Tag: PT Marketing

The 10 Text Challenge to Increase Patient Reactivation

In the world of physical therapy, there was once a prevailing belief that providing high-quality care would naturally lead to a steady flow of patients through word-of-mouth referrals. However, the landscape has shifted dramatically, and relying solely on this approach is no longer sufficient. During our recent webinar, we discussed a powerful and straightforward strategy to enhance patient reactivation and grow your practice: text messaging. This blog post will delve into the strategies discussed, with a special focus on “The 10 Text Challenge.”

Why Use Text Messaging?

Text messaging offers a direct and personal way to communicate with your patients. It ensures immediate communication, as messages are typically read within minutes. Patients find text messages convenient and less intrusive compared to phone calls. Additionally, text messaging allows for personalized communication, increasing patient reactivation.

Implementing Text Messaging in Your Practice

To effectively integrate text messaging into your practice, start by collecting explicit patient consent to send text messages. Choose a reliable text messaging platform tailored for healthcare providers and segment your audience based on their treatment plans, preferences, and communication history. Personalize each message by using patient names and referencing their specific conditions or past treatments to ensure a personal touch.

The 10 Text Challenge

One of the most effective strategies we discussed in the webinar is “The 10 Text Challenge.” This challenge is designed to reactivate past patients and fill your schedule quickly. Here’s a brief overview:

  1. Prepare Your List: Focus on past patients from the last 6 months to 2 years, segmenting by payer and diagnosis.
  2. Craft Your Message: Keep it brief and personal. Example: “Hi [Patient Name], this is [Your Name] from [Your Practice]. It’s been [Time Period] since we last saw you for [Condition]. How are you doing?”
  3. Send and Monitor: Personalize each message and be ready to respond quickly.
  4. Respond and Engage: Use questions to show care and guide patients towards booking an appointment.

Ready to take your practice to the next level? Download our free 10 Text Challenge template!

Benefits of the 10 Text Challenge

The 10 Text Challenge offers numerous benefits for your practice. By sending personalized messages to past patients, you can achieve a high response rate, which leads to quick reactivations and appointments, increasing your practice’s revenue. The challenge enhances patient satisfaction by showing you care about their well-being and improves the overall efficiency and profitability of your practice, making it an essential part of any comprehensive physical therapy marketing strategy.

Try it out for yourself

Text messaging is a powerful tool for patient reactivation and driving practice growth. By implementing the 10 Text Challenge, you can quickly fill your schedule, improve patient engagement, and increase your revenue. If you’re ready to increase your profit margins by $10K guaranteed, apply for Profitability Under Pressure today. You’ll learn even more keys to increasing profit margins, connect with like-minded owners, and achieve financial stability and growth.

Apply to Profitability Under Pressure where practice owners will learn how to use text messaging for profit and patient engagement, optimize hiring processes

The $20M PT Marketing System

It’s crucial to understand the significance of marketing in any business, including the healthcare sector. The right marketing strategies could be the game-changer in shaping up your practice, whether it’s a chiropractic clinic or a physical therapy private practice. In this article, we unwrap key aspects of our “$20M Marketing System,” a system meticulously constructed over the past two decades.

At Madden & Gilbert PT, Chad Madden’s practice in Harrisburg, PA, they started from a modest 50 visits per week in 2003. Now they see about 2,500 visits per week. They’ve consistently focused on achieving 20% growth year over year.

Recently the Madden & Gilbert PT valuation done in 2023 was for $20.8M, up from $4M just six years prior.

A $20M physical therapy private practice is realistic – read on to learn the marketing system that can help you achieve this growth year over year.

Scaling Your Practice with the $20M Marketing System

The $20M Marketing System is a strategy developed in a private practice valued at $20.8 million, and refined in hundreds of physical therapy private practices across the country. This system is designed to provide practice owners with a structured pathway to consistent and significant growth in both patient numbers and revenue.

The Key Ingredient: Processes

A solid marketing system is essential for practice owners who aim to grow their businesses smoothly and sustainably. It involves a combination of proactive processes that help attract potential patients, maintain existing ones, and ensure a steady flow of revenue.

Establishing processes means creating consistent steps, scripts, or other routines that you and your staff can follow to reach your marketing goals.

The Five Pathways of New Patient Flow

There are five consistently valuable pathways for attracting new patients to a private practice. New patients are an essential aspect of any practice’s growth. Make sure you are tapping into these key channels:

1. Reactivations: Encourage past patients to come back for additional care.
2. Word-of-mouth referrals: Tap into your network of existing patients.
3. Physician referrals: Aquire patients referred by other clinicians.
4. Partner referrals: Develop partnerships with businesses that can promote your service.
5. Cold traffic marketing: Reaching out to potential patients who are not aware of your services and how you can help them.

Each pathway requires different strategies and processes—with the goal being to maintain a balance amongst all five, ensuring a steady patient flow.

It’s important to set up processes for all five of these resources to track and optimize marketing efforts for sustainable practice growth.

Common Pitfalls in Building Marketing Systems

While building a marketing system comes with numerous challenges, the key is to understand and avoid the common pitfalls. This could range from a lack of know-how, wherein owners may confuse a system with a process, box-checking strategies that could blur tracking end results, or underestimating the effort required in building a system. Choreographing multiple processes into a system requires immense planning and execution.

Creating the Perfect Marketing System

A marketing system consists of multiple processes designed to attract and retain patients. These processes can range from reactivations to cold traffic marketing strategies. The efficiency of these processes is critical for an effective system, and they should be designed with the specific characteristics of the practice in mind.

Reactivations

A reactivation process is particularly effective at bringing back past patients. This can be achieved using a range of techniques, including patient newsletters, email campaigns, text campaigns, and specialized conversion responses. This ensures a high retention rate and maintains a consistent patient base.

Cold Traffic Marketing

Cold traffic marketing, which refers to strategies that target people who are unaware of your practice, is integral in attracting new patients. Despite the challenges that can be involved in working with an unidentified audience, if approached correctly, it is possible to convert this into a resource for growth.

Building Your Marketing Team

Building a reliable marketing team is essential in leveraging these processes effectively. While an internal marketer might focus on reactivations and referrals, an external marketer can help in partner events and establishing professional referrals. In addition, ensuring trackability in your marketing processes is key to understanding what works best for your practice.

Harnessing the Power of Online Advertising

With today’s world becoming increasingly digital, online advertising is slowly overshadowing traditional methods. Platforms such as Facebook and Instagram offer opportunities to reach broad and diverse audiences. Designing effective online ad campaigns is crucial for any practice aiming to grow. They must also understand how to turn interactions into actual patients.

Conclusion

The $20M Marketing System offers an efficient and structured approach to growing your practice.

You can increase your patient base and revenue by combining reactivation, cold traffic, and effective online social media advertising.

I hope this serves as a testament to the power of sustainable growth strategies.

Want to learn more about scaling your practice? Sign up for a Practice Growth Strategy Call to see how the $20M Marketing System can work for your unique practice.

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PT marketing strategies to fill your new hire's schedule

Conquer hiring fears with PT marketing strategies that create a steady stream of new patients.

As a Private Practice Owner, there are several tell-tale signs when it’s time to hire. 

  • You consistently have a full patient load
  • Or you spend all your time treating and not enough time working on your business
  • You may even have a waitlist (this could mean it is far past time to start!) 

Yet even when the signs are apparent, many practice owners still harbor doubts when it comes time to hire. 

You may wonder if you can attract enough clients to your clinic. Or think that your patients have grown attached to you and your current staff. That they wouldn’t want to be treated by someone new. You may fear the costs of hiring would exceed the increased revenue.  

Many practice owners experience these fears of expanding their business. But there are plenty of successful practice owners who are able to grow, hire, and expand each year. Their secret? Implementing effective systems and repeatable processes to consistently produce a steady stream of new patients. 

In this article, you’ll get a blueprint for how to never run out of patients. The strategies in this article will help you consistently attract patients, scale your business, hire more, and keep growing your practice. 

Once you build a system that works for consistently getting more patients to your clinic, you can hire without fear. You can even open new practices and use the same tactics to grow them.

The State of PT Hiring in 2022

Before diving into PT marketing strategies, let’s look at the hiring landscape for physical therapists now and in the future. 

At the macro level, an aging population and advancements in medicine are helping people live longer. This creates increased demand for physical therapy and other types of conservative care. Physical therapy is also becoming more accessible as more states open up for direct access. 

As a result, The APTQI estimates that the US will need 27.000 new physical therapists by 2025, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that by 2030, there will be a 21% growth in PT job openings. Currently, there are around 13,000 people graduating with a physical therapy degree in the US annually. 

What does this mean for your practice? A couple of things:

  • The demand for physicians will keep growing for the foreseeable future. 
  • Because of increasing demand, the job market will become very competitive (it already is). Finding new hires that fit your needs will get harder.
  • With increased demand, salaries will go up. This means that each clinician you add to your staff is more valuable than they were a year ago.
  • A competitive job market means you’ll have to attract the best clinicians. You’ll face stiff competition by the hospital system.

How to Compete in Today’s Hiring Market

The key here is to make your practice an appealing place for people to work. More patients equals the ability to deliver higher salaries and better benefits. A demonstrable track record of consistent patient demand will show potential hires that they’ll have job security. You also want to be able to paint a clear picture of future growth. This motivates future and current staff members. 

Being able to quickly and consistently attract patients and fill a new hire’s schedule helps make your practice attractive to potential hires. In fact, you should start attracting new patients even before onboarding new staff.

When Should a New Hire Have a Full Schedule?

The timeline for having a full schedule for a new hire depends on various factors, like your practice’s location and popularity. Many successful practices follow a timeline such as this: 

90 days before hiring

If you’re not already at full capacity, this is a good time to implement a patient demand system to create a steady stream of patients for your new hire. A patient demand system includes solutions for marketing across platforms such as online advertising, email automation, and two-way texting.

First 90 days after hiring

Once you’ve hired someone, it usually takes about 90 days to fully onboard a clinician.  This includes getting the PT used to their operations, acquainted with the front office, and taught to deliver the standard of care expected from the clinic. It’s normal to have a new PT work at a lower capacity during this time.

After 90 days on the job

After this first probation period, the new hire should be working at full capacity (or close to it). They should be integrated with the system, and visit as many patients as possible. A great way to structure your staff’s schedules is to have experienced clinicians seeing existing patients and to fill your new hire’s schedule with new patients from cold traffic. 

PT Marketing Strategies for Attracting a Steady Flow of Patients

You have way more control over the client acquisition practice now than in the past. Back in the day, clinics relied on word-of-mouth and referrals to keep their practices working. These tactics are great to keep in the mix, but should not be relied on for all of your business.  

Nowadays, a complete recipe for growth goes beyond referrals and word of mouth. It includes a plethora of channels and tactics for reaching potential customers, including online and offline strategies. 

Typically, growing practices should budget around 10% of revenues for marketing. Marketing includes strategies to engage existing and past patients, such as automated email blasts, two-way texting, and direct mail. It also encompasses advertising (both online and offline) for cold traffic. You can advertise online on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Google, and YouTube. A comprehensive direct-to-consumer marketing strategy should also include automated lead management and follow-up to ensure a strong ROI for your ad spend. 

Creating a Successful PT Marketing Campaign: A 5-Step Process

It may feel a little overwhelming at first, but with the right processes and system in place, you can generate a constant influx of patients. You can avoid the dreaded feeling that you are continually reinventing the wheel each month by implementing plug-and-play campaigns that repeat throughout the year. 

  • Step 1: Start by defining your audience. For example, if your clinic serves an older demographic, you’ll want to focus on means of communication favored by older folks. Things like snail mail and phone texts can yield amazing results for you. Conversely, younger audiences are easier to reach with digital marketing.
  • Step 2: Your messaging should be patient-focused. Most of your patients don’t know what latissimus dorsi is, or that they have tendonitis. They know they have pain, and only care about fixing it. And that’s how your marketing messaging should be. Make it patient-focused by using everyday language. 
  • Step 3: Identify the channels you’ll start testing for both cold traffic and past patients. Different media types can be appropriate for different stages of the patient journey. For instance, Facebook and YouTube ads are great for cold traffic. They help educate a large, unaware audience that you have a solution for them. Google is more appropriate for advertising to a more aware audience that is already looking for physical therapy clinics in their area. Email, direct mail, and two-way texting are great tools for engaging past patients. 
  • Step 4: Design a compelling offer. “Attend a workshop on solving back pain.” “Give the gift of a free screening to a friend or family member.” “Schedule an appointment easily online.” These are examples of call-to-actions, or compelling offers, that you can promote in your campaigns. Each campaign should highlight one clear call to action. For cold traffic, workshops are an incredibly powerful offer to promote online. This strategy lets you showcase your clinicians’ expertise on the workshop’s topic. Instead of telling people you can solve their health issues, you get to show them. And you enhance efficiency by driving multiple potential patients into your clinic at once. 
  • Step 5: Measure how your campaigns are doing. Set targets for each of your campaigns, and ways of tracking how they are doing. This is all data that you’ll use in the future to refine your marketing strategies and prove ROI. A patient demand software like Breakthrough will have easy-to-understand reporting and dashboards built-in. 

Patient Demand Systems for Consistent and Predictable Growth

You can’t rely exclusively on referral marketing anymore. If you want your practice to thrive and grow, you must build a system that takes people from being unaware of your services to paying customers. 

In marketing speak, this is called a funnel. Patients are either unaware of your service, aware of it but unsure if it’s the right one for them, or ready to buy. The perfect marketing system gets people from all of these places and gently accompanies them to the bottom of the funnel, which is purchasing a care plan. 

That’s why here at Breakthrough we built an all-in-one platform that does the heavy lifting for you. Its beauty lies in how it sustains itself. It starts by giving you the right tools, like our powerful online advertising tools and done-for-you campaigns to attract clients to your practice. Then, through email automation, two-way texting, and lead management tools, it converts them into paying customers. This process generates lots of data you can then use to optimize your messaging throughout the customer acquisition process and beyond.

Do you want to learn more PT marketing strategies for consistently increasing patient growth? Request a demo today. 

See how our platforms can help you create a self-sustaining marketing system that makes filling a new hire’s schedule easy.