Year after year, many people from all over the world decide to study psychology and make a career in this field. It is partly for this reason that the world of clinical and health psychology is very competitive: there are many people who offer psychological intervention services, and in comparison there are not many people who consider attending the consultation of each of these professionals.

So… how do you get patients for your psychology practice? Starting from the premise that the fact that a therapist is good will not help you to prosper if you don’t know some basic principles of marketing, let’s look at some tips that can be useful to have more clients and patients to treat.

Getting patients for a psychology consultation: various tips

Follow these basic guidelines to publicize your business and your therapy services and reach out to people who might be interested in what you do. Although the world of marketing is far more complicated than what you see here, they do sum up several important ideas.

1. Take care of your website

Nowadays, the professional website is practically sacred. A very big part of your potential clients will know about your services through it, so it is extremely important that you give a good image of your work and that it communicates well what you do.

For example, small details such as having a website that takes many seconds to load could be making more than half of the people trying to enter it give up and close the window before reading a single line about your business.

And a bad web design is also a common mistake; on the net it is possible to gain a lot of exposure, but it is also very easy to lose the attention of these visitors , so it should not cost any effort to browse your content and read what it says on your pages. It is crucial, for example, that the letters can be read easily; functionality is much more important than unnecessary frills.

2. It doesn’t matter only the quantity: choose your target audience

One of the first things we notice when we apply basic marketing principles to our business is that you can see the difference in results between a communication campaign that has taken into account the type of people you want to target and one that has not.

So, since your resources when investing money and time in your business are limited, it is important that you have everything designed to attract the attention of the potential customer profile you want to attract .

For example, if your specialty is middle-class people and people between 35 and 60, it doesn’t make much sense to use overly technical jargon that only your professional colleagues would understand.

3. Publish texts on a blog

Blogs are a good way to explain in more detail your work philosophy and the kind of problems and needs you focus on as a professional.

That’s why keeping one of them updated can be very useful to make your website’s content relevant and, in addition, gains SEO power ; that is, it has a better chance of appearing among the first results of Google (or other search engines) when potential patients or customers search on them by typing certain keywords, phrases or questions.

Mind you, spending too much time on the blog will get you into trouble. Assuming that your psychology practice is small and that you don’t have much presence on the Internet, you shouldn’t post more than once or twice a week, so that you don’t miss the opportunity to do other things that can bring you more patients.

4. Make collaborations

Having contacts is also a way to reach more people. Making win-win collaborations is something to be considered.

For example, since we live in the age of social networks, if you know a psychologist from another city or one who works in a different field than yours, you can exchange content and write on each other’s page . Your audiences will be somewhat different, but similar enough to be likely to find your services interesting, to talk about you to others or simply to share and spread those contents among their contacts, reaching a new audience.

5. Focus on the needs of potential patients

Because when you do therapy or other forms of psychological intervention you put yourself in the place of the person you are treating, you should not fail to communicate what you are doing in your business.

Put the emphasis of what you say on those practical aspects of everyday life where those who don’t yet know you might be seeing an unmet need, and provide a possible solution. Don’t limit yourself to describing situations or concepts from the world of psychology if you don’t want to attract only people who are looking for the definition of a word.

6. Call attention to yourself and offer your services, not the other way around

No one is interested in spending time on advertising, especially if that advertising is not even a television spot with a certain grace or originality. So, when you create content written with the aim of promoting your psychology practice, start by getting attention by explaining something that is not the advertising part itself. The latter can be placed at the end of your content, so that when you get there it is more interesting (having dealt with the subject you are offering services about in the previous lines).

7. Take advantage of social networks for launch campaigns

Launching a new type of service and not communicating it is a missed opportunity, since this kind of news is a good way to win patients. To do this, you can use your social networks as a loudspeaker. You can even invest some money to make these digital platforms reach more people, once you have specified certain parameters to segment well the type of users you are targeting (by age, area where they live, etc.)

8. Contact professionals

One option to make things simpler is to hire the marketing services of professionals who work in the marketing sector, and if they specialize in the field of psychology and mental health, better than better.

In this sense, Psychology and Mind offers several services that are very useful to help psychologists get patients and make their business grow. Among its team there are experts in digital marketing capable of advising on web design, social network content and personal branding, to reach people who seek the help of psychologists with the right characteristics .

On the other hand, they also give the option of advertising on this website through different modalities, from the classic banner to their Directory of Psychologists, and all this on the most visited website on Psychology in Spanish in the world, with more than 25 million visits per month. To contact the team, you can send an email through this address: [email protected]

Bibliographic references:

  • Tedlow, R. S., and Jones, G. G. (eds) (2014). The Rise and Fall of Mass Marketing. Routledge.
  • van Waterschoot, W., van den Bulte, C. (1992). “The 4P Classification of the Marketing Mix Revisited”. Journal of Marketing. 56 (4): 83 – 93.