What Your Marketer Doesn’t Want To Tell You

This is a reality check. Probably not one you want, but definitely one that you need. It's the kind of conversation that most marketers in this industry are either too cautious or too incentivized to have directly.

Most therapists are dramatically underbudgeting for marketing. Not marginally—dramatically. And the gap between what they're investing and what it actually takes to compete is determining whether their practices grow or stay stuck.

I want to walk through exactly why that gap exists, what it costs, and what a more honest approach to marketing investment actually looks like.

The problem with an arbitrary figure

When practice owners come to us, they often arrive with a monthly marketing budget already decided, usually between $500 and $2,000 a month. Typically, there isn’t really a reasoning behind why they decided on that number in particular. It just sounds reasonable.

But something that sounds reasonable isn’t grounded in what marketing actually costs. These figures are arbitrary, and arbitrary figures produce arbitrary results.

Consider this benchmark. In healthcare, spending between 10 and 20% of revenue on marketing is fairly standard. If you want to build a million-dollar practice, that means your marketing investment should be in the range of $100,000 per year, which is roughly $8,000 per month. Not $2,000.

That figure tends to land harshly. I get it, and to be clear, I don’t think you need to spend $8,000/month to reach the million dollar revenue mark. But consider what it's actually communicating: the investment required to reach a goal must be proportional to that goal.

Operations are not a driver of revenue

One of the most persistent misconceptions I see—often reinforced by business coaches and practice consultants—is that operational efficiency is the path to growth. If you subscribe to the right EHR and streamline your intake process, you can scale to $1,000,000 in ARR.

These things are necessary to the health of a practice. Smooth operations improve your profit margins, reduce administrative burden, and make a practice easier to run. But they do not generate revenue. They do not fill caseloads. They do not put your practice in front of therapy-seekers who are actively looking for what you offer.

Revenue generation requires marketing. No EHR, however beautifully configured, does any of that. Conflating operational excellence with marketing effectiveness is a fallacy. It allows a business to feel productive, but it’s not actually generating enough money to be productive.

What compressed timelines do to marketing quality

Another consequence of underinvesting—and starting late—is that it puts your marketing team in a position where they're optimizing for speed rather than strategy. When a practice owner needs results immediately because they've been avoiding the investment for too long, the dynamic of the client-agency relationship shifts in ways that hurt outcomes.

Marketers who are under pressure to deliver fast are making decisions to keep clients happy in the short term, not necessarily to do what's best for the practice in the long term. They'll pursue tactics that show quick movement—spikes in traffic, fast-ranking keywords, visible activity on a dashboard—rather than the slower, harder work that produces lasting results. The client feels like something is happening, but the foundation isn't being built.

Compressed timelines often produce exactly the kind of marketing that leaves practice owners saying “marketing doesn't work.” It's not that the marketing doesn't work. It's that the conditions under which it was deployed made it difficult to deliver.

The timelines that cannot be compressed

Even with an adequate budget and a qualified partner, certain marketing timelines simply cannot be accelerated.

SEO is the clearest example. Google takes time to index, evaluate, and reward new content and new authority signals. A practice that begins an SEO investment today will not see full results in 30 days. Not in 90 days. The compounding nature of search rankings—where authority and visibility build on each other over months and years—means the investment pays off significantly, but not immediately. No amount of additional spend changes that underlying reality. We are playing by Google's rules, not ours.

This is precisely why proactive investment beats reactive investment. The practice that starts SEO before they desperately need leads is the one that has those leads flowing consistently. The practice that starts when the caseloads are empty is the one waiting for results that can't arrive fast enough.

You are more susceptible to predatory sales and marketing tactics if speed to results is one of your top concerns.

You cannot outspend your competitors on a budget that doesn't compete

If a competing practice in your market is investing $6,000 a month in SEO and your investment is $1,500, they will rank higher, generate more inquiries, and fill caseloads faster. You cannot make more with less.

The same logic applies to getting a “bargain” on marketing. A low price in this industry almost always reflects a low level of service. Low-cost agencies aren’t always operating in bad faith, but quality marketing is expensive to produce. Large teams, specialized tools, strategic expertise, and the ongoing, defensive work required to compete in difficult markets and maintain positions have real costs. If the price feels implausibly low, the results will eventually tell you why.

The practices that see long lasting returns from marketing tend to be the ones that spend what quality requires and give the investment enough time to compound. The ones with the most negative stories about marketing are almost always the ones that optimized for the lowest possible cost and expected the fastest possible results.

From a personal perspective, part of me wishes that I could deliver incredible results for less money. But unlike me, Google doesn’t care that therapists are underpaid and overworked. The burden of proof required to rank on Google is industry agnostic. It does not “go easy” on therapists because the system is rigged against them, so as marketers, our hands are tied.

In summary…

Marketing is not an expense to minimize until business picks up since it's the mechanism that determines whether business picks up at all. And the practices that treat it that way—that invest proactively, budget proportionally to their goals, and measure in years rather than months—are the ones that actually scale and do so with much less panic.

Before you set a marketing budget, work backwards from your revenue goal. What does 10% of that goal look like monthly? Start there, not from a number that feels comfortable to you.

And if you're building a group practice specifically—where consistent, high-volume lead flow is not optional but structural—this conversation is paramount. You cannot fill and maintain caseloads across multiple clinicians on a marketing investment designed for a solo practitioner. The math simply doesn't work, and no operational efficiency closes that gap.

The full framework for building a group practice on a marketing foundation that actually scales is covered in depth in my upcoming book. Join the waitlist.

If you’d like to explore a marketing partnership with Place Digital, reach out. We would love to meet you and learn more about your practice!