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I have been running my own company now for only 5 months. Overall things are going well with some incredible feedback and some excellent results following my assessment and treatments.
However, beeing in a rural area, getting word out there is unbelievably difficult. Any ideas on spreading the company name would be greatly appreciated.
Many Thanks
Hi Otley,
Way to go on making the leap into starting yourself.
From my experiences at the start I spent what was a fair amount of money for me at the time on wasted marketing. Certain things are fairly essential I guess to build a brand but don't expect signs and car logos etc to bring in floods of people.
If you've got plenty of time during the days just now to fill get your company on Facebook, twitter and linked in which are all free. Get all your friends to like the pages etc and some of their friends will do it and the snowball effect will begin. You can then regularly update these about how the business is coming on and let people see offers and deals.
There are plenty of things you can do throwing money at it but your time just now will I assume be around 80-90% marketing and 10-20% being a physio which is the opposite of what we want but Facebook etc is free and it may just lead to the friends friends friend getting injured and mentioning 'I heard of this clinic.....' and the ratio of working as a physio will change slowly but surely.
Thank you very much for that kind advice. I have done facebook and twitter but not linked in so I will do that now.
I agree that sales reps will sell you loads of ads that won't help in rural areas. I have started 4 clinics in rural Canada, and I find people come by referral.
Now that referral can be from one of three places. Number one, far and away is Doctor referral. If you can get this going, spend your energy on this.
(energy, not money!), like joining the same yoga class that you know one of the doctors goes to, to get inside their head. Number two: Publicly funded
physios. They are spread thin in rural areas, and the government restricts who can see them and for how long. Make sure you chum up to them, and
get them to send their rejects to you. Maybe do an inservice at one of the local hospital physio departments. Third referral source: Coaches of Rugby and
other contact sports, as well as running coaches and dance instructors who see chronic stuff. Join the running club, or sponsor the ballet school's production
of romeo and juliet. Or volunteer with minor sports, (I see that's popular in UK). I trust this will help, it worked for me!
Hi otley258. I've been running my physio clinic in New Zealand for 5 years now.
I would probably say - get some business/marketing training. Most of us physios... well, lack business skills and hence make lots of mistakes and struggle to earn a good living. I have a business coach who I have dealt with over the years and it certainly helped me immensely (he is reasonably priced too). There are proven marketing strategies that will make things happen for your business. Let me know if you want me to share his contact details.