Write the marketing planfor your clinic

What you will have at the end.

A one-page written plan naming your positioning, your service categories, your annual budget split by month, and the two channels you are actually going to run.

A marketing plan is not a strategy deck. It is a short list of decisions you have already made, written down, so that the next person who calls to sell you something does not get to make them for you.

Most clinic owners we meet are not short on marketing. They have a website somebody built, a Google listing somebody claimed, a Facebook page a former receptionist started, and an ad account that has been running the same campaign since 2023. What they are short on is a written answer to four questions. Who are we for. What do we sell, in categories that do not overlap. How much are we spending, month by month. And which two channels are we actually going to run this year.

This guide gets you those four answers on paper. Budget two to three hours, split over two sittings, because the second half needs numbers you will probably have to go pull.

Part one. Who you are for

1. Write your positioning in one sentence

   The sentence has a fixed shape: we are the clinic in <area> that <people> come to for <problem>. Fill in the three blanks and stop. No adjectives, no mission statement, no talk of excellence or patient-centered care. Every clinic says those things, which means none of them say anything.

   The test is whether a competitor down the street could copy your sentence word for word. If they could, it is not positioning, it is a description of your industry.

   —Weak: we provide compassionate, patient-centered dental care to families.

   —Better: we are the dental clinic in the east end that adults with long-avoided work come to when they are embarrassed to go anywhere else.

   —Better: we are the physio clinic near the industrial park that workers come to after a workplace injury, because we handle the claim paperwork.

   In practice

   You will not love the sentence on the first try. Write three, leave them overnight, and pick one in the morning.

2. Name the patient you actually want, and the one you do not

   Write two short paragraphs. The first describes the patient who is profitable, who shows up, who comes back, and who refers. The second describes the patient who consumes a slot, cancels twice, and never returns. Both are real and both are in your schedule right now.

   This second paragraph is the one people skip, and it is the one that saves money. Every ad you run either invites or discourages the second type. If you cannot name them, you cannot avoid them.

   —Pull the last fifty new patients from your software. Mark each one: came back, did not come back.

   —Look at what the two groups have in common. Referral source, service they booked first, age bracket, insurance situation.

   —Write down the pattern even if it is uncomfortable.

Part two. What you sell

1. Split your services into categories that do not bleed into each other

   Take everything you offer and group it into four to seven categories. The rule is that a category has its own patient, its own price range, and its own reason for someone to search. If two categories share all three, they are one category.

   This matters more than it looks. Every later decision, ad campaign, landing page, budget line, tracking event, hangs off this list. A clinic that never draws these lines ends up with one campaign called General and no way to tell what is working.

   —A category with no distinct patient is a service, not a category. Fold it in.

   —A category you want to grow and a category that is already full are different categories, even if the clinical work is similar.

   —Anything that is under two percent of revenue and that you do not want to grow does not get a category. It gets a line on your services page and nothing else.

1. Put a number beside each category

   Three numbers per category. Revenue over the last twelve months. Number of new patients it brought. And a one-word verdict: grow, hold, or leave alone.

   Grow means you have capacity and you want more. Hold means it is fine and you would not turn away more. Leave alone means the schedule is full or the margin is thin, and spending money there would make your life worse.

   —You are allowed at most two categories marked grow. Three is not a plan, it is a hope.

   —If every category says grow, go back to your schedule. Something in there is already full.

Part three. The budget

1. Start from a number you can actually defend

   Pick your annual marketing budget as a share of revenue, not as a guess. For an established clinic that wants steady growth, somewhere between three and seven percent of revenue is the range most owners land in. A brand new location, or a category you are trying to open, runs higher for a year and then comes down.

   Whatever number you pick, write down why. Next March, when you are looking at this page again, the reasoning matters more than the figure.

   —The number includes ad spend, the tools, and whatever you pay anyone to help. Owners routinely forget the third one and then wonder why the budget never holds.

   —It does not include your own time. Track that separately or you will talk yourself out of everything.

2. Spread it over twelve months, not evenly

   An even split is the sign of a plan written in one sitting and never looked at again. Your clinic has a rhythm. Some months the schedule is tight, some months it is empty, some months your patients are away.

   Build a twelve-row table. For each month, write the budget and one word for why. The why is what makes the table survive contact with reality.

   —Cut the months where you are already full. Spending there buys you a waitlist and an annoyed team.

   —Load the months that feed your slowest month. Demand does not arrive the day you spend. Most clinics see the effect four to eight weeks out.

   —Leave ten percent of the year unallocated. Something will come up, and you want to say yes without reopening the whole plan.

   In practice

   Divide the monthly figure by the number of calendar days in the month to get your daily budget, not by business days. The platforms pace on calendar days even when your ads only run on weekdays.

3. Decide what a new patient is allowed to cost

   For each category marked grow, work out two figures. What a patient in that category is worth to you over two years, and the most you are willing to pay to acquire one. The second is usually somewhere between a tenth and a third of the first, depending on how much capacity you have sitting idle.

   Write both down. Without them, every conversation about whether a campaign is working turns into a conversation about whether the cost per click feels high, which tells you nothing.

   —Two-year value, not lifetime value. Lifetime value is a number nobody can check.

   —Include the follow-up visits that a first visit reliably produces. Exclude the ones that only sometimes happen.

Part four. The channels

1. Pick two channels and write down what you are dropping

   Two. Not five. A clinic without a marketing department cannot run five channels well, and five channels run badly cost more than two run properly.

   Choose based on where the demand already is. If people are typing your service into a search engine, search comes first. If nobody knows the service exists and they have to be shown it, social advertising comes first. Everything else waits for next year.

   —Search, meaning your local listing plus paid search, suits services people already know they need.

   —Social advertising suits services people do not think to search for, and suits filling specific quiet slots.

   —Content and social posting is a slow channel. It is worth doing, but it is not one of your two if you need patients this quarter.

2. Write the one page

   Now put it together. The page has five blocks and nothing else: the positioning sentence, the patient you want and the one you do not, the category table with verdicts, the twelve-month budget table, and the two channels with the line naming what you dropped.

   Print it. Put it where you will see it. The page has done its job the first time you use it to say no to something.

When it goes sideways