You can’t help patients you never meet. This comprehensive primer shares advice from ABA pros and guides you through marketing strategies to help you find, attract, and retain clients while complying with ABA ethics codes.
To market an ABA clinic, use a blend of digital and in-person marketing techniques to raise awareness, attract clients, and build loyalty. ABA professionals must also abide by ethical rules related to ABA marketing.
Healthcare marketing has unique challenges that traditional companies don’t face. Also, many ABA professionals and BCBAs (Board Certified Behavioral Analysts) began their careers motivated to help families struggling with ABS and other behavioral disorders. Often, ABA experts don’t receive significant training in business and marketing.
As a result, most new ABA clinic owners don’t tend to market their services, even though their businesses depend on paying clients. This gap represents a tremendous opportunity to advance awareness of the field and make more potential clients aware of ABA.
Rich Brooks, a digital marketing expert and digital marketing podcast host, knows firsthand that digital marketing can overwhelm beginners. Also, Brooks understands that marketing may feel disingenuous and capitalistic to a group of service-minded professionals. Yet, Brooks emphasizes that the best marketing will naturally extend from the mindset that brought you to ABA.
“Remember that you got into this industry to help people,” he says. “Your content — whether it’s on your website, Google, or a social media platform — is an extension of you. It should be helpful, informative, and build trust with your audience.”
ABA professionals who want to grow their practice should leverage digital marketing techniques like social media, SEO, and more. Still, ABA revolves around relationships, with services that work best in person. In a field where one-on-one interactions reign supreme, traditional marketing techniques like in-person events and referrals can be very powerful.
Erica Kinnebrew, a BCBA and serial entrepreneur, says, “In the autism community, word of mouth is incredibly powerful. Happy families will gladly tell others about the ways that you helped their children. For this reason, focusing on providing excellent services should always be your top priority, even when it comes to marketing.”
ABA marketing strategies must comply with ethical considerations outlined in the Ethics Code for Behavior Analysts. Most of the rules revolve around when and how you can solicit client reviews.
Katherine Jester, MS, BCBA, and LBA, stresses the importance of sticking to the explicit guidelines all BCBAs follow. “In your marketing, you have a responsibility to be truthful and to stick to behavioral interventions. We also need to be careful about testimonials, even from past clients. BCBAs should be familiar with Section 5 of the BACB’s (Behavioral Analyst Certification Board) Ethics Code.”
Jester outlines these four things that BCBAs cannot do:
Kinnebrew describes the ethics rules like this: “The ethical don’ts are mostly centered around the solicitation of reviews — who, when, how, and where you can ask for recommendations,” Kinnebrew says. “ABA Service providers cannot solicit reviews from current clients on social sites like many other service providers are able to. For this reason, you don't often see Google reviews for ABA businesses. If a client does leave a review on an external website, the business/BCBA cannot use that review in any marketing off the original website.”
She continues: “If a BCBA wants to request a review (from employees, former clients, or a third-party contractor), they must follow guidelines that outline how to request reviews (i.e., they must be given a description about where and how the testimonial will appear) and how to present those reviews to the public (i.e., must be identified as solicited or unsolicited).”
Kinnebrew notes that while every ABA clinic owner should take these ethical codes very seriously, the rules don’t preclude effective marketing. “There are still tons of ways to market services that don’t violate any ethical codes,” she says. “The absolute best way to stand apart as an ABA organization in your area is not necessarily the fastest. Provide excellent services consistently and go above and beyond for EVERY family.”
For more information, you can download The BHCOE (Behavioral Health Center of Excellence) ABA marketing e-book that explains how ethical considerations and marketing intersect in ABA.
Market your ABA practice by building a website that conveys credibility, prioritizing local SEO, and building relationships with local referral sources, like doctors. You can also use email listservs and events to market your services.
Here’s an overview of the major ways to market your ABA practice.
Your website is one of the few areas where you exert total control over the content, feel, and look. The primary purpose of any ABA clinic’s homepage will be to convey trust and credibility. Take advantage of the many pre-designed templates online that are inexpensive, professional, and easy to use.
Consider the following when planning your homepage.
Resist the urge to obsess over your website design. Instead, leverage pre-existing templates that already have the functionality needed.
Nick Prebezac, WordPress developer and web designer at Nimbus Interactive Inc., has over 20 years of experience with web development and WordPress. He recommends that ABA professionals use WordPress as their content management system (CMS).
“WordPress features an intuitive interface that even the most non-technical people can quickly master,” he says. “Plus, it’s easy to integrate SEO tactics into WordPress. Finally, WordPress has the largest developer network and the most pre-made website themes. With this large supply, you will pay less for a professional website.”
Whether you use WordPress or another CMS, don’t spend too much time or resources on designing a highly customized website. “Don’t recreate the wheel,” cautions Prebezac. “A reputable CMS will have plenty of existing themes for healthcare applications. Then, you can personalize the colors, logos, and images to reflect your clinic’s identity and feel.”
In particular, Prebezac recommends the following three WordPress themes:
These themes will give you plenty of options. Still, Prebezac notes, “It can be easy to overreach with your website. Trust the themes and try to resist the urge to make any large changes to basic theme elements. Otherwise, you may incur significant development costs upfront, just as you’re starting your business.”
He adds: “Whatever you do, don’t just rely on stock images. Research has shown that website visitors associate stock images with lower credibility. You want to imbue a sense of professionalism and a warm and friendly tone. Use pictures of your own office and staff. Once your practice becomes successful and you have a larger marketing budget, you can make any customizations to help enhance your website’s ability to attract new clients.”
SEO refers to techniques designed to put your website pages on the top of search results pages and increase traffic to your website. SEO can sound intimidating, but you don’t have to be an SEO wizard to implement basic optimization strategies for Google and other search engines.
Local SEO is a subset of SEO that takes your location into account. It aims to position your website among the first in local search results on search engines. Local SEO helps to increase both organic website traffic and the number of people who visit your brick-and-mortar location.
Because BCBAs generally provide ABA services in-person, proximity to the ABA practice will be the primary factor for which clients you can and cannot reach. For this reason, local SEO is more important than regular SEO for new ABA clinics. With Google being so advanced these days, ranking in the regular search results is much harder for smaller businesses with smaller marketing budgets. An SEO content marketing strategy is an expensive undertaking best left for larger healthcare entities.
“Google recognizes any search related to ABA clinics as potentially a ‘local’ organic search because Google understands that there is an ambiguity in ABA phrases. Someone who is just looking for basic information will likely be a prospect for a local practice,” says Mike Blumenthal, co-founder and analyst at Near Media, where he researches and reports on local SEO.
Remember, you don’t need clients from the other side of the country since you can’t serve them.
To understand local SEO, briefly study the first page of a Google search result. Brooks, our digital marketing expert, guides us through what happens when users search for ABA information.
“When you do a search on ‘ABA clinic near me,’ you’ll likely see three types of results,” says Brooks. “First, you may see Google Ads, which appear at the top of the page. If you do see these ads, you must create a Google Ads budget if you wish to appear at the top of the page. You may say, ‘I never click on those ads,’ but Google made almost $210 billion in 2021 from ads. In short, potential clients click on those ads. Below that, you’ll likely see the ‘local pack’ (or local search results), which is the map with three local results, four if Google includes an ad there, too.”
Here's an overview of a Google search for “ABA therapy,” with keywords in orange that orient you to SEO terms.
Many factors influence how well your page ranks in a local search. According to Blumenthal, a local SEO expert, Google considers proximity, relevance, and prominence to understand the strength of local entities.
List your ABA business under key directories to increase your backlinks and prominence. This listing is also called a citation. It refers to your business name and information appearing on another website, review, or article. The two types of citations are structured and unstructured citations.
Here's a list of higher-quality directories where you can list your ABA clinic.
This list of directories for your ABA clinic is also available by downloading our ABA Marketing Plan Template.
You can manage how your local business shows up across Google products, like Google Maps or a simple search, by maintaining your Google Business profile (formerly Google My Business).
“You want to create and maintain a Google Business account, so you can personalize what information Google has,” advises Blumenthal. “Otherwise, Google will scrape the internet and Better Business Bureau and create a profile for you, which may have out-of-date information. We’ve all seen these profiles—they don’t have any information, hours, or reviews. How likely are you to select this business, when another business down the street provides the same services, but has an updated profile with photos, reviews, and contact info? Also, Google allows you to respond to reviews, participate in Google Q and A, flag inappropriate photos, and do more to dramatically enhance your listing.”
Regular SEO revolves around high-quality content marketing. Experienced SEO writers create educational articles that are more helpful than what is currently ranking, and that helps to land a website on the first page of Google for a given search query.
High-quality SEO writing can be expensive because it demands excellent writing, research and interview skills, and a firsthand understanding of SEO. For this reason, SEO content marketing may be out of reach for small and new ABA practices. Also, to do well in regular SEO, your entity must have expertise, authority and trust in the topics you are writing about. Compared with larger ABA players, most local ABA clinics won’t have the authority and trust necessary to rank.
“It is difficult for a small clinic to compete against big publishers in the ABA industry, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try,” Brooks says. “Just be aware that most of the top results will be from ABA-related organizations, directories, and national players. These companies have deep pockets and can create tons of optimized content.”
Still, ABA services with a large marketing budget may want to dip their toes in regular SEO content writing.
Here's how you can tailor your SEO content to optimize your site’s ranking:
Kinnebrew used this approach for her ABA clinics. “Our clinics were early-intervention clinics.So, we targeted keywords related to early identification and intervention inautism and related behavioral disorders,” Kinnebrew explains.
“For example,we used keywords that parents may search before they knew about their child’sautism diagnosis. For example, ‘Why is my child lining up toys?’ or ‘How can I get my child to stop banging their heads?’ ”
Kinnebrew continues: “Most, if not all, parents we were targeting on our site may not have even known what ABA was. They just knew that they were concerned with their child’s development. For that reason, we targeted early-intervention keywords. For help, we consulted with experts to build long-term SEO plans and local SEO plans.”
Jester comments:“BCBAs often have areas of strength or interest, like an intervention type they use or specific skills they specialize in. They should emphasize those aspects of their practice on their website to differentiate themselves from other clinicians in the area.”
A social media presence has become a must-have asset for any business. Most experts agree that all ABA practices should maintain accounts on a few platforms but shouldn’t rely on social media alone to attract clients. Social media is more of an assisting channel, and it helps with word-of-mouth. Also, BCBAs note that social media can be useful in finding the right employees.
“Social media is good for brand awareness, workforce recruitment, and for showing your connection to the community,” Brooks says. “But I wouldn’t rely on it for identifying and attracting new clients.”
Kinnebrew doesn’t shy away from social media, calling a presence on the platforms a “must-have.” However, Kinnebrew also notes, “Social media is not the most powerful way to pull in clients, but it is important to maintain for staffing.”
Here are a few comments from BCBAs on how to use social media effectively:
Some traditional marketing channels such as email are not effective for marketing ABA services. For example, ABA marketers aren’t usually able to purchase outside email lists and send emails to the internal list they have built themselves. Email becomes a nurturing channel rather than a lead-generating channel.
Here are more ways to market your ABA services:
You must create a marketing plan to consolidate these marketing activities into an actionable proposal. The level of detail in your plan will vary based on the size of your ABA clinic, your marketing budget, and your competition.
Download our free ABA Practice Marketing Plan Template to get started on your marketing plan.
A marketing funnel describes the steps someone takes before becoming your patient. You can frame your marketing strategies based on the five stages a potential patient goes through. These stages include awareness, consideration, conversion, loyalty, and advocacy.
All types of businesses that rely on a customer or a client can use a marketing funnel to better understand the interactions between a potential customer and a company. Like a funnel, the stages start broad with how a customer learns about a business. The stages end with a narrow goal, like the customer making a purchase or hiring the company to perform a service.
In this article, we’ve already discussed the ways to find new clients and convert them to patients. However, many marketers prefer to frame these activities in the context of a funnel to better direct efforts and write a targeted marketing plan.
Here's how you can optimize each stage of your funnel.
Marketing an ABA practice takes a lot of work to execute perfectly. Lean on expert advice for help. BCBAs and digital marketers can provide inside tips that you won’t read anywhere else, and they can make a huge difference in the results of your campaign.
Here's some expert advice from BCBAs, digital marketers, SEO experts, and web designers.
Excellent ABA care will translate into clinic growth. But excellent care demands a significant investment. Take back your time and money with Artemis ABA software. The software will handle business operations, allowing you to re-invest your energy into patient outcomes.
Jester praises Artemis ABA practice management software. “Artemis ABA has modules for everything you need to build your practice, including insurance verification, a powerful scheduler, integrated billing, and intuitive data collection.”
Artemis ABA Practice Management and EMR software covers your entire business, from small ABA clinics to large, multi-clinic businesses. The mission of Artemis is simple: Streamline tedious business processes so you can focus on patient care. With a team of ABA experts, Artemis identified key areas to streamline and automate, including comprehensive reporting, integrated systems, easy data collection, and automatic insurance verification. The automated, streamlined system reduces errors, leading to fewer insurance denials and freeing up your staff’s resources and time.
Partner with Artemis ABA from Day One and get your clinic started off on the right foot. A simple investment in this software will dramatically reduce your costs, organize your time, and position your ABA clinic to serve families better. Give yourself the best possible chance to provide excellent patient outcomes.
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