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How can you clearly and empathetically yet successfully create and write the best directory profiles for yourself or your clinicians? What are the four major points that you need to hit to show clients that you know, see, and hear them? When do you offer your services in a way that is both effective and compassionate?
In this podcast episode, Joe Sanok speaks about messaging and marketing to improve directory profiles with Jenn Fredette.
Podcast Sponsor: Alma
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Meet Jenn Fredette
Jenn is a relational, psychodynamic-oriented, attachment-based loving, Jungian concept adoring, and existential thinking psychotherapist based in the DC Metro area. In addition to her clinical work, Jenn partners with psychotherapists who want to market with depth, not just offer quick solutions to get people in the door.
Jenn is passionate about dismantling the obstacles that get in the way of people exploring their own psyches, of which a core one is that depth- psychotherapists struggle to market themselves in congruent, compelling ways.
Visit A Thinker’s Guide and connect on Facebook and Instagram.
- Center your authenticity
- Start with identity
- Niche vs ICA and the PAVS process
- Jenn’s advice to private practitioners
Center your authenticity
You may feel at a loss for what to do with your marketing if you are always looking at what everyone else is doing, and managing your marketing efforts like a checklist that you need to get through.
It’s so common when you’re just getting started, or even after you’ve been around for a while, to see other successful people and say, “Oh, should I be doing that?” (Joe Sanok)
Marketing is necessary for a successful business but it is versatile, and you can approach it however you would like to and however it best reaches your ideal clients.
The clincher is that you have to be authentically yourself. It’s tempting to copy someone else because they’re successful, but they’re probably successful because they are operating from a combination of their niche and authenticity.
Self-disclosure is this really taboo word … As a seasoned practitioner practicing for almost 13 years, [I feel] that self-disclosure is an important therapeutic tool. It’s also an important marketing tool … It doesn’t mean you have to go out and tell people what you just processed in therapy, but it is about being able to bring who you are forward, which in marketing we talk about in terms of branding. (Jenn Fredette)
There are distinctive ways in which each person will show up in their marketing because you are all distinctive people.
Start with identity
Often – in life before going through therapy – and in marketing, people mimic others because they may have been told before that their authentic voices are not okay, or are not valued.
In messaging, it can feel uncomfortable putting your avenue out there, but it needs to happen. Your messaging is the words that you are using to show up in your marketing – these are the words in your copy which signify your “voice” in marketing.
Your voice is involved in how you’re bringing forward that marketing, and so we have to pay attention to the ways in which we have silenced our voice, and what it is that we actually say – especially to the clients that we really want to work with. (Jenn Fredette)
Niche vs ICA and the PADS process
Your niche and ideal client avatar are not the same.
Your niche is your speciality. It is what you are trained in, your credentials, and your lived experience that is combined with what you are passionate about and enjoy working with.
On the other hand, your ideal client avatar is the profile that you create about your ideal client who you would be working with – ideally – in this niche.
Here you flesh out things like:
- Who they are
- What they do
- What they are struggling with
- How they approach life
When we can really distill down into the individual, we start to reveal the universal, so your copy … and messaging is going to resonate with so many more people, and it also allows us to start to thread things in, so that when somebody reads your Psychology Today profile, they’re like, “How did you know that I was watching that?” (Jenn Fredette)
The images that you create through your messaging that allow people to recognize themselves and feel seen is what start to draw them into wanting to work with you because they feel like you know them already.
Jenn recommends the PAVS process:
- P: Problem: show in your messaging that you understand what your client is going through. Not the clinical term, but the problems that they are facing beneath it
- A: Amplify: bring out the problem by showing that you understand what it feels and looks like
- D: Validate: validate all the solutions that the client may have tried in managing their problem already
- S: Solution: the solution is whatever the solution is – don’t try to sell yourself as the only solution. Offer yourself as the space-holder for your client to find their solution
Jenn’s advice to private practitioners
Go to therapy yourself, because your work is better when you’ve done this work.
Sponsors Mentioned in this episode:
- Check out Mentaya
- Learn more about building a thriving private practice with Alma at helloalma.com/joe
Useful links mentioned in this episode:
- Visit A Thinker’s Guide and connect on Facebook and Instagram.
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Email Joe at [email protected] to suggest guests for the show
Check out these additional resources:
How to Find Your Niche with Susanna Guarino, LMHC | POP 951
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Meet Joe Sanok
Joe Sanok helps counselors to create thriving practices that are the envy of other counselors. He has helped counselors to grow their businesses by 50-500% and is proud of all the private practice owners who are growing their income, influence, and impact on the world. Click here to explore consulting with Joe.
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