Hello everyone and welcome back to The Testing Psychologist podcast. Today is episode 3 in the 5 Quick Tips series. I hope you’ve enjoyed the previous two. If you haven’t listened to them, maybe go back and check those out. I did Five Quick Tips for Billing Testing Services and Five Quick Tips for Getting Reports Done Efficiently. Check those out. They’re definitely on the website, thetestingpsychologist.com.
Today, I’m talking all about Five Quick Tips for Marketing.
Before I jump into that, let me give a shout [00:01:00] out to Practice Solutions who is sponsoring the podcast this month. They help you to not waste your valuable time and energy focusing on an administrative task like billing. They save you time. They make sure your billing is done with integrity and transparency, and they are a fantastic choice. We have used them for the past few months. Even in what I would have considered a pretty efficient practice, they’ve increased our collections significantly. So I can vouch for their services. They’re kind. They’re always available. They’re around 24/7. They’re very transparent and very skilled.
Check out Practice Solutions. The website is www.practicesol.com/jeremy. If you sign up through that link, or even just tell them that you signed up or heard about them through The Testing Psychologist, you’ll [00:02:00] get a 20% discount on your first month. So check them out if you’re in the market for a billing service.
Today, we are talking about five quick tips for marketing your testing practice. These are things again, that I’ve found over the years that have certainly proven helpful and things that we do in our practice day in and day out.
Quick tip 1, very easy. Send thank you faxes. Every interview that I do, I always ask who referred to the client for testing and if I have permission to contact that person just to say thank you in an anonymous way. I rarely run into anyone who does not want me to do that or is not okay with that. So after the interview, I fill out an interview follow-up form, which we have developed here in the office, and one of those items on the [00:03:00] follow-up form is a checkbox where I can say send a thank you fax to the referral source and then I write in the referral source and our admin assistant faxes that over to the referral source.
Make sure that it’s on your letterhead. Make sure to craft a nice message that is personable but not so personal that you have to rewrite it every single time. I found that that helps to get our name out in front of other people’s faces and it was just kind to let them know that you appreciate their referral. So sending thank you faxes.
My second quick tip is go to the schools as often as possible if you are testing kids. I’ve talked before about school observations and how valuable those can be from a clinical perspective. I also think that they are incredibly valuable from a marketing perspective. Again, it gets you out in the community. [00:04:00] It lets you meet educators, administrators, teachers, and counselors at the schools, and it gives you a good sense of what different schools are like in your area.
So as much as possible, and as much as is clinically relevant, do school observations whenever you can. Get out there and make sure to meet people to always introduce yourselves to the teachers, to the counselors, even to the principal, if they’re around. Over time, you can develop nice relationships with schools. We’ve gotten many referrals from schools because of that.
Quick tip 3, always do collateral interviews with any other providers involved. This is maybe a no-brainer, but I have found that sometimes it can be hard to make the time- both making the time to schedule those collateral interviews and also coordinate schedules and actually finding the time [00:05:00] to talk with other providers because we’re all so busy.
This is another place where I would give a shout-out for having a virtual assistant or even an in-office assistant as someone to help you schedule those interviews. So you can add that to your list if you’re trying to decide if you need a VA or not as that person who could help schedule collateral interviews.
I always do collateral interviews with any other providers involved. Through that, I have talked to countless other therapists, psychiatrists, medical practitioners, massage therapists, acupuncture, like anyone that seems like they would have relevant info and would be a valuable person to chat with for your testing case. Go for it. Do those collateral interviews. It doesn’t have to be long. 10 or 15 minutes usually gets the job done. I’ve heard so many times those folks say, thank you for reaching out. [00:06:00] We don’t hear from evaluators very often. So, again, that’s a great way to network and build relationships in the community and subsequently get referrals.
Tip 4 is to ingratiate yourself and get to know the referral coordinators at various medical practices. So at least in our community, we have probably three, I’d say big medical practices that have multiple locations here in town and serve a lot of people.
In some cases, the referral coordinator is a person that oversees referrals for the entire office or medical practice in multiple locations. In some cases, each office location has its referral coordinator. So I would do some research again, a great task for a VA, and figure out who the referral coordinators are. It’s [00:07:00] easy to shoot them over some information, a quick one-page fax, or a little a one-page brochure flyer, and make sure that you know their names, you know where they work and they have your information.
Related to this, you can keep a spreadsheet or contact sheet with all these referral coordinators’ contact information, locations, and all of that so you’re not reinventing the wheel every time you want to send out an update for your practice or just get some information out there.
So get to know your referral coordinators. They are the ones who are talking with the physicians most frequently, networking with the patients, and sending those patients out when they need to get connected with services.
My last quick tip for marketing is to consider digital marketing as part of your practice profile. [00:08:00] A few episodes ago, I interviewed John Clarke from Unconditional Media. I will link to that again in the show notes here.
There are a variety of ways to do digital marketing. I think it can be particularly helpful if you are adding clinicians and you need to get referrals quickly, or if you’ve moved to a new town and you need to get referrals quickly in a place where you maybe don’t know folks to do the networking.
There are many different forms of digital marketing. I would highly recommend not trying to do it yourself unless you want to spend the time and energy to figure out how to do it well. I’ve said since way back in the beginning when I started my practice and started to do these private practice talks that digital marketing, search engine optimization, AdWords, Facebook ads, all of that are science unto itself. I have personally lost a lot of [00:09:00] money trying to do it myself and not doing it well. So take it from me. If you consider digital marketing, talk to a professional, but it can be really helpful for your practice.
All right, folks, that concludes my last 5 Quick Tips episode. I hope you took a little something away from these tips for marketing your practice.
As we conclude this 5 Quick Tips little series, I’ll give you the info again, just for the website. If you want to find out more or check back on past episodes, you can go to thetestingpsychologist.com and check out all of the past podcast episodes. There’s also a link there to the Facebook community, which is fantastic. It just continues to grow. We have 300 people in there now at this point, probably more by the time you hear this episode. We’re talking the business of testing insurance, billing, different [00:10:00] measures, all kinds of good stuff. So you can find that Facebook community either by searching Facebook for The Testing Psychologist Community or by clicking through on the website.
If you’re interested at all in talking about consulting or collaborating on how to grow your testing services, you can find out more about that on the website as well. You can also give me complimentary anything, but I will give you a complimentary 20-minute phone call just to talk about whether consulting could be a good fit for you or anything else that would be helpful in moving forward with your practice. So if you are interested in that, feel free to shoot me an email, at jeremy@thetestingpsychologist.com. We can talk for a few minutes and figure out if consulting might be a good fit for you.
Finally, I will give one more shout-out to Practice Solutions. They’re a fantastic full-service billing [00:11:00] company. They do eligibility, benefits checks, statements, insurance verification, and collections. They do it all. They are kind. They know what they’re doing. They’re very responsive and they’ve increased our collections significantly just in the few months that we’ve been working with them. So I can highly recommend them from working with them in our practice.
If you do want to check them out, the link is www.practicesol.com/jeremy, and they will give you 20% off their first-month services if you mention The Testing Psychologist or go through that link. So check them out if you’re looking for a billing service.
So, like I said, we have some cool interviews coming up. I’m looking forward to getting back to the interviewing game and bringing some great content to you from some well-respected folks in the field. As always, if you have any ideas for podcast [00:12:00] episodes or anything you want to hear about, feel free to shoot me an email. Otherwise, I will talk with you next week. Thanks. Bye bye.