Visibility can make or break your urgent care business and being seen in your community is, in many ways, more impactful than your online presence. While it’s tempting to focus on easy digital ads and SEO rankings, the truth is many future patients don’t find you online.
They remember you from the school fundraiser, the Saturday flu shot clinic, or the little league game where your urgent care’s name appears on the jerseys. That’s grassroots marketing in action.
As digital channels become overcrowded and more expensive, returning to the grassroots strategies that urgent care centers have used to build trust for decades is smart business. If you’re opening a new urgent care or want to grow an existing one, grassroots marketing should be a hallmark of your outreach strategy.
Here’s how to do it effectively.
What Happened to Grassroots Marketing in Urgent Care?
When urgent care first emerged as a business model, Google Ads was still several decades away from being created. Social media hadn’t yet taken over our screens.
For a solo physician entrepreneur opening a new center in a sprawling metro like suburban Chicago, TV and radio ads were completely out of reach. Spending thousands of dollars to reach 9.4 million people, most of whom lived too far away from your clinic to ever visit, just wasn’t feasible.
Instead, early urgent care marketing efforts focused on a far more personal, and more effective, tactic: grassroots marketing.
Urgent care brands had a presence at school fundraisers, community fun runs, and church-led events. They built relationships with PTA boards, pastors, athletic directors, and small business owners in their communities. These local relationship-building tactics established urgent care centers as trusted pillars of the community.
Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Schools and churches shut their doors. Health fairs were canceled. Athletics were put on pause.
With face-to-face interaction suddenly off-limits, digital marketing skyrocketed to fill the void. Urgent care clinics started pouring their marketing dollars into Google Ads, social media, and SEO. Today, those tactics are a cornerstone of urgent care marketing, but they don’t define the most profitable businesses.
The urgent care clinics seeing the greatest success today are by-and-large the ones who have returned to grassroots marketing.
Digital Marketing is the New Yellow Pages
To be clear, digital marketing is still an essential part of running a successful urgent care business. Your clinic must show up in Google Maps, and prospective patients want to see an easy-to-use, mobile-friendly website before they visit.
Just as urgent care operators from the ‘90s wouldn’t consider skipping the Yellow Pages, you can’t afford to neglect your online presence. However, relying on digital marketing channels for the entirety of your outreach is risky. Why?
- The online market is saturated. Everyone knows how easy it is to publish a social media ad or list a business on Google. Likewise, users have become accustomed to ignoring these ads. This all makes breaking through the noise harder than ever.
- The patient journey doesn’t always start online. Assuming that a Google search is the first step of every urgent care visit ignores the power of memory, word-of-mouth, and loyalty, leading to missed opportunities to increase patient volume.
- Keyword bidding wars have driven up costs. This is true of all online advertising, but especially for healthcare, where phrases like “urgent care near me” are both expensive and highly competitive.
- It’s easy to blend in. A shiny website doesn’t differentiate you from dozens of other clinics when your competitors have the same messaging and services to offer.
Digital marketing can put your clinic on the map (literally), but doesn’t build loyalty or make you a mainstay of the community.
That said, it’s still essential, especially in the early stages of starting an urgent care. When a new patient feels flu symptoms or twists their ankle, chances are they’ll pull out their phone and search “urgent care near me.” If your clinic doesn’t show up in that moment, you’re almost certain to miss out on the visit. But when they need care for another illness or injury down the road, they’re more likely to visit a center they associate with a great experience, whether in the clinic or in the community.
Digital channels also reinforce your grassroots efforts. A relationship starts when you interact with a future patient at a school-sponsored event or a community fundraiser. When they eventually need care, your name may stand out in their mind, but that means nothing if they can’t find your clinic online to get directions or get on the wait list.
The most effective urgent care growth strategy uses digital marketing for discoverability and grassroots for differentiation.
What Urgent Care Grassroots Marketing Looks Like in 2025
The world has changed drastically since the days when grassroots marketing dominated the urgent care industry’s outreach efforts. So, what does this tactic look like today?
Surprisingly, it’s similar—but with an added layer of thoughtfulness to help you stand out in an increasingly competitive market.
Grassroots marketing isn’t just about handing out flyers or showing up at the occasional health fair. Successful urgent care centers truly integrate grassroot tactics into their brand identity and daily operations.
Here are a few of the most effective strategies we’ve seen:
1. Partner with Local Schools to Offer Sports Physicals
Sports physicals are one of the best services to offer through grassroots tactics. In one visit, a physical:
- Introduces parents and children to your center.
- Positions your providers as trusted, approachable professionals.
- Builds top-of-mind awareness for where parents should turn for care when a sports injury or illness inevitably strikes.
Even better, sports physicals can yield repeat visits for years. A student athlete may need two or three physicals per school year across multiple seasons—not to mention their younger siblings. When the physical is done well, and you have a smooth intake process, kind staff, and friendly follow-up, your center becomes the default choice for that family.
Consider reaching out to athletic directors and school leadership early (several months before the season begins) and offer them an informative sports physical flyer to include in their orientation packets. This works so well because it isn’t just advertising, you’re providing a resource that makes their job easier and helps families.
2. Sponsor Events That Matter Locally
From little league teams to church pancake breakfasts to city rec center events, sponsoring local activities is one of the fastest ways to embed your clinic into the community’s daily life. These high-trust interactions turn into real relationships when the need for care arises.
One successful urgent care center brought a mascot to elementary school events, instantly grabbing attention and creating memorable interactions. Another offered flu kits to restaurants during an outbreak, which earned them front-page local news coverage.
Organic interactions in your community generate buzz far beyond what paid ads can achieve. Even better, people see these in a highly positive light and are more likely to visit your center because they already trust you.
3. Be More Than Just a Logo
It’s not enough to slap your name on a banner or the back of a t-shirt and call it a day. Succeeding with grassroots marketing requires presence.
Train your team to represent your urgent care center in the community. Send staff to events with giveaways, quick services like blood pressure checks, and even playful games or raffles.
Established businesses can consider hiring a part-time “community educator” whose job is to attend events, answer questions about urgent care, and connect with attendees. Startup centers should get team members involved from the front desk staff to MAs, nurses, and providers.
One large urgent care chain found patient volume consistently increased 3–6 months after they put a strong community educator in place. Why? Because people remember faces, not ads.
Going the extra mile to have a presence in your community transforms your center from another faceless sponsor to a friendly, trustworthy resource.
4. Use Digital Channels to Amplify Your Grassroots Efforts
Grassroots and digital marketing aren’t enemies. In fact, they work best together. Whenever you participate in a community event or engage with people “on the ground,” consider:
- Snapping some photos (with permission) and sharing them on your social media pages.
- Tagging local businesses, news outlets, and community groups.
- Promoting your events in local Facebook groups or community forums.
- Running simple location-targeted ads to boost your posts.
One urgent care center saw their most viral post ever by simply posting a parade route map for a local Mardi Gras event along with their booth location. Thousands of users engaged with the content and visited their booth. All because they took the time to meet people where they already were, both in-person and online.
Why Grassroots Still Works
Urgent care centers are in a unique position. You’re not a hospital, yet you provide clinical care. You’re not a retail chain, but you’re still competing for consumer attention. And most of all, you’re serving a community that often doesn’t fully understand what urgent care is or why they should choose you over the ER or their primary care doctor.
Grassroots marketing, done well, solves these problems.
Unlike other industries, you can’t rely on catchy taglines or splashy seasonal discounts to create patient loyalty. People need to trust that you’ll be there for them when it matters most. Building that trust takes time, and it happens through visibility, familiarity, and connection.
When a parent engages with your providers at a back-to-school event, or when your center sponsors the local soccer team, it creates a positive association no amount of digital ad spend can replicate.
This matters because urgent care is a business built on repeat visits. A single visit might stem from convenience, but whether the patient returns depends on whether their visit creates a positive or negative relationship.
Credibility is also an overlooked benefit of grassroots urgent care marketing. No patient is choosing their healthcare provider based on an ad alone. In fact, if all they see is ads, the impersonal impression may push them away. When patients see you staffing flu shot booths, donating water at 5Ks, or showing up in branded shirts at local events, it reinforces that you’re not just selling care but are a contributing member of the neighborhood.
Lastly, the impact of grassroots marketing can be felt inside the walls of your center. When your team takes part in community outreach, they deepen their own sense of purpose, pride, and investment in your brand. Many urgent care operators report that clinics with strong grassroots engagement have better morale, stronger retention, and a culture that feels more mission-driven than transactional.
Grassroots marketing works for urgent care not because it’s trendy, but because it aligns with the service you offer. Healthcare is personal. Trust is local. In a world full of noise, showing up still matters.
Final Thought: You Can’t Automate Relationships
If you’re thinking about starting an urgent care or want to grow your business, don’t overlook the power of grassroots marketing. You can streamline and automate many parts of your outreach strategy but not being part of the community.
Grassroots marketing is how urgent care became a staple of American healthcare. In our over-saturated digital world, it’s how the best clinics continue to stand out.
Ready to grow your community-first urgent care? At Urgent Care Consultants, we help physician entrepreneurs like you turn your clinical expertise into a successful, locally rooted business. From grassroots marketing strategies that have a tangible impact to planning operations, staffing, and technology, we’re your partner at every stage of the journey. Schedule a no-risk consultation today and learn how to build an urgent care business your community knows, trusts, and returns to.