Let's TalkLet's TalkPatient acquisition for dermatology and aesthetics, where the cash-pay side funds the practice and the imagery that sells it is the imagery the ad platforms restrict.
Dermatology practices usually market the practice and wonder why the high-value procedures do not fill. We will map your cash-pay procedures against what is actually being searched in your market, show you which ones have demand you are not addressing, and tell you what each consult should cost you.
Four failures we see repeatedly in this vertical, and what each one actually costs.
A patient searching for a mole check and a patient researching injectables share a specialty and nothing else - different urgency, different price sensitivity, different decision length. Practices that run one campaign for dermatology get the low-value medical enquiries cheaply and never fill the aesthetic calendar.
Before-and-after photographs are the most persuasive asset an aesthetics practice owns and they are restricted on Meta. Practices either run them and collect restrictions, or abandon visual proof entirely. Neither is necessary: demonstration, technique and result-in-context creative performs once the angles are built properly.
Mixing insurance-billed dermatology and cash-pay aesthetics in one report produces an average that describes neither. The cash-pay side is where cost per consult can be tied to treatment revenue, so it has to be measured on its own or the budget decisions are guesswork.
Aesthetic consults are often scheduled two or three weeks ahead, which is long enough for the patient to lose momentum or book elsewhere. Without a nurture sequence between booking and appointment, the show-rate quietly decides the return on the whole programme.
The real deliverables, not a list written to make a proposal look thicker.
Your cash-pay procedures ranked against what is actually searched in your market. This routinely finds a treatment with real local demand and no page addressing it.
Two funnels, two conversion definitions, two reports. Until this exists, no number about the practice means very much.
Demonstration, technique and result-in-context angles, plus a board and platform compliance pass before anything runs. Planned around the restriction rather than discovered by rejection.
Sub-minute response on every enquiry, then a sequence between booking and appointment so the consult still arrives three weeks later.
Budget follows cost per consult against treatment value, procedure by procedure, rather than a single practice-level target.
The clinic group below came to us running one campaign across every service line in three states, with a cost per lead that made expansion unaffordable. Splitting demand by service line and moving the conversion to the booked consult cut cost per lead 57% within two weeks. That reduction is what funded the next nine states - by eighteen months the group was running in twelve states at 500+ leads a day.
Read the full case studySeparating the medical enquiries from the aesthetic ones was the whole thing. We had been celebrating cheap leads that were never going to book a treatment.
They built creative that worked without before-and-afters. Two agencies before them told me it was impossible.
The nurture between booking and appointment lifted our show-rate more than any ad change did.
Yes, and you largely have to on Meta, where before-and-after imagery is restricted and enforcement is routine. The alternatives that perform are demonstration of the procedure itself, technique and equipment, practitioner-led explanation, and result-in-context rather than side-by-side comparison. Where your state board permits results imagery, it still has a place on your own site and in organic content - it is the paid channel that constrains it.
Almost always. The two patients differ in urgency, price sensitivity and decision length, and a shared campaign optimises toward whichever converts cheapest - which is the medical enquiry, and which does not fill the aesthetic calendar. Separating them costs a little more in management and is usually the single biggest improvement available to a dermatology practice.
They differ by state, and they matter more than most practices expect - what qualifies as a testimonial, whether results imagery is permitted, what disclaimer must accompany a claim, and how a practitioner's credentials may be described. We check your state's rules before creative is built rather than after something has run, because the board is a slower and more serious problem than an ad platform.
It comes from your treatment values rather than from a benchmark. A practice where the average aesthetic treatment is $4,000 can afford a materially higher cost per consult than one at $600, and the useful target is a fraction of treatment value rather than a number borrowed from another practice. Working that out is the first thing in the free teardown.
We handle the response and the booking route, and we integrate with your calendar. The consultation conversation stays with your team, though we review call recordings monthly and feed back what is losing bookings. In aesthetics that feedback is often worth more than a media change, because the enquiry is rarely the constraint.
It depends on cash-pay volume rather than on locations. A single practice with a strong aesthetic offering and enough capacity to fill has better economics than a multi-location group doing mostly insurance-billed work. Below roughly $8,000 a month in media it is hard to gather enough signal per procedure to optimise properly, and we would say so rather than take the retainer.
This is one part of a bigger service. Here is the whole of it, and the closest neighbours.
No pitch deck, no discovery call you have to sit through. Tell us the situation and we will tell you whether we can help.