Why Most Dietitian Marketing Advice Doesn’t Work
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[00:00:00] One of the biggest frustrations I hear from dietitians building a private practice is this: "I'm doing everything people say to do for marketing, and it still isn't working." They're posting on social media. They're trying reels, writing educational content, and trying to be consistent, but clients still are not consistently booking.
And eventually, marketing starts to feel like this giant puzzle they somehow have not figured out yet. But often, the problem is not that they're not trying hard enough. The problem is that a lot of marketing advice was created to help creators get attention, and a dietitian practice just has a different goal.
You need the right person to understand what you do, recognize that you may be able to help them, trust you enough to take the next step, and eventually become a client. And that is a very different kind of marketing than the marketing that you see online. Now, both can definitely work for different [00:01:00] reasons.
But attention is not the same as demand. So in the creator world, which you're familiar with when you go online and it's very new, right? Growth is measured by followers, views, reach, and engagement. And hey, I help clients do that if that's what you want to do, but it's a different path than trying to actually get a client.
There's nothing wrong with wanting more followers, views, reach, and engagement. The visibility itself won't build a practice because you can get thousands of views from people who will never become clients. And you can have a relatively small audience where the right people understand exactly why they should work with you.
And I've seen this in my own business too, right? The content that gets the most attention, it's not always the content that creates the strongest business opportunity. Sometimes the more useful question isn't how many people saw this, it's did the right person understand what I help with? A dietitian with a smaller audience and a clear message can often create more demand than someone with a much larger audience whose content [00:02:00] is all over the place Because people have to be able to recognize themselves in your message.
Think about the difference between saying, "Here are five ways to eat more protein," versus, "You get home from work at six, you're starving, and your doctor told you your A1C is elevated, and you still have no idea what dinner is supposed to look like." The second is more specific and specifically makes someone think she understands what I'm dealing with, and that's what starts to build trust.
When it comes to the foundation of good marketing, good practice marketing should answer three questions pretty quickly. Who do you help? What problem are they trying to solve? Why should they work with you, right? If those are unclear, then the marketing is gonna get much harder, and that's when I notice the dietitians struggle the most often if they can't answer these three questions.
Who do you help? What problem are they trying to solve? That's the most important. And then why would they work with you, right? Your message changes constantly if [00:03:00] you're a dietitian that struggles with marketing, and one week you're talking about weight loss, the next week you're talking about gut health, and then general eating or a combination of the two, supplements, and then grocery shopping.
But there's no thread between your content. So if all those topics, they might be relevant to nutrition, which is a huge topic, but the person seeing your content, they might have no idea why they should come to you specifically. So you don't need to talk about only one topic forever, but you do need enough consistency that people start associating you with a particular kind of a person or a problem or an outcome, and that's positioning.
That's called positioning in the marketing world. And positioning, it's not like a tagline for your website. it's really what people begin to understand about you after hearing from you repeatedly. When your positioning is clear, the rest of your marketing gets easier because you're no longer starting from zero every time you create something.
Your clients often teach you how to market, and you might not realize [00:04:00] this, but this is one of the reasons I think marketing tends to get better as you work with more clients. That's why it's so important to focus on getting clients and really helping them because you learn more about what they want and need.
A lot of dietitians will wait for the perfect client. But the reality is if you start working with people who will pay you for your services, you will start to see those patterns, and then you can take that, that structure and that lesson from the patterns they teach you and apply it to your more specific specialty as you progress.
But a lot of us dietitians are h- holding ourselves back because of perfection. So your clients are giving you the language. You're gonna hear the same questions and the same fears and the same frustrations, which is good, because when you hear the same objections and the same things that they've already tried, you don't have to sit down and invent ideas for content or for marketing.
Your sessions are just showing you what people need to hear. Maybe your clients are saying something like, "I know what to eat. I can't s- stay [00:05:00] consistent," or, "My doctor told me to lose weight, but nobody explained what that should look like." Or, "I feel like every nutrition rule contradicts one another." Those are real things that clients have said to me and my clients, right?
To my, our dietitian clients. And those are not just counseling conversations. Those are marketing messages because they describe the actual problem that the client believes that he or she has. And that distinction matters a lot because some dietitians market the problem from the clinician's perspective, right?
But the better marketer you will become, better dietitian you will become when you learn that the potential client is experiencing the pain from their perspective. And if you can show that pain through their lens, you'll have a better time connecting with them and then increasing demand.
So your marketing has to connect the two worlds, the clinician perspective and the client perspective.
The more closely that your marketing reflects the conversations that are actually happening in your practice, in your day-to-day life, [00:06:00] the more likely that the right person will recognize him- him or herself in what you're saying. I also wanna remind you that educational content is not automatically good marketing.
And this is another place our clients get stuck. and like we're trained to educate, so when we start marketing, we default to education. And I get it. We just wanna teach five sources of fiber, three high protein snacks. I'm guilty. I've done it before as well. what to order at a restaurant, how to read a food label, right?
And that content is not bad. It can absolutely be useful, but the useful content is not always effective because everybody else is doing it, right? So sometimes you're educating someone who has no idea why they need to be with you as their clinician, and so you've taught them something, but you haven't helped them understand the bigger problem that you solve, and that is where you wanna focus your energy on.
So before you create another educational post, I want you to ask, "What does this teach someone about the kind of client that I can help? And what does it [00:07:00] teach them about the problem I solve, and how does it reveal how I think?" These days, I really like showing posts that reveal how I think.
So I want you to ask yourself one of those questions. How does it teach someone the kind of client that I can help? How does it teach them about the problem that I solve? And how does it reveal how I think?
Education works best when it supports your positioning instead of replaces it. So if you can combine education with your perspective, your point of view, the problem you solve, the type of client you help, then your content is going to be a lot more sophisticated and your content's going to become more effective and possibly increase demand.
And you don't need to be on every platform, right? So another common question our clients ask is should I do TikTok and Instagram, email marketing, et cetera?" And you don't need to do YouTube, email, podcasting, all of that at once, although they're all great channels. What I teach inside the membership is you just need to choose one to maximum, I call them marketing mediums.
Like a m- a medium is [00:08:00] a, a method, that you're going to use to increase attention and demand. So it might be Instagram and in-person marketing, or it might be refer- physician referrals and email marketing. No judgment in whatever you choose. But committing to one path and doubling down on that path is a smart choice.
You don't need more than one or two, two maximum in, in any given season of your life. When your message is clear, you can choose a f- a few places that you're willing to show up consistently down the line, but start with just one or two marketing channels or marketing mediums. So you wanna ask yourself, does the right person understand what you do when they find you?
So what I would look at before creating more content is if your marketing isn't working, I wouldn't immediately tell you to post more. I would, you improve your marketing and your perspective by getting out there and putting content out, absolutely.
But think strategically. ask yourself, who do you help? What is a problem that you [00:09:00] solve? Does your content sound like the conversations your actual clients are having? And are you repeating your message enough for people to remember it? Dietitians get bored with their own message long before the audience has absorbed it.
So as action steps, I want you to take your last five pieces of marketing content. Let's just say, I don't know if it's Instagram posts and email, maybe, an email that you had drafted or you sent out to your email list.
Maybe it's some website copy if you have that, but like whatever you've been using to attract, it could be a flyer, whatever you've been using to attract clients. And I want you to ask, I want you to analyze that content and ask yourself these questions. So could the right potential client tell this was meant for him or her?
does this content connect to a problem that I actually help people solve? Does it sound like something my clients would say or think? And does it reinforce what I want to be known for? And if the answer is no more often than not, then you probably need less content and just more clarity on your message.
[00:10:00] So as a final thought, if your marketing feels exhausting, you don't immediately assume that the answer is to create more. Take a moment and reflect on your existing message. Look at your foundation. Can someone quickly tell who you help? Can they tell what problem you solve? Can they understand why your approach might be relevant to them?
Because marketing gets much easier when you stop trying to get everyone's attention and you start becoming recognizable to the people that you want to help. You don't need more random content. You need a clear message repeated in the right places for the right people. And if you're working inside of your own business, this is exactly the kind of work that I teach inside the Dietitian Boss Library.
The library includes training resources and access to me to help you with your positioning, marketing, sales systems, and even your clinical skills. You can find out more at dietitianboss.com.
