FOR THERAPISTS

Use Your Latent Marketing Skills to Attract Ideal Clients

The conventional wisdom is that therapists know a lot about counseling but very little about marketing. After all, our training and experience is in counseling and most of us have no background in sales or marketing. For most of us, our identity and passion is all about helping people versus trying to convince people to buy stuff that they probably don’t need. So it becomes hard for us to market ourselves effectively because of the stigma around marketing. Plus many of us believe we really don’t know how to market well or where to start. At best it is a necessary evil. Right? Well, sort of…

I’d like to dispute the conventional wisdom and invite you to see things a little differently. The way I see it, most therapists are masters at influencing people and can turn those same skills into becoming master marketers – just by thinking about marketing in a slightly different way. Marketing your practice on the internet is about making yourself very visible to potential clients when they are looking for you. You want to be the first choice for someone who fits your Ideal Client Profile and is looking for a therapist on the internet.

Let’s start by looking at what good marketers do:

• Influence customers to purchase products or services they may or may not need
• Understand their current and potential customers
• Use psychological principles to influence customers
• Deal with resistance to buy
• Strive for repeat customers
• Build relationships with their customers
• Use the customer's language

Marketing is about influencing people to buy goods or services. Much of marketing today is about having customers develop an ongoing relationship with companies so that they become repeat customers. Some of this brand loyalty is done around price (think Wal-Mart) but most companies realize that developing a relationship with the customer is the best way to them to become repeat customers (think Nike or Apple). That is the idea behind all the social networking that companies are engaging in these days.
 
As therapists, most of us strive to get our clients to come back every week for months or even years. How many retailers can you think of that have that kind of brand loyalty? We get our clients to come back week after week as a matter of course, even if they don’t feel good after a session. That’s pretty powerful stuff and it tells me that we already do know a lot about marketing.
 
Now let’s look at some more of what therapists do:

• Influence clients to change in ways that they may or may not want to
• Understand their current and potential clients
• Use psychological principles to influence clients
• Deal with resistance to change
• Strive for repeat clients
• Build relationships with their clients
• Use the client's language

Notice the parallels between what marketers do and what we do. There are a lot of similarities. We just have to start thinking like marketers to get more of the clients we want into our practices.
 
We know from the research that the main factor that influences the outcome of therapy is the quality of the relationship between the client and the therapist. Most of us, consciously or unconsciously, spend time and energy during the session to build that relationship. And we are usually doing it without the awareness of the client because we know it works. Most clients are much more concerned with solving their problems and eliminating their discomfort than they are with building a relationship with us, especially in the early stages of treatment. But we know that building the relationship is essential to having them improve as well as come back on a regular basis. This may be obvious, but in order to have people get better, they have to step in the door, and that includes getting them in for the first session.
  
Dave Kaplowitz, LMFTA
www.davekaplowitz.com
dave.kaplowitz@gmail.com