This is one of the most common questions we get, and most of the answers floating around are useless. People throw out percentages with no context, or quote numbers that only make sense for a med spa five times the size of yours.
Here is a more honest way to think about it. Your marketing budget is not a fixed cost you are trying to minimize. It is the fuel that drives new client acquisition, and the right amount depends on your goals, your margins, and how well your follow-up system converts. Let's break it down.
Start With a Percentage of Revenue, Then Adjust
A widely used benchmark for service businesses is to spend somewhere between 7 and 15 percent of revenue on marketing. Med spas and aesthetic businesses often sit on the higher end of that range, especially when they are actively trying to grow rather than just maintain.
A spa doing $40,000 a month that wants to grow aggressively might put $4,000 to $6,000 a month into marketing. A spa that is comfortable and just wants to stay full might spend less.
But percentage of revenue is only a starting point. It tells you what is reasonable. It does not tell you what is optimal. The real driver of how much you should spend is how profitably you can acquire a client.
The Number That Actually Matters: Cost to Acquire a Client
Forget the percentage for a second. The question that really sets your budget is this: how much does it cost you to acquire one new client, and how much is that client worth?
If it costs you $150 in ad spend to acquire a new client, and that client spends $800 in their first visit and comes back for more, you should want to spend as much as you possibly can, because every $150 you put in comes back multiplied. The budget question answers itself.
The problem is that most med spas have no idea what their cost to acquire a client actually is, because they are not tracking leads through to booked, showed-up, paid appointments. They see the ad spend and they see the bank account, but the connection between them is fuzzy.
Once you know your real acquisition cost and your average client value, the budget stops being a guess. You spend up to the point where acquiring one more client is still profitable, and you stop worrying about arbitrary percentages.
Splitting the Budget: Ad Spend Is Not the Whole Story
When people ask what they should spend on marketing, they usually mean ad spend. But ad spend is only one piece. A complete budget has a few components.
There is the media spend, which is the money that actually goes to Google and Meta. There is the cost of the system that converts those leads, which includes your follow-up automation, your CRM, and your appointment setting. And there is the cost of the strategy and management that keeps it all optimized.
A spa that spends $3,000 on ads but has no follow-up system is going to waste most of that $3,000. A spa that spends $2,000 on ads with a tight follow-up and appointment setting system will often outperform it. The money that goes into converting leads is not overhead. It is part of what makes the ad spend work at all.
What to Expect in the First 90 Days
Here is a realistic expectation, because unrealistic ones cause people to quit too early.
The first 30 days are about gathering data. You are testing offers, creative, and audiences, and you are learning what your real cost per lead and cost per booked appointment look like. You may be roughly breaking even, and that is normal and healthy.
By days 60 to 90, you should have enough data to know what is working, cut what is not, and start scaling the winners. This is usually where the return starts to compound, because you are now putting more money behind the things that have proven they convert.
The med spas that get great results are the ones that treat the first 90 days as an investment in learning, not a referendum on whether ads work. The ones that struggle are the ones that expected a 5x return in week one and pulled the plug in week three.
A Simple Framework to Set Your Number
If you want a practical starting point, do this. Decide how many new clients you want per month. Estimate what an average new client is worth to you over their first few months. Pick a target cost to acquire a client that keeps that profitable, even if it is just a rough number to begin with. Multiply your client goal by your target acquisition cost, and that gives you a starting media budget. Then add the cost of the system that converts those leads, because without it the media budget underperforms.
This is far more useful than any flat percentage, because it ties your spend directly to the outcome you actually care about.
The Bottom Line
There is no single right number. The right budget is the one that lets you acquire clients profitably, funded enough to gather real data, and supported by a follow-up system that actually converts what you generate. Spend too little and you never get past the learning phase. Spend without a conversion system and you waste most of it.
If you want help setting a budget based on your real numbers and building the system to make that spend actually convert, book a free discovery call and we will walk you through what it would look like for your business.