What is a typical med spa marketing budget?
The clearest way to size a marketing budget is as a percentage of revenue. Across the aesthetics industry, benchmarks are well established: established practices spend roughly 5–10% of revenue, and the American Med Spa Association (AmSpa) puts the average at about 7%. Newer practices — those in their first one to three years — typically need to invest at the higher end, often 10–20%, because they’re buying awareness they don’t yet have.
Average share of revenue a med spa invests in marketing.Source: AmSpa Medical Spa State of the Industry Report
In dollars, that scales with your revenue. A practice doing $500,000 a year at a 7–10% budget is spending roughly $2,900–$4,200 per month. A newer practice pushing 15% to grow faster could be at $6,000–$8,000 a month or more.
What are you actually paying for?
The single biggest source of confusion is treating “marketing cost” as one number. It’s really two:
- Ad spend — the money that goes directly to Meta or Google to show your ads. This is paid to the platform, not your agency.
- Management & systems — the fee for the people and tools that build your funnel, write the ads, run the follow-up, and optimize results. This is what an agency or an in-house hire costs.
When you compare quotes, always separate the two. A $3,000/month agency fee with $2,000 of ad spend is a $5,000 total investment — and a cheap-looking agency that quietly requires $8,000 in ad spend may cost you more overall.
How much does a med spa marketing agency cost?
Agency management fees for med spas generally run $2,000–$10,000 per month, depending on scope. On the lower end you get a single channel (usually paid social) managed at arm’s length. On the higher end you get a full system — paid media, landing pages, SMS and email nurture, CRM, and reporting — built and operated for you. The gap in price usually reflects how much of the funnel the agency actually owns.
What is a med spa cost per lead?
On the ad platforms, med spa clicks aren’t cheap. Google Ads cost-per-click typically ranges from $2.50 to $10+, with high-intent terms like “Botox near me” sitting at the top of that range. Your cost per lead depends on how well your landing page converts that click, and your cost per booked patient depends on how fast and consistently you follow up. This is why raw lead cost is a misleading metric on its own — two practices with the same cost per lead can have wildly different costs per patient.
How do you know if it’s worth it?
Marketing cost only makes sense next to patient value. In aesthetics, the average visit generates around $536, and a retained patient returning three to four times a year is worth roughly $1,600–$2,100 annually — climbing past $5,000 over a few years before referrals and memberships. Against numbers like that, a few hundred dollars to acquire a patient who stays for years is a strong return. The failure mode isn’t spending too much; it’s spending on traffic with no system to convert and retain it.
Typical first-year value of a retained med spa patient.Source: aggregated aesthetics industry benchmarks
What does Lysett Social charge?
We keep pricing transparent. Our founding rate is $2,250/month (locked 12 months, first five practices), and our standard package is $4,500/month — both include the full system: paid media, landing pages, SMS, email, AI calls, and CRM, built and operated for you. Ad spend is separate and paid directly to the platforms, with a $3,000/month minimum so there’s enough data to optimize. See full pricing.