The concept of building trust with your clients is probably not earth-shattering one for you.
If you want to succeed in marketing your private practice, you need to make sure that your clients will trust that you can help before you start working with them, while you work with them, and continue trusting you long after you stopped working together, so that they can vouch for your services when their family members or friends are looking for a counselor or a coach.
Another thing is, that as with any business, you are surrounded by competition.
Of course, you might be in the wrong business, and then there’s only the sound of crickets. When there is no competition there are usually no clients as well.
The good news is that if you are a therapist or a coach, and you are in private practice, you are in the right business; people are reaching out to others for help since the dawn of ages, and many of them are willing to pay good money for that.
So since you have competition, and trust is a crucial ingredient to the success of your private practice, it is very helpful to create at least or even just a little more trust than your competition.
One of the best ways to do so is to position yourself as an expert or an authority in your field.
How?
- Create that expertise
- Put humbleness aside and showcase evidence/share that with your potential clients, your current clients, and your colleagues
Becoming an Expert
Here are ways to create expertise:
- Write a book or co-write book. It doesn’t have to be a 400 pages masterpiece. Here’s an example of an international number 1 bestselling book I co-authored: https://www.the6figurepractice.com/number-one-bestseller-in-12-countries
- Have a blog. Beyond it being helpful for pushing your website up in the organic search results in Google (or any other search engine like Bing or Yahoo), if you have something to say, simply by virtue of the fact that you’re actually putting it out there, people will trust you more. You don’t have to spend sleepless nights to do that: you can also share content that you’re interested in created by others or recycle stuff that you’ve already written. Papers from your psychology major or counseling master’s program are perfect!
- Have a podcast and/or a Youtube channel. If you are a therapist and / or a coach, you are being paid to have conversations. Guess what? You can do exactly that by recording interviews video calls, via zoom, for example, record it in the cloud and it will record a video file that you can use for youtube, and an audio file that you can use for the podcast. These interviews, by the way, can be done with already established experts, and then you simply position your name with theirs. And the best thing is that you can have the audio transcribed, and it will cost you around $30 for an hour of audio on fiverr.com or you can use an app like Otter. One hour of conversation can produce a staggering 10 pages of content.
- Present at conferences. You position yourself as someone who is an influencer in the field versus just a player. And guess what, it also positions you as an expert in the eyes of your colleagues that will trust you more with their referrals.
- Give talks, free and paid. This is great to create clients if structured the right way and put your name out there.
- Attend trainings. As you gain more knowledge and skills, your actual expertise grows, as well as your confidence. Seek out the best experts in the field that you’d like to be trained in. Go to the source. It will probably cost you the same or just a little bit more than training with a middleman who studied with them and now is teaching others.
- Read as many books as you can. I don’t have time to read books and yet I finish at least 2 -3 books a week. I listen to audiobooks on Audible, and gradually trained myself to listen and retain information at speeds of 2-2.5x. You’re then able to synthesize that information to your clients when needed. You will become a walking encyclopedia in your area of expertise. And by reading the best books about marketing and business you can educate yourself to build a thriving private practice.
Here are some ways to present your expertise to the world:
- Have your diplomas and certifications on the walls of your office if you have one. And please spend that extra buck on the nicer frames. Here’s a quick tour of my office.
- List your trainings and certifications on your website
- Have your blog accessible and visible on your website, including showcasing the latest ones on your homepage
- If you wrote a book, showcase it on the homepage of your website
- Mention these achievements on the phone calls with your postnatal clients (strategically and briefly, that phone call is about them not about you), chat about it with your existing clients at the beginning of your session
- Use the information you learned from books and education in your sessions
An added bonus to positioning yourself as an expert is that you can charge more (if you want): You will feel more confident doing that, and it would make even more sense to your clients.
Let yourself play a bigger game. The bigger the game, the bigger the prize! 
