I don’t know about you all, but every January my physical therapy practice sees at least a couple new/return patients for the same reason: They were trying to “get back into shape” after many months of little-to-no exercise.
Marketing to the existing trend
In an effort to: 1) add value to the relationship I have with my patients, 2) Capitalize on the yearly trend of people returning to a more active lifestyle, I created the video below and a related blog post for my clinical website.
Aside from reconnecting with my former patients and making them happy to receive valuable free information, there is another obvious benefit of this approach: if any of them find that they have a predisposition to an injury, they may take my advice and schedule some appointments to deal with it.
Getting the marketing message out
As a busy practice owner, it is important to get as many miles as possible out of every marketing effort. For that reason, I asked certain questions while creating this video/blog:
- How can I get this video and information in front of more than just my current/former patients? How can I maximize the exposure to this thing that took 3-5 hours of my life to create?
- What other referral sources and colleagues might benefit from this info or find it useful for their clients?
In answer to these questions, I did the following:
- I sent an email to my patient list with the video and a link to the full article at my website.
- I encouraged them to forward the email on to their friends and family so they too could help loved ones avoid injury in 2012.
- I scheduled posts of the article and video on my Facebook Business page (twice: the video alone, and the blog post link) and on Twitter as well. (click here for details on how to pre-schedule Facebook and Twitter posts). Though I very rarely mix business with my personal Facebook page, I even posted the video there because I figured there would be plenty of people who could benefit from it.
- I emailed all of my Personal Trainer contacts/referral sources, and explained how they could use the video to reconnect with former clients and possibly generate some repeat business.
Put this approach to work for your PT practice
And to continue with the above approach, I now invite you to use the video/blog post to bring former and new patients into your clinic (or if you’re set up to create video, make a similar one and repeat the above steps). Compel them to look for injury predispositions in themselves, and who do you think they’ll call to fix the problems they find?
The main points I want to make with this post are:
- Always be on the lookout for trends and repeating events on which you can capitalize.
- Be adamant and creative about squeezing everything you can from every marketing effort you make (and/or pay for).
I wish you all the best and nothing but success in 2012!
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Awesome idea on empowering your patients with educating them to perform their own screening for potential musculoskeletal problems!
Did you have to place a disclaimer of any form accompanying your video for liability purposes? Most of those movements you covered are safe to perform, but you never know.
That’s a great question and idea. I didn’t include a disclaimer for this particular video/blog post. Perhaps I should have but I felt like this screen was benign enough that it probably wasn’t necessary (though maybe I’m wrong with how litigious our society seems to be these days). Thanks for the question and suggestion.
What a great way to empower you patients and help guide them through awareness of their health. We should see more of this kind of education/involvement throughout the healthcare system.
Thanks Mark! Glad you enjoyed it. And yes, with healthcare costs bankrupting our country, I imagine that a higher level of screening and preventative approaches like this would make a big difference. My patients seemed to really enjoy the video and found it useful (and exciting when they “passed” all the tests).