Marketing for med spas, where nobody is searching for you yet
Almost nobody wakes up searching for a treatment they have never heard of. That single fact decides where a med spa should spend, and where it should not.
What the search behaviour actually looks like
Search volume for aesthetics is thin outside a handful of branded treatment names, and those names are bid on by every clinic in the metro. The demand that matters here does not exist until something creates it, which makes this one of the few local categories where paid social is the primary channel rather than the second one.
The first treatment is rarely the business. A client who returns for maintenance, or moves from one treatment to another, is worth several multiples of the introductory visit — and clinics that price their advertising against that first visit conclude, wrongly, that it does not work.
The arithmetic, with your numbers
Say a customer is worth $2,100 over twelve months — an introductory treatment plus the maintenance that typically follows — and you close 22% of the leads you get. Then:
| Customer value over a year | $2,100 |
| Leads you turn into customers | 22% |
| What one lead is worth to you | $462 |
That last figure is the one that settles every argument about whether advertising is expensive. If leads cost you a fraction of it, the correct response is to buy more of them, not to negotiate the price down. If they cost more than it, no amount of bidding strategy fixes that — the close rate or the customer value has to move first.
Run it with your own numbers: how to work out what a lead should cost you, and what that means for a monthly budget.
Timing
Predictable run-ups before summer and before the winter holidays, and a genuine lull immediately after each. The clinics that stay full through the lull are the ones still advertising during it, when attention is cheaper and nobody else is bidding.
What we hear from med spas and aesthetics clinics
"Instagram is where our clients are, so we just post."
Posting reaches the people who already follow you. That audience is capped at the number of people who found you once. Paid reaches the ones who have not.
"Discount offers bring the wrong crowd."
They bring exactly the crowd a discount attracts. The alternative is not a smaller discount, it is an offer built on the outcome and the consultation rather than the price.
"Our results speak for themselves."
They do, to people who see them. The constraint is not the quality of the work, it is how few people encounter it — and that is a distribution problem with a known fix.
What we would build
The offer, the page it lands on, the filter that stops you quoting people who will never buy, the follow-up that reaches them in minutes rather than hours, the tracking that tells you which ad produced which job — and then the campaigns. All of it in month one, and we do not charge for that month.
After that it is $1,000 a month while we run and grow it. Four months for the price of three, $3,000 at signing. We take three new clients a week and hold one business per category per market, so the honest first question is whether yours is still open.
Not your trade? Dental practices · Hvac companies · Law firms · Pest control companies · Plumbing companies · Remodeling and home improvement companies · Roofing companies.
Two minutes, seven questions, then pick a time. If we are not the right fit we will say so on the call rather than after the invoice.
Check my market →