7 Marketing Tips For Clinic Owners & Pilates Instructors

When it comes to marketing their own business, most Clinic Owners, Therapists & Pilates Instructors fail to have a clear marketing strategy for the year ahead, and most are unclear on what actually works within our industry right now. But that’s normal –  you’re great at what you’re trained to do, which is to help people, but marketing those skills and services can be daunting at times and confusing.

To help you, here are 7 tried and tested strategies that have helped transform my own Physiotherapy & Wellness Clinic into a thriving 7-figure business. Choose one and implement it as part of the marketing plan for your business in order to boost your revenue and increase your client retention and lifetime value. 

1. Online Reviews

Not the most glamorous of marketing tactics to begin with, but one of the most important, online reviews are vital for the long-term success of your clinic or studio. Not only will you notice a real shift in the number of enquiries you receive once you’ve collected a good number of reviews, but online reviews serve as an important signal to Google when deciding which clinic or studio to rank ahead of the other. 

Towards this, it’s important to establish a process (ideally automated) whereby a Google, Trustpilot or Facebook review link is sent to all clients following treatment, asking them to share their experience online. Even better, how about finding a way to get them to leave you a review there and then – maybe using a tablet in the clinic or studio?

2. Membership Packages

Can you fix someone’s problem in one session? If you can, then you need to be charging a lot for this! But if you can’t (which most of us can’t – not because we’re not talented at what we do, but because of how we know the body works and the lifestyle people are living), then you need to consider what your clients need in order to get the results they’re looking for. 

Most clients need to make long-term commitments to their health and wellbeing, with regular checks and adjustments from a health professional such as yourself. As such, consider altering your treatment options to funnel clients towards membership packages and wellness programmes. Not only will this lead to better treatment outcomes, leaving you as the go-to expert, but it will also help with retaining clients, multiplying their lifetime value and growing your revenue. 

By focusing on the client’s needs, results and money will follow. Anna, for example, a recent Thrive member who runs a Women’s Health Physiotherapy Clinic in Bristol, introduced a ‘Menopause & Me’ package and sold £4,000 in her first month!

3. Invitations to Local Residents

Next up, one of the main reasons people aren’t coming to your clinic or studio is simply because they don’t know you exist! But how do you solve this? Well, send them something to introduce yourself and let them know that your clinic is in the neighbourhood.

The best way to do this is by mailing a personal invitation to local residents, letting them know who you are, what your clinic has to offer, and perhaps adding some sort of introductory offer, discovery visit, or complimentary class if they reference the postcard or invitation when booking an appointment (getting them to reference this invitation or postcard is vitally important for later determining the success of this campaign). 

When trying to determine the success of this campaign, as well as making sure that people reference the invitation when booking, you also need to consider the average lifetime value of a client and work out how many clients you need to acquire in order to return your investment. For instance, let’s say an average Pilates client brought in £500 for the year, you would only need one person to join your program to cover your marketing cost!

4. Free Workshops

Have you ever considered running a free workshop focusing on a pain point that is popular in your area? Take Sheffield (my home city), for example, which has a large climbing community, offering a free workshop for climbers experiencing shoulder pain has proven very successful in the past, providing a number of long-term clients.

Significantly, clients came not only from those that directly attended the workshop, but also those that had heard about the clinic via someone that attended. When you demonstrate that you’re there to support certain groups of individuals and able to help with their particular pain points, word of mouth and recommendations naturally follow.

Importantly, when putting on free workshops, you need to make sure to deliver value – always lead with this – but make sure you also tell them about your treatment options and how you can help them.

5. Online Workshops

Of course, free workshops don’t need to always be in-person – especially now that people are so used to using Zoom.

Therefore, why not try hosting a free online workshop about a topic of interest that you know your perfect clients are asking for? For instance, do you have a lot of people asking about back and neck pain from sitting at their computer all day while working from home? In this instance, you could host a free webinar entitled “10 Exercises to Eliminate Work-From-Home Back and Neck Pain.” Your potential clients will thank you and you can later upsell to them your particular program of care.

6. Referral Schemes

Next up, another relatively simple idea that you can use that our clinic has utilised with a great deal of success is running a referral scheme with monthly or quarterly prizes. The prize could be a voucher for one free treatment, or something along the lines of ‘bring a friend for free’ if you run group classes. Whatever it is, it doesn’t actually need to cost the business that much. Consider the power of zero, meaning what do you already have within the business that you can offer as a prize that costs you nothing or very little?

7. Christmas Gift Campaign

And lastly, another idea that works especially well around Christmas is a gift campaign, allowing people to purchase a package for loved ones. We often run a ‘Give The Gift Of Wellness’ Christmas campaign that we promote within the clinic, as well as online with its own dedicated landing page. 

The great thing about a Christmas gift campaign is that because of December typically being a lower income month for most Clinic & Studio Owners, a gift campaign can help increase income and cash sales for the month, whilst ensuring you have a strong start to the year through upselling to those treated by loved ones.

Which strategy will you test?

Which of these marketing strategies designed especially for Clinic Owners, Therapists and Instructors are you going to try firstly? Whichever you do decide to go for, remember to track what works, and then rinse and repeat!

And if you need any further assistance on the implementation of these strategies, then reach out and book a call with our coaches who will be happy to guide you in the best way to implement things specific to your own situation and business.

Let me know how you get on!

Katie Bell

CEO & Founder of Thrive Health & Wellness Business Coaching

Strategic Coach