Mental Health Marketing: 5 Truths to Create Impactful Content
Mental health marketing is its own kind of marketing. Yes, you need a strategy (more on that in this blog post) and yes social media and SEO are important (more on that below too!), but what makes it unique is who you’re talking to.
In the mental health and behavioral health space, your audience is looking for something very personal and vulnerable: mental health support, guidance, and education. Many people in their lives may not even know that they’re struggling with mental health challenges like anxiety or an eating disorder.
This makes authenticity and consistency important—but it also means you must take your marketing seriously.
Whether you’re a founder trying to do it on your own or a marketer wearing one too many hats, this blog post is going to cut straight to what you need to think about most for your mental health marketing, both broadly and for specific campaigns like mental health awareness month.
1. You Need a Strategy—Stop and Make It
This is the biggest mistake I see most mental health organizations making right now: creating loads of content without a strategy. That’s why, one of the most common things I hear them say is, “It just doesn’t work for us.” Without a strategy, nothing is going to work. Sure, you might have one or two viral social media posts, but if you want to have a true, consistent impact, you need a strategy.
In your digital marketing strategy, you might consider including:
Overall budget and resources and where they’ll go
Goals for specific platforms and efforts (Ex. Instagram vs. email campaigns)
Brand voice and tone and target audience for your mental health service or product
Key metrics (Ex. organic traffic to website and total saves on Instagram)
All you need to create this strategy is 1-2 hours of time and a Google Doc. Here’s an example of a content strategy we created for a client:
Don’t overcomplicate it but do put time into figuring out what you want to do with your marketing. This will guide every action you take from what you post to where you decide to spend your time. As someone with little time to spare, this is necessary.
2. Content Marketing Takes Time to Work—Stick With It
WebFX says it takes between 3 and 6 months for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to work. If your website is brand new or has had very little interaction or traffic up until you start SEO, that timeline can be much longer.
Social media could take even longer depending on how much time you have to put into it, who your audience is, and how well you’re leveraging the features of the platforms to reach more people.
I don’t say all of this to scare you away from it—I say it to remind you that it takes time, but your mission is worth it. You can’t post half-heartedly on social media for 3 months and expect results and then give up when you don’t see them.
With a clear strategy, a commitment to your vision, and a willingness to do the work (or hire someone who will), you can turn content marketing into a valuable tool for both growing your business and your community.
3. You Can’t DIY SEO (But You Need It)—Hire Help
Speaking of SEO, I share what might be an unpopular opinion: Unless you’re a marketing expert (and specifically an SEO expert), you can’t DIY it. You can try. You can read long, involved blog posts about how to do keyword research, how to develop a strategy, and the 200+ ranking factors that impact your organic search efforts—but that takes time.
A lot of time. Plus, if you’re brand new, without the experience of having tested various efforts for a wide range of clients, you’re likely not going to get it right the first time, which means spending even more time trying to get it right.
The thing is: SEO matters for all businesses, both local and virtual, for multiple reasons:
You can’t rely solely on one channel (especially social media) to grow your business. Why? Major platforms like Instagram can go down for hours at a time all the time. Twitter completely changed overnight and, at the time of writing this, there are major government discussions about banning TikTok.
More and more people are turning to Google to understand their mental health issues and find mental health apps to help them on their journey. If you're not showing up, but your competitors are, you're losing out on those prospective patients, members, and clients.
Spending money on a single Google ad each month or multiple ongoing Facebook ads is expensive and unsustainable. SEO helps you cut paid advertising costs over time and instead, build a long-term source of traffic to your site.
A great marketing strategy is like a great stock portfolio: diverse and intentional, and SEO needs to be a part of every marketing strategy. Your website is the only thing you “own”—if you don’t put time into getting people there now (Ex. by implementing ongoing SEO), how do you plan to get potential patients there if your other sources of traffic go away?
4. Brick and Mortar Businesses Can Still Use Social Media—Use It
Any mental health practice can access a global audience with social media. As a local organization, however, you need to do more than create your Google Business Profile. You also need to connect with your local audience using the platforms where they're active.
Hyperlocal social media is a great way to build a social presence as a brick-and-mortar mental health business. For local mental health providers, from a solo mental health professional or therapy practice to eating disorder treatment and behavioral health centers, the only way to grow the business is by working with local clients and customers.
Hyperlocal social media marketing gets you in front of those people so your marketing efforts can be used to actually grow your business—not just build brand awareness or get random followers.
5. You Need to Go Beyond Your Immediate Community—Focus on Reach
Perhaps you’ve already spent years building a community on Instagram or through email marketing, and that’s great. Your mental health marketing campaigns have to go beyond your immediate community. From a single campaign to your entire mental health marketing strategy, the goal needs to include expanding the number of people for whom you can make a difference.
This is why we do more than just create content for clients. It’s about more than spitting out content—it’s about leveraging the tools and resources available to get that content, and your message, in front of more people.
Here are a few strategies to expand the reach of an individual mental health marketing campaign or your strategy as a whole: marketing
Build collaborations and partnerships. Ideally, you have one collab per quarter.
Engage daily on social, especially with potential clients.
Be active on your channels, whether that means posting to stories daily or being more frequent with your marketing emails.
Adding CTAs to content where relevant
Work with the algorithm instead of fighting it. For example, Instagram wants video content and Reels. Find a way to make them your own and leverage features like trending audio to expand each post’s reach.
Staying on-brand with all your content. What’s your unique lens that will attract more people to YOU and not another organization?
Include relevant hashtags on all posts on Instagram. Later found that including 20 hashtags is the sweet spot for expanding reach.
Make Your Mental Health Marketing Count
If you want to reach more people with your message, you can’t half-a** your mental health marketing. Don’t post and ghost. Don’t ignore your email community for three months and then hit them with a donation or sales email out of nowhere. Be intentional and intentional to get the results you’re looking for.
Struggling to get results with your mental health marketing? Let’s talk!
