Marketing Strategy & Planning

Often more so. Ads only work as well as the website and booking process behind them, and many practices are paying for clicks that never turn into appointments. A plan looks at the whole journey and shows where your budget will do the most good.

Ads can bring people to your site, but what happens next decides whether they book. Slow pages, unclear service information, a hard-to-find phone number or a clunky online booking system can all lose potential patients. So can missed calls at reception or enquiry forms that nobody follows up promptly. Without looking at those steps, it’s hard to tell whether a disappointing campaign is an ad problem or something further along.

A strategy also puts ads in context with your other channels, such as search visibility, your Google Business Profile, referrers and recalls for existing patients. Sometimes the right move is to adjust targeting, sometimes it’s to fix the website first or shift part of the budget elsewhere. The plan sets out those options clearly, along with how to measure the results.

Most plans take three to five weeks from kickoff to final walkthrough. That covers a discovery session with your team, our research and audit, a draft for your feedback and a final presentation of the plan.

The discovery session is where we learn about your goals, your patients, the services you want to grow and what has or hasn’t worked before. During research and audit, we review your website, search visibility, Google profile, ad accounts and competitors, and look at the practice numbers you share with us. The draft then gives you a chance to question our thinking and add anything we’ve missed before the plan is finalised.

Where a plan falls within that range usually depends on how quickly we can get access to your accounts and data, how many services or locations the plan covers, and how long your team needs to review the draft. We agree the timeline with you at kickoff, so you know when each stage is due and when your input will be needed.

Yes. The plan is written so your team, another agency or a freelancer can follow it. If you’d like us to handle some or all of it, we’ll quote for that separately once you’ve seen the plan.

We write it in plain language, with clear priorities, a timeline and the measures to track, so it makes sense to someone who wasn’t in the planning sessions. Each recommendation explains what needs doing, why it matters and roughly what order to tackle things in, which makes it easier to split the work between people or providers.

Some practices handle parts in-house, such as social media or patient recalls, and bring in specialist help for others, such as paid ads or website changes. The plan supports that mix. It also flags where the advertising rules need particular care, so whoever does the work understands the compliance side. If you start on your own and later want help with part of it, you can ask us to quote at any time, with no obligation either way.

It depends on your goals, your location and how competitive your services are, so we don’t work to a fixed percentage. The plan recommends a budget range for each channel based on what it needs to achieve, and explains the trade-offs at different levels of spend.

A rule of thumb based on revenue doesn’t account for the differences between practices. A new practice in a competitive suburb may need to invest more to become visible, while an established practice with full appointment books and steady referrals may mainly need to protect what it has. The services you want to grow also matter, since some are searched for far more often, or attract more competing advertisers, than others.

That’s why the plan sets out ranges rather than a single number. For each channel, it explains what a lower or higher budget can realistically do and the risk of spending too little to make an impact. You can then choose a level that suits your goals and cash flow, and review it as results come in.

Yes. Smaller practices often benefit most because there is less budget to waste. We scale the plan to your size, so it’s practical for a team that may not have a dedicated marketing person.

For a small practice, every dollar and every hour counts. A plan helps you focus on the few channels that matter most for your patients and services, rather than trying to be everywhere at once. That might mean getting your website and Google Business Profile right before spending on ads, or building referrer relationships and recalls that cost relatively little to maintain.

We keep the plan proportionate. It covers the same core thinking as a larger plan, including your goals, target patients, competitors and measures, but with recommendations a small team can realistically carry out alongside clinical work. If some tasks are better handled by a provider, the plan makes that clear, along with what can be done in-house. We’ll talk through your resources at the start so the plan fits how your practice actually runs.

To get started, we need access to your website, Google accounts and any ad accounts, a few practice numbers such as enquiries and new patients, and time with your key people. With those in place, we can see how your marketing is performing now and where the opportunities are.

Account access lets us review your website, search performance, Google Business Profile and advertising data directly, rather than relying on screenshots. Where possible, we ask for our own user access rather than shared passwords, so you stay in control and can remove it later. Practice numbers don’t need to be perfect: even rough figures for enquiries, new patients and the services you want to grow help us understand what’s working.

Time with your key people is just as important. Practice owners, practitioners and whoever manages bookings often have insights the data doesn’t show, such as which services are in demand or where patients get stuck. We don’t need patient records or identifiable patient information for planning. We’ll confirm exactly what we need at kickoff.

We suggest a short review each quarter and a full refresh each year, or sooner if something changes in your market. That keeps the plan useful rather than leaving it in a drawer.

A quarterly review checks progress against the measures in the plan. It looks at what’s been done, what results each channel is producing and whether any priorities or budget allocations should shift. These reviews are usually brief and focused on decisions rather than lengthy reports.

The annual refresh steps back further. It revisits your goals, target patients, competitors and channel mix, and updates the timeline for the year ahead. Some changes justify an earlier review, such as a new competitor opening nearby, adding a practitioner or service, a shift in your referral patterns or an update to the advertising rules that affects your marketing. If you’re working with us on delivery, we’ll build these reviews into the schedule. If you’re delivering the plan yourselves, you can use its measures to run the review internally or ask us to help.

Yes. The plan gives you a clear brief, so you can compare quotes on the same basis. Without one, providers tend to propose different scopes, which makes it hard to tell which quote offers better value.

The brief draws on the plan’s goals, target patients, channels, budget ranges and measures. It sets out what you need each provider to deliver, how success will be measured and any requirements specific to health marketing, such as following the AHPRA advertising guidelines and handling patient information under the Privacy Act. That last point matters, since not every provider is familiar with the rules for regulated health services.

Once quotes come in, we can help you compare them against the brief, looking at what’s included, what’s missing and how each provider plans to report results. We can also suggest questions to ask, such as how they approach compliance or who will work on your account. The final decision is always yours, and if we’re one of the providers quoting, we’ll say so up front.

The strategy document includes your goals, target patients, a competitor review, the channel plan, budget, measures and a timeline. Each part builds on the one before, so the recommendations follow clearly from your situation.

• Goals and target patients
• A competitor review
• The channel plan
• Budget and measures
• A timeline

The goals set out what the practice wants to achieve, such as growing a particular service or attracting new patients from a nearby suburb. The competitor review shows how others in your area present themselves and where there is room to stand out. The channel plan explains which channels to prioritise and why, while the budget and measures show what to spend and how you’ll know whether it’s working. The timeline puts it all in order, so everyone knows what happens when. Where a recommendation raises advertising rule considerations, we flag them in context.

Yes. We start by reviewing your current channels and results, because a good plan builds on what’s already working and fixes what isn’t, rather than starting from scratch.

The review usually covers your website, search visibility, Google Business Profile, paid advertising, social media, email and any referral or recall activity. We look at how each channel is performing, how they connect and where patients may be dropping off between finding you and booking an appointment. We also check your existing marketing against the advertising rules, since an issue there can affect what we recommend.

The findings come from your accounts and the practice numbers you share, along with conversations with your team. We’ll highlight what’s worth keeping, what needs attention and any quick fixes worth making straight away, and these feed directly into the plan. You’ll see the reasoning behind each recommendation, so it’s clear how your current activity shaped the priorities. If you’ve worked with other providers before, it helps to share any past reports.

Yes. We can present and answer questions, which is often the easiest way to bring owners or partners up to speed and agree on next steps together.

A presentation walks through the key findings, the reasoning behind the recommendations, the budget ranges and the timeline, without asking busy people to read the whole document first. It gives owners and partners a chance to raise concerns, test assumptions and discuss priorities while we’re there to answer, which tends to make decisions quicker and support for the plan stronger.

We agree the format with you and adjust the focus to your audience. Partners in a group practice may care most about budget and return, while practitioners may want to understand how the plan affects their own services or referrals. If there are questions we can’t answer on the spot, we’ll follow up afterwards. Let us know who will attend and what matters most to them, and we’ll shape the presentation around that.

You do. The plan is yours to use however you like, and there’s no requirement to use us to deliver it.

That means you can share it with your team, hand it to another agency or freelancer, use it as a brief when comparing providers or put it into action yourselves. Commissioning the plan doesn’t lock you into ongoing work with us, and the recommendations aren’t written to steer work back our way. The aim is a plan that stands on its own and makes sense to whoever picks it up, now or in a year’s time.

If you decide you’d like help with some or all of the work, we’ll quote for that separately once you’ve seen the plan, so you can weigh it against other options. It’s worth keeping the plan handy for the quarterly reviews and annual refresh, whoever ends up delivering it, since its goals and measures give everyone the same yardstick for progress.