Adding a service doesn’t mean adding a message.
Ask three people what your practice is known for.
You’ll get three different answers.
A new website won’t fix that. Your practice marketing message has a counting problem.
The thirty-five messages I didn’t know I had
I was watching a Geico commercial a while back and realized something uncomfortable.
Same commercial, same message, running for years. They never deviate.
Then I looked at my own business and counted up something like thirty-five different messages we had floating around out there.
All of them true, all of them things we actually do well.
And no single one of them was landing, because I kept rotating through them whenever I got bored.
If you run a physical therapy, occupational therapy, speech, or mental health practice, you’ve probably done the same thing without noticing.
Multi-service practices have a harder version of this problem
Say you run ortho PT, sports PT, occupational therapy, speech, and a wellness center under one roof.
The instinct is to give each one its own pitch. Five services, five messages, five audiences.
Now your referral sources are holding five different ideas about you, which means they’re holding none of them clearly.
Every service you offer should be proof of the same single message.
If what you’re known for is getting people back to the life they had before, then that’s what each department demonstrates in its own way: the sports program, the speech program, the wellness center.
Five services, one idea.
Adding a service line is a reason to strengthen the message you already have.
Referral sources remember one thing about you
Your referring physicians are busy, and they’re not studying your service menu before they send someone your way.
That matters more than it should, because most patients still wait for someone to point them toward you. APTA’s consumer research found that 62% of people who have had physical therapy, along with 67% of those who haven’t, say they wouldn’t go without a referral.
Those referral moments happen constantly. APTA’s 2024 research found that 86% of PCPs refer to physical therapy frequently, with nearly all of them having referred within the past six months.
Every one of those is a moment where someone has to pull a specific practice name out of their head. The question is whether it’s yours.
That depends almost entirely on whether you’re easy to remember, and complexity is the enemy of being remembered.
A survey of 7,000 consumers found that the single biggest driver of whether someone sticks with a brand is decision simplicity, meaning how easily they can gather trustworthy information and feel confident choosing, according to research published in Harvard Business Review.
The practice that’s easiest to understand usually wins the referral over the practice that does the most things.
Three steps to choosing your practice marketing message
The hard part is picking one thing and then living with it long enough for it to work.
Name the outcome your patients actually want
Your service lines describe what happens inside the building.
Ask what your patients’ lives look like once they’re finished with you, and build the message around that answer.
Test it against every service line you run
Take your one message and hold it up against each department.
If your speech program or your wellness center doesn’t obviously prove the message, either the message is too narrow or that service needs a clearer reason for being there.
Say the same thing everywhere, long after you’re bored of it
Your website, your front desk script, your referral visits, and your intake call should all say the same sentence.
You’ll get tired of it long before your market has heard it enough.
That gap, between your boredom and their awareness, is where most practices abandon the thing that was starting to work.
Write down the sentence you want repeated
Write down the one sentence you’d want a referring physician to say about your practice when you’re not in the room.
If it takes more than a sentence, you haven’t picked yet.
Freedom By Design
Freedom By Design is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube, conversations with practice owners and independent thinkers who are building businesses, and lives, on their own terms.
If something in this piece resonated, the show goes even deeper into the mindset shifts behind it.
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