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What AI Tells Are Quietly Killing Trust on Behavioral Health Websites?

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Beacon Media + Marketing

AI tells are the structural patterns in copy that signal to readers, often unconsciously, that a machine wrote the words instead of a person. They show up in sentence rhythm, paragraph structure, and word choice. In behavioral health, they erode trust faster than in any other industry because prospective clients are scanning your website for evidence that real, present humans run the practice.

Most practices using AI right now don’t realize how recognizable the output has become. Readers don’t always know what they’re spotting, but they feel something off. And in behavioral health, “something off” is the entire trust calculation.

What does “AI tell” actually mean?

An AI tell is a recognizable pattern in writing that appears far more often in machine-generated copy than in natural human writing. The individual patterns aren’t always wrong on their own. They become tells because they appear together, repeatedly, in content produced quickly without strong human input.

Three categories matter most:

  • Structural tells. Sentence constructions and paragraph patterns that AI tools use as defaults.
  • Vocabulary tells. Specific words and phrases AI reaches for to signal authority or empathy.
  • Density tells. What AI puts in (smooth structure, generic reassurance) and what it leaves out (specific stories, real numbers, actual people).

A trained reader spots these in three seconds. An untrained reader can’t name them, but feels the result instantly.

What are the most common AI fingerprints in behavioral health content?

Six patterns show up over and over right now:

  1. The negation flip. “Marketing isn’t just about conversions; it’s about connection.” It sounds profound. It reads as machine-generated. AI tools default to this construction because it manufactures depth without earning it.
  2. The false-inclusive opener. “Whether you’re a solo practitioner or running a 50-person practice…” This signals genericness, not inclusivity. It tells readers you don’t actually know who you’re talking to.
  3. Comprehensiveness sweeps. “From SEO to social media to email marketing…” AI uses this construction to signal breadth. Real expertise signals breadth through specifics, not sweeping framing.
  4. Tidy rules of three. Three perfectly parallel phrases built to land a quotable line. When the rhythm shows up out of nowhere, it reads as AI reaching for resonance it didn’t earn.
  5. Generic empathy language. “We meet you where you are.” “We walk alongside you on your journey.” Phrases that could appear on any practice’s website with no edits required.
  6. Polished sentences with no specifics inside them. Clean structure, correct grammar, zero proper nouns, zero specific stories, zero real numbers. The cleanest tell of all.

Why do AI tells erode trust faster in behavioral health than other industries?

Because trust is the conversion mechanism in behavioral health. In e-commerce, polished AI copy might lose a sale. In behavioral health, it loses a relationship before it ever begins.

The clients you want to attract are doing one specific thing on your website. They’re scanning for evidence that the people behind the practice are real, present, and capable of holding space for what they’re carrying. Generic copy fails that scan immediately. So does perfectly polished copy with no specific human inside it.

A parent searching for a therapist for their child holds a higher bar for trust than someone shopping for shoes. Every AI tell you ship is a small data point telling them to keep searching.

How are readers actually detecting AI-generated copy?

Often unconsciously. Readers may not be able to articulate why a website feels off, but they bounce. The signals stack and trigger a gut response well before the conscious brain weighs in.

What readers register, even without naming it:

  • Sentence rhythms that feel uniformly smooth, with no natural variation in length.
  • Vocabulary that feels reached for rather than chosen, including words like “leverage,” “robust,” and “comprehensive.”
  • The absence of specific names, numbers, or moments.
  • Tone that stays carefully neutral when a real person would have a clear point of view.

Readers under 30 are now extremely fluent at spotting AI-generated content. They’ve seen enough of it to recognize the rhythms instantly. That fluency is climbing across every age group.

How can practices remove AI tells from existing content?

Run an AI-tells audit on every page of your website, starting with the highest-trust pages: About, Our Approach, and clinician bios. A working audit looks like this:

  • Read the page out loud. AI tells survive on the screen but die in the mouth. Anything that sounds like a brochure gets rewritten.
  • Search for the six patterns above and rewrite each one with specifics.
  • Add at least one specific to every section. A real client situation (de-identified for HIPAA compliance), a real number, a real moment, a real name.
  • Cut every sentence that could appear on a competitor’s website with the practice name swapped.

This is slow, unglamorous work. It’s also the work that converts.

Why does removing AI tells matter for your practice?

Because in a content environment where AI now performs roughly 65% of the tasks done in marketing roles in real-world use (Anthropic Economic Index, 2025), the copy on your website is one of the few remaining places where prospective clients can verify you’re real. If they can’t verify it there, the call doesn’t happen.

Cleaning up the AI tells in your existing content is one of the highest-leverage trust moves you can make right now. If you want help running this through both a branding and content marketing lens, an audit like this is exactly the kind of work our team does for behavioral health practices.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is an AI tell in marketing copy? An AI tell is a recognizable structural, vocabulary, or density pattern that appears more often in machine-generated copy than in real human writing. Common examples include “isn’t just X, it’s Y” negation flips, “whether you’re X or Y” false-inclusive openers, and generic empathy phrases with no specifics underneath.

Are all AI tells obvious to readers? No. Some are explicit, like overused phrases such as “in today’s digital landscape.” Most operate below conscious recognition. Readers feel something off and bounce without naming why. The result is the same.

Can AI-generated content be edited to feel human? Yes, with intentional input and a thorough editing pass. A real voice document, sample writing, and an edit that adds specificity can produce content that reads as human. The work is in the editing, not the prompting.

Why do AI tells matter more in behavioral health than other industries? Because trust is the entire conversion mechanism. Clients searching for behavioral health support have a higher bar for verifying the humans behind the practice. Generic AI patterns trigger distrust faster in this category than in almost any other.

Where should a practice start an AI-tells audit? Start with the three highest-trust pages: About, Our Approach, and any therapist or clinician bios. These pages carry the most trust-building weight and have the highest impact when rewritten with real specifics.

What’s one sentence on your website right now that could appear on any practice’s site with only the name swapped?

Why Does Brand Voice Matter More in the Age of AI?

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Beacon Media + Marketing

Because AI is rewriting the internet at scale, and most marketing is starting to sound the same. Brand voice is the specific way your practice sees the people you serve and how that perspective shows up in every word you publish. As AI flattens the average voice on the internet, the practices keeping theirs intact are the ones who got clear on it before they ever opened a tool.

Here’s what I’m watching happen across hundreds of behavioral health practices right now. The ones losing their voice are not the ones refusing to use AI. They’re the ones who never paused to ask what their voice actually was in the first place. AI didn’t create that problem. It exposed it.

What is brand voice, exactly?

Brand voice is built from three things: perspective, word choice, and pattern. Perspective is what your practice actually believes about your clients, your work, and what healing looks like. Word choice is the vocabulary you reach for and the vocabulary you refuse to use. Pattern is what you say often, and what you never say at all.

Voice is not your tagline. It’s not the words you bold on your homepage. It’s the recognizable fingerprint underneath everything you publish. When that fingerprint is missing, the writing reads polished and generic at the same time. Polished, because AI is good at clean structure. Generic, because the tool is averaging from everything else online instead of starting from anything specifically you.

Why is brand voice harder to protect now?

Because the default behavior with most AI tools is to ask for output without giving input. People type a prompt, accept the first draft, and publish.

Anthropic published research in 2025 showing that AI is currently performing roughly 65% of the tasks done in marketing roles in real-world use, with the bulk of that being content production (Anthropic Economic Index, 2025). That means the marketing your prospective clients are reading right now, including from your competitors, has AI fingerprints on it. Same sentence rhythms. Same tidy structures. Same vague reassurances about meeting people where they are. Recognizable patterns once you know what to look for, and increasingly recognizable to readers who don’t know what they’re looking for but feel something off.

Why does brand voice matter more in behavioral health?

In most industries, generic copy is a missed opportunity. In behavioral health, it’s a trust failure.

The clients you want to attract are doing one thing when they land on your website. They’re scanning for evidence that you’re real, that you understand them, and that thoughtful, present humans run the practice they’re about to call. They’re not consciously asking “is this AI-generated?” They’re asking, “do I trust these people with my mental health, or my child’s, or my marriage?”

Generic empathy language fails that test fast. So does perfectly polished, perfectly safe copy that could have been written for any practice in any city. Trust gets built through specificity, and specificity is the first thing AI strips out when it isn’t given anything specific to start with.

What does it look like to use AI without losing your voice?

The practices using AI well right now are not outputting more content. They’re getting clearer on their voice first, then training every tool they use on that clarity. Here’s what that actually looks like:

  • A real, working voice document for your practice. Not a brand guideline PDF that sits on a shelf. A living, plain-spoken description of how you sound, what you say, what you don’t, and the perspective underneath all of it.
  • Inputs to every AI tool that include that document, sample writing, and the specific clinician or leader whose voice the content is coming from.
  • An editing pass against one question: would the person who started this practice actually say it this way? If no, rewrite. If yes, publish.

What we get out of AI is only as good as what we put into it. That’s the entire game. The tools are not the problem. The lack of clarity going in is the problem.

What does this really mean for your practice?

People don’t come to a behavioral health practice because they want to read your website. They come because they want to feel known before they walk in the door. Your voice is the first contact they have with whether you can do that for them.

When AI flattens everyone toward the same midpoint, the practices that hold onto a specific, recognizable, human voice will be the ones who get the calls. That’s not a marketing observation. It’s a human one. Real is the entire game, and it’s the only thing AI can’t fake for you. If you’re thinking about what holding onto your voice looks like in practice, that’s exactly the work branding and design and content marketing are supposed to do together.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is brand voice in marketing? Brand voice is the specific way a practice sees the people it serves and how that perspective shows up in every word it publishes. It’s built from three components: perspective, word choice, and pattern. Voice is not the same as tone. Tone shifts by context; voice stays consistent across every channel.

Can I use AI to write my practice’s content and still sound like myself? Yes, but only if you give the tool something specific to start from. AI tools default to averaging when they’re given generic prompts. With a real voice document, sample writing, and a clear point of view, AI can amplify your voice instead of flattening it.

Why does brand voice matter more in behavioral health than in other industries? Because trust drives conversion in behavioral health more than in nearly any other field. Clients are scanning for evidence that the people behind the practice are real, present, and capable of understanding them before they ever pick up the phone. Generic copy fails that scan immediately.

How can I tell if my marketing copy sounds AI-generated? Watch for these signals: heavy use of “isn’t just X, it’s Y” constructions, perfectly even rule-of-three phrasing, vague empathy language that could apply to any practice, and a polished tone with no specific stories or details inside it. If your copy could be lifted onto a competitor’s website with only the name changed, the voice isn’t there yet.

What’s the first step to protecting brand voice when using AI? Write a working voice document before you scale any AI-generated content. Define what your practice sounds like in plain language, with examples of what you do and don’t say. Then use that document as the input to every AI tool you touch. Voice can’t be amplified if it hasn’t been defined.

When was the last time someone told you your website sounded exactly like you?

Why Do Modern Websites Need to Answer Questions Immediately?

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Beacon Media + Marketing

Modern websites need to answer questions immediately because the user arriving at your site in 2026 has already been conditioned by AI tools, fast-loading apps, and instant search results to expect an answer before they have to look for one. A website that makes a visitor navigate, scroll, or search to find what they came for is a website that will lose that visitor — often in under ten seconds.

What changed about how people arrive at websites?

The journey to a website has fundamentally shifted. Where users once browsed their way to information, they now arrive with a specific question already formed — often pulled directly from an AI search result, a social media post, or a voice query. They’re not in discovery mode. They’re in answer mode.

That means the old website model — welcome the visitor, introduce the brand, explain the services, then get to the point — is misaligned with how users actually arrive and what they expect when they do. The point needs to come first.

What does “answering immediately” actually look like?

Immediate answers on a website are less about technology and more about structure and language. The practices doing this well share a few consistent characteristics:

  • Headlines that state outcomes, not offerings: “Get back to feeling like yourself” answers the emotional question faster than “Our therapy services.” The visitor knows within one line whether they’re in the right place.
  • Above-the-fold clarity: The first visible screen answers who the site is for, what problem it solves, and what to do next. No scrolling required to determine relevance.
  • Service pages that open with the problem: Rather than describing the service, the page opens by naming the experience the visitor is having. Recognition precedes explanation.
  • Prominent FAQ sections: Questions formatted the way a user would actually ask them, answered directly and specifically, placed where visitors can find them without hunting.
  • Navigation built around intent: Menu labels that reflect what visitors are looking for rather than how the organization is structured internally.

Why does immediacy matter more than ever for SEO and AI citation?

There’s a dual benefit to websites that answer immediately. For human visitors, the experience feels frictionless and trustworthy. For AI search engines, content that answers questions directly in the first few sentences is significantly more likely to be cited in AI Overviews, ChatGPT responses, and Perplexity results.

The structural qualities that make a website feel immediately useful to a human visitor — direct answers, clear headers, specific language, FAQ formatting — are the same qualities that make content extractable and citable by AI systems. Designing for immediate human answers and designing for AI citation are increasingly the same task.

A strong content marketing strategy accounts for both audiences simultaneously. A well-built marketing strategy treats the website as the hub that all other content — social, email, AI search — is driving toward.

What does this mean for behavioral health websites?

For behavioral health practices, the case for immediate answers is even stronger than in most industries. A visitor arriving at a behavioral health website is often in the middle of a significant personal decision. They are not browsing. They are evaluating whether this practice understands them and whether it feels safe enough to contact.

Every second they spend searching for basic information — accepted insurance, available services, what to expect from a first appointment — is a second during which doubt can win. A website that answers those questions before they’re asked removes the friction standing between a visitor and an intake form. That friction has a measurable ROI cost that most practices have never actually calculated.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do you know what questions your website needs to answer immediately? Start with your intake team. The questions they field most often on the phone are the questions your website should be answering before anyone picks up the phone. Those are your above-the-fold priorities.

Does answering questions immediately mean the site needs a chatbot? Not necessarily. A well-structured page with clear headlines, prominent FAQs, and outcome-focused copy answers questions immediately without any chat functionality. Chatbots can help but are not a substitute for clear page architecture.

How often should website content be updated to stay current with user questions? At minimum, quarterly. User questions evolve with cultural shifts, seasonal needs, and changes in how AI tools are framing information. A content marketing review every three months keeps website content aligned with what visitors are actually arriving to ask.

Are People Consuming More Content but Paying Less Attention?

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Beacon Media + Marketing

Yes — and the data is consistent across every major platform. Content consumption is up. Attention depth is down. People are encountering more content than ever before while engaging meaningfully with less of it. For marketers, this isn’t a paradox to puzzle over. It’s a reality to design around.

How can consumption be up while attention is down?

The answer lies in how consumption is being measured versus how attention actually works.

Platform metrics count a video view at three seconds, a story impression at one second, an article “read” the moment a page loads. By those measures, content consumption has never been higher. But three seconds of passive exposure and genuine cognitive engagement are not the same thing — and the gap between them has widened significantly as feeds have become more saturated and AI tools have trained audiences to expect faster, more direct information delivery.

People are scrolling more. They’re absorbing less per scroll. The volume of content passing in front of their eyes has increased while the mental bandwidth available to process any individual piece has decreased.

What does the attention economy actually look like in 2026?

Several patterns are showing up consistently across platform research and behavioral data:

  • Completion rates on long-form content are declining even as long-form production increases. More people start videos and articles than finish them, and the drop-off point is moving earlier.
  • Save and share rates are the most reliable engagement signals precisely because they require a moment of genuine decision. A save means someone valued the content enough to return to it. That’s a high bar in a low-attention environment.
  • Re-engagement is rising as a behavior — people encountering a piece of content multiple times before acting on it. The first exposure plants the seed. Attention comes later, on a repeat visit.
  • Short-form isn’t automatically winning. Highly specific, deeply useful long-form content still earns sustained attention when it answers a question the reader genuinely has. The problem isn’t length. It’s relevance.

What is actually driving the attention gap?

Three forces are operating simultaneously. Content volume has outpaced the brain’s capacity to process it meaningfully, creating selective filtering as a protective response. AI tools have raised expectations for how quickly information should be delivered, making slower content feel like effort. And April is Stress Awareness Month for good reason — chronic stress, which is increasingly prevalent, directly impairs the sustained attention required to engage deeply with content.

These three forces compound each other. A stressed audience in a saturated feed using AI-calibrated expectations is not going to slow down for content that doesn’t immediately earn that slowdown.

What does this mean for your content strategy?

The brands navigating this well are not producing less content. They’re producing more intentional content — designed from the first sentence to earn the attention it needs to do its job.

That means leading with the answer, not building to it. Using structure that rewards scanning while still delivering depth to the reader who stays. Creating content marketing that serves a specific person with a specific question rather than a general audience with a general topic. And measuring success by the signals that reflect genuine attention — saves, shares, direct traffic, inbound conversations — rather than the passive consumption metrics that platforms serve up by default.

For behavioral health practices specifically, the attention gap has a human dimension that goes beyond marketing strategy. The people searching for mental health support are often the most cognitively depleted members of your audience. Content that respects their limited bandwidth — that gets to the point, communicates safety quickly, and doesn’t demand effort before delivering value — is not just more effective. It’s more ethical. Understanding what that content is actually worth in terms of intake and revenue is where marketing strategy and mission align.

Frequently Asked Questions

If attention spans are shrinking, should we only produce short-form content? Not necessarily. Short-form content earns the initial stop. Specific, deeply useful long-form content earns sustained attention from the reader who has a genuine question. Both have a role. The problem is generic long-form, not length itself.

How do you measure attention rather than just consumption? Focus on save rates, share rates, scroll depth, time on page, and most importantly — inbound conversations that begin with “I saw your post” or “I read your article.” Those signals reflect real attention in ways that view counts and impressions do not.

Is this attention gap permanent or a phase? The underlying drivers — content volume, AI-calibrated expectations, chronic stress — show no signs of reversing. Designing for a low-attention environment is a long-term strategic requirement, not a temporary adjustment.

What Do Users Expect From Websites in the Age of AI?

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Beacon Media + Marketing

In the age of AI, users expect websites to behave more like knowledgeable advisors and less like digital brochures. They expect immediate answers, intuitive navigation, content that anticipates their questions, and an experience that feels relevant to them specifically — not to a generic visitor. Practices and businesses whose websites still operate on a browse-and-discover model are losing visitors to competitors whose sites deliver answers on arrival.

How has AI changed user expectations for websites?

The widespread adoption of AI tools — search assistants, chatbots, AI-powered recommendations — has recalibrated what people consider a normal digital experience. When someone uses an AI tool to answer a question, they receive a synthesized, direct response within seconds. That experience sets a standard.

When those same users then visit a website and have to click through multiple pages to find a basic answer, the gap between expectation and experience is jarring. The website doesn’t feel helpful. It feels like work.

This expectation gap is widening. As AI tools become more embedded in daily life, the tolerance for websites that require effort to navigate will continue to shrink.

What specifically do users expect now?

The expectations that show up most consistently in website behavior research include:

  • Immediate relevance: Within the first visible screen, users expect to know whether the site has what they’re looking for. Sites that bury their core value proposition below the fold lose visitors before they scroll.
  • Direct answers: Users increasingly expect websites to answer questions the way a knowledgeable person would — directly, specifically, and without requiring the visitor to piece together information from multiple pages.
  • Conversational content: The language of AI tools is conversational. Websites that communicate in formal, institutional language feel increasingly out of step with how users expect to be addressed.
  • Personalization signals: Users expect content to acknowledge who they are and what they need. General content written for everyone reads as content written for no one.
  • Fast, frictionless experience: Load speed, mobile optimization, and intuitive navigation are no longer differentiators. They’re baseline requirements. A site that fails on these doesn’t get a second chance.
  • Trust signals upfront: Reviews, credentials, outcomes, and human faces need to appear early. Users trained by AI tools to evaluate sources quickly apply the same scrutiny to websites.

How should websites respond to these expectations?

The most effective website updates in response to AI-era expectations share a common direction: they move answers earlier and reduce the work required to find them.

Practically, this means leading service pages with the problem you solve rather than the service you offer. It means FAQ sections placed prominently rather than buried in footers. It means navigation structured around user intent rather than organizational hierarchy. And it means content marketing that answers the questions users are arriving with, not just the questions the organization wants to answer.

A marketing strategy built around AI-era user expectations treats the website as a conversation rather than a presentation.

What does this mean for behavioral health websites?

For behavioral health practices, the AI-era user expectation is both a challenge and a significant opportunity. The challenge: users arriving in emotional distress have even less tolerance for websites that require navigation effort. The opportunity: a website that immediately communicates safety, clarity, and relevance to a stressed visitor does something competitors with cluttered, generic sites cannot. It earns trust before a single word of copy is read.

Understanding what that experience is worth in actual intake numbers is the starting point. The ROI of a website that converts anxious visitors into scheduled appointments is measurably different from one that sends them back to search results.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do users actually expect AI chatbots on every website now? Not necessarily a chatbot specifically, but they do expect AI-like responsiveness — clear answers, fast load, intuitive paths. A well-structured website without a chatbot will outperform a poorly structured one with one.

How important is personalization for smaller behavioral health practices? Highly important, but personalization doesn’t require sophisticated technology. Copy that speaks directly to a specific audience — “If you’re looking for your first therapist and aren’t sure where to start” — achieves a personalization effect through language alone.

What is the single most important website change for AI-era users? Getting the answer to “Is this for me?” above the fold. If a visitor has to scroll to determine whether your site is relevant to their situation, the site has a structural problem worth addressing before anything else.

Is Digital Overload Changing How People Interact With Content?

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Beacon Media + Marketing

Yes. Digital overload is measurably changing how people interact with content — reducing depth of engagement, accelerating scroll speeds, increasing selectivity about what earns attention, and shifting preference toward content that delivers value immediately rather than building toward it. For marketers, this isn’t a temporary condition to wait out. It’s the new baseline.

What is digital overload and how widespread is it?

Digital overload refers to the state of cognitive and emotional strain that results from sustained exposure to more digital information than a person can effectively process. Research consistently places the average adult’s daily digital content exposure in the hundreds of megabytes of information — across social feeds, email, messaging platforms, news, and streaming.

The brain is not equipped to process that volume without cost. The cost shows up as reduced concentration, faster fatigue, greater difficulty distinguishing important from unimportant information, and a growing tendency to skim rather than read.

April is Stress Awareness Month, and digital overload is one of the most underacknowledged contributors to daily stress for working professionals and the people behavioral health practices serve.

How specifically is it changing content interaction?

The behavioral shifts are consistent across research into digital consumption patterns:

  • Reduced reading depth: Users are reading fewer words per page visit than five years ago. Scanning has largely replaced reading for the majority of online content.
  • Faster abandonment: Pages that don’t communicate value in the first screen are abandoned more quickly than ever. The threshold for “this isn’t worth my time” has dropped.
  • Heightened selectivity: Overloaded audiences are making faster, more instinctive decisions about what earns their attention. Content that doesn’t feel immediately relevant gets filtered out before it’s consciously evaluated.
  • Preference for structured content: Lists, headers, short paragraphs, and clear visual hierarchy perform better with overloaded audiences because they reduce the cognitive work required to extract value.
  • Decreased tolerance for promotional content: Audiences experiencing digital overload are particularly resistant to content that feels like it’s asking something of them before delivering something to them.

What does this mean for content strategy?

Digital overload doesn’t mean people have stopped consuming content. It means they’ve gotten ruthlessly efficient about which content they consume. The practices and brands that are navigating this well are doing a few things consistently.

They’re leading with the answer rather than building to it. They’re formatting for scanners rather than assuming readers. They’re prioritizing depth on fewer pieces over volume across many. And they’re investing in content marketing that genuinely answers questions rather than content that circles topics without resolving them.

What does this mean for behavioral health marketing specifically?

For behavioral health practices, digital overload in your audience has a direct clinical dimension. The people most likely to be seeking mental health support are often already in states of cognitive and emotional depletion. Content that adds to that load — dense, cluttered, demanding, or unclear — is not just ineffective. It actively works against the trust you’re trying to build. A social media strategy built around reducing cognitive load rather than maximizing content volume will consistently outperform a high-frequency approach with overloaded audiences.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is digital overload the same as screen fatigue? They’re related but distinct. Screen fatigue refers specifically to the physical and visual effects of prolonged screen use. Digital overload is the cognitive and emotional effect of processing too much information. They often occur together.

What content formats perform best with digitally overloaded audiences? Short-form video with captions, bulleted summaries, clear headers, and content with a single focused point tend to perform best. Multi-topic content and long unbroken paragraphs perform worst.

Should behavioral health practices post less content to avoid contributing to overload? Quality over quantity is the right framework. Fewer, more intentional pieces of content that deliver genuine value cause less overload than high-frequency generic posting.

Why Do People Leave Websites Faster Than They Used To?

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Beacon Media + Marketing

People leave websites faster in 2026 because their expectations have risen faster than most websites have evolved. AI-powered tools have trained users to expect immediate, clear answers — and when a website doesn’t deliver that within the first few seconds, they leave for something that will.

What has changed about user expectations?

The experience of using AI search tools has fundamentally shifted what people expect from every digital touchpoint. When you ask ChatGPT a question, you get a direct, organized answer in seconds. When you use Google AI Overviews, the answer appears before you click anything. That immediacy has become the baseline expectation.

Websites that were built around a traditional browsing experience — explore the menu, scroll through the homepage, find the page you need — feel slow and effortful by comparison. Users are not less patient than they used to be. They’re calibrated to a faster standard.

What are the most common reasons people leave faster now?

Several factors consistently drive faster bounce rates in 2026:

  • Slow load times: The expectation is under 3 seconds. Every additional second of load time meaningfully increases the likelihood of abandonment.
  • Content that doesn’t match search intent: If a user searched for “anxiety therapy for adults” and your homepage leads with your company history, you’ve already lost them.
  • No clear answer above the fold: If a visitor can’t determine within the first visible screen whether your site has what they need, they often won’t scroll to find out.
  • Poor mobile experience: The majority of web traffic is now mobile. A site that isn’t optimized for a phone screen loses mobile visitors almost immediately.
  • Lack of social proof: Without trust signals — reviews, recognizable credentials, real client outcomes — visitors in uncertain emotional states leave quickly.
  • Too many options: Cluttered navigation and too many competing CTAs create decision fatigue, which often results in no decision at all.

How do you address it?

The answer lies in getting clearer faster. The most important question any website page needs to answer within the first few seconds is: “Is this for me?” If the answer to that question requires scrolling, clicking, or reading several paragraphs, the page has a problem.

A strong marketing strategy for websites in 2026 prioritizes clarity above the fold, loads fast on mobile, and matches the language of the page precisely to the search terms and emotional state of the person arriving. Content marketing plays a key role here — the words on the page need to feel like they were written for the person reading them, not about the services being offered.

What does this mean for behavioral health websites specifically?

For behavioral health practices, a fast bounce is particularly costly. A visitor to your site is often researching a significant personal decision, sometimes in a vulnerable moment. If they don’t feel immediately understood and safe, they leave — and the barrier to returning is higher than in most other industries. Understanding the true ROI of a website that converts requires looking at what bounce rate is actually costing you in lost intake, not just lost clicks.

Frequently Asked Questions

How fast does a website need to load to keep visitors? Under 3 seconds is the current baseline expectation. Pages that load in 1-2 seconds have a measurably lower bounce rate than those that take 4-5 seconds.

Is a high bounce rate always a sign of a problem? Not always. On some informational pages, users find what they need quickly and leave satisfied. For behavioral health intake pages and service pages, however, a high bounce rate almost always signals a conversion problem worth investigating.

Does mobile experience affect how quickly people leave? Significantly. Most web traffic is mobile, and a poor mobile experience is one of the fastest ways to lose a visitor before they’ve read a single sentence.

(VIDEO) Get Your Orthodontics Social Media Strategy Off the Ground!

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Beacon Media + Marketing

“Nobody (not even us!) can sit in front of a blank computer screen three times a week and pull something out of our hat each time like it’s no big deal. Publishing regular content is a challenge for anyone who does not have a plan. So that is exactly what we do–we come up with a plan to guide us on the days that creative genius does not come naturally.” – #TeamBeacon

A lot of practice managers know that social media is important, but they simply haven’t been able to get a strategy moving forward. If this is you, we feel your pain.

That’s why we put together this quick guide outlining our approach to consistent social media publishing, for orthodontics!

First, we’re going to do a quick refresh on the top 3 platforms we recommend at Beacon. Then we’ll go straight into our key to success: the Editorial Calendar. We’ll also touch on paid social media advertising for a bit! Enjoy the ride!

The King of Social Media: Facebook

There is no question about the popularity of Facebook and its potential for reaching a significantly large audience of prospective orthodontics patients, but just in case, here are some statistics to ease your mind.

Almost 75% of online American adults use Facebook.1At the end of 2018, Facebook had 2.32 billion monthly active users.2 That’s almost one-third of the global population!

What makes Facebook such a great tool for reaching these people is its targeting abilities. When you publish paid content to Facebook (see: Boosting Posts and Advertising), you are not simply showing your content to the world at large–you have the ability to tell Facebook who you would like to show your advertisements to based on important demographics such as location, title, income, interests, and more.

Posting Schedule

In order to grow and maintain a following on Facebook, we recommended that you post to your orthodontics page 3-5 times per week. The content of these posts should follow an Editorial Calendar to publish consistently, which we will talk about in a moment.

For a brief summary of the information shared in this blog, watch Social Media Manager Sarah Testen discuss social media marketing on Beacon’s Digital U!

 

Instagram for Orthodontics

Instagram is an important platform for reaching a millennial audience as well as the teenage population (prime time for braces!). The platform’s most active users are between 18 and 29 years old,3 with 72% of teens saying that they use Instagram.4

A good rule of thumb for posting Instagram content is that “everything that goes on Instagram can be shared on Facebook, but not everything that is shared on Facebook should go on Instagram.” This is because the content that performs well on Instagram includes warm and engaging images, and not all Facebook posts are that way.

Instagram is a visually-oriented platform that works best when you are sharing high-quality images taken in good perspective. If you have a natural photographer on staff at your orthodontics practice, you will want to enlist his or her help for this platform.

Instagram also thrives on “everyday” images, photos that provide a sneak peak into the visual life of the person, business, or practice being followed. Arm the photo-savvy members of your orthodontics team with the ability to share pictures of pretty views out the practice windows, indoor plants, positive interactions with patients (if they are willing to have their photo shared), and more! This will bring life and a following to your page.

Posting Schedule

Plan to share a couple posts types from the Editorial Calendar that include engaging images each week in addition to the photos your team photographers take!

If you are just getting started on Instagram, we recently wrote a blog with 14 tips to optimize an Instagram for Business profile. Check it out for a deeper look at some of these concepts!

Tips for Social Media Marketing on Linkedin

LinkedIn is coming back as a great way to do business-to-business marketing. Although your orthodontics practice is likely not targeting other businesses, LinkedIn can be valuable for vendor relationships as well as for reaching prospective new hires.

Among social media platforms, LinkedIn is a powerhouse for business-to-business traffic. The platform makes up more than 50% of all social traffic to business-to-business websites and blogs.5 Although there are only 154 million LinkedIn users from the U.S., this is a select group of people, comprised primarily of senior-level staff and decision-makers.6 In addition, there are currently 40 million students and recent college graduates on LinkedIn as more and more realize that it is an effective platform for networking to find jobs.7

Content that performs well on LinkedIn includes business and industry news as well as personal coaching/life advice, which makes sense considering the demographics.

Posting Schedule

If your orthodontics practice is looking to forge new vendor relationships, strengthen old ones, or if you are currently hiring, we recommend posting 3-5 times per week.

How to Create an Editorial Calendar for Your Orthodontics Practice and Publish Consistently

At this point you are probably thinking, “This information is great and all, really it is, but how do I make it happen?”

Yours is a common pain point among our clients–they understand the importance of publishing consistently to their social media accounts, but they have not been able to get the task off the ground.

As a social media agency, our job is to publish social media content on a consistent basis, and we understand the struggle. Nobody (not even us!) can sit in front of a blank computer screen three times a week and pull something out of our hat each time like it’s no big deal. Publishing regular content is a challenge for anyone who does not have a plan. So that is exactly what we do–we come up with a plan to guide us on the days that creative genius does not come naturally. We call this plan our “Editorial Calendar.”

Here is a page from an Editorial Calendar we recently produced for one of our clients (name and logo blurred for anonymity):

 

Get Your Orthodontics Social Media Strategy Off the Ground!

 

At the start of service for each of our social media clients, we sit down as a team and brainstorm 3-5 categories of content or “post types” that we could publish on a consistent basis. These categories are informed by our knowledge of the goals of our clients as well as market research. If you haven’t already come up with goals or done market research with your orthodontics team, this is a good starting place.

Once the heavy lifting of goal setting and market research has been done, you are ready to create your editorial calendar. Here are a few ideas for post types we have used in the past:

  • Educational (see example above) – Use this post type to tackle the incorrect perceptions of your followers that are holding them back from doing business with you, or for things they simply do not know. Educational posts establish authority, so we often recommend them to groups who want to be thought leaders in a particular topic space.
  • Blog or Article Shares – If your orthodontics practice has a blog, sharing those posts on social media will drive more traffic to your website. You can also share articles by other thought leaders in your industry if they share your perspective on orthodontics. Doing so reinforces a position of educational authority for your practice.
  • Human Interest – We have experienced wild success with our clients sharing human interest posts on social media. These are posts that focus on a particular person and their story, such as a staff member or a patient (with permission). As an example of this post type and the kind of following it receives, visit the Humans of New York Facebook page.
  • Behind-the-Scenes – Behind-the-scenes posts promote the transparency and authenticity of your practice. If you are able to show your orthodontics staff working directly with patients (with permission), great! If not, photos from staff get-togethers and fun moments around the practice are just as effective if not more so.
  • Before and After – Orthodontics practices especially can benefit from before and after posts. Show the value of your services by posting quality before and after pictures of your patients on social media (again, with permission)!
  • Lifestyle – Tying your services to the lifestyle of prospective patients will do wonders for your practice. Show smiling, happy people with the demographics of your target audience and talk about the direct benefit to them of getting orthodontic work done with you.
  • Videos – If you have the capacity to produce promotional videos for your practice, social media is exactly where you need to be sharing them!
  • Events – A lot of practices are involved in their local community, either sponsoring events or volunteering in some capacity. In the advent of an upcoming event, share the information to your social media accounts and invite others to participate!
  • Promotions – Practices who run promotions should be sharing them to their social media account. It’s a no-brainer for getting more participation!
  • Contests – Contests are a great way to foster social media engagement among your audience! We have discovered that photo sharing contests work best, where the followers are asked to share their favorite photo from a particular category for a chance to win your services, such as “your favorite picture of mom” for Mother’s Day.
  • Quizzes – Quizzes are a very engaging form of content on social media as well. You have probably seen this post type before, any time you have found out “what kind of cookie you are” or “which character from the office you would be.” Use tools like Lead Quizzes to create questionnaires that resonate with your audience.
  • Campaigns – Social media campaigns allow your practice to push an important message that challenges perceptions and expresses the heart of your business services. Brainstorming a campaign is a slightly more challenging task than simply developing an editorial calendar, but if you feel like you need one, go for it!

With an Editorial Calendar in place, it should be easy for your orthodontics team to stay on top of publishing for your practice!

Something that we do and we also recommend for our clients is to schedule posts in advance. Facebook Business Manager allows you to draft posts, schedule them in advance, and even post-date them! Our team writes posts at least a week ahead of when they are scheduled to go live to avoid any kind of “getting stuck” on content ideas.

Boosting Posts and Advertising on Social Media

If you have been publishing for your orthodontics practice on Facebook for any amount of time, you have probably seen the blue “Boost Post” button on the bottom of your posts:

 

 

Boosting your posts extends your reach beyond the people following your Facebook page and allows you to target audiences according to the demographics we discussed earlier.

After you click the blue button, you will be prompted to create an audience, set a budget, and decide how long you would like your posts to run. We recommend that our clients spend a minimum of $300-$500 each month, distributed across 2-3 advertisements, in order to gain worthwhile traction with Facebook advertising. That said, it is VERY IMPORTANT that you get your targeting right or your ads will flop.

While boosting posts can be done through Business Manager, running traditional Facebook advertising is accomplished through Ads Manager. In Ads Manager, you can dive deeper into targeting and the A/B testing of your ads as well as the analytics. Ads Manager is too in-depth to get into in this article, but here is a brief summary of how to make Facebook ads that bring in results.

We hope this quick guide helps your orthodontics team get a social media strategy up and out! If you get stuck at any point in this process and would like to work with us, our VP of Marketing Jennifer Christensen is always up for a free consultation. You can also reach out to our President directly at [email protected]!

(VIDEO) Website Design for Orthodontics – 5 Easy Steps

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Beacon Media + Marketing

“Your website is prospective patients’ first impression of your practice.” – #TeamBeacon

Is it time to redesign the website for your orthodontics practice? Digital marketing experts recommend that every business, practice, and organization–regardless of industry–redesign their website every 2-3 years. New products or services, staff, and even changes to website best practices can all mean your site is ready for an update!

Updating your practice website can feel like a daunting task. But we are here for you.

After over 20 years in the marketing industry, we have developed a proven process for our website services that we believe is the greatest thing since sliced bread! It is the very process that we walk every one of our clients through. We hope this process grants you and your team smooth sailing as you tackle one of your biggest projects yet.

1. Meet with Your Orthodontics Team

The first step in redesigning your orthodontics website is to determine why you are doing what you are doing, what your goals are, and what a successful website design looks like to you. Gather all of the key people on your team into one room and ask yourselves these questions. Take some time to look at competitors’ websites, orthodontics websites from across the country, as well as any websites that you generally like the look and feel of, identifying concrete specifications for your own redesign. You may be surprised by the concept you begin to develop through collaboration! Here are just some of the questions that we ask our clients at the beginning of their website services with us:

  • What are you trying to achieve as a practice? What sectors of your practice are you trying to grow?
  • What are the primary and secondary purposes of your website? What do you expect it to accomplish?
  • What information do you want your patients to find quickly on your website? Do you have any primary categories of products or services to highlight prominently?
  • Of the website designs that you like the look and feel of, what features do you like?
  • What type of imagery do you prefer to use? Is there any imagery that you like to stay away from? Do you have any official branding guidelines to adhere to?

We also discuss general marketing information (such as target patients and differentiators) with our clients in order to be as strategic as possible with their website design. Be sure to talk about these important facets of your marketing strategy with your team! Information like who your target patients are and how you stand out in the market can completely change how you choose to position your orthodontics practice online.

2. Map Out A Plan for Your Website Design

Once you have laid the foundation of a strong vision for your new website design, it is time to put your creativity to work! Using the information you gathered during the meeting with your team, you are going to create a sitemap demonstrating all of the pages you want on your site. A sitemap is simply a flowchart, and it can be as simple as a bulleted list. Here is a standard sitemap for a basic, “five-page” website:

  • Home Page
  • About Us
  • Services
    • Service A
    • Service B
    • Service C
  • Blog
  • Contact Us

Now that your sitemap is in place, you are going to create a wireframe for each of these pages, containing all of the design and content elements your team requested.

What is a wireframe, you may ask?

“(A wireframe is) an image or set of images which displays the functional elements of a website or page, typically used for planning a site’s structure and functionality.” – Google

It may sound complicated, but a wireframe is nothing more than a drawing or sketch of what you want your web pages to look like, using only boxes and lines. At this point, you do not want to get too detailed–you will have the opportunity to do that in the development step! Simply outline where you want your images, headers, written content, and buttons on each page. Here is an example wireframe, for your reference:

Source: SmartDraw

If you would like to practice wireframing a good website design, start by looking at some of your favorite websites and trying to imitate their structure with your own wireframe. There are a lot of easy wireframing tools available online. One of them is MockFlow, which offers drag-and-drop wireframing and a free package for basic users.

While you are wireframing your new website design, you will want to be thinking about the written content your team wants on your website and how to execute those concepts on each page. Now is a good time to start writing this content as your vision begins to form, but it is okay to put placeholder content such as “lorem ipsum” in your wireframe for now.

3. Write the Content as an Orthodontics Team

With wireframe in hand, you are now ready to fill in your placeholder text with real, written content that speaks to the soul of your orthodontics practice! There are several important concepts to keep in mind as you go about this process:

#1 Keywords – If one of your goals is for your website to rank on the first page of Google, pay attention to the keywords and phrases prospective patients are using to search for orthodontics services! You will want to incorporate these keywords throughout your text. This is called search engine optimization (SEO). We use the Google AdWords Keyword Planner at Beacon to do our keyword research. It is best practice to focus on one or two keywords per page and place them naturally 5-10 times throughout 400-600 word content, but do not go overboard! Keyword stuffing makes content unreadable–although your website will rank high at first, it will quickly lower in ranking as the Google algorithm learns that everyone who visits your site leaves because they cannot read your content.

#2 “Catchy” Headers – The rate at which people are moving through websites is getting faster and faster as more of the general population become tech savvy. Be sure to use headlines that catch attention at reasonable intervals throughout your content to keep prospective patients engaged. Place relevant keywords in your headers as well to boost your search engine ranks.

#3 Quality & Quantity – Although it is best practice to write 400+ words for each page of your website, do not merely write content for content’s sake. You might put prospective patients to sleep! Keep your content engaging and write in second person, directly addressing “you,” the reader and speaking to the heart of what they want in an orthodontist. Split your content up into paragraphs and use tools like headers, bullet points, and other formatting to keep your content visually interesting and palatable.

Finally, always, always, always include a call-to-action (CTA) at the end of your content! A CTA indicates to the reader what they can do next to act on what they have just read. It should be hyperlinked. For example, a common CTA for an orthodontics practice is “Schedule a Free Consultation,” linked to a contact form.

4. Implement Your Website Design

Once you and your orthodontics team are satisfied with your sitemap, wireframe and content, it is time to design your new website! This may not sound like an “easy step” at first glance, but there are actually many useful tools for people who are just getting started with website design. We use a hefty version of WordPress at Beacon that requires custom coding, but the company also offers a variety of packages available for beginners that allow you to do some customizing of your website without touching the code.

Source: WordPress

Your first task once you have established an account with WordPress is to begin the guided setup process and pick a website theme that fits your wireframe! You will then be able to customize your website design within the parameters of a basic package using the options available. Use the colors and fonts of your orthodontics practice, add the images you like, and upload your written content. WPBeginner is a great resource for any questions you may have throughout this process.

5. Set Your Website Design Live!

If you are finished with your website design and you are happy with how it turned out, you are almost ready to press “go!” First, there are a few things you will want to check to make sure everything is in order.

We have created a pre-live checklist for our staff to go through before the launch of every one of our client websites. Here are just a few of the things on that list:

  • Ensure all links across the website, including all buttons, icons, and linked images, are working properly.
  • Check the contact form to make sure it is sending to the correct email address.
  • Look at the website in all major browsers as well as on mobile to ensure it looks good on all platforms.

Most basic WordPress websites are already “live” from the get-go, however, now is the time to take the domain name from your old website and point it to your new one! Your domain name is the address at which your website is located, for example, our website is located at www.beaconmm.com/. Log in to the account you were given when you first purchased your domain and use the tools provided to point it to your new website. You should be able to see your new website at your domain name within a matter of minutes.

Congratulations! You did it! If you have followed all of these steps, you should have a fully-functioning, up-to-date website that is ready for prospective patients.

We are happy to share our proven process with you, however, if you get stuck on any part of this, please let us know! Our team would love to come on board with your website project and help you see it through to completion. If you are interested, please reach out to our VP of Marketing Jennifer Christensen to schedule a free consultation.

Happy marketing!

(VIDEO) How to Brand Your Orthodontics Practice

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Beacon Media + Marketing

“Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.” – Jeff Bezos

It’s time to brand your orthodontics practice. Where do you start? From discovering your unique reputation and identity to selecting the icons, fonts, and colors for your logo, we created this guide to walk you step-by-step through a proper branding process. Enjoy!

What Is a Brand?

Your brand is your visual identity. It communicates the essence of who you are and what you do in the form of a logo, colors, and fonts. When your patients look at these aspects of your brand, they should emotionally connect with what they know about you. A brand should run parallel to an orthodontics practice’s reputation. Done right, it informs that reputation. Done wrong, it detracts. Proper branding bears the following responsibilities:

  • If you have a good reputation, your job is to capture it.
  • If you don’t know what your reputation is, your job is to discover it.
  • If you have a bad reputation, your job is to pivot it.

How do you do all of this using only the tools of form, font, and color?

We’re glad you asked!

The Discovery Process

At Beacon, we guide all of our orthodontics clients through a series of discovery questions to either capture, discover, or pivot their brand. Begin the branding process by gathering all of the key people into one room, sitting down, and giving due-diligence to self-discovery. You may be amazed by what comes together!

You need serious buy-in from your team if you are going to change your reputation. Do not attempt to pivot your brand until everything is in place. Rebranding is not for the faint of heart!

Here are just a few of the questions that we ask our clients:

  • Describe your practice in two sentences or less. What is your “elevator pitch?”
  • A brand is a promise. What is the promise of your brand?
  • What is the current perception of your practice? What is the desired perception?
  • How do you want to position yourself in the marketplace? Are you the “value” company? The expensive boutique? The innovator? The “tried and true?” The academics? The quick-fix? The thought leaders?
  • What is your big-picture mission?

A big portion of our brand discovery meeting focuses on competition, differentiators, and target patients too! Don’t forget to talk about these aspects of your practice and market with your team.

Naming Yourself

Now that you have all of the data about your brand gathered, it is time to give your orthodontics practice a name and a tagline! Names can come as easy as pie or prove to be a real challenge depending on the day and the flow of ideas. Here are a few ways to get the creative juices flowing:

  • Take a look at what your competitors and orthodontics practices out-of-state are naming themselves. Don’t copy but use these names as a starting place for your own, unique thoughts.
  • Consider using the name(s) of your primary orthodontist(s), especially if they are family names that have a good reputation in your community.
  • Decide if you want to use your location (city, region, state) in your name.
  • Think about any nouns or adjectives that struck a chord with who you are when you had your discovery meeting.

It might sound funny, but one of the best ways to find words that resonate with your brand is to use a thesaurus! Perform searches on some of the top words that came out in your discovery meeting and see where they take you!

The Tagline

A tagline is an opportunity to communicate more about who you are than you get with a name and a logo alone. If during the naming process your team had trouble homing-in on just one idea, that’s great! Find a way to incorporate one of your “secondary” concepts in a tagline.

Not every brand needs a tagline, but it can be helpful to go through the process of creating a tagline to discover what the core of your brand’s messaging is going to be. For example, at Beacon we recently redesigned our website using the tagline, “Award-Winning Marketing, Data Driven Results.” This core message is a starting place for everything else we say or show about who we are on the new site, and it carries over into all of our marketing channels, whether that be Facebook or Google advertising, blogging, video marketing, etc.

Picking Icons, Colors, and Fonts

Selecting the icons, colors, and fonts that represent the reputation you have discovered may sound like an insurmountable task to some. “How do spoken words and visual concepts connect?” You may ask. The psychology surrounding colors and forms and how they are mentally and emotionally perceived by us is an interesting topic, but a little too deep for us to get into in this article. Suffice it to say that a lot can be communicated by what you decide to present visually with your brand, making the choice of a practice’s icons, colors, and fonts one of the most important parts of the branding process. Fortunately, there are a lot of easy-to-grasp tools available to help us overcome this challenge.

Iconography

The icon part of your logo is the form that visually represents something about who you are. It could be related to your location, your name, your values, or even something you want your patients to feel when they participate in your services. For example, when we designed a logo for Juneau Youth Services, we chose mountains and an eagle to visually tie-in the facts that their location is Juneau and that JYS youth and families feel freedom when they get the treatment they need.

An icon is an extremely valuable part of a logo because of its versatility. Icons can become art for promotional products, watermarks on branded documents, and even a standalone logo for practices that have achieved brand recognition.

To come up with ideas for your practice’s icon, reflect back on your discovery meeting. Take a look at your name and the tagline you have developed and see if anything comes to mind. We also recommend browsing the iconography of other orthodontics practices on Pinterest, which is a great tool for creating boards of ideas. To search for specific icons that you are considering, we recommend using The Noun Project, which contains over a million curated icons created by artists globally.

The Color Wheel

The colors you choose will elicit emotions in your patients more than any other part of your brand. Make sure you pick colors that communicate what you want! We recently wrote an article on the emotions associated with different colors on the color wheel. Here are just a few of the color-emotion associations we discussed:

  • Red – Depending on what shade it comes in, red can communicate temptation, warning to stop and pay attention, danger, celebration, love, or femininity.
  • Orange – Often associated with food, oranges are appetite stimulating. They can communicate softer versions of red emotions, including light and life.
  • Yellow – Yellow means light and warmth and catches attention too. It can reveal joy, optimism, comfort, and in its gold form, wealth, luxury, and rank.
  • Brown – Earth and wholesomeness are two concepts we associate with brown. Brown is a popular color in outdoorsy, organic, and all-natural circles.
  • Blue – Blue is often used in the health and wellness industry, reminding us of tranquility, mystery, depth, and strength.
  • Green – The color green comes in the most diverse forms of any other color in the world, so it has a wide range of associations from new beginnings to relaxation.
  • Purple – Purple can act either like a red or a blue! On the red side of the spectrum, it is energetic and intense. On the blue side, it is calmer and loftier.

A great tool for selecting the color palette of your brand is Adobe’s online color wheel. Using the color wheel, you can experiment with various colors and the tool will adjust all the colors in the palette so that they go well with the colors you have chosen. Try it out with your team and see what you think!

Typography

Typography is often an afterthought for practices working on their brand. This is unfortunate because, finding the perfect font to fit with your icon, colors, and feel is the finishing touch on a strong logo! Using just “any old font” can make a logo feel disjointed, especially if the font does not fit with the feel and messaging that you are going for.

Visit Google Fonts to take a look at what is available for free online! This tool is especially neat because it allows you to type the text that you want to see in each font, right in your browser.

Matching font and form is often a matter of the gut. As you are scrolling through fonts, think about what each font is making you feel. Now think about why you feel that way.

Maybe you think of one font as “editorial” because you have seen it on a popular news site. Maybe another is “creepy” to you because you have seen it on the cover of a horror film. Your patients probably feel the same way about these fonts, as certain industries gravitate toward certain font feels.

Pick a handful of fonts that elicit the right feels for you, and present them to your team. Depending on what they affirm or deny about your font/emotion choices, you have a font for your logo!

Brand Management

Once icon, font, and colors have come together, you have done it! You have branded your orthodontics practice. The next step is to protect the beautiful brand you have created!

Brand management can be as complex as a corporate policy or a simple as a style guide that tells your team what your icon, font, and colors are and the versions of the logo they have available to them to use. We produce a style guide for each of the clients that we work with. This step is important and not something to skip if you want your brand to work for you.

We hope this guide helps you on your journey to rebranding your practice! If you have any questions about any one of these steps, please feel free to email our Creative Director Adrienne Wilkerson. Adrienne has been branding practices and clinics in the health and wellness industry for over 20 years. She can be reached at [email protected]. If you are interested in hiring Beacon to work with you through the branding process, please reach out to our VP of Marketing Jennifer Christensen. You can schedule a free consultation with Jenn directly!

Functional medicine practices: Rock your online reputation with social media

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Beacon Media + Marketing

Once upon a time, reputation management was the sole responsibility of corporate PR departments. We sat back and watched as news outlets reported on scandals and company representatives spoke before press conferences. But before we knew it, the digital age hit and leveled the playing field for everyone. Today, anyone can “report” on what a large company or small practice is doing through social media. The digital age has made it more imperative than ever for industries of all kinds to become involved in “online” reputation management.

Online reputation management is proactively influencing how your patients perceive your practice by influencing the information they find online. Whether you realize it or not, people are talking about your practice, and not becoming involved is almost worse than doing so and not being perfect at it right away. That in mind, it is important that you have a plan. You must be ready to face the feedback you are receiving. Today we are going to talk about what a functional medicine practice can do to rock their online reputation using social media!

Stats to Consider

In case you are not already convinced that online reputation management is important, here are a few stats to consider. According to BrightLocal,

97% of consumers looked online for local businesses in 2017, with 12% looking for a local business online every day

85% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations

49% of consumers need at least a four-star online rating before they choose to use a business

Stats like these make it evident that people are creating perceptions of what they believe about businesses (and practices) by the information they find online, first! So what can you do to influence this information?

You Can Do This!

By creating your own content for your functional medicine practice, encouraging positive feedback from your patients, and effectively managing negative feedback, you can outshine information that is creating a negative or neutral reputation for your practice! There are four online platforms through which you can do this, following the PESO model:

  1. Paid Media – Pay-per-click advertising such as Facebook or Google advertising
  2. Earned Media – Free advertising you receive as other practices and industry affiliates talk about you online
  3. Social Media – Where we will be focusing our attention in this blog
  4. Owned Properties – Your practice website, blog, etc. (any online space that you own and from which you can publish content)

On any one of these platforms, you can use an online reputation management strategy to push negative or neutral information down the page. We will be focusing on how to develop an online reputation management strategy for social media!

Have a Plan

1. Find Your Reputation

What is your practice’s current reputation, offline? This is a good place to start. Ask around and see what perceptions your fellow professionals, patients, and industry affiliates have about your practice. Does this match what you want your reputation to be? Now take a look online. If you already have social media, peruse your accounts and see what people are saying about your practice. Take a look at your competitors while you are at it and see what reputations they have created for themselves. Next, plan a meeting with your staff and discuss these things as well as what you as a team would like your unique reputation to be. Maybe you want to be seen as high-tech, genuinely caring, or scientifically-grounded. One company that has succeeded at creating a strong online reputation is Wendy’s, most famous for its snarkiness on Twitter. We do not recommend this tactic for most people, but it is an excellent example of the power of a reputation.

2. Draft a Policy

Now that you have your reputation nailed-down, create a policy for your staff to protect it. In your policy document, outline appropriate and inappropriate topics and/or a post-approval process if you are not comfortable with giving your staff free reign to post and comment on your social media accounts. Establish important ground rules like “never publish sensitive patient or practice information.” Unfortunately, HIPAA was enacted before social media existed, so there are no specific guidelines. However, many have written helpful articles on HIPAA and social media. Use your policy document to set the tone of social media professionalism for your staff. Be sure to include that your practice reserves the right to edit or delete any content that could be harmful to your reputation.

3. Create Your Strategy

At Beacon, we often start our work on an account by developing a digital marketing strategy and editorial calendar for our clients. This includes the topics or services we are going to focus on, important themes, keywords, and elements of voice, as well as the platforms and media types we will be using. Our goal is to have a foundational document that we can always go back to for direction to keep our mind on the reputation we are establishing. The document also includes a schedule of what types of posts we will publish at what times and should include the person responsible for responding to comments. It is important to publish content regularly, as in, 3-4 times per week if you want to maintain your reputation. If you are at a loss for what kind of content to publish, take a look at your competitors and what is working for them (only do not copy their tactics, learn from them). Facebook Insights has a great tool called “Pages to Watch” that will help you discover which competitors you should be watching:

In your strategy, include the types of posts that encourage your followers to engage positively, such as questions, quizzes, and calls-to-action, like, “Have you recently had an appointment with us? We’d love to know what you think about our care. Review us now at the link below!” Also, include posts that highlight the positive things about your practice. The reason you are publishing content is to proactively create a positive perception about your practice that pushes any negative perceptions that your patients may have out the door!

Finally, you may want to include some important reminders for online reputation management in your strategy, especially if you will be having your staff do the publishing. For example, remind staff to “pause before they post” and check for grammatical errors as well as topics to avoid. The last thing you want is for your reputation to be tainted by something as simple and easy to fix as a grammatical error. Read and re-read our posts. We use Grammarly at Beacon and it is an especially helpful tool for catching these errors. As for topics to avoid, not only should your staff be thinking about no-no topics for your practice, but current trends, news, and cultural perceptions that could cause something they say to be misconstrued. For example, we were writing a post about visiting a particular national park last week until we saw the news that there had just been an accident at that location. Run your post by your fellow professionals, especially if you are unsure. In fact, if you are unsure, it is probably best that you do not publish the post at all and come up with something different. We know that it is a hassle, but it is better to be safe than sorry.

4. Engage with Followers

A significant part of online reputation management on social media is responding to the people who engage with your content! This shows that you are active, listening, and credible. Social media is not unlike any other sphere for social communication. Imagine if you never answered emails, phone calls, were never in office when people came to visit, or only talked about yourself in conversation. What would that do to your reputation? On social media, 32% of followers expect a response within 30 minutes and 42% within 60 minutes. Have a plan to check your practice’s social media platforms throughout the day and respond to comments and messages as they come. In your response, be as friendly, transparent, and as human as possible. Avoid canned, robotic responses, even to negative comments.

5. Optimize Your Profiles

Have you ever visited a social media account and felt like, “Wow, this practice really has their act together.” It is actually surprisingly easy to achieve this reputation for your practice! Take a look at your social media profiles and make sure you have all of the important pieces in place, the profile picture, cover photo, about, bio, description–Fill in all of the gaps. Make sure all of these pieces are consistent, using your colors, logo, fonts, imagery, and voice. Practices look credible and trustworthy when “everything is in its place.” As an example, take a look at the profile picture and cover photo of one of the social media accounts we manage below. Although we are currently running a particular campaign for this client, everything is consistently branded:

We recently wrote a blog on how to optimize your Instagram profile. Take a look if you would like to learn more about this topic.

6. Monitor and Adapt

After everything is in place and your strategy is up and running, it is important that you track the effectiveness of your plan. It is now standard practice for just about every social media platform to provide some form of data analytics. Monitor these analytics and adapt where necessary. See what your audience likes and does not like and continue to refine your ideas about how to effectively manage your online reputation on social media. Although there is a lot of science to social media, it is also an art. Be flexible and willing to change your tactics for your audience if you need to.

Tools for Monitoring

There are a couple tools you can be using to monitor your online reputation in addition to the tools available on your social media platforms. You can setup Google Alerts to tell you when anyone is publishing content about your business, your competitors, or your industry. This is important for finding social media platforms where people are talking about you and you should establish a presence. Social media management tools like Hootsuite allow you to view posts, comments, and messages that mention you or use keywords or hashtags pertaining to your practice on all of your platforms, all in one dashboard. These tools can help you never miss a message.

A lot of groups have done great things for their online reputation by responding to posts in which their followers mention the name of their group, but do not tag them. When followers do not tag you, they do not necessarily anticipate your response. You can look really on top of the ball by responding to these, making your followers feel like, “Wow, they were listening!” Responding to mentions turns around negative feedback and rewards positive feedback, reinforcing this behavior.

A Note on the Negative (Reviews, Posts, Comments, etc.)

Negative feedback is something no one wants to deal with, but how you handle the negative speaks volumes for the reputation of your functional medicine practice! After years of working in the social media space, we have learned a few things about how to respond to negative reviews, posts, and comments. Here are some pieces of advice:

  • Don’t take it personally. This can be particularly difficult for people who genuinely care about what they are doing. We get it. That said, a lot of people don’t realize that they are talking to people behind-the-scenes when they talk to social media accounts. They are angry with their situation and your practice is the face they have chosen to blast with their woes.
  • Use the 20-minute rule. If you are becoming angry or upset, pause and take a breather so that you can respond instead of reacting. Be the bigger person and keep your practice’s reputation intact!
  • It’s okay to hide, delete, and report. In some cases, especially where vulgarities and disparaging language is being used or the commenter is being irrelevant and ridiculous, you should absolutely hide that comment from your wall and possibly report it. Use your best judgment.
  • Be willing to improve. If the negative feedback being given touches on the truth and is a real service issue that you need to take care of, be willing to make changes to your practice and demonstrate that you are taking feedback to heart on social media! This will do powerful things for your reputation and possibly win the commenter over as a follower for life!
  • Focus on the positive. Be kind and friendly and look for opportunities to turn negative feedback into a positive interaction. We recently had the opportunity to do this with one of our clients in the example below.

Due to the advent of the digital age and social media, reputation management has moved online and is open to everyone. It is now more important than ever for all industries, including functional medicine, to participate in online reputation management! By having a plan that is firmly rooted in policy and strategy documents and backed by a firm understanding of social media, functional medicine practices can rise to the occasion and rock their online reputation. If you are a functional medicine practice and would like to work with an expert partner on your social media, give us a call! We have years of experience working in the field of health and wellness that we would love to share with you and your practice.

PRESS RELEASE: Beacon Media and Marketing Promotes Jessica Muller to VP of Production

Picture of Beacon Media + Marketing

Beacon Media + Marketing

ANCHORAGE, Alaska – June 1, 2018 – PRLog — Award-winning inbound marketing agency Beacon Media and Marketing announces the promotion of Jessica Muller, former Account Manager, to VP of Production. Her new role will focus on improving efficiencies in the production of creative work at the company. Muller is promoted just months after she was made Partner and Owner with the company in January of this year.

Two summers ago, Muller came to Beacon with a proposal. “Give me a year, and I will centralize your accounting system,” she said. Muller was connected with Beacon through her husband Rob, a current employee. She was also connected through the Alaska Inbound Marketing Summit (also known as AIMS), a Beacon event that Muller contributed to as Event Coordinator that year. The AIMS event took off, and Beacon knew that Muller had talent. The Beacon team accepted Muller’s proposal–She was brought on to spearhead the accounting department immediately.

After hiring Muller, it was quickly discovered that she had other talents. Not only was she highly skilled in accounting, but she had a knack for marketing and work in other areas as well. She developed a flair for the creative side of Beacon’s work, and started to take on increasing responsibility in campaign management. Jennifer Christensen, the Co-Founder and VP of Marketing at the company, noticed Muller’s abilities. Christensen took Muller on as a right-hand assistant in her work managing client accounts.

By the summer of 2017, Muller was attending exclusive meetings with the executive team in order to get the information she needed to centralize the company’s accounting department. Once the accounting department was in a good place, Muller had more time to pursue her talents in other areas. She started looking at the systems and processes of Beacon and making them increasingly efficient. Her labors paid off when in the fall of 2017, she accepted the Small Business Development Award from the Alaska Chapter of the American Marketing Association on behalf of the Beacon team. The award was the true turning point for Muller’s career.

The executive team credited Muller with the work that earned the AMA award and unanimously voted Muller on as a Partner with Beacon. Christensen went above and beyond and gifted Muller with part of her ownership in the company as well. Effective January 1, 2018, Muller became a fellow Partner and part-owner on the executive team. Just months later, she was made Vice President of Production for her ability to streamline the systems and processes of the company.

“When I came to work at Beacon, I always felt like it was more than ‘just a job,'” Muller says, “I was investing and building something. It was really special to me that they (the executive team) felt that way too–That we are a team, and that what we accomplish is valuable and makes a difference every day. It was particularly special to me that as a group they trusted me to have a voice in leadership, and that as a person Jenn and I had such a great relationship.”

Christensen comments on what motivated her to gift Muller part-ownership in the company, “Long before Jess was given ownership, she had the dedication and character of an owner,” Christensen says, “From day one she cared and gave everything she had for Beacon to thrive, not just survive. She felt like the missing piece–Once we had her on the team, everything started to fall into place. Everyone on the team agreed that it was the right thing to do.”

Adrienne Wilkerson, Co-Founder and President of Beacon echoes Christensen’s statement on Muller’s initiative, “I’m so thankful to have Jess’s considerable talent and insight here at Beacon. Her ability to instinctively anticipate jogs and turns is amazing. She is a joy to work with!”

This June, Muller celebrates her two year work anniversary with the company. Commenting on her vision for the VP of Production position, she says, “I want to make what we do as efficient as possible so we can do it for the most people. I have seen the result of our work have a serious impact on our community. My role will increase our capacity to do that even more.”

About BEACON MEDIA + MARKETING
Beacon Media + Marketing is an Alaska-based digital marketing agency cutting through the fog of the convoluted marketing industry to shed light on real solutions. Their services include everything from social media marketing to corporate branding to web design. Learn more at BeaconMM.com.

Contact
BEACON MEDIA + MARKETING
Jordan Inks
***@beaconmm.com

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