Dental Practice Budget
If you run a dental practice, you have probably asked yourself the following question: “How much should a dental practice spend on marketing?”. It is a great question. Each dental practice has particular goals, local markets, and financial situations. Nevertheless, acquiring new, top-level patients to your dental practice is absolutely necessary, as well as maximizing recurring revenue from them.
Starting a Percentage-based Budget Dental Practices Need
As in each stage of their life cycles dental practices need different marketing budgets, these estimates can vary as follows:
New Dental Practices
New dental practices debt is considerably high, but attracting new patients quickly can allow them to begin paying their bills and loans. When it comes to new practices, most dental business experts suggest spending 20% of projected gross revenue on marketing. How much should a dental practice spend on marketing when it is starting? Keep in mind that it depends on your local market. If you are facing strong local competition in a large city, your benchmark should be about 30%, for instance. However, 20% is adequate if there is little competition.
In terms of goals, what is dental marketing like for new practices? To make an impact in your community, your first marketing campaign is vital and needs to reach as many people as possible. Excellent marketing strategies to implement are using search engine marketing, paid ads, and developing a resourceful dental practice website. Despite search engine optimization (SEO) does require time and investment, the payoff is quite significant. Acquiring new patients will be much easier once you are at the top of search engines and create a great online reputation. Meanwhile, pay-per-click ads will let you appear at the top of the search engines to be easily found by new patients.
So, if you are starting your practice and you wonder “how much should I pay for a dental practice?”, ensure you invest a considerable portion of your initial funding towards a well-planned marketing program that makes your potential patients notice you. If you get it right, SEO will offer you the best return on investment with a constant flow of revenue and new patients.
Established Dental Practices
If your dental practice is already in this stage, you must be wondering “How can I grow my dental practice even more?” Several dental practices wish to grow to one or two million dollars in revenue, but their current website or digital marketing is not performing as well as the competition, and they struggle to find new patients and meet their goals every month. Then, how much should a dental practice spend on marketing if the practice is already established and looking to grow? To begin achieving successful results and fix current issues, these practices should spend 5-10% of the gross revenue they are aiming for.
When used correctly, an SEO program will bring effective and long-lasting results after six months or even a year. Similarly, pay-per-click ads are considerably useful for established dental practices in the short term as they are for new dental practices to place you at the top of the search engines. It is also important to redesign your site following current trends to improve your SEO.
Breaking down the revenue growth you would like to see in your practice is also very helpful. For instance, if you want to grow your practice by $240,000 in revenue for the year, you will need to acquire 240 new patients who bring in $1000 per year, which means you need 20 new extra patients every month. Therefore, considering the average cost of acquiring a new patient is $100 – $300, keep in mind you might need to spend $2000 to $6000 additionally. Spending a few hundred dollars every month to acquire 20 new patients would not be achievable by any marketing method, so remember that you need to spend money to get more. It is completely worth it in the long-term.
Dental Practices That Have Become Stagnant
To replace those patients who fall off, established practices need to attract new patients. How much should a dental practice spend on marketing in this case? The best option is to consider the revenue they would like to see and work on a budget of 5-10%. It might be necessary to increase your marketing budget to invest in a new website or a few other marketing assets. Keep in mind that underinvesting in marketing can result in shrinking or stagnation if your competition is marketing aggressively.
Best Strategies for Dental Patient Marketing
Although you have invested a lot to create a welcoming and professional environment for your new patients at your dental office, keep in mind that your website is your virtual dental office. This virtual office should be developed to attract and get new patients. So, how do you market a dental practice? The most effective marketing channels to acquire new patients are:
– Social media marketing
– SEO
– Pay-per-click advertising
– Mail campaign to a local area
– Targeted brand-building advertising in print media for high revenue practices
Depending on your practice revenue, growth goals, the competitiveness of your market, and your budget, your investments on the different marketing channels will vary. For instance, if your yearly practice revenue is $750,000 your marketing budget would be $3500 – $5000 per month. Therefore, your SEO and PPC budget could be $1200 each, while your social media, mail campaign, and printed ads budget could be $500 each.
Planned marketing is vital to acquire new patients and develop a thriving practice. Nevertheless, keep in mind that dental patient marketing should always remain humanized. What is a healthcare marketing strategy that helps patients while allows your practice to grow successfully? Take advantage of social media to market your practice while sharing high-quality information with your patients. It is a simple way to show them you care about their health while you remind the community you provide a service.