How to fix your marketing funnel
Your marketing funnel for your therapy practice looks something like this.
Image via Sprout Social
You’ll notice it’s widest at the top, which is how funnels work.
Potential clients start at the Awareness stage. The goal of the Awareness stage is to make more potential clients aware of your practice through word of mouth, referrals, social media, directories, and Google Search.
The Consideration stage is next. The goal of the Consideration stage is to increase the likelihood a client will consider you over other therapists once they’ve landed on your website through relevant content.
Next is the Conversion stage. The goal of the Conversion stage is to get potential clients to convert into paying clients. This one is pretty self-explanatory.
Next is the Loyalty stage. The goal of the Loyalty stage is to retain clients. This stage looks a little different for therapy practices than other companies because it’s not a bad thing for clients to graduate from therapy.
The final stage of the marketing funnel is the Advocacy stage. The goal of the Advocacy stage is for clients to recommend you to other clients. This one also looks a little different for therapists because you can’t explicitly ask for reviews or referrals, but if you do good work, then it tends to take care of itself.
Now that you understand the stages of the marketing funnel, you can begin to assess where the “leaks” or breaking points are.
Do you need to increase your Awareness at the top of the funnel? A key performance indicator (KPI) here would be website visitors. This number should be going up over time.
Are you driving enough awareness, but people aren’t moving from the Awareness to the Consideration stage? A KPI here would be conversation rate from website visitors to consultation bookings. 2-3% is good, 5% is great.
Maybe potential clients are booking consultations, but they’re not converting to paying clients. This would be a Conversion problem. I polled my audience on Twitter/X and 64.6% of therapists said they’re converting at least 50% of consultations to clients, so that’s a good benchmark.
You don’t always need to do more marketing to get more clients.
Instead, you may need to fix a leak in your marketing funnel.