One Key Question for Marketing Your Practice
A little over two years ago, when I got licensed as a therapist, marketing my practice was not a total enigma to me because I had already been a private practice intern for six years. During that time I marketed to get all the clients I had on my own. I was lucky, because I knew about sales and marketing from my former career in high tech sales, but I still had to learn about website optimization, Google adwords, and how networking works in the therapy world.
I still don’t know it all but I was eager to learn and stretch, and I was determined to do more with marketing than most psychotherapists do. But I also wasn’t interested in becoming a new age guru or scaring myself into marketing that wasn’t comfortable to me. I focussed on my offering: I really want to help people have good relationships. I lived through multiple divorces as a kid, and if I could help people learn some skills about relating, maybe I could help kids and families avoid some of the suffering I went through. So with all this in mind, I started a marketing support group for other professionals who were freelancers to talk about and support each other around marketing.
I’d like to share one key question that came out of one of those meetings that could likely serve everyone. A local horticulturalist who trained at Filoli Gardens, a beautiful soul, Deborah MacDonald of Flower Power Gardens, was in my group. She brought up how excited she was to be going to local schools and working with parents to plant gardens at schools. She lit up as she shared how good it felt to be doing something for the community. An unintended by-product was that she grew her business, because some of the families she leads on those gardening weekends hire her. She was not asking “how can I get more clients?” but “how do I want to serve my community?”.
I had never seen someone so excited by what was essentially marketing—she was simply doing exactly what she felt called to do and good stuff happened for her business. What a perfect match for the whole ethic of psychotherapy, I felt—compassion, right relationship, serving others. This conversation with Deborah really was the beginning of why I started the Psyched in San Francisco blog two years ago—to connect and serve with the larger world. It has been so much fun, we decided to open a downtown psychotherapy center so we can serve in even larger ways.
What I want to say today is—marketing does not have to be scary, cut-throat or cheesy. There is a great new book out on the topic that I want to share; Jay Baer has written “Youtility: Marketing That Helps People Out”. SAP, one of the top three high tech companies interviewed Jay. (If you read the article you can access and excerpt from the book for free.) In it, he focusses on a similar key question, “how do I want to serve?”.
We have been implementing ideas like Deborah’s and Jay’s and this kind of marketing works. At Psyched, we are giving away free sandwiches, offering mindfulness for stressed-out moms, serving up thought-provoking articles from working therapists from all over the Bay Area in Psyched Magazine, and, my favorite, offering the FACES video project, interviewing mothers about advice they would give to other struggling mothers. Creating projects like this makes life worth living for me…being creative, serving, collaborating and sustaining.
I think the co-marketing trend will continue to grow in the psychotherapy profession as more therapists see the benefit of coming together and sharing the cost of a website and marketing and I think that is cool. But even if you are not drawn to join with other therapists, marketing your psychotherapy practice can be more fun if you work to base it on this question, “how do I want to serve my community in my work?”
For another example, check out “Help Each Other Out”. We love this organization, not a therapy organization, but a group called Help Each Other Out. What an amazing message and a shining example of the kind of marketing that serves.
The reality is, the internet has changed the way we market. We can fear it, over-compensate or serve. Read the book “Youtility Marketing” and see how it feels to you. And if you are doing something groovy please email us. We love promoting other creative therapy projects and initiatives so everyone has a chance to get better!
[button color=”#ef5729;” link=”https://www.schedulicity.com/Scheduling/?business=TRLGEY#/services”]Schedule a session with Traci now[/button]
