Owning a mental health practice is enough work without factoring in all of the work required to dial in a marketing strategy. Fortunately, following our Pyramid of Success can help mental health practitioners build their strategy from the ground up. Not only does a marketing strategy help increase your practice’s revenue, but it also means that your business is easier to find and contact, which often makes treatment and care more accessible to your patients. It’s a win-win – here’s how to do it.
1. Assess your website.
Your website is the base of your marketing strategy (and the base of the Pyramid) because it’s where all marketing roads lead, so to speak. Most of the other strategies we’ll discuss here will be directing traffic back to your website, which means if your site isn’t good, you’re wasting money. Whether you’ve already got a site or you’re looking to launch one, there are a few key ingredients to a great site.
Design
Good website design might seem unimportant, but it has the ability to make or break your website – sometimes in a literal sense. Websites need to work across all of the devices and browsers they are accessed on, including mobile devices and tablets. This is known as responsive design. Your website also needs to be intuitive and easy to navigate for both the users that are on it and search engines that crawl it.
Conversions
Any element on your website that converts a visitor to a patient is considered a conversion element (hence the name). Common examples include click to call buttons, forms, and chat bots. If these elements aren’t working, they can actively inhibit patients from reaching your practice, so test them often.
Hosting
Who you choose to host your website is important too. Going the cheap route on website hosting might be tempting, but it can have disastrous consequences in the event that your website goes down. Choosing a provider with good customer service, faster servers, and lower risks for security leaks and downtime is the key to avoiding hosting issues.
2. Dial in your local search profiles.
Local search is incredibly important for mental health practices. Ensuring your profile information, including your name, address, and phone number (referred to as your NAP information) is correct, is only half the battle. Your practice hours, your website, and photos make your profile rank higher, as well as adding new posts to your listing regularly. In addition, regularly auditing your local profiles for inaccuracies is necessary, because local listings often change due to suggestions from users or automatic updates as a result of search engines scraping your website.
3. Collect online reviews.
Current research shows that 76% of people trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. Encourage your current patients to review you on Google and other online sites. In today’s world, potential patients looking for mental health services conduct research to see what people have to say about your practice. Many will keep themselves anonymous; however, these reviews still will weigh on the credibility of your practice. Ensure you respond to ALL reviews – positive and negative – and make changes to your process if you see consistent complaints about portions of your services. Potential patients aren’t the only ones looking at these responses; search engines index them too, so prompt responses have positive results in more areas than just your reviews. Plus, since your reviews show up on your local search results, a good number of reviews has a positive impact there as well.
We Can Help
Need help marketing your mental health practice? MyAdvice has been helping practices like yours grow for over 20 years. Contact one of our experts for your complimentary consultation today to see how we can help you take your practice to the next level.
