[JOE]: When it comes to keeping your practice organized, you want a software that’s not only simple but the best. I recommend Therapy Notes. Their platform lets you manage notes, claims, scheduling, and more. Plus, they offer amazing unlimited phone and email support, so when you have a question, they’re there to help. To get two months free of Therapy Notes today, just use promo code [JOE]. That’s ‘Joe’ when you sign up for a free trial at therapynotes.com. Again, that’s promo code [JOE], when you sign up for a free trial at therapynotes.com.
This is the Practice of the Practice podcast with Joe Sanok, session number 362
I’m Joe Sanok, your host. Welcome to the Practice of the Practice podcast where we are teaching you all about business, mostly for people that are starting, growing, and scaling private practices. But honestly, if you’re in business, so much of this applies to you and what you’re working on. So, if you are in private practice, I’m glad you’re here. Really happy you’re here. We intentionally named this podcast a little different from our typical private practice kind of podcasts because we know that ‘How to market your business’ is something that is pretty universal.
And there’s lots of pretty advanced things that we could go into, but today I’m actually going to take you through three mindsets, three statements, and then we’re going to go through 12 ideas for marketing. And so, I’m pretty excited about kind of where we’re headed with this one. And, I drew from a couple of different things. The Harvard Business Review, they have something called the Benefits of Value. So, we’re going to be talking about that. We’re going to be talking about the mindset that the StoryBrand Framework does. And so, that’s Donald Miller’s StoryBrand Framework.
We’re going to talk about when and how you kind of pepper in kind of some negativity and why you might want to do that and how to do that in a delicate way, especially as a therapist. And then we’re going to talk through some kind of fill in the blank questions, ways to kind of statements, and then we’re going to go through these 12 ideas. So, pretty excited for this episode today. Well, if you are ready to go, let’s go.
Well, so Harvard Business Review put out this thing called the Benefits of Value. And what you can do is you can Google that. I will have a link to it in the show notes as well. But let me just read for you what they say. This is what the Harvard Business Review people say, “Products and services deliver fundamental elements of value that address four kinds of needs; functional, emotional, life changing, and social impact. In general, the more elements provided the greater customer’s loyalty and the higher the company’s sustained revenue growth.
So, why don’t we start there with marketing? Well, I think we have to understand what we’re trying to market first before we say, “Oh, that’s market.” Because if you’re marketing the wrong thing, well that’s just going to be kind of a big problem. So, let’s start with functional. So, at the bottom of this pyramid, we have functional. So, does your counseling, does your practice, does your business reduce effort? Maybe it helps avoid hassles or reduces cost, so, especially if you think about an EAP, you’re definitely reducing some HR costs. Are you improving quality, adding variety, sensory appeal? Are you informing? Also, under functional we have that it saves time or simplifies, makes money, reduces risk, organizes, integrates or connects. So, let’s think about those different things. Like how would you have “Saves time “be in your marketing?
And I remember I had a consulting client a number of years ago who was amazing, with this kind of cognitive behavioral approach to helping people with sleep problems. So, they were dealing really with like, you know, being up all night and just having a really hard time sleeping and she usually within six to eight sessions could get people back to sleep. And you think about just the amount of time and energy that gave back to people as well as their friends and family members. Because if you’re that tired, you’re probably not driving yourself around places. So, that really is just saving people time. There’s a lot of other things that that would kind of fit into.
So, the next category the Harvard Business Review has for these elements of value pyramid, it’s called the emotional. So, this is obviously our jam with private practices. So, we have wellness, therapeutic value, fun and entertainment, increasing attractiveness, providing access to things, reducing anxiety, rewarding people, nostalgia, design, and badge value. And so, with those things, you know, thinking about reducing anxiety, you know, helping people feel rewarded. Like, “Wow, like I’ve really done well for myself. I should take myself to therapy. I should become a better version of myself.”
And when we can kind of tap into that in marketing, that’s going to really help us kind of show our value. And what we’re not doing, we’re not using false statements to sell people on something they don’t want. No, we’re using statements that we know work to explain what’s already happening. You know, a slimy salesperson is someone that tries to sell people something they don’t need or want. That salesperson probably believes isn’t even that good for people. It’s just all about the kind of money and the bottom line, whereas we’re doing work that really does matter.
I believe in the therapeutic process. Steve McCleary, my therapist, has been such an amazing support for me. If he wasn’t here in Traverse city, I would like probably have found another therapist, but he’s been amazing. And so, it’s really important. It changes our community and improves people’s lives to have therapists that are around.
All right, so, the next category is called Life Changing. And so, it provides hope, self-actualization, motivation, heirloom, so, what you’re kind of passing down, and affiliation and belonging. So, those are all the things that that therapy does, that counseling does, that many businesses can talk about doing, but we don’t.
And last, we have self-transcendence. So, this is social impact stuff. So, what happens if somebody is able to transcend their own problems and issues and able to say, “You know what? Like I’m going to make society better.” How powerful is that? So, when we start with these sorts of mindsets with marketing that is completely different than how oftentimes marketing is thought of. So, we want to look at the value of your business first before we even dive into marketing.
So, the next mindset we want to look at is from the StoryBrand Framework. And this is a really big shift and it’s something that I can’t believe nobody noticed until StoryBrand came along. And that’s that businesses that set themselves up as the guide, not as the expert or the hero are more successful. So, you think about it, if you, say you were looking for a running shoe. So, for example, I am working on doing a sprint triathlon later in the year, and I’m, you know, not a great runner, but say I was looking for a new running shoe.
If there was a company that said, “We are the best shoe. We’re amazing. We have won all these awards,” that’s setting themselves up as the hero. But say they said, “We specialize in helping first time triathletes to feel comfortable that their running shoe is awesome for them so that they can complete their first triathlon.” Who cares about competing in it? Let’s just complete. I would be like, “Oh my gosh, that’s awesome.”
Like for one, they niched in to say, “Okay, you’re a first-time triathlete that just wants to finish, we got your back. We know that’s a big deal for you.” Even though there’s so many other people that have done a lot more than you, you know, they’re making me the hero in that situation. So, StoryBrand Framework, you as the business are the Obi-Wan Kenobi and your client is the Luke Skywalker. All right? So, we want to focus on that mindset.
The last mindset to think about, and this is one that, you know, even in StoryBrand, they were talking about how you want to just pepper in a sort of like salt in bread. You know, just a little bit. But what happens if they don’t get help? You know, what happens if someone doesn’t come to work with you? What happens realistically if their marriage goes another month or two without having intervention? What happens if that principal calls you another time for your kid? You know, what happens if you don’t get that EMDR for that trauma that you went through.
So, these are big questions and I’m not going to like throw that at people right away. But it is a mindset that we want to be able to articulate. What happens if someone doesn’t get help? Like they’ve thought about this for months, now’s the time to take action. Maybe they even thought about it for years. All right, so our three mindsets; know the benefits of value, that’s from the Harvard Business Review Elements of Value Pyramid, which I would actually suggest you download, print off, and look at regularly. StoryBrand, you are the guide, not the hero. And lastly, what happens if they don’t get help? So, those are the three mindsets.
So, I want to give you three statements that are ‘fill in the blanks’. And so, the two things we’re going to fill in are pain and outcome. So, this is the pain of your client and the outcome of your client. So, the first sentence is “If you’re feeling pain, this is where we insert pain. So, if you’re feeling, the blank is pain, so, if you’re feeling blank, we’ll help you to, and then outcome.
So, if you’re feeling like you don’t want to get out of bed, we’ll help you to feel more social. So, if you say work with depression, if you feel like you just can’t drag yourself out of bed and you’re feeling so sad and depressed, we’ll help you to feel social again. Or you know, if you’re feeling just immense sadness over the death of your parents and it’s been a long time, we’ll help you to get out of that funk and to value your parents while also allowing life to happen again.
So, what’s the pain? What’s the outcome? So, if you’re feeling blank, we’ll help you to blank. Second, here’s another one. If you’re sick of blank, so that blank would be a pain. If you’re sick of blank, we’ll help you create a plan for blank. That’s the outcome. So, you’re kind of setting yourself up as the guide to say, “Let’s come up with a plan for this.”
So, if you’re sick of whiny, four-year-olds, we’ll help you create a plan for better behavior. I would sign up for that right now. We have whiny four-year-old right now. If you’re sick of your kid getting bad grades, we’ll help you create a plan with the teachers to help them feel up to speed in their academics. All right, make sense?
Third, we’ve helped people dealing with blank. So, that’s the pain we’ve helped people dealing with blank to start blank since 2004 or 2008. So, that second blank is the outcome. So, we’ve helped people dealing with disconnection from their partner to start loving again since 2004. So, again, it’s that pain and outcome, pain and outcome. So, let me go through those again. If you’re feeling, and it’s always pain first and then outcome second. So, if you’re feeling blank, we’ll help you to blank.
Next. If you’re sick of blank, we’ll help you create a plan for blank. And third, we’ve helped people dealing with blank. Just start blank since 2004 that’s, you know, that’s when we launched a Mental Wellness. So, or maybe it was 2006. I graduated in 2004 with my masters. That’s why I put that. All right, so, those are your three statements.
All right, now let’s go through 12 different ideas for marketing. Now we’re going to just kind of go through these quickly, but I want to talk a little bit about this networking. So, first about this marketing. So, first we’re going to say networking. Just getting to know people, talking about your specialty. They are happy that you exist. If you help with a certain area, people are happy you exist. If I don’t, for example, I don’t see teen girls for, I’m not doing much counseling anymore at all. I’m doing mostly the consulting, but like teen girls, like haven’t seen them since I worked in residential.
So, if I met someone that loved working with teen girls, they were awesome at it, I would refer to them all day long. So, networking, just people knowing that you’re out there. Next, business cards. Now, I know a lot of people go back and forth and say, “Oh, you don’t need business cards these days.” But there are people that still want your business card. Having a good-looking business card, get it through MOO who, you know, has great, cool quality. You don’t even need to have a logo yet. If you go to practiceofthepractice/MOO, I think you get some MOO to help with your first business cards. But, you know, get some good-looking business cards.
Next, what we want to do is we want to really look at maybe Facebook ads. So, Facebook ads are awesome because you can target your area. So, say you help people that just, you know, had a baby and they’re going through that, “Oh my gosh. Like what do we do?” You can target them. If a year ago they had a life event or maybe you help people that are newlyweds or just engaged, you can do highly specialized Facebook ads that are on Facebook. They get people engaged. Actually, usually pretty cheap.
You think about, if someone clicks for 3 to $5 and then they come in for counseling for five or six sessions, I mean that person’s economically going to be worth, you know, 7 or $800. So, pay for some of those Facebook ads. It’s like trading nickels for quarters. You can also do this thing called a mirror audience. So, you know, if you have maybe your friends’ emails or something like that, you can create an email kind of mirror audience that’s similar to that. Now you don’t ever want to upload that confidential information of your client list to Facebook. So, a mirror audience, you definitely want to make sure that you’re smart about that.
All right, next, I would say blogging. Some people say blogging’s dead, but you know, Google still likes blogging, ranking in Google is still very important, demonstrating who you are. Even if you get a handful of people per month that are reading your blog, that is worth it because you’re demonstrating your expertise when they come to your website.
Next, I would say Pinterest infographics and having an active Pinterest board. We know that 80% of users on Pinterest are female and half of those are moms. A lot of times, depending on your own stats in your practice, it’s going to be the female in the relationship that initiates counseling. You’ll always want to look at your own stats to make sure that’s true. But Pinterest is a great place to go a little bit deeper, but not so deep like a blog post where it’s maybe ‘Five things to avoid with depression’. With our Next Level Practice community, we offer some free infographics that people can just put their branding on. So, doing things like that is really important to help you continue to grow your practice and to market.
Next, I would say doing a 30-day challenge on Facebook. That’s probably the platform I would recommend that has to do loosely with your particular area. So, if you help people with depression, maybe you do a 30-day challenge where every day they do something that puts them out of their comfort zone. You can use an applique spa, where you can set up a challenge within there. So, for example, the 30-day challenge is in there, you know, doing a fitness one where we have to sweat every single day and we get charged $5 if we don’t sweat. And then that pool at the end gets split between the people that did it the most. So, you could do something like that. That’s part of it as well.
Next, doing a bunch of Facebook lives for a couple of weeks is a great way to market. Just talking about, “Here are three tips if you’re feeling depressed. Here are five ways to improve your marriage. Here are seven different conversations to have when you’re on date night.” Having those kinds of quick-hit content is really helpful for people to be able to see who you are and get a feel for you as a therapist.
Also, another quick tip for marketing is on your Facebook business page. Make sure you have the auto follow-up going so that if someone reaches out to you, through that, that it right away says, you know, ‘If you want to schedule an appointment, please call this number or click here to schedule an appointment automatically.’ ‘Or we’re not managing this, so if you’re having a mental health emergency, please dial 911 or go to your local emergency room.’ Those kind of automations are really helpful to help people feel like you know what you’re doing.
Also, another marketing tip is to schedule out your social media. You know, every platform you can go with any, you can schedule it out. You can also use things like Meet Edgar. You can go over to practiceofthepractice.com/meetedgar and that’s going to give you, I think it’s 10 bucks to help you get started with meet Edgar. But Meet Edgar, I think there’s like sumo me, there’s hoot suite where you can schedule out all of your social media so that you’re regularly doing it and not having these waves of people posting and then not posting within your business.
Next, you know, and I probably should’ve started with this, having brand consistency, you know. Pick one or two accent colors that really pop and then choose whether you’re going to go with kind of like the Khakis and the browns or with like the grays and the whites and then have that color pop and use that same font, use that same color, use that in everything so that you, if someone looks at stuff, they can say, “Oh, that is definitely that practice. I’ve seen that before.”
Another great marketing thing is just to do good work. You know, the amount of people I’ve sent to my own therapist because he’s just good, he gets so much free marketing from me just talking about him. When you’re good at what you do, people will share that information with people. Also, just giving, you know, a business card to your clients at the end of their session. They don’t necessarily have to give them out for you, but if they have some, then if someone ever asks, then you know, they’ll have one handy.
And last, I would say focus on your ideal client. Don’t take everybody. The more that you see people that are perfect for you, the more they’re going to recommend other people that are perfect for you. So, go through those 12 marketing things. Let me go through them again real quick. We’ve got networking, business cards, Facebook ads, blogging, Pinterest, infographics, 30-day challenge, Facebook live, auto follow up with Facebook messaging, scheduled social brand consistency, good work, and focus on the ideal client. Go through those three statements and those three mindsets and go kill it in private practice.
Thank you so much for listening to this. We have a bunch of things happening right now, one of which is actually later today, we are going to be closing for Next Level Practice cohort, this cohort number eight. And so, we’re only launching this a couple of times a year now because we want those cohorts to really connect with each other. We want them to all kind of get on board at the same time and help to grow their practice. And for the people that are already in Next Level Practice when a new cohort comes in, sometimes the questions people have a repeat.
And so, we want to make sure that the community stays vibrant with people that have even been there for years. So, if you want to join Next Level Practice, it’s only $77 per month. And what we’re doing is we’re giving you amazing content that’s going to help you stay relevant in what you’re doing. It’s going to save you so much time. Also, we’re creating a community there where you’re in small groups. We have small group leader trainings we’re doing so that we have leaders that are running some of those groups. And then lastly, we give you tools of the trade every single month.
Things like logos, a paperwork packet, infographics for Pinterest that you can use. Those are things that are going to help you succeed and move forward faster than other people that don’t get that kind of support. And it’s $77 a month. We know that that’s going to truly help you at a price point that it’s easy to pay yourself back for and justify to your budget. So, head on over, if you want to read more at practiceofthepractice.com/invite if you know that you want to get going and you want to jump into this cohort that closes today. Go to practiceofthepractice.com/door that’s going to redirect you to PayPal.
In PayPal, you’re just going to set up your payments and then after that, you’re going to get invited to join the Facebook group. You’re going to get invited to join Teachable where all of our 30 plus modules are, and you’re going to schedule a time to talk with Emily for your onboarding call to just make sure that it’s all set for you so that you get all that login and get that personal care. Again, that’s practiceofthepractice.com/door, if you want to join this cohort. Otherwise, you’re going to have to wait until June for our next cohort.
Also, I want to really thank our podcast sponsor. Therapy Notes has been such a great partner for us. We get so many reviews from people saying that it’s such a great fit for their practice as an electronic medical record company that also integrates really well with insurance billing and we can’t recommend them highly enough. If you go over to therapynotes.com and use promo code [JOE] at checkout, you’ll get two months for free. We would love for you to go over there, let them know that we sent you, it’s something that we really recommend and it makes it so that we can put out amazing content on a regular basis that we can actually get paid for and you don’t have to pay for it. And so, thank them for paying for it.
So, again, that’s therapynotes.com. Use promo code [JOE]. Thanks for letting me into your ears and into your brain. Have an awesome week. We’ll talk to you soon.
This podcast is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regards to the subject matter covered. It’s given with the understanding that neither of the host or the guest or the producer or rendering legal, accounting, clinical, or other professional information. You need a professional, you should find one.
Thanks to the band Silence is Sexy for that intro music.