Referrals are a fantastic method for gaining new patients at your massage therapy practice, but you can’t rely solely on them as a sustainable marketing strategy. Part of your future growth and success depends upon having a comprehensive advertising approach that can target a few different audiences across a variety of platforms. Keep reading to learn more about leveraging marketing to sustain a successful massage therapy practice!
Why Are Marketing and Advertising Important Avenues of Growth For Your Massage Therapy Practice?
Running a successful massage therapy practice means you’re marketing and advertising your services to the community you serve. After all, marketing and advertising are how you attract new customers, outline the services you provide and maintain relevance in your target market. Without utilizing strategies that promote your massage therapy practice, what are the odds of someone stumbling across it? Word of mouth is just one component of a comprehensive marketing strategy—there are several other avenues to take advantage of!
Marketing your massage therapy practice in the community you serve, explaining who you are and what your story is, and providing blurbs of meaningful content are all great manners to get noticed and attract your most loyal patients. After all, your massage therapy practice can’t grow if you don’t show it off!
How Much Should You Budget For Massage Therapy Advertising?
A good rule of thumb is to invest approximately 5% of your gross revenue on marketing activities if you want to maintain the size of your massage therapy practice. For example, if you collect $10,000 per month you should be budget around $500 per month on marketing and advertising tactics.
On the other hand, if you’re ramping up to grow your massage practice, it’s recommended that you spend between 7% and 15% of your gross revenue on marketing—depending on your goals and available budget for growth. It’s also understandable if your marketing budget changes a little bit over time; it should be somewhat flexible to account for the status and potential growth of your massage therapy practice.
What Is A Customer's Lifetime Value?
As the name suggests, a customer’s lifetime value (CLV) is a prediction of the total financial worth of a patient to your massage therapy practice. CLV can be applied to any industry, but it’s incredibly practical to calculate it for the healthcare and service fields.
A Customer’s Lifetime Value can be measured in the following way:
Average Annual Value x Relationship Years + Patient Referral Value
= Customer Lifetime Value
First, we determine how much the average patient generates per year. For example, if you have a patient who visits your massage therapy practice once per month and each visit costs $100, then the total revenue generated is $1200. Factor in a 20% profit margin and the Average Annual Value of a massage therapy patient is $240.
Let’s say this patient continues going to your massage therapy practice for 10 years before moving to another state:
AAV ($240) x Relationship (10 years) = $2,400.
Patient Referral Value is the amount of additional revenue the original patient brings into your massage therapy practice by spreading the word about your services. If a patient refers two additional clients to your practice, and the total Average Annual Value for those patients combined is $480—which is $4,800 over 10 years—then the original patient’s official lifetime value is $7,200.
How Does CLV Impact Your Holistic Practice?
The lifetime value of a patient is equated to the anticipated total amount they’ll spend at your massage therapy practice. Knowing this figure for each of your patients is essential for planning your financial future and determining how much to invest in acquiring new patients or retaining current ones. Overall, CLV is directly connected to the profit level attached to each customer relationship; if you estimate a patient’s CLV to be $500, you wouldn’t want to spend more than that number to maintain the relationship since it wouldn’t be profitable to your massage therapy practice.
Once you start consistently measuring customer lifetime value, you can begin to implement specific strategies around pricing, sales, advertising, and patient retention with the goal of reducing costs and boosting profit. After all, when you know what to financially expect from a typical patient over the course of their relationship with your massage therapy practice, you can make educated spending decisions to ensure you maximize profitability and continue to attract the right types of customers.
5 Massage Therapy Marketing Ideas
When outlining an advertising plan for your massage therapy, keep these tips in mind:
Network with the Health Practitioners in Your Area
Whether you’re an experienced massage therapist or new to the industry—or your community—a great way to gain reliable patient referrals is through the doctors, naturopathic doctors, chiropractors, physiotherapists, and other holistic practitioners in your area. These providers work with clients who might desire a holistic approach to take care of their wellbeing, in addition to medical services. Plus, patients who are referred to you in this manner have a high probability of following through and becoming long-term, paying clients.
Invest in the Patient Experience
Patient experience entails every instance of connection between your patients and your massage therapy practice’s brand, including visits to your practice, phone calls to your front desk, engagement with your online presence, and even their exposure to advertising and social media. Optimizing the patient experience is a practice-wide effort that’s a process of monitoring, listening, and incorporating feedback from patients that add up to a continuous improvement of your massage therapy practice.
Social media is ever more essential for patient communication and for potential patients to learn more about your massage therapy practice. Your overall online presence will affect the opinion a potential patient has of your brand moving forward, so be sure to take social media accounts, mentions, and responses into your customer experience strategy.
Start a Loyalty Program
A loyalty program incentivizes patients to continue visiting your massage therapy practice by offering discounts or benefits in return; it might take the form of a punch card or a points system that patients acquire with each visit. Although it’s not intended to be the sole method of retaining patients, a loyalty program can yield great results when it’s well done and implemented smoothly.
Facilitate Word of Mouth Marketing
Word of mouth marketing is a cornerstone of any massage therapy practice’s advertising plan. Potential clients who hear wonderful things about your practice from current patients are more likely to trust those reviews than almost any web presence or standalone marketing plan. Social media and other online review sites are excellent avenues to encourage your patients to talk about your massage therapy practice.
Massage Therapy Advertising Examples
- Massage Envy’s website boasts a holiday incentive program that promotes giving the gift of self-care to a loved one—a form of word of mouth marketing—yet treats the buyer with a $20 gift card in return. Plus, their site includes headers for the services offered—massage, stretch, and facials—so clients can easily navigate to what they’re looking for.
- Massage Studio, a local practice in Tampa, Florida, utilizes imagery to convey the goal of relaxation at their practice. Headers make it easy for clients to make appointments and a featured Etiquette page lets hesitant clients know what to expect, which helps break down trepidation about getting a massage. Promoting pertinent information on the homepage helps the site’s visitors feel that the practice is trustworthy, which benefits the brand’s image.
- CityTouch Massage Therapy, based in New York City, appeals to clients by proclaiming they now accept insurance. This can help make massage therapy more accessible to potential patients who might not explore massage options if not covered by their insurance plan.
Holistic Billing Services Supports Your Massage Therapy Practice’s Growth!
With these tips for marketing your massage therapy practice, we’re sure you’ll see sustainable growth! You can’t expand the community you serve unless your audience knows about how great your massage therapy services are—and part of ensuring the success of your practice entails having a streamlined medical billing strategy that minimizes errors while maximizing profits.
Partner with Holistic Billing Services to help grow your massage therapy practice in a variety of ways, including medical billing and coding, and facilitate the growth of your practice. Trusted since 1999, we’re here to help you put more time and attention back into your day of delivering quality care to patients.
Contact us today and let us help your massage therapy practice reach its potential!
