Your Group Practice: To Niche or Not That is the Big Question
One of the great controversies of therapist marketing is whether to market a therapy niche or specialty or not. If you follow my blog, we’ve been exploring this topic for the last couple of months. If you are interested in this topic as a solo practice owner, please start with this blog here, because today we are going to cover the topic when it comes to group practices.
The question of whether or not to niche down becomes even more complicated when you are a group practice owner than it is for solo practitioners. A big part of this complication is that you are trying to fill multiple caseloads when you run a group practice instead of just one. Of course, as a group practice owner, you know that pressure intimately.
You live with the stress of trying to fill multiple caseloads every day.
This pressure makes your marketing decisions that much more difficult to make.
If you have read my other blogs about nicheing down, you might want to skip to the next section, as I’m going to cover some of the niche basics again here for the people who are just interested in reading this article.
Niche Basics
What is a Niche?
Basically, a niche is what your practice specializes in, it can be a specific population, issue, or client type. It’s the group that you focus on or do your best work with, and it might be based on modality, population, personality characteristics, or life circumstances.
What is the purpose of a niche?
Your niche helps keep your practice focused, helps your ideal clients know what you are best at, and allows you to have more targeted marketing and training. It allows you and your practice to focus on clients that you enjoy and are good at working with.
It’s not as limiting as it sounds
Claiming a niche can sound really boring, especially if you are used to seeing all kinds of people in an agency or a general group practice. Just because you have a specialty doesn’t mean that you only see that group of people. You will still get word-of-mouth referrals, who will not always be in your niche.
Also, people will come to your website and decide that you are the therapist for them just based on how well you understand your niche, even when they aren’t in it.
A niche helps you to stand out from the rest of the therapists in your area. If you’re really good at one thing, the people who are struggling with that will prefer to see you, if possible, and people who struggle with something similar will also approach you, as you obviously know what you are doing.
Instead of trying to stand out among all the other therapists, you are only trying to stand out from a small group that also claims a similar niche.
For example, if you work with postpartum moms, other possible clients will assume you also know about parenting and women's health. This means you work with populations adjacent to your niche as well as your niche itself.
Some examples of niches;
Parents of Kids with ODD
Law Enforcement Spouses
High-Achieving Entrepreneurs
Anxious kids
Neurodivergent Folks
As you can see, a niche doesn’t have to be a particular population; it can be any number of other groups of people, from personality characteristics to life experiences.
The Three Ways That Group Practices Approach Their Niche
There are three possibilities when it comes to having a group practice and your niche. These different approaches result in different marketing strategies and often different types of clients.
Group Practice Type Number 1- No Niche
This practice is one that has chosen not to niche down. This means that the therapists who work for this type of group practice, as well as the owner, tend to be more generalists. You may have a couple of niche therapists, but it will be more difficult for you to fill their caseloads with the clients they do their best work with.
This type of group practice will often bring you a wide variety of acuity and issues, and for many therapist’s this can be a recipe for burnout, especially if they don’t get to choose the clients they work with in order to keep their caseloads full.
Group Practice Type Number 2- Each Clinician Has a Different Niche
In this type of therapy private group practice, each therapist in the practice has their own niche. This means that the scheduler assigns therapists to clients based on their niche, and the therapists spend more time seeing clients with whom they enjoy working.
This practice continues to attract a wide variety of clients, but there is a bigger possibility that your individual therapists will make a name for themselves as specialists, which brings more people into your practice.
Group Practice Type Number 3- A Practice-Wide Niche
This last type of therapy group private practice is where the whole practice has the same niche. I’ve seen practices that specialize in working with first responders, postpartum moms (dads included), and even trauma.
Referral sources know this practice’s niche, and so they are often the first people on the list to refer to when a referral that fits in that niche comes up. You do still get clients outside of the niche because if your practice does a good job, referral sources will just send any client your way.
Pros of Nicheing Down as Therapy Group Practice Owner
As a group practice owner, the pressure is so high to get new clients in the door and keep your therapists' caseloads full. If this is the case and there is a possibility your new client inquiries will be lower when you switch, why would you decide to claim a niche?
Surprisingly, there are a lot of reasons to niche down, especially as a group private practice owner. Here are some of the biggest pros to having a clear niche for your whole private practice.
Easier to Target Your Marketing
When you know who your niche is it’s easier to also know who your ideal clients are and write your website, blogs, and social media posts directly to them and who they are. You don’t have to worry about trying to connect with everyone. You don’t have to worry about leaving someone out because you know exactly who you are trying to connect with. This also guides who you reach out to network with.
2. Easier to Choose Training for Your Clinicians
Having a practice-wide clear niche helps you to easily bring training in that will benefit your whole practice. If you have a clear niche, you can easily decide if the training is helpful and important. If you don’t have a clear niche, often it can be hard to bring in training’s that are helpful to everyone.
3. Easier to Hire
If you have a clear niche it’s easier to find therapists who have passion for the people that you treat. When you are bringing in generalists you never really know what the quality of work will look like with each client that you send their way. When you have a niche you can easily discriminate the level of knowledge that the person has because you are knowledgeable about the same time. If the person is not passionate about your population then you know they aren’t the right fit for your practice.
4. Easier to Filter whether or not a client will fit into your practice
If your practice see’s mostly the same clients it’s much easier to tell whether or not the client is a good fit. You quickly learn what the red flags are and what clients who may not be a good fit for your practice look like. This allows you to reduce crisis situations in your practice that are more than your practice is equipped with. It also allows you to collect a quick and easy referral list because you should be networking with people that see similar but higher acuity clients and it’s easier to refer people out when you feel more confident about who you are referring to.
5. Easier for Clients to know whether you are the right practice for them
If you have a clear niche and know who you are writing to it’s easy for clients to know whether or not you are the right practice for them. Like I said earlier all of your clients might not be in your niche but some clients will come across your website and feel like you are a good fit basically based off the type of emotion you seem to understand and if your copy is good they can see that as well as your practices personality. This allows clients to decide whether they might be a good fit before they reach out to you.
In other words, Nicheing down your group private practice has a lot of benefits it generally can make running your private practice that much easier.
Cons for Nicheing Down as a group practice owner
Feels like it rules out other clients
When you tell the world that these are the clients that you see it feels like it is telling the rest of the world that you don’t see them This isn’t the reality as you will see. Often people are looking for a good therapist and if your practice has a specialty often people will come to you because you have expertise and that is the important part. Even if the expertise is not something that actually impacts them.
2. Limits the people who come to you
It also feels like you are limiting the number of people that will come into your practice. For most of us as therapists at the least we are only limited to your state which for many of us is quite large and with recent law changes the state reciprocity for certain licenses is much greater than it used to be. This means that there are most likely plenty of clients in your niche to fill up all of your clinicians especially if you get in front of them through your marketing.
What to Consider When Thinking about Claiming a Niche
If you are deciding whether or not to niche down there are a couple of other things you need to consider. The first consideration is whether or not you take insurance. If you take insurance you will most likely be getting paid less per hour then you would be if you were fully private pay.
But if you are taking insurance you might not need to have a niche or market because often insurance companies have more clients than therapists. So they will just fill up your practice. But the ones with a lot of clients often don’t pay much which is a quick path to burn out for both you and your therapists.
The second thing to take under consideration is whether or not you have interns and who is supervising them. If you do have interns and you are supervising them it’s easiest if they see clients that you are comfortable with. Usually the clients who are in your niche.
When supervising interns, having a group practice with one niche is much easier and takes less liability.
The last consideration you need to look at, is how picky you want to be about the clients that come into your practice. If you want them to be well screened and have a good idea of the acuity and issues your clients are coming in with it helps to have a niched group practice.
What is the best approach?
As a solo practice owner and a therapist marketer, I have always felt like it’s easier to fill up a group practice with a niched practice. It may take a bit longer to get off the ground. But as word spreads to other professionals in the area and the community you work with it will get easier and easier. Having a niche and seeing private pay clients does take more work at the start but it’s really worth it over time as you fill your caseload and those of your therapists with clients that really fill your cup. It’s also just easier because your can find trainings and provide supervision that’s just on point for what everyone does.
If you need help picking a niche for your group practice or marketing it. I’d love to help. Schedule a consultation call to explore how we can work together.