A medical practice marketing plan you'll actually use is short enough to review in one sitting every quarter. This template has six parts, and each one ends with something you can check rather than a goal you can only feel good about.
It suits a practice starting from nothing and one that has advertised for years. The difference is how much of each part you already have.
What a medical practice marketing plan needs to contain
Six things: the patients you want, the budget, how patients find and judge you, the rules you have to follow, the channels you'll test, and the numbers you'll track. Drop one and the others get harder to judge. A channel with no budget attached can't be called a success or a failure, and a budget with no patient in mind gets spread thin across everything.
- Patient profile: one paragraph, done when someone new to the practice could describe who you want more of.
- Budget: a monthly figure and a split by channel, done when you know what you can afford to lose for a quarter.
- Online reputation: reviews, listings and your site, done when someone owns each of them.
- Compliance check: done when you know which messages need patient permission.
- Channel tests: two or three channels, each with a stated result that would make you keep or drop it.
- Tracking sheet: one page, updated monthly.
Start with the patients you want more of
Write down the age range, the neighbourhoods, and the services you'd like to grow. "Everyone in the county" isn't a patient profile, and it leads to generic messages that fit nobody in particular.
A practice that wants more joint-replacement referrals is looking for different people, in different places, than one that wants more families for routine care. That difference decides almost everything downstream, from which keywords you'd bid on to whether a postcard is worth printing.
If you have two or three services you want to grow, rank them. The first one gets most of the budget and the most careful messaging, and the others wait their turn. A plan that treats every service as equally urgent ends up promoting none of them well.
Then look at your current patient list for the pattern. Who already comes back, who refers others, and which service do they come in for? Your best existing patients are the cheapest guide you have to who else is out there.
Set a budget from your own numbers
Some marketers recommend spending 5 or 10 percent of revenue or profit. Audrey Mclaughlin, RN, argues in Physicians Practice that a flat percentage is not a reliable benchmark, and that the budget should be individualised to your market, your ideal patient, your geography and your goals.
That's the sounder starting point. Pick a figure you can afford to lose for one quarter, split it across no more than two or three channels, and treat those first three months as a measuring exercise. A percentage of revenue is a useful sanity check on the number, not a way to arrive at it.
The yardstick she offers for whether the money is working is patient acquisition cost: monthly marketing spend divided by the new patients you gained that month. Her example is $1,000 spent for 72 new patients, about $13 to $14 each. Track it monthly and the patterns show up quickly.
If you'd rather not build this alone, our write-up of what a healthcare marketing agency actually does shows which parts of the plan are usually handed over.
Make the practice easy to find and easy to trust
Reviews are where many prospective patients form their first impression. In RepuGen's 2025 survey of 1,212 people, 77.78% said they use Google to check a provider's reviews. It's a vendor's own survey, so read it as a direction rather than a national figure.
The same survey found 59.48% were more likely to choose a provider who responds to reviews. Reply to them, then, and give one named person that job. A review left sitting unanswered for months is a gap in the plan, not a neutral fact.
About two in three respondents also said they check that the address and phone number match the website. Mismatches between your site and your listings cost you trust before anyone has called, and they're cheap to fix. Our guides to optimising a healthcare Google Business Profile and to healthcare schema markup cover the listing and the site sides of this.
Check the rules before you contact patients
Photo by Kindel Media on Pexels
Healthcare marketing carries privacy rules that most industries don't have. Under the HIPAA omnibus rule, as summarised by the law firm Faegre Drinker in its 2013 analysis, a communication that encourages someone to buy or use a product or service counts as marketing when a third party pays the practice to send it, and patient authorization is required.
The same summary lists exceptions, including face-to-face communication and promotional gifts of nominal value. It also warns that stricter state laws may apply, naming California's Confidentiality of Medical Information Act.
Those details are from 2013, so treat them as a starting map rather than current advice. Before you use a patient list for any campaign, have your compliance officer or counsel confirm what needs permission in your state. Write the answer into the plan.
Pick two channels and give each a test
Two channels run properly beat six run badly. Paid search, email to existing patients, local listings and a referral programme are all candidates, and which ones fit depends on the patient profile you wrote in the first step. Our digital marketing and growth service covers these channels whoever ends up running them, and the email basics we wrote for dental practices carry over to most clinics.
For each channel, write the result that would make you keep it or drop it before you spend anything. Mclaughlin's example shows why. A $180 newspaper ad that brought in two patients worth about $15 profit each returned $30, which is a loss, and the right response is to change the ad or stop running it.
Without a stated threshold, a channel that is losing money tends to survive on habit.
Track it monthly, revisit it quarterly
The tracking sheet is one page. Each month, record:
- spend by channel
- new patients, with the source each one gave
- cost per new patient, overall and by channel
- reviews received and reviews answered
Once a quarter, move money from the channels that missed their threshold to the ones that met it, and reread the patient profile to see whether it still describes who is walking in.
The weakest column is usually the source. Have whoever books appointments ask every new patient how they found the practice and write down the answer, because without it the cost per patient can only be calculated overall, never by channel.
Frequently asked questions
What is a good patient acquisition cost?
It depends on your market. Mclaughlin puts $14 or less as strong in small towns and rural areas, with higher figures acceptable in urban markets such as New York City. Compare your number with what a new patient is worth to the practice rather than with a fixed target.
How recent do online reviews need to be?
In RepuGen's 2025 survey, 40.02% of respondents said reviews more than one to two years old are too old to count, the largest single answer. A smaller group said age doesn't matter at all, so a steady trickle of new reviews is safer than a one-off push.
Cover photo by Vitaly Gariev on Pexels
Sources
- How much should practices spend on marketing? — Physicians Practice
- RepuGen Patient Review Survey 2025 — RepuGen
