Diy Marketing Vs Agency Support for Uk Practices
A comparison of what it costs to learn marketing yourself against what it costs to hire a person who already knows.
A comparison of what it costs to learn marketing yourself against what it costs to hire a person who already knows.
You are running two jobs at once One is the clinic, the room, the client on the table. The other is marketing, done in the gaps, mostly badly. This page tells those two jobs apart.
A leaflet drop through five hundred letterboxes costs about the same as an hour with a person who understands marketing.
Only one of those tells you where your next client is coming from.
The other tells you which houses have a dog, because you'll hear about it at length, over a fence, for years.
Wellness marketing challenges: challenges nearby to this:
Find yourself: some of the fields we serve:
One hour with the right person does more than a box of leaflets ever will. That's arithmetic wearing a coat.
You can lose a whole afternoon to a Facebook ad. Choosing fonts, adjusting the budget slider, feeling like a person of consequence.
The feeling is pleasant. It is a poor substitute for a booking.
Productive and profitable are different sensations, and only one of them settles the mortgage.
Feeling busy on a Sunday is not the same currency as a client in the diary on Tuesday.
Walk into most practice websites and you'll meet the tone of a parish newsletter crossed with a tetanus reminder.
Nobody in the building was hired to write. Everybody had a go, in turn, over several years, in several fonts.
Copy written by whoever was free that afternoon reads exactly like this. A clinic's words deserve more care than its curtains, and usually get less.
Owner revenue share and total practice revenue move in opposite directions, at a correlation of minus 0.61.
Owners taking a smaller slice of their own takings tend to run the bigger operation.
A strange sort of comfort, this, if you're currently taking all of it home in a carrier bag.
Owners who keep every pound personally handle every task personally, and the practice stays the size of one pair of hands. Growth tends to arrive once you stop licking the stamps yourself.
Good to know: Whatever's on your mind here, and however your practice's specifics play in, this is what specialist agencies take care of - so you can get on with running your practice. Happy to help ease your mind, if it'd be useful.
Hiring a person feels like handing over one small errand, whatever the fear suggests at 2am.
It usually means asking one person to do the one thing you've been doing badly, between clients, since roughly March.
The newsletter. The Instagram captions. The follow-up email you've been meaning to write since the boiler broke.
Go deeper: a few quick observations:
One person doing one job properly replaces you doing six jobs adequately at midnight. That's the whole transaction.
You already know which treatment room earns its keep.
You know which one mostly stores the trolley, the spare chair, and a box of leaflets nobody's touched since the leaflet incident.
You've simply never turned that same eye on your marketing spend.
Marketing spend deserves the same audit as the room, and most practices have never once conducted one.
You'd never let a treatment room sit idle for a year without asking why. Your marketing budget has been sitting idle for longer than that.
A logo redesign feels like progress, because you can watch it happen, on a screen, over three drafts and a font debate.
A referral system feels like nothing much, because it works in the background, like the immersion heater.
Systems that work without applause rarely get budget, while the visible, photogenic things always do.
You notice the immersion heater the day the water runs cold. Same principle, different bill.
Some practices need one afternoon a month from a person outside the building, sorting the mess into order.
Others need a person at a desk every Tuesday, permanently, like a piece of furniture with opinions.
The right level of support is a sum, worked out from your diary, not your dreams.
You can want the earth. Your appointment book will tell you what you can afford to want.
You need one honest answer to a single question: where is your next client coming from.
Most owners have never been asked this directly, by anyone, including themselves.
One clear answer beats a marketing department you can't staff or afford, every single time.
Ask yourself where next month's client is coming from. If the answer takes longer than a sentence, that's the finding.
One version of DIY marketing is the sound decision. It looks like a clear diary and a clean list of what's working, printed out, on the fridge, next to the bin rota.
Another version is avoidance wearing a Canva account, three fonts deep in a graphic nobody asked for.
Knowing which version you're running is the whole difference between a system and a hobby.
One of them has a plan. The other has a lovely gradient background and no idea what happens next.
Nobody hires help because the newsletter got easy to write. It never gets easy. It just gets later.
They hire help because the newsletter is the fourth thing on a list where the first three are patients, and the fifth is the washing.
Marketing gets hired out when the list gets honest, not when the will finally arrives.
A good comparison of your options looks boring on paper. Three columns, no adjectives, nothing sold to you at all.
It's likely the dullest document you'll read this year. It may also be the most useful one.
See a plain, three-column comparison of your marketing options, no adjectives, no selling. compare your options
We love that about you. Thorough people tend to love what we've built - a story garden, a visual river, a listening wind, and a discovery call that goes properly both ways. The kettle's on. How do you take your coffee?
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