Potential clients may not know where to find you, even though you may be an excellent SLP. Generating speech language pathologist leads is a lot easier than you think. You need to implement proven strategies that will make the process easier for your potential clients to find your private practice that leads them to trusting their needs with your expertise.
We’d love to talk to you about how to market your SLP practice, and, after all, the entire goal of this post is to make sure you get to know all your options to hit more businesses.
It can be difficult to generate leads for your speech language pathology practice to increase patient volume, as this isn’t a specialty most people think about when looking at ads or marketing channels.
But it does not have to be complex—especially if you have a plan. The entire idea is to build a plan consisting of different strategies that can reach both prospects looking for professionals like you and those who don’t know they need you yet.
There are many speech language pathology clinics in the world, and all of them want to be in the limelight, which is another challenge for your business.
All claim to offer the best care with the best providers and the best overall treatment. While some may be right, others might not. But as a manager, what can you do to help your clinic stand out from the crowd and promote your brand? Here comes our help for it.
Identify Your Ideal Patients
According to the American Speech Language Hearing Association (ASHA), SLPs are autonomous providers, which means, in many cases, patients can access your services without a physician’s order (although some payers do require a referral as a condition of payment).
This means that you will need to direct some of your marketing budgets toward patients. However, to do this, you will need to identify the right people and where they can be reached.
Thus, you will need to identify your ideal patients—specifically, those your practice is best able to help. Next, you can take it one step further by determining the following:
- How they spend their time.
- What motivates them?
- How do they talk about rehab therapy?
- Which rehabilitation therapy services do they require?
- Where they can get information about rehab therapy and health care services.
- What aspects of care delivery do they value the most?
- Speedy recovery, seeing an [therapist] at each visit or a spa-like environment.
You Can Tailor Your Approach to Reach Them
Once you have a clear understanding of whom you are trying to reach as potential customers, your message and channel can be tailored to connect with the patients in the most effective way. As a pediatric speech therapist, you should consider your patients’ parents, for example.
Although your brand should be targeted at children (think bright, fun), most of your marketing should reflect a calm, soothing, and kid-friendly atmosphere, which appeals both to paternal and maternal minds.
On the other hand, you must make sure that your approach isn’t invasive.
Many businesses and owners are too pushy or salesy when trying to reach their clients. In the process, they just end up losing opportunities as people feel they are being pressured to make a decision without enough info.
Use Your Patients’ Praises to Help You Sing in the Industry
When it comes to attracting new patients, social proof is crucial. This is especially important for parents and caregivers who most likely do extensive research before choosing a provider to care for their loved ones.
Your online reputation is crucial for the same reason, which means you need to work around it but also on your offline reputation—yes, both.
To ensure you’re building a presence and getting the desired results when building your reputation and collecting patients’ reviews and opinions, you should have a professional website, an educational blog, active social accounts, and any digital property that helps with your goal.
The best way to get positive reviews is to ask patients for them. But be careful: only ask those who are satisfied with your services.
We recommend using Net Promoter Score to do lead scoring. To determine who is loyal and who isn’t. This will allow you to identify your most happy patients and those who have had a bad experience with your practice.
You can then take action to address their problems before they leave or talk negatively about your practice online.
Establish Relationships with Other Providers
It is important to include direct-to-patient marketing in your lead generation strategy. However, you will also need to establish solid relationships with other healthcare providers and non-healthcare providers that serve your ideal patients. This is in other to get referrals.
Referrals make up a large portion of the new patient volume for most SLPs.
Experts suggest that if you are working with school-aged children, you should establish good relationships with local behavioral therapists, pediatric psychologists, OTs, and school-based professionals (including counselors, teachers, and administrators).
They also suggest that you ask to speak at teacher meetings and consider offering free screenings to students, thus helping teachers to identify when students could benefit from your care. You need to note that some states prohibit providers from reaching out to public school systems.
In these cases, you might need to concentrate on private schools or other entities that serve your ideal patient population, such as tutors and coaches for club sports. Make sure you have the data and outcomes that will prove your worth to patients.
Get Connected to Your Community and Follow Up
What better way to market your services than by connecting with your community—especially if your SLP niche is one that you are passionate about?
You could host workshops at your practice that teach current and potential patients new skills. Then, follow those sessions up with a community event.
To share your knowledge and support others, you could join an online community. This one could be a good fit for you if your specialty is in listening and spoken language. Sponsoring a local event is another option.
All this will enable you to reach the ideal patients and/or referrers.
There are many ways to get involved and increase community awareness, but not all of them may work for your company thus, why you need to work around those that actually benefit your goals.
Relationships are not built in one meeting. Trust between providers can only be built by nurturing relationships.
Your recommendations are valuable and reflect your professionalism as a healthcare professional. It would be a mistake to refer someone you do not know to your patients.
What if your patient had a bad experience with a practitioner, and you are the one who recommended them? That only leaves you a bad reputation from now on.
You can always try again if a potential referral source does not respond to your first attempt. It is important to be open to the possibility of being referred to by a private practitioner owner.
Reframe your message if marketing makes you feel uneasy or like a salesman selling used cars.
Follow up with people you have met at a networking event. At future events, say ‘hello.’ Connect with LinkedIn. Call or email to invite them to coffee so you can learn more about their company and whom they could recommend.
LinkedIn is a great marketing tool for generating leads if used correctly. It is growing fast, and it is a fantastic platform for your sales teams to use in search engine optimization!
Try Sending Unique Mail-outs and Develop Relations
Suppose you send a large postcard mailer out to several local pediatric medical practices and focus on making sure it is about you, your services, and your value proposition. In that case, there’s a high chance of getting more prospects for your services.
Although not all the postcards you send will become referral sources—only a few of the fifty solicitations or about 50% or less—you still get lots in return.
Many school-based SLPs can be reached to inform them of your clinic’s services. SLPs who work in schools have the chance to interact with children with various developmental and communication disorders.
There are limited hours in the day, and children may require additional treatment beyond school hours.
You can build a strong relationship with your school-based colleagues and increase your chances of them referring new patients to your clinic. Face-to-face interaction is the best way to build strong relationships and generate sales qualified leads.
Develop Your Online Presence
If you want people to take your business seriously, they will need a website. Google is the first option people use when looking for a service. If your web presence is not obvious to them immediately, it may be difficult for you to earn their trust and get more patients.
Building a website is not rocket science, contrary to popular belief. You can grow your network exponentially by joining social networks like Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook.
Your social media profiles will be among the first results if you search for the name of your practice on Google.
We recommend that you learn more about Google AdWords if you consider yourself internet-savvy. They can help your business appear on Google and allow you to be found by more people.
Here’s a tip: If you have not yet added your facility on Google My Business, do it now! It will give your clinic a Google My Business listing, which allows you to have your office appear on Google Maps and search engines.
Client Appreciation
Everyone loves to feel valued, even when it is not expected. Your patients might view visits to your clinic simply as another task on their to-do list. But with some effort, your clinic can become a destination instead of a stop.
First, make sure you have friendly front desk staff who are able to make your guests feel at home. You want them to feel like they are guests and not customers. You can invest in comfortable chairs for your waiting area. You can offer snacks to your guests upon their arrival.
Correspondence with clients on holidays and special days is a novel way to show them you care. ReminderCall is an optional add-on that will send birthday greetings to patients automatically.
Avoid Print Advertising, But Work with Outdoor Advertising and Local Events
Print is dead when it comes to SLP or, at least, not the best option as not many people seek help by going to those traditional ads and finding the service and professionals they need.
Thus, spend your advertising dollars, not on publications that nobody will read. Instead, invest in staff, sponsorships, and overall lead generation campaigns. Marketing is about maximizing value and earning the maximum return on your investment.
Sponsorship is an effective marketing strategy if the event’s scope and interests align with yours. If your SLP clinic only treats children, sponsoring an event would make sense.
This will allow you to introduce your services and yourself to the parents. If your clinic has a lot of elderly patients, you might be able to sponsor an event. It could be a day of salsa dancing, picnics, or even a mall walk.
On the other hand, outdoor advertising is alive and well. If your advertisement is placed at the right location, in front of the right people, and at the right time, your clinic could get a lot more attention.
You might be able to find a spot in your area that can serve as an introduction if you do some research.
Client Word of Mouth and Referrals
Word-of-mouth is a huge success for any type of service.
86% of respondents said they have received or tried this channel for business as they feel that people are bound to trust them more when someone they already trust recommends the service.
Word-of-mouth is the most powerful form of advertising, especially when it is in a small community, since people will always spread the word to ensure others access the best services.
Because word of mouth is a huge factor in the medical industry, it is easy to gain traction when clients begin talking about you to their physicians.
However, keep this in mind: word of mouth can take time.
You need time to build your reputation and ensure people are recommending you, be it current patients, past ones, or professionals you know in the area.
Referrals through family doctors or pediatricians are the most popular sources, with 46% of referrals confirming their success.
Many SLPs have tried different referrals, such as occupational therapists (33%) or maybe dentists and regular doctors for a checkup.
Using this strategy usually means one thing: you are likely to have clients who could benefit from your services. Let them know that you are open to referring potential clients to you. This will allow you to build a network of like-minded practitioners while you grow your practice.
Facebook Groups
SLPs were positive about joining Facebook groups that are relevant to digital efforts (e.g., “Mommy groups” are their preferred option. 58% of respondents tried to get involved on this channel.
A moderate 28% of respondents reported success in receiving business through it since people are spending time on this social media.
However, keep in mind it may not work for everyone as some SLP specialists find it a bit overwhelming when actually providing specialized solutions and services.
Thus, you need to design your strategy for Facebook carefully.
In fact, you must be careful with the platform in every possible way as there are many rules against self-promotion and marketing in this area.
These groups can be approached with the motto “Give more than your take.” Clients can benefit from being helpful to their members and a part of their communities in the long-term, so don’t be pushy, but try to get the businesses you need out of them.
Networking Always Works
Attend networking events, and just like we mentioned earlier, search for groups in your area; find other professionals who could be good referral sources.
People should know you because they will make your lead generation strategies a success.
Make a goal to meet as many people as possible before you go in. You can choose an achievable goal that you feel good about.
Start with just one person if you are new to networking. These events are great for you if you succeed at them and gain high-quality leads.
It should be a two-way street. Learn about the job of the CPA, attorney, or lactation consultant and your personal interests. Ask questions. They may need you to refer them or provide information.
Maybe try offering a free consultation on your website, social media, or in-person chats. This is a great way to make your sales leads feel more confident hiring you and to connect with others during those events with a natural offer.
Community Is Key
You can leave “Helpful Tips” rack cards at coffee shops, libraries, or with your hairdresser wherever you are able. Just make sure you are connecting with those around you and ensure you are getting in front of them.
With that in mind, we have a couple of tips for this strategy:
- Are you using company pens? No? Do it! Your website should be on these pens. You can take them everywhere you go banks, daycares, playgrounds, shops, etc.
- Free presentations: Share your knowledge on a niche topic. It takes some time, but it is a great way to show off your expertise.
- Flyers are a great way to spread the word. Do not promote your practice or sell directly, though. You can leave cards with tips and take-home points for the patients that will be useful in the future. They just need to have your contact information at hand.
- Ideas for locations: Your local library, aging and disability resource center, popular preschool, the YMCA, and Parkinson’s support groups. Also, help with assisted living facilities.
- Volunteer: Volunteer for various charities. This is a great way to network and get your name out in the community. You can host a booth at an expo focusing on children, heath, or niche-related products.
- Concentrate on the client experience: Are you providing premium, professional client experience? These little touches will make your business stand out from the rest and get you mentioned on Facebook, in the playground, and in coffee shops.
- Find out more about your ideal client: Learn more about your ideal client to help you tailor your marketing to fit their lives. This will increase your chances of attracting them.
- Accepting insurance is more difficult and has a lower reimbursement, but the increased referrals make it worth it.
- Support groups: Look for local support groups in your area and ask to speak at their next meeting.
Facilitators love to have speakers join the conversation in their groups. You can speak directly with potential clients, tell them about your services and let them know that you are available to help if they have any questions.
- Other SLPs: This may seem obvious, but it is surprising how many SLPs do not reach out and tell other SLPs about their privacy practices. Make connections with SLPs at home to get started.
You want to be resourceful, valuable, and a professional people can rely on when it comes to this therapy and process.
Don’t be a salesman; just be yourself and offer what you know to do best in this community or any other lead generation strategy you implement.
The Local Lead Generation Process for Your Speech Language Pathologist Business
All right! So, everything is about building properties and generating leads. But how does the process actually take place? Are there other steps I need to know?
The steps I mention below are what students from our local lead generation program follow to generate leads for businesses like yourself. So I’ll help you see what we do. And how if you join our program, you can simply generate leads for your own business (unless you want to start a side hustle and build a laptop lifestyle business).
Essentially, our lead generation can be divided into four steps:
The first is prospecting. You need to take the time to do market research on a niche (industry) and determine how many phone-driven businesses are there.
Keep in mind that this is local research as you need to know how many companies need leads. For example, you may search for “plumbing services Youngstown OH.”
You will find dozens or even hundreds of businesses trying to get themselves in front of the customers by ranking on Map Listings, organic results, and even Ad.
The second step, building. When you find a niche (plumbing, tree services, a software company, real estate…), you will need to start building your digital properties. You don’t need to be an expert in HTML or coding. It can be easy with the right tools.
The third step is now taking time to rank your lead gen website. With the site done, you need to work on SEO strategies and start dominating those Google search results. If you’re new to SEO, it stands for Search Engine Optimization.
To keep it simple, it consists of the entire process of growing a company’s visibility on search engines like Google and generating organic traffic. And remember this, local lead generation is part of the strategies.
Moving on to step four, once you rank the site, you will start getting your ROI and profits. You only need to rent it out to a local business interested in the leads the site generates. You can offer a couple of free leads to their move on with the actual pay per lead.
To review steps 1-4 above, I described it to a normal student who is building a lead gen business to help local service providers generate more calls. But replace the student with you as the business owner. And replace sending the leads to a business to simply siphoning the leads to your personal business.
By the way, fun fact, about 20% of our students in our local lead gen program are actually business owners who went through the program. And they use the skillsets we teach to generate leads for their own business.
An Example of Lead Generation: Home Advisor
You must be thinking, “if lead generation sounds so good so far, how come I haven’t seen any company?” That’s the thing; there are many out there. You just don’t know they are dedicated to it.
HomeAdvisor is one of the best examples you can find on the Internet as it is a top lead generation company that has spent millions building its brand but also earned even more zeros for this same reason.
They started small as everyone else but invested in building their brand awareness to make people who are looking for home services go to their website and find what they need. They are over 75% of people’s first choice when they need those services.
If you don’t get HomeAdvisor that much or need a refresh, users need to submit their information to request a service and get a professional or expert who can provide it.
HomeAdvisor’s job is to share your information, which makes you a lead, with local companies so they can contact you and offer the service you’re requesting. For sharing this lead information, HomeAdvisor gets paid by the companies. This happens for every single lead they send to multiple businesses.
Business owners who don’t have marketing skills or don’t even know how to have any online presence will always rely on those pages to list their services. They will save time and effort, but companies like HomeAdvisor can make them spend lots of money as leads aren’t exclusive (one lead is sent to multiple companies after all).
Using Facebook Ads aka Paid Ad Platforms: Do They Generate Leads?
They DO generate leads. If not, no one would use them.
However, you need to remember two facts:
- Paid ads or platforms can be expensive.
- They don’t generate “natural” leads.
Whenever someone sees or clicks in one of those ads, over 80% of them did it by accident or are trying to close/report it.
Why? Because they aren’t looking for those services. At least not at the moment.
What those ads do instead is interrupt their time on the platforms. Users aren’t there to find companies or businesses unless they are searching for a specific company’s user, and for that, there’s a search bar. This is why it is hard to convert them to actual customers who will show interest in the companies’ services. Also, you’re limited by a budget.
When using lead generation, everything is organic. You aren’t forcing others to pay attention to your business but rather being there when they need you. This is why Google’s organic traffic will always beat paid ads, and the reason companies continue investing in it, which is a lot cheaper as well.
What Is Local SEO?
Don’t worry… I didn’t get it at first either. Following the short explanation, local SEO focuses on scaling businesses’ visibility on search engines. However, this is only for those who serve their communities face-to-face.
What does this mean?
Experts and professionals like painters, plumbers, and dentists (but not only them) offer their services to their local customers. Why? Because they can’t deliver them unless they are located in the same area of their customers.
To make sure those businesses get more leads, you need to rank them locally by claiming the business listing on Google to place them on Map Listings. Local SEO also involves online reviews, citation management, and how you manage your entire online presence in the local area.
If you are going to bet on lead gen, you need to adapt yourself to today’s world: The Internet.
Keep in mind that although traditional channels and methods like billboards, warm calls, and pamphlets still work, they aren’t part of your tools. Whenever someone needs a service, they go to Google and search for it.
“Dentist in Miami” or “plumbing services in Orlando,” etc. And you can keep coming up with services or professionals people need and look for. Thus, you need to make sure you’re using Google to get the companies in front of their clients.
Users will always click on the first search results (those near the top), and many of them will be either Ad links (people paid to place their websites there), Map Listing, and then you get websites. Almost all of them are your goal and where you should always aim to place yourself.
Can My Speech Language Pathologist Business Utilize a Local Lead Generation Strategy?
If you want customers, you better know you need it. Following the previous explanation, lead gen is all about placing businesses in front of their customers, choosing them over their competitors.
Put it simply – it’s all about closing deals and having clients for those companies to make money. The main difference with the usual methods companies use for this is how lead generation approaches different channels to get them in the right place of the market to get customers.
Those channels are all focused on the Internet as most people are searching for products but also services across the net. The issue is that the Internet is way too broad, and businesses don’t know how to place themselves. They usually try, but they get one common result: losing money and time.
How Powerful Are Organic Speech Language Pathologist Leads from Google?
For companies looking for customers, it’s everything. For you? Pretty much the same. When you build a business with digital properties, you get to make thousands of dollars a month.
This isn’t a “get started today and get rich tomorrow” thing, but it is HIGHLY scalable, and ROI + positive results are guaranteed. Learning a fairly decent and very needed set of skills to create your digital properties and start ranking them on Google is required.
I have invested in several online businesses over the years, and if there’s something uncertain, whether you will get your ROI or not, even more than the actual profit.
However, this business moved my earnings from five figures a year to a month in ONLY passive income while sitting comfortably at home.
On my laptop. Anywhere. Anytime.
You can look at one of the first sites I built back in 2016, and it continues making me over $1.000+ every month. The best part is that I don’t need to touch it or the rest I’ve built over the years, just like this digital property.
What Makes Lead Generation SO Alluring?
Here it goes: you can work from home.
The main issue with regular business opportunities is how much you need to invest in staff, equipment, or rent to have a place to sell your products or offer your services.
We all know the hassles of traditional businesses that involve regular expenses, which are extremely high. Can you afford it? I don’t think so, and even if you can, is it worth it? Now, it isn’t only about the money. You also need to put in a lot of work, and it isn’t only during the first couple of months or years. Usually, it is as long as you continue running it.
You can save yourself those headaches and bone-breaking tasks and expenses with lead gen since it is more about generating leads with digital channels—mainly websites.
Websites can be VERY cheap to build, and with many tools online, you get to do it in a couple of hours instead of days. Any virtual or digital business is scalable and won’t need constant maintenance.
So, let’s summarize this:
- You save money in regular expenses with traditional and most online businesses as what you need is yourself and digital properties (websites).
- You can bet on passive income.
- There’s no need to hire more people to get started.
- You can generate leads in multiple industries, which allows you to work on any niche you want.
How Can I Get Started in the Local Lead Generation Program?
Anyone can start and learn. That’s the beauty of this business model. I knew nothing about SEO, Map Listing, and everything I’ve mentioned so far. It is all about learning the skills, gaining experience, and deciding to take the step.
Remember that this business model will never get old as business owners are always looking for leads. They need to do business and scale their companies. Why not do the same while helping others and still making money?
You can start with this local lead generation course highly recommended for anyone wanting to grow in the business. It is a close training that will take you through each step and make sure you are able to get your ROI, profits and take control of your life.
You will be added to an incredible lead generation family ready to help you 24/7 when asking questions on the group. Anyone is welcome who’s willing to put in the work. Click here to watch the lead gen webinar.