The best advice for creating a physical therapy marketing plan.

Introduction

Considerations Before Starting Your Plan

The Most Important Part of Any Physical Therapy Marketing Plan

Testing Your Plan

Strategic Marketing Plans for PTs

Free Rx & Letter Review

Marketing Packages

The importance of a good physical therapy marketing plan for practice success can’t be underestimated. Implementing a good plan will have an immediate impact on practice growth.

If you’re responsible for marketing your practice, you already know how much work goes into creating a plan. You also know that your plan’s quality depends on the experience and expertise of the planner. Before you assign this important task, ask yourself, have they ever created a complete plan for a clinic like yours and implemented it successfully? It’s one thing to blog about it, quite another to do it.

There are plenty of websites with posts about “how to” create a PT marketing plan. Most of them do a good job in hitting some helpful topics like these:

• Set down your goals and budget.
• Define your target audience.
• Evaluate your competition.
• Create a unique value proposition.
• Create your messaging.
• Select your media.
• Track results.

That’s a good general list, but it’s not a practical one for most PTs because creating and running a marketing plan is a full-time function for any clinic – even the smallest. More importantly, most PTs don’t have the right support or training to do it well. Creating and implementing a good plan is challenging enough for marketing experts with a team, so it’s important to think about the expertise and resources of the planner.  That’s why I don’t understand why many other bloggers suggest it’s a D0-It-Yourself project like cleaning the garage. In fact, the blogs I read on this topic (and that’s a lot!), overlook the most important part of a PT marketing plan…

Storyboards bring your marketing plan to life. They are the most important part of any marketing plan. They are a reflection of everything in the plan as they show the branding elements, the messaging strategy, competitive slant, target audience, and the product-service positioning.

For example, download a sample storyboard from our Workers Compensation executive letter collection. See if you can use it to describe most of the key elements of the marketing plan for WC services.

What do you think?

The board becomes the embodiment of all the key elements of a workers comp marketing plan. If your storyboards hit the mark, you’re headed in the right direction.

Imagine how easy it is to go from this sample storyboard to a  mail campaign supported by billboards, digital display ads, broadcast ads, an email series, or whatever format makes sense.

A marketing plan without a collection of storyboards lacks the most essential ingredient – the expression of the practitioner’s VISION. But although the boards bring the plan to life, that doesn’t guarantee results. To get results and to maximum your marketing leverage, the concept needs to be appealing in the marketplace. Gauging the appeal of your message is not that hard. You just need to test.

Obviously, as mentioned above, much of the marketing plan is conceptual, a vision. Once the concepts become storyboards, you’re ready to test. Testing is another topic entirely, but what you need to know for your marketing plan is that the only tests you should care about are live campaigns. That’s because it’s easy to KILL an appealing concept in the crib by relying exclusively on staff and friends to stand in for real live consumers. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t listen to input from staff and friends, but be careful!

The best storyboards are created with four things:

1. A deep appreciation of what the customer needs,
2. A deep appreciation for the voids in the market,
3. Your ability to setup your business to fill the voids most valued by customers, and
4. A powerful messaging strategy to make your unique selling advantages instantly evident to your audience.

Seeing the storyboard letter like the one you downloaded above unfolds the entire vision of the marketing strategy. For our purposes here, it doesn’t matter if you like the strategy or not. Instead, ask yourself, does it quickly communicate what the customer needs? Does it offer to a fill a void valued by the typical customer in the market segment?

Focusing your attention on those questions when looking at the concepts is the best way to evaluate the marketing plan. If the marketing plan and storyboards are done correctly, you should instantly feel the appeal of the strategy and get excited! As a result, your confidence level rises, marketing anxiety disappears, and you’re in the right frame of mind to implement your plan.

If you’re looking for some inspiration to spark your own concepts and vision, download our Clinic Owner’s Marketing Guide. Please let me know what you think.

Thanks for reading.