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Episode 180 | Branding + Marketing Considerations for New Group Practice Owners with Lisa Noble

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WITH Lisa Noble

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  • Episode 180 | Branding + Marketing Considerations for New Group Practice Owners with Lisa Noble 00:00

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Hey Group Practice listeners! In this episode, I’m talking with Lisa Noble all about branding + marketing considerations for new group practice owners!

In this episode I cover:

  • The difference between new vs. established practice strategies
  • Shifting your site from solo to group
  • Social media strategy to offers value

This episode is sponsored by TherapyNotes. TherapyNotes is an EHR software that helps behavioral health professionals manage their practice with confidence and efficiency. I use TherapyNotes in my own group practice and love its amazing support team, billing features, and scheduling capabilities. It serves us well as a large group practice owner.

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Transcript:

Maureen Werrbach

Maureen Werrbach  

Hey, everyone, welcome to another episode of The Group Practice Exchange Podcast. This week, I have an expert on who’s going to be chatting with me. Her name is Lisa Noble, she owns Vivid Visual Solutions. And we’re gonna be talking today about branding and marketing strategies for new group practice owners. So if you’re new in the group practice game or just getting started, this will be an episode for you to listen in on.

Hi, Lisa, how are you?

Lisa Noble  

Hi, I’m great. Thank you. I’m so glad to be on today.

Maureen Werrbach  

I’m really excited to have you on, it’s been a while since I’ve talked about anything branding, or marketing related. So it’s like a timely, perfectly timed episode to have today.

Lisa Noble  

Awesome.

Maureen Werrbach   

So tell everyone, for those of my listeners who may not know you, give a little snippet about who you are, why this is your kind of zone of genius, and kind of what you do.

Lisa Noble  

I like that, zone of genius. So I am Lisa Noble. Yes, I’m the owner of Vivid Visual Solutions. And what we do is we specialize in helping the busy therapist or private practice owner, really take out the overwhelm and the extra stress that comes with trying to market themselves, as you know as an entrepreneur. We take that away by doing services like brand identity creation, where we’re creating actual logos and all the elements that go hand in hand with your website, the images that really will promote you as an entrepreneur therapist, and your social media management.

So we kind of take that away from you so that you can do what you do best, which is help your clients, and we create any kind of marketing materials even if it’s offline. So we just kind of take care of everything and take that stress off your shoulders.

Maureen Werrbach  

That’s awesome. I think that’s, you know, one of those first pieces of work that practice owners should be delegating, is that social media, website building, and building of marketing materials.

So for those who are listening, who are still doing that work themselves, this is your timely reminder that that might be one thing to start to delegate out.

So when, um, there’s such a difference between a new group practice owner trying to figure out how to market and brand their business versus what an established practice might be doing. What are some tips that you might have for those that are just hiring their first few therapists, really formulating their group and shifting from solo into group practice, that they should be thinking about, or considering when it comes to branding and marketing as a group practice owner?

Lisa Noble

Well, first of all, you need to have your logo and those types of things in place, because you want to have things that represent the way you’re going to work, who you are, as a business. You need to have those things in play so that people have something to look at. Even your therapists, not just your clients, the therapists that you’re bringing in, you want to kind of show them the environment that they’re going to be working in.

So I would say start, if you’re going to start, you start with your logo, you start with getting the imagery that kind of goes along with the logo, and  that incorporates your fonts, that incorporates your colors, because that’s very important.

So if you’re the type of therapist that works with children, then you’ll have a different color palette than the one that is working with female clients. With children, you’re going to have, you know, more of a vibrant tone, you’re going to have imagery with children in it. Whereas if it’s for a female, you may have more things that are more feminine, you’ll have imagery showing that you’re either helping females on the images or, or just stock photos that show that type of imagery.

A lot of times I see out on the internet, you’ll see mountains and things like that, that doesn’t necessarily resonate with your audience, you have to know who your audience is, who do you specialize in, you have to know that before going in to create any of the elements that you need for for your website, and any other social media, your elements and things like that. You need to know who your client is, and speak to them, where they resonate, where it resonates with them.

Maureen Werrbach  

Yeah, I feel like years ago, the feedback was to have, you know, your website have all this imagery of like mountains and water and, and all this. And, you know, there’s been a shift in these past handful of years to really looking at who your ideal client is, or your client avatar and ensuring that the imagery really connects with that client base, and obviously not in all instances, is it going to be mountains and oceans.

Lisa Noble  

Right? Like, I’m in Michigan. So the imagery, if I was a therapist, and I was based here in Michigan, right now we’re going we’re in fall, right? It’s kind of dreary, rainy, but also we have these beautiful, vibrant colors in our trees and things like that. So if you want to do some kind of outside imagery, it still needs to resonate with at least the city that you’re in. You know, you need to really base those things on who your person is. Yeah.

Maureen Werrbach  

Do you notice what kind of differences are there from let’s say, the solo practice owner who’s got a website and it’s got their logo and imagery set up because they’ve been in practice, but they’re now trying to shift into group practice, and maybe they’re not changing their business name or anything like that. But their website really connects to clients from a personal space as a solo practice owner. What kind of shifts should a solo practice owner, who’s really in those beginning steps of bringing on their first few therapists, be doing when it comes to shifting just their website and their branding to better reflect that kind of group practice feel?

You know, obviously, there’s, there’s some shifts that need to happen in that sense.

Lisa Noble  

Well, what you need to do and I’ve had several clients that have done this is to start speaking about your therapists, highlighting them, highlighting what their specialties are. Because initially, when you first created your website, you may have just been somebody that just works with children. But now you have these other therapists that are bringing other specialties. And so you want to highlight that you want to let people know.

And I would change my pages from just services to also having a page that says who we help, so that you’re actually speaking to that particular audience to say, you know, really, we help couples, and we help them to do this. Their situation may have started off like, not speaking to any specifics, because let me highlight that. Don’t speak to any specific client’s case, speak very generalized. But say, you know, you, as a couple, you may not be speaking to each other, you may be having these types of issues, as therapists under X group practice, we now have this therapist in place that can help you with this, that and the other.

Maureen Werrbach  

When it comes to marketing. What are some of the things that you support group practice owners in on the marketing aspect? I know you work with branding, and also with marketing, what are some of the things that you are thinking about when it comes to marketing and group practice work?

Lisa Noble  

I would say first of all, touch on your networks. A lot of times people forget about that. Speak to the therapists that you know, who are already doing this to find out what they’re doing, what they’ve done within their city, and see if you can also bring that into your you know, your practice as far as marketing.

But I would also up your social media game. A lot of times people are afraid of it, but it extends your reach so much. And again, highlight who your therapists are, show them on your social media channels, show your range, get on things like this, a podcast. You and I have similar audiences, so I connected, I sent out a proposal to you to say this is what I can help your audience with, I can speak about these certain topics. Podcasts are just a great resource.

And in order to get in front of our audiences, and its evergreen content. Somebody may see, I’m sorry, hear this podcast years later, and still contact me or yourself in regards to questions about what we talked about. So I say, for that person who already has things kind of set up and in place, really tried to get out in front of your audience more, get on TV, get on podcasts, get on any way possible that you can get in front of your audience and get in front of a larger audience than just your customer base.

Maureen Werrbach  

One of the things that I see being a struggle, even myself as a group practice owner that wasn’t there when I was solo when it comes to social media, and marketing is that as a solo practitioner, your marketing and branding is really useful. Anything, any information you’re giving is coming from your brain is likely speaking to your ideal audience. But when you have a group practice with so many different specialties, I feel like it can be hard to figure out how to use social media in a way that actually is what the ideal clients of the practice as a whole are looking for.

Because you know, sharing information like every week of who’s this therapist, this is what they specialize in, will only take you so far versus like choosing to become a psychoeducational social media platform where your platform, your social media platform is used to provide like a ton of psychoeducational information specific to the clients that are coming in.

Whereas others might be using it to do more like graphics based training. Whereas even others use it for more like a kind of a personality for their group practice. And I know that’s something that group owners struggle with, is like how do we make this not like an information dump of who we are, versus like actually providing quality information that people like. You know, I feel like that’s the hard struggle for groups specifically because you’re speaking to potentially a lot of different populations if you’re multi-specialty. And even if you’re not multi specialty as a group practice, you’re still needing to speak in like one voice that encompasses so many different therapists in your practice.

And so what is your suggestion for groups, when it comes to using social media in a way that actually attracts clients versus potentially becoming boring. I know there’s some chiropractors in my neighborhood who I follow, and every post is just like, this is the service we offer. And then the next day, like 20% off of this service we have. Everything is just more promotional, or information about the practice, versus like, quality information that makes me want to follow them.

Lisa Noble  

So what I usually suggest to my clients is we need to become more of value, we need to become an educational source to our clients. And how you do that is if you have therapists who are comfortable being on video, coming up with educational content, that is more helpful to that client and shows that you understand what their problem is even kind of like a role playing thing can can really be helpful, and showing that you’re the solution.

Rather than saying buy my stuff, buy my stuff, buy my stuff, we don’t want to do that. We want to find, like, what we in the industry called content pillars, but it’s what is interesting to your particular audience.

And speaking to that, on your marketing calendar, say on Monday, you’re speaking to couples about certain ways to to keep their relationships spicy or something like that. Then Tuesday, it may be another therapist, that is kind of speaking and you can use this content throughout, it doesn’t necessarily just have to be video, even if somebody was to create the video, then you take that content and you create you make blog posts out of it, you make social media posts out of it, it could even be like quotes, just from small quotes from something that was said within the video. You can use though, that content in so many different ways. If it is a video, you can not just put it on Instagram, you could also put it on YouTube and use it in another manner. You can, like I said, create blog posts, you could create guests blog posts for other people just using that information to be of service, instead of saying buy my stuff, buy my stuff.

Maureen Werrbach  

If you had, if you had to give one tip for a new practice owner, for starting using social media in a way that’s going to be effective to building your audience, would that be?

Lisa Noble  

Just what I said, becoming of service, and using the information that you know, in a way that resonates with them because you know the language that they speak because you work with them all the time.

And I find that therapists really are really good at knowing how to speak to their audience, of course, because you’ve analyzed them, and you’re talking to them all the time, speaking their language. Take bits and pieces, even if it’s quotes that could be helpful to them. That’s the way I would say to start off. If on Monday, you give that educational information in a post, then maybe Tuesday, it’d become these quotes that you can find on Pinterest. That makes it a little less overwhelming on you because you have some generated content that you don’t have to necessarily just generate yourself.

Maureen Werrbach  

That’s awesome. Um, so tell us as we wrap up, like what kind of support can you offer your practice owners specifically? And is there a specific place you want them to go? I know you mentioned before the recording that you have, like a questionnaire maybe for them. So if you want to share all of that, that would be awesome.

Lisa Noble  

Well, how I can help is if you don’t know what to post, just what you were asking me. If you find that it’s just too overwhelming, or you don’t have time, because a lot of times you guys are busy. You know your greatness, your genius is helping your clients. It’s not necessarily sitting down and figuring out what do I post on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and maybe even Saturday, you don’t want to necessarily have that overwhelm.

So what my service is, that we can go in and we can create that content calendar for you and we can even create the posts and have them auto-scheduled so they’re just going out. And then you may just be answering any questions that come in and engaging with the audience that speaks to you.

Yes, as far as the questionnaire what I have is a brand level quiz. When we’re going back to the things that you may need to, as far as your brand elements, to take your business to the next level, as far as branding. We have a quiz that even starts if you just have a logo, you can go in there and put in, I have a logo, and then we’ll give you tips to take your branding to the next level.

Maureen Werrbach  

There’s a free quiz. Where do they go for that?

Lisa Noble  

They go to bitly you know, bit.ly/brand-level-quiz and they’re hyphens in between the words. Brand hyphen, level, hyphen quiz.

Maureen Werrbach  

Awesome. I totally appreciate you coming on and sharing a few words of wisdom with my audience. And for those of you who are looking for branding and marketing, digital marketing support, you can visit Lisa at what’s your website

Lisa Noble  

VVsol.com V as in Victor V as in Victor sol.com.

Maureen Werrbach  

Perfect. I appreciate you coming on this morning and on this dreary day for some feedback on marketing and branding. I hope you have a good day.

Lisa Noble  

Thank you so much, Maureen. This was a great opportunity. I love talking to you and your audience, and anytime you want me back just let me know.

Thanks For Listening

Thanks for listening to the group practice exchange podcast. Like what you heard? Give us five stars on whatever platform you’re listening from. Need extra suppor? Join The Exchange, a membership community just for group practice owners with monthly office hours, live webinars, and a library of trainings ready for you to dive into visit www dot members dot the group practice exchange dot com forward slash exchange. See you next week.

Resources

Here are the resources and guides we recommend based on this episode

Practicery is a company that helps practitioners get recognized in new, creative ways. Their services include visual branding, websites, motion graphics, print and digital ads.

Empathysites by Kat Love

Therapists helped Kat heal from childhood sexual abuse, and now they help therapists with creating their websites at Empathysites. The all-inclusive solution includes design and ongoing support. Perfect for any small or large group practice needing a website solution.

* I am an affiliate for some of the businesses I recommend. These are companies that I use in my own group practice, and make recommendations based off of my experience with them. When you use some of these companies through my links, I receive compensation, which helps me continue to offer great free information on my podcast, blog, Facebook group, and website.

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Meet your host

Maureen

Maureen Werrbach is a psychotherapist, group practice owner and group practice coach. Learn more about her coaching services here:

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The show

The podcast is structured so that you get practice building tips in small doses, where an episode can be listened to (and a group practice building lesson can be learned) in a single car ride.

Episodes are structured into categories: coaching sessions where I coach a group practice owner on a specific topic, tips of the day by yours truly, real talk where you get to be a fly on the wall while an established group practice owner and I talk about the highs and lows of ownership, and trainings done by experts in the field.

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* The content of this post is intended to serve as general advice and information. It is not to be taken as legal advice and may not account for all rules and regulations in every jurisdiction. For legal advice, please contact an attorney.

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