What It Means to Look Like a Premium-Fee Practice (Episode 36)
You’re ready to raise your fees, step into the next phase of your practice, and be perceived as the skilled, premium therapist you truly are. But how do you look the part—without spinning out over which font feels more “grounded confident” or whether beige or blush sends the right message?
In this episode, I’m walking you through how to define your visual identity in a way that feels clear, aligned, and truly representative of your expertise. We’ll talk about why design isn’t just about looking good—it’s about creating emotional safety and trust. And I’ll give you four grounding exercises to help you clarify the feeling you want to evoke and make design decisions that actually reflect your brand, not someone else’s.
Whether you’re DIYing your visuals or feeling overwhelmed by the idea, this episode will help you move forward with confidence.
Here’s what you’ll learn in this episode:
1️⃣ Why design isn’t just decoration—it’s a tool for building trust, safety, and connection
2️⃣ Four guided exercises to define the emotional tone and personality of your brand
3️⃣ How to spot and stop the spiral of trying to “be everything” visually—and what to do instead
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Hi there. Welcome back to this week's episode of Marketing Therapy number 36, all about what it means to look like a premium fee practice. The past few weeks, we've been talking a lot about looks. We've been talking about branding and design and how these things work together.
Last week we talked about the hidden psychology behind good design. The things that are happening on a website or when we're interacting with things that instantly shape how we feel about them and how you can then extrapolate that into your own marketing to influence how clients experience and feel about your practice. Now, what's interesting as we choose to dedicate in an entire other episode to design is I'm noticing this attitude of leveling up. In clinicians right now. I have the pleasure of speaking to, anywhere from three to 10 therapists in a one-on-one setting every week.
So I get a lot of insight into what they're working on, what they're nervous about, what they're really focused on, and I'm just noticing this like hunger. In a lot of clinicians we've talked a lot recently on the marketing therapy podcast about how times have changed, right? And what once worked isn't working the way that it used to, and therefore there's a need to step up and be open to evolution and doing things differently.
And man, I am meeting some of you and I am hearing in you the desire to. Level up and to really take ownership of your practice to depa, to raise your fees to make this happen. I had the incredible pleasure of speaking to a clinician last week who booked a meeting with me the day before she was leaving her government job for good and was jumping into private practice.
And so I got to see her and talk to her at that juncture in her journey. And so anyway I share that as a little bit of background as we get into today because one theme I'm hearing from those clinicians who are ready to level up is they know this stuff matters. They recognize how the way that they show up, the way that they look, the way that they're perceived is critical, especially for those therapists who are looking to get off of insurance panels or raise their fees or really create that premium fee practice.
They know this matters, and they feel a little bit hamstrung when it comes to creating that. So that is why we are spending another episode really talking about what we're gonna call visual identity. Because we know that design matters. You know, Design matters if you're choosing to listen to this episode.
But the next question becomes, how do you actually figure out what yours should look like, what your brand should look and feel like? And I find that this is where many therapists get stuck. Because they know that they need and want that professional and cohesive and high-end feel. But there are literally 1 million fonts and colors and styles to choose from.
So today I really wanna nerd out a little bit on how to define your visual identity. How to make your brand look and feel like you and be perceived as the premium fee practice that you are looking to build. So while we are gonna nerd out a little bit, and I'm gonna give you some cool exercises, my hope is also that you get some really tangible, simple questions and exercises to really help you narrow down your direction.
And I'm also gonna help you decide when it makes sense to DIY. Because for some of you, you're listening and you're like, let's go. I love this stuff. And also when to maybe outsource or get some support. 'cause for others, this is massively overwhelming despite knowing that it's important.
Okay. So that's what I wanna do today.
And like I said, I am really focusing this episode on the clinician who's ready, who knows this matters and is really ready to make this part of their marketing a priority. So, All right, let's get into it. And I wanna start with a really clear definition.
'cause quote unquote visual identity. What does that even mean? It can sound kind of abstract, right? And so I want you to imagine your visual identity as the visual language of your brand and of your practice. This is how you express your values, your tone, your personality, your client experience. Through things like color and typography and imagery and layout through design visuals.
It's really the combination of design elements that tells people, this is who I am, this is what I stand for, and this is the kind of experience you can expect working with me. That's what a premium visual identity does. It says, when you work with me, you're gonna get an experience like this. When your visual identity is cohesive, then every single touch point someone has with you, your website, your printed flyers, and your business cards, your social posts, even your EHR and your intake forms, they all feel connected.
And remember last week we talked about the fact that when things are similar or consistent, it builds trust. It's the reason I love to rewatch the office and Grey's Anatomy, right? When people recognize your brand visually. It creates familiarity. That familiarity creates comfort. The same reason you might be watching Gilmore Girls, because that's what you do every fall, okay?
But comfort is what makes people more likely to reach out. So again, consistency builds trust. Trust builds familiarity. Familiarity creates comfort. And comfort is what really does lead people to reach out. Now we know that this is especially true in therapy and in the place that your clients find themselves, they are scanning for cues anywhere and everywhere for safety and credibility before they even choose to contact you.
It's one of the hard parts of design because it is so subjective and it is highly subconscious. Your client isn't coming in saying, oh, I'm scanning the design of this website to determine if this clinician is worth $250 an hour. And yet that's what's happening. Now, what I want you to know about a visual identity is that this is not about being trendy or being fancy.
And it is absolutely, please hear me, not about copying what you see out there, what everyone else is doing chasing aesthetics that don't fit you because you feel like they're what you should do. It's really at the end of the day about being intentional about intentionally choosing. A visual language for your brand and for your practice that reflects your expertise and your personality and the transformation that you offer your clients.
So if you specialize in trauma or anxiety, then your visual identity likely needs to communicate calm and safety and stability. If you work with high achieving professionals and executives, then your visual identity likely needs to be structured and modern, maybe minimal. If you love working with creatives or couples, it might be more about warmth and energy and movement.
What I want you to know as we head into the exercises for defining your visual identity is that a strong visual identity is what turns nice. Design designed that abides by the principles we talked about in last week's episode into actual recognizable trust.
That's what your identity has the ability to do. So I wanna give you four exercises, or I'm calling them the four lenses for defining a visual identity. And these are exercises, some of which you can probably do as you're sitting here listening, and others that you might want to spend a little bit of time doing some research on.
But the hope is that after you complete these, you have a really good sense of what matters to you and of what should be driving your decisions when it comes to what you're creating visually for your practice. So the first one should sound familiar if you've been listening to our past few episodes, and that's all about starting with emotion.
This is where I want you to anchor your visual identity to your client's experience. Okay? So we are creating something intentional as it relates to the emotion that your clients feel when they interact with you. So before you think about fonts or colors, ask yourself. What do I want people to feel when they interact with my brand?
Calm, grounded, inspired, hopeful, empowered. What words describe how you want your clients to feel when they interact with you? We just shared a homepage design today with a done for you client of ours, and she had this deep sigh when she saw it for the first time. And so I completed scrolling through the homepage.
Then I asked her initial thoughts and I reflected back that I noticed that sigh and how that was really what we were after. We had talked about in her kickoff call how she wanted people to feel like there was invitation and space in her practice, and that's what she wanted to show through her design.
And so this feeling of this sigh or exhale as she saw it really reflected that goal. So how do you want people to feel when they interact with you? Calm. Maybe that's gonna point us more toward muted tones or soft lighting or open spaces. If it's empowered, we might want bolder contrast or stronger fonts or more of that modern vibe, warm, maybe neutral textures, cozy imagery, golden or warmer tones.
And all of those decisions, like I said, can come later. But think now about how you want people to feel when they interact with you. Now I know of a dear client of mine right now who has experienced a bit of an evolution in who she is as a clinician and her current branding and visual identity is quite soft and feminine and rounded around the edges.
She uses a script font in her design, and there's lots of kind of soft pastels. She's really realized she's embodying a bit more of a stronger, more direct presence. And so we're looking at what would it look like to update her brand to reflect that a bit more. She's not quite as soft around the edges or feminine as she used to be.
She's working with many of the same clients, but the way that people feel when they interact with her, we're wanting to update that a little bit. So again, how do you want people to feel when they interact with you? Design is ultimately emotional, right? It starts with feelings, not color.
Swatches. Okay? So if a client walked into your therapy room, how would you want them to feel? I want you to bring that same energy online as you make these decisions.
Now our second step or lens here is about defining opposites. So in step one, you identified how you want your clients to feel. Now I want to invite you to clarify what qualities your brand would need to express in order to create that feeling. Okay. So if you said you want your clients to feel calm and grounded, for instance, then your brand might need to feel steady and minimal and natural.
Or if you said empowered, maybe your visuals should be bold and modern and confident. So again, you know how you want people to feel in step one. What qualities of your brand's personality would make that experience possible? Now, you might pull these straight from your own personality or your own clinical style.
That's usually a great place to start, right? Because this is very much about your own energy that you bring. But I want you to identify a handful of adjectives that describe the energy or the character that your brand needs to embody in order to evoke that feeling. So again, some examples would be structured, steady, minimal, bold, modern, confident.
And from there I wanna introduce what's called the opposite test. So for each of those adjectives write, its opposite If you need to be structured, the opposite would be flowy. If you need to be modern, the opposite would be classic. If you need to be minimal. The opposite might be playful.
So after you've defined the opposite, and we're not trying to pick one or the other here, what I want you to see is that you're creating a spectrum between structured and flowy. A spectrum between modern and classic. And once you've got both of those words there, pause and ask yourself, where on this scale does my brand belong?
Maybe you're not actually fully minimalist or fully playful. You're somewhere in between.
Maybe you're not fully modern or fully classic. You lean modern, but not sterile in all hard edges. This middle ground decision is gold because it's giving you parameters for your design, right? The rails that keep your brand feeling consistent, no matter what font or color you end up choosing later.
This exercise really matters because most inconsistent or weak visual brands I see out there, especially in the therapy space, aren't necessarily poorly designed, but they lack these boundaries. They're trying to be a little bit of everything warm. But also clinical, modern and earthy, bold and subtle, and they don't end up being anything.
It becomes very vanilla and so defining your edges really helps you choose visuals that are going to consistently tell the same story. This is about knowing what lane you're going to live in visually.
And once you know your lane here, even roughly, we can't quantify this. You can make every design decision faster because you'll instantly know, does this font, color, photo, whatever fit inside my lane or outside of it? Where do I belong on this spectrum and how do I not try and be all things to all people?
This is about not watering down your brand in an attempt to appeal to everyone, but instead to have a point of view. So that's step two. Clarifying the edges of your brand personality. You've named how you want people to feel, and now you've outlined the qualities that make that possible. So next, let's take these traits and actually bring them to life picturing what they look like.
So here in step three, I'm going to invite you to visualize the feeling. If your brand were a space, what would it look like? I want you to close your eyes and imagine your brand as a physical space. Maybe it's a therapy office, maybe it's something else, and tune into your senses. What would it look like?
What would it sound like in that space? What made it smell like? What would it feel like? Is it a bright, airy studio with plants and sunlight, or is it a cozy reading nook with soft light and layered textures and cozy blankets? I find therapists do really well in this exercise because they tend to be very intuitive thinkers, so this is helping you access that instinct visually once you can see the space that you want your brand to be.
You can start to translate it. Those textures, the lighting, even the smells, the materials, they become cues for all of the design decisions that you make. The color palette, the imagery, the typography. Maybe you imagined a cozy cabin with a roaring fire. When you walk in, we're gonna be looking at warm neutrals.
And soft serif fonts, perhaps natural imagery, if that's who you're gonna love. Our new template design that's coming. Maybe you imagined a more modern loft. So we're gonna be looking more at crisp whites and clean lines and really modern, interesting fonts, perhaps pops of bright color. If your brand were a physical space, what would it look like?
What would it feel like? How can you take that feeling into your design decisions? This is really where you begin to see that design is so much more than just decoration, especially in this market. It's creating atmosphere, it's creating experience, and that's what your clients are seeking. That's what's leading them to make decisions about who they reach out to.
All right. Finally, step four is where you're gonna start to spot patterns in what it is that resonates with you. So in step one, we talked about how we want your clients to feel. In step two, we talked about the qualities that your brand needs to embody in order to create that feeling. In step three, we thought about how those things come together in a physical space.
And now I want you to go out into the wild and look for it. Okay, so I want you to spend some time, and this is where you might have to complete this activity after today's episode, but pull up three to five brands or websites that you love. They do not need to be therapists. I actually recommend they maybe aren't.
You might use Pinterest for this. You might already know of some, there might be some Instagram folks you follow, but pull up some that just resonate with you. You've liked them in the past. Perhaps you've bookmarked them. And then ask, study them. What do they have in common?
Visually? How do they make you feel? Scroll through them. Click through the pages, check out their posts, and pay attention to things like spacing and color tones and fonts, and the use of imagery. What themes are there? Now as you do this, not only is it a heck of a lot of fun, one of my favorite exercises, but you're gonna start to recognize your preferences and why they work together.
Now, it's very important here that this isn't about eventually copying what they're doing, but like I said, it's about studying why those things resonate. It might be that you're looking at a brand that is incredibly bold and high contrast, and in fact you're creating something more minimal , but there's still something to learn there.
What about it stood out to you? Why do you like it? What are they doing well, and how could you translate that into your own brand? Because again, cohesion, the cohesion you are seeing across all of these brands, the cohesion you are seeing in each website, that's what makes them feel trustworthy. The repetition and the consistency creates recognition and familiarity and comfort.
So go out into the wild and look for examples of things that are resonating with you. And then study them. How can you take what you're learning there and apply it to create your own space, your own brand that evokes the emotion that we talked about in step one.
So those are the four exercises in really thinking about visual identity. Now I mentioned that today's episode is a little bit about nerding out. It's not for everyone. Some therapists find this hmm, a waste of time might be a little negative, but some therapists find this unnecessary. This isn't the most important part of their marketing. In the list of priorities, perhaps it's not. But in this market, we're seeing the need for these visual identities to be stronger and to have more of a point of view than we ever have.
Now, if you've listened all the way through these exercises, I would guess that you're someone who recognizes, all right, this is something I need to prioritize and need to be thinking about. And some of you right now are sitting here thinking, this is awesome. You feel energized at this. The idea of gathering inspiration and experimenting and defining this and eventually going out and making decisions and putting all this together, that's incredible.
DIYing. This is exactly what you can and should be doing because now you've got the clarity to make some really good choices. And to have a point of view with your visual identity that deeply resonates with your clients. For others, and I only know this because I've talked to some of you, this feels like absolute sensory overload.
You know what you want your brand to feel like. You can answer exercise one just fine. You want it to feel calm or elevated or polished, but the idea of actually translating that into a logo, fonts, colors, images, that's where you get stuck,
And you want a cohesive, high-end brand. That matches your expertise. You are seeking that premium fee experience and you offer that to your clients. You are deeply skilled, but you also don't wanna spend weeks or months second guessing whether beige or blush. Better communicates your grounded confidence.
I remember talking to a confident Copy alumni, who we ended up designing her website for her, but she told me she lost hours in trying to figure out the right shade of purple for her brand. It was just, she spiraled over it. Maybe that's you. Maybe you also feel like you're gonna spiral and, lose hours of your life deciding on different fonts or colors or whatever that might be. I want you to know that whether you fall in the DIY camp or the sensory overload camp, that there are resources that you can absolutely be successful.
You don't have to be interested in this to do it well, but it is important right now. It's why we've decided to launch something completely brand new that we have never, ever done before as part of our Black Friday sale. And this is actually the first time I'm talking about it publicly.
So if you are listening, congratulations, you're getting the inside scoop, but it's called the Signature Brand Intensive. And it is for our therapists who are ready to look the part of the thriving premium fee practice they have built or our building without drowning in the DIY. And again, if this is exciting to you, I want to empower you to go forth and do the dang thing.
But if you're sitting here wondering, how am I gonna do this? That's what the Signature brand intensive was created for. So we're calling it in intensive because it is indeed an intensive. It is a one week done for you experience where we create your custom color palette, fonts, logos, branded marketing assets, all personalized to your practice.
This is our first ever complete brand and visual service we've ever offered. If you feel like you've outgrown DIY, and you want a brand that truly reflects your expertise, then stay tuned. This is gonna be part of our Black Friday lineup.
We're putting all the finishing touches on the page right now. But you will be able to access the page as soon as it's ready at walker strategy co.com/bf 25. That's where you'll be able to navigate to the signature brand intensive page. But to give you a little bit of an insight scoop of what we're looking at, if this is something that piques your interest during that one week experience, we're going to be developing multiple mood boards for you.
You'll have opportunities to provide feedback, and then during your design day, we're gonna be taking that brand. Installing it into the Squarespace template of your choice, sourcing images, uploading your logo, adding your headshot if you've got them. And then also designing a marketing flyer template and a business card template.
All things that you can literally drop in your content and go. And one of the best things is a bonus we're offering that we've never done before. Yeah, whichever Squarespace design you choose, you're gonna get a custom copywriting template created just for that design . So copying and pasting and adding your content to the site is going to be easier than ever because we're going to give you a formatted template.
You literally plug in what you wanna say, copy and paste over into the Squarespace site , and you'll be ready to go. So that's a little bit more about the Signature brand intensive. All the details will be available on that page that we are working on. So keep an eye on walker strategy code.com/bf 25. But again, whether you DIY, this or you get support, I want to remind you that your visual identity, it matters. It matters more than it ever has, and it matters if you are that therapist who is ready to level up. One of the most powerful ways you can do that is the way that you show up online and off, and that starts with understanding your visual identity, creating something that is cohesive and reflective of the quality of your work and the experience you offer your clients.
Making sure that you are perceived as the high caliber, high touch, deeply invested, deeply skilled clinician that you are. When your brand looks as credible as your clinical work, clients will notice and they will trust you faster. So again, if you wanna see what's coming with the signature brand intensive, make sure.
You keep an eye on Walker strategy code.com/bf 25, you'll get first access during that Black Friday event. We're gonna have just a handful of spots, but remember, whatever you do, start with the feeling you want to create and then let everything else flow from there. Thanks for being with me today. I've enjoyed this little mini design series and I hope you have too, and I'll see you in our next episode.
Resources & Links Mentioned:
The Walker Strategy Co website: walkerstrategyco.com
Signature Brand Intensive (Black Friday offer): walkerstrategyco.com/bf25
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About Marketing Therapy
Marketing Therapy is the podcast where therapists learn how to market their private practices without burnout, self-doubt, or sleazy tactics. Hosted by Anna Walker—marketing coach, strategist, and founder of Walker Strategy Co—each episode brings you clear, grounded advice to help you attract the right-fit, full-fee clients and grow a practice you feel proud of.
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