How much does it cost?
1:37 · pricing & transparency
Customers are no longer starting on Google. A growing share of them open ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google's AI Overviews, type a question - "best [your service] near me," "who should I use for X," "what's the best [product] for [situation]" - and read the answer. Two or three businesses get named. The rest are invisible. That invisibility is the unsettling part. When you lose a Google ranking, you see it happen in your analytics. When an AI tool recommends your competitor to a thousand potential customers, nothing shows up in any report you currently run. Ranking well on Google does not mean you'll be cited by AI. Research suggests the overlap between top Google results and AI-cited sources is shrinking fast. You can be the number-one organic result and still never get mentioned in the answer. The first step isn't to fix it. It's to find out where you stand. Here's how to do that in under an hour.
Most TMS clinics spend their marketing budget getting patients to enquire. The website, the SEO, the ads - all of it exists to turn a stranger into someone who picks up the phone or fills in a form. Then the enquiry comes in, and the system that worked so hard to create it quietly drops the ball. This is the part of patient acquisition almost no clinic measures, and it's where a lot of expensive marketing goes to die. You can have the best website in your market and still lose the patient in the gap between "I'm interested" and "I've booked." Here's how that gap opens up, and what closing it actually looks like. The patient isn't waiting for you. They're comparing you. When someone enquires about TMS, they are rarely enquiring with one clinic. They're anxious, they've usually exhausted other treatment options, and they're doing what anyone does with a high-stakes decision - looking at several providers at once. That changes everything about what happens next. The patient who fills in your form at 2pm isn't sitting by the phone hoping you call back. They've also messaged the clinic across town, and maybe a third. Whoever responds first, clearly, and warmly is the one who gets the conversation. The others are competing for a patient who's already half-committed elsewhere. The research on this is consistent across industries: the large majority of customers end up going with whoever responds first - not the cheapest, not the most credentialed, but the first. For a TMS clinic, that means the quality of your care is irrelevant to the patient who never heard back in time to consider it. Speed is the variable nobody is managing The uncomfortable truth is that most clinics have no idea how fast they respond to enquiries, because nobody owns the number. A form comes in. It lands in an inbox that someone checks between patients. A voicemail sits until the front desk has a quiet moment. An after-hours enquiry waits until the next morning - by which point the patient has already spoken to someone else. None of this is negligence. It's just what happens when enquiry response is everybody's job and therefore nobody's job. The marketing generated the lead; the clinical team is busy treating patients; the front desk is managing a waiting room. The enquiry falls into the space between them. The clinics that convert well aren't working harder. They've simply decided that responding to an enquiry is a defined job with a defined target - minutes, not hours - and built a small amount of process around making that happen reliably. After-hours is where the most patients are lost Here's the part that's easy to miss. A meaningful share of TMS enquiries arrive outside clinic hours - evenings, weekends, the moments when someone finally sits down, opens their laptop, and decides to do something about how they've been feeling. That timing is not a coincidence. It's often when the patient is most motivated. And it's exactly when most clinics are least equipped to respond. If your only response mechanism is a person checking an inbox during business hours, every evening and weekend enquiry cools for twelve hours or more before anyone touches it. By Monday morning, the patient who enquired on Friday night has had a whole weekend to talk to a competitor, change their mind, or lose the nerve it took to reach out in the first place. This is the single biggest fixable leak in most clinics' patient acquisition, and it has nothing to do with the website..
Choosing a marketing partner is one of the more expensive decisions a healthcare clinic will make, and one of the easier ones to get wrong. Most agencies tell you the same things. More traffic, better SEO, more patients. The pitches are interchangeable, the case studies sound similar, and the monthly fees are often comparable. The differences only become clear six months in - after the contract is signed and the budget is spent. Here's what actually separates a good agency from the right one. Does the agency understand healthcare specifically? Healthcare marketing is not the same as marketing retail or e-commerce. Patients searching for care are anxious, often researching during difficult moments, and weighing decisions with real consequences. The messaging that works for a furniture brand does not transfer. A healthcare-experienced agency understands: Patient decision-making and the emotional weight behind clinical searches Compliance constraints around medical advertising The trust signals that matter on a clinic website How to write about conditions and treatments without crossing clinical or legal lines A generalist agency will treat your clinic like any other client . That usually shows. Worth asking: how many healthcare clients have you worked with in the past two years, and what types of clinics? Are they leading with strategy or tactics? A lot of agencies open with a deliverable. A new website. An SEO package. A monthly ad spend. The tactics are real, but they're being offered before anyone has asked what your clinic actually needs. A strong marketing partner starts with strategy. They want to understand your growth goals, your current patient pipeline, your geographic reach, and where the competitive pressure is. Those answers decide whether you should prioritise local SEO, paid search, landing pages, content, or some combination. Without that foundation, the marketing becomes reactive - a series of tactics chosen because they're what the agency happens to sell. Worth asking: how would you approach our clinic in the first 30 days, and what would you want to understand before recommending anything? How transparent is the reporting? A marketing partnership should not feel like a black box. Every month, you should know: What work was done and why Which objectives it was tied to How is performance being measured What's being adjusted based on the data If the monthly update is a dashboard of impressions and clicks with no narrative and no link to patient enquiries, you are paying for activity rather than outcomes. Worth asking: can I see a sample of the monthly reporting you provide to clients?
