How to know if any marketing activity is working for your private practice

Don't spend any time or money on marketing until you have listened to or read the transcript for this episode. Too often psychologists and therapists spend time on marketing because they think they "should" not because they know it works. There are no "shoulds" only what works for you.

This episode shows you how to work it out with two common use cases, blogging for therapy inquiries and Instagram to get more downloads of your freebie.

Key points:

Define the goal of your marketing activity

Take baseline metrics. For example: how many people visited my website in the last 28 days, how many therapy inquiries did I get in that period, how many new therapy clients did I sign up?

Work out your inquiry conversion rate: (number of new clients/number of inquires) x 100

Do the work!

Take your metrics again 28 days later

Work out what your numbers are telling you

Work out your cost per client

Intervene to improve the areas that don't seem to be working

Listen to the whole episode or read the transcript for the details of how to analyse the effectiveness and cost of any marketing activity.

Client Checklist 2021

. Dr Rosie: Hello.

And welcome to the business of psychology podcast.

Today, we're here talking about something that I get asked about all the time.

And that is how to tell whether something you're doing in

your marketing is worth it.

So often I speak to psychologists and therapists in psychology business school

who are feeling really demoralized or a bit unmotivated when they first join us.

Because maybe they've been plugging away at a blog for the past couple

of months, or they've been trying to make a go of it on Instagram.

And they're just not sure whether what they're doing is actually

achieving anything for them at all.

So today I want to talk about the key principles you need to have in mind in

order to always be carefully using your time and resources in your marketing

and evaluating whether everything is worth doing and worth spending

those valuable time and resources on.

And then I want to dive into two common use cases.

That we have for marketing in a private practice.

The first one, we'll be looking at a typical private practice where

you're trying to get more inquiries.

And the second one we'll be diving into maybe using something like Instagram.

To build an audience for a passive income type products, like an online course.

So the first half of this podcast will be me with you, I'm talking into

this microphone, like I always do.

The second half is taken from an Instagram live that I did

for one of our PBS members HANA.

The, I just thought was so useful that it should be shared with a wider audience.

I thought I would use that content again on here.

So if you hear a slight difference in the audio, it's just where we have

switched to the Instagram live . Okay.

So first off then.

What are the key principles you always need to have in mind?

Uh, In order to be making sure you're never wasting your time.

Because we just don't have enough time.

To be wasting any of it.

And we certainly don't have enough money to spend money in places that are not

bringing us returns on our marketing.

Well, the first thing that you absolutely must always know before

you embark on any kind of marketing activity, any social media, any

blogging, any networking events.

Any work on your website, absolutely anything you have to know.

Why are you doing this?

What is the metric that you're trying to improve here?

There has to be a number that you can track attached to any marketing activity.

Then you need to take a baseline.

Where are you at the moment with that particular key metric?

Then you need to decide what activity are you going to focus on over the

next 30 days to try and improve that metric and make it just one

thing, one focused activity that you're going to give your all.

Over the next 30 days.

If you do all of that, it will allow you to track whether you're improving

in your efforts, whether you're getting more of the thing that you want.

But also to work out the cost of it to you.

Because the other thing that you need to do is track your time.

So, if you are say, going to focus on blogging,

Over the next 30 days, then I want you to use the TOGGL track

app and that's TOGGL track.

Which allows you to click start and stop every time you do

something related to your blog.

That way, when you get to the end of the month, you're going to know exactly

how many hours you spent on that blog.

Same thing.

If you're outsourcing it, then you need to keep a record of

exactly what you're spending on.

Outsourcing it.

So you want to know how many hours did that person's then doing a

blog for you and how much did you pay them over that 30 day period?

If you know all of that, then you've got all the ability to check whether

something is working for you.

So let's work through that blogging use case then.

So let's assume here that the reason that I'm blogging is because I want

more inquiries for my therapy practice.

Now I've got to say this.

Wouldn't be my first marketing method for getting more inquiries.

I would always recommend networking first and that you've

already heard that from me.

On this season of the podcast so far.

And so let's just imagine that I am using my blog to try and increase the number of

inquiries to my private practice website.

So the first thing I need to do then is take my baseline.

So how many.

Visits to my blog page.

Am I currently getting over 30 day period?

How many people are clicking on that blog?

This is something I can find out from Google analytics.

You need to sign up for an account for Google analytics.

If you have a site that's been made for you by somebody else, they

should have signed you up for it.

So you might need to ask them through the login.

If you set it up yourself, you should know how to access it.

It's an absolute must.

So, if any of you are sitting there and you thinking, I don't have a Google

analytics account, you have to get one.

So just look up on YouTube, how to set up Google analytics from my website.

That's much better than me trying to tell you here, because these

things change all the time.

So just look it up.

It's in Google's interest to make it easy for you.

So trust me, it's not too difficult.

So once you've got your Google analytics set up, you can then quite easily see how

many people have landed on a particular page on your site in the last 28 days.

So you're going to look for that number.

How many have landed on the blog page of your website?

The next thing I want to know is how many people have landed on the contact form.

Of my website.

The next thing I want to know after that is how many inquiries have I received?

Now, this is where things get a little bit less clear.

Because it is likely if you have a practice like mine, that some people

will contact you by phone and you won't know where they've come from.

Some people will contact you via your form on your website.

Great.

They'll show up in these stats.

And some people will contact you by email, but again, you won't

be sure where they've come from.

So for that reason, I would collect all of those things together in this statistic.

So I would put all of the inquiries that I've received here.

It means we'll always be a little bit unsure where exactly they've

come from, but unless you've got some more sophisticated tracking going on.

You will probably need to just use this as a broad rule of thumb to start with.

So make sure that you record how many inquiries you've

received in the last 28 days.

Finally, you then want to work out how many therapy clients you've

onboarded in the last month.

So how many of those inquiries when Toms become paid up therapy, clients

who have signed your contract?

So make sure that you've got that number written down too.

From that you can then work out your inquiry, conversion rate.

Say you received six inquiries over the month and you took on three new

clients as a result, you would have a 50% inquiry, conversion rates.

So write all of that down.

Those are all of your key metrics for your baseline.

Then you're going to do the work.

So you're going to follow the advice in this podcast for whatever

marketing activity you're doing.

So in this case, you're blogging.

So you're gonna listen to all of our back catalog on blogging.

Really try and optimize those blogs for search engines.

The best you possibly can.

You're going to be sharing those blogs at networking events.

You're going to be sharing those blogs and your socials.

Really putting your back into making that blog work for you.

And then we come back in 30 days time and we write out all of the same.

Statistics and compare them with the previous month.

So then we take those key metrics one by one, compare them and try and draw some

useful conclusions from what they tell us.

So that first metric was about traffic to the blogging site.

And obviously our aim over that 30 days has been to try and get more

people to go to that blogging page.

So if we look at these statistics and we see that we have not achieved

that there are not more people going to the blogging page, then

we can infer something from that.

It's difficult to be precise at this point, but if you've really put some

effort into promoting that blog, And there are still no additional hits to it.

There aren't many more people coming and checking it out.

It's likely that either the title or the subject of that blog just

wasn't compelling to people.

Maybe people weren't searching for it.

Maybe we didn't do our search engine optimization properly or

maybe we didn't get out there and promote it as much as we needed to.

So in a way.

It's kind of easy to diagnose a problem.

If there's not enough traffic to that blog, then that's why you're not seeing

an increase in inquiries . So if that's the issue, then you start working

on writing more compelling content and promoting it more effectively.

So hopefully what you'll see is that there is now.

More traffic, more people landing on your blogging page.

But what we really interested in is do those people that land on your blogging

page, come over to your contact page.

And crucially become inquiries.

So if we see, yes, there's been a massive spike in people

coming to my blogging page.

It'd be really easy to just get excited.

Pat ourselves on the back and walk off into the sunset.

Well, in reality, If your aim was to get more inquiries, but none of those

people translated into inquiries.

Then actually the blog isn't doing anything other than making

us feel good about ourselves.

And, and that's not to say blogging doesn't have other purposes.

It absolutely does.

But if what you need is more inquiries.

Then, if you've been successful in getting more people onto your blog, but

they've not translated into inquiries.

That blog something about it is not working and we

need to be able to fix that.

So you look at whether your number of inquiries has gone up and whether

it's gone up proportionally to the amount that your traffic has gone up.

And if it has yay, we know that it's working.

Then, then we look at has your number of therapy clients

that you've onboarded gone up.

And has that gone up?

Proportionally is your inquiry, conversion rates still 50%.

Now, if it has, if it's gone up proportionately, your inquiry conversion

rate is still 50% or whatever it was before, then you can say, excellent.

This blog is working exactly.

As I hoped it would.

It's bringing more people into my world who are then finding it logical to

come and book an appointment with me.

And they're just as good, a quality as the referrals that I

had from other sources before.

We were estimating that based on the fact that the inquiry

conversion rate is about the same.

So all good.

Keep going with the blogging strategy.

If, however you notice something like you were getting more inquiries,

but that conversion rate was lower.

Then we might be thinking, okay, is there something about the

people I'm attracting to this blog?

That means actually they're not such a good fit for working with me.

So maybe.

I need to change the messaging in the blog.

So the I'm attracting more of the people who are the perfect

fit for my therapy services.

Or for example, if you find that you're getting low to traffics and blogging page,

but they're not translating into inquiries are their calls to action and your blog.

Is it clear that you want them to book an appointment with you?

That people like them are welcome to book an appointment with you?

That you are a therapist who helps people like them.

Often if we are getting lots of traffic to a site, like a blog, but we're

not translating that into inquiries.

It's either because we're attracting.

People at the wrong time in their journey.

So people who are not ready for therapy yet often, or we're not giving

people who are ready to come and work with us, the opportunity to do so.

So you see how knowing all of those metrics tells you where to

intervene to improve your marketing.

So even if everything is good, you will still see things that allow you

to make improvements and make things better and better and better each month.

That brings me to the final metric that you'll want to track for anything that

you're monitoring in your marketing.

And that is whether it was worth it for you financially.

So, this is where we work out your cost per client.

And to do this, we work out your cost per inquiry first.

So if you had.

. 20 inquiries over that 28 day period.

And you've worked out from your taco track that you spent 10 hours on blogging.

And you could be paid as a rate of a hundred pounds an hour.

If you were seeing clients in that time.

Then you would be looking at.

And expenditure of a thousand pounds.

On your marketing that month.

So, so you received 20 inquiries and you spent a thousand pounds in new marketing.

Your cost per inquiry would be.

Getting out my calculator, because I can't work that out on my own.

Would be 50 pounds per inquiry.

Now if you have a 50% inquiry conversion, right.

As we discussed before, then that means that you are spending

100 pounds to acquire clients.

Assuming that this is the only marketing activity that you're doing.

If you're doing multiple marketing activities, then you will

need to add this all together.

In order to get an accurate idea of your cost per client.

So a hundred pounds cost per client might sound like a lot.

And I imagine some of you, if you've not been in business for

that long might feel a bit sick.

About that.

But what you also need to work out is a average lifetime value of a client to you.

Now, this is about financial value.

So it sounds a bit gross and it's not my favorite way of talking.

But we do need to understand this.

So if you charge.

130 pounds per session.

And you do an average of 12 sessions with people.

Then your average lifetime value of a client is 1,560 pounds.

So it probably is worth paying a hundred pounds to acquire a client.

The reason that I'm talking about this in these specific financial terms is because

so many psychologists and therapists forget that their time is worth money.

And trust me, when you get busy, you will be turning down clients

in order to write your blog.

If you choose to write your blog.

So you need to know exactly how much time.

You are giving to it and how much that is costing you in financial terms, because

this is how you make the decision about whether it's worth outsourcing it or not.

So first you do it yourself.

You assess the effectiveness, just like we've talked about today.

You assess the cost to you.

Just like we've talked about today.

And then if it works, you can then confidently outsource to somebody else

knowing that paying their fee is going to be worth it for you because you

know exactly what the return is that you get on this particular investment.

So I hope that's made sense for you.

And I've applied that specifically to getting referrals in a traditional

therapy practice model, because I know that's something that we haven't

talked that much about on this podcast.

And I think we all need to understand it and it should really be at the

foundation of our business skills.

As a as professionals in private practice.

What we're going to talk about in the second half of this podcast,

however, is applying these exact same principles to monitoring.

Whether something like social media is working to help you grow your

audience for an online course.

Or a book or a passive income product.

And I was really pleased to get that question from one of our members

in psychology business school.

Because I think it's so tempting.

To just spend a few hours every week on social media, as busy work,

just because we think we should.

And there are so many shirts out there in the world of business.

And the reality is there is nothing that you should or should not do in business.

There is only what works and what does not work.

So really in order to know whether anything is worth doing, you need to

try it and monitor whether it works.

So I'm going to switch now to the Instagram live that I recorded

for Hannah on lovely PVS member.

On Instagram recently.

Because I think there's some real golden nuggets in there that.

I think, and I hope you're going to find really helpful.

Hi.

I'm here today.

To answer a question from Hannah, who is a member in psychology business school.

Hannah asked a really good question.

It is the key question we should always be asking ourselves in marketing is

how do I know if this is working?

And more importantly, how do I know if it's worth the investment I'm making?

First step in working out, whether a marketing activity is working for you.

Is to define your goal.

Where does this particular activity sit in your customer journey and

your overall marketing strategy?

If this is your entry point, what action do you want somebody to take next?

So, for example, if we're talking about marketing on Instagram, That might be at

the entry point of your customer journey.

So, what action do you want them to take next?

Well probably, that's going to be something like downloading a freebie

from you to join your email list.

So let's take that as an example.

So now you need to take a baseline.

So how many people are currently taking the action that you want them to take?

So, for example, at the moment, before investing any particular

time in your Instagram, you might be getting 50 downloads a

month of your free downloadable.

So you need to know that baseline.

What did you get over the last 30 days before you make any investment?

Now the next step is to measure in 30 days time, how many people are now taking

the action that I want them to take.

So if you've decided that you're going to invest.

You know, a set number of hours a week, or a set amount of money on getting somebody

else to do your Instagram for you.

You need to apply all of that effort, give it your absolute best for 30

days, then come back and look at how many people have taken that action.

How many people have downloaded that freebie from you?

The next thing is to work out, whether it was worth it for the result that you got.

So you need to work out how much it costs you.

So if you're paying somebody else this might be really simple.

Maybe you paid a social media manager, 250 pounds for a month

to do your Instagram for you.

That's nice and simple.

If you did it yourself, you need to work out how many hours you spent doing

it and how much money you could have made made if you were doing something

like seeing a client during that time.

And write that down.

Then you need to write down how many additional people on your email list.

Or who took the action?

Did you get above your baseline?

So if we're using this example of downloading a freebie.

And you got a hundred people.

Downloading your freebie on top of your usual 50.

So 150 in total, then you would have a hundred people above your baseline.

And you could say that that was attributable to the extra effort you

put into Instagram or the time that the social media manager spent on Instagram.

So taking that example, then you need to work out how much each

person that took the action cost you.

So in this case, Each person that came onto your email list.

So if you spent 250 pounds either paying a social media manager or doing it yourself.

And you've got a hundred additional people onto your email list.

Then we can say that each one of those people on your email list cost you £2.50.

Now as a rough rule of thumb, if you're selling something online, like an

online course or some other kind of passive income product, you can expect

to convert about 1% of your email list.

That means about 1% of the people on your list will be likely to buy from you.

So that means based on this maths that we've just done, you would need

to spend 250 pounds in order to get one sale, which is great because

your budget happens to be 250 pounds.

So you should be getting one sale out of this month of work

that you've done on Instagram.

Now if your product or service that you're selling costs substantially more than

250 pounds, then it may well be worth it.

To know for sure you have to work out all your other costs and check that

you're still making a profit after this investment that you've made on Instagram.

But that is a really rough way of figuring out whether any marketing

activity was actually worth your time.

Now Hannah wanted to know specifically about Instagram and I would follow

that exact process for Instagram.

And that would be my.

Overall view of whether this was worth it or not always,

always take it down to sales.

Everything else is kind of a vanity metric in my opinion.

If you're running a business, you can only sustain that

business if you're making sales.

So I would use that as your first port of call for making decisions.

However, I'm aware that when you start building an audience on

Instagram, It can be slow-going.

And so we need to use other metrics to tell us whether we're moving

in the right direction with the expectation that that investment might

take a little bit longer to pay off.

That's the reality with any of the social media platforms.

At the moment.

So the three things that I do track in Instagram, and I'm not

an Instagram expert whatsoever.

You'll know that if you follow me so I'm not an Instagram expert, but there were

three things that I follow closely on my Instagram to let me know if I'm moving

in the right direction with my content.

The first one.

And I think by far the most important one for psychologists and therapists

and any other professionals is saves.

If people are saving your content, then they perceive you as authoritative.

And it's likely that that content is going to help your marketing endeavors.

Authority building is extremely important.

If you're in a professional space, as we are.

And so if you notice lots of saves on one particular piece of content, Then

make more on that subject or make more in that format because that tells you

that this is something that people find really valuable and worth coming back to.

That is the most important metric that I track.

I want to see those going up month on month, because we should be,

whether it's me doing it or a social media manager, we should be learning

more about what my audience and my ideal clients want to see from me.

And always trying to give them more of that.

The second thing that I look at is the accounts reached in the last 30 days.

So.

How many people are actually seeing my content.

Again, if I'm paying somebody else or if I'm doing it myself, I want

to be seeing those numbers going up.

The third one I look at is accounts engaged in the last 30 days.

Who's doing something with my content.

And is that on an upward trajectory?

Now you'll notice.

There's a few things I'm not talking about here.

I'm not really talking about likes.

I'm not really talking about comments and that might be, that

might sound a bit controversial.

It might be a bit controversial.

But that's because we are in the mental health space.

There's quite a lot of stuff that we put out there, which people are

not going to comment on because it would be outing themselves as

dealing with a particular issue and they may not be ready to do that.

Likewise, some of the stuff we put out there is not very likable.

Is it.

And also I think that we can get really caught up with likes and really

concerned about whether people like us.

That's not really important.

What's important is do people trust you?

And if they trust you, then they're much more likely to save your content.

They might not necessarily want to like it.

So those are the three things that I look at.

You can find all of those on your Instagram insights, which if you've got

a business account is in the professional dashboard, which you can see if you

just click on your own profile picture.

So that's what I would be looking at.

I think don't go more complicated than that at this stage.

If you, you know, you get really into a particular platform, whether that's

Instagram or any of the other platforms.

Then you can find really specific advice about getting very granular.

With your data.

If it's Instagram have a look at later they have an amazing blog,

which will tell you the latest on how to use your insights to that, max.

But if you're just starting out.

It's the broad brush.

That's really important.

Make sure that you know your numbers and you know, whether

it's worth it before you go.

And invest months and months, and years and years potentially

on a marketing endeavor that may not actually be worth it for you