4 Easy & Free Giveaways to Get More Therapy Clients

You’ve already read the title of this article so I know many of you are already wondering, “Why in the world would I give something away for free to try and get more therapy clients?”

The simple answer? Because it works.

If your giveaway is valuable enough and if it targets your ideal client like a laser pointer, it could drive in new traffic and new clients by the bucket-full. The key is to create a giveaway people actually want to use.

Scratching your head trying to figure out who your “ideal client” is? Let our Ideal Client Quiz help you out!

How do “giveaways” work?

A “giveaway” in this context is typically a downloadable PDF or word processor file that is meant to be printed out or viewed from your computer.

When website visitors are still unsure whether or not they want to commit to an appointment or a consultation with you yet, a giveaway they can download or print out right now is a great way to get an email address from them so you can stay in touch. Once you get their email address, you can continue marketing to them to help keep your practice top-of-mind and further build trust. That way, when those potential clients are ready to seek help, it’s you that they contact first.

The best giveaways are tagged with your name and contact information on every page, perhaps even an explicit invitation to reach out to you when the potential client is ready to take the next step in their care. This turns your giveaway into an interactive business card that your ideal clients are potentially using and viewing every day.

Hot Tip : Make sure your giveaway is something actionable and relevant to your ideal client.

For example, if your practice focuses on pain management and chronic pain sufferers, a worksheet on how to work through couples’ conflicts might be actionable, but it’s probably not very relevant to your ideal clients – some of them may very well happen to have relationship troubles in their own lives but that’s not why they’re your ideal client.

If your practice focuses on family therapy and teenagers, a list of the most common teen behavioral problems might be relevant to the concerned parents visiting your website, but it’s not very actionable – it doesn’t provide them with anything helpful to do or a way to move forward.

So what makes a really smart giveaway? Let’s look at some quick examples.

Great giveaways you can make today

1) Checklist

A checklist is a great choice because it’s super easy to make (like many of the giveaway types we’ll look at, it can be as simple as a Microsoft Word document) and it’s incredibly actionable for your potential clients.

A one-page checklist is typically a self-care “to-do” list that can be folded up and carried around in a pocket or purse, or tacked onto a cork board for daily reference. It’s a great option for daily tasks or simple habits that would be helpful to your ideal clients.

Image credit: TeenMentalHealth.org

This page of a daily checklist from TeenMentalHealth.org is for daily, healthy habits teens can follow to promote good mental health. Their key demographic would be teens concerned about their mental health (or those concerned about the mental health of a teen they know).

This checklist succeeds well at our two main concerns, proving both actionable for those teens – by giving them clear, helpful objectives to accomplish –  as well as relevant to their concerns, seeing as these activities would be appropriate and healthy for any typical teen in school, such as making sure to socialize every day.

It’s a good example of how simple a giveaway can be and still be effective.

2) Worksheet

A worksheet is generally one step up from a checklist in the ways that it tends to take a little more work to make, but it can become even more valuable of an offering to your ideal client because of that extra effort.

A worksheet – like a checklist – is an attractive giveaway because it’s a quick one-or-two-page activity or form potential clients can do on their own, possibly every day. A worksheet provides the potential client with a more detailed process for understanding their own care better, or with steps to start the healing process on their own.

Image credit: TheraNest.com

TheraNest provides this “Negative Thought Stopping Worksheet” for therapists to give away to potential clients in their own practices. The worksheet is aimed at clients who suffer from negative thoughts, for whatever reason.

It’s both actionable and relevant to its target audience, providing them with a functioning, reusable tool to help understand the source of their own negative thoughts without veering into unrelated topics. It’s also nice that there’s extra space here for the worksheet to be filled out more than once, and the client can always print out another copy if they’d like to use the worksheet again.

3) Guide / Workbook

A guide or workbook is, again, one step up from our last giveaway example. Anywhere from a few pages to dozens of pages long, a workbook provides more support and information to your potential clients than a worksheet or a checklist (and a workbook can often include many of these, as well). A workbook is unique because it can provide all sorts of different content which tackle the issue your ideal client is dealing with from many different angles – from checklists, to fact sheets, to guided calendars and more.

The benefit of that extra time and effort is that you get to give your potential clients a more intensive “test drive” of your mode of therapy and way of thinking. For more trepidatious clients, that extra support can be the last straw of persuasion they need to make the leap.

Image credit: SeasonsTherapy.com

This is a wonderful workbook for clients struggling with anger management issues. Not only does every page address this specific issue so it’s hyper relevant to the ideal client, but it’s also incredibly actionable because of the diverse and multitudinous worksheets, checklists, exercises, self-affirmations, and more within that help to throw a wide net of self-care.

Making sure your giveaway is actionable is not simply a matter of giving your reader “busy work” to do – it’s about helping them start to take action in a way that truly does aid them. Remember – if the help your giveaways offer is flimsy and insincere, your potential clients will assume that your help is, too.

4) Multi-Media

Don’t run for the hills when I start talking about podcasts and online video – hear me out!

Nowadays when everybody has a smartphone, creating a good quality audio or video recording and uploading it to your website can be as simple as just a few clicks. And in this day and age, a moving picture or live voice will hold your potential client’s attention longer than a text-only giveaway.

Once you get over the hump of experimenting with different media formats like audio and video, a whole new world of powerful giveaways is opened up to you. Video classes, meditation “tapes,” self-care exercises podcasts, remote lectures… There’s a whole host of ways to cater to interested 21^st century clientele if you’re willing to spend a few minutes on Google teaching yourself how.

Audio credit: The Center for Compassion Focused Therapy

This free, audio-guided exercise from the Center for Compassion Focused Therapy (CCFT) guides potential clients through a calming, meditative breathing exercise. Even better, CCFT is sure to list in the description for the audio download the specific therapies in which their center uses these same exercises, recorded by the very same voices they’d be hearing in therapy.

Directly sharing your voice and even image with your potential client is so powerful because it gives them the closest taste of what it would be like to be your client.

To help get you started, here are How-To guides to uploading audio or video files in a way that lets you share them on your site:

How To Upload An Audio File To SoundCloud

How To Upload A Video File To Youtube

A valuable giveaway can drive traffic into your website and generate a brand new bundle of client leads for you, especially when it’s shareable and reusable. Make sure you ask for an email address up front and your website URL (or another reliable way to reach you) is on every page to see that your efforts are properly rewarded. Or in the case of a video or audio recording, make sure you briefly introduce yourself and your business at the beginning and end of each recording. Simple as that!

A smart giveaway is an effective, ethical, and free way for you to persuade potential patients that you’re ready and willing to help them.

Looking For More?

Looking for more out-of-the-box ways to draw in more potential clients to your website? Sign up for our 5-part email course and we’ll show you 5 unique ways to get more therapy clients.

About Wyatt Megla