(Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited to remove this message.) Hi, welcome to the Abundant Practice Podcast. I'm Allison from Abundance Practice Building. I have a nearly diagnosable obsession with helping therapists build sustainable, joy-filled private practices, just like I've done for tens of thousands of therapists across the world. I'm excited to help you too. If you want to fill your practice with ideal clients, we have loads of free resources and paid support.
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Welcome back to the Abundant Practice Podcast. I'm your host, Allison Puryear. I am here with Allison Fox, and she is with Mental Health Match. We are talking about ethical marketing. We are talking about brand stories. We're going over some things that are going to have you thinking about not just like what you're needing for your practice, but like who you are as a therapist and what you provide. So thank you so much for talking with us, Allison. I'm really psyched to dig in.
I am also excited to talk to you, Allison, and I'm going to giggle every time I call you Allison. Awesome. We'll do it. You're at Mental Health Match. You are helping clients find therapists, making sure that they are a good fit. I am sure that you have seen any number of different marketing blunders on the parts of therapists. I know I certainly see some blunders. I see some things that people were really hoping they could hang their hat on as a marketing strategy and it not working out.
Are there some things that you would encourage clinicians to think about when they're considering a marketing strategy? Yes, there is. When I think about marketing, I think about it in two ways, right? You think about it in the ways that are practical and I think about it in the ways that are emotional. Practical are things like where you market, right? For example, if you are a therapist, it probably does not make sense for you to have a billboard in Times Square, right?
Not in the budget, not relevant. Then there is the emotional side of things, which is the messages that you have put out in the world, wherever you are going to put them, do they meet the person that you are looking to connect with in a way that they feel seen and heard and sort of, you know, in advertising, we see the first rule of advertising is paying attention, right?
So, you know, I can kind of break it down into these two things, like the way that therapists market themselves is from what we call channels, right? It is pretty tried and true. I mean, there is the mental health matches, there is psychology today, there are places like OMA who cater more to therapists who take insurance, right? These are large, effectively kind of directories where therapy seekers come to look for a therapist and it makes sense for you to be on these websites.
The bigger piece of it is who you are as a therapist because, you know, getting essentially traffic or getting clients to look at you or consider you, it comes from, you know, in marketing, every soon we see finding the right audience. And there is another thing that they say, so it is just a little bit of my background.
I have been working in marketing and in brand strategy for over 20 years and I focus specifically on ethical marketing and sort of ethical stories and businesses and organizations that are good for people and culture. And one of the things that they say is the very best brands are the ones that are true.
So with that, like you should think about marketing always as a relationship and when you create a profile or when you create a website, your job is to kind of show up as an individual so that people can find you and feel connected to you as an individual. It's the same thing, the way somebody feels connected to a brand. You might think Patagonia is a brand for me and Marlboro cigarettes is not, right?
People literally respond to brands psychologically in the same way that you build connection with another person. So when therapists, I think, feel a little overwhelmed by like marketing, they're like SEO and TikTok. At the end of the day, what you're trying to do is just communicate really authentically. And that is far more important than thinking about marketing is. And yeah, I think that everyone talks about the therapeutic alliance, right?
And the therapeutic alliance is a really great way to think about your marketing too, right? You're building trust, you're building connection and it comes through your relationship and in order for you to have a relationship with someone, you have to be sort of truly and authentically yourself. Mm-hmm, yeah.
And I think sometimes the pushback I get around this from therapists, especially therapists from different certain modalities is this idea of like there's a boundary issue with me showing up as myself. So I would love for us to dig into that. Yeah, let's dig into that. So showing up as yourself does not mean you know, putting a list of your favorite gifts on your website or talking about how your hobbies are baking birthday cakes.
It means speaking in a tone that is accessible and honest around like the way that you practice and that you engage with people. It means things like thinking about sometimes therapists are very facile and very educated in the modalities or in the skills or tactics or strategies that you use to treat people. But think about that sometimes a little bit as inside baseball, right?
Because, you know, I am the chief connection officer of a mental health company and I still struggle to define dialectical behavioral therapy like entirely. And while it is totally important to have the modalities that you practice or your background or your degrees on your site, I would consider that what they mean to you is not what the same thing that they mean to the clients who are seeking therapy with you.
So one, the things that are sort of like the inside baseball language, you're saying like, I practice dialectical behavioral therapy. It means that. So the inside baseball stuff, you're gonna wanna always translate a little bit more into consumer language or think about it, consumer language is a marketing term, right? Speaking of inside baseball, but you're gonna think about what someone who is fairly ignorant of what you are doing needs to understand and also skeptical.
Like this is a big piece of trust when somebody is gonna come to you with a trauma or a sadness or their hopes and dreams and wishes and fears. So there's the, how do we explain inside baseball in a way that's really good? And then there's also another level thinking about why someone is seeking therapy. For example, someone could go to a therapist for fertility.
And while that is something that people specialize in, there are also things like, there are more about lived experience, like racial identity or military service or loss of a loved one. So saying like, I work with clients who have experienced these things, it's a far more human and realistic way of connecting with people, right?
And when I say you should be your authentic self, it's not about taking away those boundaries that are really important to therapeutic alliance, but it is about doing the same thing that you do in therapy every single day in a way that is organized in a consumable piece of content. So this all feels a little bit speculative or theoretical when I'm talking about it and I wanna kind of make it actionable for everyone.
But at the highest level, I think the best thing to do to communicate your authentic self is to talk about what makes your clients trust you and why they would trust you when you were going out in marketing to and like finding your match or finding your people. I mean, every brand, every therapist, they're looking for the people that they're able to serve and connect with.
So when you think about like, this is what I want or this is what I'm asking for, this is what I want people to come to me for, you make therapist profiles or therapist websites that are really meaningful. Do you think that's helpful? I think it's helpful. And I think, yeah, like even digging, like giving examples will probably help.
So I'm thinking about if in session, you're not like, I think your family of origin attachment wounds are creating this dynamic within your relationships that create some like anxious attachment. You're not saying that in session. You might be saying the way that your parents treated you was pretty fucked up. And as a result, you spent so much of your life trying to prove that you were good enough and you were worth choosing to them.
And now you're doing the same thing with this boyfriend who treats you like garbage. That's how you might talk in session instead of this like airy, academic description of what they're going through. So if you do the airy fairy description, if you're overly academic, you're trying to look smart. Like I know what you're doing. I get it. I've done it myself. You're trying to look smart and use $5 words. But instead of them being like, oh, that person's so intelligent. That's who I should choose.
They're thinking like, I don't know what the heck she's talking about. And next, who else is on the list? Yes. Yeah, totally. And like this idea of being like, I help people improve their relationships at major moments of transition in their life. For example, being in young adulthood and looking for a partner or looking at second marriages or long-term partnerships. You have to translate that very much into sort of, I'm going to call it lived words. I think it's like a nice way of putting that.
Yeah. And at the same time, this going back to DBT is like my random example. You also do want to create an experience of trust, right? You want to be somebody like, I am educated. I have a PhD. I've done all of this training because just like you were taking your kid to the doctor, you're not going to be like, oh, do you believe in like supplements and YouTube videos? That's not how you choose doctors for your kids. Right.
Right. So I think that it's this really nice balance of talking about how you can help and support and a little bit even rethinking about how you build relationships with your clients and balancing it with that building of trust, building of expertise, but in a way that is accessible and not, and doesn't ever come across as like a condescending or erudite. Sorry for the $10 word in which we're discussing not using $10 words.
Yeah. Yeah. And I love your point that the tone is not just the words, but it's also the tone of how you're speaking is a part of how you are authentically you. And it's a great way to show up as you without being like when I was 10, this happened to me too. You know what I mean? Like you don't have to cross the boundaries of self-disclosure if that's not appropriate or if you're not comfortable with it.
But just talking like a freaking human being, you can really do a great job in connecting with potential clients. They can already feel like that alliance is starting to form. Absolutely. I also, I don't know, y'all have probably maybe heard this a million times, but I still want to call out the importance of a phone-out. Yes. OMG y'all. In my career, so many times I have said I will fall backwards into my grave yelling, design, right? Because people re-look before they read.
Yep. Y'all are therapists. You know, our cerebral cortex lights up when we see a face. Yes, not a couch, not the image of your office, not stacked rocks, not the beach. Yes, totally. Not a mandala or a zen cone. Yes. Your face. It's the therapeutic alliance. So, you know, of all the things that you invest in, two things, and the majority of the way people find therapists, particularly, I think, early on in their career, is things like Psychology Today, Mental Health Match, Alma, right?
And these are all profiles because at the end of the day, back to the sort of like channel or how people find you thing, y'all aren't going to run your own advertising and nor should you try unless you want to be a social media influencer because you genuinely enjoy it and that's something that you want to do. Don't feel like you have to be on Instagram. Yeah. And also, by the way, organic work only sometimes works.
Anyway, this idea of photos, natural lighting, a composed, perhaps gentle, inviting smile, paying to have a photographer come in and do your photo is the number one way that a profile or someone forms a relationship, right? Like if they look at your face and they think, like, I see an Instagram or a TikTok filter. I've seen this. Like I know that putting yourself out there is like, this is hilarious. I'm a marketing person. I post on Instagram like once every year and a half.
I have zero personal brand vibes. So it's hilarious that I'm giving this advice to everybody, right? It's hard to do, but y'all need a great photo done by a photographer that shows you as your authentic self, right? Yeah. Not a filter, not like it could, maybe your mom is a great photographer. It could even be on an iPhone if you're lucky, but I would just say invest in that because it's a big, big, big, big, big one.
Yes. And then from there, when you write profiles or you write little websites, you write blurbs in people in your community, like your sister or whatever to read it and feel like, is it feel authentic? Is it feel like somebody I want to talk to? Those are kind of like the two main tips for how to do it quite practically. And I would say reading aloud what you wrote. It will feel really wrong in your mouth if it doesn't sound like you. OMG.
Yeah. So my mother owned an ad agency, so I came by what I do quite honestly. And she used to make me read aloud my papers in high school. So annoying. So helpful. She also used to stand over my shoulder and say, don't say in 10 words what you can say in three. And you're like, but mom, I have to write a certain number of words. I'm trying. Mom, it has to be 700 words. I understand that I will undo all this learning later.
Yeah, but also maybe it's like everybody knows they're going through that paper being like, what if I add one more word to set this word count? Yeah, not not like this. There's another thing that I say that if you can, when I'm when I'm designing things or making things or making communications for people, that if you can remove 30% of it and it still makes sense, you've made it better. I love that. And I would say as a whole, us therapists can be wordy. Put it up there.
I'm including myself in it. I think as a crew of people, we can be a little verbose. I can be a little verbose. Like I love when somebody comes in and chops up my work. Like genuinely, I feel a sense of because I write things all day, all the time. I feel such a sense of relief when somebody comes in and it's like line, line, line, delete, delete, delete. I'm like, oh, yeah.
I want to talk about the photo because what I see happen is people choose the photo where they think they look best, cutest or prettiest or whatever, which is 100% natural, normal. Like I feel you. I have that knee jerk reaction too. I would love for you instead to find which photos do I look both most confident and most empathetic in? It might not be your smile that makes you look so good. It might not be that way.
It might be the one where you look like you're still smiling because you got to be warm, like confident and warm. Totally. You look like you know exactly what you're doing. That's what we want. Yes, I love that. And you want to look confident, warm, trustworthy. Also in advertising, y'all may have heard the statement, they say sell the sizzle, not the steak. And in your photo, ultimately you're also selling a little bit of hope, right? No toxic positivity here, right?
But you are selling that you can help and that things get better. And that's actually what I talk about like therapy often. I want people to understand that it's not about fixing a problem. This is a high level. It's about having and getting the life that you are working for and that you desire and that you love. And so in many ways, you're sort of selling that too. So I want to think about that in your profiles as well.
And in your photos, which is you are providing hope as well as expertise and as well as sort of like safety and security and soothing. I want to say something that I don't know if I've ever said this aloud before. I know photos make a lot of us feel insecure.
If you are somebody out there who is like, well, I don't think I'm going to get chosen if I put a photo because I am unattractive, because I am overweight, because whatever label you put on yourself, I will tell you the therapists I have worked with who look more model-esque, I think they have more of a disadvantage than the rest of us.
So those of you who are model-esque, don't be afraid to put the less attractive picture up if you're looking confident and warm and trustworthy because human beings are insecure. And it would be hard for somebody struggling with self-esteem to sit across from somebody who is dropped in gorgeous and super put together and all of it.
Even if that's who you naturally are as a human being, I don't want people who count themselves among what our culture calls less attractive, whether they're right or not. Often they're wrong, but I don't want them to think the picture is going to hold them back from getting clients. It absolutely won't. I don't care what you look like. A hundred percent, a hundred percent.
I love that you said this because the thing that I wanted to say when I kind of jumped in there for a hot second was I wanted to talk about being your authentic self, right? I wanted to talk about like this idea of ethical advertising, this idea of the very best brand stories are the ones that are true. Yeah, I see a fundamental similarity in the way that I build. I actually jokingly say my job is to be a brand therapist and a brand accountant.
And I said this when I worked in bar companies, like before I worked in mental health and like this back to this idea of emotional and practical. Your job is to create connection and your job is to embody an authentic self for your client in a way. This thing about we want our clients to stand, I'm not a therapist, but we want your clients to stand in their own power. We want them to feel confident about themselves.
We want them to say like, you know what, maybe I have this scar in my eyebrow and it doesn't mean that like it's going to hold me back or make me unlovable or make me shamed or make me rejected. So when you show up in a photo or when you show up in a profile as proud of who you are. Freaking powerful. It's powerful. The self that we show to the world, as I'm sure all of you understand, is very much a reflection of how we feel about ourselves.
And I see this irony in the way that therapists show up when they're showing themselves. Like you all are all inherently caregivers. Shout out to the caregivers of the world. I know. Feminism. But I want caregivers. I want the people who are doing the great work of holding all of the ways that the world can harm or hurt us to be able to stand with pride and joy when they show themselves to the world. And I think more than any other practical tip or like no pictures of rocks.
I mean, other than take a profile photo, I'll ride or die on that one. This sense of who am I? What do I want? How am I valuable to people? And what is the story that I have about who I am as a practitioner? Knowing and holding that that's important is back to this idea that the very best brand stories are the ones that are true. And it's the story that you get to do that you deserve to tell about the work that you do. And it's why I work with ethical companies.
Because I want to tell stories that are not lipstick on a pig. Right. Right. And I think that even there, we are also skeptical of marketing. This also might not even be about your self-esteem. Right. You're like, ew, I have to market. Like, icky, car salesman. But real marketing, really good brand work and brand storytelling is authentic and connected communications. And I think you get to leave any trappings of like, oh no, I have to be like, get on down to Bobby's truck sales. Right.
You get to put that over there. Yeah. Because your work, it's to tell your story with pride about who you are and know that that's meaningful. Right. And that is in fact, the most meaningful thing that you can do. Right. That you talking about their experience, like what your ideal clients experience and language that they recognize that makes them feel seen and known, cared for. And like, there is somebody who can help them is such a relief to them. It's such a relief.
Great marketing is not about artifice. Another $5 word, but we'll excuse it. I can't help it. I love words. Yeah. Amazing. Allison, you've mentioned Mental Health Match a few times. Can you tell us very briefly what Mental Health Match does and how people can learn more? Yeah. So if y'all are not familiar with Mental Health Match, our mission is to be like the very best place to find therapeutic care. And we are going through a massive, massive update of our site experience.
We've been around for quite some time. And in a way, it's so ironic that we're talking about this because the work that we've done as a company, it's been a little bit behind the veil of, I'm going to call it mediocre branding. And so our mission is to actually dive in and support therapy seekers to be matched with the therapist that are right for them. And internally, we talk a lot about how we want to be the consumer out there already on therapeutic support.
So many ways that people find therapy these days is based on whether or not they can pay for it, not whether or not it's right for them, or whether or not you show up in search results and somebody likes your picture. Finding therapy is so hard. Oh, my jeez. I just spent like two months finding my own therapist, which is deeply ironic because I work in mental health. Right?
So we're out to solve this problem for, we call them seekers, for therapy seekers and for therapists to create this authentic connection. Like in many ways, our site is built around this therapeutic alliance and everything that we do is to support, empower, and inform therapy seekers to make the right choice and to support and empower therapists to tell their story in a way that's going to connect to them with the right person. Yes. So keep your eyes out.
I'm not sure quite when this will, this episode will air, but the site should be live by then, which I am extremely excited about. I mean, it's already live, but the new one. Yeah, yeah. It's new. It's new makeover. I mean, it's Instagram filter. And that's at mentalhealthmatch.com. And we'll put that in the show notes so that people can check it out.
But it is not a kind of thing where you just like, it's not like psychology today where people are scrolling and scrolling and scrolling and scrolling and trying to find a therapist amid all the therapists. It's more honed than that. Based on what they say, they are given a shorter number of people to consider. Yes. Thank you for saying the clear version of what I just said, because I'm so close to it.
Which is, so we run people through a clinically rigorous survey and onboarding process when they come to Mental Health Match. And then for all of our therapists, we actually, with our therapy seekers consent, ship a dossier of their presenting issues and their needs and what they're looking for to any therapist with whom they are matched. And then for seekers, they are presented with only five matches. They have the ability to expand it if they want.
But five sort of primo matches for therapy seekers based on what they're looking for. So our data shows that people are far more likely to contact a therapist that they meet on Mental Health Match, meet versus somewhere else, because they've kind of been pre, the relationship has been set up for success. Our focus is on quality matches, not on random people calling to ask if you do autism diagnosis when you're a couples therapist. Amazing. Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Alison.
I really appreciate you talking with us about this. And hopefully people are able to immediately apply what they've learned about showing up as themselves and all their marketing. So I appreciate it. Thank you very much. And I really send just like the best wishes and the deepest gratitude to everyone who is listening. And thanks for the care and the work that you do. It's not an easy job. And it's often overlooked for shinier or glamourier things. And your work is important. And we thank you.
Yay. I'd love for you to follow, rate and review, but I really want you to share this episode with a therapist friend. Let's help all our colleagues build what they want.