If you’re going to maximize the return on investment in your website and online marketing efforts, learning how to create a top-notch content strategy for your therapy practice can make all the difference.
In this guide, I’ll outline why you need a content strategy in the first place, how to create one, and what to do with it.
“Quality, relevant content can’t be spotted by an algorithm. You need people, actual human beings, to create it”
Kristina Halvorson.
You may have been told before that blogs can help you to market your therapy practice online, but before you dive in and start cranking out blog posts by the truckload, there’s something you should know:
Creating content for the sake of creating content isn’t going to produce the results you’re looking for.
Or at least, it’s unlikely to.
In order to achieve those results, your content needs three things:
- Clarity
- Purpose
- Direction.
Today, you’ll learn six simple steps that will allow you to:
- Develop clarity around the needs of both your practice and your clients
- Define how you’ll meet both needs by creating content with a purpose
- Come up with a clear direction and take actionable steps to get from where you are now to where you ultimately want to be.
How to Create a Content Marketing Strategy for Your Therapy Practice
1. Define your Goals
No matter what type of content you’re planning to create, you first need to know why you’re going to create it.
Perhaps you’re going to publish blog posts on your website to boost your rankings in Google’s organic search results and attract more visitors to your website.
Maybe you want to make YouTube videos or publish guest posts to establish yourself as an expert in your chosen niche.
Or, of course, you may be looking to use content marketing to simply get more paying clients.
The easiest way to determine your content marketing goal is to ask yourself a simple question:
What’s the biggest challenge my business faces right now?
- Getting people to visit your website in the first place?
- Getting those who do visit your site to become paying clients?
- Establishing yourself as an authority or thought leader on a certain therapy-related topic?
If it’s all three, which one is most important to you right now?
Look:
There’s nothing to say that you can’t create a content strategy for your therapy practice that is designed to achieve multiple goals, but for now, I want you to stick with identifying the single greatest challenge you face with your practice so that we can focus on how your content can help you overcome that challenge.
2. Determine How You’ll Measure the Effectiveness of Your Content
So, you’ve decided what you want to achieve with our content, but how do you know if you’re achieving it?
How do you know if what you’re doing is working, or if you need to head back to the drawing board and start over?
A good content strategy shouldn’t be rigid and inflexible. It should be a fluid, adaptable document that can continue to evolve as your business evolves. In order to evolve, however, you need to measure how effective your therapy practice content strategy actually is.
If your goal is simply to get more eyeballs on your website, that’s pretty straightforward:
Hook up Google Analytics and monitor your website traffic.
If your goal is to get more paying clients, keep an eye on changes to the number of clients you have before and after publishing your content and don’t be afraid to ask clients directly how they found out about you.
If you’re planning to establish yourself as an expert in your field, you can track mentions of your name or your practice name on social media and in traditional media outlets.
Tracking backlinks to your website (again using Google Analytics) can also help to measure this goal as it shows you who values your expertise enough to link to you as a credible, authoritative source on a given subject.
Don’t forget to set yourself deadlines too.
When and how often will you actually sit down to measure whether your campaign is working?
3. Define Your Audience
Perhaps more than anything else in this guide, developing a solid understanding of who your customers are and what they want from you is the key to your content marketing success.
After all, you’re not producing this content for yourself. You’re producing it to add value to the lives of existing or potential clients. After all, creating a content strategy for your therapy practice is just an extension of what you already do as a therapist:
Helping people with the problems and challenges they face in life.
You may have already determined your ideal client when creating your therapy practice business plan. If not, here’s some things you may want to think about:
- Who are the people you want to target with your content?
- How old are they?
- What gender?
- What do they do for a living?
- Where do they live?
- What are the problems and challenges they face that you’re uniquely qualified to help them with?
- How do they use the web?
- What search terms do they use to find services like yours?
- What blogs or websites do they read?
- Which social networks are they most active on?
Find out as much as you can about your customers.
The insights you gather will dictate everything else that you do from this point on, from the style and tone you use to create your content to the social media you use to promote it and, yes, the subject matter itself.
There’s likely already a wealth of data out there about your target audience, and looking into existing research is certainly a good start, but you may want to look beyond that and run your own market research survey or use keyword research tools like SemRush to gather data about what your audience is searching for online.
4. Define Your Differences
There’s an overwhelming abundance of content out there on the web, and there’s more and more of it being produced every day. In fact, WordPress users alone publish 70 million blog posts every month and its even said that 7.5 million blog posts are published every day across all platforms.
With so many blog posts being constantly cranked out then, it’s unreasonable to assume that there is other content out there on the web that targets your audience.
So, to make sure that your audience reads your content and not somebody else’s, you’re going to have to think about what you can do to make your content stand out and add greater value than competing content.
Keeping in mind the USP you likely came up with when you created your original business plan, think about what separates you and your practice from other therapists, other practices, and other content creators.
Did your personal experience with a particular issue lead you to specialise in that issue as a therapist? If so, you can offer a unique perspective that others can’t.
Have you discovered techniques or exercises that work with your clients but aren’t widely known? Sharing them with your audience could go a long way to helping you stand out as a therapist with a different approach.
Do you have specialist knowledge? Can you inject humour or your own empathy and compassion into your content?
Trust me, even in those nagging moments of self-doubt, there’s always something about you and what you do that is different.
5. Create Your Plan
Now comes the exciting part:
How are you going to execute this strategy?
You know who you want to reach with your content, how you’re going to reach them, and how you’ll determine how well you’re reaching them, so it’s time to, you know, get out and reach them.
Using all the information and insights you’ve already gathered, put together a plan of action for creating, distributing, and promoting your content.
Decide what you’ll post on daily, weekly, or monthly basis.
Decide whether you’ll create this content yourself or hire someone to do it for you.
Decide what topics you’ll create content about. When you’ll do the work, how you’ll share that work (social media etc.), and when.
Don’t forget to decide what action you want your readers to take as a result of reading your content. This can be anything from simply sharing an article with their friends to making the leap and signing up as a client.
Although the content you create should in no way be one long sales pitch for your practice, it’s common practice in content marketing to include something known as a Call to Action (CTA) at the end of posts.
This is exactly what it sounds like: A call to your readers to take some kind of action, whether that’s booking a consultation appointment with you or reading another article.
To give you an example, my current goal with Therapist Marketing Tips is to build a following on social media, so my CTA (the big blue box at the bottom of each post) directs you to my social profiles.
6. Share and Promote Your Content
Having great content is all well and good, but if nobody knows it exists, it’s hardly going to do anything for you, so you need to go out and actively promote that content.
In step three, you spent some time getting to know your customers’ online habits. Now’s the time to use what you’ve learned to decide how, and when, you’ll share what you’ve created.
Are your customers active Twitter users who spend most of their time online first thing in the morning? You’ll be tweeting out links to your blog posts in time for their morning coffee.
Are they most active on Facebook at the end of a long day? That’s where you need to be sharing your content.
Do they prefer email newsletters? How about Pinterest or Linkedin?
Wherever your audience spends time, that’s where you should be promoting your articles.
7. Measure, Tweak, Repeat
Once you’ve published a few blog posts, videos, or other content on the web, it’s time for the final part of your ongoing therapy practice content strategy:
Analyzing what works.
Think about the goal you set in step 2.
Take a look at your analytics tools, social media engagements or other metrics that you’re using to determine the effectiveness of your campaign, and analyze that data to find trends.
This isn’t as complicated or as technical as it may sound.
Do you find that all of your blog posts over 2,000 words do really well, but those under a thousand get hardly any readers?
That’s a good sign that you’ll get better results by focusing all of your efforts on those longer pieces, and you should tweak your strategy accordingly.
Are you getting lots of views on your videos about performance anxiety but barely any when you talk about depression?
That tells you to focus more on the performance anxiety topic and either ditch depression altogether or at least find a different approach.
When I was training to become a hypnotherapist, our tutors would often say to us “it’s about finding what works and doing more of it.”
The same applies here.
Look at what’s working, do more of it. Look at what’s not working and simply stop doing it.
Repeat this process on a regular basis, and you’ll have a winning content strategy for your therapy practice that makes a major difference in achieving whatever goals you have in mind for your business.
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