By Frank Clayton, DDS
I spent 25+ years running my dental practice and I learned a whole lot along the way. One of the most important things I learned is that marketing is an investment in your practice. Just like your education, just like your team. And when you invest properly, the returns are measurable.
Today I spend my time working with other dentists to help them better understand the business side of dentistry, and I get this question a lot: "How much should I actually be spending on marketing?"
It's an important question, and most dentists have never had to answer it. I think for a lot of us, referrals fill the schedule for years. Until, at some point, they stopped filling it fast enough. That's usually the moment the marketing question stops being hypothetical and starts being something you actually have to figure out.
Unfortunately for us all, there's no magic number for investing in dental marketing. I know as clinicians, that's not what we want to hear. We want an evidence-based recommendation. We like prescriptions. But there's real data worth looking at, and a way of thinking that can help today's dentists make smarter decisions when it comes to marketing their practice.
Why "3-5%" isn't the whole answer
Conventional wisdom in dentistry points to a benchmark marketing budget of 3-5% of collections. But that benchmark is a) rough numbers and b) just a starting point, not a target. In real life, it will depend entirely on where a practice is starting from and what it's actually trying to do.
A dental practice that's comfortably full on the calendar and wants to hold steady needs a different marketing budget than one trying to add a location, shift toward higher-value cases, or move fully to fee-for-service. In some cases, aggressive growth goals will jump that marketing investment to 7-10%. For a small practice already happy with growth, a few thousand dollars a month might accomplish everything they're set out to do.
In my experience, you have to work backwards from the goal, not forward from a rule of thumb. Picture where you want to be. Say it out loud. Then fill in what it actually takes to get there. That's the real first question. Not "What percentage should I spend?" but "What do I actually want?" Only then can you realistically start putting pen to paper about how to accomplish it — and what might need to happen internally before you can.
If a doc tells me he wants to be doing 20 full-arch cases a month, that's not just a marketing question. Even a Super Bowl ad can't just make that happen. There's a lot more to it, right? Does the team have the skill? Does the practice have the staff? Does the office have the systems in place to run that once the leads show up? If you're not confidently saying yes to those questions too, you have some groundwork to do.
The part that has nothing to do with the number
Here's where I think a lot of marketing spend quietly goes to waste: Even when the budget itself was calculated right, there's often a problem with readiness on the receiving end.
I've watched dentists get frustrated with a marketing company that "didn't do squat." In their mind, they paid for all this action, and it didn't move the needle. The truth is that the real problem wasn't the campaign. It's that the practice wasn't ready to receive what it brought in. A front desk that hasn't been trained to handle a new-patient call differently than a routine one. A case-acceptance process that's not standardized, let alone rehearsed. A schedule already maxed out with nowhere to put new patients even if they book.
None of that shows up when you're calculating a marketing budget. And yet — all of it determines whether that budget actually pays off.
A more useful way to think about it
Instead of asking what percentage of collections you should spend, ask different questions, THEN back into a budget that makes sense.
I'd start with questions like these:
- What do I want more of? Name your goals outright. Is it new patients? Higher-value cases, higher margins, a particular procedure mix?
- How much is that worth to the practice? Add real numbers to the equation. You might be surprised how much a fee-schedule review might uncover!
- Does my schedule have capacity for more patients/cases? If not, what has to change? Do you need to hire staff? Add or change doctor hours?
- Does my team have the capacity and training to handle growth? Is CE on the horizon? Do team dynamics need to change?
- How will I measure success? Do you have a system to gauge real production and collections — or just leads and clicks?
I've talked to plenty of dentists who walked away from a marketing partnership feeling burned. And you know, sometimes marketers get it wrong. Especially if they're not well versed in dental. But in a lot of cases, it's not the marketing that's failing. It's what's happening on the other side of the lead delivery.
At the end of the day, a well-calculated budget is an important part of your marketing strategy. But it's ultimately irrelevant if your team isn't ready to invest in the lead-capture process and turn those opportunities into profitable patients and long-lasting relationships.
Where I'd start
Whether you're just getting started with marketing, or you're looking to make a change because marketing is not working how you'd hoped, start with a step back and some goal setting. Determine what it is you're really after and what kind of changes you might need to make.
As far as establishing a marketing budget for your practice, don't stress too much about the number. Most independent practices are spending less than you'd guess, and there's a decent chance you're one of them. But the number only means something in service of a specific goal, backed by a practice that's actually ready to receive what that investment brings in.
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