Are you feeling passionate about your work as a therapist? If you answered not so much, don’t take this as an indication that you’re in the wrong line of work.
At the end of the day, your psychotherapy practice is made up of the clients you treat. When your caseload is in line with your interests, you’re more likely to truly enjoy your work.
Finding your ideal clients is a process that requires careful thought and intentionality. In the end, it has the potential to keep you fired up and protect you against burnout.
Here are 3 tips for attracting your ideal clients to your practice:
1. Don’t be afraid to specialize
Do you serve a broad variety of presenting problems? If so, do you often feel you don’t have enough time in your week to do all the research and reading you’d like to do in order to better serve each of your clients?
Identifying a specialization may feel limiting in that you’ll inevitably be excluding some potential clients. On the contrary, attempting to appeal to everyone by marketing yourself as a generalist may inadvertently make you appear less trustworthy to potential clients. Imagine you recently lost a loved one. Would you be more likely to choose the therapist who advertises that they see “individuals, couples and families confronting a wide range of challenges”, or the therapist who “helps adults find meaning and purpose in the wake of grief and loss”?
The more clearly you define the clients you enjoy working with in your bio, the more you will attract the clients you’ll be passionate to work with.
2. Identify your passion
You may be thinking, that all sounds great, but I’m not sure I have a niche.
Most likely, you’ve noticed you feel more motivated, engaged, and passionate when working with some clients compared to others.
Take a moment to think about those clients whose journeys you felt most connected to; whose healing felt the most rewarding for you. What might these clients have had in common? Similar life experiences? Similar presenting problems? Similar life stages or transitions? What’s a human experience you love to think about and talk about?
When you carefully define your practice, you are given the opportunity to hone your skills for treating the populations you enjoy working with the most. You’ll gain more and more clinical experience the more you add these types of clients to your caseload. You’ll be able to seek out specialized resources for continuing education and training experiences on topics that interest you. Others in the community will begin looking to you as an expert in your specialized field and call upon you as a resource.
Narrowing down your specialties even slightly can make a big impact when it comes to finding the right fit.
3. Join an established group practice
Half the battle of attracting your ideal clients is making sure they can easily find your profile when they start searching for a therapist. Creating a website and learning the ins and outs of SEO (search engine optimization) is complicated, time-consuming, and requires constant upkeep in order to stay competitive on search engines.
Great Lakes Psychology Group offers competitive search rankings, which means we make it easier for your ideal clients to find you.
Thinking about applying? Check out our blog: Top 3 Reasons Therapists Join a Group Practice
