When establishing your physical therapy practice, you must focus on aspects of both the physical practice and your online presence. Your location, the building that you select, and the community that you serve are all critical components to your overall success. However, you must also consider the integration of a website, the steps that must be taken to build your online brand, and the target audience that you are seeking to attract. In this comprehensive guide, we will outline some measures that may be taken to successfully identify the target audience of your practice.
When Do You Select a Target Audience for Your Physical Therapy Practice?
Ideally, you should determine a target audience for your physical therapy practice prior to the creation of the website for your business. It is a known fact that each and every single day, we communicate in unique ways with different people we come in contact with. The same holds true for our business website. When you determine a target audience, your website will have a certain tone and method of communication that speaks directly to the individuals that make up that target audience.
How Do I Determine the Target Audience of My Physical Therapy Practice?
To determine the target audience of your physical therapy practice, you must simply start with what and where you know. Review the clients that you currently serve. Review the demographics of your current clients and what services they utilize.
For example, if you service athletes more than anyone else, this would be a great start as a target audience.
If you service the elderly with mobility restrictions, this would be your target audience.
If you serve many clients with many needs, start by taking the clients that you most commonly serve. Later, you could divide your clients to ensure that you appeal to all.
What Are Your Core Services?
The next way to determine your target audience is to consider the core services that your physical therapy practice offers. Simply make a list and outline your services. Then, rank them from your most popular services to your least popular services.
For example, if you most commonly offer rehabilitation services for individuals that have had knee surgery, you will want to target THAT type of audience.
Think about who is most likely to use your physical therapy practice. THAT will indicate your best target audience.
Should I Consider Demographics When Determining My Target Audience?
Yes, you should definitely consider demographics when trying to determine the target audience for your physical therapy practice. In short, demographics are defined as the “social-based statistics and specific characteristics of a population”. This type of information includes the age, race, general ethnicity, gender, marital status, education, employment, and income of individuals.
When attempting to determine who it is that you should target as YOUR audience, you should consider as many demographic aspects as possible.
What is Psychographics?
If you are attempting to come up with a target audience for your physical therapy practice, you should also consider psychographics. Psychographics are defined as the personal-based attributes of various individuals. These include social status, habits, daily activities, and even the opinions of individuals.
For example, you may consider how people obtain the information that they obtain and where they obtain it. Many may be fans of obtaining information on certain social media platforms.
Then, consider what people do and how they do it. Many may live a lifestyle that is highly athletic. It is important to consider how your potential clients look at and interact with the world when determining your target audience.
Who is Your Competition and What are They Doing?
The next step to determining your target audience is to analyze your competition and what they are doing to attract clients. Evaluate their services, sales, and promotions. This will help you determine who they are targeting and what works in their marketing campaign.
Look at their online presence – their website, their blog, and any social media accounts that they have. Evaluate their readership and their followers.
Now, compare it all to your business. How is it the same? How is it different?
Simply evaluate your weaknesses and determine how to develop your strengths so that you are a match to your competition. That will then help you in establishing a target audience.
Conduct a Thorough Analysis
Once you have done all of the previously-mentioned activities, take a step back and conduct a thorough analysis. Once you determine how your services compare to what people are looking for, you must consider if there is enough potential to achieve success.
You will want to ensure that what you have to offer will result in a good balance that includes interested clients. If not, you should look at what you have to offer and put a twist on it.
Not only should this “twist” allow your practice to stand out from the crowd, but it should also be unique and beneficial enough that loyal clients of other practices are willing to forego that loyalty and come to your practice.
Growth
As you put a marketing plan into place that targets an audience, you will likely find that it takes no time at all for your practice to grow. During this period of growth, your practice will also evolve. The more that your practice evolves, the more that you will find that your target audience will grow, too.
This means that all of the efforts that you put into your marketing endeavors will also need to evolve.
Regularly visit your marketing plans and efforts. Do they match up with your overall growth? If not, the process will need to be re-evaluated to accommodate the growth that your practice is experiencing.
What are the Main Ways to Identify a Target Audience?
As you can see from the information contained in this guide, there are many strategies to identifying a target audience. The good news is, if you want to sum it all up, you just have to focus on four main areas.
The four main areas of identifying your target market are geographics, demographics, unique psychographics, and the standard behavioral components of your potential clients.
In today’s world – regardless of niche or specialty – these are the four main ways that businesses engage in the process of segmentation when defining the target audience that they will use in their marketing endeavors.
Why is it Important to Identify Your Target Audience?
As a physical therapy practice, there are many reasons why it is important to identify your target audience. In short, it helps you determine what types of content and various types of communication that potential clients truly care about.
Once you know WHO your target audience is, you will know what tone and “voice” to use in your marketing campaigns to promote your physical therapy practice.
It does not matter if you target young athletes, the middle-aged with back issues, or the elderly with mobility restrictions, you must provide them with a persona that you may appeal to.
Join Us
If you want to streamline your physical therapy practice, gain access to tools and resources that will help in rendering your success, and/or network with like-minded professionals, we here at Colorado Physical Therapy Network would like to invite you to join us today. We can help YOU make a real difference in all of the way that you elect to do business. To become a member today, click the following link now: https://coloradophysicaltherapynetwork.com/application-forms/
