In this article we’re going to cover:
- “Marketing is too expensive”!
- What the most successful clinics spend on their marketing
Marketing costs too much:
B) I’m not confident enough to spend money on marketing.
“I just rely on word of mouth”
Too expensive?
Is £1k really that much? Is £2k?
They really didn’t want to pay our fee. It was too expensive. (In case anyone is wondering about our fees, you’d be hard pressed to spend more than £500 on us for marketing services, most clients are around £350 a month).
Because I’m a convincing guy, we got them on board. Our results:
He owes me a beer and an apology for saying we’re too expensive, I’ll be getting that next week 🙂
How much do the most successful clinics spend?
When we look across all of our customers and the relationships we have in the industry, we have some really interesting data on the average clinic marketing spend in the UK. Generally, clinics will spend roughly £200 a month. Usually that’s running some ads on Facebook or non digital like posters and so on.
However we want to look at what the really successful clinics spend. (For reference I’m not suggesting that you aren’t successful, there are always outliers).
First let’s define successful. This would be a clinic that is consistently close to capacity. 85% plus every month of the year.
Next, we need to look at a few variables:
- Location
- Current revenue of a clinic
- Available appointments (capacity)
Location. A clinic in London will always spend more than a rural clinic in the Cotswolds. Whether that’s due to the competition, the cost per click on Google ads or even the price you charge. If you charge £150 an hour then it’ll cost more to acquire a patient than if you charged £50. That’s a simple marketing rule, the more you charge the more your marketing costs!
Revenue. The more revenue a clinic makes, the less of a percentage of their revenue spend on marketing! If you’re generating £1m a year then that’s a lot of patients and referrals. You’re also generally incredibly established in an area and you won’t need to push as hard as a clinic generating £200k.
Capacity. If you only have two appointments available per week then you won’t be spending £10k a month on marketing no matter what.
Let’s run a few scenarios.
- A Clinic generates £500k a year and has good capacity and is looking to grow. Their average spend should be between 5-8% of their revenue.
- A Clinic generates £100k a year, is new and really needs to push as they have tons of capacity, they need to be spending 50%-60% of their revenue. (If they’re brand new and recently opened, make £1k a month then it’s 200% of their revenue.
- A clinic generates £700/£800k with reasonable capacity, 3%-4% of their revenue.
- A clinic, no matter what their size and that is happy with their numbers and is not looking to grow, 2%-3% of their revenue.
If you’re a London based clinic then you can add a percentage point or two onto that number.
It’s also worth mentioning one other caveat. If your SEO is absolutely on point and you’re dominating Google then you can actually reduce your spend dramatically, by as much as 3%. After all, why run ads if you’re visible for every search out there?
These are numbers from the most successful clinics we know and wouldn’t be considered to be accurate for most businesses outside of the industry or indeed the advice you’d find on the internet. This is a recent article by Hubspot with some more in depth numbers and in healthcare they recommend spending 18% of your revenue, most places will tell you 10%.
The question is, how do you match up?!
Obviously after reading this article you’re going to want to join us so if you do, drop us an email at hello@hmdg.co.uk or book in a call for a chat!
