Tools & Checklists · Free calculator
Hospital marketing budget calculator
Split an annual budget by service line and channel, phase it monthly and test it against OPD capacity.
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Why it exists
The problem it solves
Most hospital marketing budgets are last year’s number with a percentage added, split by whoever argued hardest in the planning meeting. The result is money pushed into service lines that cannot see more patients, and starved channels in the ones that can. This workbook forces the allocation to start from the service lines you actually want to grow.
You set an annual envelope, weight it by service line, split each line across channels, and phase it by month. Then the sheet checks your plan against two things the board will ask about: whether the appointments you are buying fit into available OPD slots, and whether the implied cost per booked appointment sits inside the target you set.
Inside
What you get
- An inputs sheet for annual budget, service-line weights and channel mix, all in INR
- A channel allocation grid covering search, social, content, CRM and contact centre, brand, referral programmes and offline or community work
- Monthly phasing with seasonality weights and a check that months add back to the annual total
- A capacity check comparing planned booked appointments against available OPD slots per service line
- A cost per booked appointment check against your own target, flagged line by line
- An instructions sheet explaining every input and formula
Audience
Who it’s for
For marketing heads, unit heads and finance partners building or defending an annual marketing plan for a hospital or multi-unit group.
Method
How to use it
- Enter the annual budget and your own service-line weights on the Inputs sheet, replacing every example value.
- Split each service line across channels based on where its patients actually search, ask and get referred.
- Set monthly seasonality weights so spend follows demand and new-consultant onboarding, not the calendar.
- Enter available OPD slots per service line and your expected booked appointments per channel.
- Read the Checks sheet: any line over capacity or over the target cost per booked appointment is the conversation to have before the budget is signed off.
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Questions about this calculator
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Start from where the hospital wants to grow and where it has capacity, not from last year’s split. Weight service lines by strategic priority and available consultant time, then check the weights against OPD slots. A service line that is already full should get maintenance spend, not growth spend, until capacity is added. The workbook makes that trade-off visible line by line.
Because demand you cannot serve is wasted spend and a poor patient experience. If planned appointments exceed available slots, patients get offered dates weeks out and book elsewhere. The capacity check flags any service line where the plan buys more appointments than the clinic can take, so you move money before the campaign starts rather than after complaints arrive.
Use your own. Take the contribution a new patient brings to a service line over a sensible period, agree with finance what share of that can go to acquisition, and set the target from there. It will differ sharply between a general OPD visit and a complex surgical line. The example value in the sheet is illustrative only and is not a benchmark.
It should, and the workbook has a line for them. Money spent answering, following up and reminding patients often does more for booked appointments than extra media. Treating the contact centre as an operations cost hides that trade-off. Put it in the marketing plan, even if the cost sits in another department’s ledger, so you can see the full cost of a booked appointment.