Beginner’s Guide to AI Marketing for Therapists
Are you curious about how AI can make marketing easier for your private practice? In this episode, I’m sharing simple, beginner-friendly ways to start using tools like ChatGPT to create content that feels authentic to you and your practice.
We’ll talk about programming AI to match your unique voice, generating ideas for blogs and social media, and even crafting newsletters that connect with your audience. If you’re new to AI or just wondering where to start, this episode is full of practical tips to help you explore what’s possible.
AI Tips You Don’t Want to Miss:
- How to program ChatGPT to reflect your personality, niche, and tone.
- Why generic AI content doesn’t work—and how to make your marketing stand out.
- Using AI to generate blog ideas, social media posts, and newsletters tailored to your practice.
- Tips for building SEO-friendly content to attract and engage your ideal clients.
- Simple ways to re-engage inactive clients with AI-crafted emails and messages.
Mentioned in the Episode:
Book a session with Kym to set up ChatGPT for your practice: https://calendly.com/kymtolson/build-an-ai-gpt-with-kym
Episode 15: For tips on making AI sound human: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2429049/episodes/16198750
Connect with me:
- Instagram: @thetravelingtherapist_kym
- Join the Clinical AI Club: www.clinicalaiclub.com
Sponsored by Alma: www.helloalma.com/kym
Sponsored by Berries: www.berries.icu/therapists
Transcript:
[00:01:06] Hi everybody, before I get started, I just want to say this is sponsored by Barry’s B E R R I E S dot I C U slash therapist.
[00:01:16] It’s with an S on the end Barry’s is an amazing company that I work with. I’m a clinical consultant with them. I partner with them. I love them. And I just like to do a little plug for them before we get started with this stuff. So I talk about this sometimes, but somebody had posted in the comments that they wanted to talk about marketing. They just wanted to know about marketing in general, using AI. So, I mean, this is a huge problem.
[00:01:41] rabbit hole. There’s so much we could talk about with this, but I’ll touch on some of the lighter topics around this and give you some ideas. Lots and lots of ways to use AI for marketing. Like I said, I could go really down a deep dive with this. You can build like really specific GPTs through chat, GPT or Gemini. They have a capacity to build GPTs too, which are really specialized versions of GPTs that you can use.
[00:02:08] Also, if you’re in chat, UBT, you can search. their GPT store for social media, for marketing, for all of that. And there are some GPTs that are already pre built, but you still need to go in and program it around your specific. niche, your personality, who you are as a therapist. You want to like really give it a lot of information around just your specific field, your theoretical perspective, the type of practice that you have, the type of person you’re trying to target on social media.
[00:02:38] If you don’t know where to start with that, you can start with a really simple prompt with Chachapiti. You could just say You know, look, I want to start marketing on social media. I know nothing about it. I need you to ask me what questions would be helpful for, you know, the answers to, to help me be successful with this.
[00:02:55] So then it’ll start asking you questions. If you can’t think of prompts right off the top of your head. So I hope that’s helpful. And then once you get started with that, it’ll be a lot easier. So I would never just go into chat, you could decode and say, give me. A social media post on, world mental health day related to my audience because chat GPT is just going to give you this really like AI type answer.
[00:03:17] It’s going to be real generic. It’s not going to be catered to your tone of voice. Maybe you’re super sarcastic or you’re really funny or you want to just be super professional and educate people in a really professor like way. Like all of those things, you can give that feedback to chat GPT to help you have the output be exactly how you want it to be for the social media.
[00:03:36] some ideas, if you haven’t thought about it, how you can use AI for marketing is one is content creation, like we’re talking about. So you can write blogs, social media posts, you can do newsletters. for blog ideas, you can use AI to generate blog posts and topics that address common client questions that you have.
[00:03:56] Just like for an example, you can say Chachi Boutique, give me 10 blog ideas for stress management in 2024. Or, you know, let’s say you have, like, a really specific niche that you’re trying to attract through your blogs. Because the whole point in having blogs, anyway, is to, like, build up your SEO, to educate people, but also to let people know you’re an expert in, certain areas, and to basically get them to want to work with you, to book an appointment with you.
[00:04:22] And to educate. Some people like to just put information out there to educate the world and all that. So, you could be kind of generic, give me 10 blog post ideas for stress management 2024, right? That answer might be way different than it would have been back in 1990, because there’s different tools and techniques.
[00:04:35] There’s biofeedback, there’s, you know, apps you can use, there’s all kinds of stuff. So, it’s going to give you 10 blog ideas for stress management. And then you would interact with it. You could say, actually, I focus on stress management, and specifically, I do buy a feedback, so I want these blog posts to be really niched down to that area that I target.
[00:04:56] So you could give it feedback like that, and go back and forth, and once you get the topics, For it exactly how you want it to be. You could say, Okay, I like topic number two. Can you write a blog post for that? Can you make sure it’s SEO enhanced? So chat GPT will actually write a blog post in the format.
[00:05:12] That is most widely used for Blog posts and blog posts that have good SEO. So you always want to have headings you want to have the first first You know, paragraph of each section. You wanted to also have these SEO keywords in, in it. So you can give directions around that, but ChatGPT has gotten really good.
[00:05:30] If you just say like, I want it to be SEO enhanced, it knows a lot of the stuff. So it’s already to put that in there for you. So, anyway, okay, in the social media post, I’m going to give you guys a couple of ideas around that. AI can help you write really engaging posts very quickly. You can go to other people’s social media.
[00:05:49] You can take a screenshot of something that you saw got a lot of engagement, maybe in your niche, or the same type of therapist that you are. Take a screenshot of it, take it over to ChatGPT and say, look at this in a screenshot of the caption. Look at this. Real this person did look at the captions.
[00:06:05] They put in I want you to analyze it and I want you to rewrite Social media idea for me based on what you know about me about my brand and you know All of that stuff that you did to program it before you can make it generic create an Instagram post caption for world mental health day focusing on self care tips, right?
[00:06:23] I mean you could get that You know, broad with it. If you want to, it just depends on how niche down you want to be. And they do say like the riches are in the niches. So I really highly recommend if you have a certain population you’re working with, try to get chat GPT to help you write content around that niche specifically, because you’re going to attract more people to your content that way.
[00:06:46] You can use AI to draft. It’s like engaging client newsletters that include updates about your practice, mental health tips, and you know, upcoming events that you might have, let’s say maybe you’re going to do like a, like a weekend workshop or something, or you’re going to host a like all day retreat in your town or something like that.
[00:07:07] You can tell it to, you know, understand what your newsletter format needs to be, which you could talk to it about that too. You could say first of all, I need you to help me. Create a really helpful structure for a newsletter that I can send to my clients. And again, my niches, buh, buh, buh. And I wanted to, offer helpful tips that they can use immediately if they’re needing help with their stress management or whatever your niches.
[00:07:33] I also want you to throw in an inspirational quote for every newsletter. I also want you to ask me if I have any updates that I want to give my clients. And I want you to give an educational worksheet that they can download that would help with this particular area that I know all my clients are struggling with this month, dealing with, politics or something like how to, how to cope with politics because we’re in that season right now, something like that.
[00:07:59] So you could tell it all those instructions and say, now write it and it’ll write it really perfectly for you. Really, the key with the whole thing is to be very specific with the prompts that you’re giving it. So another another way you can use a I for marketing in general or just running your practice in a way that’s going to help you retain clients and attract clients and keep clients. All that stuff is just like personalized emails.
[00:08:23] You can write them. Of course, we usually want to send these messages through our HIPAA compliant EHR, but there are ways to send messages that way so you can have it craft, personalized emails for clients. they call it lead nurturing, but you know, nurturing maybe people on your waitlist or nurturing clients that maybe have just fallen off the map a little bit.
[00:08:44] They’re not coming to their appointments. They’re not answering your calls or not rescheduling that sort of thing. So you could say like, write a friendly email to reengage a client who hasn’t booked a session in a month, Or help me compose an email that I can send to a client that I haven’t heard from.
[00:08:58] Um, I want to express concern about. their mother that passed away and their history of depression and remind them of these tools that we’ve already talked about in therapy that helped them in the past. So you could just type that out real quick. No PHI, of course, because CHA2BT is not HIPAA compliant.
[00:09:14] Have it write that out for you. It constructs a beautiful message. And if it already knows your voice and your tone and sort of your brand and the type of client that you work with, it’s going to get really, Really specific and send a great email to your client and it makes it so much easier because you don’t have to sit there And think about like what am I gonna say?
[00:09:33] I don’t even know what to say to this client today, Those are some ideas Email campaigns you can you can have it right like whole campaigns for you. Let’s say that you are going to Start offering group therapy in your practice and you have a newsletter that you want to share already interact with you send a monthly newsletter.
[00:09:51] So you have a list of potential clients, ex clients, clients that maybe you’re on your newsletter, but haven’t signed up with you yet. And you want to maybe do like a campaign around this upcoming group. So you want to educate them some, you want to tell them about what’s coming up. You want to encourage them to sign up.
[00:10:08] You want to explain all the FAQs for it, that sort of thing. So you could write, outline a five part email series to help. clients that potential clients understand my upcoming group therapy program. I want you to encourage them to enroll and I also want you to make sure you’re touching on the major pain points that these particular clients might have that would be a good fit for this group that I have coming up.
[00:10:35] That kind of thing. It’s going to, it’s going to say, okay, great. Email one, two, three, four, five. It’s going to write them out for you. Most cases, it already knows the structure that goes into a good, like, email sales sequence, but you could even put that in there. Like I want it to be nurturing empathetic, and also in a proven sequence that would result in people signing up for this.
[00:11:01] Mastermind or this group therapy or whatever you’re doing, put it in there and just like encourage you to write a sequence that follows like a strategic pattern to ensure that you get more results when you send the emails out. And there is a format for that. If you go into chat and say, what’s the best format for, automated campaign sequence to sell something, you know, to sell mental health services, something like that.
[00:11:23] It’s going to tell you, you, you start with the. Hey, how are you? Relatable story kind of email. And then it goes into, some like maybe testimonials or some things that establish your expertise. It’s going to talk about, you know, the list of things that would happen in this five part sequence. The last email is always like, okay, signups end today.
[00:11:43] Hop on the list. You know, that like, kind of like urgency email that you get that last email that you get when you’re signing up for stuff like this. those are just a couple ways I could go on and on with SEO optimization, how to do that client engagement. We could talk more about that if they’re not engaging, how you can use social media automation to do engagements, how you can use chatbots.
[00:12:05] This is a little more advanced, but chatbots that your clients can access between sessions if they want to, interact with you. You can program chatbots to be very familiar with your style and your voice and your training and all of that. So it’ll respond to the clients when you’re like, not with them in session, but it keeps them connected to you.
[00:12:23] So there’s lots of ways to do that with AI. And then of course, with the branding and messaging, like I was talking about before. Just really training it on who you are, your professional voice. You can, you can upload examples of other blog posts that you’ve written, or let’s say you’re a published author.
[00:12:42] You can upload that. You could train it all in the backend to have more information about you. So it makes this stuff really compelling and really personalized to you because the other thing about Like using it for marketing and social media content. All that is that you just don’t want it to be generic AI because we are, we’re all to the point where we can spot it, right?
[00:13:01] When it says game changing, when it says revolutionize all these like AI words, we can spot it now. So you want to make sure that it’s writing in your voice and like a human, especially with blog posts and that sort of thing. I have another podcast episode just based on it, like how to make it not sound like AI wrote it.
[00:13:18] If you go back, I think it’s like episode 15 maybe, or something like that. And in the clinical AI club, we always, we’re always talking about this stuff. Every single month we have a monthly implementation session. It’s 90 minutes where we just kind of geek out everything AI. We talk about stuff like this.
[00:13:35] Well, how do I make it sound like a human or, you know, how do I get it to, to perform this way inside of a GPT? I just met with somebody before this I do like chat GPT, Consultations to help you build GPT chatbots and you know how to use chat GPT to get it to perform the way you want it to so I do personalized Consultations on that if anybody’s interested go over to my email info Kim Tolson calm I’ll send it to you or my scheduling link will be under this episode You could schedule if you’d like to schedule like a GPT workshop with me all of that being said, there’s ways to program it.
[00:14:10] There’s ways to do the social media so it doesn’t sound like a robot. Again, this is sponsored by Barry’s B E R R I E S dot ICU slash therapist.
[00:14:21] Go check them out. You guys, I love them.
[00:14:24] You guys have a great week and I will talk to you later. Bye.