Lead Generation with Fit Factor: Using PPS’s Fitness Survey Platform to Engage with Potential Patients
By Peter Decoteau
Getting in front of new people – potential patients who have little or no prior knowledge about your clinic – is one of the great challenges of marketing physical therapy and can cause a great deal of stress.
Not only are you competing with all of the noise, news, and other brand messaging out there, you are likely starting with the additional obstacle of having to educate the audience on what physical therapy is and how it can benefit them before you can even get to why they should choose you over another provider.
Sharing engaging, useful content is so important for lead generation and nurturing and helps to reduce stress for the private practice owner. For those unfamiliar with the terms, “lead generation” refers to the process of attracting potential customers. How you inform, engage, and convert these potential customers is the process of “lead nurturing.” Having users interact with your material because they find value in it, talking with them instead of talking to them, invites people to spend more time with your brand alone, affording you the chance to share more and better information – or, in other words, generate and nurture leads into potential new patients.
Our Fit Factor survey has plenty of benefits for users, but the value extends beyond just helping them gauge their fitness level – when used strategically, it can be a convenient engagement tool for lead generation. Surveys have long been used in marketing to attract the interest of target audiences, and often to learn from them for market research. For our purposes, the value lies in the former, acting as a potential catalyst for conversations about body health, functional limitations, and the benefits of physical therapy.
The following are some examples of how and when Fit Factor can be used to attract, engage with, and convert patients for your clinic.
COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT
Anyone who’s participated in local road races or community events knows that it’s increasingly difficult to cut through the clutter and stand out to passersby. Offering complimentary stretching and/or screenings can be an effective way to engage with athletes, but how about the general event-goers who don’t need stretching and may not know about or need physical therapy? Also, what do you do if you don’t have a therapist on hand to provide services and/or expertise?
Promoting a free, quick fitness survey (potentially having individuals demonstrate the ability to perform the survey tasks) can attract the general public to your exhibit for a number of reasons. Not only do people like testing themselves, but by setting the survey up as a friendly competition, you can engage friends and family to test against each other and can even drum up excitement in a crowd. The participants’ scores and survey feedback offer you the opportunity to discuss problem areas and functional limitations, and eventually share contact information. In this case, you’ve generated a lead, educated someone about physical therapy, and established an introductory relationship.
INBOUND WEBSITE TRAFFIC
From IQ tests and Meyers-Briggs questionnaires to Buzzfeed quizzes, people love taking online surveys about themselves. MIT psychologist and cultural analyst Sherry Turkle theorized that “People want a read on the self, an order to it. They’ll use a [body] sensor to get the number; they’ll use a quiz to get the number.” In other words, individuals look to a number, or a score, as a way to identify themselves. She extends that idea to suggest that surveys are used to both confirm identity and as a form of “social proof” to share and compare with others.1
Fit Factor fills the same need, and so using it in digital communications can be an effective way to pique interest and drive traffic into your website. For example, link to the survey in patient email campaigns, on social media and even potentially in digital advertisements. If embedded into a page on your website, you can drive users directly to your site, wherein they might navigate to other pages to learn more about your services and staff. Even if not embedded, the email collection tool within the survey offers a lead funnel that offers you the opportunity to reach out to them in the future with valuable brand messaging.
USE THE ANALYTICS
One of the great benefits of Fit Factor is that it collects user responses and makes them available for survey administrators to parse. While it might require additional work, the ability to reach out to respondents with messaging tailor-made for their unique problem areas, as identified in their survey answers, can be a highly-targeted marketing opportunity. For example, if a respondent answers “No” to the survey question, “Can you walk and turn your head from side to side without losing your balance or feeling any dizziness? Are you able to get up from your bed or stand up from your chair without feeling dizzy?” you can email them directly with information about physical therapy for vertigo, dizziness, and balance issues. The more respondents you get, the more opportunity for targeted outreach.
GETTING STARTED
The first and most important step in using Fit Factor as an engagement platform is to customize the survey with your clinic name and get a unique link. Visit the PPS website at www.ppsapta.org and check out the Marketing Resources under the “Practice Management” tab for details on survey customization, as well as a free webinar covering the basics of using Fit Factor and some additional tips and strategies for getting the most out of the platform.
References:
1Healy M. The Psychology Behind Online Quizzes. https://www.ceros.com/originals/understanding-the-psychology-behind-online-quizzes. Accessed May 30, 2020.
Peter Decoteau is the Director of Marketing at Physical Therapy & Sports Medicine Centers (PTSMC), Connecticut’s largest private practice physical therapy company. He can be reached at peter.decoteau@ptsmc.com.