Most clinics spend 0.2% of revenue on marketing. It should be closer to 3%

I've reviewed budgets where the clinic was investing about 0.23% of its revenue in marketing. Less than a quarter of one percent. For a clinic turning over $1 million a year, that's roughly $2,300 across twelve months, or under $200 a month. You cannot run a sensible Google Ads account on that, let alone a website, an intake process, and any kind of reactivation. The minimum sensible ad spend I'd put behind a single channel is around $500 a month, and that's the floor, not the target.

The benchmark I work to with clinics is closer to 3% of revenue. That isn't a number I made up. It's roughly what a healthy, growth minded service business reinvests to keep its pipeline full. The gap between 0.2% and 3% isn't a rounding error. It's the difference between a clinic that quietly relies on word of mouth and hopes, and a clinic that has actually decided to grow.

Once you see your spend as a percentage, the conversation changes. You're no longer asking 'can I afford to spend this?' You're asking 'what growth am I choosing to fund?' Those are two completely different questions, and only one of them leads anywhere.

Percentages are easy to nod along to and hard to feel. So let's put dollars on it. A clinic turning over $500,000 a year at 3% is investing $15,000 annually, or $1,250 a month. A clinic at $1 million is at $30,000 a year, $2,500 a month. A clinic at $1.5 million is at $45,000 a year, $3,750 a month. None of those figures are reckless. They're the cost of keeping the top of your funnel full.

The calculator below does this for you. Put in your annual revenue and the percentage you want to test, and it shows you the monthly and annual spend that percentage represents. Run it at 3%, then run it at the 0.2% you might quietly be at right now, and look at the gap. That gap is usually the size of your new patient problem.

Build the budget by projecting revenue first, then deciding what share of it funds growth. Working the other way around, starting from whatever's left over at the end of the month, is how clinics end up at 0.2% without ever deciding to.

Three percent is the steady state benchmark for a healthy clinic. It is not a ceiling. When a clinic has a genuine new client deficit, an empty book, a new practitioner to fill, a second room sitting idle, I'll coach them well past 3%. I've worked with a clinic running at 4.71% of revenue, around $10,000 a month, specifically to close a new client gap that was strangling the business. That's a deliberate, temporary lift, not a permanent setting.

The logic is simple. If you have practitioner capacity sitting empty, the most expensive thing you can do is under invest in filling it. An idle diary doesn't just cost you the bookings you didn't get. It costs you the practitioner's wage you're paying regardless. A short, sharp lift to 4 or 5% to fix that deficit usually pays for itself faster than the cautious version ever would.

The trap is leaving it on too long, or worse, doing the opposite and turning the marketing off the moment you get busy. A growth push has a start and a finish. You lift the percentage to solve a specific problem, and you bring it back to your steady state benchmark once the problem is solved.

Choosing a percentage of revenue tells you how much you're putting in. It doesn't tell you what you'll get back. For that you need the other half of the maths: what each new patient is worth and what it costs to acquire one. A healthy physio or podiatry Google Ads account in Australia sits around $80 to $100 per new patient booking, with a well optimised account getting down toward $65. Psychology and OT run a little wider at $80 to $120, and NDIS work usually sits higher again, often $120 to $180.

Put those two numbers together and the budget builds itself. If you've decided to invest $2,500 a month and your cost per booking is $100, you're funding roughly 25 new patient bookings a month from that channel. If your cost per booking is closer to $200 because the campaign is chasing the wrong keywords, the same $2,500 buys half as many. The percentage sets the ambition. The cost per booking tells you whether the account is actually delivering on it.

This is also why I'd run the percentage decision and the what you can afford to spend acquiring a patient decision side by side. One sizes the investment from the top down. The other sanity checks it from the unit economics up. When both point at the same number, you can spend with confidence.

Lifting your percentage only works if the spend lands on something that converts. I've audited plenty of clinics that were spending a respectable percentage and still seeing thin results, because the money was leaking before it ever became a booking. Pouring more into a broken account just buys you a more expensive disappointment.

Here are the questions I'd answer before I lifted the percentage on any clinic's budget.

The clinics that grow predictably are the ones that picked a number and committed to it. They projected their revenue, chose a share to reinvest, and then held that line through the busy months and the quiet ones. The clinics that stay stuck are the ones whose marketing spend is whatever happens to be left at the end of the month, which is almost always nothing.

Start at 3% as your steady state benchmark. Lift toward 4 or 5% when you've got a deficit to clear and capacity to fill. Bring it back when the job is done. And before you scale a single dollar, make sure the account isn't quietly leaking the money you're about to add. Decide the percentage on purpose, and the budget stops being a worry and becomes a lever you control.