Show Notes

Welcome back to The Designer Practice Podcast, and I’m your host, Kayla Das.

One of the biggest things that prevent therapists from advertising their practice is the worry that they’ll sound salesy or inauthentic.

And the next biggest thing is they don’t want to have to sell themselves in order to gain clients.

But what if I told you that there is an approach you can take that eliminates both of these issues.

Well, this approach is called empathy-based marketing.

In my business coaching practice, I teach therapists how to implement empathy-based approach in private practice marketing. And today, I’ll explain how you can use this approach too. And honestly, this approach attracts clients way better than the old school salesperson style marketing anyway.

So, in this episode of The Designer Practice Podcast, I’ll share how you can use empathy-based marketing to market your private practice so that you do not sound salesy, inauthentic, or feel like you have to sell yourself to potential clients.

Defining Empathy-Based Marketing

First of all, let me explain what empathy-based marketing is. When it comes to the term empathy. There are two parts to the definition. The first part is to understand a person and the second part of the definition is to share in the feelings of another.

As therapists, we often connect empathy to the latter, the sharing in feelings of others. However, in empathy-based marketing, we focus more on the understanding side of the coin. Because the more we understand about our ideal clients, the more we can reflect the client back to themselves in our marketing.

In fact, I always say that therapists are the best marketers because we understand clients on a deeper level than most other professionals out there, meaning you already understand your clients pretty well.

Going back to empathy based marketing, it is a marketing approach that is rooted in the deep understanding of your idle client’s emotions, thoughts, behaviors and symptoms so that you can create marketing copy that reflects your ideal client back to themselves Instead of you having to sell yourself, your trainings, and the number of years you’ve been in practice, which are all great by the way, but not necessarily the most effective or even comfortable strategy for marketing.

Now I already can hear you say, this sounds good, but what about confidentiality? This is where niching your practice comes in handy because if you work with a specific type of client, you get to know the common thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and symptoms that your ideal clients have.

When it comes to marketing, we don’t want to just highlight a single client and their entire dialogue with you in the therapy room, in your marketing, that would certainly be a confidentiality issue. But the purpose here is to entice any client who’s experiencing a similar issue to automatically think, “oh wow, this person gets me. This person is reading my mind.”

So, it needs to be specific enough that the clients have these thoughts from your marketing, but not too specific that is a one-off statement that wouldn’t resonate with the general population of clients. Because again, the purpose of your marketing is to attract ongoing clients. In other words, focus on the average person within your specific specialty or client population instead of a single one-off client.

As you work with certain types of clients, you’ll likely begin to see the themes in what clients feel, think, say, and behave. And once you understand these, you can reflect them back in your marketing.

For example, when I used to use therapist directory profiles as a therapist, the first few sentences I used to use would read something like:

You wake up and dread having to go to work each day. You’re exhausted most of the time, but you’re unable to sleep at night due to racing thoughts and worries. You feel demotivated at work and you think to yourself, what’s the point? Then overwhelm and procrastination sets in.

As you can see, this is very specific where prospective clients are like, oh yes, this is absolutely me. But it also represents at least 95% or more of my clients, and it doesn’t represent a particular client where it would be considered a confidentiality violation.

Understanding Your Ideal Client

Okay, so how do you understand your ideal client?

Traditional lingo in the marketing world is to identify your client’s pain points and desires. But really what does this mean? And also in my opinion, it goes beyond just that.

It means to identify the specific emotions, thoughts, behaviors, symptoms, desired results, solutions, or changes that the client want to see in their lives. And also identifying what prevents them from making such changes or reaching their desired results, solutions or changes in the first place.

In my business coaching, I usually go through what I call a Private Practice Persona. And the Private Practice Persona is a structured step-by-step process for identifying all of the concepts so that therapists better understand their ideal client while also gaining clearer marketing statements to use in upcoming marketing initiative such as one’s website, social media, or therapist directory profile. Although this episode won’t go through the entire private practice persona, I am going to bring you through some key components of it.

So, the first step is to identify your client thoughts, behaviors, feelings, and so forth. So, I’m going to give you a little activity to do. For this activity, you’ll need a piece of paper and of course a pen or a pencil. So, if you don’t have one handy, I definitely encourage you to take a moment, go get one.

I’m going to explain the activity, and after I do so, I encourage you to pause this episode and complete the activity before continuing the episode. Because if you’re anything like me, you’ll probably forget all about the activity afterwards. Once you’ve completed the activity, then you can press play and listen to the remainder of this episode.

Okay, so on your piece of paper, create four columns that say emotions, thoughts, behaviors, and symptoms. Then I want you to list all of the emotions, thoughts, behaviors, and symptoms that your ideal client population says that occurs for them.

I want you to be really careful here. I want you to use their language, their lingo. We don’t want to use the clinical terms if that’s not what our clients are saying, but what are the exact words that your clients are saying? These are essentially the pain points we’ll say.

And then after you’ve completed the pain points, under this, create a bullet point list of all of the desired results, solutions, or changes that your ideal client tells you that they want to see changed as a result of working with you. Now, another important consideration here is this isn’t what you help them with or what you know the deep-rooted seed is, but it’s what they say they want. Because again, this is marketing, so they might not know the deeper workings as a therapist would know.

A great place to get this information is when you are asking, your clients in consults or their first session. I always used to ask the question of what would you like to see changed through our work together? That would give you so much insight. And of course, you’re going to start seeing themes when you ask that statement. One, it’s a very good therapeutic statement, but it’s also really good at understanding what do they see as wanting changed.

Again, not that you would want to write a single person’s answer in your marketing. Because again, it may not resonate with other people. Could be a confidentiality violation. But what are the themes that you’re seeing when you do ask that question?

For example, I used to work with clients experiencing workplace burnout, and I’m sure 95 to maybe even 99% of my clients would say that they would like to develop stress management techniques to use in the workplace, and to develop communication strategies to deal with a challenging boss or difficult coworker.

Although as a therapist, I did way more than just these two things, but you can bet that I’ve always used these two things in my marketing because it was what clients constantly tell me that they want to change as a result of us working together. And it always got me clients.

So again, four columns, emotions, thoughts, behavior, symptoms. After that, the changes your clients say that they want to see change as a result of working with you.

So, feel free to pause this episode and when you’re done, just press play and listen to the remainder of the episode.

Okay, great job at completing that activity. Now you have a better understanding of your ideal client, and you have specific words and phrases to use in your marketing so that you can reflect the client back to themselves.

Niching

Okay, so although we won’t be digging too much into niching in this particular episode, as I mentioned, it is important to highlight that niching is important when it comes to empathy-based marketing because it’s hard to understand the feelings, thoughts, behaviors, and even symptoms of a specific client when a therapist doesn’t have a clear understanding of who they work with. It would also be even harder to reflect your client’s pain points back to them in your marketing when you aren’t clear yourself.

In other words, you need to gain clarity over the clients you work with to better understand the clients, and you need to understand the clients to be able to reflect statements back to them. So, this is why niching is super important in practice and in marketing.

However, I do want to share contrary to popular belief, I’m not talking about that you have to work with only one type of client in your practice. Instead, what I’m saying is you need to advertise or market to one particular type of client at any given time. But you might create multiple different marketing campaigns that focus on different client populations.

Let me give you a personal example.

In my business coaching, I work with three types of therapists. And in fact, I’m actually adding a fourth in there as of recently as well. So I work with therapists looking to start their private practice. Therapists wanting to market their private practice so that they grow their caseload in an already existing practice. And therapists wanting to scale their private practice by adding alternate or passive income streams inside their practice so that they gain more autonomy, flexibility, and freedom over their life. Recently, I’ve added a fourth where I’m creating marketing initiatives for therapists in training, such as those who are either preparing to go into a therapy degree or while they are actually in the program.

Even though I’m working with therapists or therapists to be, they are at very different stages of their journey, which means their emotions, their thoughts, their feelings, their behaviors, their desired outcomes, solutions, or changes are very, very different.

So, I need to be super clear about each of these four types of clients that I work with so that I can create effective marketing copy for each when I do create marketing copy. Then when I advertise, I might have a single post or a webpage or a podcast episode or whatever targeting one specific type of client. Then the next day I might create another for another type of therapist.

However, I will say that especially if you’re starting out, it is better to start with one type of client, get super clear and create really great marketing material for that particular type of client, and then branch out after that.

However, no one says that you have to only work with one type of client. You just need to be clear and put a little bit more effort into gaining that clarity about those particular clients. Especially if you work with two very different clients, they may have very different emotions, very different behaviors. So, you might want to do two private practice personas we’ll say.

If you’d like to learn more about niching, I do have a previous podcast episode about it. It’s Episode 22: How Choosing a Niche can help you Grow your Practice

Empathy-Based Marketing Strategies

Even though empathy-based marketing is not a new thing, at least in the marketing world, it isn’t. It is often underutilized by therapist, but there are some simple ways that you can use empathy-based marketing strategies into any marketing initiative.

So, let’s discuss a few.

Highlight Clients Pain Points

Just like I had you do in the activity earlier in this episode. Identifying and highlighting the client’s feelings, thoughts, behaviors, and symptoms in your marketing creates impactful connection between you and your potential client really before they even come see you.

Highlight Client Desired Results or Changes

Next, again, highlighting the client’s desired results, outcomes, solutions, changes in your marketing. In other words, highlight the common reasons that your ideal client give you for why they are coming to see you, and then identify how you can help them obtain those results.

Going back to the activity you completed earlier. Identify the desired change and now add how you help them with that. Now, this isn’t your therapeutic modality like ACT, CBT, EMDR, anything like that, but what you do within that therapeutic modality to help a client. Or it could even be very surface level and not rooted in any particular therapeutic modality because again, this is marketing copy. This isn’t your therapeutic process with a client.

So, let me give you an example. As I mentioned earlier, when I work with clients experiencing workplace stress, clients often say to me that their desire change is to develop communication strategies to deal with a difficult boss or challenging colleague, and stress management techniques for work.

So, in my marketing copy, I would simply say something like:

In session, we’ll discuss communication strategies to help you manage working relationships between a challenging boss or a colleague. In addition, you’ll learn stress management techniques so that you build a toolkit to help you manage stress at work.

Simple, right? It’s powerful. It’s impactful. It’s really not rooted in any particular therapeutic modality, but it is something that shows my ideal clients that, one, I understand what you’re looking for, and two, basically, this is what we’re going to do to help you get that.

And then of course, once they are actually in the therapy seat, we do so much more. But the goal here is to get them in that seat so that you can use your therapy skills with the client. So again, this is marketing. This isn’t your be all end all therapy because we want to work with where the client is at and they haven’t sat in that seat with you yet. They don’t know what you’re going to bring them through. They don’t even know, if they want that at this point, right? You’re going to bring them through it, but it’s going to feel a lot less intimidating once they’re in the seat with you.

So, it’s okay to be a little more surface level, especially if the desired results or solutions or changes are surface level.

Mention a Client Barriers or Objections

Finally, mention any barriers or objections that you know that your clients might have that prevent them from working with you and also how you might address those concerns?

Again, going back to when I worked with clients experiencing workplace burnout. I often worked with very busy professionals with such little time to fit therapy in their day, so that would be a barrier for them to come see me. However, how I would call it out in my marketing and address it would be saying something like:

Because you are a busy on the go professional, finding time for therapy may seem impossible. That’s why I offer virtual therapy so that you can access therapy from the comfort of your own home, or office space.

Simple. Again, not very clinical, but very client centered and really calling them out. I know that you’re a busy on the go professional. However, this is why I offer this so that it can be more accessible for you.

Common Mistakes

Okay. Let’s discuss some common mistakes that I’ve noticed when it comes to marketing, specifically as it relates to empathy-based marketing principles.

Therapist-Center Marketing

First is creating marketing that is therapist centered instead of client centered. For example, creating marketing content that is all about you, your skills, your therapeutic modalities, and your trainings. Although there’s a time and place for this, like your About Me page on your website, traditionally people connect more when they feel that you get them and that you show them that you get them versus you telling them that you have all of these skills that can help them. In other words, reflect the client back to themselves is much more powerful than them reading your resume online.

Focusing Heavily On your Therapeutic Modality

Another common mistake is focusing heavily on your therapeutic modality rather than the steps, strategies, or resources that you use to help your client achieve their desired result outcomes or changes.

In marketing, we call this features and benefits. You should highlight the features and then also the benefits that the features give the client.

I’m going to give you an example to help explain this a little more. I’m going to give you a non-therapy example and then I’m going to give you a therapy example.

If I were going out today searching for a car and the salesperson said to me that this car has X amount of horsepower, I’m really not a car person, so I might say so? And I kind of know what it is, but I don’t really know what it is. So that doesn’t mean anything to me.

However, if the car salesperson said that the car has X amount of horsepower so that I could drive faster. I might be like, oh, okay. Even though I might still not understand what horsepower is, it’s making more sense now that, okay, this is going to help me drive faster, which kind of makes it sound like a better car. So the car is the product. The horsepower is the feature. And the fact that it helps me drive faster is the benefit.

Okay, so now let me break it down with a therapy related example. And there’s actually an extra piece to the therapy related example that I’m going to add in here too, because therapy just kind of has another level then products.

I guess first of all, therapy is the service. So, the product service, that’s what therapy is. Your therapeutic modality is the method you take in order to do therapy. So, we’re not yet at the feature, although it could be considered a feature, but it’s more like the method for the therapy. But then the steps, strategies, processes, resources, activities, all of the above you use within your therapeutic modality is the feature. And then of course, the benefit is what it gives the client.

So, imagine that as a therapist, I use CBT as my method to conduct therapy. However, when I’m working with a client, I get them to track thought patterns and behaviors that show up for them. The tracking the thought is the feature. The benefit could be that the client is recognizing unhelpful thought patterns so that they can regain control over their behaviors.

So, if I were to write marketing copy using empathy based principles, I might say something like:

For homework, you’ll track your thought patterns and behaviors so that you recognize and unhelpful thought patterns to help you gain control over your behaviors.

See how I didn’t mention CBT at all, but it was rooted in a therapeutic modality, as a CBT therapist. This is really what we want to highlight because at the end of the day, your clients don’t really understand the therapeutic modality and kind of going back to the horsepower.

Similar to tracking your thought patterns and behaviors. I could say so what? Like why should I care about that? But then when you add the, so that you recognize unhelpful thought patterns and regain control over your behaviors, that makes sense. Oh, okay. Like the connection is being made here. So that’s what we want to see in our marketing.

Brilliant, hey.

Using (Excessive) Question Format

Another common mistake that I see, and I don’t want to really call it a mistake because it is a strategy, is when therapists use three or four or five different questions at the beginning of a therapist directory profile or on their website and so forth.

This is a traditional marketing strategy specifically for social media. I use it a lot in my email marketing and my social media where you take a question that you want a client to say yes or no to, and then it’s kind of like a hook to keep them to read more.

However, I’ve noticed that it’s been overused a little bit in the therapy world and not always used effectively. So the goal when you’re using questions is that it’s one a yes or no question, so it needs to lead to yes or no. If it’s leading to like an open-ended question, it’s not a really good marketing question.

The other thing is we don’t want to be excessive in the number of questions we ask. The point is for it to be a hook that, you know, are you experiencing this right? Or are you feeling this? However, outside of my social media. I do usually do a question at the beginning of a podcast episode. But on my website, on therapist directories, I actually stick with more of a statement format versus a question format.

Again, it’s not wrong or right, but it’s just acknowledging that one, it has to be used effectively. It is a strategy. Usually, more than one question, it’s a little bit excessive. And again, it’s a social media strategy more than a therapist director strategy or a website strategy.

But it can be used effectively in certain capacities. But you don’t want to be listing, you know, 3, 4, 5, 6 questions. And again, they have to be yes or no questions that really get the client to say, yes, this is me.

If you’re putting too much in it. Is the client actually saying, yes, this is me. Or are you just kind of asking a bunch of questions that no client ever is going to be like, oh, this is me, and they’re going to go to the next therapist directory profile.

I actually think it’s a little overused. So even when it is used effectively, it’s how can you be different than other people than being the same as other people, because being different actually stands out more than being the same as everyone else.

So, I know that we always kind of look at other people and be like, oh, they’re doing this. I think I’ll follow along. But you want a client to see you and you need to stand out if you’re doing the same as everyone else, it’s not necessarily going to help you with your marketing, if that makes sense.

But if you like the questions, feel free to go ahead and continue to use them. But I just wanted to highlight some of those pieces as well.

Conclusion

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this episode and took a few good tips away to help you strengthen your practice marketing.

If you did enjoy this episode, I would love and so much appreciate if you would follow our show on Apple Podcast, Spotify. And even give an honest review of our show on these platforms. This really helps us reach other therapists who could be really benefiting from this content too.

So, thank you so much for tuning into today’s episode.

Until next time. Bye for now.

Credits & Disclaimers

Music by ItsWatR from Pixabay

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