Price your own hour first
Doing it yourself is only free if your time is worthless, and it is not. Take your consultation fee, work out what an hour of clinic time earns you, then count the hours honestly: thinking of topics, writing, filming, re-filming, editing, subtitling, posting, replying to comments and messages, and reporting. For most doctors it lands somewhere between six and ten hours a month once they are consistent — and far more in the first month.
Multiply that by your hourly value and you have the real cost of the DIY route. It is usually the most expensive option on the table, which is exactly why so few busy doctors sustain it past month three.
Selling products or courses alongside the clinic?
Shopify is the quickest way to put a store behind your name — try it free.
What each route actually includes
A freelance editor or videographer solves production and nothing else. You still choose topics, write scripts, appear, approve, publish and reply. Cheapest paid option, and the one that most often stalls, because the doctor remains the bottleneck. An in-house hire gives you availability and control, but a single salary rarely buys a strategist, a writer, a videographer and an editor at once — in practice you get a poster.
An agency retainer should cover positioning, the content calendar, filming, editing, bilingual copy, publishing, community management and reporting. When comparing quotes, ignore the headline number and compare those eight line items — the gap between a cheap retainer and an expensive one is almost always three or four of them missing.
Budget the ads separately
Whatever you pay for production and strategy, media spend is its own line. Mixing them is how clinics end up believing they spent a lot on marketing while almost nothing reached a patient. Ask any provider to split the invoice: this much is our fee, this much goes to the platforms.
As a rule of thumb, do not let media spend exceed production spend while you still have nothing worth amplifying. Money spent boosting weak material buys you a larger audience for the wrong impression.