Search "exercise physiology marketing" and almost everything you'll find is Australian. That's not an accident — clinical exercise physiology is an established, Medicare-recognised profession there, so an industry grew up around marketing it. In the UK, the field is younger, the titles are less protected, and nobody has written seriously about how an exercise physiology or sports rehab practice actually gets clients here.
This guide is our attempt to fix that. It's written by a practising clinical exercise physiologist (MSc) who also spent ten years in marketing — which is roughly the Venn diagram this topic needs.
The structural problem: nobody knows what you do
Physiotherapy has a marketing advantage that has nothing to do with marketing: the public already knows what a physio is. Exercise physiologists and sports rehab clinics start a step further back — the first job isn't "choose us", it's "understand that this exists and is for you".
That changes the playbook. Copying what physio clinics do — rank for "[town] physio", collect reviews, run some ads — skips the step where your market learns why they'd search for you at all. The practices that do well lead with conditions and outcomes, not professional titles: "exercise for lower back pain", "rehab after ACL surgery", "safe training with a heart condition". Patients search for their problem. Almost none of them search for your qualification.
Positioning: niche down further than feels comfortable
A one-room practice cannot be for everyone, and pretending otherwise produces the beige websites this sector is full of. The practices that fill their books pick two or three conditions they genuinely want to own — because of caseload experience, local demand, or referral relationships — and build everything around them: a page per condition, evidence cited properly, plain-English explanations of what a course of care looks like and costs.
Specificity also does your credibility work for you. An audience that has been burned by wellness marketing can smell vague promises; citations and honest scope ("this is what the evidence supports, this is what it doesn't") convert better than enthusiasm.
Local search is most of the game
For a clinic serving a physical area, local search beats everything else on effort-per-client:
- Google Business Profile, fully completed. Category, services, condition-led descriptions, photos of the actual space, and a steady drip of reviews. Fully completed profiles earn several times the engagement of half-finished ones, and most impressions come from category searches — people who don't know your name yet.
- Condition pages, not service lists. One indexable page per condition you treat, written for the patient, beats a single "Services" page every time. This is also where the UK gap helps you: hardly anyone else is writing this content properly.
- Reviews with specifics. Ask at discharge, when the outcome is fresh. A review that names the condition ("after my knee replacement…") is a ranking asset and a conversion asset at once.
Referrals: the channel that compounds
Most sports rehab and exercise physiology caseloads are built on referral relationships, not search. Treat that as a marketing channel with a system behind it, not a hope:
- Map the referrers around you — GPs, physios who don't want long-course rehab, PTs whose clients exceed their scope, surgeons' secretaries, cardiac and pulmonary rehab services discharging patients with nowhere to go.
- Make referring effortless: a one-page PDF of who you take, what you do and how to refer; a named contact; a fast, reliable letter back after first assessment. The letter back is the whole relationship.
- Report outcomes to referrers in their language. Nothing builds a referral habit like evidence their patients did well.
None of this shows up in Google Analytics, which is exactly why it needs deliberate tracking — a simple "referred by" field, reviewed monthly, tells you which relationships to invest in.
The website: one job
Your website has one job: turn a person with a problem into a booked first assessment. Everything on it either helps that or is decoration. The essentials — a clear statement of who you help, evidence you can be trusted with a body that's already been let down, the price (yes, publish it), and a booking path that works on a phone. If your booking system is Cliniko, Jane or similar, be aware that the default setup quietly breaks your measurement — we've written up why every clinic booking shows as "direct" in GA4 and what to do about it.
What to measure (and what to ignore)
You don't need a dashboard of twenty metrics. You need five numbers a month:
- Enquiries, split by where they came from (search, referral, walk-past, word of mouth — ask everyone).
- First assessments booked — and the conversion rate from enquiry.
- Cost per new patient for anything you pay for. If you can't compute it, fix the measurement before spending more — our free baseline scorecard does the arithmetic in two minutes.
- Rebooking / course completion — retention is cheaper than acquisition, in clinics as everywhere else.
- Review count and rating trend — your public proof, growing or not.
Ignore follower counts, impressions and "reach". They feel like progress and change nothing — effort below the threshold.
Paid ads: mostly not yet
Honest arithmetic: UK healthcare paid-search costs have risen year on year, and most clinics only get reliable traction spending £1,000+ a month. If your budget is a few hundred pounds, exact-match ads on a handful of condition-plus-town terms can be worth testing — but organic local search and referral systems will beat ads on cost-per-patient for almost every practice under that spend level. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling ad management.
Where to start
Start where we'd start: measure the baseline before buying anything. What does your current presence actually produce — enquiries, assessments, cost per patient, review velocity? Our baseline review answers exactly that for £495, credited in full against your first month if we go on to work together. And if you'd rather do it yourself, this guide is the map — the discipline is the same one we'd apply: test first, then prescribe.