Revenue share toward growth
3 – 8%Healthy ABA practices invest 3–8% of clinical revenue in marketing & growth. Below 3%, intake stalls; above 8%, you're usually paying to plug an intake or capacity leak.
Source · Higglo book of business, n=34Free tool · for ABA & behavioral health
Plan an ABA marketing budget that doesn't waste a dollar.
A free planner for clinical owners and operations leads. Tell us your size, growth target, and current state - we'll suggest a defensible 12-month allocation across the six disciplines that actually move census: SEO, GEO, CRO, UX, web, and PR.
The planner
Six inputs. One defensible plan.
Built from 30+ long-running ABA and pediatric therapy engagements. The model adapts to your size, growth ambition, and where your current site sits - and tells you plainly when a discipline doesn't deserve the spend yet.
Inputs · clinical & commercial01 / 02
Clinical capacity sets the ceiling. Be honest about how many active clients you can actually onboard this year.
$4.0M
Used to sanity-check spend as a percentage of revenue. ABA practices typically invest 3–8% of revenue in growth.
$500K$5M$10M$15M$20M+
36
Net new active clients you want intake to onboard. We back into qualified-inquiry volume from this.
660120180240
If your site is a placeholder, web & UX gets the early budget. If it's modern and instrumented, the spend rotates to acquisition and authority.
3 selected
Higher service-line count means broader entity work and more landing-page real estate to support.
Local SEO & GEO entity work scales with the number of metros or service areas you cover.
6 of 6
Toggle off any discipline you don't want in the plan. The remaining budget redistributes across what you keep.
Suggested allocation02 / 02
0 / 4 answered
Your plan appears once we know enough about you.
Answer a few more inputs on the left and we'll surface your recommended annual investment, monthly run-rate, and a discipline-by-discipline split. 4 more fields to go.
- Recommended annual investment, monthly run-rate, and unit economics.
- Discipline-by-discipline allocation (only the disciplines you keep).
- A copyable plan you can paste into a deck or email.
What's behind the math
Six rules the planner actually applies.
R.01
Spend scales with capacity, not ambition.
The model caps recommended spend against what your stage can plausibly onboard. We won't push you toward a 12% growth budget if your active-client capacity says otherwise.
R.02
Web & UX go first when the site is a liability.
If you mark the site as a placeholder, web & UX takes 30–35% of the first-year budget. Acquisition channels do not compound on a broken substrate.
R.03
GEO matters more every quarter.
For caregiver research happening inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI overviews, we hold a minimum 12% allocation to GEO regardless of stage. Skipping it now compounds the wrong way.
R.04
CRO scales with traffic volume, not opinion.
Below ~3,000 monthly sessions, CRO is mostly hygiene. The model lifts CRO share once your traffic supports statistically meaningful experiments.
R.05
PR & authority unlock after foundations.
Digital PR has the longest payback window. The planner gives it a smaller share for emerging practices and grows it at established and multi-site stages, where citations move the needle on AI retrieval and trust.
R.06
No allocation drops below useful.
Every discipline either gets a working budget - enough to staff a real workstream - or zero. Spreading 4% across six disciplines produces six half-systems, not one program.
Benchmarks · ABA category
Numbers we typically see across the book.
Inquiry → enrolled client
18 – 24%For practices with a real intake function and reasonable wait-time signaling. Below 18% the constraint is usually intake response time, not lead volume.
Source · Higglo intake studies, n=22Inquiry growth · year-on-year
+ 35%Median qualified-inquiry growth between year one and year two of an integrated engagement. Year three usually outpaces year two.
Source · Higglo pipeline reads, 12 cohort accountsKeep going
Related tools.
Pressure-test the plan
Bring the number above to a 20-minute call.
Whatever the planner spits out, the right plan for your practice depends on conversations the model can't have. Bring your number - we'll tell you where it'll work, where it won't, and what we'd actually do first.