonial if you have one about the topic. Think about the last time you needed to call a local business or get directions. Was it easy to find the phone number and address? If it was, you probably don’t even remember the experience because you were able to get to your goal quickly. But, when you struggle to make a call or find an address, you get 4) Make Your Contact Information Easily Accessible

Inside This Issue:

Marketing Newsletter Powerful marketing to build your practice

• 6 Tips for a More Effective Website Homepage • 3 Easy Ways to Train Your Team to be Marketers • The Best Tax Deduction for Your Practice • 7 Digital Marketing Trends to Grow Your Practice

Live Video Live video might have been the biggest trend of 2018 and, it's not going anywhere. According to Facebook, 78% of their users are already watching live stream videos – and they spend 3x more time watching them, and comment more than 10x more during live videos. Live streams are perceived as more authentic and personable than a pre- planned social media post. Video (And Video Ads) Will Keep Growing Like live video, traditional video will keep growing too. Studies expect video to account for 85% of total internet traffic by 2019. Uploading videos like patient testimonials and exercise demonstrations to your Facebbok page and boosting those to your page followers is a great way to get involved in this marketing trend. Chatbots Will Become a Normal Thing Chatbots will soon be the first place someone goes to order a pizza, choose a mobile plan, or even book a hotel room. Chatbots allow you to deliver the right message to the right user at the right time. What more could we ask for? Data says chatbots will dominate too. According to a study out of LivePerson, only 19% of the 5,000 people surveyed had a negative perception of chatbots. Further, 33% had a positive view and 48% were indifferent so long as their problems were resolved. Our Platinum and Ultimate website plans now come with a custom chatbot developed for your practice. Email gwen@ practice-promotions for more information. Mobile Marketing More than 1.2 billion people worldwide use mobile. Users spend an average of 2.8 hours on mobile daily compared to 2.4 hours on desktop. With so many people using mobile and having access to the internet almost anywhere they go the importance of mobile marketing is evident. Making sure your website, emails, and digital newsletter look great on mobile will be even more crutial to reaching a broad audience in 2019.

7 Digital Marketing Trends to Grow Your PT Practice It's hard to believe that we're now in the final quarter of 2018. Many of you are already working with your account managers to craft end-of-year marketing messages to your patients. As we anticipate the new year, let’s take a look at 4 trends we see taking over the digital marketing space in 2019.

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