The Channels a Practice Can Use, and What Each One Moves
What each channel does, what it costs, and how long before it produces a patient. Written by a physician, not by the people selling the bundle.
What each channel does, what it costs, and how long before it produces a patient. Written by a physician, not by the people selling the bundle.
Healthcare marketing gets sold as one monthly package. Inside it are four separate jobs with four different timelines, and treating them as one number is how a practice ends up unable to say what its money bought.
Ads move in weeks. Search moves in months. The website changes the yield of both immediately. Reviews decide whether anyone calls after seeing you. Bundle them and no report can ever tell you which one worked.
The practices that get this right are not the ones spending the most. They are the ones running the four in the right order, with the measurement set up before the first invoice.
The order matters more than the amount. Run them in the wrong sequence and the same budget produces a fraction of the patients.
Six to twelve months before it changes patient volume, then it keeps producing without a monthly media bill. Includes your Google Business Profile, which drives the map results.
Enquiries within weeks, and the tap closes the day you stop paying. Worth running while search is built, worth keeping for procedures with a short decision window.
Every other channel sends a stranger to these two. Weak, and everything upstream costs more. Strong, and the same traffic produces several times the appointments.
Each one answers a different question. Knowing which question you have decides where the money goes first.
Six to twelve months before it changes patient volume. Impressions and map position move earlier, which is why honest reporting separates the two. Once built, it produces patients without a monthly media bill, and it is the only channel whose cost per patient falls over time.
Enquiries within days, a genuinely tuned account in six to eight weeks, and everything stops the day the card is declined. Right for filling a schedule this quarter, right for procedures where the decision is quick, wrong as the only thing a practice ever does.
Not really a source of patients, a multiplier on the others. Four to eight weeks to rebuild, and it changes the yield of every channel pointing at it. This is why fixing it first is almost always the cheapest decision available.
Measurement, then the website, then ads if the schedule is thin now, with search built underneath from the start and reviews running throughout. Any split proposed before someone has looked at your actual numbers is a template rather than a plan.
Does your schedule need patients this quarter, or next year?
This quarter means ads, because nothing else moves that fast. Next year means search, because nothing else gets cheaper over time. Most practices need both, and the mistake is starting either one before the website can convert what it sends.
If ads and search are quoted with the same promise, nobody will be able to tell you which one produced a patient, and that is usually the point.
The most common way a practice budget disappears. The website is not the glamorous part of the plan, it is the part that decides what everything else is worth.
Ads judged at six to eight weeks, search not before six months, the website judged on conversion rate. Separate timelines, separate verdicts, no hiding.
I trained as a maxillofacial surgeon, moved into orthodontics, and co-founded a three-clinic group in Paris. I then spent time inside Publicis Health learning how medical marketing actually works at scale.
While running the clinics I hired an agency. I paid them more than 20,000 EUR over a year. They owned my Google and Meta ad accounts, not me. They spent a fraction of the budget, kept the rest, and delivered one patient, who came in for a cleaning, while I was selling orthodontic treatment. I only found out when I pulled the account myself and read the raw numbers.
Nobody ever explained to me that these were four different things on four different clocks. That is the only reason this page exists.
Most healthcare marketing agencies sit between $3,000 and $6,000 a month and will not show you that number until you are already on a call. Here it is upfront.
I sign this personally. My team keeps working until each channel is either producing patients or has been stopped for a reason you can see in the numbers. No lock-in, no promised patient count. Ads judged in weeks, search judged in months, and I will tell you which is which before you pay.
Territorial exclusivity: one practice per area per treatment. When yours is taken, your competitor cannot buy it.
The first 90 days
Where you rank, what the site converts, what the ads cost per enquiry, how your reviews compare locally. Free, no call, read by a physician.
Thin this quarter means ads first. Protecting next year means search first. The website comes before both if it cannot convert.
Each channel switched on with its own tracking, so the first report can already tell you which produced what.
Ads reviewed at six to eight weeks, search not before six months. Decisions made on cost per booked patient rather than on impressions.
Four: search visibility including your Google Business Profile, paid ads, the website, and reviews. Everything else sold as a channel is either one of these under another name, or an activity that does not end in a booked appointment.
The website, almost always, because every other channel sends a stranger to it. After that it depends on urgency: ads if the schedule needs filling this quarter, search if you are protecting next year. Reviews run alongside both from day one because they cost nothing but attention.
Ads produce enquiries within days and are genuinely tuned in six to eight weeks. Search takes six to twelve months to change patient volume, with impressions moving earlier. A website rebuild takes four to eight weeks and changes the yield of everything else immediately.
Yes, and most do, usually ads. It works, and it means renting every patient forever at a cost that never falls. The reason to add search is not ideology, it is that the cost per patient drops over time and the visibility keeps working during the months you are too busy to think about it.
For most practices it is a retention and trust channel rather than an acquisition one. It reassures the patient who already found you and is checking whether you look credible. That is worth something, but it is not where a limited budget belongs before the four channels work.
Recall is the cheapest patient acquisition available to a practice and it is almost always neglected. It is not marketing to strangers, which is why it sits outside the four, but if your recall list is untouched you are buying new patients at full price while ignoring people who already chose you.
Start by fixing the website out of the fixed budget, then weight toward ads while search is being built, then let the balance shift as organic visibility takes over. Any split proposed before someone has looked at your current numbers is a template, not a plan.
It is a new surface for an existing channel rather than a fifth channel. Assistants draw on the same signals as search: structured content, clean local data, review depth. You do not buy your way in, you get cited because the work was done properly.
Tracked phone numbers by source, form submissions tagged to the page they came from, and asking at the desk. None of it is complicated, all of it has to be set up before the spending starts. Without it, every budget decision afterwards is a guess dressed as a report.
When it has had a fair run and the cost per booked patient is worse than the alternatives. For ads that judgement is fair after six to eight weeks of proper tracking. For search it is not fair before six months. Killing a channel early is as expensive as running a bad one too long.
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