Dental Marketing Investment – Sail through 2015

Now we know that we need to market our practices, we need to know how much to spend and where to spend it.

As I have suggested on numerous other occasions, 5% of the practice’s gross revenue should be invested in marketing. What I have also realised over the years is that for practices with an annual turnover of £0.5 million, while spending £25,000 on their marketing will provide some results, it’s not enough to set their campaign on fire. Similarly, a young practice turning over £300,000 with a £15,000 marketing spend, will see a relatively small return on investment.

It is necessary therefore to manage your expectations. There is a certain quantity of investment that can have as much of an effect as the quality of the marketing. There is a tipping point where the size of the investment will generate momentum, regardless of what you decide to do with it, below which the return on investment can be difficult to see.

In fact, I recently went so far as to suggest a minimum marketing spend of £50,000 (cue the cries of ‘what?!’). Realistically, I think anything over £25,000, wherever possible, will see more bang for your buck and provide enough momentum to achieve a high return on marketing investment (ROMI).

So the next question is how you deploy your resources. There are three main areas to focus your efforts in the modern marketing world: digital, direct and word of mouth. The latter of these of course requires little financial investment – it’s all about the language used with patients, as well as the self-esteem of team members who are asking for referrals and tackling the fear of rejection. While it appears to be a hideously difficult thing to do, word of mouth marketing can be highly effective.

With this in mind, the majority of your marketing budget will be allocated to the remaining two marketing avenues – digital and direct. The former of these involves Google and Facebook advertising, an effectively designed website, a carefully orchestrated social media programme and lifecycle marketing techniques to create short and long term nurture sequences. Direct marketing concerns more traditional methods such as print media, signage, business cards, smile evaluation questionnaires, waiting lounge TV loops, radio advertising and networking.

I usually suggest that approximately 50% of the overall marketing spend should go to each area. However, there are more specific allocation decisions to make at this point: for example, in digital marketing for the next 12 months, how much will you invest in the website? How much will you invest in your social media channels? In your content creation and curation? Equally, direct marketing can be split into further sub categories as listed above, and the budget can be calculated and allocated quite simply between each area.

It’s the detailed breakdown of spend that makes for an authentic marketing plan. The actual figures will vary depending on your annual marketing budget and the goals identified for your individual practice.

10 year’s ago, practice owners concentrated their marketing energy on newspaper advertising. The fashion at the moment however, is to focus on Google advertising, creative websites and social media channels such as Facebook. There can be a ‘herding’ instinct in dentistry where dentists speak to colleagues, find out what they’re doing, and then follow the crowd. While this can be effective when sharing ideas of what works, this is only one phase of the research process, and it is the easy solution to simply stop there and implement similar strategies.

The key, is to look further into the ROMI. Through treatment coordination and patient journey systems, you should be looking to engage patients in a detailed conversation about how they came to visit the practice. If they discovered the practice through your website, were they searching for ‘a dentist in the area’, or for your practice specifically? If the latter, where did they originally come across the practice name?

These conversations also need to happen every time a new patient visits – while you may have created a preliminary 12-month marketing plan, it is a living document and subject to change throughout the year. By analysing the source of new patients on a monthly basis, tracking your marketing exploits and establishing your ROMI, you are able to refine your strategy through the reallocation of resources. Think of your practice as a sailing boat and you are at the helm – you plot your course straight, but the boat needs to tack and jibe left and right according to the tide, wind and trim in order to follow that course. Similarly, your marketing strategy needs to adjust to both external and internal factors affecting your practice, helping you to achieve your goals.

This is exactly what the Ultimate Marketing Academy from 7connections is designed to help you do. Through quarterly meetings and on-going support, we will help you not only establish what to do, how much to spend and where to spend it, but we’ll also share effective tactics to help you maximise your ROMI and sail through 2015.

For more information about 7connections and the Ultimate Marketing Academy, please call 01647 478145, email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. or visit www.7connections.com