HMDG’s Top 5 Tips for Marketing Budgets
Most clinics either spend blindly or spend nothing, and both are bad business. A marketing budget only works if it is disciplined, tied to revenue, and adjusted against results. This article is part of our Complete Guide to Marketing for Clinics. Below are five rules we use at HMDG to make sure clinic marketing budgets work instead of waste.
1. Budget as a percentage of revenue
The simplest way to stop overspending or underspending is to tie your marketing budget to your turnover. Growth-focused clinics should put 5–10 percent of annual revenue into marketing. A £500k clinic should be budgeting £25–50k. Spending at random is gambling. Tying it to revenue creates discipline and ensures your investment scales with your business.
2. Match budget to goals
You cannot expect champagne results on a lemonade budget. Spending £200 a month will not deliver the same outcomes as £2,000. Your spend has to match your ambition. A brand-new clinic with lots of capacity to fill needs heavier investment than a mature clinic that is just maintaining numbers. If your goals and your spend do not line up, you will fail before you start.
3. Test before scaling
Throwing thousands at an unproven campaign is reckless. Test small, measure results, and scale what works. Spending £500 to prove a channel makes sense. Spending £5,000 on a hunch does not. The fastest-growing clinics are the ones that test, learn, and scale systematically.
4. Cut dead weight
Too many clinics keep funding marketing channels that do not work simply because they always have. Directories, ads, or campaigns that produce nothing should be cut quickly. Keeping them alive is commercial negligence. Dead spend is money you will never see again. Kill it and move your budget into the channels that prove they deliver.
5. No copy and paste strategies
Set an annual budget, but review it every month. Marketing performance shifts. What worked last quarter may flop this one. Sticking rigidly to a fixed plan is just laziness. Smart clinics commit longterm but adjust tactically based on results. Marketing is dynamic. Your budget should be too.
Budgeting is about control, not guesswork. Tie spend to revenue, test before scaling, and cut what does not deliver. If you want the full strategy, go back to our Complete Guide to Marketing for Clinics. Or move on to the next chapter: Leads & Funnels for Clinics.