Marketing can be challenging for therapists. They tend to (rightly so) focus more on the clinical execution of their skills and less on promoting them. But if therapists set aside a couple hours each month to focus on marketing the skills and programs in their departments, they’d see an uptick in their caseload.

So where do you start?  

The first step to any marketing is determining your audience. In the case of most rehab departments, there are typically two—referral sources and potential patients.

Let’s say you want to promote your sports medicine program. Your potential audiences for referral sources would probably be orthopedic doctors, family practitioners, athletic directors and coaches. On the potential patient side, your audience would be athletes and/or their parents.

Next, you determine the best way to reach those audiences.

In the case of most referral sources, we typically recommend hand-written notes or informational program cards. For potential patients, you could pitch a success story to a local news outlet, hang posters in locker rooms, run newspaper or radio ads, or use social media to educate people about your sports medicine program.

Obviously, there is leg work involved in getting these things accomplished. At RehabVisions, we have created resources to enable our therapists to easily market their services. Our company intranet includes templates of letters and notes as well as advertising examples. Likewise, we recently launched a print shop where our employees can order special program cards customized with their facility logo and shipped directly to them. We also have a social marketing manager who provides expertise in all things digital and related to social media.

Our thinking is you can have amazing therapists and provide life-changing treatments but it won’t get you very far unless you tell people about them. So, make the extra effort. It will be worth it.