Dermatology marketing
Dermatology Marketing Agency Run by a Physician
Every account stays in your name, not ours. Built by a physician who signed the invoice and got burned. From $1,200 a month, published here before you talk to anyone.
Every account stays in your name, not ours. Built by a physician who signed the invoice and got burned. From $1,200 a month, published here before you talk to anyone.
Your next available appointment is four months out. On paper that is a problem solved. In the accounts it is not, because the schedule filled itself with whoever called first, not with the work you built the practice to do.
Meanwhile the cosmetic side, the part that is not tied to a reimbursement rate, is being taken by med spas with a marketing budget and an injector who is not a dermatologist. They are not better. They are simply the ones showing up when someone searches.
A four-month wait does not protect you. It just hides the fact that you have no control over what walks through the door.
Local search, AI visibility, reviews and paid reach, built on accounts registered in your name from day one, aimed at the case mix you actually want.
Your practice surfaces for the specific conditions and procedures you want to see more of, medical and cosmetic, instead of only for your own name and the generic dermatologist search.
Your credentials, your reviews and your condition pages make the difference visible online, where a med spa currently looks equivalent to a board-certified dermatologist.
The site is built to route each enquiry to the right pathway, so the calendar reflects the practice you want rather than whoever dialled first.
Most dermatologists hire an agency the way they hire a contractor: a referral, a decent-looking website, a confident call. Twelve months later the schedule is just as full, with the same mix, and nobody can tell you what the money bought.
Here is what to actually check before you sign anything.
Your Google Ads account, your Meta account, your Google Business listing, your website hosting. Ask whose name each one is in on day one. If the answer is the agency, your visibility is rented, and the ad history and review record you paid to build leave with them.
If your next opening is months away, more enquiries is not the goal. Ask the agency directly how they would shift the composition of the schedule rather than its size, and whether their reporting can even show you that. Most cannot, because they were built to count leads.
On a search results page, a med spa offering laser and injectables looks equivalent to a board-certified dermatologist. That is a positioning problem, not a bidding problem. An agency with no answer beyond spending more on the same keywords will hand you an invoice and a lost auction.
Before you sign, ask what happens to your ad accounts, your website files, your Google Business ownership, your reviews and your content if you stop working together. If any of it stays behind, you were not building an asset. You were renting one.
Who legally owns your ad accounts, your Google Business listing and your website files today?
If the answer is the agency, you do not have a partner, you have a landlord. Ask before you sign, not when you try to leave. Someone who has paid that invoice and watched the budget vanish knows what that question is worth.
If Google, Meta or your website login sits in the agency's name, they hold your visibility. Leave and you restart from zero, without the ad history or the review record you paid to build.
For a practice already booked out, a bigger lead count means nothing. If the reporting cannot show which kind of case is coming in, nobody is managing the only variable that matters.
A real agency builds everything in your name, shows the raw platform spend with nothing marked up, publishes its price, and lets you walk away with every login intact.
I trained as a maxillofacial surgeon, moved into orthodontics, and co-founded a three-clinic group in Paris. I then spent time inside Publicis Health learning how medical marketing actually works at scale.
While running the clinics I hired an agency. I paid them more than 20,000 EUR over a year. They owned my Google and Meta ad accounts, not me. They spent a fraction of the budget, kept the rest, and delivered one patient, who came in for a cleaning, while I was selling orthodontic treatment. I only found out when I pulled the account myself and read the raw numbers.
That is why Forge exists. I read every audit personally. A specialist team runs the day to day. Every account we build stays in the client's name from the first day, because I know precisely what it costs when it does not.
Most dermatology marketing agencies sit between $3,000 and $6,000 a month and will not show you that number until you are already on a call. Here it is upfront.
I sign this personally. My team keeps working until your practice is getting found and chosen for the cases that matter to you. No lock-in, no promised patient count, because what a patient decides in your room is yours, not mine. Paid ads can move in weeks. Honest search visibility takes months, often six to twelve. I will not take your money and go quiet.
Territorial exclusivity: one practice per area per treatment. When yours is taken, your competitor cannot buy it.
The first 90 days
A free audit maps the conditions and procedures you are invisible for, and who is taking that work in your city. No call, no pitch, in your inbox within 24 hours, read by a physician.
Priorities are set by the cases you want more of, with medical and cosmetic treated as the two separate economies they are. You approve it before anything goes live.
Site rebuilt or corrected, condition and procedure pages structured, local presence live, ads running in your own ad account. Everything registered to you from day one.
Enquiries reported by case type, not just by count. Ad spend shown in full, nothing marked up. You see which work is moving and what comes next.
A dermatology marketing agency runs the channels that determine which patients find you: local SEO, your Google Business Profile, paid search, reviews and a website built to route enquiries. In dermatology the useful version of that work is not raising the number of enquiries, it is changing which conditions and procedures those enquiries are about.
Because a waitlist tells you the schedule is full, not that it is full of the right work. The appointments were taken by whoever called first, which is usually the lowest value visit, while the cosmetic and procedural cases you would rather be doing are booked by someone else in your city. Marketing here is about controlling composition, not creating volume.
They need separate pages, separate campaigns and separate measures, because they are two different businesses sharing an address. Medical dermatology is bound by insurance and referral patterns; cosmetic work is elective, cash-pay and competes against med spas. A single blended campaign will always drift toward whichever is cheapest to acquire, which is rarely the one you wanted more of.
Honest condition-level and local SEO takes six to twelve months before it changes what fills the schedule, and paid search can shift the mix within weeks. For a practice that is already booked out, the sequence usually starts with paid campaigns aimed narrowly at the cases you want, because that produces a measurable change while the organic work builds.
Managed dermatology marketing starts at $1,200 per month at Forge for strategy, execution and reporting, with ad spend paid directly by you to the platform and never marked up. For a practice with a waitlist, the number that matters is not cost per enquiry but the difference in value between the case you are getting and the case you want, because that gap is what the work is buying you.
Not by bidding harder on the same keywords, but by making the difference legible where the patient is comparing. On a results page a med spa and a board-certified dermatologist look interchangeable, so the work is to surface the credentials, the complication management and the clinical depth in the content, the reviews and the pages themselves. Price competition against a spa is a losing position; medical authority is not.
Yes, because Google ranks pages rather than websites and someone searching for eczema treatment is not the same person as someone searching for a mole check or laser resurfacing. A single conditions page splits authority across everything and ranks for none of it, while dedicated pages let each condition carry the specific detail and expectations that turn a searcher into a booking.
The most common mistake is treating a full schedule as proof that marketing is unnecessary. That reasoning leaves the composition of the practice entirely to chance, and it is why so many dermatologists end up doing the lowest value version of their own specialty while the profitable work goes elsewhere. The second most common is running one blended campaign across two economies that behave nothing alike.
AI assistants now name two or three practices when asked who treats a specific skin condition in a city, drawing on structured content, review signals and content depth rather than page rank alone. Practices with thin sites and no condition-level content are omitted entirely. Being absent there matters more in dermatology than in most specialties, because patients frequently describe a symptom rather than searching a provider type.
Confirm that every account, your ad accounts, your Google Business Profile, your analytics and your website files, sits in your name from day one rather than the agency's. Ask whether their reporting can show the composition of your schedule and not just the number of leads, ask how they separate medical from cosmetic, and ask what happens to everything if you leave.
How 50+ practices took back control of their own visibility. Apply one of these five moves and the effect shows up fast. We handle the rest when you are ready. Rank for the cases that actually pay in your area. Depend less on directories and paid ads. Build visibility that still works next year.
The free Forge Visibility Snapshot shows which conditions and procedures you are invisible for, and who is taking that work in your city. No call, no pitch, read by a physician.