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Guide · Practice growth
How much should a dental practice spend on marketing?
The percentage of turnover rule is the wrong tool. A practice with empty implant capacity and a practice with a full diary should not spend the same, even at identical turnover.
There is no single correct percentage. A more useful method is to work backwards from capacity: decide how many additional patients or cases you can actually treat each month, work out what each is worth after lab and clinical costs, and multiply by a realistic cost per patient for the treatment and area. That gives a budget tied to something real. As a sense check, many UK practices spend somewhere in the low single digit percentages of turnover on marketing, with practices in growth or launch phases spending considerably more.
- Better than a percentage
- Work backwards from capacity
- Key inputs
- Case value, margin, cost per patient
- Growth phases
- Justify higher spend
- Before spending
- Check the free channels first
Why the percentage rule fails
It ignores capacity, which is the actual constraint. Filling a diary you cannot service damages a practice more than doing nothing, and a practice with three empty implant slots a month has a completely different budget requirement from one turning work away.
The method that works
Start with how many additional patients or cases a month you can genuinely take. Multiply by the value of each, then by your margin after lab and clinical costs. That is the value at stake. A budget that costs meaningfully less than that value is defensible; one that costs more is not.
Cost per patient, not cost per lead
The number to work with is what a patient costs, not what an enquiry costs. Enquiry cost is flattering and easy to reduce by lowering quality. Cost per patient accounts for how many enquiries book, how many attend and how many accept treatment.
What to spend first
If you have an untouched patient database, spend there before buying advertising. If enquiries are not answered within the hour, fix that before increasing budget. Both are cheaper than ads and both raise the return on everything you spend afterwards.
Budgets by situation
A quiet diary needing patients now points to paid search, where enquiries arrive in days. A practice wanting to stop renting patients points to SEO, which is slower but persists. A high value treatment focus justifies a larger budget because one accepted case can cover a quarter. A new practice justifies more still, because the alternative is paying fixed costs into an empty diary.
Reviewing it
Judge paid channels at ninety days rather than thirty, because high value treatment decisions take four to twelve weeks. Judge SEO at six months. Judge database work almost immediately, because it responds within a fortnight.
Where it usually goes wrong
The mistakes we see most often, in roughly the order they cost the most.
- Setting a budget as a percentage without reference to capacity
- Measuring cost per lead rather than cost per patient
- Buying advertising while an untouched patient list sits in the software
- Increasing spend when the real problem is response time
- Judging a high value campaign at thirty days
- Filling a diary the practice cannot actually service
Questions and answers
Common questions.
What percentage of turnover should a dental practice spend on marketing?
There is no single right figure, and percentage rules ignore capacity. Many UK practices sit in the low single digits of turnover, with launches and growth phases higher. Working backwards from spare capacity and case value is a more reliable method.
How do I work out a marketing budget?
Decide how many additional patients or cases a month you can treat, multiply by their value, then by your margin after lab and clinical costs. That is the value at stake, and your budget should cost meaningfully less than it.
Should I measure cost per lead or cost per patient?
Cost per patient. Cost per lead is easy to improve by attracting lower quality enquiries, which makes the report look better and the diary no fuller.
What should I spend money on first?
Your existing patient database if it has not been contacted, and your enquiry response time if it is slow. Both cost little and improve the return on everything else you spend.
How long before I judge whether it worked?
Ninety days for paid campaigns on high value treatment, six months for SEO, about two weeks for database reactivation. Judging a slow channel on a fast channel timescale is the most common reason practices conclude marketing does not work.
Is there a minimum worth spending?
For paid search, roughly £750 a month of media in most areas. Below that there is not enough data to improve on and you spend three months guessing.
Related
Where this connects.
Next step
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