3 Months of Physical Therapy Content Planning in 30 Minutes
Updated: Dec 4, 2024
Starting your own cash based practice as a physical therapist or other healthcare provider is an admirable challenge in itself. Between managing your clients, keeping up with documentation, and prioritizing work-life balance, oftentimes marketing for your practice can get put on the back burner.
We know that we live in the information age, and a digital one at that. So in order for you to continue growing your practice and achieve success long-term, it's important to consider your marketing strategy as a business.
An effective online presence with the use of a solid content marketing strategy can be a game-changer for speaking to your ideal client. The problem is, most practice owners get bogged down in the details. During this post, I’m going to walk you through how I go about planning 3 months of content for my physical therapy practice in 30 minutes or less.
Learn about why every PT should be doing content marketing in the blog post here.
Why Content Planning Matters
When I first started my practice back in 2019, I’ll admit, my marketing efforts were scattered. My marketing plan at that point included sitting down, planning, executing, editing, and publishing new content all in the same day. In the beginning this process seemed manageable, but after a short amount of time and the demands of my business expanding, it became obvious there was no way I could sustain it.
I learned that when it came to digital marketing for my cash based physical therapy practice, I needed to break the process into steps that I could tackle one at a time. Just like anything else, when it comes to completing a large task, sometimes it's better to break it up into smaller tasks and slowly chip away at it.
Because I know how challenging it can be to wear many different hats as a business owner, I emphasize to the students I coach in our DPT to CEO business program just how important having a content plan can be. Does it take work? Yes. But once you have a plan in place, you can watch the magic of your work unfold.
Set Your Content Goals
Before you jump right into physical therapy marketing, it’s important that you take the time to determine what goals you have in mind for the content you create. When you look at creating content, break it down into 3 main pillars or goals of the type of content you want to bring to your audience. Here's some examples:
Build awareness and offering education
Create opportunities for engagement
Make your offer
Building Awareness and Offering Education
When it comes to building awareness and offering education to your audience, you really can’t give away too much information for free. The average Joe really doesn’t know much about physical therapy in general, and probably doesn’t understand how a physical therapist could help them get back to doing CrossFit without pain (for example). That’s why when creating content, you want to cover topics that you want the average person to learn about, specific to you and your business.
Here are a couple examples of topic ideas for the physical therapist who works with CrossFit athletes:
What physical therapy is and what it isn’t
The benefits of PT for CrossFit for recovery
Proper lifting techniques to avoid injury
Creating Opportunities for Engagement
Creating engagement and fostering a sense of community with your audience can be powerful for building trust. Helping people get to know you, learn to like you, and find you trustworthy is the key to turning followers into paying clients. Learn more about my take on the KLT framework in the blog post here.
With that being said, we want to encourage our followers and audience to comment, ask questions, share posts, etc. Somehow you want to get your followers involved in the content you’ve created, which not only brings in fresh leads for you, but promotes a sense of community built around your business.
Making Your Offer
Last but not least is making your offer. This is often a content goal that I see students forget to prioritize. They typically are so focused on putting out educational content for their audience that they forget to tell their followers about the services they offer.
Don’t let this be you too. Your offer and services are key pieces of your business. This could be a simple post introducing yourself and who you help or the problems you solve. It’s also important to include information about how to work with you, whether it be to schedule a consultation to get started or to book an appointment on your website.
We don’t want to just create content for the heck of it, we want our ideal customer to know that we’re open to new clients and ready to help them in any way that we can.
Niche Marketing for Your Practice
If you’ve been following me for a while now, you’ve heard me talk about the importance of “niching down” for your practice. Declaring your niche and developing what’s called a unique selling proposition (USP) is what sets you apart from other practice owners. Without it, it’s highly unlikely that you’ll be landing a steady influx of clients anytime soon.
Learn why marketing physical therapy won’t get you clients in the blog post here.
In some ways your USP is your practice’s personal brand. It should define who you are, who you help, and the problems you solve. Using my own practice as an example, my USP would be “I help CrossFit athletes get rid of shoulder, knee, and hip pain so that they can workout without limitations.” This clear statement, when it comes to marketing your practice, allows your target audience to know exactly who it is you help and the problems you solve.
Choose Your Platforms
When it comes to choosing platforms, I want to encourage you to lean into social media marketing for starters. We’re in the era of the social media boom. One social media platform, at least at the time of this post, that is benefiting practice owners all over the country is Instagram. Personally, I’ve seen the benefits of posting consistent content on Instagram, and many of my coaching students have too.
Pro tip: As a rule of thumb, your social media strategy for posting on Instagram should be a minimum of 3 posts per week. If that seems too overwhelming, start with one post per week and work up from there.
The second platform I recommend is utilizing your website to post blog content. Updated blog content can significantly improve your website’s search engine optimization (SEO), helping keep it fresh and on the forefront of the Google algorithm when potential customers are searching for relevant keywords. Not to mention, with the power of things like ChatGPT, you can bust out a 500 word blog in no time.
Pro tip: Consider posting one new blog per week on your website. Again, if this frequency feels too daunting, start with one post a month and build from there.
Create Your Content Schedule
Next up is creating your content schedule. You’ve decided on the main goals of your content, as well as the platforms you plan to participate in. From there, getting organized is key to fostering consistent content.
There are two main concepts when it comes to creating a content schedule:
Plan when to post
Stay ahead of the game
When it comes to planning when to post, use a calendar such as Google Calendar, a software like Notion, or an old fashioned pen and paper calendar to map out when you are planning to publish new social and blog content.
In that same token, I encourage you and anyone getting started with creating consistent content to stay ahead of the game. I know firsthand the feeling of putting something, like content, on the back burner when I’m swamped with other work tasks. Planning your content schedule and then creating the content itself at least a week or two in advance will help you to always have content ready to roll out, even when business is hectic.
Generate Content Ideas
Last but not least, generating content ideas is maybe the one step that I see many practice owners get stuck on. I want you to know that coming up with fresh ideas doesn’t have to be such a chore. Returning to the use of ChatGPT for writing blog posts, I would also encourage you to use software like ChatGPT to help you come up with ideas for content.
Here’s a simple ChatGPT prompt I would use for my own practice: “I’m a pelvic health PT who specializes in working with female CrossFit athletes so that they stop peeing their pants during workouts. Help me come up with 12 educational content ideas for my ideal customer.”
From there, here are some ideas that ChatGPT could spit out to help kickstart your creativity:
Instagram Content:
Educational Posts: Discuss how pelvic health can benefit a female CrossFit athlete’s performance in the gym.
Engagement Posts: Create polls on stories to see what pelvic health challenges are most commonly faced by your ideal customer (i.e. pelvic pain, leakage, pain with sex, etc.)
Testimonials: Share a story about yourself or a client and how you were able to take them from point A to point B. Share their success, helping your audience resonate with their story.
Blog Content Ideas:
Write about topics like “The Importance of Pelvic Health in the Female CrossFit Athlete” or “5 Exercises to Stop Peeing Your Pants During Weightlifting.”
BONUS - Email Newsletters:
Email marketing can be a powerful tool to summarize your best social and blog content and share with a specific group of individuals who have subscribed to your email list. Simply sharing a monthly or biweekly newsletter can point your subscribers to your content allowing them to digest information relevant to their interests.
Conclusion
In conclusion, planning 3 months worth of content for your physical therapy practice in 30 minutes is very doable. By following the thought out process above, you’ll be well on your way to streamlining content planning and production in no time. Work smarter, not harder with the use of tools like ChatGPT and remember that the key to a solid marketing plan is consistency over time.
If you’re struggling to get started with creating marketing content for your practice, we cover important concepts and offer one-on-one help in our DPT to CEO business coaching program. Or if you’d like to find out more about if our program would be the right fit for you, book a free discovery call with me here! We can discuss your goals, current state of your practice, and what your next best steps would be.
Listen to this episode on my podcast!
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