Let's TalkLet's TalkThe fastest sales cycle in aesthetics, and the one most dependent on repeat visits - so the work is as much about the second appointment as the first enquiry.
Most med spas price their marketing against a single treatment and then wonder why the numbers never work. Send us 12 months of appointment history and we will show you revenue per patient over their first year, by treatment entry point. That number is what you can afford to spend, and it is usually two to four times what the practice assumed.
Four failures we see repeatedly in this vertical, and what each one actually costs.
A patient who comes in for one syringe of filler and returns three times a year is worth several multiples of that first appointment. Practices that budget against the first ticket cap their spend far below what they could profitably afford, and lose the market to whoever did the arithmetic.
An introductory price brings in people shopping on price, who do not return when the price goes up. The offer has to be built around the consultation or a first-visit experience rather than a discount, or the retention that makes the model work never materialises.
Naming specific products, promising outcomes, or framing copy around what the reader supposedly dislikes about their face are all routes to a restricted account. Med spa creative sits closer to that line than almost any other vertical, so it has to be written to the policy rather than corrected after rejections.
The cheapest appointment in a med spa is the next one from someone who already came. Most practices have a list they email occasionally and no structured recall, which means paid acquisition is subsidising a retention gap it cannot fix.
Business outcomes rather than dashboard metrics. None of these is a guaranteed number - where we do guarantee something, it is written into the offer above.
The real deliverables, not a list written to make a proposal look thicker.
Not the general agency pitch. The reasons that only apply to this kind of business.
Which treatment you lead with decides which patients you get. Some entry points produce people who come back for a second and third treatment; others produce one visit from someone comparing prices across four clinics. We measure that from your own appointment history and build the campaigns around the entry points that lead somewhere, which sometimes means advertising your most popular treatment less.
Some treatments look like loss leaders and lead nowhere - the patient never returns for anything else, and the margin on the visit itself is thin. Continuing to advertise them keeps the booking numbers up and the business flat. Saying so reduces the spend we manage, and it is still the more useful thing to tell a clinic owner than another report showing cheap bookings.
A med spa is frequently constrained by one or two senior injectors rather than by enquiries. Generating demand that only they can serve produces waitlists, cancellations and frustrated patients, while other practitioners have open time. We plan campaigns against who can actually deliver the treatment, and push demand toward the services and people with room to take it.
Twelve months of appointment history turned into first-year revenue per patient by entry treatment. Everything downstream is priced off this, so it comes first.
A consultation or first-visit offer that attracts patients who intend to return, rather than a price that attracts patients who intend to shop.
Injectables creative written to the policy, avoiding product claims and personal-attribute framing, with a compliance pass before launch and on every new batch.
Sub-minute response on new enquiries, and recall sequences for the existing list switched on at the same time. The second lifts return on the first immediately.
Budget rises while cost per new patient stays under the affordable number from step one, rather than against a first-ticket target that was always too tight.
The parts of this that come from having run it in this industry before rather than from running it well in general.
The treatment that brings a patient in often says more about whether they return than any age or income setting in an ad account does, and it is measurable from appointment history the clinic already holds. Very few clinics look, so very few campaigns are built around it - which makes it one of the cheapest advantages available in this category.
A patient on a monthly membership has a value you can actually state in advance, which turns acquisition from an uncertain bet into a calculation. It also moves the metric that matters from bookings to churn - and churn is a retention problem most marketing plans do not even measure, let alone manage.
The consideration period is long - comparing clinics, reading reviews, looking at prices - and the decision, when it comes, is fast and goes to whoever responds first. The long part is held by organic content and remarketing; the short part is won by response time. Clinics that invest in only one of the two lose the patient at the other end.
Paid search runs into two rulebooks at once. Organic loses the explainer searches to publishers and wins on cost and suitability. The map turns on category choice and practitioner profiles. Enquiries are decided by response speed and deposits. Knowing which of those is your clinic's actual bottleneck is the planning decision - the pages below take each one in turn.
A note on the fit: this was a dental group rather than a med spa. We use it here because the mechanics are the same ones that decide a med spa - standardised funnels across locations, budget moved to the channel that actually converted, and automated reminders behind every booking. Cost per lead fell to $19 and appointment show-rate lifted 44%, which in a repeat-visit business is worth more than the acquisition saving.
Read the full case studyWorking out first-year patient value changed what we were willing to spend. We had been capping ourselves at the price of one syringe.
Dropping the introductory discount was counterintuitive and it worked. Fewer bookings, far better patients.
The recall sequences were sitting there unused. That was revenue we already owned and were not asking for.
Because it decides what the ad account is allowed to spend, and almost every med spa gets it wrong in the same direction. A patient who enters on one treatment and returns three times a year is worth several multiples of that first appointment, so budgeting against the first ticket caps acquisition far below what is profitable. Getting that number right usually unlocks more growth than any optimisation inside the campaigns.
As the primary offer, usually yes. A discount selects for patients shopping on price, and they do not return at full price - which breaks the repeat economics the business depends on. A consultation-led or first-visit-experience offer converts a little worse on the day and produces materially better patients. We have seen practices cut new bookings by a fifth and grow revenue, because the mix changed.
More than most verticals. Naming specific injectable products, promising outcomes, and framing copy around what a reader supposedly dislikes about their appearance are all routes to a restriction - the last one because Meta forbids implying knowledge of a personal attribute. Before-and-after imagery is restricted too. It is workable, but only if the creative is written to the policy from the start rather than edited after rejections.
Both, and they are deliberately launched together. The cheapest appointment in a med spa is the next one from a patient who already came, and most practices have a list with no structured recall behind it. Running acquisition without that is paying to fill a gap that retention should be filling, so the recall sequences go live in the same phase as the campaigns.
They vary by state and they bind you regardless of what the ad platforms allow - what counts as a testimonial, whether results imagery is permitted, what disclaimer must accompany it, and how practitioners may be described. We check your state's rules before creative is produced, because the board is a slower and more serious problem than a rejected ad.
It depends on capacity to fill rather than on locations. A single med spa with open appointment slots and a treatment menu beyond one service has good economics. On a smaller budget there is not enough signal to optimise every treatment at once, so we lead with the entry treatment that produces the best returning patients and put the early effort into recall and response time, which cost nothing in media. As the budget grows, more treatments get their own campaigns - and the repeat-visit maths tends to make this one of the better verticals to spend in.
This page is the business. These are the individual pieces of it, each written for how that discipline actually behaves in this industry.
The board that governs your advertising depends on the licence you hold and the region you hold it in. These are the states we have written up.
Written for owners weighing this up, whether or not they work with us.
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.