Guide
How to set a practice marketing budget.
The usual advice is to spend a fixed share of revenue on marketing, and the share quoted changes from one website to the next. A budget built from what a new patient is worth, how many the practice can see, and what each channel costs is harder to write down and much easier to defend.
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Is there a standard percentage of revenue to spend on marketing?
Not one we could verify. Percentages of revenue for medical marketing circulate widely, usually without a named survey, a date or a sample behind them, and we found none on a publisher's page that we could check and cite. This site prints no rule of thumb for that reason.
A percentage also answers the wrong question. A practice with a long wait for new patients needs almost no patient marketing whatever its revenue, while a new practice with empty schedules may need to spend well above any average for a year. What a practice can afford depends on what a patient brings in and how many more patients it can see.
How do you build a budget from what a patient is worth?
Start with the value of one new patient: the average collected per visit, the visits a patient makes in a year, and the years they stay. A dermatology patient on regular follow-up, a dental family on recall or a member of a concierge practice is worth many visits; an urgent care walk-in may be worth one or two.
Then decide how much of that value you are willing to spend to win the patient. The patient acquisition cost calculator takes the monthly spend and the new patients it brings, works out the cost per new patient and the return, and lets you set a target ratio between what a patient brings in and what they cost. Its result tells you the most you can spend each month and still hit that ratio.
Finally, check capacity. A budget that brings more patients than the schedule can hold only lengthens the wait and produces bad reviews. Spend to fill the openings you have, by service and by physician.
What does paid search cost on the healthcare benchmark?
If part of the budget goes to search ads, LocaliQ's healthcare benchmarks are the best dated figures we have found. Across healthcare, a click costs $5.64 (benchmark, LocaliQ, 2026) and 8.09% (benchmark, LocaliQ, 2026) of clicks become a call or form, and LocaliQ puts the cost per lead at $66.02 (benchmark, LocaliQ, 2026); working from the first two figures gives a similar cost of about $69.72 (worked out from the benchmark, LocaliQ, 2026) a lead.
The categories differ a great deal, as the table shows, and a city with many competing practices can run above the median. A lead is not a patient: a share of callers book, and a share of those arrive, so the cost per new patient is always higher than the cost per lead.
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Healthcare search ad benchmarks, by category
| Category | Cost per click | Conversion rate |
|---|---|---|
| Healthcare overall | $5.64 a click | 8.09% of clicks |
| Addiction Recovery | $3.46 a click | 0.5% of clicks |
| Assisted Living, Elder & Home Care Services | $6.30 a click | 5.51% of clicks |
| Dermatology | $4.90 a click | 25.33% of clicks |
| Emergency Dentistry | $7.85 a click | 8.89% of clicks |
| Emergency Medicine | $2.29 a click | 6.89% of clicks |
| General Dentistry | $7.03 a click | 7.74% of clicks |
| General Practice & Family Medicine | $5.47 a click | 11.63% of clicks |
| Hearing Aids & Care | $8 a click | 5.62% of clicks |
| Hospitals & Clinics | $4.90 a click | 6.1% of clicks |
| Mental Health | $4.22 a click | 1.85% of clicks |
| Ophthalmology | $4.95 a click | 18.29% of clicks |
| Oral-Maxillofacial Surgery | $7.85 a click | 11.6% of clicks |
| Orthodontics | $8.76 a click | 14.21% of clicks |
| Physical Therapy | $4.95 a click | 15.35% of clicks |
| Plastic & Cosmetic Surgery | $5.75 a click | 8.52% of clicks |
| Urology | $5.64 a click | 4.61% of clicks |
How does the money usually split across channels?
Most practices spend in five places, and the cheapest ones come first. The free listings and the website cost staff time; booking marketplaces charge per patient; ads charge per click; and the people who answer the phone decide what all of it is worth. The listing site directory records how each listing and booking site charges.
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Where a practice marketing budget goes
| Channel | How it charges | What to decide |
|---|---|---|
| Free listings and reviews | Staff time only | Who keeps profiles current and answers reviews. |
| The practice website | Build cost, then hosting and upkeep | Whether each service the practice wants more of has its own page. |
| Booking marketplaces | A fee per new patient or booking, where published | Whether the fee is lower than what ads cost for the same patient. |
| Search and social ads | A cost per click or per view | Which services to fund, and a monthly cap. |
| Front desk and intake | Salaries and phone systems | How fast calls and forms are answered, and by whom. |
How does the budget change with the kind of practice?
Practices whose patients choose for themselves, such as dermatology, dental and plastic surgery, spend on listings, websites and ads. Practices chosen by referring physicians, such as pathology or thoracic surgery, spend almost nothing on media and a great deal of time on referrers. Practices chosen by facilities, such as anesthesia groups, spend on relationships and recruiting.
Each marketing guide by specialty works the calculator's example for its benchmark and says which kind of practice it is; the pathology guide shows the referral case and the dermatology guide the patient-facing one.
How do you know whether the budget is working?
Ask every new patient how they found the practice and record it, track calls by source where you can, and compare each channel's cost with the new patients it brought. After a few months, move money from the channels with the highest cost per new patient to the lowest, and stop anything that brings calls but not patients.
Questions to ask
- What is one new patient worth to the practice over the years they stay?
- How many more new patients can each physician see in a month?
- Which channels brought new patients last quarter, and at what cost each?
- How many calls and forms went unanswered last month?
- What target return on marketing spend will the practice hold itself to?
Questions people ask.
What percentage of revenue should a medical practice spend on marketing?
We have found no sourced figure we can stand behind, so we do not quote one. Build the budget from what a new patient is worth, how many the practice can see, and what each channel costs; the patient acquisition cost calculator does the arithmetic.
How much does a new patient cost a medical practice?
It depends on the channel and the specialty. On LocaliQ's healthcare benchmark a search lead costs about $69.72 (worked out from the benchmark, LocaliQ, 2026), and only some leads become patients; free listings and referrals cost staff time instead.
What should a first-year marketing budget for a new practice include?
The website, claimed and complete listings for every physician and location, a steady process for reviews, and a limited ad budget for the services with the most open time, reviewed monthly against new patients booked.
Sources
Every rule and figure on this page was read on the source’s own page on the date shown. The guide was last checked on .