Why Nobody Publishes Plastic Surgery Marketing Agency Pricing
Go look at ten agency websites right now. Count how many list a price. Probably zero.
The official reason is that every practice is different. The real reason is that most agencies want to see your revenue before they tell you a number. If you’re a solo surgeon doing $1.2M, you get quoted one thing. If you run a four-surgeon group with a med spa attached, you get quoted three times that for roughly the same work.
So here’s the number you came for. Plastic surgery marketing agency pricing usually lands between $3,000 and $15,000 per month in management fees, plus ad spend on top. Retainers under $2,500 typically buy you one channel handled part-time. Above $10,000 you’re paying for a full team covering SEO, paid search, paid social, and the systems that follow up on leads. Ad budgets commonly run $5,000 to $30,000 a month separately.
This piece breaks down the pricing models you’ll run into, what actually gets delivered at each spend level, and the questions that expose whether a quote is honest. We put honest ranges on things instead of “contact us for a custom proposal.”
The Four Pricing Models You’ll Be Quoted
Before you compare agencies, you need to know that they’re often not selling the same shape of thing. Two quotes at $7,000 can mean wildly different amounts of work. These are the four structures you’ll see.
Flat Monthly Retainer
You pay a fixed fee, the agency does a defined scope, ad spend is billed separately to your card. This is the most common model in aesthetics and the easiest one to budget against.
Typical range: $3,000 to $15,000 a month depending on how many channels and locations are in scope.
Who it’s for: most single-location and small multi-location plastic surgery practices. If you want to know exactly what marketing costs you every month, this is it.
The honest downside: a flat retainer pays the agency the same whether your phone rings or not. Good agencies don’t need the incentive. Mediocre ones coast. Ask what happens to the fee if you miss targets two quarters running, and watch how fast they change the subject.
Percentage of Ad Spend
The agency takes 10% to 20% of whatever you spend on ads. Spend $20,000, pay $2,000 to $4,000 in management.
Who it’s for: practices spending heavily on paid media and not much else. It’s rare as a standalone in aesthetics because most practices need SEO and content too, and neither of those scales with ad spend.
The honest downside: it rewards the agency for spending more of your money. I don’t love this model for practices under $25,000 in monthly ad spend, because the incentive to push budget up is baked into the contract. If you use it, cap it. Write in a spend ceiling that requires your written approval to cross.
Hybrid: Base Fee Plus Performance
A smaller base retainer, say $4,000, plus a bonus tied to something measurable. Booked consults. Qualified leads. Sometimes revenue attributed to marketing.
Who it’s for: practices with a front desk that actually answers the phone and a CRM that tracks where patients came from. Without clean tracking, performance pay turns into an argument every month about what counts.
The honest downside: defining “qualified” is where these deals go bad. A lead who fills out a form for a $500 injectable treatment and a lead requesting a $12,000 surgical consult are not the same thing, and if your contract counts them the same, guess which ones the agency will chase.
Project or Build-Only
One-time work with no ongoing retainer. New website, brand refresh, photo and video shoot, a set of landing pages.
Typical range: a plastic surgery website build runs $8,000 to $40,000 depending on custom design, procedure page count, and whether it integrates with your booking and CRM. Brand work adds $5,000 to $20,000.
Who it’s for: practices whose site is the actual bottleneck. If your site was built in 2016 and loads in six seconds on mobile, no amount of ad spend fixes that. Fix the site first.
What Plastic Surgery Marketing Agency Pricing Buys at Each Tier
Here’s the part most pricing articles skip. Not what the tiers are called, but what work actually happens inside them.
| Monthly Fee | What’s Usually Included | Realistic Ad Spend | Best Fit |
|---|---|---|---|
| $1,500 – $2,500 | One channel handled part-time. Usually Google Ads management or basic local SEO. Little strategy, minimal reporting. | $2,000 – $5,000 | Solo surgeon testing whether paid acquisition works at all |
| $3,000 – $6,000 | Two channels. Paid search plus SEO, or paid social plus SEO. Monthly reporting, call tracking, landing pages for your top procedures. | $5,000 – $12,000 | Single-location practice with one or two surgeons |
| $6,000 – $10,000 | Full channel mix, content production, review generation, lead follow-up automation, CRM integration, dedicated strategist | $10,000 – $25,000 | Multi-surgeon practice or practice with a med spa arm |
| $10,000 – $20,000+ | Everything above plus multi-location campaign structures, creative production, offline attribution, consult-conversion coaching for front desk staff | $25,000+ | Multi-location groups and practices scaling toward acquisition |
Notice how the ad spend column scales faster than the fee column. That’s normal and it’s how it should work. As you grow, the media budget becomes the bigger line item and management fee flattens out. If an agency’s fee is climbing at the same rate as your spend, ask why.
The tier most practices should start at
$3,000 to $6,000, with $5,000 to $10,000 in ad spend. Below that, you’re spread too thin to learn anything. Six weeks into a $1,800 retainer with $2,000 in spend, you won’t have enough conversion data to know whether your rhinoplasty campaign is broken or just slow.
Plastic surgery has a long, deliberate buying cycle. Somebody researching a tummy tuck may take four months to book a consult. Underfunded campaigns don’t survive long enough to see that cycle complete, and then everyone concludes marketing doesn’t work.
The Hidden Costs Nobody Puts in the Proposal
Your quoted retainer is not your marketing budget. These are the line items that surprise practices in month two.
- Ad spend. Almost always separate. Confirm in writing whether it’s billed to you directly (better, you own the account) or passed through the agency (worse, you may lose the account and its history if you leave).
- Onboarding or setup fee. $1,500 to $5,000 is common. Covers audits, tracking setup, account builds, creative kickoff.
- Software. Call tracking, CRM, review platform, scheduling tools. Budget $200 to $800 a month. Some agencies bundle it, some resell it at a markup, some make you buy it yourself.
- Creative production. Before-and-after photography, video, patient testimonial shoots. This is where aesthetics differs from other specialties. Your creative gets stale fast on Meta, and refreshing it costs money. $1,000 to $5,000 per shoot is a reasonable expectation.
- Website changes. Some retainers include a few hours of dev time. Many bill it hourly at $125 to $200.
Add it up honestly. A $5,000 retainer is often a $12,000 all-in monthly number once you include media and tools. That’s not a scam, it’s just the real cost of acquisition, and you should walk into it with your eyes open.
Six Questions That Tell You If a Quote Is Honest
You’ve probably sat through three agency pitches that all promised page-one rankings and a flood of surgical consults. Here’s how to pressure-test the next one.
“Who owns the Google Ads and Meta accounts if we part ways?” The answer should be you, on your own billing, with the agency added as a user. Anything else means your conversion history walks out the door with them.
“What’s included at this fee, and what triggers an extra invoice?” Get a written scope with hours or deliverable counts. “Ongoing optimization” is not a deliverable.
“What’s the contract term and what’s the exit clause?” Twelve-month lockups are common and not automatically bad, since aesthetics campaigns need runway. But a 12-month term with a 90-day out is fairer than a 12-month term with no out at all.
“How do you handle advertising compliance?” This one separates healthcare-specialized agencies from general ones. Many states have rules about before-and-after imagery, results disclaimers, and guarantee language in medical advertising, and your medical board is the one that comes after your license, not the agency’s. Any agency worth hiring will tell you to run claims past your own compliance counsel and will build campaigns that don’t promise outcomes. If they shrug at this question, that’s your answer.
“What happens in months one through three?” Honest answer: paid campaigns can produce consult requests inside 30 days. SEO usually shows ranking movement in 60 to 90 days and meaningful patient volume closer to month six. Anyone promising surgical bookings from SEO in week three is guessing.
“Who’s actually doing the work?” The person in the pitch is often not the person managing your account. Ask for the name and the number of other accounts they carry.
How to Pick Without Overpaying
Start with the math instead of the menu. Take your average surgical case value, multiply by your consult-to-surgery close rate, and you’ve got what a consult is worth to you. Say a facelift consult closes 30% of the time on a $15,000 procedure. That consult is worth $4,500 in expected revenue. Now you know what you can pay to generate one, and whether a $6,000 retainer plus $10,000 in spend needs to produce four consults or forty to make sense.
Most practices skip this and pick based on who had the nicest slide deck.
Then match the tier to your actual bottleneck. If you’re getting plenty of leads but your front desk converts four out of ten calls into booked consults, more ad spend is the wrong purchase. Fix intake first. We’ve written separately about plastic surgery lead conversion, but the short version is that a practice losing half its inbound calls to voicemail doesn’t have a marketing problem.
And a genuinely useful filter: ask whether the agency will tell you no. An agency that agrees your budget is too small for what you want, or that says your website needs to be rebuilt before ads make sense, is worth more than one that says yes to everything. PatientProcure isn’t the right fit for every practice. If you’re a solo surgeon with $1,500 a month to spend and no website, you’d be better served fixing fundamentals than hiring anyone.
One more thing on the multi-location question. If you’re running three or more locations, per-location pricing usually beats a flat group retainer, because campaign structure, local SEO, and reporting genuinely multiply per address. Expect $2,000 to $4,000 per location on top of a smaller central strategy fee. A single flat fee for five locations is either underpriced (you’ll get thin work) or the agency is hoping you don’t do the division.
What This Should Cost You, Summed Up
A single-location plastic surgery practice serious about growth should plan on $8,000 to $16,000 a month all-in, split roughly 40% management and 60% media, with a one-time $10,000 to $25,000 for a website if yours is more than four years old. Multi-location groups scale from there. Practices testing the water can start at $4,000 to $7,000 all-in, but should expect to learn slowly.
Those numbers assume you want compounding growth, not a one-month experiment. Plastic surgery is one of the most expensive verticals to advertise in, because your competitors have the same margins you do and they’re bidding on the same keywords.
Book a free strategy call and we’ll walk through your current numbers, tell you what tier your practice actually needs, and give you a straight quote with the ad spend and hidden costs spelled out. If we’re not the right fit, we’ll say so and point you somewhere better.