2025 Behavioral Health Marketing Trends: Top Challenges & How To Overcome Them

Challenges from all sides beset behavioral health marketers. Operational challenges like staffing shortages. Challenges in reaching the right patients and building up trust. And the ever-present challenge of a competitive market where it’s harder than ever to differentiate yourself.

Nobody ever said behavioral health was easy.

There is good news though: We’re seeing some success with various strategies designed to overcome these challenges, and fully expect these strategies to become popular behavioral health marketing trends in 2025. Of course, the sooner you adopt them, the better positioned you’ll be to handle the endless challenges facing behavioral health marketers.

Top Challenges in Behavioral Health Marketing

The first step in overcoming any challenge is to understand the problem you’re trying to solve. And behavioral health marketers have plenty of them:

Competitive Markets & Differentiation

I don’t have to tell you that there has been a surge of new mental health provider groups in recent years. Even if you’re not one of them, you’re certainly aware of them. But the upshot is that it has become more challenging to differentiate yourself than ever before.

Once upon a time, you could stand out by being a provider that offered convenience, access, and fully online options. Today, that’s just table stakes. To differentiate yourself in the modern market, you need to go further and really define your USP.

“Behavioral health providers have gotten pretty good about saying the right things, about bringing the right images. So for an individual, every company they’re looking at kinda seems warm and fuzzy. They’re all kinda saying the same thing. So, how do you differentiate between those? … The way that we do that is is via outcomes and, with an important recognition that different outcomes matter differently to different people.”  

—Michael Midgette, Chief Growth Officer at Thriveworks

Stigma of Mental Health Care

We know that mental health is a crucial part of overall health, and compared to where we were even just a few decades ago, there has been tremendous progress in terms of societal acceptance of mental health care. Unfortunately, we still have a long way to go. For many people, there is still a stigma associated with mental health care and addiction treatment, which discourages them from seeking help. Building trust with patients to overcome that stigma is essential.

Poor Experiences With Providers

There is a general dissatisfaction with the quality of care in behavioral health, which is even more pronounced in GenZ patients, according to a McKinsey study.

Many people have had bad experiences with therapy, which discourages them from seeking further treatment. The more providers they have already tried without a satisfactory result, the more discouraged they are likely to be.

Again, this highlights the importance of building trust with patients, especially if they are coming from a situation where they previously engaged a provider who left them dissatisfied. Trust is the cornerstone on which therapy is built, and it is important to acknowledge that many patients are arriving with pre-existing distrust — whether due to their own past experiences or indirect experiences like what they hear from family or see in the media. Overcoming this hurdle and establishing trust is essential for effective treatment.

Reaching the Right Consumer

One of the things that makes behavioral health marketing so tricky is that you’re not just marketing to your patient. You’re marketing to a complex decision-making unit (DMU), which can also include parents, partners, and other close relationships. Your carefully-defined patient demographic doesn’t cover the demographic you need to be advertising to, which can make it very challenging to target your marketing effectively.

Compounding this difficulty beyond the complexity of the DMU is the fact that you want to reach consumers who will actually convert to booked appointments, which means not only finding people with the right insurance coverage but who are ready to act and looking to book appointments now, rather than “maybe next year.”

Mental Health Provider and Staffing Shortages

Staffing shortages have always been a problem in behavioral health. Still, in recent years, we’ve been acutely feeling the shortage of clinicians at a time when the industry would otherwise be growing by leaps and bounds. The population needing care has continued to grow, but the number of available clinicians has yet to keep pace with demand.

Exacerbating this challenge is the desire of many patients to have not just any provider but a provider they feel can truly understand and help them. A lack of racial diversity in providers hampers connections of trust between providers and patient populations. And the mismatch between the age of providers and patients likewise has a negative effect on trust and engagement.

These are all difficult challenges, no doubt about it. But behavioral health marketers are not without options in these trying times. Here are some of the key behavioral health marketing trends for 2025 that can help you overcome these challenges:

Patient Acquisition Strategies Need a Diversified Channel Mix

As mentioned, behavioral health is complex, both in terms of the Decision-Making Unit, and in terms of the patient journey overall. One of the best ways to account for this is to widen your media mix to encompass a more diverse set of channels. This offers a number of benefits for the behavioral health marketer:

Reach Diverse DMU:

Decisions in behavioral health often involve multiple people. By diversifying your media mix, you reach a broader range of channels that cater to different demographics, not to mention different entertainment and educational preferences. Some of these might include:

• Parents seeking treatment options for young children—in cases where parents are the primary decision-makers, children aren’t necessarily involved in the research phase; parents are doing the research, and often even choosing without the child’s involvement.
• Parents seeking treatment for adult children—here the patient will generally still make the final decision. However, parents can still very much influence that decision by sharing resources, information, and suggestions.
• People seeking therapy options for their relationship and with their partners—when behavioral problems are relationship problems, people will often search on forums where they are most comfortable, such as Reddit.
• Support groups and organizations—all members in the DMU may seek out mental health organizations like NAMI as an access point where people go to find information.

It’s critical to think beyond the patient and consider all the people in the DMU, as well as how these people search for information or where you can engage them.

A varied media mix ensures your brand becomes familiar and trusted across all segments of the DMU.

Overcome Diminishing Returns:

All campaigns and media channels will reach their saturation point, where the incremental returns on investment start to diminish. Typically, healthcare organizations will leverage lower-funnel, high-intent Google Ads to drive leads. But there will come a point where you’ve maxed out all optimizations, and your budget just isn’t delivering the results you need. By diversifying media, you can test to see how adding new channels, like paid social, impact overall results.

Achieve Cross-Channel Synergy:

A diversified media mix often results in a “lift” effect, where one channel enhances the effectiveness of others. For example, brand awareness efforts on display or video ads can make users more likely to click on a paid search ad later, proving that incremental impact is higher when channels work together.

Increase Brand Awareness & Trust:

High-acuity healthcare decisions are rarely made on the spot; they typically involve a long decision-making process with extensive research and deliberation. With consistent brand exposure across multiple media channels, you keep your brand visible to the DMU throughout the entire journey. This reinforces your credibility and relevance, making it more likely that they’ll recall your brand when they’re ready to make a decision.

You Need Next-Gen Patient Journeys

Overcoming the natural hesitation of your target market requires a fuller understanding of the patient journey. There are three key steps behavioral health marketers should consider to accomplish this:

1) Understand consumer preferences

The easiest way to get someone to engage with you is to deeply understand what they want. While it may seem obvious, begin by simply asking patients how they prefer to engage with your brand.

• Do they prefer tele-therapy or in-person?
• How do they want to communicate? SMS, email, or phone?
• What do they need in terms of follow-up care to ensure they adhere to treatment plans?
  

2) Build trust

While understanding patient needs may begin with simply asking them, it can’t end there. Behavioral providers must be proactive when it comes to establishing trust.

“When we think about reaching out our hand via marketing and other channels, we still need to assume that the individual on the other side is not entirely comfortable with reaching back… We constantly as marketers have to be making that individual feel welcome, supported, and heard every step of the way through the care that we provide, but also through unique strategies of marketing and engagement throughout the entire journey for that individual, not just getting them to the door for the first time.”

—Micheal Midgette, Chief Growth Officer at Thriveworks

3) Build the tech stack

The other element to consider is that building the patient journeys of the future requires the right marketing technology. Customer data platforms (CDPs), such as healthcare privacy platform Freshpaint and call tracking systems like Liine, Patient Prism, and Call Rail, give you access to critical data on how patients interact with your brand and the outcomes of those interactions. With this information, you can refine patient journeys by eliminating friction points and identifying opportunities to deepen the relationship.

“We are leveraging third parties to better understand consumer preferences, behavior, psychographics, demographics, etc. In a perfect world, you know, looking at integrations across Nielsen, LiveRamp, other, kinda data aggregators, right, to build out those personas or maybe to validate what you’re learning in the research space.”

—Andrew Henderson, HCA Healthcare

Capacity Balance Is Essential to Maintain Patient Expectations & Grow Revenue

Staffing shortages are one of the biggest challenges for mental health providers across the industry, and it’s especially true for behavioral sectors like ABA therapy. A lack of available staff translates to a lack of available appointments, resulting in long wait times for patients that can extend out to 3 months.

Three months may not be a long time geologically speaking, but for a patient (or their anxious loved ones) waiting to receive care, three months can feel like an eternity. By the time the patient finally gets in for the appointment, they already feel negatively about your practice, and establishing trust becomes that much harder.

And that’s if they even show up at all. In many cases, patients faced with a 3-month wait time will simply seek out a competitor who can see them in a more timely fashion. In this environment, you must plan your media investments in line with current practice capacity. Otherwise, you’re just wasting your budget to send patients to competitors and damage your own brand reputation with long wait times and a poor experience.

The Capacity for Improvement

Thankfully, there’s a better way to do things. By using capacity data to inform your marketing strategy, you can avoid wasting money by spending to increase an overbooked waitlist. We know this first-hand, from working with a behavioral health client that faced the same staffing shortages and long waitlists that every behavioral health organization faces. They were suffering because their blanket spend strategy was wasting budget on overbooked locations.

We helped them implement a 3-tier approach that allocated more budget to those locations that had more availability and need for patients and less to locations already dealing with significant waitlists. Budgets were adjusted frequently as waitlists and availability changed, and the result was a significant improvement in booking rates.

Now admittedly, this approach is only possible when marketing has close alignment with ops and a constant feed of capacity data. But if you can make that happen at your organization, the sky is the limit.

“At a team level, we’re aligning our plans with operational data to identify growth areas and where we may need to pace ourselves. Overall, it’s about effective communication, data utilization, and a shared goal for sustainable growth, maintaining program quality, and delivering the experience our consumers expect.”

—Mari Considine, Chief Marketing & Development Officer at Acenda Integrated Health

Marketing + Ops Must Work Together to Engage Patients

Behavioral health populations are frequently hesitant when it comes to seeking care. According to the latest Monigle report on Humanizing Brand Experience, disengagement among healthcare consumers is on the rise, with the 3rd largest consumer segment now being classified as “Doctor Dodgers” — roughly 16% of the US population (21+).

These are patients who initially sought out healthcare, but encountered obstacles along the way and became disengaged. For behavioral patients who are already hesitant about seeking care, any obstacle could be enough to put them off. If accessing care is difficult and complicated, if it is hard to get an appointment or time-consuming to fill out forms, they may already find the process too overwhelming and decide to delay their healthcare indefinitely.

The result: A lack of care for them and a lack of revenue for you.

So ask yourself: What’s preventing them from getting care, and what can you do to make it easier for your clientele to access care?

You should:

• Examine your digital front door – Is it mobile-friendly? ADA compliant? Do you use an appropriate reading level (e.g., 6th grade)?
• Listen to your call tracking transcripts – Are there hiccups and barriers preventing patients from booking care?
• Confirm how long patients are waiting – What’s your average appointment time?
• Ensure that you are re-engaging existing patients – Do you send appointment reminders? Text or SMS or phone call, as your patients prefer?

It’s not enough just to advertise to patients; you have to make sure their path is as smooth as possible to attend that first appointment and every appointment thereafter.

“If they have a bad experience with operations, if they have a bad experience with our patient access team or our call center, if they have a bad experience with our online chat, fill in the blank, there can be so many touch points where someone can have a negative experience. We really have to be cognizant of ensuring that the entire organization is swimming in the same direction… making sure that the entire front end is built out for that patient experience.”

–Colin Jefferies, Vice President of Marketing & Communications, BrightView

Learn more about the need for Marketing and Ops alignment.

Healthcare Consumers Crave Trust

As mentioned above, patients aren’t trusting providers these days, which can be especially challenging in behavioral health. Stigma and negative mental health care experiences can turn people away from seeking care. Even search results online feel unreliable, thanks to AI. Patients are asking themselves:

• How do I know this comes from a doctor?
• Can I trust what the doctor says? 
• Will they make the best decision for me?
• Can I believe what I read online?

In this climate, authenticity and originality are key to standing out and engaging consumers. Healthcare groups must prioritize their brand and their experts; generic or AI-generated content will erode trust — something behavioral health providers can ill afford.

Trust remains the biggest challenge for behavioral health providers and one that can only be addressed by a humane and human approach.

Be Real

One of the best ways to build trust is to highlight the experiences of real human beings who have been helped by the services you provide. Testimonials or even just shared authentic patient experiences are a valuable tool for building that human connection and establishing trust via another person facing similar circumstances.

“Especially in behavioral health, it’s incredibly important to bring the individuals who are actually impacted to the forefront where appropriate. And if you have those conversations about arming them to help other people the way that they were helped, it can become a very, very powerful thing.”

—Michael Midgette, Chief Growth Officer at Thriveworks

In addition to the patient perspective, don’t forget your own. Your healthcare practice or organization has its own unique approach, and you should highlight the unique service and patient experience you bring to the table. What do your providers wish more patients knew? How can you address questions that often get ignored? Dig deep here to find out what patients want to know, what information gaps exist, and introduce your authoritative and original voice to put your answers into the mix.

Think Outside the Box

When it comes to forwarding an authentic voice, sometimes the best thing you can do is to let those authentic voices carry beyond the bounds of traditional marketing campaigns.

Mind, Britain’s mental health charity, put together a series of short videos for a campaign called “If this speaks to you”, where they paired an individual experiencing a mental health issue with a spoken word artist who wrote and performed a short poem based on the individual’s experience.

The Campaign Against Living Miserably (CALM) put together a suicide awareness campaign called “Suicidal doesn’t always look suicidal”, where they showcase home videos of smiling happy people who took their own lives soon after the video was filmed.

And your authentic voices don’t have to be restricted to an ad campaign at all. CHI St. Vincent has a patient podcast called “A View From The Bed: A Patient’s Perspective”, which features lengthy conversations with patients about their experiences. It may not look like marketing, but it builds trust in the CHI St. Vincent brand by giving visibility to other people who have been in that situation and can now share their stories.

“Our doctors only have so much capacity of knowledge, right? They can tell you, for example, if you have weight loss surgery, here’s the outcome. Here’s what you can expect. But has that doctor had weight loss surgery? 100% not… so the podcast is patients only, and, we talk to them about the good, the bad, and the ugly of the procedure.”

–Bonnie Ward, CHI St. Vincent

If more mental healthcare providers put together something like this, it could really help to break down the stigma around mental health by showcasing authentic stories from real people in these situations.

Behavioral Marketers Seek New Measurement Frameworks

Meta’s recent announcement about new game-changing healthcare advertising restrictions is just the latest in a long series of challenges. In a privacy-first world, marketers are searching for new solutions to evaluate marketing impact and help them determine where to invest next.

Existing measurement approaches have numerous problems, from HIPAA and state privacy laws that prohibit tracking pixels, to walled garden ad platforms where advertisers don’t have all the data, to complex patient journeys not easily captured by first/last-touch attribution.

Media Mix Modeling addresses all three of these challenges in evaluating marketing impact and guiding future investment decisions:

Walled Gardens: Eliminates dependency on tracking every impression and click by correlating revenue with investment, bypassing closed ecosystems (like Meta and Tikok).

HIPAA Compliance: Removes pixel-based tracking concerns, using revenue and investment correlation instead, ensuring privacy compliance.

Shallow Tracking: Focuses on revenue-driven metrics that matter to key stakeholders (CEO, CFO, COO), moving beyond surface-level metrics that lack outcome alignment.

“Walled gardens cease to become a problem because you’re not trying to track every impression and every click. Instead, you’re correlating revenue with investment. HIPAA isn’t a concern, since we’re no longer using pixels. Again, we’re using a correlation between revenue and investment to determine if the investment decisions that we’re making are driving an incremental improvement in our digital marketing efforts. We don’t need pixels to do that. We’re tracking revenue, the metric that everybody cares about, all the stakeholders: your CEO, your CFO, your COO.”

–Rich Briddock, CSO, Cardinal

RevRx™: An MMM and More

We’ve recently released our proprietary business intelligence tool RevRx™, which is built upon a complex MMM that uses a full-information Bayesian econometric model, as well as Cardinal’s deep healthcare expertise. We believe it’s a real game-changer, with statistically modeled forecasting that lets you:

• Analyze Past Performance and determine channel contribution
• Measure Incremental Channel Value for each channel towards conversion
• Get Clear-Cut Budget Guidance based on model predictions with <4% error
• Spot Diminishing Returns in case it’s time to diversify
• Show Data Supporting Your Investment Strategy to better communicate value to the C-suite

Learn more about RevRxTM on our podcast.

Conclusion

The challenges of behavioral health aren’t going away any time soon. But I hope that by delving into some of the key behavioral health marketing trends for 2025, you’ll be well-equipped to mitigate staffing shortages with capacity data, differentiate yourself in a competitive market with strong patient journeys, and build trust in your brand by presenting authentic voices.