According to Business Insider, “LinkedIn is a professional networking site, designed to help people make business connections, share their experiences and resumes, and find jobs.” Because LinkedIn has this stigma of being a digital resume, business owners—including PT clinic owners—often miss out on the opportunity to use it to attract new clients.
Advertising your physical therapy clinic on LinkedIn may take a little creativity and outside-of-the-box thinking to execute successfully, but it can be fruitful in driving new business. After all, the targeting capabilities of LinkedIn advertising are top-notch and can help you develop a strategy you may not have thought to use otherwise. There’s no other social platform with the type of granularity that LinkedIn allows its advertisers. In this post, I’ll explain a few strategies for using LinkedIn successfully.
Creating a LinkedIn Advertising Audience
The good thing about LinkedIn being a “digital resume” is that you have the opportunity to create very specific audiences. You can target specific companies (and their employees) and drill down based on their number of employees, gender, age, and specific job titles.
Pro tip: You can also layer your targeting. For example, you can target human resource professionals (using the “Job Experience” option) who are located in your city (e.g., Phoenix) and work at a company with 200-plus employees. We’ll discuss this tip more in depth below.
Targeting Based on Location
Some advertising platforms allow you to radius-target based on your clinic’s location. LinkedIn doesn’t offer that, but you can target the town or city that your business is located in.
Pro tip: Use location exclusions to exclude towns that you believe are too far away.
Targeting Local Groups and Organizations
LinkedIn also allows advertisers to target groups, something Facebook does not offer. Find local organizations (e.g., charity or fundraising groups) you support and use them to create a targeting audience. You can use these audiences to get your clinic’s name out into your community.
These are not the only targeting options available on the LinkedIn advertising platform. Here are a couple others:
- Retargeting: You can use this option to show ads to searchers who have visited specific pages on your website. This tactic is offered on other platforms, but is still a great option.
- List Uploads: Hopefully you have a database of clients. You can upload a list of past clients who are no longer receiving physical therapy and target them with advertising intended to re-engage them. Whereas other platforms require you to use full names and locations of the people you’d like to target, LinkedIn only requires their email addresses.
So, why are these different targeting options important for physical therapy providers? Here are a few marketing strategies that you could use today in your practice.
1. Create and develop corporate partnerships.
As I stated previously, you can layer your targeting. One tactic that could be wildly successful is using LinkedIn ads to target HR teams. You can use the content of your ad to build trust and develop corporate partnerships. HR representatives are valuable liaisons who can help get your clinic’s name in front of a company’s employees.
2. Target employees from neighboring companies.
Target employees from companies located near you. You know they are within close proximity to your physical therapy clinic, which makes your location convenient for them. This could allow those employees to easily schedule their appointments during a lunch break or immediately before or after a shift. Tailor your ad content to emphasize that convenience.
3. Target potential patients whose companies provide health insurance your clinic accepts.
Find businesses in your area that are part of the insurance networks for which you are a contracted provider. This tactic will take some research on your end. But, many patients don’t want to seek care outside of their network, and the fact that your clinic accepts a patient’s insurance could be enough to catch that patient’s attention.
LinkedIn may not be your first choice to market your clinic—or even your second or third—but it is a valuable resource. Don’t forget that marketing is all about creativity, and with a sound strategy, any idea can be a good one. Comment below if you have any questions.
