There are many SLP (speech and language pathology) clinics that claim the best features and results but only a handful of such SLP clinics get a big share of patients. To excel in your speech and language therapy practice, just good skills and a strong academic record won’t take you far. For every medical SLP practice to be successful, it needs to work on a good marketing plan to keep growing its business. By acting upon these speech therapy marketing ideas, you will definitely see great results.
1) Increase the Effectiveness of Your Online Clinic
Your speech therapy website is your central asset around which the entire online marketing of your business will be based. Therefore, you must work on improving the website efficiency so that a greater percentage of the visitors to your site would take your service. There are certain things that can enhance this convertibility factor. Check and implement these things given below for your SLP website:
a) Have a systematic arrangement and navigation for different pages and categories for your website. Too much congestion on a site will make many visitors quit your site.
b) Trust-enabling factors are key to making a website visitor book your services. So get things like certifications, testimonials, affiliations, awards, media releases on your business, etc displayed on your website.
c) Give a powerful offer of free consultation/discount on your website to get the website visitor to reach out to your business.
d) Sites that take more than average loading time do lose visitors, so check how fast your site loads and correct the elements that slow down your website.
e) Browsing the internet through mobile devices and tablets is getting common, so having a fixed-resolution website will get many visitors to back out from your website. So mobile responsiveness of your website should be implemented in your site design.
f) You can concisely explain the top features of your speech and language therapy through videos. So leave a video presentation of your business on the primary page of your website.
2) Issue Press Releases for Big Coverage and Promotion
You can quickly spread the word about your speech therapy on reputable media sources such as the Associated Press, Market Watch, Yahoo News, etc through professional press release distribution services. Once you have successfully published your business-related content on such big news websites, you will be in a position to acclaim in your advertisements that large media portals have covered your SLP therapy. In terms of other benefits, a great advantage is gained by the acquisition of new backlinks from the websites that have published your PR content. These backlinks are a very crucial factor in determining the position of your website in search engines. More quality backlinks equate to higher rankings which in turn brings in more traffic and bookings. Therefore, publishing press releases is a straightforward and efficient method for acquiring many associated benefits for your speech therapy practice.
3) Push Rankings, Push Traffic
Your speech therapy site needs a good ranking on search engines if you want people to find your website when they search for speech therapy practitioners in search engines. Your business will lose many potential customers if it doesn’t pay attention to increasing the online visibility of the website associated with your SLP business. To get your business to be seen on the top page of Google search results, you need to optimize various facets of your website which is called “Search Engine Optimization” or most popularly “SEO”. To handle SEO, there are two ways, either you learn SEO using various resources present online and implement them or a more efficient way is to find an expert SEO agency and let it handle the work.
4) Let Content Drive You More Patients
You cannot expect to get thousands of visitors per day to your site by just having a few posts on your site. A very simple method adopted by businesses to grow their revenue is by adopting content marketing which includes adding new content to their website consistently. With the growth of content on your website, the traffic also grows proportionally which definitely impacts your revenues too. Therefore, start exploring new topics related to your business to begin writing content on them (for example: “best SLP clinic in [city/town]”). If you are running short on ideas for new topics, use any popular keyword-exploring tool/application. One additional strategy for content marketing of your site is to explore guest posting opportunities on sites that get thousands of monthly visitors.
5) Make Your Business Appear in Local Listings
Having a “Google My Business” page for your speech and language therapy business can unfold new opportunities for the marketing of your SLP business. When users do a search for anything in their nearby location, Google presents a special area in the top 10 results page which displays 3 local businesses/services. This section of 3 local listings is usually known as “Google Local Pack” or “Google Local Listings”. To have your business appear in this local pack, the most fundamental requirement is having a Google My Business page followed by good optimization. Making a GMB page is easy and can be easily done by yourself. Optimization of the GMB page requires taking care of many elements as a result of which the best option to get it handled will be by taking the services of any digital marketing agency that is competent in GMB optimization.
6) Use Pay and Play Game of Advertising
For every dollar spent on ads for advertising your speech therapy, you will get returns in a few multiples if you have the right ad management skills. Ad services offered by popular platforms like Google, Facebook, and Bing are the ones that are known for providing quality leads. A lot of businesses and services all over the world are already benefiting from running ads on these platforms. The results you get from paid advertising will depend on how well you are equipped to optimize the ads and their related parameters. Plenty of courses, tutorials, and videos are available online that provide information on various aspects of running ads on popular platforms. There are also specialized ad agencies that can effectively handle your paid advertising if you outsource this task to them.
7) Reach More Locals with Social Marketing
Given the fact that social media platforms have millions of users, they have become very significant for business promotion needs. You can very easily find the existence of many of your competing SLP businesses on social media. However, the actual benefits of social media marketing can be availed only if you are successful in growing your social media profiles. This process of growing the profile on social media takes a few months of consistent efforts but given the fact that the rewards are long-term, the efforts justify the end results. So start sharing valuable content on social media along with regularly using hashtags for consistently growing your speech therapy practice.
8) Get Relevant Influencers on Your Side
If you share a post on social media, very few people might come across it as your profile might not be having a good number of followers. On the other hand, if you send out the same promotion through someone who has thousands of followers, then your speech therapy business will be noticed by many people and will thus help to promote your business. Marketing a business through such people (with large follower counts) is referred to as influencer marketing and by getting your business promoted through more influencers, you can get great promotion of your speech therapy on social media. For a successful influencer marketing campaign, use those influencers who have close demography and interest as your business.
9) Use Referal Chain Marketing
If a person familiar to you refers you to a product or service, then you are much more likely to trust that product or service as compared to believing the advertisements done by various businesses. This is how word-of-mouth marketing works for a business. An extremely simple step in this direction that your speech therapy practice can implement is by getting referral coupons printed and distributed over to your patients so that they can refer their friends and relatives to your clinic. You can also track the referring person through the referral coupons and can reward him/her for referring your speech therapy practice.
10) Decrease Loss of Potential Patients Using Email Marketing
No website is 100% efficient in converting all its visitors to customers. This is why you must use an opt-in form to collect the email addresses of your speech therapy website visitors as it will give you extra chances for converting your traffic into your clients. As people resist providing email addresses online, you must give some sort of good incentives that your site visitor can get in exchange for providing his/her email address. With email marketing, it is easy to make a long-term connection with people and this process can thus give you more clients and more referrals.
11) Start Utilizing Other Powerful Channels
Directories if used the right way, can not only give you backlinks but can also give you more visitors. Though most directories are not of any value now, a select few like Yelp, DocStoc, are still dominating Google search results for local businesses and services. So make a business profile on these few directories and if you start getting patients from them, you can also try their premium plans.
12) Find More Patients with Video Promotions
The more engaging the content is, the more likely it is to fetch favorable results from its readers/viewers. Since videos enjoy a much higher engagement rate, they are way more effective in pursuing people to get speech therapy from you. This explains the reason why you must create videos for your speech therapy promotion and must start sharing them on all the high-traffic platforms like YouTube and on your social media profiles like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. For even faster results, you can get your videos spread by famous local influencers in your region. By consistently getting your videos posted on YouTube, the combined power of these videos will start sending a significant number of patients to your SLP business.
13) Offline Promotion Also Matters
The total percentage of businesses that use only online marketing for promotion is very low. Most businesses aim to reach out to the maximum number of people and for this, they make use of both online and offline marketing methods. Similar to online marketing strategies, offline marketing strategies are also many with the most common being promotion in events, newspaper advertisements, ads on local radio stations, billboards and flyers advertising, etc.
14) Use the Combo of Information + Authority Marketing
Informational content published by you in newspapers can serve benefits for all three parties i.e. readers, newspaper, and your business. You can ask for contributing content on speech problems to local newspapers. If they agree, you can regularly provide quality content through such newspapers so that these content pieces written by you can position yourself as an expert in speech language-related problems and this will bring more business to you.
15) Offer Free Seminars and Basic Consultation
On your speech therapy website and on your social media profiles, offer free short-time consultation so that this move by you will bring you many targeted leads to whom you can provide full-fledged services later. You can also announce free seminars/webinars from time to time to get a big group of your potential leads to attend them. You can let people know about your free seminars through newspaper ads locally or by using big local social groups.
16) Build Top Lead Funnels with Partnerships
All people and businesses who come in touch with your potential customers can be good partners for growing your SLP practice. For this reason, reaching out to and asking for referrals from daycare providers, babysitters, behavioral therapists, pediatric doctors, etc is a good start to getting more patients for your speech therapy practice.
17) Use Kids’ Contests and Expos
Based on your budget, you can sponsor/co-sponsor contests for kids so that kids and their parents can become familiar with your services. You can also collect the email address, phone numbers of parents accompanying their kids in such contests and expos so that you can promote your speech therapy marketing newsletter and messages with them for getting more people to know about the services offered by you.
18) Let Case Studies Become Your Promotion
Success attracts many people. This is why case studies in almost all industries are so popular. Your speech therapy practice too can, therefore, publish case studies of various people who got their speech and language problems corrected using your practice. Such case studies can be shared across your website and other digital assets like social media, forums, etc. These case studies, published on your site, will also help in convincing and getting more number of your site visitors to take your services.
19) Expand Using Local Networking Events
With just a basic search on Google, you can easily find out the upcoming events in your area. To promote your speech therapy, get yourself or your business representative to attend such local events as it can not only introduce your business to more local people but people met at such events can also refer you to new patients.
20) Start Accepting Insurance to Convert More People
For health and medical-related problems, many people are in search of those health and medical services that accept insurance. By adopting insurance payment, you can have more people opting for your speech therapy practice.
21) Grow with the Power of Your Book
It is very easy to get a book written and published nowadays due to digital resources. You can write a small ebook on speech and language-related issues and can get this ebook published on Amazon and other sites. You can then proudly present yourself as the writer of a book which will grow your personal image and will also help in generating more business.
22) Let Affiliates Drive More Patients
Having other people promoting your business is a great joint effort for growing a business. This is why you can opt for getting affiliates to promote your speech therapy practice. For this, become an advertiser at any affiliate marketing network and let people start sending you new leads based on the criteria set by you.
23) Step Up Indirect Promotion Using Reviews
Reviews are the new currency for social proof and this is why businesses that are active on the marketing front pay significant attention to maintaining positive reviews online. Getting low ratings or negative reviews or less number of reviews can make your potential customer choose another speech therapy clinic over yours. This means that reviews can affect your business revenues and hence you must not only provide good services for gaining good reviews but must also ask or even incentivize people to leave good reviews about your speech therapy practice online.
With such a powerful list of speech therapy marketing ideas, it’s all about implementation to start growing your business faster. Doubts, concerns, and feedback, all are welcome and for this, the comment box below is waiting :).
