How Much Should a Dental Practice Spend on Marketing?

Sources:

https://www.ada.org/en/science-research/health-policy-institute/dental-statistics/income-billing-and-other-dentistry-statistics
https://jemsu.com/marketing-budget-calculator/

Transcript:

Okay, we’re gonna look at how much a dental practice should spend on marketing. Um, the first thing that we want to look at is data from the ADA or the American dental association to see approximately how much the average dental practice makes. So I’m going to pop right over to the ADA website and it lists right here. The average gross billings per owner dentists in private practice in 2018 was $717,000 a year, uh, for general practitioners, um, and the little over a million for specialists. So that is the average gross revenue for a dental practice may vary off of that. So we’ll use that as our example here. So we popped back over to our marketing budget calculator. And the first thing you want to look at is the marketing table here, which this is from the SBA or the small business administration tells us that six to 8% is average for a business to spend on marketing, six to 8% of their gross revenue.

Um, but it varies widely based on your industry. Dennis should be on the higher end of that scale. Probably in the 12 to 14% range. Um, whereas manufacturing and some on their industry that might be on the low end of that scale. But this is kind of a scale and it is, it does vary a lot by industry. Um, but for these purposes, we’re going to put dental practices at about 12%. You’re always welcome to come back and use this calculator and try some things out with, uh, different inputs just to see approximately what your particular dental practice should spend on marketing. But for this example, we’re gonna use 12%. So we go down to the calculator itself and we’re just going to put it, I’m going to put in the dentist and we’re going to say for our example here that our yearly revenue is 750,000.

Um, our marketing budget, we’re going to be aggressive. We’re going to say hi or about 12% of our gross revenue is marketing. Um, and then we’re going to choose our digital versus traditional allocation. There are some good channels to advertise traditionally for dentists and postcards, um, and some other channels that might work well. So we’re going to do an 80, 20 split, 80% into digital and 20% into traditional, um, advertising channels. And that will output our overall marketing budget recommendation, which in this case would be $7,500 a month. Um, it further breaks down approximately how that should be spent. Uh, we recommend 4,200 in digital advertising, which would be stuff like Google ads being ads, Instagram and Facebook or social advertising and remarketing, and display advertising. Um, SEO is about 1200 is the recommendation. And then branding and social media is about 600. That leaves 1500 a month for other traditional advertising channels.

So with this particular example, if this dental practice made 750,000 in a year, it’s recommended that they spend 7,500 a month in advertising with an 80, 20 split. Um, now you can come in here and try your own. Maybe you are a very successful practice and you do one and a half million. Um, you could see and, but maybe you’re less aggressive with your marketing budget. Maybe you’re sitting at 8%, maybe you have a little bit higher in digital. So it will really output, um, approximately how much you should spend based on your revenue, your aggressive, your, how aggressive you want to be with your marketing budget, and how you allocate that. Um, and then it does give recommendations on how to split that. Um, the most effective channels are, are paid, but they, uh, you know, they go away as soon as you stop paying. However, the majority of your spend typically should go to stuff like pay per click advertising. SEO is very important because it’s sticky, it lasts long, and it’s very valuable. So a percentage of that budget, a smaller percentage was, should go towards SEO. And then traditional channels and branding and social media should allocate a little bit about budget just to keep those channels going as well. So that is, um, how you calculate how much your dental practice should spend on marketing. Thank you.