Med spa and clinic marketing: filling the book without discounting

Two questions decide a first booking

A first-time aesthetics client is running two checks at once, and neither is about your brand. The first is whether the result will look like them. The second is who is holding the needle. Everything else — the interior, the reels, the promotion on the story — sits downstream of those two.

This is why med spa marketing behaves differently from salon or restaurant marketing. Aesthetics is regulated as medicine in most of the country, so the two things a client most wants to see are the two things a regulator most restricts: results and endorsements. Marketing that ignores this gets a page taken down, or worse, a complaint. Marketing that understands it has an advantage, because a treatment page written plainly and specifically is rarer than it should be.

One page per treatment, and what goes on it

Start with a real page for each treatment you actually sell. Not a services grid with eight icons. A page a nervous person can read end to end before they call.

• What the treatment is, in the words a client uses, not the brand name of the product
• Who it is not for. Naming a contraindication or a case you would turn away buys more trust than any adjective on the page
• What the first appointment involves, minute by minute, including the consult and the paperwork
• Downtime, honestly. What the next 48 hours look like and what counts as normal
• How long results last, and what maintaining them costs over a year rather than per session
• Price, as a range, with the variables named
• Who performs it at your clinic, by name and credential

That last one is the section most clinics skip, and it answers the question a first-time client is quietest about.

Put the same language on your Google Business Profile, listing each treatment separately rather than sitting under one broad category, with a booking link and photos of your actual rooms instead of stock. Most people meet your clinic in the map result, not on the homepage, and a profile that answers the treatment question there saves a click a lot of nervous people never make.

Credentials are the proof you are allowed to publish

Injectable aesthetics involves controlled acts. Depending on the province and the treatment, a registered nurse or practical nurse performs them under an order or a directive from a physician or nurse practitioner, and that oversight relationship is real rather than nominal. Clients have started asking about it, partly because the news keeps giving them reasons to.

So publish it. Who performs each treatment, their registration and the college they answer to, who the medical director is, and how a complication is handled and by whom. A page that names a real person with a verifiable registration number does the job a testimonial would do, and it is one of the few forms of proof no regulator objects to. It also filters. The client who chose you because you were $2 a unit cheaper was never going to be a good client.

The federal rule that decides what you may say about an injectable

This one catches almost everybody, because it is not a college rule and it is not optional. Anything on the Prescription Drug List is subject to section C.01.044 of the Food and Drug Regulations, which restricts advertising to the general public to name, price and quantity — and nothing else. Health Canada names Botox on that page as the example, and lists what it keeps finding on clinic websites: videos describing the procedure, before-and-after pictures, images alluding to what the drug is for, and testimonials about the therapeutic benefit.

The distinction that saves you is on the same page. The Food and Drugs Act does not apply to advertising a service. So a page about your consultation, your assessment process and what a treatment plan looks like is a page about your practice. A post that names a prescription drug and then tells the reader what it will do to their forehead is drug advertising, and it is over the line. Write about the service, the assessment and the practitioner. Let the prescribing conversation happen in the room, where it belongs.

Provinces layer their own requirements on top of this. Ontario's physician rules, for instance, additionally prohibit any reference in advertising to a specific drug, appliance or equipment, along with anything sensationalised, any comparison to another practitioner, and testimonials outright.

Before-and-after photos: the consent is the hard part

Before-and-afters are permitted in more places than clinic owners assume. The conditions attached to them are stricter than almost anybody follows. Ontario's advertising policy for physicians is one of the most detailed published versions in the country, and it is worth reading even if you are not a physician, because it describes what a defensible consent process looks like.

The images themselves have to depict an actual patient of the practitioner in the advertisement, show an outcome that can reasonably be expected, be unmanipulated, use consistent lighting, pose, technique and setting, keep the patient de-identified unless they specifically consented to being identified, and carry a statement that results are not guaranteed and vary.

The consent process has more teeth. You wait until after the treatment is delivered to raise it, so nobody feels the request hanging over their appointment. You show them the exact final images before they run. You tell them they can withdraw consent at any point, and you tell them the risk that a post already shared may not be fully recoverable. You have a conversation about it rather than sliding a form across the desk. You account for the power imbalance between practitioner and patient. And you offer no incentive of any kind — no discount, no free session — in exchange for the consent.

One more constraint that surprises people: the policy separates places a prospective patient seeks images out from places the public meets them unsolicited. Your own website is the first kind. A print ad in a magazine is the second, and before-and-afters do not belong there.

Reviews and testimonials are not the same thing

A Google review is something a client writes on a platform. A testimonial is something you put in your advertising. Under most Canadian medical advertising rules the second is prohibited and the first is not, which is why the practical answer is to collect reviews properly and never lift one into a graphic.

Collecting them properly has its own rules. Google's policy bans incentives of any kind, bans discouraging negative reviews or selectively asking only the happy clients, bans pressuring someone to post while they are still in the clinic, and bans asking for specific content — including asking them to name the injector who treated them. Ask everyone, the same way, after they have gone home.

If you take American clients or advertise across the border, the FTC's Consumer Reviews and Testimonials Rule has been in force since October 2024 and carries civil penalties. It covers buying reviews, suppressing negative ones, and reviews written by staff or insiders without disclosing the relationship. Worth knowing that it also applies to the agency or reputation firm doing it on your behalf. Ours is on the hook too, which is a reasonable thing to ask any vendor about.

Deposits, no-shows and what a deposit is actually for

A missed 90-minute appointment is not a small loss. The room sits empty, the practitioner is paid, and the slot cannot be resold at two hours' notice. Work out your own number: the treatment price, times your no-show rate, times appointments per week, times 52. Most clinics have never calculated it and are surprised by the answer.

A deposit fixes most of it, and the way it is written matters more than the amount. Take it at booking, put it toward the treatment, state the cancellation window in hours, say plainly what happens inside that window, and say what you do when someone is genuinely ill. Publish the policy on the booking page rather than mentioning it in a confirmation email nobody reads. A policy discovered after the fact reads as a penalty. The same policy read before booking reads as a clinic that runs on time, which is what your reliable clients want anyway.

Then reduce the need for it. A reminder at 48 hours with a one-tap reschedule link recovers more revenue than a stricter policy does. Very few people set out to burn your afternoon; they forgot, or the day turned, and rescheduling was harder than not showing up.

Rebooking beats discounting, and there is a clock on it

Nearly every treatment you sell has a natural return interval. The clinic that knows its own interval per treatment, and contacts people when they are actually due, does not need a promotion to fill a slow week.

Canada's anti-spam law sets the outer edge of that. Implied consent runs two years from the last transaction and six months from an inquiry. Texts count as commercial messages the same as email. Every message needs sender identification, a mailing address valid for at least sixty days, and an unsubscribe honoured within ten business days. If your last contact with a client was three years ago, you need express consent, not a clever subject line.

Groupon-style promotions do fill an empty week. They also fill it with people who booked a price rather than a practitioner, and they teach everyone on your list that the real number is lower than the one on your page. Run the discount if a specific Saturday needs saving. Do not build the year on it.

What we'd run for a clinic

Four lines, each sold on its own, Canadian dollars, no discount for taking more than one.

Organic Growth is $1,000 a month: ten designed posts, five reels, five search-built articles and one newsletter, plus the website, the reviews and local search. Paid Growth is $1,000 a month with the ad budget separate and in your own account — figure on about $1,000 a month of media as the floor for a campaign to learn anything, and the line covers spend up to $10,000. B2B Sales is $2,000 to set up and $1,000 a month. Automation starts at $1,500 to build and $500 a month, which is where the deposit reminders and the rebooking sequences live.

The limit, said before you ask: search takes about 90 days to move. Ads are the only line built to shift a number inside a month. On the others the first month is work you can look at, not a result you can bank. We write to your college's rules and to the federal drug advertising restriction, and nothing publishes until you approve it. There is more on the clinic side on our med spa marketing page, and more on sizing spend in our marketing budget guide.