Healthcare Marketing

Monthly retainers dominate. A solo practice buying local SEO and review management usually sits at the low end, while a multi-location group or hospital service line with paid media, content, and analytics sits much higher. Paid media is typically billed as a percentage of ad spend, most often 10 to 20 percent, layered on top of the retainer.

Project pricing shows up for websites, rebrands, and one time campaigns. A practice website with compliant forms and online scheduling is usually a five figure project. Some patient acquisition shops sell per-lead or per-booked-appointment pricing, but that model is harder to run cleanly in healthcare because tracking a lead to a booked patient touches protected health information, and the good firms price that compliance work into the retainer rather than pretending it is free.

Privacy enforcement is the biggest force in this vertical. Regulators and class action lawyers have gone after hospital systems over web tracking, so agencies have had to rebuild measurement around consent, server-side tagging, and modeled conversions. That work favors larger, more technical firms and is squeezing out generalists who bolted healthcare onto a local marketing practice.

On the demand side, private equity consolidation of dental, dermatology, veterinary, and physical therapy practices has created multi-location buyers with real budgets and procurement processes. Winning them requires reporting discipline that small agencies often lack. Meanwhile AI is genuinely useful here for drafting service line content and answering patient FAQs, but every output still needs clinical review, so the promised cost savings are smaller than in other verticals. The agencies growing fastest sell compliant patient acquisition as a system: tracking, intake call handling, and reputation management together, priced against the lifetime value of a new patient.