How To Find Your Next Best Clients
Today, we are going to show you how to find your next client.
If a pipe bursts in your home and your floor is flooding with water and you need to call a plumber, where’s the first place you turn? Well, in 2020, most people go to Google, or a search engine to search for a plumber nearby.
The same thing is true for therapists and counselors their place in marketing your practice, but those are not channels where people tend to search when they need something NOW. For best results, we recommend at-need search-based strategies.
Typically, therapy and counseling is what we call an “at need” service, meaning people look for it WHEN they need it, and not until.
While a lot of mental health professionals build successful practices around referrals, word of mouth marketing is NOT consistent and it’s NOT reliable to find clients.
Building relationships is a great thing, and it will always be the icing on the cake of growing your practice, but even better is knowing that when you need business and are ready to take on more clients, there is a surefire way to do so.
Like turning on a spigot when you need a drink of water.
As a mental health provider, if you want to attract new customers in modern times, you need to appear on search engines, where people are looking for your services when they need them to help you.
Now, there are two ways to appear on search engines – SEO (or search engine optimization) which is free, and PPC (also known as pay per click ads) which comes at a premium cost. There are pros and cons to both of these strategies.
As a private practice owner, you have to decide what’s best for you and fits within your budget and within your schedule to find clients.
Search engine optimization is comprehensive. It’s a process of both optimizing your site to be easily picked up by search engines, and also garnering external links from other authoritative sites, that link to you. While SEO can be done yourself for free, it is typically time-intensive and can take months or years to pay off. The strategy is also something that can leave you at the mercy of Google (and other search engines’) changing ranking requirements, and however competitive your market is.
For instance, if there are a lot of other mental health private practices in your area, all vying for top positioning on Google, it will be harder to rank the top.
Pay-per-click ads, on the other hand, can guarantee you top positioning as long as you’re willing to pay a premium for it. You can specify which keywords you want to appear for and set your budget. Keep in mind, some keywords can be pricey. Always monitor your costs to determine if your campaigns are effective and worth your investment. Remember, optimizations must be made along the way, and hiring a professional could be your best bet to avoid misspending.
Other traffic channels such as Facebook and Instagram have their place in marketing your practice, but those are not channels where people tend to search when they need something NOW.
For best results, we recommend at-need search-based strategies such as search marketing for getting the best return on your investment.
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