Creating Connections: The missing link to effective marketing

By reading this article, you’ll gain valuable insights into how to build a successful physical therapy business by making meaningful connections. We’ll take a deep dive into the three key objectives of a connected marketing strategy that will help you attract and retain paying customers. Additionally, we’ll explore the importance of having a trust-building nurture process in place to turn prospects into loyal clients. You’ll also discover what you need to do to streamline your customer journey, saving both time and money. In this article, we’ll explore in more detail how you can implement this business-growth strategy in practice. Reading this article will give you clarity about your marketing objectives and of the business value and importance of building connections with people both online and in your local community. Read this article online http://bit.ly/3JwLoDY

There are lots of reasons why so much small business marketing fails, but there’s one particular reason which has spread so widely and so quickly, and for the most part gone unnoticed, and that’s the growing disconnection between: our marketing; our businesses and the services we provide; and our local communities.

Businesses need connections

Think back to how local trade began a few thousand years ago, when people started to produce more goods than they needed for their own consumption. This prompted people to start bartering goods with one another where for example, a farmer might trade some of his crops for a pot made by a local potter. This bartering system didn’t require money.

But, as societies became more complex, the need for a more organised system of trade emerged and this led to the development of market places, where people could buy and sell goods in a central location, hence the reason why market places are generally located in the middle of a town. The key to this whole trade system was face-to-face connections.

Humans need connections

We also now know how crucial connecting with others is for our physical, emotional and mental wellbeing.

Human beings are social creatures and most of us need at least some level of social interaction to feel a sense of belonging, support, and emotional fulfilment. Studies have shown that people who have strong social connections are happier, healthier, and more resilient than those who are isolated.

On the flip side, social isolation has been linked to a range of physical health problems, including increased risk of heart disease, stroke and premature death.

Social connections have also been linked to lower rates of depression, anxiety, and other mental health problems. Having people to talk to and share experiences with, can help us process our emotions and cope with stress.

Then there are the benefits that come from learning and growth as well as helping to facilitate social change through the connection with people who share our values and goals. In a nutshell, it’s communities and connections that help us to thrive as human beings.

Technology and connection

As technology has spread so rapidly through our lives, we’ve taken a huge step back from those face-to-face connections that have helped us and our businesses to thrive in the past.

On one hand, the internet has enabled people to connect with others beyond their immediate geographic area, and has provided access to all sorts of information and resources that may not be available locally, which is good for communities that are geographically isolated or marginalised.

But on the other hand, the internet has also been associated with a decline in the more traditional forms of community engagement, such as face-to-face interactions, involvement in local social organisations and community events, and this has weakened our sense of community, as we spend more time online and less time engaging with our local neighbourhoods and organisations.

Physical therapy and connection

Despite the advances in telehealth necessitated by Covid, a vast majority of physical and manual therapy services are still delivered within a local community setting and that’s a community that for the most part, we’ve lost touch with. The service we provide requires people to put themselves literally physically at our mercy, usually requiring the need for them to undress at least partially. This is a big ask for many people, which means gaining the trust of our prospective customers is one of the most important ingredients to our professional success.

In the old days (pre-1976), physiotherapists in the UK at least, had to rely on GP referrals as a source of new patients as they weren’t allowed to actually advertise their services. Can you even start to imagine that today? So it’s easy to understand why historically we’ve relied so heavily on word of mouth as our primary source of new patients.

But in 2023, there’s competition literally everywhere. Even 30 years ago, there might have only been one or two physiotherapists in a town and even rarer an osteopath or chiropractor, today there are probably 20 or 30 physical therapists within just a few miles of you, all of whom are similarly qualified to treat the same prospective patient.

Ironically, in 2023 we choose to hide behind websites and social media platforms as our main form of marketing –neither of which are very conducive to building connection or trust, especially not when it’s done as passively as we are currently doing it.

For most therapists the primary focus of their marketing efforts is to build a website. They might then graduate to publishing some usually poor quality, self-promotional content to their social networks and then just sit back and wait for the local community to start pouring through their doors, or take valuable time out of their busy days to engage with our newly published social media posts.

But why do we expect this to happen when we make absolutely ZERO effort to get that content in front of people? We seem, for some unknown reason, to think the adage ‘build it and they will come’, will apply.

There’s a quote I use quite often in talks and presentations, that illustrates this point well:

“Doing business without advertising, is like winking at a girl in the dark. You know what you’re doing, but nobody else does.”

You can build a website, and invest time in a great social media feed but unless you give people a reason to visit those assets, they’re never going to know they exist.

For your marketing to work, it needs to work as one joined up, cohesive strategy. We need to create connections between our website, our social media and our community.

In short, in order to attract new clients, we have to create the opportunities for people to SEE us. If ever there was a time to get out in the local community making connections and meeting people, then that time is now because I believe it’s these connections that will decide whether a business dies, survives or thrives in the future.

Box 1: Your blueprint to a connected marketing strategy

When you look at the big picture, marketing breaks down into three core objectives:

1. The first goal is to help people find you.

2. The second goal is that when people do come across you, to make it very easy for them to book an appointment.

3. And lastly, if they’re not ready to book an appointment, the next goal is to collect their email address so you can gently nurture those relationships by adding value and building trust, so that when they are ready to become a client, you have no competition.

Remember, the role of marketing is to build awareness and attract leads (ie. prospective customers) to your business. The role of sales is to convert those prospects into paying customers. To grow your business, you need to use a holistic, collaborative approach that involves both those components working together.

If we take those three marketing objectives a level of detail deeper:

1

Helping people come across you boils down to: a. Making sure you appear in relevant internet search results which comes down to search engine

2 optimisation (SEO) – absolutely fundamental for local businesses. b. Getting out into your local community, forging connections, setting up partnerships and being seen, heard or read about (eg. interviews or articles). c. Proactively engaging in strategies to increase your social media reach (ie. getting in front of new prospective customers through the social networks).

When people do come across you, making it very easy to take the next step to booking an appointment: a. This means optimising your website to allow them to book either online or over the phone. b. Building trust by giving plenty of useful, addedvalue information to help them take the next step (ie. condition and treatment pages and fresh blog content). c. Making sure you have plenty of social proof on your website (ie. testimonials, business logos) as this is one of the most effective ways to build trust and encourage prospects to become new customers.

Beware of leaky funnels

Every single one of the three customer journey stages I’ve outlined are critical. If one is weak or missing altogether, you have what’s often called a leaky funnel.

For example, there’s no point investing in SEO, writing fresh blog content, and spending time on community or social outreach to get people onto your website, if it’s not optimised to a) get them to convert to a paying customer, b) share their email address with you or c) at the very least, take a helpful value-added piece of information with your branding and contact details on it, because you may never get them back to your website again, and your investment risks being either partially or totally lost.

Equally, there’s no point investing in writing high value pieces of content (lead magnets) and setting up email lead collection forms designed to get people to share their email address with you, if you don’t have a regular email nurture programme in place, because the minute that new email lead (prospect) joins your email list, they start to go cold. And worse still, if you annoy them with spammy salesy emails, the chances are they’ll just unsubscribe anyway and again your investment and hard work is lost.

Putting it into practice

The goals in Box 1 break down into specific marketing objectives:

1 Be visible = optimise your website for SEO to ensure you’ll be found on Google searches and get yourself out and about locally and online to ensure both you and your content is seen.

2 Build trust = optimise your website to convert prospects into paying clients by providing helpful, authority-building content and demonstrating social proof (ie. reviews, testimonials etc)

3 Nurture relationships = take your website visitors on a value-adding, trust-building email nurture journey and give them opportunities to become a paying customer.

There are three key channels (listed in order of impact) that you can use to achieve the marketing objectives above:

1 Your local community

2 Your website

3 The social media platforms

Before we dig into specifics, keep in mind at all times that the most successful and sustainable connections are built on mutual benefit, so with everything you do, try and make sure there’s a win-win for everyone involved. Even if you can’t see what that win-win is immediately, it doesn’t mean it’s not there. The important thing is to start the conversations.

And if you’re going to take the time to build these connections in the first place, you want to make sure that time investment is worth it. Set time aside to implement what you’ve agreed and make sure to do what you promise you will.

3 If people don’t choose to become a customer at that point, the next goal is to bring them into a trust-building nurture process by: a. Giving web visitors a genuinely compelling reason to share their email address with you using high value pieces of content that solve targeted problems or answer questions your website visitors may have. b. Committing to a consistent email nurture programme where you send regular valueadding, trust-building emails – generating a sense of reciprocity and staying top of mind with not only your prospects but also existing and past customers. (This also helps to increase word of mouth referrals.) c. Offering educational and value-adding opportunities to this audience, that continue to build trust and helps move them closer to becoming a paying client.

The combined effect of these activities results in the building of a trusting and warm audience who are ready to take action, the minute you need them to.

Lastly, remember to try and connect everything together. If you meet people locally, invite them to interact with you on social media, and do the same for them. Small increases in social engagement can start to turn into big gains when it comes to how many people your posts reach (more later). And people you’ve met face to face are much more likely to engage with your social media posts than people who have only met you online.

1. Connecting with your local community

Let’s start here because it’s the most powerful of all three connections. Face to face interactions are easily the quickest way to build trust and particularly powerful when trust is a big component of the service you offer (which as we know, it is). Let’s delve into these opportunities in a bit more detail.

Sport and exercise-related opportunities

When was the last time you reached out and made contact with a person or business, in your local area, who provides one or more services that complement yours? Anyone working in any kind of sports or fitness role is likely to come into regular contact with people who are primed for injury, which makes this a great place to start. Here are some starting points: l Sports shops – stores like cycle, running, snow sports or general sports shops l Sports clubs and meets – golf clubs, racket sports, cricket, running, Park Runs, netball, hockey, football/ soccer, basketball, cycling clubs (many cycle stores have a cycling club), cold water swimming groups, ultimate frisbee, beach volleyball, walking clubs. l Charity/sports events – local 5k/10k runs or walks, half marathon, triathlons, bike rides, swim-a-thons, fitness challenges. l Coaches/fitness trainers – coaches eg. tennis, football, hockey, boxing, dance instructors, personal trainers, Pilates and yoga instructors, parkour. l Exercise venues – gyms, gymnastic halls, boxing clubs, skate parks, running tracks, athletics fields, swimming pools, dance halls, parkour venues.

If you haven’t got a local running or cycling club nearby and you love running or cycling, why not organise your own? Even better if you have a clinic that you could make the meeting point, it’s a great opportunity to subtly reinforce your expertise.

But don’t stop with sports-related business, think outside the box. Do you have friends who run local businesses? What have you got to lose by organising to have a beer and brainstorm some ideas about how you could help promote each other’s businesses? Do they have any connections they can facilitate for you and vice versa, like contacts with local organisations, GP/primary care surgeries, health clinics, Women’s Institute groups for example?

Other connection opportunities

l Small businesses – it’s really powerful when local businesses team up, maybe your patients own businesses that could use some help, there’s a win-win.

l Local business or networking groups – this is a great place to meet up with other entrepreneurs in your local area who are actively looking to boost their businesses. Entrepreneurs Circle runs local meetings all over the UK.

l Community organisations – ChatGPT came up with these ideas for me – Wimbledon Village Business Association, Friends of Wimbledon Common, Wimbledon Choral l Local charities – you could offer discounts to volunteer workers, or help raise money for the charity. Those with local shop venues would be a great place to distribute educational resources (eg. posters and leaflets).

Society, Wimbledon Community Association, Merton Voluntary Service Council, Wimbledon Bookfest – that would give me some great places to start if I was still a practicing physio of course!

Ways to collaborate

The following collaboration ideas apply whatever context you’re in whether it’s face to face or online and they’re just here as possible starting points, see where it leads you.

Direct referrals/discount opportunities

Usually this involves paying an introductory fee for the referrer and/or offering a discount for the person being referred.

Added value/bonuses

Say you collaborate with a local café, they could give you coupons you could give to the first 20 patients who visit that week that earns them a free coffee or cake, or a restaurant could offer a discount or a voucher for a free drink/starter/ desert. You get to give a nice added bonus to your customer and the partner business gets someone new to try their offering. Or you could reserve these bonuses for your best clients or for your new clients that you are particularly keen to impress.

In return, you could give vouchers for a discounted massage, a gait analysis, a bike fit or a ticket to an education event that you’re running. The idea is to cross-pollinate customers between businesses.

Education sessions or events

Education events are a fantastic way to make connections in your community. They are a great way to demonstrate authority, build trust and provide lots of reasons for local businesses or media outlets to link to you (which as we’ll see later is extremely powerful for SEO).

You can also choose the subject of your presentation, to appeal to a specific target audience. For example if you love treating runners, deliver a presentation on preventing or treating the most common running injuries. Or you could deliver a presentation on strategies for coping with the menopause to a local women in business group, or lifestyle strategies for managing arthritis to the local choral society.

The great thing is that you’re strategically tapping into audiences that other people have already built, preferably who match your ideal target customer, while at the same time offering great value and benefit to that group. You can widen your potential audience further by collaborating with other professionals who have complementary skill sets.

Then link everything together on your website. Add a blog post giving some helpful information in its own right, and explaining that you’ll be discussing this in greater detail at your event, with a link to the event sign up page. The blog is good for SEO in itself, and if you ask your growing network of local contacts to also link to it from their social media and their websites if possible, this will give you an even bigger SEO boost (more shortly).

Information provision

If you don’t want to go as far as running an education event, why not distribute helpful information resources like leaflets, or print out helpful posters for walls of clinics, shops and other venues?

Ideas include giving leaflets on preventing tennis injuries, to the local tennis club or promoting the importance of exercise for arthritis sufferers in say bingo halls, or nursing homes. All the time, your focus is on adding value and contributing to your community.

We’ve produced literally 100s of these peer-reviewed leaflets, all of which are included under our Co-Kinetic subscriptions, covering just about every population group. Why not ask your general practice if they would benefit from particular leaflets on specific topics? If we don’t already have them, we’ll produce them for you!

The key part here is that your logo and contact details are on every leaflet and poster you distribute.

In our latest issue of the Co-Kinetic journal we’ve produced two awesome posters covering the benefits of exercise for arthritis sufferers and an arthritis myth buster (or topic this quarter is arthritis!) which you can add your logo, website, and email address to and order them to be printed through Canva. What a great piece of value-adding content which also happens to feature your business details.

2. Your website and SEO

As I’ve mentioned above, it’s really important to connect your offline efforts with your online ones as it amplifies the impact of each thing you do. Good marketing should stimulate a cascade effect.

Your website has two key responsibilities l Converting website visitors into customers l Attracting potential customers by increasing the likelihood of someone searching for the services you provide, visiting your website.

Optimising your website for converting website visitors into customers a) Make it easy for them to book an appointment b) Build trust through your website

The first priority is when someone hits your website, making it really easy for them to find the information they need and to book (and attend) an appointment.That means, easy “Book Now” options and a clickable telephone number on every page along with all the info they need to actually attend their appointment (eg. map links, public transport options) and one or more ways to get in touch.

The second big role of your website is demonstrate your authority and build trust. Trust is the single most important factor in someone deciding to take the leap from checking out your website, to booking an appointment. They have to trust that you’re suitably qualified and experienced to help them with their specific need. That means being able to see your ‘knowledge’ on display and see that you’ve helped similar people, who have been in similar situations to themselves. This is another reason why defining a clear target audience is beneficial.

Knowledge can be demonstrated with good educational content on your website (ie. treatment and condition pages and blog posts), and experience can be demonstrated with social proofing (testimonials, reviews and logos of businesses, sports clubs, organisations you’ve worked with).

Personally I’m not a fan of testimonials that aren’t shown on genuine review platforms such as Google, Facebook Review or TrustPilot. The minute you turn a quote into a graphic, how can anyone tell it’s authentic? They might look prettier but is it even worth the pixels it’s formed from? People are sceptical enough these days, don’t give them a reason to doubt your authenticity.

Trust can also be built by conveying a genuine sense of ‘giving’ through your site. I review a LOT of websites belonging to a huge range of therapists literally all over the world, and I’m becoming increasingly aware of the sub-conscious ‘vibe’ a site gives off. Some are really basic, which unfortunately just doesn’t reflect well on your clinical skill set, however good it may be. Others are all business. The best ones convey a strong sense that the business genuinely cares for their visitor, whether they’re a patient or not, by sharing lots of value-adding, nurturing, trust-building content as well as giving all the information necessary to book an appointment. c) Encourage visitors to give you their email address This is a majorly neglected part of most people’s websites but is a fundamental component to building a healthy business. A healthy email list is single-handedly your most profitable marketing asset. Before you think of skipping this section, because it’s boring and you hate the idea of collecting people’s emails, check out GMB Fitness case study in Box 1 as an example of how it can be done supremely well, and in a way that offers 100% value at every level. And I love receiving their emails, I very rarely delete them as they’re always useful. A benchmark survey by MarketingSherpa found that the average value of a new email lead is $12 (US), so about £10 (GBP) at today’s exchange rate. One study by DMA (Data & Marketing Association) found that the average return on investment (ROI) for email marketing is $42 for every $1 spent. I bang on about it at just about every opportunity I get but email marketing done well, will always be your most profitable marketing activity. So if you’re lucky enough to get someone onto your website, don’t waste that opportunity, make sure to give them plenty of value-adding ways to share their email address with you. And then enter them into a nice, gentle, value-adding ongoing nurture email programme to keep building trust, generating reciprocity (the desire to give back to you) and keeping your business top of their minds.

Attracting potential customers onto your website in the first place

The reason I’ve listed this second is because your first priority is to ensure that when someone does visit your website, it’s optimised to give the best chance to convert that person into a customer. If it’s not, it doesn’t matter how many new people arrive on your site, because they’re likely to leave if you haven’t made it easy for them to take the next step. Once you’ve done the above, the next priority is to get as many people onto your website as possible. The two best routes for achieving that are: a) Direct search engine searches

If someone searches for ‘osteopath near me’, they are searching with what’s often referred to as ‘buyer’s intent’. They have a problem, and they’re looking for a solution and in our industry, by the time they’re searching, that need is usually an immediate one. These are primed prospective

Box 2: GMB fitness email lead collection and nurture best practice example

A gold standard example of how to do this well, is the exercise platform GMB Fitness. Firstly their blog posts are 100% focused on offering value to their readers. You can check out their blog here https://gmb.io/best/). Go on, I promise you’ll enjoy it.

Within every blog post, is a targeted ‘lead magnet’. By that I mean a helpful resource that is super-specific to the blog post. It’s embedded in a neat little box in the article – there’s nothing screaming at you and the leaflet is 100% focused on helping you answer a question, solve a problem, or do something you clearly desire to be able to do, otherwise you wouldn’t be reading the blog post.

For example, check out this article on Stretching (https://gmb.io/stretching/).

Right near the top of the article they have a little box with a download option for a stretching routine – highly specific to the article, helpful and value-adding – and I suspect they generate a lot of email leads from their website, plus the reader gets access to a high-value resource with GMB branding – a great little piece of marketing. The focus is always about adding value. customers ready to buy and you want to be as close to the top of the search results when that happens, and that boils very crucially down to search engine optimisation (SEO), one of the most important areas of digital marketing to get right if you’re a local business.

But the best bit is that their subsequent emails again are all about building on that value. It’s not a naff “Sign up to my email newsletter” (which we all know will result in a bucket load of spam emails), they offer targeted resources that deliver real solutions directly related to the article the person is reading.

This is brilliant example of great content marketing in action. Occasionally they run a sale but honestly, I’ve been subscribed to their emails for probably 6 or 7 years I think I remember 2 sales pitches in that time! Aspire to this because it’s all very doable if you focus on the doing the right things.

b) Links onto your website

The second way to get people onto your website is through links from third party websites, directories, or through social media channels.

Now this is where you’ll appreciate how things become truly connected because everything feeds into each other.

As you’ll see in Figure 1, 54% of where you’ll rank in an organic Google search (ie. without using Google Ads) comes down to three things, consistent publishing of engaging content is nearly 50% of that 54%. There’s your top priority.

The other two elements at level one are basically dependent on that engaging content existing in the first place. Backlinks are links to your website from other places, primarily websites, social media profiles and social media posts (both yours and other people’s).

The arrows hopefully help to indicate the connections. If you’re not publishing good engaging content, nobody is going to have a reason to link to you and you’ll have no meta titles to SEO-optimise, so you can’t even get out of the block.

And if you’re not fulfilling the top layer, the items on layer two ie. proving trustworthiness and authority, are virtually impossible to demonstrate, the end result is that it will be your competitors who are doing these things who will win those all-important clicks from rich supply of ‘buyer intent’ searches.

In short, you’ve got to a) give people the opportunities to link to you by doing things that are worth telling people about ie. running events or publishing fresh content and then b) you’ve got to proactively go out there and create those connections by asking people to link to you (both online and offline).

3. Social Media

Lastly let’s look briefly at where social media fits in. As you’ve read above, linking back to your website from your social media profiles and your posts, will help increase your backlinks and boost your SEO.

Equally, if you can build an engaged audience on your social networks, who will share your content, this builds a source of additional backlinks. The good thing about social is that it’s much easier to share links than it is to get people to add links onto websites (which requires website editing). Who’s prepared to do what, comes down to how good, strong and mutually beneficial your connection or relationship is with those people. Remember, this is not a one-way street. If you expect people to do things for you, you have to reciprocate the effort.

Social media algorithms prioritise content from accounts that have strong engagement and connections. When your content receives likes, comments, and shares from your connections, it signals to the algorithm that your content is valuable and relevant. This can help your content appear higher in people’s social media feeds, increasing your visibility or reach.

By fostering relationships with your social media connections and creating valuable content which links back to your website, you can not only boost your social media presence but also your search engine optimisation.

In summary

Hopefully it’s clear from this article, just how much connections matter both face-toface and online. Successful marketing means getting out there and forging those relationships. Just think, if you swopped the time you spent producing ineffectual social media with time networking in your community, the impact on your business would be incomparable! You can’t hide behind a website that never changes, or a social media feed that is essentially a billboard of ads for your business, you need to get out there, be seen, add value and build trust. Why not start that journey today by committing to reaching out to just one person or business and see where it leads you? And as always, I’d love to hear your success stories.

Key Points

l Creating face to face connections in your local community is one of the most effective ways to generate new clients and grow your reach on social media l Ranking highly on the search engines is another powerful way to gain new customers and the single most important factor in achieving that goal is to publish consistent, engaging content on your website l Your email list will give you the best ROI of all your marketing activities so investing in email lead generation and building relationships with your list should also be high on your marketing to do list.

The Author

Tor Davies began her professional life training as a physiotherapist at Addenbrookes Hospital, Cambridge, UK. She went on to complete a BSc in Sport & Exercise Science at the University of Birmingham while also achieving a WTA international tennis ranking. After graduation she worked in marketing with a London agency and then moved into medical journalism where her passion for publishing was born. At 27 she established sportEX medicine, a quarterly journal for physical and manual therapists. Tor’s leadership grew sportEX into the Co-Kinetic journal and more recently she has developed a technophobe-friendly marketing website containing pre-written, automated social media and a huge library of peerreviewed, tried and tested marketing resources. Tor’s focus is on providing resources to help therapists develop their professional authority and brand, and grow their own businesses while working more efficiently and effectively, a topic that she speaks regularly on at global conferences and in mastermind groups and as a visiting lecturer to several UK universities.

Join us on Facebook: www.facebook.com/CoKinetic/ on Instagram: www.instagram.com/co_kinetic and/or connect with Tor: www.facebook.com/cokinetic.tor