Most IVF marketing strategies are lists of channels: social media, Google Ads, SEO, email marketing, content, events. The list is rarely wrong. The order usually is. A clinic that turns on more advertising before it can measure results, before its IVF page answers basic questions and before every enquiry gets a fast reply is paying to send patients into a leak.

A patient’s journey runs from a search, to a page, to an enquiry, to a booked consultation. A good strategy fixes that path from the end backwards.

This is the plan we would run for a fertility clinic over its first 90 days, in the order we would run it. It assumes a clinic that already has a website, some patients arriving from search, and probably some ad spend. It does not assume a bigger budget. Most of the first month costs time, not money.

Before you start: decide what counts as a result

The goal is booked consultations. Not traffic, not clicks, not leads, not followers. Every step below is judged on whether it produces more consultations, from the right patients, at a cost the clinic can live with.

Write down three numbers before you change anything:

  1. Consultations booked last month, and where each one came from, as well as you can tell.
  2. Enquiries received: calls, forms, chats and emails.
  3. What you spent on marketing, including agency fees and ad spend.

If you cannot fill in the first number by source, that is your first job, and it is why the plan starts with measurement.

Days 1–14: measure what you already have

You cannot improve what you cannot see, and most clinics cannot see which search, page or campaign produced a booked consultation.

  • Track calls. Most fertility enquiries arrive by phone. Call tracking with a number per source tells you whether a call came from Google Ads, organic search or your Google Business Profile.
  • Track form submissions as conversions in Google Analytics and Google Ads, firing only on a real successful submission.
  • Connect enquiries to bookings. Whatever system books consultations, it needs to record where the patient first came from. Even a spreadsheet is better than nothing.
  • Check that the tracking itself is HIPAA-safe. Tracking pixels on pages about treatments, or on forms, can send health information to third parties. HHS issued guidance on this in 2022; a court later narrowed part of it, but tracking on forms and patient portals is still a real risk. Keep health details out of anything a tracking tool can read.

By day 14 you should be able to answer a simple question: last week, how many consultations came from each channel? It will not be perfect. It will be far better than guessing. Our post on measuring cost per consultation goes deeper on this.

Days 15–45: fix the website so it can book a patient

Your website is where every channel ends. Fix it first and everything you do afterwards works harder.

Give each treatment its own page. IVF, IUI, egg freezing, donor eggs, fertility preservation and LGBTQ+ family building each need a page that answers the questions patients search for. A patient who searched for egg freezing should not land on a page listing nine services.

Answer cost. A range for a typical cycle, what it includes, what it does not, and how people pay for it. Our guide to talking about IVF cost on your website shows how to do it without publishing a fee schedule.

Shorten the enquiry form to a name, a way to reach the patient and one optional line. Everything else is a conversation. More in your enquiry form is losing IVF patients.

Make it work on a phone. A tappable phone number on every page, text you can read without zooming, and pages that pass Google’s Core Web Vitals on mobile.

Show who will treat them. Physician names, photos and credentials near the contact form, plus clinical content with a named reviewer.

Handle success rates honestly. Patients compare clinics on success rates, and it is tempting to lead with the best-looking figure. Link to your published SART data instead, say what the figures measure and for which age group, and avoid comparisons with other clinics. It reads as more trustworthy, and it keeps you clear of the claims that cause advertising and regulatory problems.

Use real patient stories only with consent. Testimonials and success stories work, but only from patients who agreed in writing to be featured, quoted exactly. A short video of a physician explaining a first consultation often does more to build trust than any testimonial, and it needs no patient consent at all.

This is the part of the plan with the most work in it, which is why it gets a month. It is also the part that keeps paying back the longest. Our website assessment and revamp covers exactly this.

Days 30–60: answer every enquiry, fast

This runs alongside the website work, because it costs very little and fixes a leak that is often bigger than any on the site.

  • Reply quickly. Patients researching fertility contact more than one clinic. The first one to reply has an advantage the others rarely win back.
  • Cover the hours patients actually enquire. Evenings and weekends are when a lot of fertility research happens. An instant automatic reply that says when a person will call, plus a real call the next morning, is the minimum.
  • Follow up. A patient who did not book after the first call is not a lost patient. A short, polite sequence of follow-ups over the next few weeks recovers a share of them.
  • Log everything in one CRM, so nobody wonders whether a patient was called back.
  • Keep in touch with patients who are not ready yet. Many people research fertility treatment for months before booking. An occasional, useful email (what a first consultation involves, how insurance coverage works) keeps the clinic in mind without pressure. Keep health details out of it.

None of this needs new advertising. It needs a clear process and the tools to run it. That is the work in our lead capture and automation service.

Days 45–90: get found for the searches that matter

Once the pages are worth landing on, make them easier to find.

Local SEO first. Your Google Business Profile needs the right categories, accurate hours, real photos and a steady flow of reviews. Most fertility searches are local, and the map results often appear above everything else. Our guide to getting more Google reviews without breaking HIPAA covers the review side.

Then content patients search for. Not a news feed. Pages that answer the questions patients type at night: what happens at a first consultation, how egg freezing works, what IVF costs with and without insurance. Each one written for patients, reviewed by one of your physicians, and linked to the treatment page it supports. This is our clinically reviewed content service.

Technical basics. Each treatment page indexed, a clean sitemap, sensible titles and descriptions, and no slow pages. Search engine optimisation for a clinic is mostly these unglamorous basics done properly, which is what our SEO for fertility clinics page covers.

SEO takes months to show its full effect. Starting it in the second half of the first quarter means it is working by the time the clinic is ready to judge it.

Days 60–90: paid search, pointed at the right pages

Google Ads comes last, not because it does not work, but because it multiplies whatever is underneath it. Pointed at a website that books patients, with tracking that shows which campaigns produce consultations, it is the fastest channel a clinic has. Pointed at a homepage with no tracking, it is the most expensive.

  • One campaign or ad group per treatment, sending each search to its own page.
  • Search before social. Someone searching for IVF near them is further along than someone scrolling a feed.
  • Judge it on booked consultations, not clicks or cost per lead.
  • Keep ads inside Google’s healthcare policies, and keep sensitive data out of remarketing lists.

Our Google Ads for fertility clinics page covers how we set it up.

Where social media, email and referrals fit

Social media, email newsletters, webinars and physician referral relationships all have a place in a full fertility marketing plan. They build trust over months and keep the clinic in mind for patients who are not ready yet. They work best on top of the foundation above: a social post that sends someone to an IVF page that does not answer cost is still a leak, just a slower one.

If you have the team to run them well from day one, run them. If you have to choose, choose the foundation.

How to know it worked

At day 90, go back to the three numbers from the start. You should be able to say, by channel, how many consultations were booked and what each one cost. That is the real result of the first quarter: not only more consultations, but knowing where they come from, so the next quarter’s budget goes to what works.

Expect the website and follow-up fixes to show first, because they improve what you already get. Expect SEO to keep building after day 90. Expect ads to need a few weeks of data before they settle.

The plan, in one paragraph

Measure first, so every decision after it is based on what produced a consultation. Fix the website so a patient who arrives can understand, trust and contact you. Answer every enquiry fast and follow up. Then make the site easier to find, and only then buy more traffic. It is the same order as our IVF clinic marketing ideas, set against a calendar.

If you want this plan written for your own clinic, with your own site checked against it, that is what the free website plan is.