4 Easy Tools to Use to Market Your Private Practice
One key idea to remember as you prioritize your marketing efforts is that most of the content you create and share with your audience should be geared toward building their trust and allowing them to get to know more about you and your practice. So the good news is that your marketing strategy, graphics and content don’t have to be perfect - but they should show off your dazzling personality and offer value to your audience and ideal client.
Marketing your private practice doesn’t have to feel overwhelming and tedious. By investing a bit of time in learning to use some basic tools, you can create and implement a successful marketing strategy to launch, grow and expand your practice; on a budget. Keep reading for 4 easy tools to use to market your private practice!
Canva
Canva is a graphic design tool (with both free and paid plans) that allows you to create visual content including social media graphics, printable PDF workbooks and so much more. Canva has thousands of templates that have been designed to look professional and aesthetically pleasing.
Canva makes it easy to create content that is on-brand (using a consistent colour scheme, fonts and even stock imagery). This elevates your brand presence and ensures that your audience will be able to recognize a piece of your content at a quick glance.
The content you create in Canva can be used as social media posts, infographics for your blog article, pins for Pinterest, business cards or letterhead. It is this consistent branding, and attention to detail, that will enhance your client experience from mediocre to referral-worthy!
Social Media Platforms
It’s likely that you already spend quite a bit of time on social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn and even Pinterest. Using the platforms that you are already familiar with to market your private practice will alleviate the learning curve as you implement your strategy.
The posts you share on these social platforms can build a relationship with your ideal client by providing them with helpful tips or by inviting them to learn more about your services. Social media also allows you the opportunity to connect with your audience by interacting with them in the comments of your posts or via direct messaging.
There are even features such as Instagram Stories stickers or Facebook polls that allow you to get feedback from your audience to determine what questions they may have or what content they want to see from you. All of this information can be used to create an effective marketing strategy that provides tangible value to your ideal client.
Social Media Schedulers
As you start to incorporate social media into your overall marketing strategy, you may begin to find that creating graphics, writing captions and posts and actually posting content can be time-consuming. There are many social media scheduling tools that can help alleviate some of the administrative burdens.
For Instagram scheduling, we would recommend Later. Its free plan allows you to schedule and publish up to 30 posts per month. The paid plan on Later offers additional features such as hashtag suggestions and generating a schedule for the best time to post based on your unique audience.
There are also more robust programs such as Recur Post or SocialBee that allow you to create recurring content categories and allow posting on multiple platforms (i.e. Facebook business page, Facebook group, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.). While these types of programs do not offer free plans, they do allow you to effortlessly recycle content, create multiple variations of posts and automate your scheduling - ideal for someone who already has a large bank of content.
A word of caution, though… most social media platforms favour authentic engagement within their platform. This means that while scheduling programs can be helpful from an administrative perspective, it’s important to ensure that you spend time engaging with your audience and ideal clients as part of your social media strategy.
Email Marketing
Incorporating email marketing into your overall growth strategy is highly recommended. Not only does it ensure you are protected against the ever-changing social media platforms, but building an email list allows you to direct access to your audience’s inbox.
Email marketing is a great way to share news about your private practice, re-engage past clients and offer additional value to your audience. You can use email marketing to answer frequently asked questions, invite your subscribers to book a session with you or even launch the new product that you’ve worked so hard on!
Many email marketing programs offer free plans for users with a small subscriber list or who will send just a handful of emails each month. Some of the more popular email programs include ConvertKit (what we use at BYPP!), Mailerlite and Mailchimp. There are some great tutorials for these programs on Youtube, so set some time aside to commit to learning and your marketing efforts will be rewarded!
How do you feel about marketing your private practice? Leave us a comment or feel free to share in the BYPP Community!
If you’re looking to take your marketing strategy to the next level, check out our Niche & Copy Crash Course - it’s designed to help you get clear on your ideal client and effectively write your Psychology Today profile!
