Performance Marketing
2026-10-14 · 11 min read
Sapun Lamichhane
Founder & CEO of Arcetis
Before a clinic or hospital spends a single rupee on marketing, it helps to know the boundaries. The Nepal Medical Council's code of conduct restricts how individual doctors can promote themselves - claims of being "the best," comparative superiority statements, and testimonials that imply a guaranteed outcome are all problems, not just ethically but professionally. Hospitals and clinics as institutions have somewhat more room than individual practitioners, but the spirit of the restriction still applies: factual, service-level advertising is fine; hype is not. Any agency or in-house team running healthcare marketing in Nepal needs to understand this before writing a single ad.
None of this means healthcare marketing does not work - it means it looks different from a restaurant or a clothing brand's marketing. Patients in Kathmandu, Pokhara, Biratnagar, and Chitwan increasingly search online before choosing where to go, whether that is Googling a symptom at 11 PM or checking a hospital's reviews before a scheduled appointment. But outside the big cities, word of mouth and referrals from a trusted local doctor still account for the majority of actual bookings. The job of marketing here is less about persuasion and more about being easy to find and credible-looking at the exact moment someone is already deciding.
A useful way to think about this: marketing for a Nepali hospital or clinic is not about creating demand that does not exist - the demand is already there, driven by illness, injury, and the basic need for care. The job is reducing friction between someone who already needs care and the facility that can provide it, which is a narrower and more achievable goal than what marketing tries to do in most other industries.
“Patients rarely search for "the best hospital in Kathmandu" - they search for a symptom at midnight, and whoever answers clearly and locally is who they call first.”
The unglamorous first step delivers the most reliable return: a fully completed, accurate Google Business Profile for every physical location. Correct category (hospital, dental clinic, diagnostic center), real operating hours, real photos of the actual facility rather than stock imagery, and a habit of responding to every review - good or bad - professionally and without confirming anyone's status as a patient, which would breach privacy. For a hospital with multiple departments, this usually means one strong primary listing plus clear department information on the website, rather than creating separate fake listings per department, which Google can and does suspend.
This is where an SEO budget in the realistic range of NPR 30,000 or more per month is well spent for a healthcare business - optimizing pages for "[city] + [specialty]" searches, building a proper page per department or service, and fixing the basics that most Nepali hospital websites get wrong: slow load times, outdated information, and a homepage that does not even rank for the hospital's own name when someone searches "pokhara eye clinic appointment."
It is worth noting that many Nepali hospital websites fail at an even more basic level: they are not mobile-friendly, take more than five seconds to load on an average mobile connection, or bury the phone number and address somewhere a visitor has to hunt for. Fixing these basics before spending on any paid promotion is usually the highest-return single change available to a healthcare business operating on a limited budget.
Google Ads can work well for urgent, high-intent searches - "emergency dental pokhara," "dialysis center kathmandu," "pediatrician available now." Healthcare keywords in Nepal tend to cost more per click than average, commonly somewhere in the NPR 15-40 range depending on specialty and city, simply because demand is real even though few advertisers bid aggressively yet. Management typically fits the same band as other Google Ads work - roughly NPR 20,000-40,000 per month in fees, separate from the actual media spend, which should scale with how many appointments a clinic can realistically absorb.
The constraint on ad copy is actually a feature here: no promises of cures, no ranking claims, just facts - services offered, hours, location, insurance accepted. Most patients searching with real intent want logistics, not persuasion, so this restriction rarely hurts performance.
It is also worth budgeting conservatively at first. A hospital running its first Google Ads campaign should expect a learning period of several weeks before cost per lead stabilizes, and should resist the urge to judge the campaign's value within the first few days, when the algorithm is still working out which searches actually convert into booked appointments.
Patient education content does double duty: it helps real people and it builds the topical authority search engines reward. Pages answering specific questions - what to expect before an appendectomy, when chest pain warrants an ER visit versus a GP appointment, how to prepare for a colonoscopy - written or at least reviewed by an actual doctor on staff, consistently outperform vague "we care about your health" messaging that says nothing.
What to avoid is just as important: fabricated or uncredited before-and-after images, reviews that were incentivized rather than earned, and any claim that a doctor is "the best" in a city or country. Beyond the professional conduct issue, this content erodes trust fast if a patient discovers it was exaggerated, which in a small-world market like Nepal, travels.
For a mid-size clinic or small hospital taking this seriously across channels, a rough combined picture looks like: local SEO and Google Business Profile management around NPR 30,000/month, Google Ads management around NPR 20,000-25,000/month plus NPR 40,000-80,000/month in actual ad spend, and social media around NPR 15,000-20,000/month - landing somewhere around NPR 100,000-150,000 per month all-in. A smaller practice can start with just Google Business Profile and basic SEO from roughly NPR 20,000-30,000/month and expand once it is generating bookings.
Arcetis, a Pokhara-based, Verified Google Partner agency, has worked with a small number of healthcare clients inside these exact constraints. The point in choosing any partner for this category is not finding someone who can run ads - it is finding someone who understands medical advertising rules well enough not to create a liability. Engagements are scoped per business from around NPR 20,000, and clients keep ownership of their own accounts and data throughout.
Factual advertising - services offered, hours, location, qualifications - is generally fine. What the Nepal Medical Council's code of conduct restricts is claims of superiority, guarantees of outcomes, and testimonials that imply a result. Institutions have somewhat more latitude than individual practitioners, but any campaign should be checked against current NMC guidance before it goes live.
A starting point focused on Google Business Profile and basic local SEO can work from roughly NPR 20,000-30,000 per month. A larger hospital running ads and social media in parallel typically lands in the NPR 100,000-150,000 per month range once management fees and media spend are combined - and those two should always be budgeted separately.
Google Business Profile optimization usually shows movement within a few weeks because most clinics neglect it entirely while real search demand already exists. Paid ads can drive calls faster but the cost continues only as long as the spend does, whereas the organic groundwork keeps compounding.
Social media and reputation management
Facebook and Instagram remain where a lot of Nepali patients go to double-check a clinic even after finding it on Google - looking at photos of the actual facility, community activities like health camps, and how the page interacts with the public. A realistic budget for consistent management runs NPR 15,000-60,000 per month depending on posting frequency and whether video content is involved; it is worth outsourcing once the doctor's or owner's own time becomes the bottleneck.
Reputation management deserves more attention than most clinics give it: proactively (but not financially) asking satisfied patients to leave a Google review, and responding to negative reviews calmly and generally, without ever confirming that a reviewer was actually a patient - that alone can be a privacy violation regardless of how the response is otherwise worded.
It also helps to be realistic about what social media can and cannot do for a clinic. It rarely drives emergency or urgent-care decisions, which tend to route through Google search or direct word of mouth instead. Where it earns its budget is in the slower trust-building work - a potential patient who has already heard of a clinic checking its page before committing to a first appointment.