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How Should a Practice Prepare for the January Intake Spike? 

Picture of Stephanie Melsheimer

Stephanie Melsheimer

If January tends to bring more inquiries to your practice, October is a great time to figure out whether you’re ready for them. Start with your own historical data, estimate what a similar increase would look like this year, and figure out which part of your operation would feel it first. 

For one practice, that might be phone coverage. For another, the intake team could handle more inquiries, but the calendar is already packed. Sometimes there simply aren’t enough clinicians available to take on more patients. 

That’s why preparing for January isn’t about finding an industry statistic that says demand goes up after the holidays. Your own numbers can tell you much more about what January actually looks like for your practice and where things tend to get tight. 

If you’re trying to turn more of your marketing into actual patients, Beacon Media + Marketing’s mental health marketing team can help you look at what happens after the lead comes in, too. 

How Much Does Your Practice Actually Grow in January? 

The best place to start is your own data. Look at what happened last January and compare it with the months leading up to it. How many people reached out? How many were actually a fit for your services? How many scheduled, and how many eventually became patients? 

If you normally receive around 200 inquiries a month and that number jumped to 250 last January, you have something useful to plan around. It doesn’t mean you should automatically expect another 25% increase this year. Your marketing, services, insurance networks, referral relationships, and staffing may have changed. 

Look for patterns across two or three years if you have the data, and don’t stop at total inquiries. Follow those leads through the process: 

Inquiry → Contacted → Qualified → Scheduled → Admitted 

Maybe January brought 50 more inquiries, but most were for a service already close to capacity. Or maybe the increase was smaller, but those leads were highly qualified and your team suddenly had more people to schedule than expected. 

Those are two very different versions of a January surge. 

Your January forecast doesn’t need to be perfect. It needs to show your team where more demand would create pressure. 

Which Part of Your Practice Is Most Likely to Get Stretched? 

Once you have a rough estimate, ask a practical question: if inquiry volume increased by 20% next week, what would get difficult first? Usually, the pressure shows up somewhere in intake, appointment availability, or clinician capacity. Knowing which one matters because each requires a different response. 

If that increase happened tomorrow, could intake handle the extra conversations? If so, are there enough assessment slotss available? And if those assessments convert into patients, can the appropriate clinicians or programs actually take them on? 

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality includes measuring appointment supply and demand among the resources practices can use when working to improve patient access. That basic supply-and-demand question gives marketing, intake, and clinical leadership something concrete to plan around. 

Could Your Intake Team Handle More Inquiries? 

Intake may be your first constraint if clinicians have room but calls, forms, insurance verification, and follow-ups already keep the team busy. Look at your busiest days from last January and see how quickly new inquiries were contacted, whether follow-up started piling up, and which channels were hardest to manage. 

Think about a Monday after the holidays. There are web forms waiting from the weekend, several voicemails, and new calls coming in. The person handling those inquiries also has insurance verification and follow-up calls on the schedule. 

Everyone may be doing their job, but new inquiries are now competing with unfinished work. 

Breaking intake data down by day can reveal problems monthly lead totals miss. You might find that Mondays need more coverage or that web inquiries sit longer because nobody clearly owns them. 

Those are changes you can test in October. Adjust coverage, change ownership, track response times, and see whether it actually helps before January arrives. 

What If Your Intake Team Has Nowhere to Schedule People? 

Calendar availability becomes the constraint when intake can respond quickly but qualified patients are waiting for an appointment. Count how many new-patient appointments will actually be available in January after existing patients, clinician schedules, PTO, appointment types, and program requirements are taken into account. 

“We have openings” is too vague for planning. A clinician might technically have six openings, but only two work for new patients. A program may have group capacity but limited assessment appointments. 

The American Medical Association’s scheduling guidance recommends building flexibility into outpatient schedules so practices have room for changes in demand rather than filling every available minute in advance. 

Behavioral health scheduling has its own considerations, but the broader point still applies. If you expect 25 more qualified inquiries and only have eight additional new-patient appointments, you’ve found the bottleneck. 

What If Clinician Capacity Is the Real Problem? 

If intake can manage additional inquiries and there are appointments available for assessment, the next question is whether your clinicians or programs can actually accept more patients. Marketing and clinical operations should be having that conversation before January campaigns are already running. 

Maybe your outpatient program has room for 15 more patients while another service is close to full. Promoting both equally doesn’t make much sense if one has nowhere for additional patients to go. 

This is where marketing reports can tell a very different story from what’s happening inside the practice. A campaign might have a great cost per lead while intake is repeatedly telling qualified prospects that the service they’re asking about isn’t available. 

An AHRQ-funded project gives a good example of how much capacity can depend on how patients are distributed across a practice. Using data from 20,000 patients and 39 physicians at Mayo Clinic, researchers found that shifting patients away from an overloaded physician toward one with more room improved timely access and continuity by 40%. In another part of the project, optimized patient panels were able to absorb a 10% increase in demand while still offering more capacity than the original, non-optimized setup. 

Your practice doesn’t need a complicated model to start asking the same basic question: How many more patients can we actually take? 

Marketing should know where the practice has room before it creates more demand. 

What Should You Change in October? 

October is an opportune time to test the changes you think you’ll need in January. Once you know the likely bottleneck, focus there instead of trying to overhaul your entire intake operation. 

If intake coverage is the concern, test a different staffing schedule. If the calendar is tight, start looking at January availability now. If clinician capacity varies by service line, make sure marketing knows which programs actually have room. 

Lead tracking belongs on the list, too. Pick a recent inquiry and see how easily your team can answer a few questions: Where did the person come from? When did someone respond? Were they qualified? Did they schedule? What happened in the end? 

If answering those questions requires opening several systems or asking around the office, January reporting won’t suddenly become easier when volume increases. 

This is also the time to decide what happens when you reach capacity. Whether that means a waitlist, another appropriate program, or a referral process, intake should already know the next step. 

If you’re trying to get a clearer picture of what happens between a new marketing lead and an actual admission, Beacon can help you connect those pieces before your busiest months arrive. 

Should Your January Marketing Plan Change Based on Capacity? 

Yes. January marketing should reflect where the practice actually has room to grow. If one service line is nearly full while another has significant availability, your campaigns and budgets shouldn’t treat them the same. 

Marketing needs a practical view of capacity. Which programs are accepting new patients? How many openings are there? Are certain clinicians full while others have room? Are scheduling or insurance limitations affecting who can actually be admitted? 

Imagine one program fills faster than expected in early January. If operations communicates that quickly, marketing can adjust rather than continuing to generate inquiries for a service that has nowhere to put them. 

This is also why a form fill can’t be the end of your marketing measurement. It tells you somebody was interested, but it doesn’t tell you whether they were a fit, whether you could serve them, or whether they eventually entered care. 

When those pieces are connected, marketing can respond to what the practice actually needs instead of optimizing toward the easiest number available. 

What Should Marketing, Intake, and Leadership Know Before January? 

Before January, marketing, intake, clinical operations, and leadership should share the same basic picture of expected demand and available capacity.  The goal is to give everyone a shared picture of what January could look like and how the practice will respond if things shift. 

A simple planning sheet could include last January’s inquiry volume, this year’s expected range, qualified leads, available assessments, clinician or program capacity, and current intake response time. 

Then decide who watches those numbers. If a program fills faster than expected, who tells marketing? If response times double, who looks at coverage? If inquiries increase but qualified leads don’t, who reviews where those leads are coming from? 

Those details may feel overly specific in October. In January, they’re exactly the things you’ll be glad you worked out ahead of time. A January surge can affect the entire process, from the first inquiry through the first appointment. 

What If You Don’t Have Good Historical Intake Data Yet? 

You can still prepare without several years of clean data. Start tracking the basics now and use October through December to establish a baseline. You may not be able to make a precise year-over-year forecast, but you can learn how much demand your current intake process and clinical team can handle. 

Track total inquiries, qualified inquiries, response time, scheduled appointments, admissions, and available capacity by service line. You can also run a few scenarios: What happens if January volume stays flat? What starts getting tight at a 10% increase? What about 20%? 

You aren’t trying to guess the exact number. You’re looking for the point where something starts to break. 

What Doesn’t January Intake Planning Tell You? 

Historical data can help you prepare, but it can’t guarantee how many people will contact your practice or exactly which services they’ll need. Changes in marketing, staffing, insurance participation, referrals, and services can all make this January different from the last one. 

Treat your forecast as a range rather than a promise. If demand comes in lower than expected, you can adjust. If it comes in higher, your team should already know which numbers will tell you that intake, scheduling, or clinical capacity is getting tight. 

That’s much more useful than trying to predict January perfectly. 

What Should You Do Before January Gets Here? 

Start with your own numbers. Look at what happened last January, estimate what a similar increase would mean for the practice you have today, and figure out whether the first constraint would be intake, your calendar, or clinician capacity. 

Then use October and the rest of the fall to start working on that specific problem. You might test additional intake coverage, clean up CRM fields, open January schedules earlier, or change which service lines marketing is prioritizing. 

You don’t need to rebuild the entire operation before the new year. You just want to make sure a predictable increase in demand doesn’t expose a problem you could have found three months earlier. 

If your practice needs a better way to connect marketing performance with what happens during intake, talk with Beacon Media + Marketing about building a clearer lead-to-admission picture. 

Frequently Asked Questions 

Does every behavioral health practice see more inquiries in January? 

No. January volume varies based on the practice, its services, market, referrals, marketing activity, and other factors. Instead of assuming a broad seasonal trend applies to you, compare your own January inquiry and admission data with surrounding months. 

How many years of January intake data should you review? 

Two or three years can provide useful context if the data is reliable. Just account for major changes between years, such as a new location, larger clinical team, different marketing budget, new insurance contracts, or different services. 

What numbers should you track before January? 

Track total inquiries, qualified inquiries, response time, scheduled assessments or appointments, admissions, and available capacity. Breaking those numbers out by service line can also show where you have room and where capacity is already limited. 

When should you start preparing for January? 

October gives you time to review historical data, identify likely constraints, and test changes before January. Staffing, scheduling, lead tracking, and marketing decisions are much easier to work through before the increase in demand has already arrived. 

Should you increase your marketing budget in January? 

That depends on your goals, historical performance, and capacity. Before increasing spend, look at which services can accept more patients and whether intake can handle additional inquiries. In some cases, reallocating existing spend may make more sense. 

What Should a Behavioral Health CRM Actually Do? 

Picture of Stephanie Melsheimer

Stephanie Melsheimer

A behavioral health CRM should help your team track what happens from the first inquiry through intake, follow-up, and the point when someone becomes a client. 

That visibility matters because a practice can have a great EHR and still know very little about what happened before someone entered care. Your electronic health record, or EHR, is built around care delivery. It holds clinical records, supports documentation, helps manage appointments, and handles the information your team needs once someone becomes a patient. 

A CRM, or customer relationship management system, fills in the earlier part of the journey by showing where an inquiry came from, who followed up, whether the person was a good fit, and what ultimately happened. 

That difference becomes especially important when you’re trying to connect your marketing efforts to the people who actually become clients. 

A good CRM should give your marketing, intake, and leadership teams a shared view of what happens between the first click and the first appointment. It should also fit the realities of behavioral health, where lead information can quickly cross into protected health information and HIPAA requirements need to be taken seriously. 

With platforms such as GoHighLevel, HubSpot, Curve, and WhatConverts all offering different combinations of CRM, attribution, lead management, and HIPAA-supporting features, choosing the right system takes a little more than comparing feature lists. 

A better CRM setup can give your team a clearer view of lead quality, follow-up, and final outcomes—Beacon Media + Marketing can help you build it. 

What to Know Before Choosing a CRM 

  • Your CRM and EHR have different jobs: The CRM should help manage and measure the journey from inquiry through intake, while the EHR remains centered on care delivery and the clinical record. 
  • Lead tracking needs to go beyond contact information: Source, campaign, lead grade, follow-up, and final outcome are what make the system useful for marketing decisions. 
  • HIPAA support isn’t automatic compliance: A BAA, appropriate safeguards, access controls, internal processes, and your own risk analysis all matter. 
  • Different platforms solve different problems: GoHighLevel leans toward broad marketing and CRM functionality, HubSpot offers a larger enterprise CRM ecosystem, and WhatConverts is especially focused on lead tracking and attribution. 
  • Start with the problem you’re solving: The best system is the one your team will consistently use to connect marketing activity with what actually happens during intake. 

What’s the Difference Between a CRM and an EHR? 

There’s some overlap between these systems, which is why practices sometimes assume an EHR should be enough. 

In most cases, though, they’re built for different parts of the patient journey. 

An EHR is designed around the patient’s care. Depending on the platform, that may include clinical notes, treatment plans, scheduling, billing, prescriptions, assessments, and other documentation tied to treatment. On the flip side, a CRM helps you understand what happens before someone becomes a client, including how they found your practice, how intake followed up, and what happened as they moved toward care. 

For a behavioral health practice, a CRM might tell you: 

  • Where an inquiry came from 
  • Which advertising campaign generated it 
  • When the person first reached out 
  • How quickly intake responded 
  • Whether the lead was qualified 
  • Why someone wasn’t a fit 
  • Whether they scheduled 
  • Whether they eventually became a client 

That information answers a very different set of questions. 

If 40 people contacted your practice through a paid campaign last month, the EHR may eventually tell you which people became patients. However, it usually won’t tell the marketing team that 12 inquiries were out of state, seven didn’t have compatible insurance, five never received a second follow-up, and eight ultimately started care from one specific campaign. 

That’s the gap a CRM can help fill. Having a CRM gives you a clearer view of what happens before someone becomes a client, including how they found your practice, how intake followed up, and what happened as they moved toward care.  

We’ve talked before about why a behavioral health website has to do more than attract traffic in our guide to whether your mental health website is actually generating leads. The CRM picks up the story after that conversion happens. 

What Should Your CRM Be Tracking? 

Contact information is only the beginning. If your CRM is basically a digital address book, you’re missing most of the reason to have one. 

The most useful setup connects the information marketing already has with what intake learns later. At a minimum, that usually means tracking lead source, campaign information, lead grade, first-contact timing, and final outcome. 

Those fields let you and your team answer questions such as: 

  • Which campaigns are bringing in qualified leads? 
  • Which sources generate a lot of inquiries that never schedule? 
  • Where are prospective clients dropping out of the process? 
  • How long does it take the intake team to respond? 
  • Why are leads being marked unqualified? 
  • Which marketing investments are eventually producing new clients? 

If your team knows that one campaign produces fewer leads but a much higher percentage of qualified inquiries, you have a stronger reason to keep investing there. You can also begin feeding higher-quality conversion information back into ad platforms instead of optimizing everything around the number of forms submitted. 

What Does HIPAA Compliance Actually Require From a CRM? 

This is where the conversation needs a little nuance. You’ll often see software described as “HIPAA compliant,” but using a platform with HIPAA-related security features doesn’t automatically make your practice compliant. 

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) says that when a cloud service provider creates, receives, maintains, or transmits electronic protected health information on behalf of a covered entity, the provider is generally acting as a business associate. That means an appropriate Business Associate Agreement, or BAA, is required, along with the other safeguards and responsibilities outlined under HIPAA. 

A BAA matters, but there’s more to the picture. 

DHHS also makes it clear that covered entities need to understand the cloud environment they’re using, conduct their own risk analysis, and establish appropriate risk-management practices. For example, compliance can be affected by access controls, security procedures, employee permissions, how integrations are configured, and what information your team chooses to put into the system. 

That’s why the better question isn’t simply, “Is this CRM HIPAA compliant?” 

In addition ask: 

  • Will the vendor enter into a BAA for the plan and features we’re using? 
  • Which parts of the platform are covered? 
  • How is PHI encrypted? 
  • Can we control which users have access to sensitive information? 
  • Are access and activity logged? 
  • What happens when the CRM connects to another tool? 
  • Are there features we shouldn’t use with PHI? 
  • How will our own team need to configure and manage the platform? 

The answers can vary considerably between vendors and subscription levels so it’s important to make sure your questions are consistent so you are truly comparing apples to apples. 

How Do GoHighLevel, HubSpot, WhatConverts, and Curve  Compare? 

These four platforms came up for a reason, but they aren’t interchangeable. Each one approaches the problem from a slightly different direction. 

GoHighLevel 

GoHighLevel, often referred to simply as HighLevel, combines CRM features with marketing automation, funnels, forms, messaging, scheduling, and other tools. These capabilities can appeal to practices or agencies that want several marketing and lead-management functions under one roof. 

For healthcare organizations, there’s an important caveat: HighLevel isn’t HIPAA-compliant by default. 

According to HighLevel’s current documentation, customers need to purchase and activate its HIPAA Compliance add-on and complete a BAA. The company says the add-on enables features including ePHI encryption, audit logging, and multifactor authentication enforcement. As of June 2026, HighLevel lists that add-on at $297 per month at the agency-account level. 

For a practice considering HighLevel, the attraction is the breadth of marketing functionality. The tradeoff is making sure the HIPAA configuration, user access, automations, integrations, and workflows are all set up correctly. 

HubSpot 

HubSpot is a much broader CRM ecosystem, with tools spanning marketing, sales, customer service, automation, reporting, content, and data management. 

For behavioral health organizations, HubSpot now supports protected health information through its Sensitive Data functionality. HubSpot says its HIPAA-supporting protections include audit logging, advanced authentication, session controls, additional encryption, and field-level permissions. Its BAA is incorporated into its Sensitive Data Terms for qualifying covered entities and business associates. 

The important detail here is the subscription level. 

HubSpot’s documentation currently lists Sensitive Data functionality under its Enterprise-level products, including Smart CRM Enterprise and the Enterprise tiers of its major Hubs. 

That may make HubSpot a stronger fit for a larger organization that wants a robust CRM and marketing system and has the budget and team to manage it. Smaller practices should pay close attention to the total platform cost and whether they’ll actually use enough of the broader feature set to justify it. 

WhatConverts 

WhatConverts is built around lead tracking and marketing attribution, including calls, forms, chats, source data, and lead qualification. That makes it especially useful for practices trying to answer a pretty specific question: “Which marketing efforts are producing leads that actually turn into clients?” 

Its current documentation says HIPAA compliance can be enabled on Pro and Elite plans. Once enabled, WhatConverts says lead and call data is encrypted, access to PHI is logged, potentially sensitive information is removed from notifications, and certain insecure connections are restricted. The company requires a BAA to be executed before HIPAA mode is activated. 

For practices that already have an EHR and other operational systems in place, WhatConverts may make sense when the main gap is attribution rather than the need for a full marketing CRM. 

Curve 

Curve approaches the problem a little differently from the other platforms on this list. Rather than acting as a full CRM, it’s built as a HIPAA-focused tracking and attribution layer that works alongside the systems a practice already uses. 

Curve says its server-side setup can connect with ad platforms, CRMs, EHRs, and other health care tools while removing PHI before conversion data is sent to platforms such as Google or Meta. It also includes a signed Business Associate Agreement and is designed to help health care organizations track deeper funnel activity without relying on standard client-side tracking pixels. 

For a behavioral health practice that already has a CRM or EHR in place but still struggles to connect marketing activity to qualified leads and downstream outcomes, Curve may be worth looking at as the tracking layer between those systems and the advertising platforms. 

That makes it especially relevant when attribution and privacy are the bigger gaps, rather than contact management or intake workflow itself. 

Which CRM Is Best for a Behavioral Health Practice? 

There isn’t one clear answer that works for every practice. 

A smaller organization trying to understand which Meta ads produce qualified calls may need something very different from a national behavioral health group managing multiple locations, service lines, intake teams, and marketing channels. 

Before comparing software, get clear about what you need the system to solve.  

  • If attribution is the biggest gap, prioritize source and campaign tracking, lead grading, and final outcomes. 
  • If the bigger challenge is managing outreach and follow-up across a busy intake department, workflow automation and communication tools may carry more weight. 
  • If your organization wants marketing, intake, reporting, and broader relationship management in one platform, a more comprehensive CRM may make sense. 

Whatever you choose, it also needs to work with the rest of your marketing infrastructure. Your website, forms, calls, paid campaigns, CRM, and intake process shouldn’t operate as separate islands. Beacon’s approach is built around connecting those pieces so practices can see more clearly how people find them and what happens next. 

Your CRM Should Help You See What Happens After the Lead Comes In 

A practice can spend a lot of money getting people to call, click, and fill out forms without having a clear picture of what happens afterward and t. That’s the problem a good CRM should help solve.  

It should give marketing better information than total lead volume, help intake consistently record what happened, and give leadership a clearer view of which efforts are contributing to growth. 

For behavioral health organizations, it also has to do that in a way that fits the practice’s HIPAA responsibilities. That means looking beyond a vendor’s “HIPAA compliant” label and understanding the BAA, security controls, subscription requirements, integrations, and internal processes involved. 

GoHighLevel, HubSpot, and WhatConverts can all play a role in that infrastructure, but they solve different versions of the problem. 

Start with the gap you’re trying to close. Once you know what information your practice needs to see, choosing the technology becomes a lot easier. 

If you’re trying to connect your marketing, lead data, and intake process but aren’t sure what the right setup looks like, talk with Beacon about building a system that gives your team a clearer view from first inquiry to new client. 

How Should a Practice Define a Qualified Lead? 

Picture of Stephanie Melsheimer

Stephanie Melsheimer

Ask your marketing and intake team what they each count as a qualified lead, and there’s a good chance you’ll get two slightly different answers. 

Marketing may be looking at someone who filled out a form, called from an ad, or took another action that showed clear interest. Intake sees everything that happens after that. They know whether the person actually needed the services you offer, lived in the right area, had a workable payment option, responded to follow-up, and ultimately moved forward. 

Both teams have useful information, but it’s hard to get a clear picture when those pieces stay separate. Marketing may see strong lead volume, while intake is seeing that many of those inquiries aren’t a good fit or aren’t going anywhere. Cost per lead might look great on paper, but new client numbers stay flat. Before long, everyone’s having the same conversation every month without much clarity about what’s actually happening. 

A shared definition of a qualified lead helps bring those perspectives together. Once marketing and intake agree on what a good-fit lead looks like, your team can start measuring lead quality in a way that’s consistent, useful, and much easier to act on. 

If your marketing and intake teams are working from different definitions of a good lead, Beacon Media + Marketing can help you build a clearer system for measuring what is actually driving growth. 

What to Know Before You Build the Scorecard 

  • Define qualification together: Marketing and intake should agree on what makes a lead a realistic fit for the practice.  
  • Use clear criteria: Service fit, geography, eligibility, payment, and engagement are strong starting points.  
  • Keep grading simple: An A, B, and C framework is usually enough to make lead quality easier to compare.  
  • Assign ownership: Make it clear who enters the grade, when it gets updated, and where the definition lives.  
  • Review it regularly: A short monthly check-in helps the scorecard stay aligned with changes in services, capacity, and marketing. 

At the most basic level, a qualified lead is someone who has a realistic path toward becoming a client. That sounds simple, but the details can vary a lot from one practice to another. 

For example, a psychiatry group that accepts several insurance plans will have very different qualification criteria than a private-pay residential treatment center. A multi-location practice may care a lot about geography. A specialty program may need to look at age, diagnosis, level of care, or other eligibility requirements before knowing whether someone is a fit. 

That’s why your definition has to come from your practice and not from a generic marketing template. HubSpot’s lead qualification guidance takes a similar approach, looking at factors such as a prospect’s needs, readiness, alignment with the service, and likelihood of moving forward. It also emphasizes the importance of having teams work from the same qualification framework so everyone’s evaluating lead quality using the same criteria. 

The key is to make those criteria clear enough that your team can actually use them without having to stop and debate what they mean. “Seems interested” is probably too subjective, while “lives in our service area and is looking for a service we currently offer” is much easier to work with. Once you’ve nailed down those kinds of criteria, you can turn them into a scorecard. 

Which Fields Should Be Part of Your Lead Qualification Scorecard? 

Your scorecard should give you enough information to understand why someone is or isn’t a fit without turning intake into a paperwork exercise.  For most behavioral health practices, a handful of fields is usually enough.  

Service Fit 

Start with whether the person is looking for a service your practice actually provides. Someone may be genuinely interested in getting help and still fall outside what your organization can offer. For example, a person reaching out to an outpatient therapy practice for inpatient detox would be a real inquiry, but they wouldn’t be considered a qualified lead for that practice. 

A simple service-fit field might include: 

  • Matches a current service 
  • Possible match, needs clarification 
  • Doesn’t match an available service 

This information can also help your marketing team spot messaging issues, especially when the same types of poor-fit inquiries keep coming from one campaign. If people are repeatedly reaching out for services you don’t offer, the ad, landing page, or website copy may be creating the wrong expectation. 

Geographic Fit 

Can you serve the person based on where they live?  For some practices, this is straightforward. For others, it can get more complicated because of state licensing, telehealth boundaries, physical locations, or campaign targeting. 

Your field might be as simple as: 

  • Within service area 
  • Potentially serviceable 
  • Outside service area 

If one campaign suddenly starts producing a lot of out-of-area inquiries, that gives the marketing team something specific to investigate instead of just labeling those leads as “bad.” 

Clinical or Program Eligibility 

Some programs have basic requirements that need to be confirmed before a lead can realistically move forward. An intensive outpatient program, for example, may have different eligibility criteria than standard outpatient therapy. A specialty practice may also work with certain age groups, diagnoses, or levels of care. 

The scorecard doesn’t need to turn your marketing team into clinicians. Clinical appropriateness should stay with the people responsible for making those decisions, while the scorecard simply captures the outcome once intake knows more. 

You might use: 

  • Meets basic eligibility criteria 
  • Needs additional assessment 
  • Doesn’t meet program criteria 

That keeps the information useful without oversimplifying a clinical decision. 

Payment or Insurance Fit 

Payment fit is another reason leads often look promising at first but don’t move forward. If your practice accepts certain insurance plans, that information should probably be part of the qualification process. If you’re private pay, you may instead need to confirm whether the person understands and is comfortable with the cost structure.  Tracking this separately gives you much better information than simply marking the lead as unqualified. 

For example, if one campaign keeps producing people whose insurance you don’t accept, that tells you something very different than a campaign producing people who need a completely different service. 

Engagement and Intent 

Once the basic fit is there, it helps to look at how engaged the person is in the intake process. Have they returned calls? Are they actively trying to schedule? Do they need more information before deciding? Have several follow-up attempts gone unanswered? 

This field may change over time, and that’s okay.  A person can look like a strong fit on paper and still never move forward. Another person may initially need more time or information and become highly engaged later.  

The point is to capture what’s actually happening rather than forcing every lead into a permanent box too early. 

How Should You Turn Those Fields Into a Lead Grade? 

Once you know which factors matter, you need a simple way to summarize them. 

An A, B, and C system is usually enough. 

  • An A lead might meet all of your core requirements and be actively moving through intake. 
  • A B lead may look promising but still have one or two open questions. Maybe insurance needs to be verified, they haven’t returned the first call, or intake needs more information before confirming fit. 
  • A C lead has a clear reason they’re unlikely to become a client. They might live outside your service area, need a service you don’t offer, or fail to meet a basic eligibility requirement. 

The categories can look different depending on your practice, but the definitions should be easy to understand. 

For example: 

  • A: Meets all core fit criteria and is actively moving through intake. 
  • B: Looks like a potential fit but still needs more information, follow-up, or confirmation. 
  • C: Doesn’t meet one or more required criteria and is unlikely to become a client. 

Some criteria may automatically rule someone out, while others just mean the lead stays in the B category until you know more. That flexibility gives your team room to account for the situations that don’t fit neatly into one category while still keeping the grading system consistent. 

Who Should Be Responsible for Grading Leads? 

This is where shared ownership matters. Marketing can usually capture things like lead source, campaign, landing page, and sometimes geography automatically.  

Intake is better positioned to evaluate service fit, payment compatibility, responsiveness, and the details that come out during a real conversation.  

In most practices, that means intake will probably own the final lead grade, with marketing supplying the context around where the lead came from. 

The system itself, though, should be built together. 

If marketing creates the grading criteria alone, it may miss the things intake sees every day. If intake builds it without marketing, the team may leave out attribution details that would make the data much more useful later. 

That connection becomes especially important when you’re evaluating paid campaigns. Beacon’s approach to behavioral health paid advertising focuses on clear targeting and meaningful performance data, and lead grading gives you another way to see whether campaigns are bringing in the people they were meant to reach. 

How Often Should You Review Your Definition? 

Your definition of a qualified lead will probably need to change as the practice changes. A new service, different insurance participation, another location, shifts in clinician capacity, or a new target audience can all affect who counts as a strong fit. 

A quick monthly review between marketing and intake can help keep the grading system current without turning it into a major meeting. Pull up the month’s leads and look for a few patterns: 

  • What percentage of leads received each grade? 
  • Which campaigns produced the most A leads? 
  • Why were leads getting C grades? 
  • Are the same reasons showing up repeatedly? 
  • Are B leads eventually moving forward? 
  • Is everyone using the grading system the same way? 

Looking at the actual lead data gives both teams something more concrete to work from. If intake feels like lead quality has slipped, the review may show that one campaign is driving a higher number of out-of-area inquiries or another type of poor-fit lead. From there, marketing has a much clearer place to investigate. 

What Can Qualified Lead Data Tell You About Your Marketing? 

This is where lead grading starts to give you more context than a basic lead count. 

Say two campaigns each bring in 25 inquiries. On paper, they look pretty similar. But once you break those leads down by quality, the difference becomes much clearer. 

Campaign A might bring in 15 A leads, five B leads, and five C leads, while Campaign B might bring in five A leads, five B leads, and 15 C leads. 

That tells you a lot more than total lead volume ever could. You can start seeing which campaigns are attracting stronger-fit prospects and where there may be issues with targeting, messaging, landing pages, or even the intake process itself. 

Sometimes the issue starts before the lead ever reaches intake. A website might be attracting traffic but not guiding the right people toward conversion. We’ve talked about this before in our guide to whether your mental health website is actually generating leads, because knowing where people are dropping off makes it much easier to decide what needs attention.  

Other times, marketing may be bringing in strong-fit leads and the gap happens later in the intake process.  Without a shared lead grade, those two situations can look very similar. 

How Do You Put the Scorecard Into Practice? 

Don’t worry, you don’t need to build the perfect system on day one. Start with a small sample of real leads.  Pull 10 to 20 recent inquiries and have marketing and intake review them together. Talk through what made each one a strong fit, a weak fit, or somewhere in between.  

Pay attention to the reasons that keep coming up. Those patterns will usually tell you what belongs in your first scorecard. 

From there: 

  1. Pick the qualification fields that matter most. 
  1. Define what A, B, and C mean for your practice. 
  1. Decide which criteria are required and which allow some flexibility. 
  1. Assign responsibility for entering and updating the grade. 
  1. Add the fields to your CRM. 
  1. Keep the definitions somewhere both teams can easily access. 
  1. Review the results together each month. 

Your first version will probably change, and that’s a good thing. Once the team starts using the system, you’ll see where the definitions are too broad, too narrow, or unclear. 

What matters most here is consistency. If one person gives an A to anyone who schedules while someone else only gives an A after intake is completed, the reporting will be hard to trust. A shared definition gives everyone the same starting point. 

A Better Definition Gives You Better Answers 

“Qualified lead” is one of those phrases that gets used all the time in marketing, but it only helps when everyone means the same thing.  

For behavioral health practices, that definition should reflect both sides of the client journey: what brought the person in and whether they realistically fit what the practice can offer. Once those criteria are clear, documented in the CRM, and reviewed regularly, your team can start getting much more useful answers. 

  • Which campaigns are bringing in the right people? 
  • Why are some leads falling out? 
  • Are you dealing with a targeting problem, an intake problem, or something else entirely? 

Those are much better questions than simply asking how many leads came in this month. And when marketing, intake, and leadership are all looking at the same information, it becomes significantly easier to decide what to improve next. 

Not sure what should count as a qualified lead for your practice? Talk with Beacon about building criteria that reflect how your intake process actually works. 

You Have One Referral Source, and You Didn’t Choose It

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Adrienne Wilkerson

Ask a practice owner to name their referral sources, and you’ll get a real answer. The hospital discharge planner. Two pediatricians. The EAP contract. The church counseling program down the road. They can tell you which ones send steady volume, which ones dried up last spring, and which relationship needs a lunch. If one of them disappeared tomorrow, they’d feel it inside a month and be working the problem that week.

Now ask the same owner where their patients find them online.

The answer is almost always Google, said with a shrug, the way you’d name the weather.

How Did Google Become the Only Room?

Nobody decided this. There was never a meeting where a practice owner looked at the options and concluded that one company’s algorithm should sit between them and every prospective patient in their county. It happened the way most concentration happens, which is quietly, because the thing was working and it was the only thing anybody could measure.

Google was generous for about fifteen years. It gave us clean numbers, a dashboard that updated overnight, and a story we could tell the board. Everything else in the discovery landscape was harder to see, so it got treated like it wasn’t there. Marketing budgets follow measurement, and measurement followed Google.

Nobody decided this. It happened while everyone was busy running a practice.

So the practice ended up with a single point of failure at the very top of the funnel, and the owner who would never accept that from a referral relationship accepted it from a search engine without ever knowing they’d made the trade.

I want to be careful here, because this is not an argument that Google stopped working. Google works. It’s still the biggest room in the building. The point is narrower and, I think, more uncomfortable: it stopped being the only room, and most practices have not adjusted their behavior to match.

Where Are Patients Actually Finding Providers Right Now?

Start with the one nobody expects. According to Statcounter data compiled by Backlinko, Bing now accounts for roughly one in ten U.S. searches across all devices, and close to one in five on desktop.

Desktop. Sit with that for a second, because in behavioral health it matters more than it does almost anywhere else.

Think about who’s on a desktop in the middle of a Tuesday. Somebody at work. On a Windows machine, in Edge, defaulted to Bing, using their lunch break to look up whether their insurance covers therapy, because the work computer is the one their spouse won’t pick up and scroll through that evening. That’s not a rounding error in your traffic. That’s a person doing the most private search of their year on the only device where it feels safe, and if you’ve never once checked how your practice appears on Bing, you have no idea whether you were there for them.

Then keep going, because Bing is only the first surprise.

There’s the insurance plan’s provider directory, which for a huge number of patients is the actual first stop, ahead of any search engine, because coverage is the gate everything else has to pass through. There’s Psychology Today, Healthgrades, and the specialty directories, where people compare profiles side by side using filters before they visit a single practice website. There’s the map listing. There’s a Facebook group for parents of teenagers where somebody asked for a recommendation last week and four people answered. There’s a Reddit thread from 2023 that still ranks.

And now there’s the newest one. rater8’s 2026 Patient Choice Report, a survey of nearly a thousand U.S. adults, found that among patients who searched for a provider in the past year, AI tools were cited as an influence slightly more often than Google search itself, and slightly more often than a recommendation from another doctor.

Every one of those is a room where a decision about your practice gets made, and most of them have never appeared in a marketing conversation at your practice.

What Does This Concentration Actually Cost You?

Here’s what makes this so hard to catch. The failure is completely silent.

When a referral partner stops sending patients, you notice. The volume drops, somebody says something, you pick up the phone. When you’re invisible on a channel you were never on, nothing happens at all. There’s no drop, because there was never a number. There’s no complaint, because the person who couldn’t find you doesn’t know you exist and has no way to tell you.

You don’t get a notification telling you that you were invisible.

This is also why the dashboard can’t save you. Analytics is a rearview mirror pointed at the roads you already drove. It reports faithfully on the channels you’re in and says absolutely nothing about the ones you’re not. A practice can look at a report showing 80% of traffic from Google and read it as proof that Google is where the patients are, when it’s equally consistent with Google being the only place they ever bothered to show up.

Your analytics can only report on the rooms you’re already standing in.

And the one question that’s supposed to close this gap mostly doesn’t. “How did you hear about us?” gets you whatever comes easily to mind. It gets you the last thing, not the first thing, and certainly not the six things in between. A patient who heard your name in a Facebook group in March, checked your reviews in April, found you again through their insurance directory in June, and finally called in July is going to say “I think I found you online.” That answer is true and nearly useless.

What Would You Do If This Were a Referral Problem?

You’d already know, which is the whole point of framing it this way.

You’d start by finding out where the volume actually comes from instead of assuming. You’d look at the sources you’d never worked and ask whether there was a relationship worth building. You’d stop treating the largest partner as permanent. You’d diversify, not because the big one is bad, but because depending on one of anything is a decision you should make on purpose rather than drift into.

That’s it. That’s the entire strategic move, and there’s nothing clever about it. The reason it hasn’t happened isn’t that owners lack sophistication. It’s that this work is unglamorous, it’s spread across a dozen platforms nobody owns, it produces no dopamine, and there’s no dashboard that makes it feel like progress. So it stays undone in practices that are otherwise run beautifully.

Why This Matters More in Behavioral Health Than Anywhere Else

Now the part that actually keeps me up.

The person looking for you is not running a channel strategy. They’re not optimizing their search. They finally decided, after weeks or months of talking themselves out of it, that they’re going to do something about this. And in that moment they’re going to look in whatever room they happen to be standing in. The work laptop. The insurance portal, because money is the thing they’re most afraid of. The group chat with the one friend who’ll get it. Whatever their kid’s pediatrician wrote on a sticky note.

The person looking for you isn’t running a channel strategy. They’re scared, and they’re looking in whatever room they happen to be standing in.

We say “meet them where they’re at” constantly in this field, and we mostly mean it emotionally. Meet them in their fear, in their ambivalence, in their shame. That’s right, and it’s not enough anymore. Meeting people where they are is also a logistics problem now. It means being present in the physical and digital places they’ll actually be standing in when the window of courage opens, because that window does not stay open long, and it does not reopen on your schedule.

A practice that’s only findable in one room is asking every prospective patient to walk to it. Most of them are barely able to make the first step as it is.

So here’s what I’d ask you to sit with this week. If your practice’s presence on Google went away on a Thursday morning, how would you find out? And how long would it take?

I’d love to hear your answer, especially if it’s the uncomfortable one.

The Dark Funnel Is Real — Here’s What That Means for Your Marketing ROI

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Adrienne Wilkerson

Nobody at your last marketing meeting wanted to say this out loud. So I will.

The way most businesses have been measuring whether their marketing works… isn’t working anymore. And if you’re well into 2026 and expecting the same attribution clarity and ROI timelines you had 2-3 years ago, you’re navigating with an outdated map. The territory has changed.

That’s not a criticism. It’s just where we are, where the industry is. And the sooner we can have an honest conversation about it, the better decisions you’ll make with your budget.

What Is the Dark Funnel, Exactly?

The dark funnel refers to all the marketing touchpoints that influenced someone’s decision to contact you — that you can’t see or directly attribute in your analytics.

Here’s how it actually plays out. Someone reads your blog post at 11pm on a Thursday. Doesn’t click anything. Three weeks later, they listen to your podcast on the drive home. A month after that, a colleague mentions your name in a LinkedIn comment. They Google you. They read your About page. They sit with it. And then, finally, they fill out your contact form.

What does your analytics platform report as the source of that conversion? Probably “organic search.” Maybe “direct traffic.” It almost never tells you about the blog, the podcast, or the LinkedIn mention — even though all of it was doing real work.

That’s the dark funnel. It’s not a failure of your marketing. It’s a failure of attribution.

And here’s the part that makes it even more complex: the dark funnel has grown significantly wider. AI-powered search. Voice assistants. Social algorithms that surface content without generating outbound clicks. Zero-click search results where Google answers the question before anyone visits your site. People are discovering, evaluating, and forming opinions about your brand through channels you can’t easily measure — and it’s only accelerating.

The buyer’s journey hasn’t just gotten longer. It’s gotten less linear. People aren’t clicking one ad and converting. They’re doing research. They’re building trust over time. They’re watching how you show up before they ever raise their hand.

The Microwave vs. the Slow Cooker

For years, pay-per-click advertising was the microwave of marketing. Set the timer, press start, results. Traffic. Leads. Conversions. Fast, measurable, satisfying. You could tie almost every dollar to an outcome.

That era isn’t gone. PPC still has its place — for a new service launch, a short-term campaign, a specific census gap. It’s the microwave. You need one.

But you can’t build a sustainable, recognizable brand by paying for every single eyeball. And you can’t feed a family exclusively on microwave meals.

What’s taken center stage is fundamentally different. Content-driven, organic, relationship-first marketing. The slow cooker. You set it up, you trust the process, and what comes out is richer, more complex, and a lot more durable than anything that came out of the microwave.

The slow cooker doesn’t flash instant results. But what it produces — trust, authority, consistent inbound — compounds. And compounding is where the real growth is built.

What Good Agencies Are Actually Doing About It

Let me be honest with you: we’re all adapting. Rapidly. And any agency that tells you otherwise is either not paying attention or not being straight with you.

The old model was built on dashboards that made attribution look cleaner than it actually was. Point to click-through rates. Call it working. The problem is that a click-through rate has almost nothing to do with whether someone decided to trust your behavioral health practice with the most vulnerable moment of their life.

What a good marketing partner should be tracking now:

  • Content engagement depth — not just page views, but whether people are actually reading. Are they spending 40 seconds or 4 minutes on your services page? That distinction matters.
  • Brand search volume over time — are more people searching your name specifically? That’s the dark funnel showing up in measurable form.
  • Share of voice in your market — are you being mentioned, cited, recommended? Are you showing up in more places than last quarter?
  • Qualified lead quality, not just lead quantity — a content strategy attracts clients who already understand your value, which shortens the sales cycle and improves fit.
  • Multi-touch attribution modeling — imperfect, but better than last-click attribution lying to you about what’s actually driving decisions.

None of these tools is perfect. Attribution is genuinely hard right now, and anybody who tells you they’ve cracked the code is probably trying to sell you something. What I can tell you is that the practices that committed to this longer-game approach 12 to 18 months ago are seeing real returns now — lower cost per acquisition, stronger referral networks, and a brand presence that holds up even when ad costs spike.

The Timeline Conversation Nobody Is Having

If you launch a content strategy today, you should not expect to see significant ROI in 30 or 60 days. Here’s what a realistic content and organic strategy actually looks like:

Months 1-3: Foundation. Content is being built. Technical SEO is being cleaned up or established. Your brand voice is being refined. Nothing looks exciting on the dashboard yet. This is the prep work — the painting a room phase — and skipping it is exactly why so many strategies fail.

Months 3-6: Early signals. Search rankings start to move. Organic traffic begins ticking upward. Content pieces accumulate. Brand mentions may start appearing in places you didn’t expect.

Months 6-12: Momentum. The compound effect starts to show. Organic leads increase. Referrals mention they found you through your content. Your name starts coming up in conversations you weren’t part of.

Month 12 and beyond: This is where the real ROI conversation begins.

I know that timeline makes people uncomfortable. I get it. We’re running businesses. We want to see results. But here’s what I know after more than two decades in this industry: the tortoise always beats the hare. Not because the hare isn’t faster. But because consistency beats speed over a long enough horizon.

The businesses that demanded microwave results from a slow-cooker strategy? Many of them are starting over. Again. Because the shortcut didn’t hold.

This Matters Differently for Behavioral Health

For those of you leading counseling practices, treatment centers, or behavioral health clinics — this isn’t just a marketing conversation. It’s a trust conversation.

Your clients don’t convert on impulse. They’re often in the most vulnerable moments of their lives. They’re researching carefully. Reading your blog at 2am when they can’t sleep. Listening to your podcast on a drive they took to clear their head before calling someone. Building trust with you over weeks or months before they ever submit a form.

For behavioral health practices, the dark funnel isn’t a problem. It’s a description of how your audience actually works. Your marketing needs to match that journey — which means being present consistently, creating content that meets people where they are, and building a brand they recognize before they need you. So when they do need you, you’re already there.

This is exactly why the practices we work with at Beacon are shifting their success metrics alongside their strategies. We’re not just reporting on what we can see. We’re building frameworks to make the invisible visible — or at least more visible than it was.

The Longer Game Always Wins

Here’s what this is really about. It’s not KPIs or attribution models or slow cookers and microwaves.

It’s about building something that lasts. A practice that grows because it’s genuinely known, genuinely trusted, and genuinely serving its community. Marketing that reflects who you actually are — not just what you can afford to put in front of people this month.

That requires a different kind of partnership with your agency. One built on honest timelines, realistic expectations, and a shared commitment to the long game. It’s not always the most comfortable conversation. But it’s the right one.

Where are you in this shift? Is your team still expecting 30-day returns from a 12-month strategy — and how are you navigating that conversation?

Best Practices for SEO + GEO Optimizing Content with in 2025 with AI

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Adrienne Wilkerson

How does your content rank in an era where SEO is driven by artificial intelligence? Search Engine Optimization (SEO) keeps evolving, and if we want our websites and posts to remain relevant, it’s time to rethink our strategy. AI is reshaping how search engines work, and 2025 holds even greater changes. Are you ready to adapt?

This guide will take you through the major impacts of AI on SEO, like Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) and Artificial Intelligence Optimization (AIO). Better yet, we’ll cover practical tips to stay ahead of the curve.

The Impact of AI on SEO in 2025

How’s AI Transforming Search Engines?

Ever wonder how search engines get so good at understanding what you mean—even when your question is vague? It’s AI. Search engines now use advanced models like Google’s RankBrain and MUM to figure out intent and context. Forget about keywords alone; search engines are analyzing your entire conversation.

  • Intent vs. Keywords: When someone searches for “best therapists near me,” it’s not about matching those exact words anymore. Search engines want to see content that solves problems, answers big questions, and shows expertise. Does your website do that?
  • Semantic Search: Have you noticed how search engines understand even the vaguest questions? AI is linking words in smarter ways, so your content needs to be comprehensive, clear, and natural. Are you writing in a way that sounds conversational and human? Hint: That’s more important than ever before!

Why Does User Experience (UX) Matter More Than Ever?

Have you thought about how visitors feel when they land on your site? AI ensures search engines notice if your visitors are happy—or frustrated. If they leave too quickly, click around aimlessly, or experience slow loading pages, you might take a hit in the rankings.

  • Core Web Vitals: Are your pages loading fast enough? Are they responsive on all devices? Google’s Core Web Vitals measures things like load speed and interactivity, and they matter more now than before. It’s time to check if your site is up to speed (literally).
  • Voice and Visual Search: Imagine asking Alexa or Siri a question—or snapping a picture to search for something similar. That’s where search is headed. Have you optimized your content for voice queries and visuals yet? If not, it’s something to consider.

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) and Artificial Intelligence Optimization (AIO)

What’s Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)?

Have you noticed how Google sometimes gives instant answers to your questions right in the search results? That’s what GEO is all about—aligning with AI-generated responses. If you can make your website the trusted source for those instant answers, you’re golden.

  • How Can You Stay Visible in Results? Think about adding structured data markup to tell search engines exactly what your content is about. Are you making it easy for search engines to pick your content as the top answer?
  • Are You Writing in a Conversational Way? AI loves conversational tone—just like a friendly back-and-forth. If your writing feels robotic, it’s probably time to change that. Think about the questions your audience really asks and how you’d answer them if they were sitting in front of you.

How Does Artificial Intelligence Optimization (AIO) Work for You?

Did you know AI tools can make your SEO life easier? Tools like Jasper and predictive analytics software can save you hours, helping with everything from keyword research to creating content tailored to your audience.

  • What Can Predictive Analytics Do? Wondering what topics will trend next season? AI can predict what your users might search for, letting you get ahead of competitors. Isn’t that a game-changer? It’s a little like having your own crystal ball!
  • How About Personalized Content? Want to speak directly to your audience? AI helps you create different versions of content—like location-based landing pages or blog posts targeted at specific demographics. How much more relevant or human could your content feel?

Strategies to Optimize Content for AI-Driven SEO

We’ve covered the trends, but how do you apply them? Here’s a game plan for you.

1. Know What Your Audience Really Wants

Do you focus on keywords or user intent? Think about why someone is searching—are they gathering info, making decisions, or looking to buy? Your content should match their actual needs.

  • What Type of Content Does Each Search Intent Need? Start categorizing by different intents. For example:
    • Informational—Are my patients asking “How does therapy work?”
    • Transactional—Are they looking to book appointments?

You wouldn’t serve the same content for both, right? Right, you wouldn’t. You need different tones to your content and information for both types of search intent. Tools like Mouseflow and HotJar can help you identify where visitors to your site spend most of their time. If they are visiting your blog or FAQ pages, then they are on the informational side of intent. If they are spending more time on a contact form or looking for your booking link, then you guessed it, they are on the transactional side. This is hitting people in different stages of the buying cycle or funnel. Likewise, if you are using a reporting tool like Databox or Google Analytics 4 (GA4), you can track where the traffic is coming into your site and the same concepts apply. The traffic you have coming into your blog page or your about us page is focused more on information. The traffic coming into your contact us page or booking platform is transcational. Figure out how much you have of each and you’ll have a good starting point for your content focus.

2. Sprinkle in Schema Markup

Are you making your content easy for search engines to understand? Structured data markup (or schema) helps search engines know your pages. What is schema? Schema is a way to organize information on your website so search engines can understand it better. Using Schema can make your site stand out in search results with extra details like reviews or event info.

  • What Should You Markup? If you run a healthcare site, imagine marking hours, services, or even reviews. Wouldn’t you want that important info to show front-and-center in the search results?

3. Get Voice and Visual-Search Friendly

How do people actually search? More and more, they’re talking to devices or using images. Your strategy has to keep up.

  • Are FAQs Part of Your Strategy? Try putting together an FAQ page to address the questions people ask their devices. What are common voice-search phrases? Something like, “What’s the best addiction recovery program near me?” might sound familiar.
  • Are Your Images Optimized? Don’t skip writing alt text and naming your image files with intention. Do your photos say what they’re really about?

4. Write for People—Not Robots

Is your content genuinely helpful? AI is smart, and it’s looking for content that puts people first.

  • What Makes Your Content Stand Out? Share real advice or experiences. If you’re writing about addiction recovery, could you share the origin story of the clinic founder (if they approve) or relatable but privacy protected examples that reflect your audience’s real-life struggles? That personal touch goes a long way.

5. Use AI Tools to Work Smarter

What if you could spend less time on manual SEO tasks thanks to AI-powered tools? Tools like SEMrush and MarketMuse might just become your new best friends.

  • How Can Tools Help You? Imagine using predictive technology to plan seasonal blog topics—like focusing on mental health during the stressful holiday season.

Real-Life Ways to Apply GEO/SEO Concepts

Idea 1: Reaching Local Audiences with AI

A clinic could use AI-powered tools to uncover specific search behaviors. By creating content around phrases like “intensive outpatient program near me,” you could boost your local search traffic by up to 40% in just six to nine months. What untapped local searches could you “tap” into?

Idea 2: Winning Google Snippets

A mental health provider could use structured data to break into the rich snippet game. You could design a guide to simplify therapy options. The goal would be for your guide to become a go-to resource on Google. This could bring in a 20% increase in page views. Would a structured guide work for your audience too?

Why Brand Visibility on the Web Matters for GEO

Let’s dig a little deeper—have you wondered how AI-powered search pulls the right answer from millions of possible sources? Here’s the thing: the more visible and credible your brand is on the web, the more likely it is that Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) algorithms will surface your content as the trusted “go-to” answer. But what does “brand visibility” really mean when it comes to GEO? And how can you make sure your business is always in the running for those featured spots?

Think Like an AI: Consistent, Broad, and Connected Presence

Imagine an AI engine scanning the entire web to answer a detailed, context-heavy question. What signals convince that AI to pick your answer first? It’s all about digital visibility and consistency.

First, do a quick audit—are you actively publishing helpful, up-to-date content across your site, blog, and other channels? Is your brand’s voice consistent everywhere you show up online? GEO learns to trust brands with credibility, expertise, and a strong online presence. Having your content referenced on reputable sites, linked from relevant sources, and mentioned across social platforms all add up to a stronger “web footprint.” Remember, AI considers not just what’s on your website, but also how often your brand appears in reputable corners of the internet.

Example: Claiming Authority to Help GEO Find You

Let’s say you run a mental health clinic. If you consistently share insights, patient resources, and expert commentary across your homepage, FAQs, and even social media, Google’s AI—and other GEO-powered search engines—start recognizing your brand as a reliable source. Did a local news story feature your clinic’s approach or did you guest post on a respected wellness blog? All of these contribute to your digital footprint.

Suppose you’ve created an in-depth guide about “how to recognize the signs of anxiety in teens.” If this guide has backlinks from reputable education and medical websites, and snippets are mentioned on social media, GEO engines will see clear signals that your content is well-regarded, authoritative, and widely referenced. When a parent asks a search engine “How do I know if my teen is struggling with anxiety?”, there’s a much better chance your content will be chosen for a snippet or summary.

Actionable Steps: How Can You Strengthen Your Brand’s Web Presence for GEO?

  • Regularly Publish High-Quality Content: Are you answering the kinds of questions your audience really cares about? Think beyond a single post—try series, guides, and fresh updates.
  • Diversify Where You Share Your Knowledge: Are you writing guest articles, participating in online forums, or providing expert quotes? Don’t keep your expertise contained to just your own website.
  • Leverage Social Proof: Can you encourage satisfied clients to leave reviews on Google and other trusted platforms? Reviews, testimonials, and real stories all contribute to visibility and build trust—two factors GEO loves.
  • Be Consistent With Branding: Is your messaging, logo, and “about” copy the same everywhere? Inconsistent branding can confuse users and AI crawlers alike.
  • Use Structured Data and Schema: Are your answers marked up for easy recognition? Schema helps both traditional search and GEO engines extract the best bits from your site.

Putting It All Together: Brand Visibility and GEO Success

Think of GEO-powered search like hosting a Q&A with the entire internet in the audience. Only the most visible, relevant, and trustworthy “experts” get the microphone. If your brand is out there—answering questions, building connections, and demonstrating expertise—you boost the odds that your content is pulled for direct answers.

The payoff? More people find you right when they’re seeking the information you’re best equipped to provide. And as GEO tech evolves, the value of a well-established web presence will keep climbing.

So, ask yourself: What steps can you take today to make your brand more visible, consistent, and helpful online? Start small, stay steady, and watch as the search engines start to notice—and reward—you.

Final Thoughts

AI is shaping SEO faster than ever. The good news? You’ve got what it takes to stay ahead. By focusing on intent, user experience, and leveraging the right tools, you can future-proof your strategy.

Why wait? Start refining your SEO strategy today—because growth doesn’t wait for anyone. What step are you going to take first?

Optimize your mental health marketing on social media

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Sabrina Martinez

Social media is the perfect tool for mental health marketing. The wide variety of platforms means that you can target your preferred audience, use the whole range of digital media, and build brand loyalty. Even better, you can do most of this for free! In this post, we’ll explain our five top tips for making sure your social media presence is as good as it can be.

Already know what you need? Give us a call.

1. Choose your social media platform(s)

There are so many social media platforms these days that choosing which one to use for your mental health marketing strategy can seem like a daunting task. They are all different, and the demographics that use them mean the differences are important. Ultimately, the platform you choose will inform the audience you are able to reach.

For example, Facebook is still the biggest platform around, and it has loads of useful features for businesses, but its user base is getting older. If you want to target a millennial audience for your mental health practice, you might do better on Instagram. If you want to target even younger audiences, you’ll want to be looking at platforms like TikTok.  The challenge with the youngest social users is keeping up with whatever platform is fashionable right now!

The audience is not the only factor to consider, however. Different platforms also lend themselves better to certain types of content. In some cases this is obvious – for example, YouTube is for videos – but in others, it might be less clear. Instagram is for photos, right? Well, it can also be a really good platform for short video. Meanwhile, LinkedIn, with its focus on B2B, tends to be used more for text than other platforms. This is important to consider when trying to place your marketing efforts.

Read more: Telemedicine is booming in mental health

2. Mental health marketing needs consistency

This is something that sounds obvious, but which many people overlook. If you want your mental health practice to have a successful social media presence, you need content. Just creating an account won’t do anything. You need to be posting at least weekly, and we’d suggest more regularly if you can. The real advantage of digital marketing has over traditional marketing is that it’s so easy to put out large amounts of content to lots of people. Unfortunately for you, everyone else is doing this too. The more they put out, the more you have to put out in order to just be noticed. Social media may have democratized mental health marketing, but it’s also increased the work you have to do to keep up.

So, if treating social media like a billboard or newspaper won’t do, then what will? Well, as we said above, post content! Post it as often as you can, post every time you write a blog on your website, post every time you offer a new service, post every time you change something about the way you practice, post every time you attend a mental health conference, or a new study comes out that changes the way you work. You need to be putting content out there if you want this to be worthwhile.

Read more: 3 things to know about Google Ads.

3. Community building on social media

We’ve got quantity out of the way, now for the quality. What we call “community building” in mental health marketing is really just a different way of saying building brand loyalty. The great advantage of social media is that you can build brand loyalty in people who haven’t even visited your mental health practice. This means that if in the future those people do find themselves in need of mental health services, they’ll already have a preferred provider in mind, you!

There are many ways of building a community online, and each successful business has its own. Here, we’ll just give a few tips that go a long way. Obviously, the first is in what you post. Your content should be friendly, human, and show people that your team is made of real people, not just a corporate account run by some faceless person in an office block. Just as important is that way you interact with people who comment on your posts. Social media posts aren’t just “fire and forget” marketing; they’re two-way. If you reply, you can build rapport with the comments, and everyone else who stops to read.

The way you reply is possibly even more important. Having a good in-person reputation is hard when your social media is badly managed. If people are posting criticisms on your platforms, you need to be able to respond politely. It may sound obvious, but it’s not uncommon to see businesses respond to negative comments badly, and it can be more off-putting than the original comment.

Remember the golden rule of social media: everyone can read what you write!

Looking to maximize your impact? We can help.

4. Branding is key to mental health marketing

This is related to our previous section but goes a little further. Not only is it important to remain courteous, but also to keep the tone of your posts consistent with the mental health service you’re trying to sell. There is a certain tone of voice that is appropriate when posting about children’s services, but a very different tone might be needed when talking about crisis prevention services.

It all comes back to your brand. Who are you? Why are you in business? What matters to you and why? What is your purpose? Figuring this out right at the beginning means your messaging will be consistent across all of your social platforms, as well as the way you treat your patients in real life. Consistency is essential in mental health marketing because it helps people get to know you, so they know what to expect when they engage your services, and they can feel confident working with you.

Read more: What makes a good mission statement?

5. Mental health marketing needs visuals

Visual marketing has become really important in mental health marketing. This isn’t really news, because images have been used in marketing for as long as marketing has existed, but we’ve never before had the ability to include video quite so easily. Previously, you’d have to pay big bucks to produce television commercials, but now you can just pull out your phone and do a Facebook live. This is a great way to let people meet you, see your practice, and invited them to come and visit.

Video is a great way to convey information. Humans absorb and retain data best when they are able to hear and see someone telling them, so this is the best way to get your message across – second only to talking to someone face-to-face. Video is also much more friendly, and less intimidating, than a wall of text. If you’re interested, you can learn more about video marketing here.

Ready for a marketing partner? Schedule a free consultation.

Simple way to use sales funnels in dental marketing

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Sabrina Martinez

You’ve probably seen the term “sales funnel” quite a lot as you’ve been researching digital marketing online. They can be extremely powerful when you’re trying to convert leads, but how can you apply a sales funnel to your dental marketing strategy? That’s a really good question.

Sales funnels works as you’d expect, by collecting as many people as possible at the wide end, and gradually drawing them down the levels of your funnel until they become paying patients at the bottom. The number of people at each stage will reduce as they progress through the funnel, until you only have qualified leads. The way you set up your funnel is important, so here’s a step-by-step guide.

Ready to talk sales? Ask our experts today.

Dental marketing starts with awareness

Awareness is the first stage of every digital sales funnel. This is where people become prospective patients, transitioning from never having heard of your dental practice, to becoming aware of it. This is also the stage at which the person starts to learn how you can help with problems they’re having.

The best dental marketing strategy here is to generate awareness is through content. At this stage, you want lots of people to see what you’re putting out. This maximizes the number of people in the funnel and increases the number of people making it all the way through. This is a case of quantity AND quality – obviously, the content has to be good enough that people actually read or watch it, but you need to make sure you don’t spend too much time making it, and too little working on the next piece.

So, what kind of content you be putting out to raise awareness of your dental practice?

The truth is just a 400-600 word piece about a topic people are searching can increase the chances of people finding your business. Take our client, Dr. Mandanas, whose integrative dental practice is based in Anchorage, Alaska. We write blogs for her dental practice every month and now we have our blog on the top of the Google results page for the search term “integrative dentistry.”

Dental Marketing

You can increase your chances of reaching the top-ranked spots on Google search by practicing Search Engine Optimization, which we explain in detail here. It’s a really neat way to take your dental marketing strategy to the next level. You should also note that in addition to publishing on your website, you can boost the reach of your blogs through Google Ads, Facebook ads, and social media.

Want to phone a friend? We’re here to help.

Education is the key to dental marketing

The next level of the funnel is education. This is for those people who clicked on one of your ads, navigated more of your website after reading your blog, or clicked on a link in a Facebook post. The people who click on a link on social media or an ad need to be sent to dedicated “landing pages,” which are essentially sales pages that give people all the information they need to sign on.

For example, if you’re advertising children’s braces, your ad and landing page should focus on the topic. The landing page should give some more information about the braces you offer, the problems you can fix with them, and how to get in touch with you so that they can learn more. It should be fact-based and persuasive – getting this right is essential to your dental marketing strategy.

Alternatively, if you wrote a blog post about regular cleanings and their importance in staving off periodontal disease, you could then include a link to the page of your website where people can schedule an appointment to have a check-up and cleaning.

Read more: 5 genius ideas to grow your dental practice

Dental marketing leads to engagement

The third level of the sales funnel is where prospects become leads. People in your community are aware of your dental practice, they know they services you provide, they’ve clicked through to your website, and now they need to be converted into leads. The best way to convert these people is by having them reach out to you and schedule a consultation, or to ask about your services and costs.

The question, then, is how to get these people to get in touch?

Your landing pages really need to be on point. You need to be active on social media. You need to run Google Ads for key terms people will search when they have an issue you can address. That way, you’re staying front of mind and making it as easy as possible for them to choose your practice. That way, when they’re interested enough to pick up the phone or fill out a contact form on your website, it will be an easy decision and you’ll be waiting to welcome them into your office.

Although this is a very exciting stage, we’re not done yet.

This is where you cross from dental marketing to sales. The prospective patient is now interested enough in your dental practice that they have actively got in touch with you, but if you can’t close the deal all that work will have been wasted. We call this process “conversion”, as you are converting a person from a prospective patient into an actual patient.

Need help refining your landing pages? Contact us.

Converting patients with dental marketing

Conversion may be more of an art than a science. It’s important to remember that people probably aren’t just looking at your practice. If they’re actively looking for a dentist it’s likely they’re dissatisfied with their current provider, or they have a problem. If it’s the latter case, they are likely to be looking with a sense of urgency and will be looking for a solution ASAP. Whichever of the practices they are researching is able to provide that information first is likely to convert that prospect into a patient.

According to revenue acceleration company Xant, half of prospective patients choose the company that reaches out first. Among the reasons for this are a perception that your practice is well organized, professional, eager to help, and easy to find. Those who do it well are likely to convert.

Read more: Step-by-step orthodontics marketing plan

Dental marketing needs a target

We talked at the start about the way sales funnels grab as many people as possible with a wide opening, and gradually draw people down to become patients as they pass each level of your dental marketing strategy. However, there are tools available that make this even more efficient.

The rise of targeted advertising on platforms such as Facebook, and across the entire web thanks to Google, means that you can use your funnel a bit more like the nozzle of a vacuum cleaner. By targeting your ads based on Facebook or Google’s prediction models, you can make sure that your ads are only seen by people who are likely to make their way all the way through the process. This may seem as though your numbers will be reduced, but due to the vast reach of platforms like Google and Facebook, you can still reach large numbers of people. More importantly, you’ll reach the right ones.

We hope you find this guide helpful in creating your own sales funnel. This is a great time to re-evaluate your dental marketing strategy as many people look to start returning to regular life, although now with a heightened sense of hygiene and cleanliness. Not only is this a time to welcome your regular patients back, but you can also seize the opportunity to increase your market share.

Ready to get started? Schedule a free consultation.

Top four dental marketing tips to increase market share

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Sabrina Martinez

It’s time for people to come back to the dentist after lockdown, which means now is a great time to be marketing your dental practice. This is a great opportunity to start gaining market share, as well as welcoming back your own regular patients. If you want to make the most of this period, you’re going to need a killer marketing strategy that makes use of all the tools available to you. Keep reading for our top four dental marketing tips.

Prefer to talk it through in person? Give us a call.

1. Dental marketing starts with a website

No matter what your dental marketing plan entails, sooner or later patients will be looking at your website. A few years ago, an amateur could put together a website and it didn’t matter that much what it looked like. Nowadays, however, so many people have well-designed sites that anything less can reflect badly on your dental practice. It’s easy to see why. If you’re looking for a dentist to take care of your teeth, you want someone who gives a sense of competence and professionalism in every aspect of their business. A well-designed website, with a clear list of services and costs, is a necessity if you want potential patients to feel as though they can trust you to take care of their oral health.

Your website can also show the human side to your dental practice. Many people are wary of visiting a dentist, and humanizing the process can alleviate some of their fears. Short biographies of your staff members, lots of pictures of the practice, and testimonies from current patients are all dental marketing essentials. They can all help to make the dentist seem much less daunting.

A great website will be the anchor for your entire dental marketing strategy.  All of your social media presence, advertisements, and physical marketing will point people to your website. It should be easy for visitors to find your location, your contact details, and your services and costs. This allows them to decide that you’re the dental practice they want to visit and make the necessary appointments.

Read more: Managing online reviews in dental marketing

2. Community building in dental marketing

Social media is the next most important dental marketing tool. It has such a huge reach that not using it is a significant lost opportunity. Social media allows you to produce ads which can be targeted to specific audiences. This targeting can be incredibly specific due to the amount of data people willingly give and the inferences that these companies are able to draw from users’ activity. We’ve written before about how Facebook advertising yields results (you can read that here).

Here, we want to focus on the organic side of social media. When we talk about “organic” on social media, we’re referring to the posts you make on your own profile, rather than paid ads. These posts are visible to people who follow your page, as well people tagged in the comments. This kind of post may not have the same kind of reach as an ad, but it has a different relationship with the people who see it, because it feels more genuine – it’s a modern form of word-of-mouth advertising. It’s easy to present the culture of your dental practice, perhaps with slightly less “polished” visuals, but they let people interact with your practice on a personal level, which builds a community. Dental marketing in this way builds a form a form of brand loyalty, where patients feel that they actually know you.

We’ll develop a step-by-step guide for you. Contact us now.

3. Dental marketing with Google My Business

Google My Business is a tool that we are recommending to our clients more and more as we see really impressive results. You’ve probably come across it before. When you search for a restaurant or store, you’ll see a box on the right-hand side of your Google Search results page. It can include images, a link to the website, and interactive phone links for mobile users.

We recommend it for the same reason we recommend a professional website: it’s becoming standard, which means not having one can make your dental practice seem less reputable.  If all the big-name businesses have Google My Business then not having one makes you seem like a small, slightly unofficial business, and no-one wants to visit an unofficial dentist.

The good news is that it’s is really easy to set up. In fact, we’ve written a detailed guide on setting up your listing here – it’s as simple as finding your listing on Google and claiming it. You’ll want to do this as soon as you can, because the process is so simple that anyone can claim a listing. At this stage, there’s actually nothing that can stop someone else from claiming yours, which isn’t ideal.

Case studies: Grow your practice with these bold strategies

4. Online reviews in dental marketing

Google My Business allows us to slide neatly into our next tip, online reviews. Reviews are integrated into your listing, so anyone who searches for your dental practice can see what others think of you. This is really important. If your practice is well-rated, this will obviously inspire confidence in prospective patients. On the other hand, dentistry is a field where people are already nervous, and the perceived potential for harm is large. In practice, this means that your reviews are going to have a much more significant impact than other types of businesses, such as stores or coffee shops.

The best way to make sure you get good reviews is to give good service, but there are other tricks to maximize your score. You may have heard of a concept called “volunteer bias.” This is what happens when people are voluntarily able to review products. Those who had an average experience don’t put in the time to review, so the aggregate score represents only those who had either a bad experience or a very good experience. As a result, negative reviews can have a disproportionate effect. You can get around this by actively asking people to review your business. This is a fine line to tread, because being too pushy can lead to people be put off and giving a worse review, however, when it’s done well, it can fill in some of that space between the very good and the bad, which improves your score. It also increases the numbers of reviews, so any single bad review is much less noticeable.

Another good strategy for reducing the impact of bad reviews is to reply to them. A well-reasoned, polite response can often turn a bad review into a positive – read this post to learn more.

Worried about your reviews? We can help!

Bonus tip: Using video in dental marketing

Okay, okay, we promised four tips – but here’s one extra. We’ve been writing a lot about video lately. It’s dramatically increased in popularity with the increased performance of mobile devices, and it’s a great way to connect with customers online. For example, it’s an excellent way to cram a lot of information into a format that takes little effort to absorb, and it’s easy to maintain attention.

Not only is video great for information transfer, but it’s also really great for building rapport as it allows you to present a human face to potential patients. As we mentioned before, this is especially important for dental practices as it helps remove some of the apprehension that people may feel. It also gives you a great opportunity to let people see your practice and to talk about offers.

We hope you’ve found this list of our top tips helpful, if you’re interested in learning more about the digital marketing strategies we use, check out our other blog posts on marketing for orthodontics.

Need a marketing partner? We’d love to help.

How functional medicine marketing can convert leads

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Sabrina Martinez

Once you establish a strong functional medicine marketing funnel, you’ll start to see a steady stream of leads arriving in your inbox. It’s the first step to helping your practice grow to the next level.

Most often, people will find your practice through search and social, where you’ll have an active presence thanks to Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and an active content marketing strategy. They’ll click through to a polished landing page on your website, where you’ll educate them about what functional medicine is, and all the different ways you can help. They’ll reach out to you and either schedule a free consultation or request a free download. Just like that, you’ve got a lead.

That means you’re going to have tons of business, right?

Maybe! Abundant leads are a very exciting part of the growth process, but truthfully, it all depends on whether or not you can close them. After all, numbers are only meaningful if they follow through to a sale. You can develop the best website traffic, the highest social engagement, and the longest list of leads, but they’re not going to help you unless you can drive conversions.

So how can we close the gap and ensure functional medicine marketing leads to sales?

Prefer to chat to a real person? Schedule a free consultation.

Converting functional medicine marketing leads

One of the most important things to remember in health marketing is that your business might not be the only business that prospective patients are considering. They’re looking to solve a problem related to their health, which means they’re experiencing a certain level of discomfort, which in turn leads to a sense of urgency. They’re looking for answers, and they’re looking for them now. The first functional medicine practice to give them the information they need is likely to convert.

You can’t expect your leads to sit still, so you need to make time a priority. As internet entrepreneur Neil Patel says, “first to call is first to close.” According to Xant, a revenue acceleration company based in Utah, 50% of leads end up choosing the company that reaches out first. There are a few reasons for this: the fact that your practice comes across as being organized and professional, the perception that you have answers and are eager to help, and the fact that you make it easy.

In this respect, automation can be your friend. Once someone hits “submit” on a request for a consultation or phone call, send an automated email thanking them for their request, providing a link where they can get more information, and letting them know a realistic timeframe.

Time really is of the essence. Five minutes is better than 30 minutes, which is better than an hour, which is better than a day. The earlier your respond, the better your chance of converting a new lead you’ve received through your functional medicine marketing strategy.

Read more: Is marketing the new sales?

Try, and try again, to close functional medicine sales

The internet is theoretically endless, and every page is fighting for attention. That means there are distractions are every turn. People have short attention spans, which means they move on quickly. Chances are, they’re not sitting by the phone and waiting for your sales call.

We assume you’ve heard the famous quote: “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” It’s believed to have originated in 1840, but it’s as relevant today as it was then. Don’t stop after just one or two emails or calls. Be polite, and don’t hound your prospective patients, but remember a little bit of persistence at this stage shows that you’re willing to go to the extra mile for them.

Need help refining your strategy? Schedule a free consultation.

Making sure functional medicine marketing and sales match

Digital functional medicine marketing requires a constant flow of feedback, not just from between your practice and its patients, but between your marketing and sales strategies. If something isn’t working, ask why! Are you attracting the right type of leads? Are your messages getting mixed? Do you need to bolster the educational part of your process to help people understand what you offer? Is your price point too high? Is there a weakness in the funnel, like a broken link?

Effective functional medicine marketing strategies aren’t “set and forget.” You need to check in constantly to adapt and modify things as best practices change, you should run A/B tests to see what’s going to be most effective in your area for your desired clientele, and you should think critically about how things are working and why to ensure your process is optimized.

If you can’t figure it out, go right back to basics. Who is your ideal client? What do they need? Who are your leads? Do they match your ideal client profile? If not, why did they reach out? Once you have answers to these questions, you’ll be able to ensure both your functional medicine marketing strategy and your sales process address the right pain points to convert the right leads. It’s important to be consistent across all your patient interactions so you can start building trust.

Read more: Anatomy of a high-converting landing page.

Finding your functional medicine marketing niche

Every functional medicine business has a unique value proposition. It comes with the territory: by nature, you’re an out-of-the-box thinker. That means some aspects of your business might be better suited to driving sales through a functional medicine marketing strategy than others.

For example, you might have an integrative cardiology program you can use to deliver results for people with heart problems, which allows you to focus your efforts on a really narrow niche. You might have a 12-week anxiety program, designed to help people reset their mental health through functional medicine practices, which allows you to hone in on a highly-targeted market. Perhaps you specialize in helping people with autoimmune conditions, or migraines, or obesity. Great! Use that to your advantage and make it the focus of your functional medicine marketing and sales process.

The best thing about finding a niche is that it allows you to research your competitors, find out what they’re doing, and think of ways you can do it differently or better. It reduces the competition, which means you’re likely to see a return on investment much sooner than you would otherwise.

Finding a niche is a great way to streamline your funnel, align your messaging, and fine-tune your process. Once you’ve nailed it on one aspect of your business, you can build up to your other programs and speciality areas, to ensure you’re doing it in the most effective way possible.

Read more: Why having a mission statement matters.

Helping your functional medicine practice grow

If you’re new to the world of sales funnels, you’re rebranding, or you’re serious about wanting to grow your business, you may benefit from hiring a digital marketing agency. They’ll be able to conduct research on your behalf, advise you about the best way forward, and build all the pages you’ll need to refine your funnel. They’ll also be able to provide training to ensure you’re ready to receive sales calls and you know exactly what to say to get convert new patients for your practice.

Ready to get started? Schedule a free consultation.

Is your social media marketing producing results?

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Adrienne Wilkerson

Originally published on June 12, 2018. Updated on July 9, 2020.

So you have your social media editorial calendar and you’re consistently posting good content and putting ads out there on social media. Congrats! Good job! Way to be proactive!

The next question, naturally, is how effective are your efforts? Is your hard work producing results? It’s great if the phone is ringing more or there is more foot traffic at your place. But do you know where it’s all coming from? If you don’t this is a great article for you! Getting out there and being active as a business on social media is at least half the battle. However, if you’re not paying attention to the results and where they are coming from, there is a very real possibility you’ll burn out on social quickly. Here are three things to consider to make sure your efforts are producing the results you want and need.

Does Your Social Media Marketing Have Reach?

When we talk about reach in social media marketing, it means something similar to what you would expect: How many people could see something published by you. It doesn’t mean how many people are engaging with your content, but the total number of eyes that could be seeing the posts you put out.

While reach is important to keep an eye on, it isn’t the blockbuster measuring stick it used to be. In the earlier days of social media marketing, there were considerable bragging rights tied to the number of fans or followers you had. This got so bad that at one point brands and even celebrities were “buying” likes, followers, and fans from random places like Thailand, Cambodia, and others. Facebook caught on to this disappointing fad and shut it down rather quickly. Now the focus is on quality over quantity. Yes, you want the number of fans you have to consistently grow over time. However, making sure you engage the followers you do have is now more important than just being the one with the most fans.

The number of impressions is a valuable metric to track on Facebook because it means someone saw the post or interacted with it in some way. Twitter, on the other hand, counts an impression when a post is delivered to a particular Twitter accounts stream. They do not say that someone has seen the tweet, just that it would show up somewhere in a person’s stream. Make sure you keep this in mind as you are comparing stats. In my experience, impressions, especially on Facebook, are more important than your reach numbers. I say this because reach is about the potential and impressions is about those who have seen your material.

Are You Getting Leads from Social Media?

Having quality engagement and reach on social media is a good start, but the goal of these efforts is to drive traffic and leads to your company. I believe social media has a lot of power in generating brand awareness. It is foundational that the public knows your business exists. Awareness is the first step, and while it is more intangible than getting a customer, it carries a lot of value.

Once people are exposed to your company, then you want them to choose you over the competition. You want them to become leads, which are potential new clients. For the most part, we consider followers or fans as leads when they make the jump and click on a post, an ad, or tweet that takes them to your website or a landing page. Some people will give your business a call directly from Facebook, but honestly, this is rare. Leads typically will reach out via your website or a landing page when they are ready to make a buying decision. We do see a fair number of our clients get business via a direct message on Facebook as well.

Google Analytics is a great tool to track the amount of traffic that is coming from social media to your website and if you use a landing page creation service like LeadPages you will have their tracking metrics to look at as well. If your social media marketing isn’t generating the amount or the type of leads you want, that usually means you aren’t on the right platform, or your content isn’t engaging the right customer.

Are Your Leads Converting to Customers?

The final step in the process is making sure your leads are converting to clients. Usually, you have to do this tracking internally because in involves making sure you know which of your new customers were referred to you by social media. If you are marketing through multiple channels, make sure you track which one is delivering better quality leads. That is then the one you need to put the most effort into.

To be honest, this final stage of tracking is often the one most overlooked. There are no easy tracking tools like Google Analytics to automate it for us. Instead, we have to train ourselves and staff to consistently ask the right questions to gather the date we need to prove ROI from our social media efforts. However, it is well worth the extra time and attention to close the loop.

Social media marketing is a powerful tool for businesses in Anchorage and across the US. Part of what makes it so powerful is the tracking that is available to everyone who does it. The monitoring gives us the data we need to prove what is working and what isn’t. The information we get paints a roadmap by which we can guide our marketing to be as effective as possible. Without this data, we are driving blind and throwing our money away. If for any reason, your social media marketing is not getting the results you want, the answers are probably in the data we discussed in this blog and my blog on the effectiveness of your social media. With that information, you can tweak and adjust your marketing until you are getting the clients you want from your social media marketing.

Managing online reviews in dental marketing

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Sabrina Martinez

Going to the dentist involves a huge degree of trust. Often, your patients are nervous about visiting you, and they rely on you to correctly diagnose and treat any problems they may be having. It can also be very expensive, depending on what they need done and whether their insurance covers it. As such, it’s really important that your dental practice’s marketing strategy revolves around trust.

Successfully building trust requires a few different elements. Transparency and legitimacy are important, so it’s critical that you ensure your website is up-to-date, that you have a Google My Business profile, and an active social media presence. This lets people find you when they need you, and check you out to see what kind of practice you run and whether you’re the right fit for them.

However, the oldest and best form of marketing is word of mouth, and the best way to capitalize on this is by incorporating online reviews into your strategy. This allows people to check what others have said about your business, and get a sense of the experience they might have if they choose you. We’ll run you through the basics of Facebook and Google reviews as well as website testimonials.

Need to call the professionals? Schedule a free consultation.

Making the most of Facebook reviews

When you set up a business page on Facebook, you’ll automatically get a “Reviews” tab. This is a page where your patients can create posts, give you a rating, and decide whether to recommend you. All posts are open to the public, which means they’re really valuable for two reasons. First, they let you get a sense of what people really think about your customer service. Second, they’re really compelling for people researching new dentists online – after all, you can write whatever you like about your practice on your website, but the public is an independent judge.

Here’s an example from our client, South Anchorage Dental Center:

Dental marketing

As you can see, there is a rating out of five, and a simple button people can select to recommend the dental practice to their friends. Anyone can click through and read the comments.

The other important thing to note is the response. Dr. Broc Brimhall is one of the dentists working at this office, and he responded promptly to acknowledge the positive review, thank the patient, and explain why the experience they had reflected the practice’s mission statement. This is a great example of best practice in managing Facebook reviews. It’s not every day a patient leaves a positive review, so if they take the time to do it, let them know that you appreciate it. It’s quick and easy and will show anyone else reading the page that you’re responsive and polite.

Read more: 10 tips for optimizing your social media presence

Optimizing your Google reviews

If you haven’t already set up a Google My Business profile, do it now. It’s a free tool that creates a business listing and ensure you can easily connect with patients (and prospective patients) across Google Search and Maps. For example, if someone types “emergency dentist near me” into the search bar, having an active profile means your practice will show up at the top of the results page.

Google My Business results are displayed in a column on the right-hand side of the Google results page. They include a map, a rating out of five stars, a list of basic details (such as address, hours, and phone number), popular times, and then – you guessed it – a reviews section.

Here’s an example from our client, Mandanas Dental:

Dental marketing

People can then click through to read the full list. Just like Facebook, Google My Business providers the business owner an opportunity to reply to all comments. It’s a great way to reinforce your connection with people, increasing the chance that they’ll come back to see you again the next time they need a dentist. It’s also a great way to address concerns raised in negative reviews.

Stay tuned, because we’ll circle back to this a little later.

Read more: 10 tips to improve your website’s ranking on Google

Making website testimonials work for you

When a company displays testimonials on its website, we marketers call that “proof.” Essentially, that means proof your dental practice is as good as you say it is, validated by a third party.

There are a few different ways you can do this. For example, you can share things people have said in Facebook or Google reviews on your page, you can provide links where people can click through to read those reviews, you can ask patients to fill out a survey after their appointment, or you can reach out to long-term patients via email or text and ask them directly.

Once you have a range of testimonials, you may find it helpful to incorporate some of them onto highly-trafficked pages, such as your home page, about page, and contact page. Depending how many you have, you may even consider creating a dedicated reviews page.

Here’s an example from our client, Valley Dental:

Dental marketing

This practice has provided quality family dentistry services in Wasilla, Alaska, for many years. Dr. Robert W. Robinson III (affectionally known as Dr. Rob) took over the practice from his father in 1999. Dr Robinson Sr. started the clinic back in 1973, so it has a proud history in the area.

They’ve collected a huge number of glowing reviews over the years, so it makes sense to display them front and center on the homepage. It’s one of the first things people will see, and it immediately creates a positive first impression that invites visitors to take action and schedule an appointment. Don’t underestimate the persuasive power of these simple statements!

Read more: 5 website design trends you need to watch this year

How to handle negative reviews

Unfortunately, at some point in your career, it’s inevitable that you’ll have to deal with a negative comment. Perhaps you dropped the ball. Perhaps your patient was having a bad day. Whatever the reason, it’s important that you can deal with them promptly and professionally, because many consumers read online reviews before engaging the services of a dental clinic.

Remember what we said at the start about trust?

The good news is that negative reviews aren’t necessarily bad. For one thing, they allow you to keep your finger on the pulse of public perception so you can proactively manage your reputation. For another thing, they allow you to identify areas where you can improve your business.

They also provide a great opportunity for people to learn about your character and your values. Yes, negative reviews can sting. It’s totally normal to feel a range of different things – disappointment, frustration, anger, injustice, and more. However, other people can see when you respond quickly and calmly, and offer to make things right. It gives them confidence that, since you valued that patient’s experience, you’ll value their experience as well and do your best to look after them.

Read more: 6 must-read tips to rocking your online reviews

So there you have it: managing reviews 101. If you’d like help managing your online reviews, or some advice about how to make them work for your specific circumstances, schedule an appointment. We’d love to discuss this with you over tea, coffee, or something stronger.

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