This is the question at the root of any other marketing question: can I afford it? And it is the question which most therapy businesses have been answering without much forethought a little of this, a little of that, a guilt feeling that perhaps it could be more (or less).
This results in expenditure that does not add up or does not get noticed. Here’s the truth: there isn’t any one figure but there certainly is a way to figure out your own.
The standard recommendation for professional services is to allocate about 2–5% of gross income to marketing — more if you are getting established, less once you have a full diary. If you are a therapist earning £50,000, this would mean £1,000 / £2,500 per annum, or roughly £85–£200 per month.
This is a good rule of thumb, but it is not applicable to most practices. Instead of asking "What percentage should I spend?" the better question to ask is "What does each client cost me, and how many do I need?"
As we worked through in How Many New Clients Does a Therapy Practice Actually Need Per Month?, a settled solo practice needs only two or three new clients a month and four to six if you're building from scratch. Marketing that produces one extra client per month is therefore genuinely transformative, even though it sounds modest.
Now flip it: if a client typically stays six sessions at £150, they're worth £900. If a marketing channel brings you one client for £100, it's wildly profitable.
For £400, still clearly worthwhile. Even £900 a full client-equivalent breaks even on the first course of therapy and pays out across everything beyond it.
This is the arithmetic that should govern every budget decision, and it's the same maths behind the 4.5x return we modelled in our Google Ads analysis: £1,200 of monthly ad spend returning £5,400 in bookings. So the honest answer to "how much should I spend?" is: as much as reliably produces clients at comfortably under their lifetime value. The ceiling isn't arbitrary it's the point where cost per client approaches £900.
Translating that into monthly tiers for a solo practice:
Tier 1 — Essential, near-zero cost (£0–£50/month): A claimed and polished Google Business Profile, a professional photograph, directory listings, and your own website you actually own. Skipping this tier makes everything above it more expensive.
Tier 2 — The compounding layer (£variable, mostly time): Therapy SEO — one problem-focused page or blog post per month, built on the right keywords. Money-wise this can cost nothing but a few hours; paid help typically starts in the hundreds per month. This is the asset layer: it keeps working when you stop paying.
Tier 3 — Paid experiments (£150–£600/month, tested not committed): Only once tiers 1–2 exist. Google Ads at a disciplined test budget, or — where eligible — pay-per-lead formats, each judged by the same yardstick: cost per booked client, not cost per click or impression. Channels we'd treat with caution at this tier: Yelp outside the US, LinkedIn for client-finding, or anything promising guaranteed leads.
A practice in build-up mode might reasonably run tiers 1–3 at £400–£800 a month for six months. A settled practice needing only a trickle might sit at £100–£300 indefinitely, mostly in tier 2.
Irrespective of which level you choose, demand that there be a way of measuring everything. Trace every lead that comes in to its origin in one quarter and you will know more about your budget than most practices discover in five years. If any particular channel cannot tell you where its leads originated from, then ignore it visibility without measurable leads is only vanity. And expect the delays SEO in particular takes time to kick off but is tough to beat once it does, whereas paid channels are instant on and instant off.
