A healthcare marketing budget set as a flat share of revenue is a guess with a decimal point on it. Gartner's 2025 survey puts the cross-industry average at 7.7% of company revenue, with healthcare near the bottom.
That tells you what large organisations spend and very little about your clinic. Sound healthcare marketing budget planning starts from patients instead: how many you need, what each is worth and what it costs to win one.
What share of revenue do healthcare organisations spend on marketing?
There's no universal figure, and the best-sourced benchmarks come from organisations far larger than a typical practice. In Gartner's 2025 CMO Spend Survey as reported by Marketing Brew, about 400 marketing leaders averaged 7.7% of revenue, unchanged from 2024. Most worked at billion-dollar companies, and healthcare reported some of the smallest shares of any sector.
Hospitals show how low it can go. A survey of almost 2,700 respondents by the Society for Healthcare Strategy and Market Development, covered in 2018, found that marketing and communications still made up less than 1% of the overall hospital budget.
Neither number is a target for you. A 7.7% average says nothing about a three-dentist practice trying to fill its calendar, and a hospital's sub-1% figure reflects patients who arrive through referrals and emergencies rather than through search.
Zocdoc's planning guidance agrees: there is no single right number, but there is a right framework. Treat any percentage as a sanity check after you've built the budget, never as the starting point.
Healthcare marketing budget planning starts with what a new patient is worth
Begin with lifetime value. A practice that earns $4,000 over the life of a patient can justify spending far more to win that patient than one whose patients visit once.
A second Zocdoc guide makes the contrast concrete: paying $250 to acquire a patient who generates $4,000 in lifetime revenue beats paying $75 for one who never returns. The cheaper patient costs less and is worth less. Judge spend against what comes back, not against the invoice.
Put a number on a returning patient
Pull the last year of billing for patients who first came in, say, two years ago. Average what each has paid since. That's a rough lifetime value, and it's better than any industry average because it reflects your fees, your specialty and how often your patients actually return.
Count the whole cost of winning one
Patient acquisition cost is total marketing and sales spend divided by new patients in the same period. Include everything tied to acquisition: advertising, SEO, agency fees and the salaries of the people doing the marketing.
Leave out the staff time and the number looks better than it is. You'll then set next year's budget on a figure that was never true.
The funnel costs to track before you set a number
A single cost-per-patient figure hides where money is leaking. Splitting it by stage shows whether the problem is traffic, enquiries or the front desk.
That guide's worked example follows 500 website visitors through to completed visits:
| Funnel stage | Count | Cost per | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|---|
| Website visitors | 500 | n/a | Whether your ads and search listings attract anyone |
| Leads | 100 | $30 | Whether the website and offer persuade people to get in touch |
| Scheduled appointments | 40 | $75 | Whether your team converts enquiries into bookings |
| Completed visits (new patients) | 30 | $100 | Your true patient acquisition cost, including no-shows |
Read down the cost column and the story is plain: each stage costs more than the last because fewer people survive it. A practice that watches only the first row will happily buy more traffic while 10 of every 40 booked appointments never turn up.
What does a lead cost in healthcare?
It varies enough that borrowing someone else's figure is risky. Writing in Physicians Practice in August 2022, Neil Baum, MD, cites healthcare lead costs ranging from $36 to $286, with an average around $162, and about $125 for health and medical advertisers using Google.
That gap is the argument for measuring your own. A specialty with long waits and strong referrals will see very different costs from a cosmetic clinic competing against five others on the same search results.
Baum also separates two measures that practices often blur. Cost per lead counts the people who contact you. Patient acquisition cost counts only the callers who become paying patients, because, as he puts it, not all initial callers convert. If you track one number, track the second.
Where the money goes once you have a number
Photo by Pavel Danilyuk on Pexels
Gartner's survey found paid media taking 31% of marketing budgets in 2025, up from about 28% the year before. Paid channels are the fastest way to generate leads, and they stop the moment you stop paying.
For a local practice, the cheaper work often sits in assets that keep producing. A well-kept listing is one: we cover the details in our guide to healthcare Google Business Profile optimisation, and it costs time rather than ad spend.
Conversion work is the other. Doubling traffic to a site that books few appointments is expensive, while fixing the booking path lifts the return on every pound or dollar already being spent. Our piece on turning website visitors into booked patients walks through where visitors drop out.
As for how the pieces fit together, a healthcare digital growth stack of website, SEO and ads is a useful way to see which layer to fund first. A practice with no working site shouldn't be buying clicks. One with a strong site and thin visibility should lean towards search and listings before display.
Match spend to the stage you're in
A new practice has to buy attention, so paid channels take a bigger slice early. An established one with a full diary should be spending to replace patients who leave, not to grow, and the budget will look smaller as a result.
Hospitals add a wrinkle. The same survey coverage notes that hospitals still put most of their advertising money into traditional media, so comparing your digital plan to a hospital's mix tells you little.
If you'd like a second opinion on how a budget like this should split across channels, our digital marketing and growth service is built around exactly that kind of planning.
Review the budget against booked appointments
Clicks and impressions are easy to report and easy to inflate. Booked appointments and completed visits are harder to flatter, so they're the figures to review spend against.
Set a regular check, comparing each channel's cost per completed new patient with the value you worked out earlier. Move money from the channels that cost more than a patient is worth towards the ones that cost less, and write down what you changed so next year's plan starts from evidence.
Frequently asked questions
Does Gartner's 7.7% figure apply to a small practice?
Not directly. The survey covered about 400 marketing leaders, most at companies with revenue above $1 billion, so it describes large organisations. Use it as context, and build your own figure from patient value and acquisition cost.
Do agency fees and salaries count toward patient acquisition cost?
Yes. Count all acquisition-related costs, including advertising, SEO, agency fees and marketing staff salaries, and divide the total by the new patients acquired in the same reporting period.
Is a lead the same as a new patient?
No. A lead is someone who gets in touch, and Physicians Practice notes that not every caller becomes a paying patient. Track cost per lead and patient acquisition cost separately so you can see where enquiries fall away.
Sources
- Marketing budgets and the Gartner CMO report — Marketing Brew
- SHSMD report shows healthcare marketing budgets growing despite hospital consolidation — Healthcare IT Today
