Hiring a marketing agency for a med spa, or doing it yourself
What a fair price is, the red flags specific to aesthetics, what to keep in your own name, when in-house makes sense, and why a trial beats a contract.
Med spas get pitched harder than almost any local business. Device manufacturers refer partners, practice management platforms bundle marketing, and a steady stream of aesthetic-specialist agencies work the conference circuit. Most owners have hired at least one and been disappointed.
The disappointment usually is not incompetence. It is a mismatch between what the clinic needed and what was sold. This guide is about telling those apart before the money moves.
What things actually cost
Rough US ranges for a single-location clinic in 2026:
- Google Ads management: $800 to $2,000 a month, or 12% to 20% of ad spend on larger budgets. Separate from the media itself.
- Meta and Instagram ads management: $700 to $1,800 a month.
- Local SEO and Google Business Profile work: $500 to $1,500 a month.
- Social media content and posting: $800 to $2,500 a month, higher if they film on site.
- Full-service retainer: $2,500 to $6,000 a month for a single location, and materially more for multi-site groups.
- Website build: $3,000 to $9,000 for the kind of site described in the website essentials guide.
Below the bottom of those ranges you are usually buying an offshore contractor running a template. Above the top you should be getting on-site content production, a named strategist and weekly contact.
Media spend is separate and should be billed to your own card in your own account. Always.
Red flags specific to aesthetics
They cannot answer the Meta policy question. Ask directly: "What is your approach to before and after imagery in paid ads?" If the answer is that they run them and it is fine, they either have not run enough aesthetic accounts or they are about to get your ad account restricted. The correct answer involves single-frame creative, testimonial video and offer cards. See the Meta ads guide.
They want to advertise per-unit pricing. It generates cheap leads and destroys your average ticket. An agency that leads with a unit special is optimizing for the metric on their report rather than your revenue.
They report leads, not booked treatments. Lead count is the easiest number to inflate and the least connected to your bank account. The report you want tracks leads, consults booked, consults shown, treatments performed and revenue. If they cannot see into your booking system, they cannot manage to the number that matters.
They will not talk about your front desk. In most med spas, the front desk conversation is worth more than any ad change. An agency that never mentions it is not looking at your business.
They own your accounts. If the Google Ads account, the Meta business manager, the domain or the Google Business Profile is in their name, leaving costs you everything you built. This is the most common trap in the industry.
Guarantees of ranking or results. Nobody controls Google's rankings, and outcome promises in a health-adjacent category are a compliance problem as well as a marketing one.
Long contracts up front. Twelve months before any result is a financing arrangement, not a partnership. Six is negotiable. Month to month after a short initial term is normal for competent operators.
What to keep in your own name, always
- The domain, registered to you, with you holding the login.
- Google Ads account, Meta business manager, and every ad account inside it.
- Google Business Profile, with you as primary owner and the agency as manager.
- Website hosting and the site files or CMS admin.
- The client list, exported monthly to somewhere you control.
Grant access. Never transfer ownership. Any agency that resists this arrangement is telling you what leaving them will look like.
When to do it yourself
In-house makes sense in three situations.
If you are under about $40,000 a month in revenue, agency retainers eat too much of the margin. Do the fundamentals yourself: profile, reviews, follow-up speed, one Google Ads campaign. Those four are most of the available upside anyway, and every one of them is documented on this site.
If you have a genuinely good marketing person on staff, keep the strategy in-house and buy specific execution, such as ad management or a site build.
If the constraint is capacity rather than demand, do not hire anyone. A clinic with a full injector calendar and a two-week wait does not have a marketing problem. It has a staffing decision, and spending on ads makes the wait longer and the reviews worse.
The order to fix things in
Whether it is you or an agency, the sequence matters more than the vendor:
- Google Business Profile complete, with the right primary category. See the profile guide.
- Review velocity running at checkout.
- Missed-call text-back and a five-minute response standard. Size the leak on the calculator.
- Treatment pages with prices, credentials and online booking.
- Then paid traffic.
Anyone who wants to start at step five is spending your money to send strangers to a business that is not ready to catch them.
Why trial-first is a fair test
A month of real work is the only honest sample. Deck reviews, case studies and referrals from a manufacturer rep tell you what an agency has done for someone else in a different market with a different injector.
That is the reason every service on this site is offered as a free 14-day trial. Not as a discount tactic, but because it inverts the risk. You see the work in your own accounts, with your own numbers, before any money changes hands, and if it does not move anything you have lost a setup call.
Frequently asked
Should I use an agency that only works with med spas? It helps, mostly for the policy knowledge and the creative patterns. It also means they may be running your competitor two towns over. Ask about exclusivity by market and get the answer in writing.
What should the reporting cadence be? A short monthly report with the five numbers listed above, and a call. Weekly dashboards that nobody reads are theater.
How long before I judge the results? 60 to 90 days for paid channels, two quarters for SEO and AI visibility. Judge the process in week two: are they asking about your booking system, your front desk and your average treatment value, or only about your logo.
If you want to see what a working month looks like before you commit to anything, that is the free 14-day trial. Text or call (385) 832-6175, and read the FAQ first if you want the fine print.