How many business or marketing worksheets have you filled out in your life?
If you’ve ever been a part of a coaching group or hired consultants, it’s probably in the dozens.
Everyone’s got them (including us), and they are all basically the same.
Identify your target market.
Describe your patients.
Write out your unique value proposition.
They are all good in principle, and good things to think about.
How many of them actually helped your business?
Coaching groups, books, and courses are great for learning the basics, but they naturally have to speak to a very broad audience.
When it comes to actually applying those principles to your particular business, you are usually left on your own.
Good luck!
That’s why no matter how many worksheets you fill out, it all ends up basically the same.
It’s why you see the same thing repeated on every clinic’s newsletter or website or front door.
If your unique service proposition is basically the same as everyone else’s in your coaching group, it’s not exactly a unique service proposition, is it?
It’s just a regular old service proposition.
You’re missing the most important piece.
No wonder it never works out as well as you hope.
You’re caught in the coaching group curse, where you are given good advice but not how you can personally use it.
Fortunately, you can easily break the curse and actually benefit from all those worksheets by slightly changing your perspective.
It’s easy to get stuck in a groove with all the examples you’ve been given and not be able to come up with unique, creative ideas.
When that happens, try these tricks for sparking some fresh thought:
- Discuss your business with someone NOT in your group and preferably not a PT. That could be your spouse, your parents, your best friend, your office manager, or the guy next to you at the gym. Maybe have them try to fill out the worksheets. The answers may surprise you.
- Ask your patients. They know what’s valuable or unique about your business better than anyone. Ask them why they decided to come to you, what they like best about your service, what makes you different from the last person they saw, and what else they would like to see from you. Try to avoid just asking for a positive review. Ask pointed questions to get at the specific details. Take note of the words they use.
- Look on social media. No, not in your coaching facebook group, and not at marketing gurus or PT business groups, but at regular people who have the problems you treat. A sciatica support group or a moms group post that’s recommending a PT or an influencer building awareness of hypermobility problems. What do normal people say they need and want, and how does that line up with what you offer (or could offer)?
Once you’ve collected this information, though, don’t just slap it on your website or marketing materials.
You still have to integrate that into your business, your strengths, and your story.
Take the words people use, the problems they have, and the desires they express, then think about how you offer the solutions they want.
Focusing on one particular group of patients will help you avoid the overly broad and generic language that plagues a lot of clinics.
Focusing on the actual words of normal people will help you avoid the lifeless PT and marketing jargon that infests insulated PT groups.
Finally, test your messages in the same places you got them.
Ask your spouse, your patients, or your social media acquaintances what they think, and always be willing to change.
It might take some trial and error, but you’ll end up with something personal and unique.
Which means you’ll get a lot more interest from the patients that fit with you.
Maybe even enough to justify all those coaching fees.