How much should a dental practice spend on marketing?

Why percentage rules mislead

The most common answer you will find is a percentage of revenue. One UK vendor guide, for example, suggests budgeting 5 to 8 per cent of target monthly private revenue.¹ I could not find an independent study behind this kind of figure. It's a rule of thumb, published by businesses that sell marketing.

The deeper problem is that a percentage rule starts from the wrong end. It tells you what you can afford in general, not what a specific target needs. Two practices with the same turnover can need very different budgets.

A budget should answer a question: how much will it cost to get the patients I want? Only the backwards method answers that.

Start from the treatment target

Start with the outcome, per treatment. "More patients" isn't a target. "Six more implant treatment starts a month" is.

For each treatment you want to grow, write down:

1. The target: how many treatment starts a month you want. A treatment start is a patient who has accepted a plan and begun treatment.
2. The capacity: whether you have the chair time and clinicians to deliver that many. If not, marketing will fill a waiting list, not a diary.
3. The value: what a treatment start is worth to the practice, after lab and material costs.
4. Seasonality: whether demand for that treatment rises and falls through the year, so the budget can follow it.

Capacity is the step to settle before any spend figure. There's no point paying for implant enquiries the book can't take. If capacity is the limit, the right budget may be smaller than you expected, and the better investment may be in the consultation process instead.

Work back to budget

Each step between an enquiry and a treatment start loses some people. Working backwards through those steps turns a treatment target into an enquiry target, and an enquiry target into a spend figure.

The rates you need are:

Once you have enquiries needed and cost per enquiry, spend is one multiplication. The more useful number to track afterwards is what each booked consultation cost, because it includes the drop-off at your front desk, where a paid-for enquiry can still be lost.

If you don't know your own rates yet, that is the first problem to solve. Budgets built on guessed conversion rates are guesses. Set the budget as a test, measure the real rates for a few months, then rebuild it from your own numbers.

Fees versus spend

A marketing budget has three parts, and they behave differently.

Keep them separate in your planning. A practice that doubles its target doesn't necessarily need to double its fees, but it may need close to double the ad spend. What vendors charge, and the pricing models to watch, is covered in what practices typically pay for dental marketing.

Organic search changes the picture over time. Pages that rank bring in enquiries without a cost per click, so a practice investing in its site and profile can often reduce the paid share of its budget as those pages mature. That is a reason to plan over twelve months rather than one.

A worked example

Illustrative figures, not benchmarks. Every number below is invented and rounded to show the method. None is an average, a target or a typical result. Replace each one with your own.

A practice wants 4 more implant treatment starts a month and has confirmed it has the surgical time.

Two things stand out even with invented numbers. The front desk step, turning enquiries into bookings, moves the budget as much as any ad setting: in this illustration, improving it from 1 in 3 to 1 in 2 would cut the enquiries needed from 30 to 20, and the ad spend with it. And the whole calculation depends on tracking that can see each step. Without it, every rate is a guess.

Then check the result against value. If each implant treatment start is worth far more to the practice than the total monthly cost divided by 4, the budget is worth testing. If it's close, fix the conversion steps before spending more.

For the other buying decisions, including who to hire and what you must own, see how to buy dental marketing. If you want help building this from your own numbers, email me about your practice at [email protected].