MFM#35 When the therapy marketing stars align, your practice fills with clients.

For therapy marketing to be successful and to fill your caseload with clients you love working with, we need to ensure the following is ticked off, or as I often say, the therapy marketing stars need to align:

1. Choose your niche / ideal client.
2. Identify what associations your ideal client needs to pick you.
3. Articulate your ideal client's pain, desired outcome, and offer.
4. Create the identified associations and reflect back their pain and desired outcome through your website and marketing activities.

Choosing your ideal client

I understand that if you're in the very early stages, it's not always super easy to select a type of client you want to focus on working with. Often simply because you haven't had enough time to work with enough clients to learn who you do and don't like working with.

If you're struggling to select a niche, narrow it down as much as possible. For now, that might be neurodiverse young adults, and then in two years, once you've worked with more clients, that might narrow further down to neurodiverse, career-passionate young women navigating the workplace.

Articulate your ideal client's associations

Brand associations are the thoughts, feelings and beliefs someone has about you. It's everything that someone associates with you. Which could be positive, negative, accurate or inaccurate. 

As a therapist, you would know that each bit of knowledge you have sits in your memory as a node within a larger network of ideas. When you encounter something for the first time, if you pay sufficient attention, this experience can create a new node to represent this new bit of knowledge. This new node doesn't exist in isolation; it gets attached to your existing memory network. This idea of the human memory is called the collective associative network theories of memories (Anderson & Bower, 1973). This process of building a network also describes how a brand is created in your memory (Keller, 1993).

A strong brand is a brand that has created numerous positive and accurate associations in the minds of their ideal customers. When a prospective customer encounters the brand or is considering which brand to buy, the brand they are aware of and that has the most positive associations will typically win the sale. 

How does this relate to you as a therapist and growing a private therapy practice? We need prospective clients to create numerous positive and accurate associations about you, ideally more than the other therapists they're considering booking an appointment with. Typically, the therapist with the most positive and accurate associations will be the one the client books an appointment with. 

A company with a big marketing budget should research what associations customers need to increase the likelihood of buying their product/service. Without this research, we must make assumptions about what associations a prospective client needs to trust that you're the best therapist to help them. 

For example, for the niche "Neurodiverse, career-passionate young women navigating the workplace", some associations include:

"She seems like someone who really gets it—someone who won't make me feel broken or 'too much.'"

"I've seen a lot of therapists' websites, but Sarah's actually feels like a space where I could be myself."

"Reading her posts, I felt understood for the first time. Like someone had finally put into words what I've been feeling."

"She's neurodivergent too—that makes such a difference. I won't have to mask or explain everything."

"She talks about therapy as something we do together, not something that's done to me. That feels really empowering."

"I like that she blends different approaches. It feels flexible and respectful of how I think and feel."

"She uses creativity and visuals in her work—that might actually work better for how my brain processes things."

"I don't want a therapist who's just going to focus on my 'problems.' I want someone like Sarah, who sees my strengths too."

"She's clearly committed to inclusivity. As someone who's LGBTQ+ and neurodivergent, that matters a lot to me."

"Her online presence makes me feel calm and hopeful—like maybe therapy could feel safe this time."

Articulate your ideal client's pain and desired outcome, and how you're uniquely placed to help

What builds further trust is reflecting back to them what is going on for them, and what they're hoping their future might look like after therapy. 

The more you can reflect back to prospective clients their pain and desired outcome, and how what you do will help them move away from that pain towards their desired outcome, the more they will see that you "get them," and that you specialise in working with people just like them. 

What are common ways your ideal client expresses what's going on for them? Are there common feelings, fears, behaviours, experiences, and ways it shows up for them in daily life?  

Be as nuanced as possible because the more nuanced you are, the more it demonstrates that you understand them. And then do the same for their goals and desired outcomes. How do they imagine their life might look differently after therapy? What are they hoping therapy will do for them? 

Examples of pain:

• I feel like a Zombie, just trying to survive each day at work.
• Feeling lost, alien, worthless, or "broken."
• Strong rejection sensitivity, leading to people-pleasing behaviours as part of a masking strategy to avoid conflict or discomfort.
• Self-deprecating humour often masks deeper feelings of inadequacy.
• Substance use to manage anxiety at work.
• Restrictive eating or other self-punishing habits are often tied to a sense of worthlessness.

Examples of desired outcomes

• Free from the constant internal struggle.
• Start thriving at work.
• Building meaningful connections and feeling understood and accepted.
• Achieving personal and career milestones that they previously felt were out of reach.
• Breaking free from the "invisible shackles" of societal expectations and embracing the courage to be themselves.
• Feel empowered, capable, and liberated—able to live authentically and without limits.

How is your offer uniquely placed to help your ideal clients? When we talk about your offer, it's the combination of your qualifications and experience, modalities, approach to therapy and the experience a client can expect from you. Your offer is how you will help your client move from their pain towards their desired outcome. We need to show prospective clients how this combination is different from other therapists and will give them the best shot at helping them. 

Create the identified associations and reflect back their pain and desired outcome

The job of marketing activities (website, SEO, Google Ads, Instagram, directory profiles) is to get you in front of your ideal clients, create positive and accurate associations, reflect back their pain and desired outcome, and show them how you're uniquely placed to help. 

Every time you get in front of an ideal prospective client, whether that's your website, a video on Instagram, a blog article, a newsletter, a free resource, your Psychology Today profile, your response to an enquiry, an initial free consult - all of this content whether its written words, conversations, videos, the colours and look and feel of your website and social media designs, everything needs to be focused on consistently creating those identified associations, and reflecting back to them what's going on for them. 

This is why videos are important - on your website and on Instagram, they are more powerful in creating associations -  I feel like she will understand me, I feel I won't be judged, I feel we'll have a good rapport, her personality seems like someone I would find easy to talk to. 

Their experience in an Initial consult or response to an enquiry needs to confirm and build on the associations they've already created. This cements their thoughts and feelings and further develops trust and confidence in their decision to pick you as their therapist. 

If the stars aren't aligned

If one star is slightly off and not doing its job, your marketing becomes less effective in building your caseload. If you are clear on who you want to work with, and are fairly confident in knowing what these clients need to think, feel and believe about you, but your website does a poor job of creating these thoughts, feelings and beliefs then you may have clients still making enquiries but its going to be less likely that they'll be your ideal client. 

Or if your website and content all do a great job at creating accurate and positive associations, but their experience in an initial consult contradicts those associations, you'll get fewer clients moving from initial consult/enquiry to appointment. 

When all the stars are aligned, you'll get more ideal clients booking free consults / making enquiries and a high number of these moving forward into appointments. 

References

Anderson, J. R., & Bower, G. H. (1973). Human Associative Memory. Washington, DC: V.H. Winston & Sons.

Keller, K. L. (1993). Conceptualizing, Measuring, and Managing Customer-Based Brand Equity.
Journal of Marketing, 57(1), 1–22.