MHM#44 Assessing your marketing strategies

When reviewing the different types of marketing you've been using to attract more clients, it's common to look at each one separately, viewing them as independent marketing strategies.

With this approach, you may conclude that Psychology Today isn't working, or that you never get any new clients from Instagram, or that Google Ads isn't bringing enough clients in to make the spend worthwhile.

But all your marketing strategies are working together, each playing a role in attracting prospective clients, building trust, and moving that interest into enquiries and appointments.

Before delving into this further, an understanding of cold and warm audiences is probably helpful.

Cold Audiences: These are people who, as a result of your marketing, are coming across you for the first time. They might have typed "psychotherapist" into Google, and your website appeared, making them aware of you and your Practice for the first time. They have no existing knowledge, feelings, or experience with you or your Practice.

Warm Audiences: These people have been "warmed up." Perhaps they've been following you on social media for a while, subscribed to your email list, received your newsletters, or have even been a past client. They have an existing relationship with you - even just through watching your videos on Instagram. You've started building trust with them, making them more familiar with who you are and what you offer.

How Marketing Activities Work Together

Getting your Practice in front of a cold audience with Google Ads.

Google Ads can be a great way to get more people to your website. If you're not familiar with Google Ads, it's an advertising platform that lets you pay to have your website appear at the top of Google's search results for specific queries, such as "trauma therapist Brisbane". SEO is particularly challenging in the therapist/mental health space, making Google Ads a highly efficient way to increase your website's visibility, much quicker than relying solely on SEO.

Google Ads puts your Practice in front of a cold audience - people searching Google for a trauma therapist who can discover you through your Google Ad campaign. We then want them to click on your Google Ad, which will take them to your website.

Your website starts warming them up.

As soon as prospective clients land on your website, they should know who you work with, what you help them with, what modalities/approaches you use, and why you're uniquely placed to help them. Your website's job is to quickly tell someone if they're in the right place or not - we want people who aren't your ideal clients to leave and people who are your ideal clients to stick around. Once a prospective client sees that you help people just like them, we want them to visit the About section to learn more about you, explore your services, get an idea of what they can expect from therapy with you, and read your valuable blog articles.

This is an essential part of warming them up - the more time they spend on your website, the more they're getting to know you, and the more trust you're building with them.

Social media then warms them up further.

After looking around your website, if you have your social media icons visible, a prospective client will probably decide to check you out on social media. If you have videos, this helps prospective clients connect with you further. They get a sense of your personality, whether you'll be a good fit, and can get a sense of what a therapy session might be like with you.

So, a prospective client may have discovered you via Google and Google Ads, but they then learnt more about you on your website, and then got to connect with you by watching your videos on Instagram.

It's a similar process with referrals as well.

Even with a referral, prospective clients will follow a similar process. A GP or another therapist might recommend you to their patient, and that referral/recommendation carries significant weight. But most prospective clients will still check you out via your website and social media before deciding to book an appointment with you, so if your website doesn't do a great job at resonating with your ideal client, or giving them insight into what therapy is like with you, they're going to be less likely to move forward and contact you.

Inaccuracy of "How did you find out about us?" data

Adding a "How did you find out about us" question to your contact or intake form is a single self‑reported data point, which can help get a sense of what people remember or feel stood out most, but it's not reliable enough to base major marketing decisions on.

People often struggle to accurately recall how they initially heard about a brand or business, and their responses may be influenced by recency bias, favouring more recent touchpoints. Moreover, as we discussed above, it typically takes multiple touchpoints for a prospective client to book an appointment. People rarely remember every step they took before making contact, so they tend to mention only the most recent or most memorable touchpoint.