Which Therapy Marketing Strategies Are Working For My Practice

I’ve written a lot about therapy marketing strategies, and today I wanted to give an update after my most recent move.

Last year I moved to San Diego, CA from San Jose, CA. About a month after the move I started marketing my practice.

While I’m still seeing my existing clients virtually, I pretty much started from scratch as far as marketing in San Diego.

I thought this would be a good time to check in with myself to see what’s working, what’s not, and what tweaks I can make to improve my therapy marketing strategies.

I’ll take you along with me while I do this so hopefully you can glean from my process as well!

Starting Over

After moving, I completely started over marketing my practice. I moved to a new place, changed my practice name, and bought a new domain name. Therefore, I couldn’t rely on my prior marketing tools to keep my practice filled.

I released a video, a few months after moving, sharing the 8 therapy marketing strategies I planned to implement to market my practice.

Let’s see how those strategies worked out, shall we?

Did My 8 Therapy Marketing Strategies Work?

1) Changing My Business Name

Changing my business name has indeed helped clarify my therapy niche.
I changed my business name from “Life Christian Counseling” to “Affirming Christian Counseling”, and this has made my purpose clearer.

2) Psychology Today

The only things I changed about my profile were my practice name and location.
Psychology Today was not working for me the way it used to when I lived in San Jose.
I decided to go ahead and email and ask Psychology Today to deactivate my profile because I would rather put energy into the strategies that are working for me right now.

3) Local SEO

I did make changes on my website to indicate my new location is San Diego.
This did help bring some more clients who are based in San Diego my way.
But, I also got many folks contacting me that were from all across the nation.
This tells me that I have some more tweaks I need to make related to my local SEO.

4) Google Business Profile

Google Business Profile is free, and it has helped some searchers find me.
It hasn’t given me enough traffic to send tons of referrals my way, but folks are finding me in Google searches. And that is reassuring!

5) Regular Blogging

I added a new blog about once a week for about 8 weeks after I started marketing my practice.
Then, I fell off the wagon. (Moving and two small children were keeping me busy!)
But, I really want to get back into posting regularly because it has been working SO well for my practice!
I’ve built up my SEO primarily through these blog posts.
And it has helped build trust with potential clients.
Blogging is one of the primary things I am going to focus on going forward.

6) Networking

I really hit the ground running with this strategy.
As I meet people who I connect with as a friend/colleague/consult partner I keep reinitiating with them.
The circle of folks who I have been reaching out to has gotten smaller, but I have gotten much more intentional in spending time with them.
I have met 3 times each with about 4-5 people who I connect well with.
This hasn’t helped send referrals to my practice…yet. But it has made me feel encouraged and supported as I put down roots professionally in San Diego.
My hope is to collaborate with these local colleagues and be able to cross-post to each other’s websites. This will help strengthen my local SEO.

7) Network With Local Leaders

My plan was to reach out to local leaders that overlapped with my therapy niche.
For example, since I work with LGBTQ+ Christians, I planned to connect with local church leaders of affirming churches.
I used this strategy more in San Jose, but I actually decided to deprioritize this strategy on my list.
I haven’t reached out to any local leaders at this point, because I noticed that my favorite clients to work with are folks who have not yet come out to anybody.
Therefore, those local leaders are not going to know to refer that person to my practice.

8) HARO For Backlinks

I fell off the bandwagon on this one!
My half-hearted effort using HARO hasn’t paid off, because I don’t have any backlinks to my new website.
At this point, I think it’s going to be wise to spend more time on the local SEO by backlinking with other local therapists.
I will probably spend less time on HARO for SEO because I’m already getting website traffic nationwide.

My Takeaways

Whew! That felt like a trip down memory lane!

Clearly there were several strategies that I didn’t follow through with in the way that I had planned. Some I intentionally chose not to pursue, and others got lost in the shuffle of life.

For now, I plan to focus on local SEO building. In particular, I want to prioritize blogging weekly, collaborating and backlinking with local therapists, and keeping up with my local Google Business Profile.

But wait, is it working?!

I realized I never actually spelled out if my therapy marketing strategies are working. Am I getting clients from my existing marketing strategies?

I am pleased to report that I have had a steady, fairly slow, trickle of folks finding me. And the folks that are reaching out to me are such an ideal fit for me! So something about my marketing strategy is working really well to help me find clients who will stick with me, and come back for more sessions.

Find What Works For YOU!

Also, I’d like to be clear that this is just the marketing strategy that’s working for me. I’m always happily surprised that strategies that don’t seem to quite work for me often are the very strategy that fills someone else’s practice.

So it’s so important to explore what fits best for your strengths and your clients so that you can find that nice sweet spot of a marketing strategy that fits for you.