Hiring help for practice marketing, or doing it yourself
What marketing for a therapy practice should cost, the red flags specific to this field, what to keep in house, and why a trial beats a twelve-month contract.
Therapists get pitched constantly. Directory upsells, SEO firms with a Google partner badge, a nephew who builds websites, and a growing category of companies selling lead generation to practices at a fixed price per client. Some of it is fine. A meaningful share of it is built for home services and repackaged with a stock photo of a couch, and some of it will hand you an ethics problem you did not know you had bought.
This guide is about deciding what to hire out, what to keep, what a fair price is, and how to test someone without signing a year away.
What you should never hand off
Three things stay with you regardless of who you hire.
Your accounts. The Google Business Profile, the Google Ads account, the Meta business account, the domain and the website hosting are all registered to you, with you as owner and the agency added as a user. If a company creates any of these under its own name, you are renting your own practice. When you leave, the reviews, the ad history and the site go with them. This is the most common way small practices get trapped and it is entirely avoidable by asking one question at the start.
Anything that touches client information. Your EHR, your intake, your scheduling with clinical detail, your notes. No marketing vendor needs access to any of that, and any vendor asking for a client list to build a lookalike audience should be shown the door.
Your clinical voice. Have someone edit your specialty pages, not write them. A page describing how you work in language you would never use is obvious to a reader in three sentences.
Red flags specific to this field
- They propose collecting testimonials or "success stories" from clients. This is disqualifying on its own. It means they have not read the ethics code that governs your license, and you would be the one facing the board.
- They want to upload your client list to Meta or Google for audience matching.
- They offer to write blog posts about mental health conditions under your name, at volume. Clinical guidance published under your license, written by someone unlicensed, is a liability with no upside.
- They guarantee a number of clients, or promise page one rankings. Nobody can guarantee ranking, and a guaranteed client count usually means low-quality leads that consume your intake time.
- They quote a per-lead price without defining a lead. A form fill from another state is a lead by that definition.
- They will not name the other practices they work with in your metro. If they run ads for three therapists in your city, you are bidding against each other with the same manager.
- The contract is twelve months with a ninety day out. Ask why the work needs a year to show anything.
- They cannot explain what happens to your data or whether they will sign a business associate agreement if any of their tools touch protected information.
What a fair price looks like
Rough ranges for a solo to small group practice in the US:
- Google Ads management: $400 to $900 a month, or 15 to 20 percent of ad spend, separate from the ad spend itself which you pay Google directly.
- Meta ads management: $400 to $800 a month, plus spend.
- Local SEO and Google profile work: $300 to $800 a month, and honestly, after the first three months the workload drops a lot.
- Website build: $1,500 to $5,000 one time for five to eight pages, or $75 to $200 a month on a managed platform.
- Full-service package for a solo practice: $1,000 to $2,500 a month all in, including some ad spend.
Anything above $3,500 a month for a single-clinician practice is difficult to justify, because a solo calendar fills at about 22 sessions a week and there is nowhere for the extra spend to go. Anything under $400 a month is either automated software with a person's name on it or someone junior learning on your account.
What is genuinely worth doing yourself
Some of this work is not hard, it is just unglamorous, and paying $600 a month for it is a poor trade.
Do it yourself: the Google Business Profile, which is a few hours once and fifteen minutes a month afterward, per the profile guide. Your specialty page copy. The intake phone script. Your voicemail and text-back messages, from the follow-up guide. Referral relationships, which cannot be outsourced and are still the highest-converting channel in this field.
Worth hiring out: Google Ads, where the negative keyword and search term work is tedious and expensive to get wrong. The website build, if yours is more than four years old. Meta campaign management. Bookkeeping, always, because the hourly math is not close.
How to test someone in 30 days
Whoever you talk to, structure the first month as a test rather than an engagement.
- Pick one problem, not five. "Fill three open slots" or "get the phone to ring more" or "rebuild the site". A vendor working on five things in month one is working on none.
- Agree on one number before anything starts. Booked consultations, not impressions, clicks or "reach".
- Keep ownership of every account, with them added as a user.
- Set a stop date. Thirty days, no auto-renewal.
- Ask for a written thirty-day plan before the money moves. If they cannot describe what they will do in a page, they do not have a plan.
- Ask what they will need from you. Anyone who says "nothing" is not going to produce anything worth having. Good work in this field needs two hours of your time in the first month.
Why a trial rather than a contract
The argument for long contracts is that marketing takes time to work. There is something to that for organic search. There is nothing to it for ads, missed-call follow-up, a profile rebuild or an intake fix, which show a signal in two weeks.
That is why every service on this site is offered as a free 14-day trial. You pick one, it gets built inside your own accounts, it runs for two weeks, and there is no card on file. At the end you keep it at a price quoted before it started, switch to something else, or stop and keep whatever was built. It is the same test described above, without the risk, and it exists because a clinician should watch the phone ring before paying anyone.
Before you hire anyone, read the benchmark report so you know what normal looks like in this category, and run the calculator so you know whether your problem is demand or intake. A vendor selling you traffic when your real problem is unreturned calls will happily take the money.
Frequently asked
Should I use a therapy-specific marketing company? Sometimes. The good ones already know the ethics constraints and save you a lot of explaining. The weak ones are directory resellers with a niche landing page. Judge by the questions they ask, not by the niche they claim.
What about hiring a virtual assistant instead? For intake calls, confirmations and follow-up, a trained VA at $8 to $20 an hour is often better value than any agency, provided they are trained on your script and crisis routing and covered by an appropriate agreement.
How do I fire someone without losing everything? You do not have to, if you own the accounts. Remove their user access, change the domain registrar password, and export the ad account history. That is a fifteen-minute exit, which is exactly why ownership is item one.
To try a single service for two weeks with no card, use the free trial page or text or call (385) 832-6175.