Going All In on Intensives? Your Marketing Needs to Match. [Alumni Check-In #8] (Episode 93)
Adding intensives to your private practice—or transitioning to an intensives-only model—isn't the same as simply adding another specialty. You're introducing a different offer and, in many cases, a different business model. That means your marketing needs to change with it.
In this alumni check-in, Anna answers a Confident Copy graduate who's moving toward an all-intensive practice. She breaks down three important shifts to consider when marketing intensives: more psychoeducation, a more premium presence, and more organic marketing. You'll learn how to help potential clients understand an unfamiliar therapy format, create a website experience that supports your pricing, and build awareness and demand for intensives in your market.
Here’s what you’ll learn in this episode:
1️⃣ Why marketing intensives requires more psychoeducation—and how to help potential clients understand what makes this format different.
2️⃣ How your website and overall brand experience need to support the premium price point you're asking clients to invest.
3️⃣ Why relationships, referrals, and other organic marketing efforts can be especially important when you're offering something clients may not already know to search for.
4️⃣ How getting specific about your intensive offer can help you communicate its value and build demand for this model of therapy.
-
Hey, hey. Welcome back to another episode of Marketing Therapy. I'm really excited about this one. It's very, very relevant to a lot of you who I've been talking to. Now, this is an alumni check-in. If you've been around here for a bit, you know that our alumni check-ins are opportunities for our Confident Copy alumni, folks who have graduated from our signature program, to ask follow-up questions about their marketing.
So they may have launched their website and are now revisiting another part of their marketing. They might be adding to their website, working on improving it, whatever that might be. And this month's question came from Jean, and jean said to us, "Things are going well. I'm moving toward an all-intensive practice and would like to shift some marketing toward that." She's asking here what she needs to do on her website and beyond to shift to an all-intensive practice. Now, this is a really exciting transition and something, as I mentioned, I've been talking to a lot of you about.
Some of you do have the goal of moving entirely to intensives. It's a really fantastic model. It can free up your time. It presents a lot of opportunity as it relates to revenue and flexibility and scaling your practice, all really wonderful things. Many of you, even if you're not planning to go all intensives, are interested in adding this model. So in addition perhaps to your weekly or bi-weekly clients, you're interested in adding on a handful of these per month or per year to, again, offer some additional revenue, but also to meet your clients at a different point of need, right?
There are certainly clients who can benefit from a more concentrated, in-depth, accelerated experience than those who might be interested in weekly therapy throughout the course of the year. So if you're thinking about intensives, you're in the right spot. I think you're gonna get something good here, 'cause we're gonna be looking at what actually needs to happen if you're gonna go all in here.
Because this is not the same as adding on a different specialty. Like, oh, um, yes, I used to do anxiety and trauma, but now I'm doing grief. That's not how this goes. Adding on intensives it's adding on a different offer. It's actually changing your business model,
And it requires something different of your marketing in order for clients to say, "Hey, yes, that is actually what I'm looking for." Okay? Now, here's the thing about intensives right now. They're still new enough that not everyone knows it's a thing. Even some therapists are like, "Wait, what's that?"
There's... You can do extended sessions, you can do multiple days, whatever that might be. They're still new enough that therapists are still learning about it, which means clients definitely are. How do you market something that not everyone knows exists? That's why intensives is an interesting thing right now.
Now, that tells us that right now, literally today is the best time to start trying to get this right. Right? So, yes, it might be a little bit of a scary time to try, but it's also the best time to get this right because you are getting in early. You are getting in before this is the primary way, perhaps, that people seek out therapy, or at least one of the m- most popular ones, right?
You're getting in on kind of the ground floor as people just begin to learn about the transformation available to them in the form of intensive therapy. Now, let me tell you about a client of mine who figured this out, and it was really interesting to watch her do this, and she did it before anyone, like, told her she needed to. She's a incredibly experienced and highly trained EFT clinician, and she started offering intensives back when they were just starting to catch on.
Like, this was a brand-new kind of baby concept.
Barely anyone was searching for them. And she had every reason because of that to stay really, really broad, to offer intensives for literally anyone, and she didn't. She knew what she wanted to do, so she went specific, into couples intensives. But then she did another layer of specificity. She does couples intensives specifically for professional couples who are navigating really demanding careers and dynamics related to that.
Then more specific still, because of her expertise in EFT, she does EFT couples intensives for professional couples in demanding careers. Ultra specific. And every decision there, every layer of specificity, was a chance for her to play it safer. She could've been like, "No, I'm gonna stop here," and she didn't.
She leaned in, and I've really respected that confidence and that boldness in her marketing, like I said, early, early on, when this is just a brand-new baby concept out there in the market. So we built her a website really helping her expertise shine and speaking to the value of what she offers, and guess what?
It worked. This was about two to three years ago, and today people find her on Google. People find her on ChatGPT. People travel to the small coastal town where she lives to engage in these intensives with her. Her packages run 4,500 to $5,000 plus. They're booked off her website. People who know they want her, they acknowledge the fee.
They're ready to go because she leaned in and she did it. So that's where we sit today, is not waiting until intensives get popular, right? Not waiting for that reason to get specific, but to go ahead and get specific now so that you can be the one people find as this grows in popularity. What this client did on purpose, what I got to watch her and support her in doing, is exactly what everyone moving to intensives needs to be doing on purpose as well.
Okay? So there's really three things that I see change when you are planning either to add on intensives, but especially if you're wanting to go intensives only. Okay? Three things. One, more psycho ed. Your marketing has to incorporate more psycho education than when you are doing standard traditional one-on-one therapy.
When someone says therapy, you automatically think of sitting in a room with one other person for fifty minutes or whatever that might be. That is the model, that is the default that most of us think about. You know if you've ever pitched intensives to anyone, that could be a past client, that might be a colleague, that could be a random stranger at, you know, a dinner party, whatever that might be.
You already know often the question that comes back, "Wait. Wait, what? What is that exactly? What's an intensive?" So you're not just describing a service anymore, right? You are introducing a format that most people haven't encountered before. What's your marketing gonna do in that case? It's not just, "Oh, I'm adding on grief, and now I do grief therapy.
Okay, let's talk a little bit about grief. You know what that means. Off we go." No, this is a brand-new format and for that reason, we have to do a lot more education in your marketing. Now, this isn't gonna be a lecture, right? We're not writing a workbook about intensives. But it means that we need to be really, really thoughtful about how your marketing positions this.
It means walking someone through things that a weekly session, you know, website or marketing doesn't have to. So what actually happens in an intensive? There's the intake, there's the intensive itself, there's the integration, the workbook, the prep, whatever that might be. You're gonna have to make a case, not directly, but you're gonna have to make a case for why the per hour cost is probably higher than your standard weekly therapy.
And you're gonna have to really communicate what the experience feels like. So sometimes when you introduce a new format, you are really inclined to talk about what they get. "Here's what's included, and you get snacks, and I have a workbook, and then we have a session." Those things are important. They need to understand that.
But more than that, they need to understand, "Why is this experience the one that I need out of therapy?" Especially contrasted with the default that I think about, which is weekly sessions. So you have to be prepared to make that case and to communicate what that experience is actually going to feel like. Now, we know that marketing's whole entire job anytime, whether we are marketing traditional weekly therapy, intensives, or something entirely different, it's really all about reducing confusion.
The less confusion, the more likelihood to buy, always, across every industry. Nobody reaches out about something that they are still confused by. Absolutely no one.
So as you are thinking about adding intensives, and I hope you're planning at the very least to add a intensive specific page to your website, that is the bare minimum here, you need to be thinking about how you're going to be reducing that confusion. So if you have presented this to someone before and they've said, "Wait, what?
What is that?" Y- your website's job, your marketing's job is to answer that, to reduce that confusion, to communicate the value, and to invite them to see why this is the model that they need. Lindsey is another client of ours who chose to add on intensives as she started her practice and she describes an intensive as dedicated, uninterrupted time to do the deeper work of therapy in a more focused format, rather than spreading it across weeks or months.
She says it's intentional space to focus on one challenge, experience, goal, or pattern without the pressure of the clock. Now, this is of course copy that we wrote for her as we worked together in our done-for-you setting. But that is boiled down what her clients need to hear. Notice what that does. Notice what that information does.
It doesn't just define the format. It's not just you get this, this, and this. It makes the format sound like a relief, like a breath of fresh air, like something that I need. Past just the definition of this service, you have to be clear on why you're offering the intensives. Why does your client, your ideal client, not someone else's, why does your ideal client need this service? Is it expedited healing? Is it deeper healing than the weekly sessions allow? Is it more of the time?
Is it built for the busy professional who literally cannot fit weekly therapy into her week? Is it for someone with a specific event on the horizon that they need to prepare for and need to move through in order to proceed with? Is it for someone who's stalled out in traditional weekly therapy, needs to shake things up before they get back to their other therapist?
Why does your client need this service? You need to get really, really clear on that so that you are resonating with them. Like I said, not someone else's, 'cause there's a lot of different ways that intensives provide value. Your ideal client is going to appreciate it for a very specific set of reasons.
So define which ones are true for your ideal client, and then position that front and center. Again, we're gonna talk about format here, but we're also gonna talk about the experience that we provide in order to ultimately communicate the value of why this is the model that they need.
Remember, with where we are in the market, with intensives still being relatively new, people are not going to reach out about something that they don't understand. And so this additional psycho-education, this first thing that needs to change in your marketing, is not just a nice-to-have, right? It is going to be the thing that gets them to the consult with you.
So Jean, our Confident Copy alumni, anyone else who is listening, you can jump in back into the Confident Copy vault. You can work through our intensive specific workbook and get really, really clear about the best way to communicate this, right?
Format, psycho-education, experience. How are we communicating those? How is it structured? And how are we gonna get these folks to book, right? If you're a template customer of ours, or you're a Squarespace user at all, we also have an intensive specific add-on page. That add-on page is structured using the same model we recommend for our done-for-you clients and for our Confident Copy students, and you can install it into any Squarespace website.
If you aren't aware of those, jump over to walkerstrategyco.com/add-ons, add-ons pages, and you can see what that page looks like. You can choose a style, and then you can actually install that into your website in order to start communicating this front and center and highlighting the value of what it is that you offer.
Okay? All right, so that's the first one, is more psycho-education. The next thing that has to change as you add on this service is you need a more premium presence. So first was more psycho-education, now it's more premium presence. Now, here's a question I want you to sort of sit with.
What's actually going to prompt someone to spend four thousand dollars and a few days of her life with you? What's it gonna be? Now, the thing is, it's not going to be because she ran a spreadsheet you know, built out an Excel doc of every EFT-trained couples therapist around you, right?
People make decisions based on perception, not reality, unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on how you look at it. It's not a knock on them, it's literally how we work. It's how buying works, especially when trust is the product. Trust in you is the product. Trust in what this intensive is going to offer is the product.
And the higher your fee, four thousand, six thousand, we have a client right now charging twelve thousand per intensive. The higher your fee, the more trust that perception has to carry. So your website at this price point is building trust on contact before anyone's heard your voice, talked to you, even learned what's included, right?
It is conveying professionalism and competence through perception alone. Because again, we're making decisions based on perception, not reality. And it's priming someone to believe that your fee, whatever it is, is fair before they even ask what it is or scroll down to that section of a page. Okay? So when you get these things wrong, then your website stops being neutral, and it actually begins working against you.
It plants doubt. Is she actually worth four thousand, five thousand dollars? And the hard thing about doubt is that it doesn't announce itself. You don't know what's happening. It shows up as a I'll think about it," or clicking out, just not booking the consult. You don't get that feedback. So that's why if you are planning to charge premium fees, you need a premium presence, and this is especially true in the intensive model when people are taking a little bit more of a gamble since it's a newer format, since you are charging more than a standard weekly session.
And so sometimes that dated or DIY-looking website next to your five thousand dollar price tag actually reads as a legitimate mismatch and those mismatches are exactly where the doubt creeps in If you are planning to put together hours, days of your expertise, package them up into an, an intensive model, you need to be delivering a more premium presence.
We actually talked about this just last week, When we talked about what it takes to de-panel from insurance. Your website needs to match the fee you are now asking people to pay. That is especially true when you are at these types of price points The way that I see it, this is where your brand and your practice kind of split into two different things.
Your practice is what you do. Your practice is your expertise. Your practice is your time. Your practice is your intensive model. But your brand, your brand is why they choose you. Your brand is why they pick your practice and not someone else's. And if your brand does not feel in alignment with the experience that you are saying you can offer, that's where we create that friction.
That's where we create that doubt. Your brand is what is going to prime someone for a higher price point. It's the thing that's going to convey the quality of the experience they're about to have, and I would believe that the quality of the intensive experience you have designed is pretty dang high, right?
We need your website and your marketing to say, "What you see here is what you're going to experience when you work with me." Your website should be going before you, going ahead of you into the search result, right? Into the referral conversation, the inbox, whatever. Making the case on your behalf, making the yes easier.
This is why DIY Or dated websites can tend to fight against you at this price point Premium pricing, $4,000, $5,000 plus, and DIY my site don't often send the same signal. That is not to say... Please let me pause here. That is not to say you cannot DIY an absolutely killer and beautiful website, because I know people that are doing that.
Jean's website is gorgeous. She used one of our templates, and obviously things are going really, really well for her. But we have to be really mindful about the quality of the presence matching the quality of the experience you're asking people to pay for.
So is your website feeling as premium as the fee you're charging and the experience you're going to offer these folks? As I see people move from standard weekly sessions into intensives, I see also the need for them to uplevel the experience that you're creating for people on your website and in your marketing.
All right. Finally, the other thing that needs to change. So we've had more psycho ed, a more premium presence, more organic marketing. Friends, because intensives are still new, most of your growth right now isn't gonna come from Google. It's probably not gonna come from AI. It's likely not going to come from Google Ads.
It's going to come from the boots on the ground. Because not enough people know to search for this yet, and this episode, at least that statement from this episode, is probably going to be outdated in six months or a year because I really do see this growing and growing and growing as we go.
But right now, not enough people know to ask Claude for an intensive, right? They don't have that language yet. We know that networking is still the number one driver behind premium fee success.
This is going to grow relationally. This is going to grow by talking to your own clients about this option directly, by building adjunct relationships with therapists doing weekly work who could refer someone in for a focused intensive. This is going to grow relationally. This is going to be a boots-on-the-ground effort.
Okay? So listen to me. Come in close. If you wanna add intensives, especially if you wanna go all intensives in your practice, this is not a set it and forget it situation, my friend. Now, it can be incredibly fruitful and profitable and whatever that might be. It is not going to be passive. None of your marketing is passive, but especially not this, okay?
The very cool thing about getting in on this now, the very cool thing about creating a really well-optimized page for couples intensives, a really well-optimized page for grief intensives, whatever that might be, is that you are creating something that's going to be ready when demand catches up. When people know to search for this, you will have been out there already.
You will have been well-optimized building this relationship, building this experience for people before they even knew they needed it. This is only going to serve you better over time if you start getting it right right now. But because of where we sit with this format of therapy, because we're in its infancy, if you wanna grow that part of it, you need to be more intentional about the marketing that you're doing.
Now, this isn't to say that you can't be found through Google or ChatGPT. Like I mentioned, the client at the top of the episode, she was a done-for-you client. We did both her copy and design. People are finding her through both of those things. So it's not that you can't, but your expectation should be to be more engaged with this marketing, to be more boots on the ground, as we say, and prepared to talk about this, to grow relationships, to foster those in order to get these clients.
And then you're gonna get to see the fruit of that pay off probably for years to come as this grows in its popularity. Right now, this is gonna grow by relationship, but it's starting to grow by search too, and people who build for that now aren't gonna be scrambling to catch up later.
That's the beauty of getting in on this right now. So back to Jean's actual question. What has to shift in your marketing? Well, Jean, y- we know that you already have a really, really incredible website from Confident Copy. We know that it's doing well for you so far, so this isn't gonna be a huge overhaul.
Hallelujah, right? All we need to be looking now is, are there ways in which we need to be providing more psychoeducation, a more premium presence, or preparing for more organic marketing in ways maybe you haven't had to so far? As you step into a business model that is more premium and also less understood earlier in that adoption curve, then we need to be looking at these types of shifts in order to prepare you to create demand right now, and then to take on the demand that is only going to grow over time. I love working with intensives-only clinicians.
It's one of my favorite clients to see come in for our done-for-you services. You know, we'll sit down in a discovery session. I'll ask them what their vision is for their practice and where they're at right now, and whenever they say, "I'm wanting to add intensives," or, "I'm wanting to shift to this," my eyes light up because the marketing potential available to you is huge. Okay? But we gotta lean in. We gotta focus on that psycho ed. We gotta be prepared to talk about and communicate the value that this model specifically offers. We've gotta create that super premium presence, which obviously our design team does an incredible job of.
And then you gotta be prepared to get out there, to talk about it, to share it, in order to start booking those, you know, four and five figure intensives where you get to see absolute transformation on behalf of your clients, right? All right. If you're interested in chatting about this, if you're someone who needs help figuring out how to do this psycho education in a way that doesn't sound like a textbook, or maybe you know that as you shift into an intensives-only model, your website needs to be upleveled as well.
I actually have a discussion with a clinician about that very thing in just a week or so. In a discovery session, you and I can chat more about your vision for your practice. We can look at your current website, and I'll let you know if one of our services might be a good fit.
Remember, more education, more premium presence, more organic marketing. If you're prepared to check all three of those boxes in your marketing, then the shift that you're about to make is bound to be successful, and I can't wait to see how it serves you, not just now, but in the years to come as this adoption curve picks up and more and more people realize what is available to them in the form of intensives.
I hope this one was helpful for you. I'll see you in our next episode.
Resources & Links Mentioned:
Episode 92: https://walkerstrategyco.com/show-notes/92
Done-for-you copywriting, branding, and website design services: https://walkerstrategyco.com/services
The Walker Strategy Co website: https://walkerstrategyco.com
Connect + Subscribe
Enjoying the podcast? Subscribe so you never miss an episode—and feel free to share it with a fellow therapist who’s building their private practice.
Explore more marketing support for therapists: The Walker Strategy Co website
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.
Rate & Review
If you’re enjoying Marketing Therapy, please consider leaving us a rating or review. This helps more therapists find the podcast (& avoid the marketing spiral).
