MHM#31 My caseload is full, can I stop marketing?

I often get asked, "Once my caseload is full, can I stop marketing?"

The type of marketing and the intensity may change slightly, but as a business, you'll always need to market your Practice.

I’ll start with a brief lesson on one of my favourite topics, brand management. 

To build a strong brand, two things need to happen:

1) Your ideal clients need to become aware of you.

2) Your ideal clients need to create positive and accurate associations about you (thoughts, beliefs and feelings about you and your Practice)

A key objective of brand management is to get your brand in people's consideration set. People can't consider making an appointment with you if they firstly don't know about you and secondly don't feel positively about you. 

A prospective client might initially become aware of you by typing "therapist" into Google.

Then, this prospective client will hopefully visit your website, read your blog articles, visit your Instagram account, and watch your videos. Now, they have started to create associations - they know who you work with, what you help them with, and your modalities. Your videos give them a sense of your personality, what a session might be like with you, that you'll "get them", and you'll be a good fit. 

This prospective client will typically do the same for a few other therapists. They will then consider these therapists based on the associations they’ve created for all of them, and then decide who to book an appointment with. 

Suppose a therapist's website does a poor job of resonating with their ideal clients and they have no social media presence, photos, or videos. In that case, fewer positive associations will be created making it less likely the prospective client will choose them. 

Consumer behaviour research into how brands work shows that the brands who have more accurate and positive associations get more customers compared to brands who have less accurate and positive associations, and particularly those brands that have negative associations. 

I have many negative associations about Coke :) and they are never in my consideration set when I'm considering what drink to purchase. However, being a huge company with huge sales, they have a lot of data that’s useful for marketing and consumer behaviour research. This is why they feature so highly as case studies when you're studying marketing at Uni. 

Coke and Pepsi are both huge, but they never ever stop marketing. Why? Because they know that if they did, people's awareness of them would start declining, and they would gradually fall out of people's consideration sets.

There are obviously some significant differences between the soft drink industry and mental health - every day, people can be considering what drink to purchase, whereas therapy clients might only select a few therapists to see in their lifetime. One of the main differences is how long people consider booking an appointment with a therapist.

According to LIVIN.org, "On average, it takes 8 years for someone to seek support, and still, about 55% of those with mental health issues receive no professional help." No doubt, the average timeframe changes depending on what people need help with. But as therapists, you understand there are many barriers to people seeking help. 

This is why consistent long-term marketing is essential in maintaining your caseload and future-proofing your Practice. A prospective client might become aware of you today - but it's your Instagram posts and blogs and newsletters that maintain that awareness and keep building on those positive associations, so if and when they're ready in 12 months or 3 years, they'll consider and choose you.

It also provides an opportunity to address barriers and stigmas on your website and in your social media content, helping more people feel confident and safe asking for help sooner. 

Your tasks

1) Write down your top five associations you would like a prospective client to have about you and your Practice. 

These can be thoughts/beliefs/feelings related to who you work with and what you help them with, your modalities, what makes you unique, your philosophy of care, what clients experience when having therapy with you. Sometimes it’s helpful to think about how you would like an ideal client to describe their experience with you with a friend. 

2) Take an audit of your digital presence. 

Is it clear who you help and how? Are your website, directory profiles, social media, and other touchpoints creating accurate and positive associations? Do they align with the associations you wrote down? If not, make some changes so they begin to create the right associations across all the places a prospective client might come across you. 

3) Continue marketing even if your case load is currently full. 

The marketing tasks and intensity will just be a bit different compared to when you weren’t full. For example, you might not be reaching out to new referrers anymore, and focusing on nurturing the referrer relationships that you already have. Initially, Google Ads can be a great way to rapidly increase web traffic and enquiries, but over time, you might have a really established referrer network, email list, and presence on social media that you can turn Google Ads off.

It can be really hard to know exactly how much marketing you need to do to maintain a small waitlist and keep your caseload full. It varies based on types of clients, modalities etc and can just be randomly different from month to month. It really comes down to managing a full caseload long enough that you get a sense of when you need to ramp up marketing a bit again or pull it back a bit.