There is a version of this article — most physiotherapy marketing guides are it — that recommends a content strategy, a posting schedule and an advertising budget. It is written for clinics with a marketing person. If you are treating patients all day and doing the admin in the evening, the useful version is shorter and starts somewhere else: with the patients you have already treated.
Where physiotherapy patients actually come from
Ask any established practice and the answer is roughly the same, in roughly the same order:
- Returning patients. The same person, a new episode, eighteen months later.
- Word of mouth from those patients, to family and colleagues.
- Referrals from GPs, consultants, podiatrists, trainers, sports clubs and pilates studios.
- Local search. Someone types “physio near me” with a sore shoulder and picks from what they see.
- Paid advertising, a long way behind, and usually the only one people ask about.
The order matters because the effort is the reverse of the cost. The top of that list is free and slow to build. The bottom is instant and expensive, and it works best for practices that already have the top half in place.
Start with the people who already know you
Open your patient list and filter for people discharged between three and twelve months ago. In most practices that is a list of several dozen people who liked you enough to finish a course of treatment, know where you are, and have no barrier at all to booking again except that it has not occurred to them.
A message to that list is not marketing in any sense that needs a budget. It is a sentence:
“Hi Sarah — it has been about six months since we finished with your shoulder. How has it been holding up through the winter? I have space on Tuesday afternoons if you want a check on it.”
Three things make that work, and all three are easy to get wrong. It names the actual problem, so it does not read as a bulk send. It asks a question, so replying is natural. And it offers a specific time, so the answer can be yes rather than “I will look at my diary”.
What does not work: the same text sent to everyone, anything that opens with “We hope this message finds you well”, and discount codes. A discount tells a patient who was going to book anyway that the normal price was negotiable.
Do fifteen of these on a quiet morning. Two or three will book that week, one or two will book later, and nobody minds being asked how their shoulder is.
Keeping a patient is cheaper than finding one
A practice that loses patients after two sessions has an acquisition problem that no amount of acquisition will fix. Before spending anything on being found, it is worth knowing why people stop coming.
The usual reasons, in order:
- They felt better and assumed they were finished. Nobody told them what the rest of the plan was for.
- The next appointment was never booked. They left saying they would ring, and did not.
- Cost, unspoken. Easier to drift away than to say money is tight.
- The times on offer did not fit work. A practice that only offers midday slots loses everyone with a job.
Two habits fix most of that. Book the next appointment before the patient leaves the room, every time — an appointment that exists can be moved, an appointment that does not exist has to be created by someone who is now busy. And say out loud at the first session roughly how many sessions you expect and what the end looks like, so “feeling better” is understood as progress rather than as discharge.
Referrals: the ones that arrive and the ones that do not
Most physiotherapists have a vague plan to “build relationships with local GPs” and never do it, because it feels like sales and because it is genuinely hard to get in front of a doctor.
What actually moves the number is less social and more clerical:
- Send a discharge summary back to whoever referred the patient. One page: what you found, what you did, how it ended. This is the single most effective referral tool available to a physiotherapist and it costs ten minutes. A GP who receives one remembers your name the next time someone limps in.
- Be specific about what you treat. “Physiotherapy” is not memorable. “Post-op knees and running injuries, usually seen within a week” is.
- Say how fast you can see someone. Waiting time is the deciding factor in most referrals, more than technique or price.
- Go where the injuries are. Running clubs, amateur sports teams, gyms, pilates and yoga studios, dance schools, podiatrists. These send more patients than hospitals do, and they are far easier to reach.
A reciprocal habit worth building: when a patient needs something you do not do — an orthotic, a strength programme, a scan — refer them somewhere specific rather than saying “you should see someone about that”.
Referral traffic tends to flow in both directions between people who have actually sent each other work.
Local search, and the one profile that matters
For a local service, the map listing outranks the website in both attention and effort-to-reward. Someone in pain searches, looks at the three results on the map, glances at the reviews and rings one. That entire decision happens before anybody visits a website.
So the free business profile on the search engine your patients use is worth an afternoon:
- Exact opening hours, kept true. Nothing loses a booking like a listing that says open when the door is locked.
- A phone number that is answered, or a booking link that works on a phone.
- Real photos of the actual room and the actual person. Stock images of a smiling model being stretched fool nobody.
- The services you offer, written the way patients describe them — “back pain”, “sports injuries”, “after knee surgery” — rather than in professional vocabulary.
- The same name, address and phone number everywhere they appear online. Inconsistency here quietly hurts you in local rankings.
Asking for reviews without being awkward
Reviews are the closest thing to word of mouth that a stranger can see, and most physiotherapists have far fewer than their patients would happily give, for one reason: they never ask.
Ask at the right moment, which is the session where the patient tells you they are better — not at discharge, when the visit is already over and they are putting their coat on. Ask in person, once, and follow it with a link. Never offer anything in exchange: it is against the rules of every review platform, and a bought review reads like one.
Reply to all of them, including the unhappy one. A short, non-defensive reply to a bad review is read by far more prospective patients than the review itself.
Know who has not been back
Your patient list already tells you who finished treatment six months ago. That list is the cheapest marketing you have.
Create a free account → No credit card. The first 7 days have no limits at all.A website that does one job
A physiotherapy website does not need a blog, a chatbot or a video. It needs to answer four questions within a few seconds on a phone, because that is the device it will be read on:
| What the visitor wants | What has to be visible without scrolling |
|---|---|
| Do you treat my problem? | A plain list of conditions, in patient language |
| Where are you? | Address, area, parking or nearest station |
| What does it cost? | The price. Hiding it filters out more patients than it protects |
| How do I book? | A phone number that dials on tap, or a booking link |
Everything beyond that is decoration. A one-page site that answers those four converts better than an elaborate one that makes a person hunt for the phone number.
Knowing which of these is working
You do not need analytics for this. You need one question, asked at the first session and written down: how did you hear about us?
Three months of that answer, tallied, tells you more than any dashboard: which referrer is actually sending people, whether the map listing is doing anything, and whether the patients who find you through search stay as long as the ones who were recommended.
The second number worth knowing is what a patient is worth across a full course of treatment — average sessions multiplied by your fee. Until you know that, you cannot judge whether any paid channel is worth trying, because you have nothing to compare the cost against.
What Physioly does here, and what it does not
Physioly is practice management software, not marketing software, and the distinction is worth being clear about.
What helps with the work above: a patient list you can search and filter, so the reactivation list is a few clicks rather than a spreadsheet; the clinical record, so a message to a former patient can name their actual problem; packages and session counts, which make discharge and return visible; a diary you can offer specific times from; and PDF reports you can produce in a minute and send to a referring doctor.
What is not there:
- No marketing campaigns. There is no bulk email tool, no newsletter, no automated sequence.
- No “how did you hear about us” field as a dedicated, reportable item — today you would record it in the record and tally it by hand.
- No automatic WhatsApp reminders. The system prepares the message; you send it. Anyone promising fully automatic messaging on that channel is describing something else.
- No website builder or landing pages, beyond a public patient card.
- No review collection or reputation management.
If what you want is a system that holds records, diary and money properly, and leaves you the time to do the work in this article, that is what this is. If you are shopping for campaign automation, you are shopping in the wrong category — and honestly, for a practice under a few hundred patients, the campaign tool is not what is missing.
Questions we get asked
How do physiotherapists get new patients?
In roughly this order of return: patients who have been treated before and come back, word of mouth from those patients, referrals from other health professionals and trainers, and local search. Paid advertising works for some clinics, but it is the most expensive channel and the easiest one to waste money on before the first three are working.
How do I fill empty slots in my physiotherapy diary next week?
Look at patients discharged three to twelve months ago and send a short, specific message to the ones whose condition tends to recur. Not a newsletter — a sentence that names their problem and offers a time. A morning of that fills more slots than a month of advertising, and it costs nothing but the morning.
Should a physiotherapist advertise on Google or social media?
Only after the free channels are working and you know what a patient is worth to you across a full course of treatment. If you do not know your average number of sessions and your average revenue per patient, you cannot tell whether an ad that costs 30 a click is a bargain or a disaster.
How do I get more referrals from doctors and trainers?
Make it easy and make it visible. A one-page summary of what you treat and how quickly you can see someone, sent to people who already have your patients in front of them, plus a short discharge report back to whoever referred each patient. The report is the part most physiotherapists skip, and it is the part that produces the next referral.
How many reviews does a physiotherapy clinic need?
Enough to look like a real practice rather than a new one — in most areas that means more than the clinic two streets away, gathered steadily rather than ten in one afternoon. What matters more than the count is that recent ones exist: a profile whose last review is from two years ago reads worse than one with half as many, all from this year.