Marketing Do’s And Dont’s In 2025 For Clinic Owners

[00:00:00] Katie Bell: Hello and welcome back to the Treat Your Business podcast. My name is Katie Bell. A huge welcome to all our new listeners. And as always, my job is to help you.

[00:00:12] Katie Bell: The amazing clinic owners that we have out there build a business that truly works for you whilst empowering you to make an even bigger impact. Today, we’re diving into always one of the most popular topics. If I look at my, in fact, I was sat planning, Q1 of 2025 and my content plan and my episodes, what I’m going to bring to you and how I can impact and help you on a much bigger scale next year.

[00:00:40] Katie Bell: And I was thinking, okay, I’m going to look at what were the most popular episodes of 2024. And it’s always anything to do with marketing. Marketing is one of those things that can either skyrocket your clinic’s growth, or it can drain your time, your money. your energy faster than a Pilates class on turbo.

[00:01:03] Katie Bell: So let’s get into the do’s and the don’ts for clinic marketing and studio marketing in 2025. I promise this episode is going to be as practical as possible. Obviously I’m bringing all the fun as usual, but I want to make sure that you leave today’s episode with a really clear plan of what you should be doing and what you should stop doing and almost have the permission from me that you can say no to things in 2025 if they do not serve you from a marketing point of view.

[00:01:36] Katie Bell: So let’s jump in.

[00:01:40] Katie Bell: Okay, so let’s think about the big picture. What does marketing mean in 2025? And before we jump into the specifics, let’s talk about Marketing isn’t about just getting clients through the door in 2025. It’s about creating meaningful connections, building trust, positioning your clinic as the go to choice in your community.

[00:02:04] Katie Bell: But here’s the twist. It’s also about doing this in a way that works for you. We have all seen clinic owners who burn themselves out trying to do all the things. Instagram, TikTok, email campaigns, Google ads, Facebook ads. events, workshops, you name it, they’ve got their name on it. So here’s my first tip, don’t try and be everywhere, but do choose the platforms and the strategies that align with your clinic’s mission, like your purpose, your values, and your audience.

[00:02:40] Katie Bell: There is absolutely no point, if you don’t even have the infrastructure to create an Instagram post right now, to be thinking about setting up a TikTok account and trying to, do a fucking dance on there or whatever it is, with a skeleton, thinking that’s going to bring people through your clinic door.

[00:02:58] Katie Bell: It’s not. You are not. When I say you don’t try to be everywhere, we want you to have omnipresence. We want you to be visible within your community. But you’ve got to choose the right platforms to do that. You’ve got to choose the right strategies to do that. So for example, if you specialize in working with the older client, like maybe TikTok isn’t your top priority hunt.

[00:03:19] Katie Bell: Instead, focus on platforms like email marketing or like actual physical, handheld. Newsletter that gets posted through their door because that you’re much more likely to reach your ideal client. You’re going to connect with them and they’re going to take your call to action. So let’s, I’ve chosen five big ones.

[00:03:42] Katie Bell: First of all, of the things that I think you should be doing in 2025 when it comes to marketing. So number one, prioritize your Google business profile. It’s 2025 and guess what? Google is still king when it comes to finding local businesses. I was at the Therapy Expo a few weeks ago and I told the Hedgegate story.

[00:04:04] Katie Bell: I have told the Hedgegate story on this podcast before and you will have all have heard it when I came home from my run with my friend one day to find a six foot gap in in the middle of our hedge. Having asked my husband to just Trim it, tidy it up just neaten the edges. This turned into we needed a skip, we needed a dry stone wall person, we needed a stump grinder person, we needed all the people.

[00:04:32] Katie Bell: Because, the, task was much bigger than just cutting the hedge. Anyway, let’s not go into that again because we we know the outcome. However, it was a lot of money, it was a lot of effort, but in that moment what I didn’t do was get on Facebook or Instagram or TikTok to try and find a dry stone waller doing a fucking TikTok dance on how to lay a dry stone wall in the quickest possible time scale.

[00:04:58] Katie Bell: I went on Google. So keeping your profile up to date with your services, your reviews, decent quality photos is a no brainer. Happy clients reviews, it’s free, it’s incredibly effective. So prioritize updating this, put something in your calendar that means quarterly you check at your Google My Business Profile.

[00:05:24] Katie Bell: They, Google My Business Profile did something completely random a few weeks ago. I was talking to somebody in the marketing industry and they said they just changed people’s like the, link, the URL that they were sending people to from people’s Google My Business profiles. So like just check that you’re sending people to where you should be sending them to your online booking page or whatever it is.

[00:05:47] Katie Bell: So just run a quarterly check on your Google My Business profile and update it add things to it. If you’re posting on social media anyway, just use those posts and repurpose them on your Google My Business profile and just check that. What you’re seeing on your Google My Business profile is the same as what’s on your website.

[00:06:09] Katie Bell: So that’s number one. Get that, the basics first of all. Number two is focus on relationships over algorithms. Social media algorithms change faster than you can say, reformable artists. So instead of changing trends, focus on relationship building. If, you have got people connecting with you, commenting on things, responding to things that you post, then respond back, show up authentically, make sure that you, and if you, and you don’t have to be the ones to do this.

[00:06:43] Katie Bell: I pay our social media marketing manager to respond to whatever’s going on in social media because I haven’t got time and frankly, I don’t have couldn’t be bothered. to spend my time on that. There is much better ways that I can spend my time, but I think it’s important we do that if that is the thing that you need to focus on the most.

[00:07:06] Katie Bell: So outsource it if you can’t find the time to do it. But also think about building those relationships. So many clinic owners Put all their eggs in the Google Ads basket, and they think this is going to be the saviour to all of their problems. And, Google Ads work incredibly well when they are done right.

[00:07:30] Katie Bell: When you have a Good online booking system when you have a high quality website, all of those things need to obviously be in place. Don’t put all your eggs in that basket because when something changes, when Google change their algorithms, then what do you do? So really focus on building relationships within your community.

[00:07:54] Katie Bell: Get yourself out there, speak to more people. That’s what you should be doing as a clinic owner. More than seeing one to one people in your clinic room all day long, because you’re never going to grow your business. Or if you do, it’s going to be incredibly slow. Okay. Number three is you need to build an email list.

[00:08:11] Katie Bell: So email is the unsung hero. It’s one of the things that I hear lots of clinic owners, not even clinic owners, business owners, actually. I go to lots of big conferences and get to have the pleasure of being in a room with people who are. Doing multi seven, eight figure businesses. And they all talk about building an email list and doing it early on in their business.

[00:08:38] Katie Bell: Because it’s direct, it’s personal, it’s completely under your control. You own your email list. Use it to share valuable tips, updates, offers. Don’t just sell. You want to educate and inspire your audience, but you want to be at the front of people’s minds so when they next have a problem or a pain, you are the, become the obvious solution.

[00:09:00] Katie Bell: I was racking my brain for a biscuit company in London who do these beautiful like Bespoke Handmade Biscuits that are all iced in a gorgeous box. And I’ve ordered from them before at Christmas and I could not for the life of me think about what their name was because I clearly am not within their email marketing list.

[00:09:26] Katie Bell: I don’t have any any stuff coming through now might have unsubscribed. Fine, then that’s my issue. It took me ages and it was only because I know that they’re really good and I was very, and I’ve used them before, that I was able to then track down who it was and I could order from them again. Freddy’s Flowers, another great example of a company that does their marketing really, well.

[00:09:50] Katie Bell: I used to have Freddy’s Flowers. For those of you who don’t know what that is, that’s a a bouquet of fresh flowers delivered to your house. And you can have it weekly, twice a week, three, three times a month what, whatever you want. And they have, or they have, you can see what arrangements are coming up, you can skip certain arrangements because I have a thing about multicoloured flowers, that is not okay.

[00:10:15] Katie Bell: I won’t say multicoloured, like all the colours in one. Ugh, no, and I hate coronations. Anyway, I’m sidetracking. What they do really well, so you can skip, you can add, you can put vases in, you can do what, you can gift them to people, all sorts of things, and they just take a, amount out of your account every however, every month, and your flowers just arrive.

[00:10:38] Katie Bell: And this morning, as I opened the door to walk the dog, there was a box of Freddy’s flowers on the doorstep, because about four weeks ago, In fact, it was in COVID. I stopped Freddy’s flowers. And, they, I’m still on their mailing list. They obviously still have my contact details from being a previous customer and somebody rang me.

[00:10:58] Katie Bell: Now, usually I would be like, Oh God, sales chart. Can’t be arsed with this. She was brilliant on the phone. They gave me an irresistible offer to try another three boxes of Freddy’s for like basically no money. And. I really couldn’t say no to her. She just react, re activated my account. And then they arrived and actually Bokeh 1 and today’s Bokeh 2, beautiful.

[00:11:24] Katie Bell: So am I likely to now just keep going with Freddy’s flowers? I am because they’ve worked on their relationship building. They have reached out to past customers via the phone to check in that do you still love fresh flowers? What, person, what lady doesn’t like fresh flowers? And do you need convenience in your life?

[00:11:46] Katie Bell: Like I am their ideal customer. And I’d said, I hate multicolored, like all the multicolored shit I don’t want. And she was like, okay we’ve got a solution to that and you can skip and you can do this sort of thing. So I was in. So they’re using that email list, they’re using their past database, they’re connecting with clients, they’re building those relationships and they gave me an irresistible offer build an email list.

[00:12:09] Katie Bell: Find some way of always collecting emails so that you can then market to them in the future. Number four. Video content is king. If it’s a 30 second reel or a longer YouTube video, is still one of the most engaging formats. You don’t have to dance on camera. You could share client success stories, you could demonstrate some techniques or simply explain common questions in your field and use things that people are asking, not what is in your head.

[00:12:41] Katie Bell: Like people are asking, should I use heat or ice? Should I do, whatever common questions you hear people ask you in your clinic rooms, they’re the things that you want to then take. to to create a really short video clip. So easy to create content because your customers are giving you it. So use it.

[00:13:02] Katie Bell: And number five is to offer value first. Like you can have free workshops, you can have downloadable guides you can, have discovery calls. They’re very powerful tools to attract the right clients. But I want you to make sure that it aligns with the services you actually want to grow. And you have very clear targets for that free thing.

[00:13:28] Katie Bell: So if you’re going to run a workshop and you’re going to we, just talked actually in a meeting yesterday with my ops manager in my clinic of our Q4, January, February, March our strategy. What, do we need to do? What’s the financial targets? And therefore we do it like a one, three, five.

[00:13:46] Katie Bell: So the one thing is like the big revenue profit target. The three things are the key things that we need to do to hit that. And then the five is five things underneath those three things that are going to get us towards. Hitting our goals. So we broke it down in departments, so we are very clear about what each department needs to do.

[00:14:06] Katie Bell: And one of the things in our Pilates studio is that we wanted to grow our membership to, I can’t remember now, eight to five percent occupancy, which would take us to something like 258 members. That doesn’t include all of our Flexi packs that go on top of that. Okay, great. So how are we going to get there?

[00:14:25] Katie Bell: How many members does that mean we need to get between now and the end of March? I can’t even remember the numbers, like 25 or 20 or something like that. Okay. So we know our conversion rate. Off tasters. So we can work out then how many people we need to get in the class, like turning up to tasters. We know our attendance rates.

[00:14:44] Katie Bell: We know how many people we need to get booked in the first place for so many people to attend for us to convert to get 20 members out the bottom of the funnel. So we are very clear about our target. It aligns with the services that we actually are wanting to grow. So offer value first. Okay. So a summary of the in 2025.

[00:15:03] Katie Bell: Prioritize Google My Business. Get the basics right. Focus on relationships. Start building your email list because then you can start to think about how to use that email list most effectively. Experiment with video content more and even sending little mini videos to to your members, to your clients via WhatsApp can be super powerful rather than just endless amounts of emails or whatever it is.

[00:15:31] Katie Bell: And offer value first. Okay. Take a breather. That is the dos, the don’ts of clinic marketing. Let’s cover what not to do because sometimes what you don’t do is just as important as what you do. And this is coming from a place of working with hundreds and hundreds of clinic owners now and seeing what they do and what they shouldn’t be doing.

[00:15:56] Katie Bell: And and so the first thing is about spreading yourself too thin. Trying to manage too many platforms or too many campaigns leads to ineffective marketing and burnout. You’ve got to think about your plan and think further ahead than where you think you need to think. So we are looking at 2025, January, February, March, in yesterday we looked at that.

[00:16:29] Katie Bell: That gets disseminated then to our teams, our marketing team, et cetera. So everybody’s very clear. And we had to look at that plan as if to say what is happening in January, February, March, so that we’re not trying to market everything all at once. We will then sit down at the beginning of February and map out the whole of 2025, 2026.

[00:16:48] Katie Bell: financial year from a strategy point of view on what we need to do. Now that we’re with loads of detail in the ins and the outs, there will be for Q1 of next year, because we, will do that on the day that we plan the whole year ahead, but we’re thinking much further ahead and then really targeting our campaigns around the thing that we’re trying to build the most.

[00:17:14] Katie Bell: I would say don’t spread yourself too thin and think further ahead than you can. Where you are now, because when you feel like you’re just thinking about this week, next week, trying to chase your tail, that’s when things are really ineffective and they don’t work well. If you’re going to run a workshop, you need some run time on it.

[00:17:33] Katie Bell: You need to reverse engineer the date of when it’s going to run, and come back from that as to all the steps that need to happen before it even starts. Number two is to. Not rely solely on social media. It’s great for visibility, in some ways, but you don’t own those platforms. If your Instagram account got hacked tomorrow, can your business still reach your audience?

[00:17:59] Katie Bell: So that’s why an email list and Google presence are crucial.

[00:18:04] Katie Bell: Number three, don’t undervalue your services. Discounting your services to attract clients will backfire. Focus on adding value, bonus resources, package offers that can help clients seek the long term benefits of working with you. If you are going to run a discounted thing or a free thing or whatever, business needs to be thought through and we need to decide is this a loss?

[00:18:29] Katie Bell: leader in that if we, do this, is what our conversion rate’s going to be at the back of that. And that’s what we’re going to get as a result of it. So make sure that you’re not just undercharging. I met somebody at the therapy expo. He was such a lovely person. He had a fabulous beard actually.

[00:18:49] Katie Bell: So if you listen to this, you know who you are. And, he was like, I’m the cheapest in my, area. And I said, And he said, and it was that moment of, Him just realizing that actually being, and I said to him, okay, I want you to think about it this way, by undercutting everybody else you’re, actually damaging our industry.

[00:19:12] Katie Bell: I’ve known to be bold when I, when it comes to coaching. And I said to him do, not be the cheapest person. Cause you’re going to attract the wrong type of clients to your, business. So he had to go through a price restructure, but discounting your services won’t end well. So don’t undervalue yourself.

[00:19:34] Katie Bell: Number four, don’t forget to track your results. Marketing without metrics is like running a race without a finish line. You’ve got to use tools, simple spreadsheets, Google Analytics, I don’t know, whatever, to work out what’s working and what’s not working. Simple things. That might be just pulling a report from Clinico or Jane or whoever that you use on where your patients have come from and leverage more of the things that work and ditch some of the things that don’t.

[00:20:05] Katie Bell: Very easy, isn’t it? To go to all of these events and collabs and joint ventures, they all take an enormous amount of work. And when you then actually look back at your revenue growth, you’re like, I haven’t actually I don’t think I’ve got any more clients as a result of this. So what was the point? So be really clear about what works, what doesn’t work and ditch what isn’t working and spend more time on stuff that is.

[00:20:29] Katie Bell: And number five is don’t ignore like you and your brand. Like your brand is not just your logo. It’s your clinic’s personality. It’s the voice. It’s the values that you live, that like how you show up in your clinic. Make sure your marketing reflects that. If your clinic values of empowerment and authenticity like ours are, make sure those shine through in your marketing.

[00:20:54] Katie Bell: If marketing feels overwhelming, let me remind you, you don’t have to do it all. Start with one thing, just one, and do it consistently. Marketing is like a marathon. It’s not a sprint and you’ve got to ask for help. Unless you went to uni and studied marketing, and every time somebody tells me that on a, call.

[00:21:16] Katie Bell: I’m like, I’ve never really met anybody that went to uni and did a marketing degree that was actually any good at marketing. That’s interesting. Maybe a conversation another time. And I’m sorry for anybody to go to uni and actually are smashing it. However, unless you are like an absolute pro when it comes to this stuff, you need to ask for help.

[00:21:39] Katie Bell: Whether it’s hiring, joining a community of clinic owners like ours in the elevate and the activate programs. There’s power in not going it alone in 2025. So let’s recap. Focus on building trust, relationships, strong presence in the community. Don’t burn out trying to be everywhere. Don’t try and be everything to everybody and nothing to nobody.

[00:22:02] Katie Bell: Don’t undervalue your services. And marketing in 2025 is all about working smarter and not harder. I hope you’ve enjoyed today’s episode. Please share it with another clinic owner who might need to hear this. There, there now is something like 105, 108 episodes for you to indulge in, which has got plenty more marketing tips, advice, things that you can pick up that you can go back to and listen again.

[00:22:28] Katie Bell: Thank you for tuning in to the Treat Your Business podcast. Until next time, keep showing up, keep serving, keep building the business and life that you love.