Are you not getting therapy clients after opening your private practice doors? What should you do if your practice isn’t full or even half full? Or maybe it’s totally empty.
Someone left a Youtube comment on one of my videos on anxiety that I thought was a really great point. They said, “Having gained my license and opened the doors of my private practice two months ago, but not having found any clients yet, I’d absolutely trade the anxiety of seeing clients to the anxiety of my currently unpaid rent and bills piling up.”
Been there. Done that. Yes, that was for me, the most stressful part of my career. Let’s talk about that today!
Of course, no single blog post can address every single marketing idea. But, I want you to think about this article like a triage to go through if you find yourself not getting therapy clients. Start here and then keep building.
If you’d rather watch than read, check out the video version of the article below:
What is your marketing strategy?
Let’s suppose someone were to call me up and say, “Marie, I am freaking out. My doors have been open for weeks or months or longer and I have no clients/just a couple clients.”
First, I would ask, “What’s your existing marketing strategy?”
I know some of you don’t have any sort of marketing strategy. But, most of you reading probably do whether you know to call it that or not.
Basically, the question is, what avenues are available for potential clients to find you? You might be listed on Psychology Today, or maybe you are paneled with insurance, have a website, or have been networking with professionals. Most likely, there’s something you’ve tried to do to make a way for clients to find you.
Helping you to triage
I’d like you to think about this triage process like we’ve taken a car to the mechanic. We’re opening up the hood and assessing the situation.
If I’m thinking like a mechanic, I might ask you to start your car and then we would see what’s happening under the hood. Maybe there’s some strange noises, or you can tell something’s not working the way it should be.
Start from the beginning & look for snags
We want to follow a similar approach when we’re looking at your marketing strategies. Let’s imagine that you’re your own potential client. Try to walk through every step of the process of how they would go about finding you. Then you can see if there are any snags along the way.
Do your best to imagine you’re someone who doesn’t know your name and try to figure out how that person might find you.
So let’s pretend you have a Psychology Today profile that’s your primary avenue for potential clients to find you. Let’s say one of your favorite specialties is working with adults diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder.
You might open up Psychology Today and type in “autism”. Make sure your settings are set for your area and then click search. If your profile isn’t towards the top, the chances are really low that a potential client is going to contact you through that avenue.
Keep searching for your primary specialties and see where your listing shows up. How far do you have to scroll down before you get to your profile?
Even if your marketing strategy is less techy, you can still walk through this process just in a different way. Let’s say your primary marketing avenue is through networking with other professionals. Maybe check-in with some of those professionals and explain that you are doing an inventory of your marketing strategy. Ask if they’ve given your name out to any potential clients along the way. Their answers will give you some data to work with.
If it’s difficult at any point to find yourself in going through these search processes, then you have found a snag. This seems like a common snag for most therapists who have some marketing avenues available but their practice isn’t filling up.
Clients can find you but aren’t booking
If somehow, I’m wrong, and you run through this diagnostic strategy and your name is showing up but you’re still not getting therapy clients then that tells us that there’s a snag further down the line once someone has discovered that you exist.
In other words, the issue here typically isn’t that people can’t find you. Rather, it’s that they aren’t booking with you once they’ve found you.
Invite others to go through your marketing funnel
If your name is showing up at the top of search results or colleagues are referring clients to you but people just aren’t booking with you then I’d suggest you’d have a friend or trusted colleague run through your entire marketing funnel.
Your marketing funnel is the series of steps involved for somebody to go from discovering that you exist to booking with you.
Suppose your marketing funnel is your website showing up in Google search results. Start with your friend seeing your profile show up on Google search results and clicking on it.
Is there anything that happens between them showing up on your website and booking that is confusing or unclear? Maybe it’s not clear how to go about contacting you? Or maybe they thought they were going to find one thing when they clicked on your website but then the messaging didn’t match up and seemed to be saying something else?
If they could run through that with you then that’s going to give you a lot of information.
Seek *free* information to help fix snag
Hopefully at this point in the process you’ve identified some kind of snag. You might know how to fix some of these snags easily. But, for a lot of the snags, you’re probably going to be able to see what the snag is but not know how to fix it.
Let’s say Psychology Today is your primary avenue for clients to find you. You search for all your primary specialties and your profile is not showing up anywhere near the top. How can you get your profile to show up at the top?
Now that you have a pretty clear problem that needs fixing, I would suggest that you start by getting free, accessible information about how to fix it.
You can try YouTube, or asking for advice in therapist Facebook groups or therapist subreddits. Try asking your therapist networks to see what they advise. Ask folks you already know who are successfully marketing their practice through the same means that you are using.
Many times you can get quite a bit of information for free before you even have to pay for something.
Implement the feedback
Of course, implement whatever feedback you gather. Sometimes you’ll need to do something simple like tweaking a wording here or there. Other times it’s going to be more involved and take more time to implement.
Keep looking for snags!
At this point I would say: lather, rinse and repeat.
What I don’t want to happen is for you to go through this whole triage process of identifying the snag and fixing it and then think that you’re all done. That’s not how these things typically work. There’s maintenance, you know?
Maybe you fixed one thing but you didn’t realize that further down the road there’s also an additional problem you have yet to discover. Keep going back and running through the tips that I named above. You might find more snags as you go.
When you need to pivot marketing strategies
Now I think for most folks, if you run through everything I just suggested, that might be enough to fix the problem.
But there’s definitely still folks who will smooth out all the kinks in their existing marketing strategy but still not get enough clients. If you’re still not getting therapy clients, now’s the time to pivot and consider a different marketing avenue.
Keep the one you have and add a new one. Or if the one you’ve been using is completely not working for you, you can drop it and start a new one.
Generally, it’s wisest to take on one new marketing strategy at a time. Fine-tune it. Master it. Make it the best you can make it within your reasonable skill set. And then once that’s smoothed out, you can add on a new marketing avenue after that.
In time, I think it does actually make a lot of sense to have multiple avenues for potential clients to find you. But, I encourage you to just focus on one of them at a time.
Ending thoughts
This wraps up how I would approach this imagined coaching scenario. The above steps include the line of questions that I would run through with anyone who is not getting therapy clients. Hopefully these tips can help you get off onto the right foot.
Marketing Resources
I have a whole set of YouTube videos packed with different marketing strategy advice and tips. Look through the playlist and find one that fits what avenue you are working on right now.
Want to hear more about what marketing strategies I use? Check out the article all about what avenues I’ve found successful for filling my practice.
If you would like more in-depth help in setting up sustainable ways for clients to find you, I have an online course called the Client Attraction System. It will help you reliably attract your favorite kinds of clients to your therapy practice.
And until next time, from one therapist to another: I wish you well!
-Marie
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