Healthcare / Mental health
Mental health marketing for people who do not want to be followed.
Somebody looking for a therapist is doing it quietly, usually late, usually on a phone, and often without telling anyone. A marketing tactic that would be unremarkable in home services is actively harmful here.
How do therapy practices get more clients ethically?
Therapy practices grow by being findable for the specific problem somebody is searching, being clear about who they work with and what it costs, and making the first contact feel private and low stakes.
The advertising constraints are real and specific. Meta does not allow an ad to assert or imply knowledge of a viewer's health condition, so creative asking whether someone is depressed is not permitted. Google treats health as a sensitive interest category, which removes advertiser built audiences such as customer match and lookalike segments.
Retargeting is the single most inappropriate tactic in this category. Following somebody around the internet after they read a page about anxiety is both a policy problem and a betrayal of the discretion that brought them there.
Discretion is the product, and most marketing tactics violate it.
The behaviour in this category is unlike anything else in healthcare. People research anonymously, in private browsing, often over weeks. They close tabs quickly. They do not want a therapy advert appearing on a shared family device, and they will not fill in a form that asks for a diagnosis before it will accept a message.
Every one of those behaviours has a marketing implication. A retargeting campaign is not merely ineffective here, it is a breach of the discretion the person came looking for, and it makes the practice that ran it look careless with exactly the thing they are selling.
Read the full breakdown: Discretion is the product, and most marketing tactics violate it.Hide the full breakdown: Discretion is the product, and most marketing tactics violate it.
Meta does not allow an ad to assert or imply that it knows a personal attribute of the person seeing it, including a medical or health condition, financial status or criminal history. "Depression counselling" is allowed. "Depression getting you down?" is not.
That rule is the clearest statement of the principle in any platform policy. Depression counselling is allowed. Depression getting you down is not, because it implies knowledge of the viewer. The compliant version is also the more decent one.
Google treats health as a sensitive interest category, and an advertiser promoting products or services that fall within it cannot use advertiser curated audiences. Google names those as customer match, your data segments, audience expansion and lookalike segments, and your data segments is the ordinary site visitor list that retargeting runs on. What the ads and the landing pages promote is what triggers the restriction, not how the list was assembled. Google's predefined audiences stay available, including in market and affinity segments, life events, demographics and location targeting, because Google configures those with the sensitive signals excluded.
Together these shape the whole account. Targeting is built from search intent and geography rather than from audience lists, creative describes the service rather than the viewer, and frequency is kept low deliberately.
What compliant creative actually looks like.
These are the working rules we apply before anything goes live in a behavioural health account.
- Describe the service, never the viewer. Anxiety therapy in Oak Brook, not are you struggling with anxiety.
- Do not use the second person about a condition. You and your become a problem the moment a health state is attached to them.
- No retargeting of people who visited condition pages, and no audience lists built from site behaviour.
- Keep frequency low. Repetition that reads as persistence in another category reads as surveillance in this one.
- Contact forms collect the minimum: a name, a way to reply, and a free text box the person controls. No diagnosis fields, no condition checkboxes.
- Say what happens after somebody makes contact, including who will reply and how. Uncertainty is the main reason a form is abandoned here.
None of this reduces effectiveness. Search intent in this category is strong enough that the campaign does not need audience tricks, and the restraint is visible to the people you want.
A campaign radius has to match a licence map, not a service area.
Telehealth changed the economics of this category and introduced a constraint most local businesses never face.
Clinical licensure is granted per state. A practice can deliver therapy remotely across a whole state, which is a much larger market than a physical office serves, and cannot deliver it one mile over the state line no matter how convenient that would be.
That means the campaign geography is set by where the clinicians hold licences, and it changes whenever a clinician is added or leaves. A group practice with five clinicians licensed in three states has a targeting map that needs maintaining rather than setting once.
It also changes the content. A practice offering telehealth statewide should say which states it can serve, prominently, because the alternative is enquiries it has to refuse and a reputation for wasting people's time at their most vulnerable.
The same constraint applies to in person work in the opposite direction. A practice with a waiting list for in person appointments and open telehealth capacity should be marketing the capacity it has, not the capacity it wishes it had.
You are not competing with other practices for the first position.
Behavioural health search results are dominated by directories, and pretending otherwise leads to a lot of wasted effort.
| Surface | Who usually occupies it | What it is worth to you |
|---|---|---|
| Broad organic terms | National directories and health publishers | Hard to win, and lower intent than it looks |
| Directory profiles | You, if you maintain them | High. People filter inside the directory and then contact |
| Local pack | Practices with a physical address | High intent, limited to in person work |
| Your own condition pages | You | Good, when written for a local reader rather than the internet |
| Paid search | Directories, national telehealth brands and practices | Workable, and needs careful compliance |
| AI answers | Increasingly a summary with a few named sources | Worth structuring for, and not yet measurable |
The honest strategic answer for many small practices is to make the directory profile excellent first, because it is the faster route to enquiries, and then build the site's own visibility over a longer horizon.
A growing share of this research happens in an assistant.
BrightLocal's 2026 consumer survey covers local business recommendations generally. In a category where people prefer not to be seen searching, a conversational interface is an obvious fit.
SourceBrightLocal, Local Consumer Review Survey, 2026, base 1,002 US consumers
This is vendor survey data about local business recommendations in general, not about therapy specifically, so treat it as a direction of travel rather than a measurement of your market.
The first contact decides most of it.
In behavioural health, intake is where marketing spend is converted or wasted, and the gap between practices is enormous.
Make contact low stakes
A short form, a direct email address, or a phone number with a clear statement of when somebody will reply. Not a fourteen field intake questionnaire before anyone has spoken.
Reply fast, without pressure
Speed matters because ambivalence is part of the condition for many people. Pressure does not, because it reads as sales at a moment when the person is deciding whether to trust you.
Answer the two real questions
Can you see me, and what will it cost. Insurance panels, private pay rates and sliding scale availability belong on the website so this is settled before contact.
See the remaining steps: The first contact decides most of it.Hide the remaining steps: The first contact decides most of it.
Handle the waitlist honestly
If you are full, say so and offer a route: a waitlist with a realistic expectation, or a referral. Leaving an enquiry unanswered because there is no capacity is the worst outcome for everyone.
Protect what is collected
Whatever the first message contains, it lands somewhere. Where that is, who can read it and how long it is kept are decisions to make deliberately.
If a vendor creates, receives, maintains or transmits protected health information on your behalf, HIPAA treats that vendor as a business associate and a written business associate agreement is required. VIS Mountain signs a BAA where an engagement genuinely involves protected health information.
More enquiries than capacity is a real problem, not a good one.
Many therapy practices are full. An agency that responds to that by generating more enquiries is producing a queue of people who reached out at a difficult moment and got nothing back.
The useful work in a full practice looks different. Improving payer mix so the same hours are worth more. Reducing cancellations and late notice gaps. Building a group programme or a different service line with genuine capacity. Recruiting, which is a marketing problem too and one most practices handle badly.
Read the full breakdown: More enquiries than capacity is a real problem, not a good one.Hide the full breakdown: More enquiries than capacity is a real problem, not a good one.
Recruitment marketing in behavioural health deserves its own attention. Clinicians choose practices on caseload expectations, supervision, administrative burden and pay structure, and a careers page that says none of those things will not attract them. A practice that can hire can then grow. A practice that cannot has a ceiling no advertising budget will raise.
We say this before proposing a campaign rather than after, because it changes what the engagement should be. Results vary by market, budget, competition and other factors. Nothing here is a guarantee of a ranking, a lead volume or a revenue outcome.
The rules that govern this category.
- Meta does not allow an ad to assert or imply that it knows a personal attribute of the person seeing it, including a medical or health condition, financial status or criminal history. "Depression counselling" is allowed. "Depression getting you down?" is not.
- Google treats health as a sensitive interest category, and an advertiser promoting products or services that fall within it cannot use advertiser curated audiences. Google names those as customer match, your data segments, audience expansion and lookalike segments, and your data segments is the ordinary site visitor list that retargeting runs on. What the ads and the landing pages promote is what triggers the restriction, not how the list was assembled. Google's predefined audiences stay available, including in market and affinity segments, life events, demographics and location targeting, because Google configures those with the sensitive signals excluded.
- There is no such thing as a HIPAA certification, and no website is HIPAA compliant on its own. HHS states plainly that it does not certify any person or product as HIPAA compliant, and the Security Rule contains no requirement to certify at all. Anyone selling you a certificate is selling you a document, not a defence.
- If a vendor creates, receives, maintains or transmits protected health information on your behalf, HIPAA treats that vendor as a business associate and a written business associate agreement is required. VIS Mountain signs a BAA where an engagement genuinely involves protected health information.
- The part of the HHS online tracking bulletin that treated an IP address plus a visit to a condition page as protected health information was vacated by the US District Court for the Northern District of Texas in June 2024, and HHS withdrew its appeal that August. The business associate rules did not change, so the safe position is still to keep identifiable patient detail out of pixels, chat transcripts and call recordings.
- State licensing boards, not just HIPAA, govern what a clinician may publish. New York's Board of Regents rules allow a patient testimonial only where the patient has expressly authorised it in writing, the portrayal is disclosed, reasonable disclaimers accompany any claim about results, and fictional patient testimonials are prohibited outright. Rules differ by state and by profession, so the answer for one practice is not the answer for another.
Client testimonials are additionally constrained by professional ethics codes in most behavioural health disciplines, which generally treat soliciting a testimonial from a current client as impermissible. Check your own discipline's code before any review request process is built.
What we would do.
Local SEO
Visibility for in person work, and clean profiles for each clinician where appropriate.
Google Ads Management
Intent based campaigns built without the audience tools this category cannot use.
Answer Engine Optimization
Structuring pages so an assistant can lift an accurate answer and name your practice.
Web Design and Development
A calm, fast site with forms that ask for the minimum and say what happens next.
Conversion Tracking Setup
Measuring enquiries by source without clinical detail reaching an ad platform.
Get a behavioural health marketing audit.
We look at how your practice is found, whether your creative and tracking would survive a policy review, and what happens to an enquiry once it arrives.
One caveat on all of that. These are descriptions of rules as they are published today, not legal advice about your situation. They differ by state and they change, sometimes quietly, so check the current wording with your own counsel or compliance officer before you rely on any of it. Where a rule touches your marketing we write to the stricter reading and send it to you for sign off before anything publishes.
Straight answers.
Can we run Facebook ads for a therapy practice?
Yes, within Meta's personal attributes standard, which does not allow an ad to assert or imply that it knows the viewer's health condition. Depression counselling is acceptable wording. Depression getting you down is not.
Audience building is also constrained. Google treats health as a sensitive interest category and removes advertiser curated audiences for advertisers in it, and the same caution should apply to how you approach Meta.
Should we retarget people who visited our site?
No. It is the single most inappropriate tactic in this category. Somebody reading about anxiety on a shared device does not want that advert appearing later, and a practice that does it signals carelessness about privacy.
There is enough intent in search to run a campaign without it.
Is it worth paying for directory listings?
For many small practices it is the fastest route to enquiries, because directories occupy much of this search landscape and people filter inside them before contacting anyone.
Treat it as one channel rather than the strategy. A directory profile you do not control is a rented position, which is why it runs alongside building your own visibility rather than instead of it.
How do we market telehealth across state lines?
You do not, beyond where your clinicians hold licences. The campaign geography follows the licence map, and it changes whenever a clinician joins or leaves.
Say clearly on the site which states you can serve. It saves enquiries you would have to refuse, which matters more here than in most categories.
Can we ask clients for reviews?
This is governed by your professional ethics code as well as by platform rules, and most behavioural health codes treat soliciting testimonials from current clients as impermissible.
Check your own discipline's code before building any review process. Where reviews are not available, the trust signals have to come from clarity, credentials and how the practice describes its work.
We are already full. Should we still be marketing?
Not for more enquiries. Generating demand you cannot meet leaves people who reached out at a hard moment with no reply, which is worse than not advertising at all.
The work in a full practice is payer mix, cancellation recovery, new service lines with real capacity, and clinician recruitment, which is itself a marketing problem most practices approach badly.
Where this comes from.
Primary documentation and published research behind the guidance on this page.
- Meta Transparency Center: privacy violations and personal attributes in ads (opens in a new tab)
- Google Ads Help: personalised advertising policy (opens in a new tab)Health is a sensitive interest category, which limits audience targeting.
- HHS: be aware of misleading HIPAA marketing claims (opens in a new tab)HHS does not certify any person or product as HIPAA compliant.
- HHS: HIPAA business associates (opens in a new tab)
- American Hospital Association: court ruling vacating the HHS online tracking bulletin (opens in a new tab)
- New York State Board of Regents Rules, Part 29: unprofessional conduct and advertising (opens in a new tab)Testimonials need written authorisation, disclosure and disclaimers.
- BrightLocal: local consumer review survey (opens in a new tab)
Talk to the team
A short call, a look at how the business currently shows up, and a straight answer on what we would do first.