The Agency Perspective: Real Solutions for Patient Acquisition

Introduction and the biggest marketing mistakes agencies help clients avoid00:00

Signe Engelien: We wanted to open this up to the audience and find out what you're most interested in learning more about. So while you vote — quick introductions. In the center, Gary Garth: founder and CEO of elev8.io, a growth agency exclusively focused on helping addiction treatment and mental health providers increase patient access. Serial entrepreneur, best-selling author, and five-time Inc. 5000 honoree. Gary spent fifteen years working alongside Google and Microsoft before dedicating his career to behavioral healthcare in 2020. On the end, Derek Hyman: founder and CEO of Scalable Growth, where he helps treatment centers own their admissions pipeline instead of renting leads. He built the first real-time insurance verification tool on a treatment center website back in 2019, holds a Master's in public health, and measures everything by beds filled. And Adrienne Wilkerson: co-founder and CEO of Beacon Media and Marketing, an award-winning digital marketing agency in the mental health and behavioral health sectors — published author, podcast host, and speaker on ethical marketing and AI's role in business.

Signe Engelien: Looks like you all want to hear about solutions and strategies first. So: what do your clients ask you to do that you're going to say no to?

Adrienne Wilkerson: We're dealing with a lot of "add bells and whistles." Complicated is a barrier — the more you can strip down the barriers, the more people are going to get the help they need. It comes back to creating connection. The more complicated it is, people tend to bounce faster. Whether that's a website or social media, if you're cramming it full of credentials and acronyms on the first touch, that's not going to connect to the emotional need. Simplicity creates connection.

Derek Hyman: Our partners come to us because they want us to help drive leads and admissions. Not everything is going to do that. We get hired because we are experts in our field and understand what is going to help drive traffic and put people into treatment. When clients ask us to do things that we fundamentally know aren't going to have a positive impact on lead generation or admissions, we just have to draw that line. It's about letting us do our job — and being laser-focused on what actually moves the needle.

Patient acquisition strategies producing the strongest results right now08:22

Gary Garth: Facilities come to us very channel-specific: "I need help with SEO, Google Ads." We like to take a step back first and say: do you have the foundation in place? Do you understand attribution? Have you established goals that are aligned with industry benchmarks that are realistic? Because you can't say "let's spend money on Recovery.com or Google Ads" if your Google reviews are bad. It's a multi-touchpoint world across multiple devices. The path to admission is not straightforward — there will be multiple touchpoints, and trust and credibility has to be in place first. Establishing the attribution framework is always step one.

Signe Engelien: What tactics are delivering the strongest results for your clients right now?

AI, search, and how patient behavior has already changed13:34

Derek Hyman: There's an enormous amount of content about addiction treatment on the internet — millions of pages. Your brand has to differentiate itself from all of it. Tactically: involve your clinicians. Have them talk about how you're providing alcohol detox or addiction treatment — specifically, authentically, in their voice. Get in the media through digital PR. Do research studies based on your own outcomes and real data that are unique to your treatment program. You used to be able to rank a website by gaming the system. Today, your clinical program is the thing you need to promote. Your website is just a lens into that — promote what's behind the lens.

Building trust through websites, reviews, and digital authority14:45

Gary Garth: Two things you can do immediately from an AI visibility standpoint: first, 70–80% of all websites don't have an LLMs.txt file or proper robots.txt — so ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity can't properly read your site. They can't answer "what's your family counseling like?" or "do you accept this insurance?" Second: your core web vitals have to be ten out of ten. All components have to be in place to get preferred and get that AI visibility. And when you write content, stop writing for Google only — write content that can be repurposed. Turn a blog post into a podcast clip, then into reels, then into an interview segment. Multi-platform distribution with different content types. Everybody in this room can probably double their earned and owned media reach with those two moves alone.

What keeps behavioral health executives awake at night17:22

Adrienne Wilkerson: User behavior has already changed — we need to stop saying "is changing." By the time people are hitting your website, they're most likely already choosing between your top three because AI recommended you. They're not in the research phase; AI handled that. So they're hitting your website looking for human connection and trust. Your website has to function as a connection experience, not an information catalog. Video provider bios. Authentic patient stories — handled ethically and compliantly. Content that says "I understand your fear right now" instead of content that lists credentials. That's what closes the gap between a website visit and a call.

Gary Garth: The brands that have good domain authority and authentic content are the ones getting favorized in AI visibility. That weeds out all the lead aggregators. I think that's the biggest opportunity right now: the organizations that invest in genuine authority, clinical credibility, and alumni communities are building something that compounds — while paid channels keep getting more expensive and less predictable.

Signe Engelien: What's keeping executives up at night right now?

Derek Hyman: Reimbursement disruption and payer unpredictability. Insurance companies are combating claims with AI — everything and anything is getting rejected, and payments are being reduced. That directly impacts marketing budgets. The CFO looks at margin compression and cuts marketing first. So the challenge is making a bulletproof case for marketing ROI in the middle of that pressure — which is exactly why attribution frameworks matter so much right now.

Technology stack every behavioral health organization should evaluate26:17

Gary Garth: FOMO — fear of missing out on whatever the latest tactic is. And misalignment between marketing, admissions, and business development. You can generate leads all day, but if the admissions team isn't converting them, or if BD is claiming credit for alumni referrals that marketing actually influenced, the attribution breaks down and everybody is arguing about where the budget should go instead of growing census.

Adrienne Wilkerson: We're also seeing AI being used to try to solve problems that aren't AI problems. Leaders are chasing AI tools without first asking: "What is the actual business problem we're solving?" Use AI to enhance the human connection, not replace it. In behavioral health specifically, where trust is the entire decision — the human element is non-negotiable.

Signe Engelien: What technology stack should every behavioral health organization be evaluating?

Marketing attribution, CRM integration, and measuring ROI31:12

Derek Hyman: Start with call tracking — CTM is our preferred choice for robustness. Lead rating systems properly mapped and integrated with your CRM. Marketing automation that creates consistent nurturing through text, email, and calls. And CRM integration that's true deep-data integration, not just passing a single field. Every step of the patient journey should be captured. Without that, you can't do attribution, and without attribution you're flying blind on every channel decision.

Gary Garth: Alumni systems — and I cannot say this enough. Alumni is the most underutilized technology investment in behavioral health. Build the CRM infrastructure to track alumni referrals, readmissions, and alumni-influenced admissions as a separate attribution source. Add that to your executive dashboard alongside paid search and SEO. Once executives see the cost per admission from alumni vs. Google Ads, the conversation about alumni investment changes immediately.

Looking ahead: AI, personalization, and the future of patient acquisition35:46

Adrienne Wilkerson: And make sure the tools talk to each other. The biggest technology problem isn't which tool to pick — it's that the tools don't integrate. You end up with four platforms that each tell a different story, and nobody can reconcile them. Integration first, then optimization.

Signe Engelien: Looking ahead — what are you most excited about, and what are you most concerned about?

Gary Garth: Excited: AI-driven personalization. The ability to deliver the right message to the right person at the right point in their journey — without them having to navigate a confusing website — is going to be extraordinary for behavioral health. Concerned: organizations abandoning proven fundamentals to chase every new AI tool. The brands that win will be the ones that use AI to enhance their authentic clinical voice, not replace it.

Derek Hyman: In May 2026, there were more robot visitors to websites than humans for the first time. That means the ROI on the content you're creating is actually being magnified — robots are crawling, indexing, and citing your content across AI platforms. But ninety-five percent of the search market is still traditional Google. Good marketing principles haven't changed. Create genuine clinical expertise. Build real authority. Differentiate through outcomes. Those fundamentals will outlast every algorithm change.

Audience Q&A: Why partner with a specialized behavioral health agency44:55

Adrienne Wilkerson: I'm excited about AI giving smaller organizations the ability to compete with the big guys on content and personalization. And concerned — same concern as Gary — about organizations getting so distracted by new tools that they stop investing in the basics: reviews, referrals, community, trust. Those will always win.