How much should a clinic spend on marketing?

Start with what a new patient is worth

Percentage-of-revenue rules are a sanity check at best. Your budget should come from your own numbers.

Percentage-of-revenue rules ignore the two figures that decide whether marketing pays for itself: the value of a new patient and your close rate. Two clinics with the same turnover can need very different budgets because one books half of its enquiries and the other books one in five.

You need three numbers, ideally from the last quarter rather than from memory:

1. Average patient value. What a typical new patient spends with you over a sensible period. For a physio or osteopath that might be the first course of treatment. For an aesthetics clinic it might be the first year, because people come back for top-ups and skin treatments. Use the figures in your practice management system, not a hopeful guess.
2. Gross margin. What is left after the clinician's pay, room costs and consumables. Marketing is paid for out of this, not out of revenue.
3. Close rate. Of everyone who enquires by phone, form or booking request, how many book and turn up. If you don't track this yet, a simple spreadsheet for four weeks will tell you more than any benchmark.

From those you can work out the most you are willing to pay for a new patient, and from that the most you can pay for an enquiry. Your monthly budget is then the number of new patients you want, multiplied by what you will pay for each one.

A worked example with hypothetical numbers

Take a multi-practitioner MSK clinic: three or four physiotherapists and an osteopath, with spare diary space on weekday afternoons. Suppose the owner's numbers look like this.

If this clinic keeps total marketing costs (ad spend, management fees, SEO and the website's monthly cost) at or under £3,000 a month, each new patient costs a third of the profit they bring in. That is before counting the patients who return next year or send a friend.

A third is not a rule. Owners who know patients come back may spend more; owners who need a fast payback may spend less. Pick a figure, write it down, and make every campaign pass it.

What the example tells you

• Close rate is often the cheapest lever. In the example, lifting the close rate from 40% to 50% raises what the clinic can afford per enquiry from £40 to £50 without spending a penny more. A phone that gets answered, replies within the hour and a clear booking page do more than most owners expect.
• If enquiries cost more than the ceiling, stop and change something. The channel, the landing page, the offer or the follow-up. Spending more and hoping rarely fixes it.
• Smaller practices should run the same sum. A solo counsellor (hypothetically charging £70 a session for eight sessions) gets a very different answer from an aesthetics clinic with repeat patients. For many solo practitioners the sum points to a good website and Google Business Profile first.

Splitting the budget between ads, SEO and your website

The website comes first, SEO builds slowly and keeps paying, and ads buy enquiries now for as long as you pay for them.

Your website: where everything else sends people

Every ad click, Google Business Profile visit and word-of-mouth referral ends up on your site. If it is slow on a phone, doesn't say what you treat, or hides the booking button, every other pound you spend works less hard. Our done-for-you sites start with Launch at £449 setup then £39 a month for five pages, Grow at £949 then £59 a month for 10+ pages with service pages, and Scale at £1,950 then £129 a month. Our guide to website costs covers the wider UK market.

SEO and Google Business Profile: slower, but it compounds

Local SEO costs time or a monthly fee, and results show over months rather than weeks. The upside is that the enquiries keep coming without a cost per click. For physios, osteopaths and chiropractors, a complete Google Business Profile with a steady flow of reviews is often the best-value item in the whole budget. Our guide to getting more Google reviews is a good place to start, and local SEO for physio clinics explains the rest.

Paid ads: enquiries now, while you pay

Google Search ads reach people already searching, which suits physio, MSK, dermatology and private GP services. Meta ads on Facebook and Instagram reach people who aren't searching yet, which suits aesthetics, skin, hair loss and wellness, where a clear explanation of a treatment and real photos of the clinic do the work. Ads stop when the spend stops, so think of them as a tap rather than an asset.

A rough split by stage

• Starting out or solo: most of the money on the website and your Google Business Profile, plus your own time on reviews and directories. Ads only if you have the margin and someone to answer enquiries quickly.
• Growing, with spare capacity: website sorted, steady SEO work, and a modest ad budget tested against your ceiling.
• Established multi-practitioner clinic: ads usually become the biggest line because they scale, with SEO and the website maintained underneath. This is usually the point where paying someone to manage the ads starts to make sense.

Ad spend versus management fees

Agency proposals often bundle two separate costs together. Pull them apart.

• Ad spend is what you pay Google or Meta for clicks and impressions. Ideally it is billed to your card from an ad account you own, so you can see exactly what was spent.
• A management fee pays a person or agency for the work: keyword research, ad copy, landing pages, conversion tracking, weekly optimisation and reporting.

Some agencies charge a percentage of ad spend. That ties their income to how much you spend rather than how many patients you get, which is an odd incentive. Others pay the platform themselves and invoice you a marked-up figure. A fixed fee, with ad spend paid direct to the platform, is the easiest arrangement to judge against your ceiling.

Questions to ask any agency

• Do I own the ad accounts and the data if we stop working together?
• Is any margin taken on ad spend?
• What is the minimum term, and what happens after it?
• How will you track enquiries through to booked patients, not just clicks?
• Who does the work day to day?

On budgets, Google Ads works from an average daily budget. Google says a campaign can spend up to twice that figure on a busy day, but you won't be billed more than 30.4 times the daily budget across a month (Google Ads Help). Set the daily figure from your monthly ceiling and the arithmetic holds.

For transparency, here is how we do it: ad spend is paid direct to Google or Meta, with no margin taken, and the starting budget is agreed on a call.

What to expect in the first 90 days

The first quarter is for finding out what an enquiry really costs you. Judge it on that, not on week one.

Month one: setup and tracking

Calls, forms and bookings need tracking properly before any budget is judged. Google Search ads can produce enquiries within days of going live, because the person is already looking. Most of what you learn in month one is which searches are worth paying for and which aren't.

Months two and three: the numbers settle

Meta ads need a learning period. Meta says an ad set usually leaves its learning phase after about 50 results in the week after its last significant edit, and that editing during learning resets it (Meta Business Help Centre). A clinic optimising for real enquiries rather than cheap clicks can take a while to get there, so Meta results often land in the second half of the quarter. SEO work started in month one is usually only beginning to show by month three.

What to measure

• Cost per enquiry, against your ceiling
• Close rate, split by channel, because enquiries from different sources rarely convert equally
• Cost per new patient
• How many of those patients rebook or refer someone, which is where the real value sits

By day 90 you should know whether a channel can work at your ceiling. If it can't, that is still a useful answer: it tells you where not to spend.

A simple private practice marketing plan

If you want one page to work from, this is it.

1. Work out patient value, margin and close rate from last quarter's figures.
2. Set your ceiling per new patient and per enquiry.
3. Fix the website and Google Business Profile first, because every other channel depends on them.
4. Pick one paid channel that matches how your patients find you, searching or discovering, and give it 90 days at a budget under your ceiling.
5. Track every enquiry through to a booking, and review cost per new patient every month.
6. Add a second channel only once the first is working.

It is also the honest answer to how to get more patients for a private practice: fewer channels, done properly, measured against what a patient is worth to you.