Why most practices don’t need to pay £2.5k per month for dental marketing.
Readers of our blog and customers of our business generally, tend to be quite savvy about business expenses and the avoidance of unnecessary costs. Indeed, we get a steady stream of new clients who have become disenchanted with overcharging by their existing supplier and migrate across for a better deal.
Whilst this steady influx of new clients is excellent for our own business, the root causes of it, i.e. overcharging and hard “up-selling”, are worrying reflections of some sectors within the dental marketing business.
Not all companies do it, but it seems that the “hard” up-sell is becoming widespread. Maybe I’m too cynical but perhaps the trend is driven by the misnomer that all dentists are “loaded”? Or maybe that increasing competition in dentistry and the need to keep attracting new patients, forces the uninitiated to purchase any old thing in the effort to stay ahead?
The trend also seems to be exacerbated by information broadcast within the dental marketing business advising what a dental business owner needs to do to stay ahead of the game. Just recently I read a blog post which advised that practices generally need to spend at least 5% of gross revenue on marketing along with some interesting recommendations for how the spend should be split.
This loosely translated to £5k for a dental website (!) and £2.5k per month for various other marketing tools; e.g. £1k on pay-per-click, £250 on SEO, £750 on email marketing etc. This type of generalisation is not too helpful in my opinion and can completely confuse dental business owners about what they actually need to budget for their marketing. As you’d expect, each business is different and the majority don’t need to budget anything like those figures to be successful. 15 years of experience and lots of data gives us the real picture.
Horses for courses
First off, all dental businesses are different – no prizes there. However, the “guidance” we hear often seems to be a “one size fits all” solution which of course it’s not. Each business has different needs, levels of competition, aspirations etc. Only once this is properly analysed, can a suitable marketing plan and budget be developed. For some, £3k per month will not be enough, but for the majority it’s significantly over the top.
Lets start with the cost of a website. Whilst you can pay £5k if you wish, there’s absolutely no need to. £3k will get you a good-sized, mobile and SEO optimised website, complete with CMS. Irrespective of what the expensive suppliers try to tell you, their websites neither look better or perform better than more cost-effective versions. Please take a look in our dental website portfolio to see what can be produced at sensible prices.
Moving on to SEO, I can’t work out why the blog article I mentioned earlier seemed to de-prioritise organic SEO in favour of huge pay-per-click (PPC) fees. Whilst PPC has a place and is complementary to SEO, most experienced dental marketing practitioners know that the traffic from natural search tends to convert a lot more effectively than paid traffic – even where the paid accounts are optimised. So whilst we would never say that PPC is bad, it would be foolish to claim that everyone needs it.
Email marketing is another case in point. Whilst full blown CRM systems might be suitable for very large, well-established practices, they certainly aren’t suitable for the majority. Again it’s very definitely a case of using the best tool for the business commensurate with it’s needs. Most practices can run very effectively with free tools such as ‘Mailchimp’ and then upgrade as and when the need arises.
So what do you need to spend?
The answer of course is “it depends”. There are numerous examples of projects where a practice revamped an old website, invested in some effective digital marketing and obtained a prominent Google ranking in less than 6 months. 30 -> 40 new patient enquiries per month from this scenario is typical; often many more. The ongoing investment is typically well less than £1k per month. The timescale to achieve this will vary on the level of competition but it is a realistic target. For completely new start-ups in competitive environments, it is realistic to expect to spend more than this; a typical scenario would be where the SEO campaign is supplemented with PPC to help gain early traction. However, not multi-thousands of pounds per month.
Email marketing should be in place from day one if your budget will stretch to it, and free systems such as Mailchimp would be perfectly adequate at this stage – if only to help collect and collate your patient’s email addresses. But what you shouldn’t do at this stage is go full-tilt into a CRM system such as Infusionsoft – leave this for later when your business and budget can sustain it. In simple terms, your priorities should be attracting new patients to the practice – word-of-mouth, Google, pay-per-click; before you invest in complex CRM.
Summary
The level of “up-sell” in the dental marketing business is increasing all of the time, often resulting in practices paying over the odds for tools they don’t actually need and which add limited value. Dental business owners need to be tuned to this and seek advice from trusted partners as to what does work, what doesn’t, and what they actually need to spend to get results with sensible return on investment (ROI).
At Dental Media we’ve been providing cost-effective and proven marketing services for dentists for over 15 years. If you need some impartial, practical and free advice, please get in touch on 01332 672548 and we’ll be pleased to help.
