How to determine your medical practice’s marketing budget

In an ideal world, your service would be your marketing.  

But the reality is that you need to market your healthcare practice to attract and keep patients. 

You’ve probably dabbled in marketing. Maybe you’ve tried your hand at Meta advertising, social media marketing, or even blog posts. While the first step to getting started is… getting started, deciding on your marketing budget is high on the priority list.

Whether you outsource or handle your marketing in-house, you’ll have to determine your medical practice’s marketing budget. How much should you spend to get patients in the door?

Of course, there’s no one right answer. (Nothing’s ever that easy.) But we’re here to help you determine:

In the Healthcare Marketing Budget Benchmark Survey, Tebra surveyed owners and managers of 106 private practices to hear how they allocate their marketing budgets directly from them.

According to Tebra’s survey, here’s roughly how much private medical practices spend on marketing in dollars:

Here’s the full budget breakdown:

However, if you’re looking for an easier way to calculate your own budget, it’s more helpful to look at the marketing budget as a percentage of the practice’s overall revenue:

Several critical factors play into how you determine your annual healthcare marketing budget. It’s not just about picking a number that sounds good — it’s about strategically aligning your financial resources with the unique aspects of your practice. 

Consider these factors when determining your healthcare practice’s marketing budget.

Practices at this stage have to allocate a much higher percentage of their revenue for marketing efforts than practices that have been around for a while. You’ll have to balance the need for new patients with your available funds.

Also, take a look at your patient capacity. If you can’t expand your care team, how many patients can you realistically see in a day? If you’re well under capacity, it means you need to siphon more money into your budget. However, you can have a more conservative marketing cap if you're near max capacity.

Your specialty also impacts your patient lifetime value. Do you often see patients for a short period of time, like a physical therapy clinic? Then, you need to work harder to continue to acquire new patients. However, if you work in primary care, your patients will typically stick around longer, and you won’t have to continuously work as hard to find new ones.

A well-structured marketing budget is essential to get your marketing plan up and running. But what should medical practices put in a marketing budget? Consider these elements:

Once you’ve decided on your marketing budget, you need to determine how to spend it. You need a strategic approach that balances multiple channels to achieve the highest ROI. Let’s examine marketing tactics and how medical practices allocate their budgets.

Note: You can also start with a goal-based marketing budget that works through this process backward. Start with your goal, determine the tactics to get there, and set the budget based on that information.

Average budget: 

Networking and referrals are often the most effective marketing tactics that medical practices can employ. However, they're not often reflected accurately in marketing budgets.

These often include hard expenses like health fairs, networking events, and conferences. It pays for tickets, signage, promotional items, and booth fees. 

However, this doesn’t account for the intangibles that make networking and referrals effective. It takes time to build relationships and earn a reputation that encourages people to recommend your practice. You need to deliver consistent results, have strong patient relationships, offer personalized care, and keep patients engaged. 

Networking is a great marketing tool for longevity and sustainable growth, but it’s not a quick solution for attracting more patients to your practice.

Average budget:

As part of your marketing budget, allocate resources to ensure your practice is accurately and prominently listed across various online platforms. Online listings, such as Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business), insurance websites, and review sites improve your SEO, making you more likely to land on top of the results page. 

That’s likely why 42% of surveyed medical practices use online business listings. It’s ranked the #2 most used tactic and the second most successful for practices. Yet, most providers only keep up with 1 to 3 listings out of more than 60 in the market. 

To make the most of your online listings, you need to claim them and update them monthly to reflect new information (think: updated hours, new providers, additional specialties, etc.). Overall, practices said managing their online listings was the third most effective marketing tactic.

Whether you manage your own online listings or automate them, it drastically impacts your searchability on the web and offers a high ROI.

Average budget: 

Managing your healthcare practice’s online reputation is critical in today’s digital landscape. According to Tebra’s 4th annual Patient Perspectives report, 3 in 4 patients say online reviews are extremely or very important when choosing a healthcare provider.

According to Tebra’s most recent survey, 37% of medical practices use online reviews and reputation management as part of their marketing efforts, and practices ranked it the second most successful marketing tactic overall.

You can manage reviews, send surveys, monitor feedback, and respond to reviews either with your in-house team or through reputation management automation. 

Take a look at some additional strategies to boost your online reputation.

Average budget:

Medical practices can use social media ads to attract new patients and engage current ones. Ads offer a strategic way to increase visibility and promote health services.

Social media advertising enables practices to target specific demographics, tailoring messaging to potential patients based on age, location, interests, and even health-related behaviors. This level of customization ensures that you use your marketing dollars efficiently and helps you reach the right audience with the right message.

Given how budget allocations vary, there’s clearly flexibility in how much you invest in this channel. The key is to align your spending with clear objectives and measurable outcomes. This could include increasing website traffic, boosting appointment bookings, or enhancing patient engagement.

Average budget:

Earned media is any content written about your business that you didn’t pay for or create yourself. Owned media are tactics like your practice website, blog, or social media accounts. Together, they make a powerful marketing platform.

Search engine optimization (SEO) falls somewhere in the middle, influenced by what you write about your practice and what others write about it. With average budgets indicating modest SEO spending for most medical practices, you can do the most by optimizing your existing website and using local SEO strategies.

Since creating a practice website or starting a blog can seem daunting, many practices outsource it to healthcare marketing agencies with the resources to build a full digital marketing strategy.

Whichever budget range you determine will also likely determine the depth of your strategies. SEO and content marketing are both long-term strategies that take time to build up but pay off in the end.

Average budget:

Print ads and billboards require relatively minimal expertise and are a straightforward option for medical practice marketing. They’re both easy to create, either by an in-house team or through an agency, and reusable for multiple campaigns.

While it’s hard to measure the ROI of billboards, coming in last place on Tebra’s most impactful survey, this traditional approach can work in high-traffic areas. Billboards may cost as little as $2,000 per month but can soar to as much as $100,000 in populous urban areas. Still, they should be considered for brand awareness and patient acquisition.

Print ads come with a much smaller price tag, with magazine ads typically starting around $500. Still, those considering print ads should take a closer look at digital ads for their ability to target specific demographics and their trackability.

What should you expect for healthcare practice marketing in 2024? Most surveyed medical practices (65%) anticipate their marketing budget to stay the same in 2024, with nearly a third expecting an increase.

With mostly stable marketing budgets, medical practices seem to be approaching marketing with a cautiously optimistic approach.

Digital channels will continue to dominate marketing spending, with reputation management and online reviews at the top. As 2024 progresses, it’s clear that healthcare practices are balancing stability and targeted investments to position themselves for sustained growth and success in this dynamic healthcare market.