How Much Should You Spend Marketing Your Practice?

As with any small business, the growth and ultimate success of your orthodontic practice depends on effective marketing. And like any small business, you’ll no doubt find yourself asking, “How much should I spend on marketing?”

Creating a Good Marketing Budget for Your Practice

Finding the ideal marketing budget for your orthodontic practice depends on a number of different factors, so there is no one-size-fits-all solution. One of the biggest factors is how long your practice has been around. If your practice is new, it is well worth it to invest significantly more into marketing compared to if you have an established practice. 

Establishing a Marketing Foundation

When it comes to new businesses, including new orthodontic practices, it is advisable to invest about 12-20% of your yearly gross revenue into marketing. Building brand awareness and establishing yourself as a practice in the community is one of the most difficult goals to achieve, so it’s worthwhile to heavily invest in marketing during the initial years your practice is open. 

Your initial marketing budget will also be relatively high because you’re creating a marketing foundation for your future. One of the major pieces of your marketing foundation will be creating strong branding for your practice. Creating a memorable name, logo, and design scheme is worth investing significant time, effort, and money into since you will be able to build on this foundation. 

Another crucial piece of marketing is establishing a website for your practice. Your website will include your branding, along with well-organized pages that make it easy to learn about your practice and contact your office for appointments. Implementing good SEO practices on each landing page and your blog will help drive organic traffic. Once this is established, you will just need to make sure you maintain your website. 

An established orthodontic practice may not need quite as much marketing to experience continued success. In general, established small businesses, which includes orthodontic practices, should invest about 5% of their yearly gross revenue on marketing. However, this figure won’t be the same from year to year. If you have more lofty goals you would like to achieve, such as increasing new starts, expanding to a new location, or offering a new product, you can expect to spend more than the typical 5%. 

Marketing Strategies with a Promising ROI

Investing in a great website design, regular content marketing, and high-quality video production are all fantastic ways to see excellent growth, but you can also put your efforts into low-cost marketing techniques to see growth as well. For one, you can get valuable insights on how your current digital marketing channels are performing by using free analytics tools through Google My Business. This platform also lets you create a free business page with helpful information and opportunities to include links and keywords for good SEO. 

Finding good opportunities for word-of-mouth marketing will also help you as an orthodontic practice. Being part of your local chamber of commerce and creating strategic partnerships will be a good platform for this strategy. 

Of course, you can also join social media platforms for free and use your presence to interact with potential patients, create contests, and build a positive online reputation.

By investing in quality marketing, your practice can build a solid foundation and continue to thrive.