How Long to Stick With a Marketing Strategy: A 2-Part Framework (Episode 71)
How long should you actually stick with a marketing strategy before deciding it’s not working? In this episode, Anna breaks down one of the most common (and emotionally loaded) questions therapists ask when growing a private practice.
If you’ve ever felt discouraged because your efforts aren’t producing immediate results, this conversation will help you approach your marketing with more clarity, patience, and confidence. Anna explores why marketing timelines have changed, what today’s slower buying cycle means for therapists, and how to evaluate your strategies without reacting purely from burnout or frustration. You’ll leave with a practical framework for knowing when to stay the course, when to optimize, and when it may actually be time to pivot.
Here’s what you’ll learn in this episode:
1️⃣ Why therapists are experiencing slower marketing results than they did a few years ago
2️⃣ How to evaluate whether a strategy truly isn’t working—or simply needs more time
3️⃣ The difference between measurable and relationship-based marketing strategies
4️⃣ Why patience and consistency are competitive advantages in today’s private practice landscape
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Hey, hey, welcome back to Marketing Therapy. I'm excited about this episode. 'cause man, I get this question a lot and I get it. I think it's important that clinicians ask this, and I'm also here to maybe deliver a little bit of tough love. So every clinician at some point asks, is this actually working or am I wasting my time?
Today we're looking at the question, how long should you actually stick with a marketing strategy before you call it? Right? You know, we talk a lot about the fact that not everything you do in your marketing is gonna land. Not everything you do in your marketing is gonna feel good or align with your energy or whatever.
That's okay. That's normal. But it's also very, very important that you give a strategy enough time to actually know if it's working or not. Before you make that determination. So the problem here is not that question. You're allowed to ask, is this working or am I wasting my time?
But I find that many therapists are asking that question way too soon with the wrong data and against the wrong timeline. That's what I wanna break down today. How long should you actually spend not just running on vibes, and I don't feel like doing this anymore, but like what should you actually do?
Okay. This is essentially a framework in this episode of how to answer that question honestly, and to do it wisely. Not just because you're burnt out, not just because you're discouraged, not just because you haven't gotten a client yet. So I wanna talk first about the market that we're in. 'cause we have to get really honest about that.
We're gonna talk a little bit about getting your mind right, and then the actual mechanics of this, the actual. Criteria I would recommend you use when evaluating whether or not something is working. Okay. So first and foremost, my friends, we are not in 2020 anymore. I probably don't have to tell you that, but maybe I do.
Maybe I do need to remind you that the era of making a change in your marketing, implementing something new, optimizing something, and then seeing results the next day, the next week. Even the next month. That era is no longer, and that's a hard pill to swallow for a lot of clinicians. You know, we've talked recently, and I've even talked to other clinicians and other marketing specialists in the therapy space about the fact that the pandemic times.
Kind of lulled some therapists into a false sense of security when it came to marketing. Marketing felt really, really easy, and honestly, it was really fun to help therapists with their marketing during this time because I also got to see results from what I suggested the next day or the next week.
What's happening now is different. That's okay. That is just a statement of fact. It's not actually good or bad. It's not because marketing doesn't work. It's not because. You're doing anything wrong. It's literally because the buying cycle, the way that your clients are making decisions, has shifted. That's a neutral statement.
Now, one thing that we know this is not exclusive to therapy, is that in slower, more uncertain economic times. People don't necessarily stop spending, although in some cases we do see that, but they do take longer to make decisions about their money. They slow their decisions down, so they're doing more research.
They're comparing more often. There's more time between them learning about you for the first time and then committing to you. So someone literally might visit your website three times and a bunch of other therapists, they might sit on it for two months. They might reach out to you for a consult.
They might ghost you. Or at least it feels like it, and then they come back a month or two later in book with you. That's actually a pretty normal conversion right now. Not ideal. I understand. And not all of them are gonna be like that, but that's an example of how this buying cycle has gotten longer.
Evaluating more, sitting with the decision, taking more time before saying yes. This is not, again, a fundamentally red flag. This is not fundamentally something wrong. This is just how it is. So we've gotta get really, really honest and clear about that. We've also talked about the trust recession. We have an entire episode on this, and I'll link it in the show notes, but we know that trust is taking longer to build because of the increased skepticism that people have.
Right now. All of us as buyers and as consumers, are more skeptical than we have ever been. That's especially true when we feel financially or emotionally stretched in any way, which many of us do in the current climate, right. So because your clients are more discerning and are more cautious, more deliberate, right?
Then therapists who are doing well right now are the ones focusing on building trust and who are communicating that and cultivating that in their marketing. So what does this mean practically? This means that your marketing may be working, it may be working really, really well, but it might be working on a timeline you just didn't expect.
So the danger, the trap that many clinicians are falling into right now is quitting a strategy that is actually gaining traction. They just can't see or feel it yet. That's the danger here. So before we get into how to know if your social media is working or whatever, we first have to make sure that your mind is right.
Okay. So mindset is literally a prerequisite right now, and this is a theme I see as I look at the clinicians I know who are still thriving in this current market. You can have the right strategy, you can have the best marketing plan and still fail if your head is not right. Strategy requires patience.
If you have not committed to having patience, then you're gonna check the data too early. You're gonna misread signals and you're gonna pull the plug before you get to the results. By having a practice right now, by deciding to be full fee, for instance, by deciding to go out on your own, which are all things to celebrate, you are also signing up for the long game.
Okay. Not indefinitely. It doesn't mean that results won't eventually come, but the game is longer than it used to be. We're not getting to make changes and see results next week. When I've had to summarize this as I've spoken to many, many clinicians over the last 24 months, when we really saw this shift start to happen, it is that you are going to have to be more boots on the ground, more engaged in your marketing than you used to.
If you're newer to private practice, maybe you started your practice post COVID, awesome. You probably are signing up for more boots on the ground and more engagement than you expected. You've gotta recognize that as you get into this, you are going to experience windows of time that are discouraging 100%.
The period between starting and seeing results when it feels like nothing is working is a very, very normal place to be. You've gotta be prepared to push through that. If you know that you're gonna face those windows, those discouragement windows, then you can prepare for them, right? So know that, prepare for them, acknowledge them, and then be ready to push through them.
What I really want to drive home for you today is that patience is actually an active strategic choice right now. Your ability to be patient is a competitive advantage because impatience, this desire to just quickly pull the plug or this isn't working or jumping between strategies, that is expensive.
It's expensive because you restart. It's like starting a cold engine on a cold day as opposed to running one that's been running for a while. You pivot too quickly. And you essentially accumulate this graveyard of half tried strategies with no real data, and often just a bunch of frustration and very few clients to show for it.
That's what impatience can cost you. So staying the course is the work right now. Patience is a active and strategic choice right now. If you can be prepared, if your mind can be in that place. You can be successful right now. That is the theme I see in the most successful clinicians I know. Now, one more thing before we get into the actual criteria is that you have to know how you are getting your clients.
Before you evaluate any strategy, we gotta know what's actually generating your inquiries, okay? So if you do not currently have a practice in your practice of asking how clients found out about you, you gotta implement that today. You have to implement that. Right now you are flying blind, otherwise.
You are running off of what you think is working or what you poured your energy into. Most recently, what it could have been the thing that you have been doing faithfully for six months that generated this inquiry. You cannot assign, pass or fail to something that you're not actually measuring here.
All right, so this doesn't have to be complicated. My favorite place to put this is just in the contact form of your website. How did you hear about me? Psych Today Referral. Google search, ai, whatever kind of the most common ones are capture that. Measure it. Because without this, you are not evaluating your marketing.
You are just guessing, and we don't wanna do that, right? That's not why we're here. Now, it's important to note that your website analytics are also part of this picture. I've talked recently about how this should be a regular practice. You should be looking at your data on a monthly basis or so to understand how traffic is trending, where people are coming from, what pages they're visiting.
That can give you additional. Insight. So just a side note on that. But primarily we need to at least be capturing how people found out about you. Alright, so now let's get into the actual criteria. How long should you stick with something? I kind of view these in two categories. One are our very measurable strategies, alright?
These are things like Google ads. These are things like social media directories. We have a clear input output here. So what I would recommend here as you implement a strategy like this is that you kind of define your window before you start. So you agree, you commit to doing something for X amount of time and then evaluating.
So not just stopping when you're frustrated or discouraged, but deciding ahead of time how long you're gonna stick to it. Because if you decide that timeline in the middle. Of that discouragement window I was talking about. It's like changing the rules mid game. Okay?
So know how long you're gonna stick with something before you start it. My general rule of thumb, and this is universal to literally any strategy, you need to do something for at least three months before you assign, pass or fail. Okay? In that first month, you're kind of getting your feet under you, right? There's gonna be a little bit of noise, there's gonna be a little bit of figuring it out. Month two, you might start to see some signals emerge. It might not be hard data, but you might start to see kind of some patterns in engagement, some patterns in interest, questions, things like that.
And then month three is really where you can start to truly evaluate. Is this generating inquiries, A and B? Is this generating inquiries at a rate that justifies how much I'm investing in it? I've mentioned before in our recent episode about whether or not Psych Today still works, and I'll link that in the show notes.
We talked about the fact that psych today is incredibly high, ROI because of how little effort you have to put into it. You optimize your profile, maybe you update it every month or something like that. But for how little effort you put in one client is awesome.
If you're getting one client from Instagram or you have been posting daily, showing up on stories, dancing on reels, you gotta decide at some point whether or not that is justified. And for some people it's gonna be like, yes, it absolutely is. And for others it's not. So there isn't necessarily a black and white there.
But what I'm noting here is we have to weigh. The return on the investment, whether that is time, money, or energy. Now, like I mentioned, my general rule of thumb is three months. Directories do have a little bit of a faster feedback loop. I recommend keeping a version of your psych today or other directory profile up for six to eight weeks before drawing some meaningful observations and making decisions.
But like I said, three months is kind of the standard here. What's important here is that you have a healthy relationship with the data, okay? That you can monitor these things without obsessing, right? You're not checking things every single day. You're maybe checking in biweekly, monthly, something like that, not daily or hourly.
I've talked to people who are pulling up their Instagram analytics literally on the daily. This allows you to see trends. Okay. Not just the daily fluctuations or the monthly fluctuations that are so, so, so expected. I want you to be able to view this objectively, to make decisions from that place. Then you can optimize thoughtfully as you gather that data.
That might mean small adjustments to your strategy. It might mean, you know what, this isn't working and that's okay with me. I've given it a solid try. But we can't do that without some data. So as you get to that three month mark, or whatever timeline you decided on ahead of time, ask yourself, is the volume of inquiries here proportional to the investment?
Right? So the time, money, energy investment that you made, is that proportional? Is there a conversion problem hiding behind this traffic problem? And I recently just talked about that in part two of our summer Slump Playbook series. Definitely. We'll link that in the show notes if you haven't listened to that yet.
But we've gotta make sure if we're pouring water into the bucket, that bucket is holding it right. Otherwise we could be losing clients on the other side of the journey. And then finally, if it's not working, quote unquote, and I'm putting that in quotes because not working can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people.
Is it the strategy itself or is it the execution? Is social media not working, or is it the way that you are doing social media? And what this invites you to look at is whether or not this is actually a sustainable option for you, that you're open to optimizing or shifting on, or if it just straight up isn't the right fit.
Because you get to decide that you are in charge of your marketing. You are the CEO of your practice, and you get to decide if this is worth the time, money, and energy you're putting into it. And if maybe just. It needs to be updated or optimized or maybe it's just not the right fit for you. Alright, so those are kind of those more measurable strategies.
Then we have the more non-measurable ones. Networking, for instance, we can't always track. Alright? I reached out to six people this week and it turned into three clients three months from now. It's much, much harder here. This is a way more qualitative. Strategy than it is quantitative like ads. Ads are very cut and dry, very, very numbers driven.
So networking, any sort of relational marketing, right? Local marketing, things like that. SEO even falls into this because it is such a long-term play that we can't necessarily know. Okay? The strategy I put in that today turned into a client three months from now, it's much harder to draw those relationships because they're just compounding over time.
So this is not necessarily a. Measurable item, but this is where we gotta have a little bit of faith. Okay? These strategies are not going to give you a dashboard. You're not gonna get to log on and see your networking, you know, analytics report.
Unfortunately, this is just the nature of strategies like this. It doesn't mean they're wrong, of course we know we need to network, but it's just the nature of it. So what's important to remember is that these compound. So when you are having regular conversations, you are planting seeds.
Some seeds will grow in a week, some will grow in a year, and you rarely know which is which until you plant them. So there is a level of trust in the process, in faith in yourself, trust in yourself that as you engage in this, as you plant the seeds, that some will be fruitful. The clinicians I see who benefit most from marketing aren't necessarily reaching out to the highest number of people, although volume is part of the equation, but they keep showing up consistently.
They stay in touch with relationships. They cultivate them. They continue forming new ones. They don't let the discouragement of not hearing back or not clicking with someone, or not quote unquote getting a client, keep them from continuing to push forward lots of networking episodes here in the marketing therapy library.
Scroll back to find some we talk about it at least once every two months or so. So you can find lots of of examples there. But the fact is that.
You've gotta be willing to show up and plant the seeds, recognizing that some might never actually blossom and others will be incredibly fruitful. Now, SEO, which I mentioned kind of falls into this non-measurable category. I would recommend at least a six month minimum here. SEO is a longer term game than it's ever been.
It's always been a long term play, but especially now. So this means optimizing for Google. This means optimizing. Even for AI tools, you've gotta stick with it. You've gotta do it very, very well before you can start drawing conclusions. That feedback loop is long, right? I mentioned directories like six to eight weeks.
We're not gonna know if your SEO strategy is working in six to eight weeks. So what's important here is that you stay in touch with the data over time. Not just that you don't look at it for six months, but you keep an eye on it. You continue pressing forward, and then at that six month mark you can decide, okay, has this been worthwhile?
And then again, is it the strategy or is it the execution? Are there additional things you should be doing, could be doing here? Like I said here, the feedback loop is long. The variables are many. But impatience here is especially costly because of how high value this compounding effect is, but only if you stay in it.
So again, you gotta show up ready to commit to that strategy. I've heard clinicians talk about, oh, I quote unquote optimize my website. Okay. What have you been doing over time? Well, nothing. Okay. Well, we would expect that a couple of efforts toward optimization would. Support you over time, but SEO is as much an ongoing strategy as any other right now.
So just like you wouldn't, you know, hop onto Instagram, post a single reel and expect to get clients, we can't expect to do one thing for your SEO or engage in one optimization and see the clients come. So again, if you're going to sign up for that strategy, which you don't have to, but if you're going to, you gotta show up ready to do it.
What I wanna highlight here about these more non-measurable strategies is it's not necessarily about frequency, although you do need to be regularly engaging in it. It's just about not disappearing. Please don't ghost the strategy. Okay? Stay engaged. Stay committed. Agree. Going into it that you're gonna stick with it.
One genuine coffee chat a month. Maintained over a year. Is going to be a flurry of outreach that you only do twice a year when you get scared that you're not getting clients. All right, so this is about consistency. This is about staying the course and having faith in what you're doing.
When you plant a seed, you don't get to see the roots that are growing. You just gotta trust it. But if you keep nourishing, you keep watering like the growth is happening even when you can't see it. And again, that does not feel as good as a hard and fast analytics dashboard.
I get it. And yet it proves true time and time again. So how long should you stick with a marketing strategy before you abandon it? My standard answer at least three months. My more nuanced answer, it depends on the strategy. You gotta have your mind, right, and you have to recognize that by signing up to market today, you are signing up for the long game.
If you understand all of those things, then you too can be incredibly successful and you can be engaging in strategies that feel good that you know are offering return on your time and energy and money, and aren't just throwing spaghetti at the wall. Okay? Like I said, your patience right now is a competitive advantage because so many therapists are quitting too early.
The very thing you have been doing in the last weeks or months, may very well be gaining traction, growing roots, and you just can't see it yet. So I encourage you to stay the course. I encourage you to keep your mind right, and I encourage you to keep pressing forward and then make decisions that are thoughtful, that are objective, and that will lead you toward the types of results that you're looking for in your caseload.
Okay. So the question now is not just, is this working? It's are you giving it a real chance to work? Once you answer that, you'll know what to do next. Thanks for joining me today. I'll see you in our next episode.
Resources & Links Mentioned:
The Walker Strategy Co website: https://walkerstrategyco.com
Previous episode on the Trust Recession: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/marketing-therapy/id1746207241
Summer Slump Playbook Part 2: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/marketing-therapy/id1746207241
“Does Psychology Today Still Work?” episode: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/marketing-therapy/id1746207241
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About Marketing Therapy
Marketing Therapy is the podcast where therapists learn how to market their private practices without burnout, self-doubt, or sleazy tactics. Hosted by Anna Walker—marketing coach, strategist, and founder of Walker Strategy Co—each episode brings you clear, grounded advice to help you attract the right-fit, full-fee clients and grow a practice you feel proud of.
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