How Much Should a Practice Actually Spend on Marketing?

An owner posted a question in r/smallbusinessowner with a title that is really the whole problem: "How much do you spend on marketing." Not what worked, not what to spend it on. Just a number, asked of strangers. The replies came in as percentages, the way they always do. Seven to ten percent of revenue. Under five and you are not serious. A contractor asking the identical question one subreddit over got the identical answers.

Here is the trouble with every one of those replies. A percentage tells you how much to spend. It tells you nothing about the thing that actually decides your return, which is what you spend it on and in what order. Two practices can both put 8 percent of revenue into marketing and one of them wastes most of it, because the money went in before the machine that was supposed to catch it existed.

The percentage rule answers a question you are not asking

The percentage is not wrong. It is an answer to a different question than the one you have. When an owner asks a public forum what to spend, the people answering run businesses with completely different unit economics: a general contractor, a dentist, a software founder. A contractor replying in one of these threads flatly called spending under a set share of revenue ridiculous, with no reference to what the money buys (r/GeneralContractor, "How much do you spend on marketing"). Adjacent trade, identical reasoning, and none of it transfers to a treatment room.

For a practice there is at least a real anchor to start from. According to AMSPA's 2024 State of the Industry data, as compiled by Spa Ledger, a single-location med spa spends a median of 6% of gross revenue on marketing, which against the roughly $1.2 million median revenue is about $72,000 a year. That is where to start the conversation. It is not where to end it, because $72,000 spent in the wrong sequence buys you clicks and a feeling, not patients.

What the money buys matters more than how much there is

Our own flagship account is the clearest case I can point to. It runs on a daily budget small enough that most agencies would decline to manage it, and it still sits second on impression share in its market, behind an advertiser spending something like ten times more. The cost per click runs under a dollar. The cost per booking action lands at well under a quarter of the category cost per lead. Not because we are clever with bids, but because the budget went in last, after the parts that decide whether a click becomes a patient were already built.

WordStream's 2025 Google Ads benchmarks report that the average cost per lead is about $60 for Beauty and Personal Care and about $57 for Physicians and Surgeons, against an all-industry average above $70. Those are lead actions, the same soft-signal category our own number counts, so the comparison is honest rather than flattering. A small budget spent in the right order beats a large one spent in the wrong order, and the gap is not close.

Spend in this order, not in this amount

In my work with practices, the budget question is the last thing I want to settle, not the first. Here is the sequence I give an owner before we discuss a number at all.

First, measurement. If you cannot tell a booked patient from a click, every number downstream is fiction. We once ran a campaign that spent real money for weeks and recorded zero bookings, and the cause was a single line of inherited tracking code, not the campaign. Spend here first or spend blind.

Second, the conversion surfaces: the landing page, the booking flow, the phone that rings while you are with a patient. A click that lands on a page built to inform rather than to book is a click you paid for and threw away.

Third, the organic and local structure: your profile, your service-area pages, your reviews. These compound over months, and a competitor's budget cannot take them from you the way it can take an ad slot.

Paid search comes last, and it comes capped. Set the cap at what a real, calendar-confirmed cost per patient justifies, and raise it only when that number has earned the raise.

The strategic recommendation

Before you set next year's number, spend the next 30 days doing one thing: reconcile what you think you spent against what you can prove it produced. Pull your ad spend, your new-patient count from the booking system, and your consult-to-booking outcomes into a single view for the last three months. Most owners have never once put those three numbers in the same row.

That reconciliation tells you something a percentage never can: whether your problem is that you spend too little, or that what you already spend leaks out before it reaches a patient. Set next year's budget off that answer, not off a stranger's rule of thumb. Across the practices I have seen, the first dollar of new return is almost never in a bigger budget. It is in fixing the order of the one you already have.

Where GrowBien fits

In my work with practices, the reason the order gets inverted is almost never ignorance. It is that spend, patients, and outcomes live in three systems that never meet, so nobody can see where the money leaks. GrowBien is built to put those numbers in one row and sequence the spend behind them. If you want to see your own number before you set the budget, book a free marketing review.