3 Steps To Use Instagram Marketing for PT Businesses

As a business coach for cash based practice owners, I often see a common struggle across all students feeling confident with physical therapy marketing for their practice. As their coach, I encourage them to pick 1-2 social platforms they want to get started with, but in my opinion, Instagram is a must and content marketing itself is critical.

Learn more about the importance of content marketing for cash based practice owners in the blog post here.

To name a few selling points for the Instagram social platform, most people are already familiar with Instagram so there’s minimal learning curve, creating and posting content for practice owners is very straightforward, and lastly, Instagram allows you to have direct and private conversations with people, helping you to nurture potential clients.

With all that to say, during this post we’re going to break down the process of developing a social media strategy for your practices’ marketing with an emphasis on Instagram. We’re breaking things down into three simple steps that will help you not only attract more clients but also build relationships with them before they even walk through your door. Getting started with content marketing can feel overwhelming, but once you have a solid strategy in place, it’s a powerful tool for growth.

Step 1: Define Your Niche

I’m sure that I sound like a broken record with how often I emphasize this concept, but defining your practice’s niche is one of the key principles of marketing. And this rings true for marketing on Instagram. Without a specific niche, your marketing message becomes all over the place, and when you’re trying to talk to everyone, you end up talking to no one.

Learn why marketing physical therapy won’t get you clients in the blog post here.

When I started my practice, I made the same mistake many therapists make—I tried to help everyone. I thought that casting a wide net would bring in more clients, but what really happened? I felt scattered, and my audience couldn’t figure out if I was the right fit for them.

Once I focused on working with female CrossFit athletes and women with pelvic health issues, things started to ramp up. My success with lead generation started bringing in the right people, and these individuals already knew exactly what I could help them with before we even spoke for the first time.

To do a quick review of defining your niche, follow these steps:

Identify who you want to help. Are you passionate about working with athletes? New moms? Seniors? The more specific you can be, the better.
Understand their pain points. What problems are they facing that you can solve? It’s not just about their physical pain—think about the emotional struggles they might have too. What is their problem holding them back from doing?
Create content that speaks directly to those problems. Your audience should feel like you're reading their minds when they see your posts. Posting content that brings front and center real life problems and solutions will help your audience relate and see themselves in your content.

A good rule of thumb to live by for defining your niche: If you can’t describe your ideal client in one or two sentences, your area of specialty is probably too broad. Narrow it down, and you’ll notice a big difference in how people respond to your content.

Step 2: Choose Platform—in This Case, Instagram

Once you have your niche, you want to choose a platform you feel that you can be consistent on. In this case, we’re choosing Instagram. In reality, it doesn’t matter how great your content is, it really only matters that you’re showing up regularly. That’s the key to any content marketing strategy, even if you aren’t the best graphic designer, or create the most fancy reels. Consistency with content builds trust, and trust builds relationships. That’s what leads to more clients.

Learn more about building trust in my blog post here.

Keep in mind, consistent content doesn’t mean that you have to be posing every single day. It’s great if you can but typically not as realistic for busy practice owners. A good starting point is to aim for 3-5 posts on the same platform per week. If that seems too much, start with 1-2 posts per week. If you have a good content plan in place, it helps make your consistency a lot simpler.

To help you with creating a content plan, here’s what I recommend:

Create a content calendar. This doesn’t have to be complicated! It could be as simple as jotting down ideas in your Notes app. Block out themes for the week: maybe one day is for educational posts, another for client stories, and another for personal or behind-the-scenes content.
Batch your content. Set aside a few hours once a week or once a month to create several posts at once. That way, you’re not scrambling to figure out what to post every day.
Use Instagram’s scheduling tools. There are built-in scheduling options or third-party apps like Later and Planoly to help you stay on track.

Once you’ve been consistent with your posting for a while, make sure to check out your Instagram insights. Marketing analytics like Instagram insights can be your best friend when determining what content has done well to help you decide how to proceed with creating future content. We want your efforts to be put towards the right things, so things like analytics will help direct your planning and execution with content marketing moving forward.

Bonus Tip: Don’t Forget to Engage!

This might seem obvious, but it’s often something that I feel is neglected when it comes to social media marketing is engagement with your audience. Consistency with your content is critical, but if you’re not engaging with your audience, your efforts could be for not. Try to set aside a few minutes a day or on certain days of the week to reply to comments, answer messages, and engage with other accounts.

One thing my team and I have started to implement is what I’m calling “Power Hour” where we set aside an hour on certain days of the week to message back and forth with potential leads, respond to questions and comments, and just interact with our followers.

If potential leads are taking the time to interact with your content, it’s important we are giving them the time of day. A simple “like” or comment on a post from a potential lead could result in a paying client in the future if you’ve taken the time to interact with them.

Step 3: Tell Stories and Share Results

When it comes to the type of content you create, the possibilities are really endless. One piece that I feel can be very powerful is storytelling. This could be stories about yourself, your clients, anything. Stories help your audience relate and can evoke an emotional response that allows them to see themselves in your shoes or your clients’ shoes.

Starting with your clients’ stories, their testimonials can be very impactful. Helping your social audience to understand where this specific client started and where they ended up can be super helpful to “sell” someone on your services. Sure it’s beneficial to have a client saying “Joe Smith at ABC Physical Therapy is great!” but that’s not as emotion provoking as sharing their story of coming to us with issues peeing their pants during workouts to now hitting PRs without any symptoms of leakage.

One side of storytelling I typically forget myself, is sharing my own story. Let your audience know things like:

Why you chose physical therapy for your profession
Why you decided to start your own practice
Why you’re passionate about helping your target audience
More about you on a personal level like your hobbies, family, goals, etc.

It sounds simple, but your audience wants to know the person behind the business. Not only does this humanize you, it helps you become more relatable to potential clients making it easier to approach you with their problems.

Bonus: Mix Education with Personality

Educational posts are great—they position you as an expert in your field—but don’t forget to inject your personality into them. For example, if you're sharing tips on improving mobility, you could show yourself doing a mobility routine and add a caption about how you use it to recover from your own workouts. This gives your content a more personal touch and helps potential clients relate to you. It can even showcase that you are putting into action what you recommend to your patients.

Final Thoughts: Keep It Simple and Stay Consistent

To summarize, three steps you can take to benefit from Instagram marketing for your physical therapy business are:

Define your niche
Establish a consistent marketing routine
Tell powerful stories that showcase your clients’ success and share your personality

You don’t need fancy equipment, expensive softwares, or a huge Instagram following to see results. At the end of the day, keeping things simple, consistent, and authentic will help you build long-term relationships and connections that can help turn potential leads into paying clients.

If you’re struggling to market and grow your practice, we cover all of these concepts in our DPT to CEO business coaching program. Or if you’d like to find out more about if our program would be the right fit for you, book a free discovery call with me here! We can discuss your goals, current state of your practice, and what your next best steps would be.

Listen to this episode on my podcast!