Alright, you’ve started 2018 by making a couple new green business decisions. You opted for LED light bulbs, installed a couple recycling bins, and even put in a fancy programmable thermostat to help lessen the environmental impact of your physical therapy clinic. That’s awesome! You may have even already started to see some returns on these green investments via a smaller power bill or several extra hours of billable patient time (if you said no to laundry and made the switch to our EcoPro Pillow Covers). Now it’s time to turn the return on your green investments up to 11 by letting your patients, and future patients, know about your green decisions. If you’re ready to start marketing your eco-friendly clinic practices, here’s what you need to know.

First, How Not To Do It

 

First a note of warning. If you aren’t a green clinic, don’t advertise that you’re a green business. This is called “greenwashing,” and if you get caught, it can have a disastrous impact on your credibility in the marketplace. Simply put, only advertise and market why is factual. If you don’t have an employee carpool program, don’t advertise that you do. Keep your marketing claims aligned with what you have in place.

 

Marketing Your Green Clinic

Specify Your Clinic’s Green Investments

 

“Going Green” means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. A generic, “We’re a green clinic!” message is never going to be as impactful as a message that focuses on the specific green actions your clinic has taken. Some green decisions have a direct and noticeable impact on your business (opting for reusable coffee mugs vs disposable cups for example). Others might be invisible to your patients and even your works, such as installing a tankless water heater in your clinic.

Be sure to take stock of both kinds of green decisions. Have you:

• Installed low-flow aerators
• Instituted a recycling program
• Switched to EcoPro Pillow Covers (saving 2,600 gallons of water each year with each cover)

Use these specific actions in your marketing messages to ensure your clients are aware of every green practice you’re employing.

Focus on The Benefits of Your Green Actions

On top of letting your patients know about the green investments your clinic is making, you need to also let them know what the benefit means to the patients. Why should your patients care that you switched to LED bulbs? What do they get out of it?

Case in point, the benefit for switching to EcoPro Pillow Covers isn’t that the new pillow cover is going to in it of itself enhance your patients experience (although they are quite comfortable). Instead, the benefit is that switching to our pillow covers frees up hours of time every week for your therapists and admin staff. Time that can be then spent enhancing the experience of your patients.

That’s the marketable benefit. Less laundry means more time your staff can spend with each patient.

Evangelize Your Actions

Fun fact, companies that openly embrace “going green” outperformed their counterparts financially. Consumers (as a whole) are big fans of sustainability business practices. In fact, 91% of consumers say that they expect companies to operate responsibly when it comes to the environment.

If you’ve taking steps to “greenify” your business, you need to be sure your current, and future, patients are aware of those actions and their benefits. Start by:

• Sending out emails to your current clients advertising the change
• Updating your website
• Communicating to your staff (so that they can communicate to your patients)

 

Bottom line, if you’re making green investments to make your PT clinic more environmentally friendly, you need to make sure your patients and partners are aware of these changes. Build a competitive advantage for yourself by being known as a PT clinic that cares about healing the environment as much as they care about healing its patients.