Marketing Budget Dentist - How Much You Should Spend on Marketing?

How much marketing budget do dentists must-have?

The truth is that it is not easy for dentists to determine the specific amount they should or must spend on their marketing campaigns.

Generally speaking, to arrive at a budget, you need to work backward from your expected return on investment. For instance, assume that you determine that every Invisalign patient will be worth $6,000 and that you have a goal of getting 10 new patients per month. No matter how much you decide to spend, this metric can serve as your guide. The revenues that you make out of marketing must be 8 to 10 times what you spend.

This means that, working backward, the $60,000 in new revenues every month that the practice is seeking suggests a marketing budget a month of $6,000 to $7,500, i.e., $50,000/10x ROI = $5,000 or $50,000/8x ROI = $7,500.

If the number doesn’t feel intuitive, there is another approach you can try: your marketing budget dentist must be around 10% to 12.5% of the total revenues you want to generate.

Here is one more example. Assuming you have a general dentistry practice of your own and you wish to generate 10 new patients every month or 120 new patients per year. Assume that every patient is worth $2,000 a year. All in, the flow of new patients will generate revenue of $240,000. Considering the metric of 10% to 12.5% suggests that your marketing budget can be $24,000 to $30,000 a month.

Why are There Dentists Who Don’t Do It?

These metrics emphasize the age-old marketing saying – if you want to generate more revenue, you also need to spend more. The metrics must provoke a question. If you could spend $5,000 to earn $50,000, why is it that there are still dentists who don’t do it every day and all day? There are probably three common reasons for this.

For one, some practices don’t believe that it is easy to achieve these figures. Yes, these can be achieved, but it takes work similar to other types of marketing.

Second, these figures show an annualized run rate. It means that if you got 120 new patients that contribute $2,000 each indeed, your ROI is 8 to 10 times your expenses. However, this is not what really happens during the first year. The patients you get in the latter months of your budget period will not generate revenue until the next year.

Finally, and probably the most important touch of reality, these figures require the highest level of operational preparedness. While a monthly marketing expense of $3,000 a month can provide enough leads for producing an ROI of 8 to 10 times, for some reason, leads might not convert.

There are various reasons behind this. The practice probably doesn’t respond well to incoming inquiries. It could be that the implant patient had a bad extraction experience and choose a different clinic for the implant.

At the end of the day, the marketing budget dentist must set will be based on many important factors.

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