Reason 3 why therapists have a hard time making their own websites
Focusing on the Positive
Marketing a therapy practice involves addressing potential clients in writing. Noobs write on the top of their website “Hello! I’m so glad you’re here”. Can you imagine going to the Target website and the first thing you see is “welcome to our website!”? This makes people look eager and a bit too personal.
One of the well-known ways corporations market an idea, product, or service is by focusing on what’s called a pain point. These are specific problems or frustrations that a target audience experiences. This assumes that if I focus on your problem (such as dry skin), my good will solve that problem (lotion). The writing, images, fonts, and colors demonstrate how my service can provide solutions.
Therapists, trained in empathy and client-centered care, often find it challenging to:
Highlight Client Struggles: It can feel uncomfortable or counter-intuitive to explicitly state the problems their clients might be facing, even if it's for marketing purposes. Most therapists write about the way a client will feel when they’re released from stress, worry, and guilt. Or how EMDR works for treating trauma (which can bog someone down with jargon).
Shift from Compassion to Persuasion: The language of therapy is supportive and understanding, while marketing often requires more direct and persuasive language, which can feel inauthentic.
"Selling" a Solution: Focusing on "pain points" can feel too much like "selling" or capitalizing on someone's distress, which can conflict with their ethical framework. While pain points are important in content, some therapists prefer less focus on identifying with the patient's pain and more on why their services will work to get rid of it.
The problem here is that therapists know too much in some sense. That is, they’re not seeing the person who Googles “divorce couples therapy near me”. That person is desperate- they’re done contemplating looking for a therapist. The time is NOW.
And lastly, these folks are mostly “pre-therapy”. Meaning you have to speak to someone who hasn’t experienced any solutions yet, who may not have a single skill for something like skin-picking or insomnia. You’re not relatable to them if you’re not talking about how crappy it feels to not know what to do.
At the end you bring it around and say that therapy can help (not that you’re going to get the person results, which would be a huge assumption). But first, we have to speak to a niche client. We know what our clients feel like when they get to therapy: scared, bedraggled, trepidatious, and demoralized. It’s just the way it is. So, if you need someone else to do your copywriting to be less sunshine and rainbows, it’s a good idea to hire someone who knows how to speak the language of these pains.
Copywriting costs a lot. Plus, anyone who’s creating a website needs someone to figure out what to say. This dreaded combination stops most therapists in their tracks.
What we do at MincWork is we draw upon the millennial language of marketing, creative writing skills, and our backgrounds in psychology to come up with verbiage. As therapy professionals, we actually know what we’re talking about, so things don’t feel clunky or awkward.
Our services are about a quarter or what you will pay for copywriting elsewhere. Fold it in to your website design and you’ll get a seamless experience of just telling us what you want and then seeing it come to life without having to stress over writing your own copy.
