Thanks to Twitter, I have “met” some really forward thinking, dynamic DPT Students. During a recent conversation on marketing and branding, I was impressed by Melissa Dreger’s comments, and asked her to write a guest post for me. Melissa is a DPT student at University of Pittsburg. I think you will enjoy what she has to say, and I hope that we can stimulate some great conversation again here! Take it away, Melissa: Let’s face it, as Physical Therapists we’re always talking about becoming “more marketable” or “advertising to our clients,” but how many of us actually know how to accomplish this? How many of us even know where to begin? Well, here’s a simple step-by-step process that can get you started on how to better market yourself. Number one, we need to figure out our message. In other words, what’s our story? Some typical phrases thrown out there include “movement specialists”, “restorative specialists”, or “movement analysts,” but what do all of these have in common? It’s simple: we are pain managers and ultimately help to restore mobility and to decrease cost to not only our patients but to the healthcare system as a whole (taken from the APTA website at http://www.apta.org/AboutPTs/). There are many ways to twist and turn what Physical Therapists actually do – which leads us to the problem: If one of our goals as a profession is to be autonomous in nature, shouldn’t we have ONE consistent message? It is therefore our responsibility as a physical therapist and as private practice owners to determine what our message is. We can determine this in part by asking our patients directly or through a survey “What is the value of physical therapy?” Number two, we need to be make our message simple. There’s no need to include complex […]
Read more →
