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In House Marketing vs Agency for a Single Clinic
In House Marketing vs Agency for a Single Clinic
Most comparisons of whether to hire marketing agency or employee invent a salary figure and then declare a winner. This page does not. It lists what you have to price yourself, and prices only the half we can prove.
In house, eight lines
Salary
PF and ESI
Laptop and phone
Software subscriptions
Recruitment cost
Training time, yours
Cover during leave
Ramp up months
Only you can fill these in.
Agency, two lines
Monthly fee, published
Ad spend, paid direct to the platform
Both already public on this site.
The honest framing
Should a clinic hire marketing agency or employee?
It depends on one thing more than any other: whether you have somebody who will still be doing this in month six. Marketing for a clinic is not a project that finishes. Whichever option survives month six is the right one for you.
Definition
In house marketing means employing somebody, usually part time in a single clinic, to run the website, the Google Business Profile, content and campaigns. An agency means contracting that work out for a monthly fee. The real difference is not cost or quality. It is who carries the risk of the work stopping.
Eight dimensions, side by side
Which one wins on each dimension?
Neither wins outright, and any page claiming otherwise is selling one of them. In house takes three. An agency takes five. Which three matter more is a question only you can answer.
In house
Dimension
Agency
In house
Wins
In the clinic, all day, every day
Availability
Agency
Scheduled hours, not on call
In house
Wins
Hears real patients at the desk every day
Patient understanding
Agency
Learns it from you and from the data
In house
Wins
Complete, it is your decision every time
Control
Agency
Shared, and only as good as the contract
In house
Stops when they leave, resign or fall ill
Continuity
Agency
Wins
Continues, that is most of what the fee buys
In house
Has to be taught, and taught by you
Compliance knowledge
Agency
Wins
Should already be there, so ask in the first call
In house
One person rarely writes, designs and runs ads well
Breadth of skill
Agency
Wins
Split across people who each do one thing
In house
Eight lines, several of them variable
Cost predictability
Agency
Wins
One published monthly figure
In house
Hiring, then a ramp up of months
Speed to start
Agency
Wins
Days
3
to in house
Presence against continuity. That is the whole trade.
5
to an agency
Fill this in yourself
What does in house marketing actually cost?
More than the salary, and we are not going to guess the number for you. Salaries swing widely by city and experience, and any page quoting a single figure is inventing it. Here is the sheet, with the boxes left empty on purpose.
The line
Your number
01
The salary, and what sits on top of it
Provident fund, ESI where applicable, bonus, and the increment you would expect at twelve months. The advertised salary is the floor, not the cost.
Rs
02
Equipment and software
A laptop, a phone plan, and the subscriptions the role needs: a design tool, a scheduler, a rank tracker, image credits. Individually small, collectively a monthly line.
Rs
03
Finding the person
The posting, the hours you spend shortlisting and interviewing, and the real possibility of doing it twice. In a smaller city the pool who have done healthcare marketing specifically is thin.
Rs
04
Your own time, which is the expensive one
A new hire needs the clinical vocabulary explained, the procedures explained, and every piece of copy checked before it goes out. That checking is a consultant hour, and it does not stop after month one.
Rs
05
The ramp up
Somebody competent but new to healthcare needs months before the compliance boundaries are second nature. You pay full cost for partial output through that period.
Rs
06
Cover when they are away
Leave, illness, notice period. In a one person setup the work simply stops, and search work that stops for six weeks loses more than six weeks of ground.
Rs
07
The compliance risk, which stays with you
An employee who does not know the Drugs and Magic Remedies Act writes a cure claim, and the liability lands on the registered practitioner. A real cost even when nothing goes wrong, because avoiding it means reading everything.
Rs
08
What happens when they leave
Passwords, the content calendar, the reasoning behind past decisions. In house knowledge lives in one head unless somebody insists it is written down, and usually nobody does.
Rs
Your monthly total
Rs
0
Against the agency figure we publish
Fill the boxes above to see where you land.
Nothing you type is sent anywhere or stored. Enter monthly figures, and divide any one off cost such as recruitment by twelve so the total stays comparable.
The half we can prove
What does an agency actually cost?
At MedZove, between Rs 15,000 and Rs 40,000 a month, plus a one time website build for practices that need one. That is the whole of it. Ad spend is separate and never passes through us.
In the fee
The work, the tools and the software
Cover, because the work does not stop for leave
Compliance knowledge, already in the room
Monthly reporting and a call to explain it
Not in the fee
Ad spend, paid by the clinic straight to Google or Meta
Clinic photography
Paid promotion of any kind
A website build, if the clone package is what you bought
Why we publish it
Custom pricing sounds like tailoring and usually is not. When a price is only ever quoted in private it can move with how wealthy the buyer looks, and there is no way for you to know whether it did. Publishing removes that question, and it is also the only reason this comparison can exist at all.
Written against our own interest
When is in house genuinely the better answer?
In four situations, and we would rather write them here than have you find out after six months of paying us. If any of these describes your clinic, do not hire us or anybody like us.
Somebody in the family already does it
If a son, daughter or spouse is genuinely interested and will still be interested next year, they will beat an agency on context and on cost. The word that matters in that sentence is still.
Your real problem is the front desk
If calls go unanswered and appointments are missed, no amount of visibility helps. That is an operations fix, it is free, and it usually creates more capacity than new patients would have.
You are already running at capacity
A full clinic does not need more enquiries. It needs better matched ones, or higher value procedures, and that is a positioning question rather than a marketing spend.
You want daily social content
Volume posting needs somebody physically present photographing real moments. An agency delivering that remotely is either using stock or inventing it, and both show immediately.
What most clinics actually land on
Is there a version that uses both?
Yes, and it is the most common sensible answer. The clinic keeps what needs presence and contracts out what needs continuity. The line falls exactly where physical presence stops mattering.
Keep inside
Anything needing presence
Answering the phone and WhatsApp
Asking every satisfied patient for a review
Photographing the clinic and the team
Telling you what patients actually said this week
None of this can be done remotely, and all of it matters.
Contract out
Anything needing continuity
The website and its condition pages
The Google Business Profile
Search work, which compounds only if nobody stops
Compliance checking of everything that goes out
All of this survives a resignation, which is the point.
If you take one thing from this page, take the split above. It costs less than a hire, it fixes the gaps an agency cannot reach, and it is what we would tell a friend.
FAQ
What else should you ask before deciding?
Because we do not have that data and we do not publish figures we cannot source. Salaries swing widely between cities and experience levels. A page that gives you one number is guessing, and it is guessing in the direction that suits whoever wrote it.
It is, and it sits between the two on almost every dimension. Cheaper than both, weaker on continuity than an agency, weaker on presence than an employee. The same three checks apply: one client you may call, one dated screenshot, and the price in writing.
Search work loses more than the time it pauses for, because competitors keep publishing while you stop. On the practice we have documented, month three was where positions started arriving. Stopping at three months means paying the whole cost and collecting almost none of the return.
Ask one compliance question in the first call and one clinical one. If they cannot say what the Drugs and Magic Remedies Act bars, or cannot name the three commonest procedures in your speciality, they are learning on your money. The eight specialities we build for
Because three months is not long enough to know whether it worked, and a shorter term guarantees a disappointing answer. It is framed as a fair test rather than a lock in, and there is fifteen days notice to end it after that. The full terms
You should, from day one, including the domain, the hosting account and the Google Business Profile. Ask any agency this before signing. Google documents that only the existing primary owner can transfer a profile, and a new owner must hold the role seven full days before promotion, so it cannot be sorted out during a bad exit.
Send every shortlisted name the same three requests: one client you may telephone, one screenshot with the date range visible, and the price in writing. Anybody who cannot answer all three within a day has answered you already. The five checks in full
Next step
Want a straight answer for your clinic?
Tell us the size of your practice and who is doing this today, and we will say which of the three answers fits, including when it is not us. The conversation is free and it does not end in a proposal unless you ask for one.