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3 Powerful Insights to Grow Your Practice

June 7, 2019 • Business • Paul Potter

Are you looking a quick and easy way to grow your practice?

Despite what you read on most marketing websites, a magic solution to open the floodgates for new patients doesn’t exist.

Sure, you can host a seminar or an online contest to get a surge in new patients. But unless you regularly repeat the various marketing tactics, your flow is destined to trickle back to usual.

Who has time for all that?

The only way to grow your practice in today’s information-saturated world is to see and understand marketing in a whole new way.

Answer the following three questions. They will change the way you promote your work, and most importantly, the work you do.

Who are You Called to Serve?

At the heart of this approach is that great marketers don’t use people to solve their practice problems, they employ marketing to solve other people’s problems.

Of the seven billion people in the world, who are you uniquely gifted to help?

It’s obvious that you have no chance of helping everyone. Everyone is too diverse, too many to handle, and too different to impact.

Instead of anyone, force a focus on a small group of someones. Who are the someones that are a good fit for your knowledge, personality, and skill set?

Do they share a need, a desire, or a similar problem?

Do you care about their problem? Do you share the same worldview? It is much more effective to create a solution to a problem for people you deeply care about.

Focusing on a specific group of people to help is the greatest challenge my coaching clients face when growing their businesses. But, once they are clear on “Who is this for,” the doors of attraction swing wide open.

What do They Want?

Now you’ve gotten specific about whom you are seeking to serve. The next step is to determine precisely how you are going to help them.

Don’t start by cloning what you see the big clinics doing. Organize your practice and your marketing around the needs of the smallest viable group of someones.

Find a corner of the market that can’t wait to experience a solution to their problem. Start with what they tell you they want.

Exceed this group’s wants, needs, and desires with your care, your attention, and your skill. Make their lives remarkably better. Make a change that is so profound they can’t help but talk about it.

What Will They Pay For?

The first step in successful marketing is having something worth offering. It needs to make people’s lives better.

Marketing is not about using your money to interrupt people to sell average stuff to average people. Design and build your practice in a way that a few particular people will benefit from it and talk about it.

A market is a group of people who exchange something they value for another thing they value more.

How do you know if you have a good idea?

If enough people buy it.

Market validation is the process of discovering whether your idea actually solves an important problem to your smallest group of people.

Before you invest a lot of time on marketing your great idea, figure out the simplest version of your service then engage it with your group. Focus on solving important problems for them, then improve and repeat.

There’s no sense in spending your hard earned money marketing stuff people won’t buy or if there isn’t enough people to make a living from it.

Steve Blank, the father of Lean Entrepreneurship, stated that a customer focus is the only project of a startup. Customer development is worth far more than fancy digital advertising and expensive marketing.

That is what separates unsuccessful and successful practice growth strategies.


I’d like to hear how you grow your practice. You can tell me below or email me at [email protected]

 

I’ve created a short guide on How To Talk About What You Do To Gain Respect and Referrals that provides a five-part formula to explain what you do in a natural way.

Paul Potter

For over 30 years Paul Potter has owned and managed a private physical therapy practice specializing in manual orthopedic rehabilitation and medical fitness programs for special populations. He hosts the Functional Freedom Podcast where he interviews current thought leaders on practice issues and strategies to facilitate the professional effectiveness of therapists. A few factoids about...

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Pranit Patel

Commented • June 11, 2019

I think creating a user persona is really important for any marketing effort. If you know your target group well, you can create content accordingly and that can be effective to convert them into paying customers. Great insight, thanks for sharing!


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