Agency and vendor review
What your current agency is doing, what it is charging for, and whether the reporting matches the accounts. We read the ad accounts and the deliverables, not the invoice summary.
The short answer
Medical marketing consultants advise on strategy, channel mix, budget, vendor selection, and in-house team structure without taking over execution. Behavioral health operators typically engage one when an agency is spending money with nothing to show for it, when admissions volume dropped and nobody can explain why, or when a facility is being acquired and the buyer wants the digital assets valued. Quantum contracts consulting separately from retained marketing work, so the recommendation can be to keep your current vendor or to hire nobody at all.
14 years
In behavioral health lead generation
number of consulting engagements to date — verify with Tim
Consulting engagements completed
What it includes
Medical Marketing Consultants: what it covers
Channel mix and budget allocation
Where the next dollar goes. Paid search buys speed, SEO buys margin, local buys proximity. The operators this fits are usually running about $10,000 a month in SEO and $50,000 to $100,000 a month in paid search, and at that size the allocation question is worth more than any single campaign.
In-house team design
Roles, salary bands, tooling, and what to keep outside. For some operators a marketing coordinator plus two specialist vendors beats a full-service retainer on both cost and control.
Admissions and intake process review
Speed to answer, callback discipline, insurance verification friction, and CRM hygiene. Marketing spend gets wasted here more often than it gets wasted on ads.
Multi-location and expansion planning
Whether a new market can be won on search before the lease is signed. Competitive density, cost per click, existing directory strength, and licensure timing all belong in that decision.
Diligence on an acquisition
Traffic quality, link profile risk, brand search volume, LegitScript status, and whether the seller's call volume survives the transition. Digital assets get valued casually in these deals and it is a good place to find money.
Who calls us for this
Operators with an in-house marketing person who is competent and under-supported. They know what to do and cannot get budget approved until somebody credible says the same thing to ownership.
Owners two years into an agency relationship who cannot answer a simple question: how many admissions came from marketing last month. The reporting has never contained that number, and asking for it produces a different metric instead.
Private equity and multi-site groups doing diligence, where the target's traffic looks good on a screenshot and needs somebody who knows whether it is real.
How we keep the advice honest
Consulting is priced and contracted separately from execution. If an engagement ends with us recommending ourselves for the work, that recommendation has to survive you asking why, and the answer had better be a specific capability rather than a pitch.
We also tell people not to spend. A facility already running near full census does not need more traffic. It needs a better payer mix and a referral strategy, neither of which we sell. Saying that costs a retainer and buys a referral, which has been the better trade for fourteen years.
Format and engagement shape
Most engagements start with the free audit, because it produces the raw material. From there it is either a fixed-scope project with a written recommendation and a working session, or a recurring advisory block where we sit in on your marketing meeting and hold your vendors to account.
consulting engagement pricing and typical scope — confirm with Tim
Tim Stoddart got sober in 2010, built Sober Nation, and has spent fourteen years on search and lead generation in behavioral health. Consulting engagements are his time, not a junior account manager's.
Free audit
Want this looked at on your site?
We audit your rankings, ads, and call tracking, then show you where admissions are leaking. Yours to keep either way.
Prefer the phone? (561) 269-2833
Who we help
Programs we run this for
Drug and alcohol rehab
Fourteen years in behavioral health, all of it spent getting rehab centers on the phone with people who need a bed. We know your competitors, we know which searches produce a call, and we know which ones only produce a report.
Behavioral health centers
That is the structure we find in almost every behavioral health center we audit. Six different searchers, one page they all compete on, and a phone that stays quiet.
Mental health centers
We market outpatient mental health, PHP, and IOP programs. Different searcher than rehab, different ad rules, same job: make the phone ring and know which dollar made it ring.
Hospitals and health systems
Hospital marketing usually gets judged on brand awareness and billboard recall. We judge it on calls and scheduled procedures by service line, traced back to the campaign that produced them.
Assisted living and nursing homes
Type your city and level of care into Google. The top results are referral aggregators, and every move-in they send you costs a placement fee.
Non-profit behavioral health
Google gives qualifying non-profits $10,000 a month in search ads, and most of those accounts sit dormant or out of policy. We run the grant as a real source of calls, alongside organic work that does not depend on it.
Further reading
Written on this in more depth
No gate and no form. These go further than a services page reasonably can.
FAQ
Questions we get asked
Will you tell us to fire our agency?
Only if the evidence says so, and we will show you the evidence. Sometimes the agency is executing fine and nobody ever defined what success meant, which is a cheaper fix. Other times the account has been on autopilot for a year and you will see that in the change history.
Can you consult without also doing the work?
Yes, and that is the normal arrangement. Consulting is contracted separately. If we end up doing the execution afterward it is because you asked, not because the engagement was built to funnel there.
Do you help build an in-house marketing team?
Yes. Role definition, hiring criteria, interview questions specific to behavioral health, tooling, and which functions to keep outside. For a single-location facility a coordinator plus specialist vendors is often cheaper and faster than a full-service retainer.
What does a consulting engagement cost?
It is scoped per engagement, since a one-time diligence review and a standing monthly advisory block are different animals. consulting rates and engagement minimums — confirm with Tim The initial audit is free, so you can read the thinking before anything is quoted.
Who actually does the consulting?
Tim Stoddart. He got sober in 2010, built Sober Nation, and has spent fourteen years on search and lead generation for treatment providers. Consulting engagements do not get handed to an account manager, which is also why availability is limited.
Free audit
Find out where your calls are leaking.
We take apart your rankings, your ads, and your call tracking, then show you where the calls are going instead of to you. The audit is yours to keep whether we work together or not.
Prefer the phone? (561) 269-2833