The way we do business is constantly changing, whether we’re learning yet another new social platform, adapting to new client demands, upgrading our marketing plan, or pepping up our tech. With the right attitude and approach and the right help, that can be very much a good thing, where we learn, grow, and improve our businesses.
The problem is that sometimes it can just feel completely overwhelming.
With a local business, such as a physical therapist, it’s important to localize your online presence and focus on building your business up in the local area where you operate. You want to be known for the quality of your services and your results, and you want local referrals and leads flowing to keep your income steadily growing and your business thriving.
And if only it was as easy to do it as it is to read it.
The fact is that it takes work to localize your online presence. You need to thoroughly understand your clients and what they want, understand what attracts people to your business rather than your competitors, and keep what can feel like an ever-growing list of marketing tasks on the go, as well as actually running your business.
You’ll have to create and run your marketing plan, regularly acquire great reviews and make sure you respond to them, keep up with all your social platforms, ensure your directories and Google Business Profile are all up to date and full of quality content, create great content for your website, ensure you are using local SEO to attract interest from potential clients in your local area, and more.
Even with such challenges, however, it is important to focus on localization because it can make all the difference to your success. You can get ahead and stay ahead of local competition, create a quality online reputation for your business, build your brand locally, and ensure your name is the one people think of when they need a physical therapist.
So, how do you do all that and still manage to keep your physical therapy business running smoothly? You could employ someone to do your marketing for you, but then you have the added expense of either paying another full- or part-time salary or hiring a freelancer.
Instead, it’s time to turn to marketing tools and technology. With the right tech in place, you can hand over a large part of your marketing to automation and let the technology work for you. Technology can completely streamline your marketing processes and ensure you aren’t spending more time than you need to on marketing your business in your local area.
You can plan and schedule social posts and newsletters ahead of time, so you can focus on working on your business rather than in it. You can quickly and easily respond to reviews, including by saving ready-written sections to copy and paste, and you can send automated reminders to people who haven’t yet left a review. Manage your content marketing, email marketing, and social media, all from one place, and update your directories to ensure your online presence is always up-to-date and consistent. With the right platform, you can also benefit from highly detailed analytics and reports to learn what parts of your marketing are working and which ones aren’t.
There are so many ways in which technology can be an absolute boom for physical therapists. But it’s got to be the right technology.
Find out more about what a local marketing platform for physical therapists can do for your business below.
Benefits of Marketing Tools for Physical Therapists
1) Increased efficiency and time savings
Let your marketing software take the strain and automatically run parts of your marketing for you. You’ll get far more done with running your business while still continuing to market yourself and bring in fresh leads.
2) Enhanced targeting and personalization
With quality analytics and reports, you’ll have improved data analytics and insights into local customer behavior. This, along with analysis of your ads, social media, and other marketing efforts will allow you to understand your audience more closely, target even more tightly, and personalize your marketing to attract the right people.
3) Maximize your marketing budget
Easily see what ads are working and which should be switched off and save money for what is moving the needle. Ensure you know how all of your marketing is performing, so you can focus on what works and stop spending on anything that doesn’t.
4) More impactful and relevant marketing messages
With quality analytics and reports, you’ll easily be able to see what content is having an impact and where you are getting engagement. You can then use this knowledge to create marketing messages that build on what has previously worked to become ever more impactful and relevant to your audience.
5) More positive reviews from happy customers
No longer spend time chasing people to leave a review with a marketing platform that can send reminders for you. You’ll get higher response rates and ensure you capture as many reviews as you can from delighted clients.
Understanding the Difference in Approaches: All-In-One vs Duct-Tape
When selecting the right marketing software, you’ve obviously got to consider your budget and what your business needs. What you also need to consider is whether to invest in an all-in-one platform or buy separate pieces of software for each facet of your online marketing.
You may think that separate software items would be the way to go as you can have flexibility over where you buy from and what you choose, and that is, of course, true. However, what every business needs is for all of its systems and software to work together smoothly, and it can be extremely hard to get individual software systems to talk to each other and share data.
What you don’t want is to end up with a situation where you have to input data several times over so each piece of software has the information. It’s also not helpful if you can’t get a full overview of your marketing unless you run reports in each system and then manually combine them to see what’s actually happening with your marketing.
You may also find that this “duct tape” approach leaves you with a larger bill than you think when you add up how much you’ve spent buying several different solutions and trying to make them work together.
However, if you invest in a dedicated all-in-one marketing platform that’s specifically designed with local businesses in mind, it’s far easier to run your marketing smoothly and quickly and to run analytics and reports all in one place to cover every aspect of your marketing.
You’ll find that the price isn’t as much of a stumbling block as you might think, too. Especially when compared to trying to build your own marketing tech stack out of a lot of different platforms.
How Surefire Local helps physical therapists with localized online marketing
Surefire Local offers a comprehensive, all-in-one local marketing platform for small to medium-sized businesses. With years of marketing and software development experience, we have built the tool that can take your marketing from “How on earth do I find the time?” to “Relax, I’ve got this.”
Our platform allows you to work on the most important aspects of marketing with an integrated approach. Not only can you ensure you’re always on brand and consistent with your messaging, but this approach also means that every area of your marketing works in harmony with the others. You’ll be able to see how each aspect of your marketing is performing individually and how your marketing is performing as a whole. It’s then easier to drill down and find out where you can improve and what improvements to make now to quickly move the needle and make your marketing even better.
With automation to help you get things done even when you’re on vacation, you can market your business at any time, even when you aren’t right there at the keyboard.
Key features and capabilities offered by Surefire Local:
- Website / Local SEO – You can create geotagged content that is published on your website, blog, and social media profiles to gain attention in your local area and increase your search engine rankings. Create separate pages for each business location you have and ensure you’re reaching your local audience.
- Reviews – Send review requests, write responses to reviews, and chase any outstanding reviews without leaving our platform. And you can analyze your brand sentiment at a glance to learn what customers think about your business.
- Directory Listings – Claim, edit, and publish new content like photos or a special offer for your business across 80+ online directory listings platforms. This keeps every directory listing you have fully up-to-date and relevant. Not only that, but it ensures all of your listings are consistent and correct. It’s important that your NAP (Name, Address, Phone number) in particular is consistent across all sites to increase trust in your brand and ensure that both clients and the search engines know that yours is a genuine and reliable business.
- Content – We provide professional tools to create locally targeted and relevant content on your blog, Google Business Profile, business directories, and social media profiles. You can jot down ideas, create draft posts, finish off your writing on our platform, post, and schedule ahead, ensuring there’s always something new and interesting for your audience to consume.
- Social Media – We also offer quality tools for scheduling posts, tracking engagement metrics, and responding to comments to enable you to keep up with your social platforms without spending too much of your precious time on them.
- Online Advertising – We can help you create ads that are specifically designed to attract only the attention of customers within your service area. You can save your marketing dollars for the ads that really work for you, secure in the knowledge that you aren’t paying for your ads to be shown in areas where you don’t provide a service.
- Email and Text Messaging – You can quickly craft effective localized email and text message campaigns to build and nurture your customer relationships. Keep in touch with your customers and stay top of mind, so the next time they need a physical therapist, they think of you.
- Analytics and Reporting – We provide transparency into your campaign performance and exactly how much revenue your marketing dollars are generating. No more stabbing in the dark wondering which marketing activities are generating results and which aren’t. And we also include AI-generated recommendations on specific actions you can take to see improvements. Our software can even guide you to try different actions and approaches to get better results.
At Surefire Local, we understand that small businesses don’t have the luxury of endless budgets or the staff, time, and resources to spend experimenting on things that may or may not work.
We know that you have to be in a position to make decisions quickly and move forward, with the right information, data, and reports at your side to help.
We tailor every part of our marketing platform to ensure that it works for small businesses and genuinely can increase efficiencies and save time and money.
We can’t overstate the importance of localizing your online marketing if you’re a small, local business. It really can be the difference between being highly successful or struggling to compete.
Ensuring you market locally and attract your ideal local audience gives you the potential for increased visibility in specific zip codes. You really can tailor your marketing so closely and ensure that you aren’t wasting marketing dollars on advertising where you don’t practice. You can also ensure better customer engagement and business growth by following effective local online marketing.
While it takes time to grow your online reputation, it doesn’t have to be an overwhelming amount of work. Marketing tools, such as our all-in-one platform, can help you manage your marketing, stay on track, and continuously improve, without having to spend too much time on it.
Surefire Local is all about helping small businesses establish their online presence by creating local signals across platforms and profiles that make it easier for new customers to find them. We are the all-in-one marketing platform for local businesses, and we’d love to help you save time and money on your marketing.
Why not get in touch and book to attend a Surefire Local demo? Come and see what a difference the right marketing platform can make to your physical therapy business.