What med spa marketing actually costs

Three separate numbers, not one

A marketing budget for a med spa is made of an agency fee, an advertising budget that goes to Google and Meta, and the cost of the tools that answer and remind. Quotes that blend all three into one monthly figure are hiding which part is being marked up.

Our own fees are published: a one-time setup between 1,500 and 4,500 dollars depending on the package, then a flat monthly fee between 1,200 and 4,200 dollars. Your advertising budget is paid by you, on your card, directly to the platforms, and we never take a percentage of it.

Ask any agency to split their quote the same way. The ones who will not are usually taking a share of your ad spend, which means their income grows when your budget grows, whether or not the calendar does.

What a booking is allowed to cost

Start from your own numbers rather than from a benchmark. Take the revenue from an average first visit, add what that client spends with you over the following year, then decide what share of it you are willing to pay to acquire them. For most aesthetic practices that share sits somewhere between a tenth and a quarter.

That gives you a ceiling for cost per booked consultation. Multiply it by the number of consultations you want each month and you have an advertising budget that is tied to your calendar rather than to a round number someone suggested.

The arithmetic also tells you when to stop. If the ceiling you can afford is below what a click costs in your market, paid advertising is not your next move, and any agency that will not say so is selling you a setup fee.

Why the cheap quote is usually the expensive one

A low monthly fee with no system for answering enquiries produces leads you will not reach. You pay for the clicks, the enquiries arrive, and the ones nobody called back are gone. That is the most expensive advertising there is, and it looks cheap on the invoice.

Compare quotes on cost per booked appointment, not on the fee. An agency charging twice as much while producing bookings at half the cost is the cheaper option, and the only way to see that is to measure bookings instead of leads.

Questions that get you a real number

Ask what the fee covers and what is billed separately. Ask whether the ad budget is paid by you to the platform. Ask what happens to an enquiry that arrives at nine in the evening. Ask what the first ninety days are expected to produce, and what happens if they do not.

Every one of those has a plain answer. An agency that answers them in one sentence each is an agency that has done this before.