There’s a piece in the Australian Health Journal arguing that government needs to fundamentally rethink how it funds health and medical research — that the timescales of genuine innovation don’t match the timescales of political funding cycles. The short version: you can’t plant a tree on Monday and expect shade by Friday.
I read that and thought: this is exactly the conversation I have with allied health practice owners every single week.
Not about research funding. About marketing.
The tap problem
Most practice owners treat marketing like a tap. Business is slow — turn it on. Waiting list is full — turn it off. Cash is tight — turn it off. Things feel uncertain — turn it off.
I get it. When you’re running a practice, every dollar has somewhere else it needs to be, and marketing is often the easiest thing to cut because the results aren’t sitting on a spreadsheet in front of you. It doesn’t feel as immediate as payroll or rent or equipment.
But here’s the problem with the tap approach: marketing doesn’t work like a tap. It works more like exercise. The results compound over time, and the moment you stop — really stop — you don’t just pause your progress. You start losing it.
If you’ve never thought about this systematically, our one-page marketing plan for allied health practices is a good place to start — it’s designed to help you build a consistent foundation rather than react to what’s in front of you.
The client who got it right
I’ve been working with EP360 — an exercise physiology practice — for over two years now. We meet every week. We look at what’s working, what isn’t, and what opportunities are sitting in front of us. Sometimes we’re making adjustments. Sometimes we’re just observing and staying the course. But we never stop.
What strikes me about EP360 is that they understand marketing consistency almost instinctively — because it mirrors exactly what they do with their clients every single day.
Exercise physiology is built on the idea that it’s the accumulation of consistent effort, over time, that creates real change. Their clients don’t show up to one session and walk out transformed. They show up week after week, month after month, and the results compound. EP360 knows this. They live it. So when I talk to Chris about staying consistent with marketing even during their biggest months — even when the books are full and it would be easy to ease off — he gets it immediately. Because it’s the same philosophy.
And the results have followed. Chris has mentioned more than once — sometimes in the middle of what we both know has been a hard stretch for the industry — that they’ve just had their biggest ever month. For revenue. For sessions delivered. Multiple times since we’ve been working together.
That’s not a coincidence. That’s compounding.
The client who pulled the pin
On the other side of the ledger, I worked with a psychology clinic that was seeing real traction. We were running Google Ads alongside some SEO work, and the ads were generating a significant volume of leads. Contact form submissions were coming in consistently. The traffic was targeted, the cost per lead was solid.
But the clinic was struggling to convert those leads into booked appointments. A lot of people weren’t responding after making initial contact. Some were cancelling. Some were no-showing.
In my view, this was a screening and intake problem, not a marketing problem. The people filling out the form weren’t low-quality leads — they were people in a real decision-making moment around their mental health, which by its nature is a hesitant, fragile moment. The fix was to tighten the intake process: ask better questions upfront to triage intent, and move faster on follow-up.
The research on this is unambiguous. A Harvard Business Review study found that companies who responded to leads within one hour were nearly 7 times more likely to qualify them than those who waited even an hour longer — and the average business was taking 42 hours to respond. In a context like mental health, where someone has worked up the courage to reach out, a slow response doesn’t just cost you the booking. It can cost them the moment.
But instead of optimising the intake process, the clinic decided the marketing wasn’t working. And they stopped.
The thing is, I understood their frustration. Watching leads come in and not convert is genuinely painful, especially when you’re paying for every click. But the engine was running. The audience was there. What needed fixing was how the practice was receiving them — not whether to keep driving them through the door.
I often think about what might have happened if they’d stuck it out another three months and made those operational changes. My guess is they’d be in a very different position right now.
What this actually means for your practice
I’m not going to pretend there’s a perfect answer to the question of when to adjust versus when to persist. Marketing isn’t a set-and-forget investment, and there are absolutely times when you need to change strategy.
But there’s a difference between changing course and stopping. One is strategic. The other is reactive.
The practices I see building real, durable growth are the ones who treat marketing the way EP360 treats client care: show up consistently, measure honestly, adjust where the evidence points, but never confuse a hard stretch with a reason to disappear.
Because here’s the thing about consistency — it has a compounding effect on trust, not just on algorithms. When someone has seen your content for six months before they’re ready to book, you’re not a stranger anymore. When a GP has seen your name turn up in their feed consistently, you’re the person they think of when a patient needs what you do. That doesn’t happen in a week. It doesn’t even happen in a month.
But it happens. And when it does, it’s very hard for someone who stopped to catch up with someone who didn’t.
I started producing a weekly industry monitor for the allied health sector recently — pulling together news, trends, and content opportunities every week. I won’t pretend I’m certain it’ll pay off immediately. But I’m fairly confident that in six, twelve, eighteen months, it’ll be one of the better things I’ve done for this business.
The tree won’t give me shade by Friday. But I’m planting it anyway.