MFM#70 Planning your marketing budget

One of the most common conversations I have with solo therapists is about marketing budgets.

"I'd love to run Google Ads, but $360 a month feels like so much money."

"I don't know if I can justify paying for Psychology Today."

"I'll wait until I'm earning more before I invest in marketing."

I completely understand why it feels that way. When you're starting or growing a private practice, every dollar matters.

But I'd like to offer a different way of thinking about it.

Instead of asking, "How much does this cost?" try asking, "What return could this investment generate?"

That small shift changes the conversation.

Take a Psychology Today listing. It costs around $25 a month.

If your session fee is $160, you only need one new client every five or six months to cover that cost. Everything after that generates more revenue than you would have had without Psychology Today. 

The same applies to Google Ads.

A budget of around $12 a day works out to about $360 a month. At first glance, that can feel like a significant expense.

But one new client who attends a few sessions will cover that monthly spend. Every additional client that comes through your Google Ads campaign is no longer just paying for your advertising, it's generating additional revenue for your practice. 

This is why businesses don't usually make marketing decisions based on cost alone. They make them based on return on investment (ROI).

For example, imagine you spent $10,000 on marketing and that generated $50,000 in revenue.

You didn't simply "spend $10,000."

You invested $10,000 to earn an additional $40,000.

It's the same way we think about supervision and professional development. Yes, they cost money. But we don't usually judge them on price alone. We judge them on the value they create.

Marketing is no different.

Of course, this doesn't mean you should spend money you don't have.

When you're building your practice, I generally recommend keeping some part-time work, EAP work, or another source of income while your caseload grows. It gives you the financial breathing room to slowly build your caseload with the right clients. 

As a general guide, many established small businesses invest somewhere between 7% and 12% of their revenue into marketing, with businesses in the growth phase often spending even more while they're establishing themselves. This is one of the reasons it's common for new businesses to make a financial loss in the beginning. When you're first starting out, you're investing in things like your website, marketing, software and business setup before you've built a consistent client base. 

The important thing is to build your marketing budget gradually.

Start with the essentials, such as your website, directories and Google Ads. As your practice grows and your marketing begins generating more enquiries and appointments, you can expand into things like Instagram advertising or increasing your Google Ads budget.

Another thing that's worth remembering: marketing expenses are generally tax deductible (although the rules vary depending on your country, so it's always worth checking with your accountant).

The next time you find yourself thinking, "That's expensive," pause for a moment and ask a different question instead:

"If this brings me just one or two new clients, what would the return actually be? Would I generate more revenue by making this investment than by not making it?"