How to Market a Group Practice

Congratulations on making the leap from a solo practice to a group practice.

Hiring clinicians for your group practice is an exciting step, however it can also bring a number of unanticipated changes.

As you grow your business, it’s important to shift and evolve your group therapy practice marketing strategy to keep up with those changes. 

What to know about marketing a group practice

A well-developed marketing strategy can help build up your referral network, attract clients that fit with your new clinicians’ skill set, and ultimately help expand the reach of your practice.

And, as you continue to hire new clinicians, there are strategies that are specific to marketing for group practices you can use to help move your practice forward. 

1. Focus on your brand 

As a solo practitioner, your authentic personal therapy brand is basically synonymous with your practice’s brand. Your focus is communicating who you are, your specific skillset, and what you can offer your clients.

As you add clinicians though, you will need to distinguish your personal brand from your practice’s brand.

Even if the name of your practice remains your name, there are ways to build an inclusive brand that shifts the focus to your practice as a whole—separate from yourself as an individual. 

First, make sure you have a logo for your group therapy practice. This logo can be used in all your external marketing efforts—from your website to any social media assets.

Your goal should be for potential clients to start recognizing your logo, and associating it with the name of your practice.

It’s also helpful as you start connecting with other practitioners and group practices who you want to have in your referral network.

When your fellow clinicians can easily recognize your logo on any communication you have with them, it makes it easier for them to remember you—and refer clients to you if they’re the right fit. 

Along with your logo, you should develop consistent brand colors and fonts.

This might seem overly specific, but it’s important that you have consistency throughout all the marketing materials you create. 

For example, my group practice has five brand colors that we use across all our social media posts, on our website, and in all the rest of our marketing materials. We also have three fonts that we consistently use.

Once you choose these brand essentials for your group practice, you can begin to develop a consistent and recognizable visual appearance. 

As a solo practitioner, you may have been the face of the practice, but as you grow into a group practice, your public-facing image should be your logo, brand colors, and fonts.  

2. Create and use consistent and authentic messaging  

As a solo practitioner, your marketing message and pitch was most likely centered on your clinical skills and what made you stand out from other clinicians.

Now that you are adding clinicians to your group practice, the messaging has to be focused on what makes your practice stand out as a whole. 

Developing a practice mission, or vision statement, can go a long way in articulating what your practice is known for and what makes it stand out from other practices in the area.

To start off, think about who your practice’s target clients. What are their key demographics and areas of treatment need?

Do you work with adults, children, or couples? Who is your ideal client?

Next, consider the expertise and services your practice successfully provides for that key demographic.

Are you evidence-based?

Do you provide culturally responsive care?

Once you articulate what makes your group therapy practice unique, this statement should be front and center on all your marketing materials—including any printed advertising materials, social media, and your therapy website. 

Often, the main page of a solo practitioner’s website has an overview of themself and their practices.

However, as a group practice, your website’s homepage should shift the focus away from any individual in the practice, and instead showcase the practice’s overall mission that connects the individual clinicians. That said, it’s important to still have professional bios and headshots of your staff on your website.

3. Coach your new clinicians on communicating expertise

Your new clinicians will become an essential part of your marketing strategy.

When you hire and onboard new clinicians and staff, be sure to guide them about how to articulate what your group practice provides and the ways in which it is unique.

It’s also important you help your clinicians talk about their own clinical strengths and approaches and how they can communicate to clients the specific expertise and specialties they bring to your group practice. 

As a group practice owner, your goal is to make sure you’re supporting your clinicians to attract clients that fit well with their clinical skill set. Coaching your clinicians on how to deliver their elevator pitch to prospective clients will go a long way in helping them connect with clients that are a good fit for them. An introductory elevator pitch should be a 15-20 second, 2-3 sentence explanation of their clinical strengths and the clientele they typically work with. 

In addition to helping your clinicians develop their elevator pitch, think about how you can assist them with marketing to their ideal client through your marketing material. The clinic I manage is set up to serve people at every stage of their journey, and our marketing for our group therapy practice reflects that. 

At the same time, several of our clinicians have niches that complement our lifespan clinic’s goals, so we work with them to market to those niches. 

One of our clinicians is bilingual and enjoys serving the Latinx population, so we created a specialty page for her to let potential clients know. Another clinician provides donor conception support, so we shared a lecture she gave on the topic to our social media platforms.

To help expand our reach, we have found ways to support and boost the particular specialties of our clinicians under the umbrella of our overall marketing strategy.  

A marketing strategy that’s developed and well-thought-out is a must-have for any private practice, and it’s especially critical for a group practice.

Not only do you need to promote the needs and goals of your group practice as a whole, as a group practice owner you also need to have a plan to support your staff and their individual growth.

If you focus on these three areas, you’ll be able to adapt your existing strategy to help you build a thriving group practice. 

How SimplePractice makes it easier to run your group practice

SimplePractice is practice management software that includes everything you need to run your group practice—from booking and scheduling to insurance and client billing.

Your group practice clinicians can streamline all of their client engagement—like scheduling and payments—using the client portal.

Plus, SimplePractice keeps your group therapy practice efficient by offering your clinicians a robust template library of customizable notes and documentation. And, your clinicians can speed up their documentation process by loading any notes they took from a previous session.
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READ: NEXT: What to Know Before Starting a Group Practice