How to Get Full Fee Private Pay Therapy Clients in My Area (Even if I Think They Can't Afford It)

Marketing Strategies for Therapists Video Series, Episode 1

________________________________________________________________________

🔗 Helpful links to get you moving forward:

✅ Join our thriving Facebook community of 25,000+ therapists — where we share ideas, support each other, and grow our practices together.
  / 1mj7kfb5fp  
​​
✅ Get my Get It Going Checklist (your first steps to move towards your dreams):
https://www.onlinetherapistgroup.com/...
​
✅ Ready to join Step by Step? Learn how to set up your online therapy practice here:
https://www.onlinetherapistgroup.com/...
​
✅ Need help with marketing? Let’s work through it together. Join the waitlist for the Marketing Intensive here:
https://www.onlinetherapistgroup.com/...

✅ Ways to Connect with Amber:
https://www.onlinetherapistgroup.com/...

________________________________________________________________________

01:25
Is it true that there are really no people in your area that can afford your full fee private pay rate? You might be looking around thinking, "I don't know anybody that can pay that rate." And that might be totally true, but it doesn't mean that those people don't exist. Even if you've done the work to look up the highest and lowest SES socioeconomic status in your area, or even in your whole state and it tends towards low, that does not mean that there aren't pockets where there are higher tax brackets. It's far easier to market to a particular zip code or city within your state than it is to market to your entire state. Let's start thinking creatively about how can I find those areas where these folks might be living and then how can I target them with my marketing. One last thing is to think about or even Google, are there concierge medical services available in your state? Because if there are, what that tells us is that there are people paying privately out of pocket for their medical needs.

03:48
There are likely pockets in your state where you could be marketing, but you might be thinking, "Oh, I don't know how to market." I always talk about least effort marketing necessary. So when you think about concierge doctors, for example, if we Google concierge doctors in your state, those are people that I would spend time and energy to network with. So the people who are willing to pay for a concierge doctor are willing to pay for a medical spa, are willing to pay for private pay therapy, are willing to pay for high end physical therapy.

05:26
As an online therapist, you are not limited to your city or your county, take advantage of that. Google highest socioeconomic status in your state, you will get zip codes that pop up, we're going to market to those zip codes. Marketing to a particular geographic area is so much easier than marketing to an entire state. If you're wanting to set up your practice, like I did mine where I could market to high end clients that could pay my full fee private pay rate and as a result, I was able to free up three to five sessions per week that were completely pro bono. If I wanted to, I could market to folks who needed pro bono using the same strategy. Remember that we need to look outside of your state, your city or county, find those zip codes and then market to those. And you might be saying, well, "how do I market to those?" Remember that in Psychology Today, you can list multiple zip codes, four total zip codes. When you are working on your website and you're trying to build up SEO, you can embed zip codes that you know you want to target in your website so that your website's more likely to get in front of people in that area.

07:13
Let's market outside your state. There's one state at the time of this recording, Florida, that you do not have to be licensed in to practice here. You can just Google “telehealth out of state provider certificate,” it is a super fast thing that you can get just as long as your license is in good standing in your state. Number two, know that there are things called compacts that are being worked on right now so that if you are licensed in one state, you can practice in many states that have agreed to this compact. So psychologists have the PsychPact, there are pacts compacts for most of our mental health professions right now, or at least the profession is moving towards having that. Last thing here is getting true licensure in a sister state. In Florida, many people vacation here, and they vacation for like six months out of the year. And the places they come from tend to be in New Jersey and New York, if you're on the East Coast, and Ohio if you're on the west coast. So those three states would be great places if I was trying to expand my network.