When it comes to starting and growing a private practice, therapists start by attracting clients through referrals, word of mouth, and insurance panels. Arguably, it’s the easiest way to fill your practice. But it’s not the only way, particularly if your practice is private pay only or transitioning to a private pay model.

With the promotional tools available to every therapist who wants to grow their practice, relying on referrals or insurance may slow down and even prevent your business’s success. Unfortunately, marketing is an often-neglected topic in virtually all psychology grad school programs, leaving clinicians to figure it out on their own in the real world, even though nearly 50% of therapists end up working in private practice.

When you choose the private pay model, you’ll need to invest in marketing on your own, but you will have full control of the type of clients to attract, your rates, and your promotional methods. This mental health marketing lab series is designed to take you through the process of marketing your therapy practice in manageable monthly sessions.

Without perspective, we can lose track of all the moving pieces in the world around us.

We can get distracted or develop a single vision in business and life that can distort our sense of reality. When it comes to marketing, zooming out and looking at your whole strategy can give you clarity and show how every channel, effort, and activity is supposed to work together to achieve a specific goal. In private practice, the goal is to consistently attract new clients. We use SEO, Social, ads, outreach, and other tactics to do that, but we don’t often have a clear understanding of the order, or in marketing terms, a “funnel” that helps us organize this process. The diagram below shows how each marketing piece builds up on the other.