A physical therapy poster can do for your clinic what a movie poster does for a Star Wars movie: attract your target market’s attention. It becomes a part of your sales team. This post looks at the four types of PT posters and how you can use them to:
- Increase brand awareness
- Build trust with clients
- Attract new patients
So, if your clinic feels empty of late, take a cue from movie marketing. Fill your walls with posters and watch your clinic’s seats go from empty to full… Just like at the movies.
4 Benefits of Physical Therapy Posters
In the Age of the Internet, you may wonder if analog advertising methods like physical therapy posters work as well as online ads on Google do. The truth is, posters have been around since the times of the ancient Romans, according to a JSTOR article. This speaks to their staying power, and according to Psychology Today, posters with positive images create a pattern interrupt. Pattern interrupt is a term that comes from neurolinguistic programming (NLP).
In this case, seeing a positive image causes the blood to flow to the area of the brain that is associated with happiness. For visitors to your clinic, a nicely-designed physical therapy poster can help your clients’ brains associate positivity with your work and physical therapy.
Further, people are primarily visual creatures. According to the University of Rochester, more than 50% of the brain is responsible for visual processing. The brain is wired to respond to visual stimuli, and the brain will process that information before it processes any textually-based information. PT posters get to the heart of your message in a way that text alone can’t.
On a more practical level, physical therapy posters:
- Brighten up your clinic and waiting rooms
- Increase brand awareness
- Cause an uptick in service utilization
- Promote trust in your patients
- Encourage referrals through poster messaging
1. Physical Therapy Poster Ideas: Service & Standards of Care
Ideally, you should always convey the types of services you offer and the standards of care which you adhere to. However, those messages can get lost in the shuffle of the day-to-day running of your clinic. Posters help to fill that gap in a memorable and succinct way.
Here are some examples.
1. Create a poster explaining your clinic’s mission statement, goals, credentials, and other important information. This establishes your brand and what it stands for.
2. Highlights the different services you offer. This is especially helpful if offer services in your clinic that other area PTs don’t or if you have a specialty.
For example, you may be a former athlete who works primarily with college sports athletes. A physical therapy poster highlighting your sports medicine specialty creates a powerful visual and speaks directly to your target market.
Additionally, if you offer something like cash-based physical therapy services, posters offer you an excellent way to get the word out. What’s nice about a poster is that it stays on the wall for a while, allowing your clients to see the message more than once.
This is important. According to some industry statistics, it takes customers up to seven times to act on an ad’s message after seeing it for the first time. Creating a poster about your cash-based PT services allows them to see the message seven times and eventually act on it.
3. Allows you to show professionalism and build trust with the people visiting your clinic.
2. Use a Physical Therapy Poster to Pass on Community Info
A PT who is connected with his/ her community often enjoys a thriving practice. The two go hand-in-hand.
As we’ve discussed in other articles, most people aren’t looking for physical therapists per se when they do a Google search. Instead, they’re looking for relief from common symptoms like back or shoulder pain.
We bring this up because you may hang a poster at a local gym or YMCA offering a workshop on natural remedies for back pain. Someone in that facility who faces those challenges may not know that a PT can help them. They do know they have back pain that needs some relief.
A poster advertising a free workshop on back pain remedies gives them the info they need to make contact with someone who can help. And that’s just one of the ways that a well-designed physical therapy poster can help you get information out to the community.
Here’s a short list of ideas.
1. Promote a class, fundraiser, program, or workshop that you’re running. Put up posters in businesses like a gym, the local college campus, and other areas where your target clients will likely hang out. You can also promote the community partnerships you’re involved with via a PT poster.
2. Design posters with seasonally relevant information. For example, you can highlight physical therapy month each October.
It’s also possible to use this type of announcement in tandem with other messages. For example, you may decide to run a workshop during the month of October to coincide with PT month.
This may also be used in conjunction with postcards, social media posts, and other types of marketing. It can be an all-around valuable way to create content if you’re not sure how to fill your content calendar.
On a related note, you can also use physical therapy posters to remind clients to set year-end appointments so that they can meet their insurance deductibles for the year. It may not be something they think about if you don’t remind them.
3. You’ll boost brand awareness and referrals. Sometimes, getting referrals can be as simple as asking for them. While supports like patient rack cards at the front desk can help, your front desk staff may be too busy to really solicit referrals.
A poster on the wall asking for referrals offers additional information about referrals and can even encourage people to pick up a referral card.
3. Physical Therapy Posters Are Great for Review Generation
Getting good reviews on sites like Yelp and Google gives you the social proof that makes new clients trust you. More reviews equal more brand awareness and trust.
For many would-be PT patients, the world is filled with a cacophony of advertising static. A multitude of good reviews can quiet your competitors’ voices online – metaphorically speaking – allowing you to attract new patients.
There’s no doubt that reviews work. However, in the day-to-day hustle and bustle of running a PT office, requests for reviews from patients can be forgotten.
A PT poster that hangs at eye level in a strategic place, like by the front desk, serves as a reminder to clients. This allows you to catch the ones you didn’t get to talk to while they were still in the treatment room.
It’s easy to set this up, too. Just create a poster and add a QR code to it. Patients can scan it with QR scanning software on their phones on their way out.
4. Your PT Poster Can Encourage Social Media Engagement
Social media are big these days. Most businesses have multiple social accounts. Sites like Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, and Pinterest play a vital role in keeping your clients engaged. Those sites also become places where your newly acquired clients can go when they want to interact with you in real time.
Use physical therapy posters to advertise your social channels. As with the request for reviews, you can add QR codes to this type of PT poster. The QR codes will take your clients directly to your social media accounts where they can start following you for information like:
- Clinic updates
- Information about new services
- Upcoming workshops, classes, etc.
- New clinic openings (or closings)
- Additions to staff like new PTs, fitness or nutritional coaches, etc.
- Seasonal promotions
- Etc.
Final Thoughts on Physical Therapy Poster Marketing
When used in the right way, PT posters play an integral role in your clinic’s point-of-sale marketing strategies. There are a variety of ways that you can use posters to support your clinic’s marketing and advertising campaigns.
These include:
- Advertising cash-based physical therapy services
- Promote workshops, classes, and other events
- Announce any special awards or certifications you have
- Etc.
If you’d like to get your own PT poster marketing campaign started, go to the PTMarketingStore.com to learn more!