For many private practice owners, the decision to DIY their marketing stems from a desire to maintain authenticity, articulating value in a way that feels true to their clinical approach, while keeping overhead low.
While this approach provides a direct, unfiltered view of client behavior, owners typically reach a point of overwhelm due to the complexity of the digital marketing landscape.
We’ll dive into the advantages and disadvantages of DIY therapy marketing, and how variables like technical skill and domain expertise affect potential business outcomes.
Table of Contents
- DIY Therapy Marketing: How You Benefit and What it Costs
- Doing Your Own Therapy Marketing: The Benefits
- Doing Your Own Therapy Marketing: The Costs
DIY Therapy Marketing: How You Benefit and What it Costs
We asked over a dozen mental health professionals how long they spend each week on their own marketing, and they responded with an average of 5 hours per week.
These practice owners typically fall into two groups:
- Therapists who take the time to learn marketing and sales fundamentals on their own, or consult with an expert for a short-term project.
- Therapists who choose not to learn the fundamentals and instead carry out unsuccessful advice given to them by friends, family, or relayed in short-form videos.
We’ll explore some of the benefits practice owners from the first group witness and the costs associated with bad habits exhibited by professionals within the second group.
Doing Your Own Therapy Marketing: The Benefits
The field of marketing is technical and scientific, often requiring analytical and research-based skill sets in addition to the creative skills more familiar to the public, like copywriting and visual media creation.
Even so, many mental health professionals successfully translate their proficiency in behavioral and cognitive human psychology for business application.
Among the many benefits of doing your own marketing are:
- Complete control over your marketing strategy and online execution.
- Immediacy in the execution stage from decision-to-market.
- Zero to low spending on marketing services (spending is limited to subscriptions for CRMs, social media schedulers, and email marketing software).
- Real-life education in the “school of hard knocks” through the successes and failures of your own campaigns.
- Enjoyment, as many therapists discover a hidden passion for data analytics, content creation, or video development.
How to Learn Therapy Marketing Properly
Professionals who successfully carry out their own therapy marketing typically engage in the following activities:
- They read foundational marketing textbooks (like “The Principles of Marketing” by Gary Armstrong and Philip Kotler).
- They sign up for local community college courses in Marketing 101.
- They enroll in asynchronous online marketing courses from reputable education platforms like Coursera.
- They hire a short-term marketing consultant to learn alongside a seasoned professional.
Professionals who manage their own marketing derive benefits in the form of both knowledge and financial savings. But as is the case for everything in life, there are tradeoffs.
While you may save money in the long run, what you sacrifice is time.
Doing Your Own Therapy Marketing: The Costs
For any business owner, time dedicated to areas outside revenue-generating activities cannot support scaling efforts.
Five hours spent on your own marketing is five hours not spent on billable client calls. Is your hourly clinical rate higher than the cost of a marketing consultant? If so, you are technically losing money by carrying out online marketing efforts by yourself.
Costs in the Form of Empty Promises
Professionals who attempt to market their own practices by seeking short-term solutions or who fall victim to empty promises made by predatory actors who offer online marketing “courses” in exchange for pre-payment, typically encounter the following challenges:
- They exhaust their funds on solutions that promise unrealistic results.
- They fail to book new clients due to a lack of fundamental knowledge in marketing strategy.
- They fail to learn how to measure their marketing, rendering them incapable of replicating successes.
- They carry out marketing with a lack of strategic consistency, resulting in ineffective, ad hoc social media posts.
Treat your marketing like a client session. Just as you wouldn’t prescribe a treatment plan without a diagnosis, you shouldn’t post content without a marketing strategy. Random posting is the equivalent of ‘wild guessing’ in clinical work.
Stay Clear of Advice from Friends or Unqualified Contacts
While well-meaning, friends and relatives who offer marketing advice are not privy to the ever-present changes affecting your competitive landscape, nor are they experts in consumer psychology.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
The advice we offer to clients is unambiguous and attachment-free, meant to improve any glaring marketing or sales messaging gaps preventing you from earning revenue.
Ultimately, the choice between DIY and hiring a consultant comes down to your current business phase.
The decision framework:
- Time: Do you have 5+ hours weekly to dedicate to strategy, not just posting?
- Skill: Are you willing to learn the data analytics behind the content?
- Scale: Is your goal to maintain your current caseload, or to build a waiting list?
If you’re ready to reclaim your time and focus on your clients, let’s outline the methods that will generate awareness for your practice.
Learn to Market Your Practice Alongside a Marketing Professional
We offer mental health private practice owners the option to learn alongside our agency founder and digital marketing consultant, Laura Bailey-Wickins, on topics including social media strategy, search engine optimization, profile management, content development, and measurement.
Our flexible consulting options include a 5-part structured series of 60-minute hands-on working sessions or 90-minute one-off working sessions.
Book a free, no-obligation, 30-minute Zoom consultation with Laura Bailey-Wickins directly.
