Tips for Deciding on & Marketing your Additional Certifications
Ashland Arnold is a therapist at Midtown Nashville Counseling with a range of specialties and trainings, including Brainspotting.
I recently asked her to share about the value of certifications, and how she has worked to optimize what they bring to her clients and practice.
In her initial response, she shared: “From a business perspective, it’s helpful to have some speciality certifications as a way to market yourself.
“I live and work in the Nashville area (very much a therapy town), and people call our practice almost daily asking what kind of modalities we offer on-top of “basic” talk therapy.”
She went on to share that 40% (or more) of their clients find them looking specifically for Brainspotting, which is a niche brain-based trauma healing modality that most of their staff are trained to provide. (That’s huge!)
But there are a few challenges that come with this:
“Brainspotting is all the rage right now” (among several other popularized modalities), which can quickly shift a certification from a clinic “differentiator” to a baseline expectation among clients.
When this “market saturation” happens, it becomes challenging to keep standing out,
And when it’s hard to stand out, the temptation is to start spending more money to go after more certifications.
Ashland’s advice: To best market your certification, get specific with how you are going to use your certification.
For Ashland, her practice has “an entire page on [their] website describing Brainspotting and how it helps people heal from embodied trauma” (see here), along with videos and explanations for how their modality works for specific client types they work with (in their case, athletes and musicians).
It’s important to paint a picture of the particular way in which you intend to apply your certification and not be too generalized.
In other words, “what makes you the ideal fit (or not) for a client to work with?”
Some final pieces of advice when it comes to certifications:
Slow down before rushing into certifications (especially earlier in your career).
Certs are expensive- don’t drown yourself in debt or burn your savings prematurely (but, remember they can go towards CEUs, which you have to budget for either way)!
Identify one (MAYBE two) modalities that fit the specific client- and issue-types you are VERY passionate about & go deep with them (and create a financial plan for when it makes sense to start trainings around them).
Take time to share about your new certification - email your personal and referral networks, post on Linkedin (adding it to your description), and create educational content/posts around your cert to educate your network about it.
