Prescription-only medicines can’t be advertised to the public. Half your competitors do it anyway. That’s an opportunity for you, not a licence.
The Bigger Brand is a Manchester-based marketing agency that works with aesthetics clinics across the UK and Ireland, covering paid advertising, website design, local search, content and enquiry conversion. Every advert is written to ASA and CAP rules, including the ban on promoting prescription-only medicines to the public. We bring the same approach we use with dental practices, where regulated advertising and high-value treatment decisions are the norm.
Nobody needs aesthetic treatment. People choose it, usually after a long spell of thinking about it, so no clinic gets new clients by default. Regulars and word of mouth will keep a diary ticking over, but growth beyond that depends on being found by the people who are quietly looking.
That happens on Instagram and Google, which is also where the rules bite hardest. Marketing has to put your clinic and your practitioners in front of the right people, with advertising that’s allowed to stay live, and then turn a nervous enquiry into a consultation.
We built this agency around dental practices, and aesthetics turns out to be the same business with the restrictions turned up.
It’s regulated advertising and high-value treatment that people think about for months. The client is nervous, slightly embarrassed and researching quietly before they ever fill in a form, and trust does most of the selling long before price comes up.
The difference is that aesthetics has a harder compliance problem and a more crowded market.
You’re competing with clinics prepared to break the rules, with injectors working from a rented room on Instagram, and increasingly with prices that make no commercial sense. Racing them to the bottom isn’t a strategy. Following them into non-compliant advertising is how a clinic ends up with an ASA ruling attached to its name in Google.
The clinics doing well treat it as a medical service that happens to be aesthetic, rather than a beauty service that happens to involve a needle.
Prescription-only medicines can’t be advertised to the public in the UK. Full stop.
That includes botulinum toxin by any name, whether that’s the brand, “anti-wrinkle injections”, “wrinkle-relaxing treatment” or any of the euphemisms invented to get around it. Emojis and coded language count too. The ASA has ruled on all of it.
What you can do is advertise consultations, talk about treatment areas generally, promote your clinic and clinicians, and give information once someone has made contact.
It’s a real constraint, and it’s also a filter. Clinics that build their marketing around treatments they can’t advertise have no foundation. Clinics that build around skin health, consultation, expertise and outcomes have something a ruling can’t take away.
The same few problems account for most of the wasted spend we see in aesthetics.
Wasted spend, account restrictions, and occasionally a public ruling that outranks your own website.
You can’t win it, and if you did, you’d attract clients you don’t want.
A clinic logo and stock imagery, in a category where the entire decision is about who’s holding the needle.
Higher-value aesthetics decisions take weeks, and almost nobody follows them up.
With no route from a first appointment to a second, every month starts from zero.
More so than in almost any other category. People are choosing who puts a needle in their face, so show them who that is, at length and repeatedly.
Skincare, peels, resurfacing and consultations can all be advertised and built on, and they create a route to everything else once someone is in the clinic.
Documented, real and unfiltered, and never implying typical or guaranteed outcomes. In a category full of edited images, an honest one stands out more than you’d think.
This is the compliant version of every campaign. It’s low-commitment, right for a medical service, and it puts a qualified person in front of the client.
Aesthetics is repeat business, yet most clinics market it as though every appointment is a first. Courses and plans change the economics completely.
Same as dental. People enquire, don’t book, and come back when something prompts them. Most clinics never contact them again.
We’ll check your ads, website and social channels against the rules, show you what’s at risk and what you could be promoting instead. It’s free.
No. Botulinum toxin is a prescription-only medicine, and UK regulations ban advertising prescription-only medicines to the public. That includes brand names, descriptive terms such as “anti-wrinkle injections”, and coded or implied references. Clinics can advertise consultations, discuss treatments generally once someone has made contact, and promote non-prescription services.
Clinics may advertise consultations, clinic and practitioner credentials, non-prescription treatments such as skincare, chemical peels, microneedling and resurfacing, and dermal fillers, which are not prescription-only medicines in the UK though they remain subject to general advertising rules on claims and evidence. Prescription-only medicines may not be advertised to the public in any form.
Through content led by the practitioner that shows their credentials and approach, treatment categories that can be advertised such as skin health, consultation-based offers, real before-and-after images used with documented consent, and structured follow-up. Treatment decisions often take weeks, so staying in touch after the first enquiry usually improves conversion.
Dermal fillers are classified as medical devices rather than prescription-only medicines in the UK, so they may be advertised, unlike botulinum toxin. However, advertising remains subject to ASA and CAP rules on substantiation, socially responsible messaging, and restrictions on targeting under-18s. Claims about results must be supportable and must not imply guaranteed outcomes.
