Interpersonal
Branding
for Therapists
You're not on your own anymore.
I'm Carrie Wiita, and I had career-pivoted my way into grad school to become a therapist when I found out the field of psychotherapy has a tortured relationship with marketing.
Through vague threats and not-so-subtle shaming of clinicians, the field itself has made "marketing" a dirty word. Then, the field offers absolutely no business or marketing training as part of the standard therapist education before shoving you off a metaphorical cliff to go make your way in a capitalist hellscape where your actual survival requires marketing yourself to either employers or clients.
I had learned a lot about marketing, personal branding, and professional development in my previous careers, and I knew there could be a better way.
So I made it.
My master's thesis exploring the intersection of marketing and psychotherapy required a massive interdisciplinary literature review and ultimately resulted in the development of Interpersonal Branding, the first marketing and professional development framework specifically for service providers.
You are no longer on your own to figure out who you are as a professional and how to talk about yourself in public. Let me help!
Let's create an Interpersonal Brand that will make marketing easier and your work more fulfilling
for the rest of your career.
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Bronze
What should we know about the services you provide? Better descriptions result in more sales.
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Silver
What should we know about the services you provide? Better descriptions result in more sales.
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Gold
What should we know about the services you provide? Better descriptions result in more sales.
Whether you're just finding marketing your service a tad overwhelming or whether you downright loathe it and would rather fall into a sinkhole than talk about yourself online, you're not alone.
I think it’s time for every therapist to find out that the entire history and culture of our field is conspiring to make you feel like a shameful imposter about marketing.
(Yeah, I said it--the agony is a feature, not a bug. I'm happy to tell you all about it and why it's time to eradicate it if you're interested in a little side-quest.)
But even if things aren't that bad yet, maybe you're just struggling with marketing your practice as a service-provider, and you've been gamely trying to follow all the "solopreneur" and small-biz marketing advice you've found online but it's still not working...there are good reasons for that.
Marketing a service like therapy or coaching requires a different approach.
Traditional personal branding rhetoric doesn't work, because it's too self-focused--it ignores how you impact your clients.
Traditional advertising doesn't work, because your service can't be quantified--it can't be measured against competing options, it can't be test-driven before purchase, and it can't be returned if the consumer isn't satisfied.
These approaches are lacking because they fail to understand that, as a service-provider, your marketing is actually part of the service you offer.
We know from decades of research that it's not the interventions of any specific approach that make therapy work (CBT thought-logs alone, for example, don't magically cure depression).
Instead, the common factors research seems to suggest that interventions only become useful to clients as "rituals for healing" in the hands of a trusted "healer" who has proposed a convincing therapeutic "myth" that sets expectations for therapy. Therapy outcomes are consistently correlated with the therapeutic relationship and client expectations and preferences for treatment.
Marketing is the best way to optimize the therapeutic relationship, honor client preferences, and set and manage expectations from the start.