It is inevitable that every small business owner is offered LinkedIn advertising sometime therapists are no exception. Your perfect prospects are professional people aged 30 to 55 with expendable income target them using job titles and industries. The pitch seems convincing enough. But that doesn't mean it suits therapists' needs for marketing.
The good news is that LinkedIn advertising isn't pointless. The bad news is that it is an answer to a question therapists didn't even ask. Let's figure out when it makes sense, and when it secretly eats up all your budget.
Consider the process of finding a therapist. It is always a search-oriented one: a bad night, a breaking point, a suggestion from a GP, and then Googling "CBT therapist near me" or "panic attack therapy [city]." We discussed this in our keywords guide for EMDR and CBT therapists: clients search for the problem they're having, not the modality or the provider.
Nobody ever uses LinkedIn in such a mindset. They are browsing among job postings, in a professional mindset, and suddenly getting advertisements for services which they are going to use if at all in moments of private despair. LinkedIn advertisements get in the way, they do not take over.
What you are paying for is increasing awareness in a situation when the choice will be made out of urgency and a personal need to search for a solution. That's the hardest way possible to acquire your therapy patients.
There's also the matter of price, since LinkedIn ads have always been one of the most expensive major platforms per click, because the platform is designed for B2B lead generation when a single client is worth thousands of pounds, euros or dollars.
Before dismissing the channel entirely, it's worth being precise about who it suits. LinkedIn ads can pay off when your offer is itself B2B — that is, when you're selling to organisations or other professionals rather than members of the public:
In these cases the person seeing the ad is, in a work context, being shown something relevant to their working life and the value of one conversion easily covers the higher click costs. That's exactly what the platform was designed for.
In case the objective is the traditional one – building a caseload – then there is a much more cost-effective way to utilse LinkedIn: organically.
Regular posting of informative content (psychoeducation, analysis of the issues you help with, comments on mental wellbeing in the workplace) will not cost anything but will create familiarity with the professionals who can refer clients to you – GPs, occupational health, coaches, HR people, etc.
So, are LinkedIn ads ever worth it for therapists? For filling your diary with clients: almost never. You'd pay premium prices to interrupt people who aren't looking for you, while the people who are looking are on Google.
Put that budget behind search ads and therapy SEO instead our analysis of whether Google Ads are worth it for therapists shows how a well-run search campaign can return several times its spend.
For B2B offers — training, corporate work, supervision, group practice growth: yes, plausibly. The targeting fits, the buyer is in a professional mindset, and the deal sizes justify the costs.
And remember the scale of what you actually need. As we worked out 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.
Expensive interruption advertising is disproportionate to that goal — modest, well-targeted search presence and professional relationships will get you there for a fraction of the cost.
