The Typical Physical Therapy Marketing Plan
And How It Should Be

Physical therapy marketing can seem to create inconsistent results. Typically what happens in most practices is that they have a certain patient volume or ceiling that they consider is all they can treat because of the current staff situation. The patient volume looks like this:

A. Business is down, so you have to go out and build relationships and meet with doctors and in general leave the office. If you are effective the patient volume will go up. This is the typical physical therapy marketing plan.

B. Now since you are also a physical therapist and likely have a patient load to treat, you can’t go out and continue to build the patient volume. Now remember, we do physical therapy and not chiropractic, therefore we do actually discharge our patients and consequently the patient volume drops and back you go doing “A” again – more door-to-door marketing of your physical therapy practice.

Another interesting thing is that this rollercoaster pattern is so typical that most practice owners will wait entirely too long, when the statistics are on a major uptrend, to hire additional staff. They are usually so certain that the patient volume will go down because it always does. They don’t know why but it always does. This is one reason why physical therapy marketing seems unreliable so let me share with you why your patient volume will go down just as it seems you have hit your peak.

When you start hitting the ceiling of patient volume or tolerance level, there will be a counter-effort to your expansion. It starts out with the ‘anti-new patient dance’ at the front desk where the staff PTs hop around and complain to the receptionist saying things like – “I can’t fit that patient in!” or perhaps say something to the patient such as, “You are doing well; perhaps we should only see you once a week….”

Another common reason many practice owners do not continue to ride the upward trend of their practice is because they commonly have no idea what makes the new patients increase in the practice. Often there is a lack of recognition of direct causation of their expansion and rollercoaster statistics are explained away with comments like, “The winter is always busy” or “Most of the doctors are on vacation right now” or worse, “When is it ever going to slow down around here … this place is a zoo!”!” The owner doesn’t realize that there may be something wrong with the physical therapy marketing plan being used.

As time goes on, the practice statistics take on an appearance of going up and down, up and down, up and down over a period of years.How you may appear to your staff is something like this: As the practice owner you are usually uncertain as to what drives in new patients, but then, sometimes by fluke you do something and it punches the numbers up. You then decide to have a staff meeting. You tell your staff that we are all very busy, so it is time we look for another therapist, and they (quietly) say to themselves, “Loser, what kind of practice owner are you not to predict that we needed to be recruiting for another PT much sooner than this!” The group might say “Hurrah!” but they know that they can’t wait another 8-10 weeks for you to find another PT and continue to expand the practice. And so the group pressure NOT TO EXPAND holds the practice down. This group pressure then begins to squash any physical therapy marketing actions you have in place to expand the practice.

Have you ever been on the physical therapist side of this dilemma and not the owner? What if you could know at least 8-10 weeks before you had to have a new hire and you spoke in that same staff meeting and said, “Based upon our physical therapy marketing plan and the trend on our statistics it is likely that in 8-10 weeks we are going to need another PT on board. Let’s get a mailing list of PTs from an 8 county area and start NOW promoting for PTs.” Wouldn’t your group think that you were an actual genius?

The typical physical therapy marketing plan does not build a stable and consistently expanding practice. It is a boom and bust scenario. But there is a solution. The solution is to have in place a simple and effective plan that does not rely on the practice owner, does not require you to leave the office to ask for referrals and creates three avenues that each generate new patient referrals. This physical therapy marketing plan would also make the practice well known and well thought of.

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