As you can imagine, there’s no set number that determines how much your practice should be spending on marketing. Without guidance from an experienced marketing agency, it can be fairly challenging to determine the right marketing budget allocation for your business.

Your marketing budget should be based on your specific goals. The U.S. Small Business Administration recommends spending 7 to 8 percent of your gross revenue on marketing and advertising, which is often the marketing budget percentage we see in practices we partner with.

A marketing budget allocation of 7/8 percent of your gross revenue is a good rule of thumb, but again, your marketing budget should depend on your market and your priorities.

How to Determine Your Marketing Budget Breakdown

First, let’s define a few of the different pieces that make up your marketing and advertising:

• Website costs (starting new or ongoing maintenance)
• Organic/ongoing SEO costs
• Paid advertising costs (traditional and/or digital)

Every practice is different, with different financial circumstances, different business goals, and a different market to accommodate.

Depending on the practice’s market, some may find more success in traditional marketing methods, such as mailers, flyers, billboards and dental referrals. Other practices will find that digital is a pay-to-play space that is essential to tap into in order to get the practice name in the right ears. Regardless of your market, in today’s digital world a user-centric and mobile-friendly website is just as important as your brick and mortar office.

More established practices looking to grow and emphasize their brand may choose a custom website, whereas for a startup’s budget may be more of a fit for a cost-effective template website.

If you already have a website, integrating an organic SEO strategy into your website content and/or business listings is imperative for improving your online presence over time. This means posting high-quality content (like blogs) regularly to drive more traffic to your website. A long-term SEO strategy with the foundation of a quality website is necessary for your marketing budget plan, because the one constant in marketing is internet exposure—and Google isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

Once your longterm strategy is in place, it’s time to consider running paid advertisements (like Google and Facebook ads) to attract more patients and make the community aware of your brand.

So how do you determine the best marketing budget allocation based on all of these varying factors? As experienced marketers and strategists, we can help you determine how much to allocate to your marketing and advertising budget, and how to break down your budget to achieve your goals.

When you schedule a complimentary discovery session with us, we’ll discuss your needs and develop a personalized marketing plan to propel short-term and long-term growth.

It’s important to choose a marketing partner that will look at the whole picture of your goals, market, and audience, and guide you with a custom strategy that aims to make the most impact within your budget.

In the meantime, here are a few questions to consider when creating your marketing budget plan:

• How competitive is your market/area?
• What is your growth stage? (Just starting out, established, or somewhere in between?)
• Are you aiming to grow your practice or get your name out there?
• Who is your target audience and what are their needs?

Receive a Custom Marketing Quote

Just as your marketing budget should be customized to suit your practice’s needs and goals, the price quote you receive from your marketing partners should be custom as well.

We create custom price quotes for your marketing plan, because your marketing needs depend on the competitiveness of your market, as well as your specific needs and goals. With more than 20 years of orthodontic industry experience, we can also give you a few tips on where to allocate your marketing budget to get the biggest bang for your buck.

For example, if you’re just starting out with a limited budget, it may be best to prioritize a targeted digital campaign, instead of investing in top-of-the-line t-shirts and branded tumblers to boost your patient swag. Later on, when your practice is more established and you have loyal patients to sport your logo, this would be a good time to invest in some nice brand awareness swag.

We’ll create a custom price quote, depending on your stage of growth, the nature of your market, as well as your short-term and long-term goals. Over time, we can adjust your marketing budget plan or create a new plan to switch gears.

Oftentimes, our orthodontist partners will start out with a plan focused on lead generation, then over time as their exam chairs are filled, pivot to focus on more brand reputation and brand awareness.

You tell us your needs, and we create a plan to match. We do the research to determine your target audience’s needs as well as how saturated your market is, and we gauge how aggressively your competition is marketing themselves.

Once we know the ins and outs of your circumstances, we can help guide you through strategic marketing that produces the results you’re looking for.

Ready to become the leading orthodontist in your area? Request a complimentary discovery session with us today!