How Much Should I Spend on Dental Marketing?

Episode #348 with Xaña Winans

There is no magic formula for marketing. But there are ways to make good investments. And to help you figure out how much and where to spend on dental marketing, Kirk Behrendt brings back Xaña Winans, founder and CEO of Golden Proportions Marketing, for a guideline to better marketing decisions. If you want to invest in your own success and get ahead of your competition, listen to Episode 348 of The Best Practices Show!

Main Takeaways:

55% of dentists are spending a minimum of $1,000 a month on marketing.

A quarter of practices are spending over $5,000 a month on marketing.

Lead generation is one area where you will see results.

Invest in digital, such as SEO, paid search, and online reviews.

Tracking is the only way you'll know whether you're getting a return.

Recording calls is the best way to see if your marketing budget works.

Your marketing needs to be consistent, and you need to give it time.

There needs to be commitment from dentists and their practices for results.

Quotes:

“[Determining a marketing budget is] important because money is a driving factor for everybody. It’s determining, ‘How do I spend enough money to get the results that I want, but I don't waste money that I could be taking home to my family?’ So, if you are just guessing how much money to spend, it’s going to constantly make you stressed and wonder if you're doing the right thing, ‘Am I spending it in the right places?’” (06:14—06:37)

“[Jim Du Molin] did a huge survey to find out what doctors were spending. And over 55% of doctors are spending a minimum of $1,000 a month, which doesn't sound like that much. But what was interesting to me, just about a quarter of practices are spending over $5,000 a month on marketing, which is way more than I think most dentists would expect. They think, ‘I can just rely on referrals and internal marketing, absolutely free.’ But I'd tell you what, if your practice isn't growing, that's probably why, because your competition is outspending you. They're getting brand awareness that you just don't have.” (07:55—08:30)

“Once you're up and established, if you are cruising, you're a full practice, you've got tons of referrals coming in, you're still going to want to spend at least 2% to 3% of your gross collections every single month, if only because 8% of the American population moves every single year. You're going to, just by sheer people moving out of the area, lose some of your patients, so you have to keep investing.” (09:13—09:41)

“Anything you spend on, you should be able to measure it and make sure it has a good ROI.” (10:39—10:44)

“Your ROI is really going to depend on what you're measuring. There are actually five different places where your marketing money goes, and you have to measure ROI based on where it’s spending. The first thing is foundational stuff. And it’s really difficult to measure an ROI on things like designing a new logo, building a new website, doing a setup for SEO or paid search. Those are things you have to have, but they're usually one-time or one every couple of years expenses. So, that, don't expect ROI. It’s just an expense. That's foundational stuff.” (11:34—12:10)

“You're going to spend money on things called subscriptions. When you have Weave and LocalMed and RevenueWell and Swell, and some of these other review sources and online scheduling, they're still marketing expenses. You have to count that in your marketing budget. The ROI for those can also be really difficult to measure because they're more like internal marketing tools. They're things that you need to keep patients engaged, so I wouldn't be looking for a big ROI there either.” (12:12—12:44)

“Where you're really going to see [results] is when