Marketing Closer to Home

Hi, this is Dave Kats with Therapist Consultants and I have a tip for you.

They say behind every black cloud is a silver lining. COVID-19 was a black cloud, where is its silver lining? There are several silver linings. First of all, when you were just doing therapy in your office, you could only advertise and market and accept people within about 10 miles of your office. Now there are a few people that would drive 50 and 100 miles but very few. Most people were right around your office.

Now that you're doing tele-mental health, the truth is you can talk, advertise and market and accept anybody in the state or any state you're licensed in and so that's a real advantage. Here's the disadvantage in the advantage. A lot of our therapists said, "Now that I'm doing tele-mental health, I'm going to advertise over the whole state, let's say the whole state of Florida, as opposed to just Orlando." They spent $500 to advertise in Orlando, COVID happened, they went online, they did $500 advertising the whole state and the referrals actually went down.

Here's why we've come to this conclusion. Even though people know they're doing telemental mental health and can do it from anywhere in the world, we realized that they liked people and therapists that are close to them. They still think a little bit geographically. When you spread it out all over the state, people didn't respond. If you spend $500, just in your local area, you're going to do better than advertising in the whole state. Now, that doesn't mean you shouldn't advertise in the whole state, but just spend your first money advertising close to home.

This is Dave Kats, thanks for listening.