Marketing for clinics.

How a clinic goes from depending on referrals to having a predictable flow of patients.

A clinic grows when it stops treating marketing as promotion and starts treating it as an acquisition system: knowing where each patient comes from, what it costs to bring in the next one and what happens between the first contact and the filled chair.

Referrals are great. But they are a channel you do not control. The job is to add channels you can switch on, measure and adjust.

Diagnostic

Signs that the bottleneck is not a lack of exposure.

Almost every clinic that comes to me thinks the problem is not getting enough exposure. In most cases the problem is a different one: demand is arriving and it leaks before it becomes a patient.

The schedule fills up one week and empties the next, with no explanation.
You cannot say where the last new patient came from.
Messages come in, but they vanish between the price quote and the booking.
The ad brings contacts, but almost no contact becomes an appointment.
Nobody has ever calculated what it costs to bring in a new patient.
When business slows down, the reaction is to post more.

If three of these light up, the problem is not content volume. It is structure: there is no defined path between the person who discovers the clinic and the person who sits in the chair, and no measurement to show where the path breaks.

What we do

Four areas of work, in this order.

The order matters more than the list. Traffic before offer is money buying indifference.

01
Positioning and offer

Which procedure drives growth, for whom, and why someone would choose your clinic and not the one two blocks away. Without this, everything else gets expensive.
02
Acquisition

Paid and organic traffic aimed at real opportunity, not reach. Channel chosen by the patient's intent, not by the trend of the month.
03
Funnel and conversion

The path between the first message and the booked appointment: response time, intake script, confirmation, rebooking the people who did not show up.
04
Metrics

Cost per new patient, show-up rate, the value of a patient over time. It is the dashboard that turns opinion into decision.

Data over drama

Mood

The decision depends on how the day went.

You post more because the week was slow.
You switch channels because someone said good things about one.
You cut budget because the month scared you.

Method

The decision was already made before the day began.

How much came inR$
How much it cost to bring inR$ 200
How much each customer is worthHow much each patient is worthR$ 2,000

If it is worth more than it cost, you make a profit.

Panel example, in Brazilian reais. The real numbers are your company's.Panel example, in Brazilian reais. The real numbers are your clinic's.

Frequently asked questions

What clinics ask before starting.

How long until a clinic sees results?

Paid traffic usually generates contacts in the first week. But a contact is not a result. The honest cycle until the operation becomes predictable is 60 to 90 days: the first weeks are for finding out what works, and the rest for turning that into routine.

Whoever promises predictability in 30 days is selling luck with a nice name.

How much should a clinic invest in paid traffic?

The number that matters is not the absolute amount: it is how much a patient is worth to you. If a new patient is worth R$ 2,000 over the course of treatment, paying R$ 200 to bring them in is an excellent deal. If they are worth R$ 150, the same cost breaks the clinic.

That is why the first piece of work is never setting a budget. It is calculating the value of the patient. Without that number, any budget is a guess.

Can a clinic advertise? What do the professional councils allow?

Yes. What Brazil's professional councils (for doctors, dentists, physiotherapists, psychologists and others) restrict is the how: in general it is forbidden to promise or guarantee results, to use before-and-after images sensationally, and to treat a procedure as a promotion, raffle or clearance sale.

The rules vary between councils and are updated often. Always confirm your own council's current resolution (CFM, CFO, CRO, CREFITO, CRP and others) before publishing. In practice this does not limit growth: a campaign built on clarity and authority converts better than a campaign built on promises.

Instagram or Google: where to invest first?

It depends on the intent you want to capture. Google serves people who are already searching: high intent, volume limited by the size of your city. Instagram creates demand among people who were not searching yet: more volume, less intent.

A clinic that needs to fill the schedule next month starts with Google. A clinic that wants to build demand for a new procedure needs both. Choosing by what is more comfortable to use is the common mistake.

My clinic lives only on referrals. Is that a problem?

Referrals are the best channel there is: low cost and high trust. The problem is not depending on them. It is having only them. You cannot switch a referral on or off, it does not ramp up when you need it and it does not warn you before it drops.

The goal is not to replace referrals. It is to have a second channel that responds when you press the button.

Do I need an agency or can I do it in-house?

In-house execution works when someone has dedicated time and the judgment to decide. What almost never works is the front desk running Instagram in the gaps between patients. Not for lack of ability: for lack of continuity.

I work both ways: directly with me, when the bottleneck is strategy and decisions, or with execution through Bache, when you do not have the people to run it.

Do you work with clinics in other cities?

Yes. The conversation and the follow-up are online, by video call or WhatsApp, so the clinic's city does not change the method. What changes is the local market: how many clinics compete for the same patient and through which channel the patient arrives.

How do I know whether marketing is turning a profit?

Three numbers settle it: how much you spent in the period, how many new patients came from that spend and how much each one is worth over the course of treatment. If the third is bigger than the first divided by the second, you make a profit.

It sounds obvious, and it is exactly the calculation almost no clinic does. Likes, reach and followers do not count in that math.

What is CAC and why should a clinic track it?

CAC is Customer Acquisition Cost: everything you invested to bring in new patients, divided by the number of new patients who arrived. If you spent R$ 3,000 and 20 came, your CAC is R$ 150.

It answers the only question that matters when you invest more: if I put more money here, does more come back than went out? Without CAC, raising the budget is a bet. Do the math in the CAC and LTV calculator.

Contact

Where is your clinic stuck?

Message me on WhatsApp and tell me how things are today: where your patients come from and what you have already tried. I will send back an honest read on what to prioritize. No fluff, no ready-made formula.

Chat on WhatsApp