Grow My Therapy
Grow My TherapyGrow My Therapy — marketing for psychiatry practices
A new psychiatric patient is rarely a single transaction. An evaluation is followed by medication management that may run for years, at a cadence that fills a calendar reliably. That arithmetic changes what a practice can sensibly spend to be found, and almost no psychiatry practice has ever done it.
It also changes what to spend it on. In this specialty the largest sources of new patients are usually not advertising at all — they are the referring clinicians who already know your name, and the searches you are absent from.
The honest ranking
We would rather tell you which of these to do first than sell you all three at once. For most psychiatry practices the order below holds.
Primary care physicians, therapists who need a prescriber, hospital discharge teams. Usually the largest single source, and almost entirely neglected as a marketing channel because it does not look like marketing.
The people who arrive without a referral, having worked out what they think they have. Slower to build and permanent once built — covered in detail on SEO for psychiatrists.
Useful for a new location, a new subspecialty or a gap you need filled this quarter. Expensive in this field, constrained by health advertising rules, and worth doing only when the first two are in place.
Being paneled is itself a lead channel — insurer directories send real traffic. Making sure your listing is accurate and points to your site is nearly free and routinely forgotten.
Not a referral programme — that is awkward in medicine — but a practice that is easy to return to. Someone who stopped two years ago and is struggling again should be able to rebook without a new intake gauntlet.
Buying leads from aggregators. In psychiatry the quality is poor, the exclusivity is usually fictional, and it builds nothing you keep.
The channel nobody treats as one
Ask any primary care physician why they send patients to one psychiatrist rather than another and the answer is rarely clinical. It is that this one answers, this one has availability, and this one sends something back after the appointment. Referral flow is a logistics relationship long before it is a reputational one.
A practice can make itself the easy choice deliberately. That means a page written for referrers rather than patients — scope, ages seen, subspecialties, current wait time, insurance, and exactly how to send someone — at a short URL that fits in an email signature. It means a referral route that does not require a physician’s staff to navigate a patient booking form. And it means your current availability being visible, because a full psychiatrist gets crossed off a list quickly and quietly.
None of this is advertising, so it is not subject to advertising restrictions, and it compounds. Ten referring clinicians who find you easy to work with will outperform any campaign we could run for you.
The cheapest marketing intervention available to most psychiatry practices: a dated, accurate “currently accepting new patients” line, and a referral page a physician’s front desk can actually use.
When ads earn their place
Advertising platforms restrict how health-related campaigns can target people. You cannot build audiences around inferred medical conditions in the way other industries build audiences around interests, and remarketing to someone who visited a page about a diagnosis is constrained for good reason. Anyone proposing that has not read the policies.
What does work is search advertising against intent — someone actively looking for a psychiatrist in your area, with a query specific enough to be worth the click. Costs in this field are high because the patient value is high and hospital systems bid too, which is precisely why the arithmetic at the top of this page matters before a budget is set.
We run campaigns on Google, Facebook and Instagram where they earn it, and we say plainly when a budget is better spent on the site or on the referral layer instead. The monthly review reports what each channel produced in evaluations, not impressions.
How campaigns are run here
The part that recovers what you already earned
In psychiatry the gap between first contact and first appointment is often weeks — insurance to check, a referral to chase, a decision to make. Practices lose a large share of enquiries in that gap simply by going quiet.
How the pieces fit
Everything else we do for a psychiatry practice is a component of this. The website is where referrals and searches both land, and it is the constraint on everything downstream — no campaign fixes a site a referring physician does not trust. Search visibility is the compounding asset that keeps producing after a budget stops.
Writing is what search visibility is made of, and in psychiatry it doubles as the thing that makes you legible to the AI tools patients now ask for recommendations. Social content is the slowest and the least likely to fill a calendar directly, which is why we would put it last for most psychiatry practices rather than first.
The monthly review is where these stop being separate services. One conversation, thirty minutes, covering what produced evaluations this month, what did not, and what we are moving next — with the honest version of which piece is currently carrying the practice.
If you only do one thing: fix the site, then make yourself easy to refer to. Campaigns can wait for both.
Questions we get
It depends on your fee structure and how long patients typically stay with you, and it is worth calculating before any budget conversation. An evaluation followed by medication management at regular intervals over a year or more produces a very different number from a single session — and that number is what determines whether a campaign is sensible or reckless.
We will do the arithmetic with you on the call using your figures. Where we do not have real numbers, we will not invent them.
By being useful rather than promotional. A one-page referral resource with your scope, wait time and referral route is a service to their front desk, not a pitch. Sending a brief note back after you have seen a referred patient — within whatever your consent arrangements allow — does more for future referrals than anything you could pay for.
What does not work is the practice-branded gift basket. Physicians remember who made their day easier, not who bought them lunch.
Sometimes, and they are expensive. You are bidding against health systems and telepsychiatry companies with far larger budgets. Where they tend to work is narrowly — a specific subspecialty, a specific city, a specific gap you are trying to fill quickly — rather than as a general “get more patients” campaign.
They also cannot use the condition-based targeting people assume, because health advertising rules restrict it. Campaigns run on search intent instead.
Reduce, do not stop. Search visibility decays if abandoned and takes months to rebuild, which is painful when a practice suddenly has three openings. The usual move is to pause paid spend, keep the site and the content ticking, and switch the messaging to a waitlist. That way capacity can be turned back on in weeks rather than quarters.
A monthly conversation, in plain language, that leads with the number of evaluations booked and where they came from. It includes what we tried that did not work and have stopped doing. If a report has no failures in it, it is not a report.
That number decides what to do first, and it takes about ten minutes. Then we will show you where your referral layer and your search visibility currently stand. See the full marketing service or everything we do for psychiatrists.
No obligation · reviewed with you every 30 days
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