Med spa marketing budget: how much to spend per month at every revenue level, with worked examples

By Benjamin Chua·Updated October 12, 2026·12 min read

Most owners set their marketing budget by accident. Whatever the last agency charged, plus whatever Meta took last month. That is a surgeon dosing anaesthesia off what they used on the last patient instead of this patient's weight and vitals. It might work. You would not want to be on the table when it does not.

Your funnel numbers are the weight and vitals. This article gives you a method you can run in ten minutes with them, worked examples at four revenue levels so you can see the dollars, and two guardrails that tell you when to stop adding spend.

One thing up front. We are not going to quote an industry average. Published med spa benchmarks are thin, usually survey based, and they mix a two-room injector studio with a surgeon-led clinic doing body work. Your own numbers beat any average. The method below runs on them.

The method in three steps

Step 1: pick a percent of revenue from how booked you are

Start from the stage ranges, then let the schedule choose where in the range you sit. Open your provider column for the next four weeks and count the filled hours.

• Under 70 percent booked for the next four weeks: top of the range, 12 percent of revenue. Empty hours are the most expensive thing in the building, so acquisition carries the budget.
• 70 to 85 percent booked: 9 to 10 percent. You are close to busy and need steady demand to fill the capacity you are adding.
• Over 85 percent booked for four weeks straight: 6 to 7 percent. More leads now just lengthen the wait list. Move the freed cash into hiring or a second room, then step the percent back up once the new capacity opens.

The stage labels still work as a rough map. Building clinics under about $50k a month usually sit under 70 percent booked, growing clinics from $50k to $150k sit in the middle band, and mature clinics over $150k with strong rebooking sit at the top. The schedule is the trigger though, and it moves faster than revenue does. These ranges are a working rule from our own client work, not a published statistic.

Step 2: split it across four buckets

Content is video and the production around it. Paid is ad spend plus whoever manages it. Local and Google is your Business Profile, reviews, website and any search ads. Retention is email, SMS, memberships and rebooking tools. A starting split that works for most clinics under about $150k is 35 percent content, 35 percent paid, 15 percent local, 15 percent retention. On $75k a month at 10 percent, that is $7,500: $2,625 content, $2,625 paid, $1,125 local and Google, $1,125 retention.

Past about $150k with full columns, move ten points from paid into retention. An existing patient is cheaper to reactivate than a stranger is to acquire, which is the whole argument behind the Acquisition.com Lifetime Value playbook (p. 6).

Step 3: check the paid bucket against lifetime gross profit

The percent gives you a number. This step tells you whether that number buys patients at a profit. Hormozi's guardrail is lifetime gross profit to customer acquisition cost, LTGP:CAC, and he puts the floor at 3:1 (Hormozi, $100M Leads, p. 146). LTGP is the gross profit one new patient earns you over the time they stay. CAC is what you paid in ads and management to get them through the door.

Worked example for an injector. A $450 average ticket times 3 visits in the first year is $1,350 of revenue. At a 60 percent gross margin after product and provider time, that is $810 of lifetime gross profit per new patient. Divide by 3 and your maximum allowable CAC is $270. If your ads are currently costing $350 per new patient, you are buying patients at a loss, and the answer to 'should I raise the budget' is no, whatever the percent says. The funnel math further down shows where that CAC number comes from.

Worked examples at four revenue levels

Look at the $30k row. $1,260 a month of ad spend is thin. It works, but only if the creative is strong and the person answering DMs is fast. That is why clinics at this stage should spend their content dollars on the provider on camera and almost nothing else. Our 12-month content calendar covers what to film first.

The $300k row is where owners start overspending on paid out of habit. By that size, a working rebooking system and a membership usually produce more revenue per dollar than another $2,000 on Meta.

From ad spend to booked consults: the math

This is the check that stops you funding a budget that cannot work. Think of it like ordering filler. A clinic that orders five boxes because it always orders five boxes is guessing. A clinic that counts booked patients, syringes per area and days ahead is ordering. Budget works the same way: target treatments, times your funnel rates, times cost per lead. All of these are your numbers. If you do not have them yet, pull them from your last 90 days of ads and your booking software before you set next quarter's budget.

1. 1

   Start with media spend, not the whole bucket

   The $75k clinic has a $2,625 paid bucket. If an ads manager costs $625 out of that bucket, $2,000 actually reaches Meta. Use the $2,000 for the lead math and the full $2,625 when you check payback.

2. 2

   Divide by cost per lead

   Cost per lead is what Meta reports once your pixel and lead form are set up properly. $2,000 at a $40 cost per lead gives 50 leads a month.

3. 3

   Multiply by booking rate

   The share of leads your front desk turns into a booked consult. 50 leads at 40 percent gives 20 booked consults.

4. 4

   Multiply by show rate

   The share of booked consults who turn up. 20 booked at 70 percent gives 14 attended consults.

5. 5

   Multiply by close rate and ticket

   14 consults at a 60 percent consult-to-treatment close gives 8 treatments. At a $450 average ticket that is $3,600 of front-end revenue in the first month.

6. 6

   Check 30-day payback

   $3,600 divided by the full $2,625 paid bucket is 1.37x. The ad patients paid for the ads inside 30 days, which Hormozi calls client-financed acquisition (Hormozi, $100M Leads, p. 147). You can keep spending without draining cash.

7. 7

   Check lifetime gross profit

   8 new patients times $810 of lifetime gross profit is $6,480 against $2,625 spent, which is 2.47:1 in year one. That is under the 3:1 floor on first-year numbers alone, and crosses it if patients stay past twelve months. So this clinic holds spend steady and works on retention before it scales.

Read that last step twice. A budget can sit inside the percent range, pay for itself in a month, and still not be worth scaling yet. The percent gets you in the room. The ratios decide whether you add money.

Run the math backwards too. Decide how many treatment starts you need to hit your revenue target, then divide by close rate, show rate and booking rate to get the leads you need, and multiply by cost per lead to get the paid bucket you need. If that number is double the bucket you have, you have three levers before adding spend: better creative to cut cost per lead, faster follow-up to lift booking rate, and deposits plus reminders to lift show rate. Our no-show fix covers the last one. All three are usually cheaper than more media.

The guardrails that stop a budget lying to you

Two rules and one table. Put them next to the budget and check them monthly.

Rule 1: 30-day payback

Revenue from ad-sourced patients in their first 30 days should cover the whole paid bucket, ads plus management. That is a 1.0x floor. Above it, this month's new patients fund next month's ads and you can scale without choking cash. Below it, every month of growth comes out of your bank account, and one slow month can take the whole program down with it (Hormozi, $100M Leads, p. 147). A $600 first-visit package against a $200 CAC clears this easily. A $150 consult fee against a $270 CAC does not, and needs the lifetime number to carry it.

Rule 2: LTGP:CAC between 3:1 and 5:1

Below 3:1, each new patient costs more to win than they give back after margin, so raising the budget scales a loss. Above 5:1 you are being too careful. Patients are cheap for you right now and a competitor will bid that cost up, so raise spend in steps until you settle back inside the band (Hormozi, $100M Leads, p. 146 and p. 231; Acquisition.com Lifetime Value playbook, p. 6). The band tells you when to stop. The percent of revenue never will.

The per-$1,000 minimum

Every $1,000 of media spend should produce at least the numbers below. Beat it two months running and raise spend by about 20 percent. Miss it two months running and fix creative and follow-up before you add a dollar (Hormozi, $100M Leads, p. 156).

What to cut first when cash is tight

Slow month, payroll due, something has to go. Cut in this order.

1. 1Any retainer where the monthly deliverable is graphics, captions or a 'social media presence'. If it cannot show you an enquiry, it goes first.
2. 2Brand-awareness ad campaigns with no lead form or booking link attached.
3. 3Paid directory listings and sponsorships that have never produced a tracked lead.
4. 4Software you pay for but do not open: the second email tool, the unused chatbot.
5. 5Ad spend, but only after the above, and taper rather than switch off. Meta campaigns that go dark lose their learning and cost more to restart.
6. 6Last, and ideally never: the provider's time on camera. Filmed content keeps working for months after the shoot. It is the cheapest asset on this list per week of use.

The three budget mistakes we see most

One-time content investment vs monthly retainer, over 12 months

Owners ask us this a lot, usually because they have both quotes on the desk. The honest way to compare is total cost over a year, what you own at the end, and how much of your time it took. The table keeps it generic. Put your own two quotes into it.

Our offer sits in the right-hand column, so weigh that. The agency vs in-house trade-offs beyond cost are in our agency vs in-house comparison.

What your budget should buy you every month

Which thing to fix first

Where this comes from

• The percent ladder (12 / 9 to 10 / 6 to 7 by utilization) and the 35/35/15/15 split are our working rules from client work. They are not a published statistic and you should move them once you have 90 days of your own data.
• The LTGP:CAC guardrail of 3:1 to 5:1, the 30-day payback rule, the per-$1,000 minimum, the Rule of 100 and the more, better, new ladder are Alex Hormozi's frameworks from $100M Leads (pages 146, 147, 156, 162, 231 and 242 as cited above).
• The consult-led bundle in place of unit discounts follows the value equation in $100M Offers (p. 35).
• Moving spend from acquisition to retention past $150k, and the LTGP definition, follow the Acquisition.com Lifetime Value playbook (pages 6 and 8).
• Every dollar figure in this article ($40 cost per lead, $450 ticket, 60 percent margin, $810 LTGP, $270 max CAC, the $75k clinic) is an illustrative input. Replace each one with your own before you act on the result.

Questions owners ask

Written by Benjamin Chua

Founder of Trueframe and Med Spa Launch. Nine years building video systems for founders and clinics, including a Melbourne plastic surgeon whose account went from 12,043 to 36,236 followers in ten weeks.