Beat the Competition with Focused Niche Marketing

By Paul Martin, PT, MPT, CBI, M&AMI

As an independent provider of rehab services, you have the ability to make decisions and act on those decisions quickly. This attribute quite likely gives you an advantage over larger regional, national, and system competitors. So, if you have identified a specialty area within your practice that you are already providing for patients and physicians, now it is time to “bulletproof” that program by taking the following steps:

• Identify a therapist on your staff who has a special interest and/or training in the identified specialty program. Provide them with the necessary resources to become an expert in the program.
• Charge your new program leader with the task of building an operational and financial model for the program.
• Create a work group to identify specific referral sources (physicians and community) that are currently and/or could benefit from this program. Utilizing these sources, this group should build a marketing plan to promote and build the program.
• Develop ways to include referral sources in the development of this program.

The growth and development of a specialty program should be accomplished in a matter of a few months and become profitable in four to six months