What Clinic Marketing
Actually Costs.

How much does clinic marketing cost in Egypt?

In Egypt in 2026, most clinics pay between 12,000 and 30,000 EGP per month for an agency retainer, plus a separate advertising budget of 5,000 to 25,000 EGP per month. A single doctor starting from zero should plan for roughly 18,000–20,000 EGP all-in per month. Multi-branch clinics and competitive aesthetic practices routinely run 50,000–100,000 EGP.

That range is wide because "clinic marketing" is not one product. A doctor who needs a logo, a website, and their first fifteen videos is buying something very different from a clinic that already has all three and just wants more bookings this quarter. Both are quoted as "marketing."

Here is how the Egyptian market divides in practice — real ranges we see rather than invented averages:

For context, Vira's services are modular rather than bundled: content runs from 6,000 EGP for 15 reels edited from your own footage (Vira Clips) to 16,000 EGP for a full studio shooting day with 15 reels edited (Vira Studio); publishing on up to four platforms is 4,000 EGP per month (Vira Social Media Management); ad management starts at 5,000 EGP per month (Vira Performance & Media Buying); and setting up a new practice's digital assets in the doctor's own name is a one-time 5,000 EGP (Vira Branding & Foundation). You can see the current figures on the services section of our homepage.

What am I actually paying for — the agency or the ads?

Both, and they are separate line items. The retainer pays the agency for strategy, filming, editing, design, copywriting, publishing and campaign management. The ad budget is money that leaves your account and goes directly to Meta or Google to buy reach. A 20,000 EGP retainer with no ad budget will produce beautiful content that almost nobody sees.

This is the single most common misunderstanding we encounter, and it is the source of most disappointment in the first month. A doctor pays 15,000 EGP, sees three hundred views on a reel, and concludes marketing does not work. What actually happened is that they bought production and never bought distribution.

There is a third category people forget entirely: one-off assets. A website, a logo, a studio shooting day, a photoshoot. These are capital purchases, not monthly costs, and they should be quoted separately and owned by you.

How much should I put behind ads specifically?

For a single-doctor clinic in Cairo or Alexandria, 5,000–10,000 EGP per month is enough to generate a steady, measurable flow of enquiries in most specialties. Aesthetic, dental and fertility practices compete in far more expensive auctions and typically need 15,000–40,000 EGP to hold position. Below about 3,000 EGP a month, Meta's algorithm does not get enough conversion data to optimise properly.

That last point is technical but it matters financially. Meta's delivery system needs a certain volume of conversion events before it learns who to show your ads to. Spend too little and you never exit the learning phase, which means you pay a premium for every result indefinitely. A small budget is not a slower version of a big budget — it is a structurally less efficient one.

One clarification that saves a lot of arguments: the correct way to set an ad budget is not "what can I afford" but "what does one patient earn me, and how many do I want." We work through that calculation in the metrics every doctor should track.

What does a medical website cost, and is it a monthly fee?

A professional clinic website in Egypt is a one-off build of 15,000–40,000 EGP, not a monthly subscription. Vira's website service is 16,000 EGP and includes a multi-page, multilingual build, the first year of domain and hosting, deployment, Google Search Console indexing and source code handover. Ongoing costs after that are only hosting and domain renewal — typically a few hundred EGP a year.

Be careful with quotes in the 3,000–6,000 EGP range. They are almost always a page builder template on shared hosting, which means slow load times, poor Core Web Vitals, and a structure search engines struggle with. You save 20,000 EGP once and then pay for it every month in rankings you never achieve. We go through the trade-off in detail in do you still need a website if you have Facebook and Vezeeta?

Why do quotes range from 3,000 to 80,000 EGP a month?

Because the word "marketing" covers everything from a freelancer posting three designs a week to a team producing studio content, running ads, managing a CRM and reporting on booked patients. The price gap is real work, not just positioning. The two questions that explain almost every quote are: how much original content is produced each month, and is anyone accountable for bookings or only for posting.

Roughly, this is what separates the tiers:

1. Who produces the content. Stock images and canned captions cost almost nothing. A videographer, a studio day, an editor and a medical copywriter cost real money. Fifteen properly shot reels is a production commitment, not a content calendar.
2. Whether anyone reviews the medicine. Agencies that specialise in healthcare have someone checking claims before publication. Generalist agencies do not, and the risk lands on your licence, not theirs.
3. Whether ads are actually managed. "Boosting" a post takes thirty seconds. Structuring campaigns, testing creative, excluding audiences and tracking cost per booked patient is a weekly job.
4. Whether the loop closes. The cheap tier stops at the enquiry. The expensive tier follows it to the appointment and tells you which campaign produced it. That gap is where most clinics lose money — see why your ads bring calls but no bookings.
5. Seniority and accountability. A dedicated account manager who knows your specialty costs more than a shared junior who manages eleven pages.

A 3,000 EGP quote is not a scam. It is simply buying the first item on that list and nothing else. The problem only arises when it is sold as if it were all five.

What does clinic marketing cost in Saudi Arabia and the UAE?

Substantially more. A comparable full-management retainer runs roughly 8,000–25,000 SAR per month in Saudi Arabia and 8,000–30,000 AED per month in the UAE, with ad budgets often exceeding the retainer itself. The drivers are higher local salaries, far more competitive ad auctions — particularly in Dubai aesthetics — mandatory bilingual production, and regulatory pre-approval requirements.

The regulatory column is not a footnote. In Saudi Arabia and the UAE, health advertising generally requires prior approval and there are firm restrictions on promising outcomes or publishing certain before-and-after imagery. Content that runs fine in Cairo can be rejected — or fined — in Dubai. We cover the specifics in what a doctor can and cannot legally advertise.

One practical consequence: several Gulf clinics contract production in Egypt and keep only media buying and regulatory clearance local. It is a legitimate way to get Gulf-quality output at a materially lower production cost, provided the agency genuinely understands the destination market's rules.

How do I know whether any of this was worth it?

Divide your total monthly marketing cost by the lifetime value of one new patient — not the price of one consultation. That gives you the number of new patients you need each month to break even. Most clinics land between six and ten. If you are getting more than that, marketing is profitable; if you are getting fewer after three consistent months, something in the funnel is broken.

Work it out properly, because the consultation-price version of this calculation is misleading. Suppose:

• Your consultation fee is 700 EGP.
• An average patient returns twice and refers 0.4 more patients.
• A share of them proceed to a procedure averaging 4,000 EGP.

Your true value per new patient is far above 700 EGP — often three to five times it. A clinic spending 20,000 EGP a month with a patient lifetime value of 2,500 EGP breaks even at eight new patients, which is two a week. Framed that way, the question stops being "can I afford 20,000 EGP" and becomes "can my clinic absorb and convert two extra patients a week." Usually it can.

What should I refuse to pay for?

Do not pay for follower growth, "boosting" sold as campaign management, content you never receive the source files for, or any guarantee of a specific number of patients. Also refuse to pay a retainer that includes the ad budget without a transparent breakdown — you should always be able to see what Meta actually charged.

• Bought followers or engagement. They do not book appointments, they damage your organic reach, and on a medical page they actively undermine trust.
• Guaranteed patient numbers. No one can guarantee this, and in most Gulf jurisdictions guaranteeing clinical or commercial outcomes in health advertising is a regulatory problem in itself.
• Opaque ad spend. You should have admin access to your own Meta Business Manager and be able to see billing. If the agency owns your ad account and will not share it, you are renting your own audience.
• Assets you do not own. Logo source files, raw footage, the website's source code and the domain should all be yours. Vira hands over the GitHub repository and registers the domain in the client's name for exactly this reason.
• Long lock-ins with no exit. A three-month commitment is reasonable — that is how long results take. A twelve-month contract with no performance review is not.

If you are still weighing up providers, the companion piece to this article is how to choose a healthcare marketing agency — 12 questions and 7 red flags, which turns all of the above into a checklist you can take into a sales call.

Frequently asked questions

Dr. Samer Arafa

MBBS · Master's in Radiology · Founder, Vira

Samer is a radiologist turned healthcare marketer. He holds an MBBS and a master's in diagnostic radiology from Ain Shams University, practised radiology in Cairo hospitals from 2014 to 2019, founded the medical 3D animation studio Addax Animation, and in 2023 founded Vira, a specialised healthcare marketing agency working with doctors and clinics across Egypt and the Middle East. Figures in our articles reflect our own published rates and what we observe in the Egyptian and Gulf markets — they are ranges, not guarantees.

Samer on LinkedIn →