Marketing Your Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) Clinic in a Boom Market

Signs in the Strip Mall

There are new signs everywhere. In strip malls. In office parks that used to house insurance adjusters. In former tax-prep storefronts with the decals scraped off but the blinds still half-broken. ABA clinics. Dozens of them. The signs are fresh vinyl, the fonts always sans serif, the colors reliably soft: blue, teal, green. They bloom like fast food chains did in the eighties. Like tanning salons in the nineties. Like vape shops in the early aughts.

Those other storefronts promised tans, buzzes, quick highs and late night cravings. These promise something else entirely: progress measured in eye contact, in words spoken, in small breakthroughs that families wait months to see.

Parents see the signs, click the ads in a break from doom scrolling, fill out the forms. They wait. They know they will wait. Half a year is the average, longer in some states, shorter in none. One survey puts three out of four families on a waitlist. They trade notes in Facebook groups, like a neighborhood swap but for autism care: We are still waiting since February. Try the one near the airport, they called back faster. Get on every list you can, something will open.

Meanwhile the websites all hum the same note. A headline about “personalized ABA therapy.” A photo of a therapist crouched at eye-level with a child stacking blocks. A paragraph about “family-centered care.” The button says Get Started Today, though of course today is impossible.

If you open five sites in a row you cannot remember which is which. The names blur. The logos blur. The promises blur.

This is the sameness problem. Not that ABA does not work. Not that the people inside do not care. But that the industry has adopted the marketing posture of every other professional service and applied it to a decision that feels, to parents, nothing like choosing a dentist.

Inside the Intake Spreadsheet

Step inside a clinic. There is an intake coordinator, headphones crooked, toggling between a phone system and an Excel sheet with a hundred names. Each row a child, each row a family waiting. The coordinator is harried. She wants to call everyone back. She cannot.

A director looks over the sheet. They know the website still says accepting new families. They know it is not true. Updating the site falls below today’s fires. Hiring. Billing. Scheduling.

None of this is malice. None of it is indifference. But parents on the other end do not feel the nuance. They feel the silence.

The Quiet Catastrophe of Turnover

Then there is turnover. The quiet catastrophe. For RBTs, the entry-level therapists, the churn is somewhere between seventy and ninety percent a year. Imagine if nine out of ten teachers at your child’s school left by June. Imagine explaining to your child, again, that the person they trusted is gone.

Parents notice long before operators talk about it. They notice when a child cycles through three therapists in twelve months. They notice the instability. They start to wonder if the clinic itself is stable.

The money for RBTs is better than retail. Better than food service. But the work is relentless, the pay still modest, the career path foggy. They leave. They always leave. Unless the clinic does something unusual: mentorship, acknowledgment, visible investment in staff. Even then, it is a fight against gravity.

A Boom That Still Feels Fragile

Here is the contradiction. ABA is booming, but it is still finding its feet, its voice, its true purpose. A four-billion-dollar market climbing toward six. Growth that attracts entrepreneurial mindsets with dreams of profits. National chains expanding. Private equity circling.

And yet in the parent groups the story is still the same. Silence. Turnover. Waitlists.

The marketing ignores this. Agencies apply the template they use for dermatology or dentistry. Swap in ABA where it used to say braces. Push a checklist: local SEO, reviews, social posts twice a week. A commodity campaign for a trust market.

Parents are not comparing dentists. They are looking for continuity in a system that rarely promises it. Something they can belong to. Something they might recommend to others. Maybe even something others will try to emulate. Parents are not comparing dentists. They are looking for continuity in a system that rarely promises it. Something they can belong to. Something they might recommend to others. Maybe even something others will try to emulate. And honestly that is the onus clinics should bear. Becoming a living, creating member of a community.

The Signals Families Actually Trust

The signals that matter are not hard to name: staff bios, intake timelines, languages spoken, insurance explained without jargon, real stories. A parent saying, We waited, but they kept us updated. A therapist explaining why they stayed. A BCBA showing their face, their credentials, their reasons. These things take time. They resist templating. They are also what families remember.

Breaking the Template

The boom will continue. More signs. More clinics. More spreadsheets. More unanswered forms. The question is whether marketing keeps pretending or begins to tell the truth. Does it embrace the process? Even when approval is slow. Even when nothing is guaranteed. While not owed, is communication clear and consistent? Are you a partner, or just a polite shoulder while families wait for insurance to come through?

Where We Come In

And this is where we step in. Not as decorators. Not to add another teal logo to the pile. Our work is about making two audiences legible to each other: the machines that surface answers and the families who are making decisions with limited time and patience.

And how we do it is like this. We take the teal-and-blue template, the boilerplate about “personalized care,” and we dismantle it. We sit with the intake form and ask why it still asks for a fax number. We read the parent group threads and hear what actually matters. The callbacks. The staff who stay. The honesty about waitlists. Then we build around that.

We give the machines what they need. The search engines, the algorithms, the AI systems that now decide what families see first. Structured data. The invisible scaffolding that makes a clinic legible in Google, in Gemini, in ChatGPT. Service schema. FAQs. Reviews. The kinds of signals that tell the retrieval layer this is a credible answer.

We give families what they need. Names and faces of staff. Stories told without varnish. Intake processes written in plain language. Cultural fluency that does not stop at stock photos.

And it is different from what most agencies sell. Yes, we have a list. But it is not a checklist. It is not a template. It is closer to the way your clinic actually works. We meander. The way parents do through insurance portals. The way staff do through levels of care. The way your BCBAs map out plans that never fit neatly into boxes.

That is the work. Translating the wandering path of real ABA into signals the world can understand. Making sure the story is the same whether it is on your website, in a parent group, in a Google result, or in the quiet decision-making of a family at the kitchen table.

A Story Worth Telling

The market will keep expanding. More clinics will open. More parents will wait. More staff will come and go. That much is certain. What is not certain is who will actually stand out.

If that feels like your clinic, reach out. We will not promise a magic checklist or a single tactic that fixes everything. We will sit with you, the way parents sit with insurance forms, the way your staff sit with care plans, and work through it. Honest about the challenges. Honest about the tradeoffs.

Because what families notice is not polish. It is whether you show up, clearly, consistently, as yourself. And that is the kind of story worth telling. That you are here to make a connection.

Sources

Further reading and data sources that informed this piece:

GM Insights. 2024. U.S. Applied Behavior Analysis Market Report.
CDC. 2023. Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network.
L.E.K. Consulting. 2025. Investing in Autism Therapy: Key Trends.
CentralReach. 2025. Waitlist Management: 4 Challenges Facing ABA Orgs.
Links ABA. 2024. Common Mistakes New ABA Practices Make.
Aim Higher ABA. 2024. Choosing the Right ABA Provider.
Belay Autism Services. 2024. 6 Essential Factors in Provider Selection.
Achievement Behavior Services. 2025. Overcoming ABA Services Waitlists.
Little Health Law. 2025. Handling Parent Complaints in ABA Clinics.
Website analyses: Hopebridge, CARD, InBloom. 2025.