Stop spending money on social media: The biggest mistake private practice owners are making in digital marketing
Hello and welcome to the Business of Psychology Podcast. This series is all about what we can do when we have that tugging feeling that our practice needs to change, but we're not quite sure what to do about it.
Full show notes for this episode are available at The Business of Psychology
Links/references:
Episode 103: Why you should specialise – old gold that is still important
Episode 127: What matters to our clients in private practice?
Episode 128: Who are you helping? Three ways to specialise your psychology or therapy practice
Episode 129: How to make sure your marketing actually works: How to use authority for psychologists and therapists
Episode 152: Thinking differently about your practice: A tool to put the client first
Episode 158: How to find your ideal clients in 2025: SEO for psychologists and therapists with Chris Morin
Links for Rosie:
Substack: substack.com/@drrosie
Rosie on Instagram:
@rosiegilderthorp
@thepregnancypsychologist
Evolve Your Practice: The map to more income, impact and flexibility
Are you craving more flexibility in your practice?
Maybe you've built something amazing and you're proud of your business, but it's also bringing you to the brink of burnout.
Maybe you want to use your skills differently and create recurring revenue outside the therapy room.
Whether your priority is financial stability or flexibility, or both, adding recurring revenue streams into your business is essential.
If you want time, freedom, more income, and to make a bigger impact for your client group, join me for a free masterclass on Monday, the 17th of November at 11:00 AM and I'll show you how I use my values, voice and impact framework to create income, impact, and flexibility in my own business, and for the hundreds of psychologists and therapists I've supported over the last five years.
I'd love to see you there. You can sign up here: https://psychologybusinessschool.mykajabi.com/offers/fnr6d7si/checkout
ShownotesStop spending money on social media: The biggest mistake private practice owners are making in digital marketing
Today we're focusing on social media, because one thing I have noticed about people that come into my Evolve and Thrive program is they've often already been spending money or time trying to build a social media audience because they think it's a prerequisite for adding additional income streams into their practice.
Firstly, it is not true that you always have to do social media to add new revenue streams. Even passive income doesn't always have to involve social media. But what we're focusing on today is the danger of spending loads of time or loads of money on social media before you've done the work on your marketing strategy, because I see so much waste when that happens.
First, I'm going to talk a bit about the perils, and then I'm going to give you some practical strategy advice using my Values, Voice and Impact framework that I use with all my coaching clients so that you can invest in social media safely and effectively and actually make your investment back from it.
The Mistakes
Let's get started by thinking about the mistakes, because honestly, my heart hurts when I meet a new client who has already outsourced their marketing or hired a new social media manager or one of those fancy, all-inclusive marketing agencies. And it's not because those are bad things to do, but they are usually bad if we do them too soon.
Social media is just a way of reaching people. It's a marketing channel, just in the same way that a poster on a lamppost is a marketing channel. Except in 2025, every lamppost you pass has a thousand posters, blue-tacked over the top of each other competing for your eyeballs. You wouldn't expect the fact you had a poster on a lamppost to do anything for your marketing, would you? You'd probably think that the content of that poster was quite important. You'd probably also consider the position of the poster; whether it was on a lamppost outside a busy coffee shop or in a country lane, whether you were at the top or three sheets deep at the bottom, you'd instinctively know that all of those things were really crucial.
Social media managers tend to have no idea how to tackle good quality content or positioning for mental health professionals, so they mostly post content that is so bland and uninspiring, you might as well be sticking up a blank sheet of paper in a country lane. I am afraid that you have to be fully in charge of the marketing strategy for your business. Strategy cannot be delegated. Graphic design can be delegated, copywriting can be delegated, but the strategy is all yours.
I'm going to use my values, voice and impact framework that underpins the coaching in my group programs like Startup and Evolve and Thrive to show you what you need to have in place before you go hiring help.
Values
We start with the values. To put together a strategy, you first need to understand what you want from your business and what your clients needs from you. Here is where we do all the work on personal and professional values, picking a specialism, narrowing to a client group and really understanding what matters to that group.
I've recorded episodes before on the tools that we can use here, like the customer persona and the value proposition that can help us get that really deep understanding of the priorities of our client group. And that work can only be done by you because it's psychological work, and actually the majority of people who work in marketing are used to marketing products, which don't involve anything like the emotional investment that we are asking our clients to make, even if we're selling them a book or an online course. And so we need to be using our skills as mental health professionals to really get under the skin and understand our clients in the way that most marketing professionals aren't used to doing.
I do find peer discussions very helpful here though, so do use your colleagues, but more importantly, as I talk about in all the episodes around customer personas and value propositions, get out and talk to your actual client group and test ideas out with them.
Voice
The second stage is about voice, because what content you should post is also determined by your expertise. Everything you produce should be aiming to build your authority with your client group. You should be proud of the body of work that you put out there into the world on social media. It needs to carry your authentic voice, and most importantly, you need to be spreading the messages that your client group need to hear from you, specifically.
If you've done your values work well, you'll have a good idea of the things that your ideal client group desperately want to hear about, and you'll know the language that they use too. Pick three to five of those things that align with your expertise and make those your content pillars - the things that you always talk about online. I always suggest writing out about five to ten stories that illustrate that you really understand those things, that you understand the struggles that your clients face related to those topics, and you can link them directly to the things that they want to hear you talking about. For example, if you think that they want advice from you about burnout, write out some compelling stories that show you really understand burnout; either stories from your personal life, anonymised client stories, it could be anything, but stories are so much more compelling than how-tos or advice lists. So making sure you've got some of those in your back pocket that you can repurpose over and over again for various posts on social media is really helpful.
Impact
The final stage is impact. In order to make your marketing strategy effective, you have to know the journey you want potential clients to take. What do they need to know about you to make a decision to take the next step, and buy your course, buy your book, become a client.
Some of the content you create will be designed to raise awareness of your existence. Some will be designed to encourage trust, show your authority, and some will be designed to directly sell your services. We need to fully understand the purpose of our content and what we want it to do for our clients and the business before we can even think about what social media platforms or posts make sense.
At this stage, you also need to think about where your content will have the most impact. You use your understanding of the client group to decide:
- where they're most likely to see and be receptive to your awareness content
- where they'd like to get to know you better
- and how it makes sense for them to book with you or buy your product.
You can't let a marketing professional tell you those things because it's really likely that you are the person that knows that client group best, whereas a marketing professional is very likely to make assumptions, which are probably a bit too broad brush for the kind of client groups that we are dealing with.
Finally, you need to know what good looks like. Know the metrics that tell you your marketing is working. If your business priority is referrals, then volume of referrals is the key metric. If your priority is book sales, that's the key metric. You might also measure one or two things that might show progress before the sales come in, like website traffic, but never get caught up in vanity metrics. Lots of followers, but no sales, still means a business that's going to go under. Really good engagement, but no sales still leads to a business that's going to go under. A lot of marketing professionals out there, especially those who've kind of set up freelance, maybe haven't been connected to the wider business goals of a bigger business, they're just not going to make that link. A lot of social media managers out there don't necessarily look beyond the social media content. It is your job to understand how the social media content ultimately leads to profit in your business and impact for your clients. They won't necessarily take an interest in that or really think beyond the things that they're creating in Canva or scheduling for you.
If you try and delegate marketing before you have all of this strategy mapped out, you are most likely going to lose money and you're going to get annoyed with your social media manager. And that's not fair on anybody. And I say this, having done it many times. I've delegated to social media managers, and it has not worked out lots of times, and it's taken me a long time to realise that that's because I was just giving them too much control over the strategy and expecting them to have skills that they just don't have. And that really isn't meant to sound judgemental or to diminish the expertise that they do have in any way, because their skillset is really defined and really good and I don't have it, and I need it. I do have a social media manager, and it makes my life much better, but they're not strategists. Most of them are not strategists, and even the ones that are, don't tend to be very well experienced in mental health services. So, for us, I could not emphasise more strongly, you need to let yourself be in the driving seat, do not allow someone else to take control of your marketing. You are the boss, you know what your clients need better than anybody. So, enjoy the process because you'll be really good at it if you let yourself use your skills to do it well.
I really hope that this has been a helpful and practical episode to help you save money when you do decide to outsource social media. Please let me know what you think over on Instagram. I'm @RosieGilderthorp and I'd really love to hear from you.
