Fees for dental internet marketing
Have marketing agencies priced themselves out of the market for small businesses such as dentists? What are your options?
I recently saw a Facebook discussion where a well-known dental coach was seeking advice as to why he couldn’t get an agency to take on his client who had a £24k per year budget for dental web marketing.
This was to include pay-per-click, SEO for the unpaid search results, Facebook (or similar) advertising and integration of activity into a life-cycle marketing tool. Apparently he had expected a queue of interested suppliers but was struggling to find any takers.
On the face of it, £24k is an awful lot of cash, in fact way out of reach for many. However there are still businesses who can run with such outgoings, particularly if they can be sure that there will be decent ROI. So why couldn’t the guy get any takers to provide the service? What was going on there?
Let’s try to break down the £24k budget….
We don’t know exactly where this particular dentist was based, however if the practice was in London or another very competitive environment, then it’s quite easy to see where £24k might go, particularly when you start to consider the level of fees typical for larger marketing agencies. Let’s start with pay-per-click, often shortened to PPC or simply “AdWords”….
Pay-per-click can be a huge cash sink, with typical campaigns ranging from £300 per month in less competitive environments through to several thousand per month in the centre of London. Of course it depends on how hard you want to push, but it’s easy to see how a large chunk of the budget could go on PPC – and this is just click costs. There is the management fee too.
For the SEO element, if we consider small campaigns in less-competitive environments, this might typically warrant around 8 – 10 hours of work input per month. This will usually cover some blogging, limited use of social media and some link-building. Some analysis and a monthly report should also be provided. This type of campaign can be very successful in areas where competition is not too fierce, albeit, like all work of this nature, it will take time to yield results.
However, in more competitive environments, e.g. inner city where there are websites firmly entrenched on page one of Google, SEO scope will need to be much broader, including content generation, multi-channel broadcasting and link outreach. This is very time consuming – 30 hours per account per month would be typical and often more. Remember that the days of “quick” SEO whereby link building was just outsourced to cheap off-shore agencies, have well and truly gone – so to get results, you have to put the work in.
For Facebook marketing, typical spend is generally quite a lot less than AdWords campaigns, however Facebook fees are on the rise as more advertisers realise the potential there.
The agency fee factor – why does it appear to be so high?
For the sake of this article, let’s take a practice based in a suburb of a city with moderate levels of competition and try to calculate some rough costs. Although SEO projects will vary case by case, it would not be unreasonable to allocate a minimum of 15 – 20 hours per month to a project of this nature, covering SEO, PPC management, blogging and limited use of social media.
On top of this you will have click costs and advertising/promo costs for other channels. Let’s take a conservative figure of £650 per month for this.
Agency fees vary considerably but a recent survey conducted by MOZ suggested an average around the £65 – £70 per hour mark.
A quick summation gives an annual cost of around £19.5 -> £24.5k per year for this scale of project managed by an “average”, large agency.
However, where competition levels are higher, time input and hence overall cost starts to build significantly. Here you can see where agency fees can start to become unmanageable for all but large, well-established businesses. Many agencies also want a several hundred pound per month retainer and some won’t even entertain contracts which don’t guarantee them a significant baseline fee.
Of course, the fees you might expect will vary considerably based on the project and the agency, but this hopefully serves to illustrate why you need a considerable budget if you go the route of using a large agency.
What are your options to avoid large agency fees but still get results?
Large agencies have large infrastructure fees – and hence why they have hefty hourly rates. A lot of your cash is not actually going into your work but actually to cover their costs. If they actually deliver for you, then this might well be an acceptable risk, but are you prepared to take the gamble and outlay a lot of money whilst your campaign gains momentum? Unfortunately there are numerous examples of large agencies charging lots of money and still failing miserably – and of course expensive doesn’t always mean good.
There are also examples where agencies have tried to keep the price down to hang on to their smaller clients, but you need to think carefully about what is happening there. Over the last couple of years, Google has made SEO much more difficult and the cheap and quick tools that agencies used to use to get results, no longer work. To do it right is very time consuming. Consequently if your agency has maintained a low price for you, are they actually doing the work as thoroughly?
Whilst there is clearly a place for bigger agencies to supply large-scale services to large, well-established businesses, fortunately there are also more cost-effective options, which are not only much more affordable but can also demonstrate considerable levels of success for smaller businesses, i.e. the large majority of dentists:
- develop expertise in-house. Whilst this might sound like a tricky task, it is very definitely achievable. At Dental Media we have had particular success with training practices to develop their own internet marketing expertise and then helped develop it ongoing.
- look to smaller agencies and/or freelancers with lower infrastructure costs. Whilst the web marketing industry is still strewn with “dodgy” unethical vendors, there are good teams out there who will achieve great results at affordable rates.
Summary
There is a wide range of dental marketing services available in the UK today – large agencies for large scale projects and clients with big budgets, through to smaller agencies and freelancers gaining success for their clients at much more affordable fees. There is something to suit all.
At Dental Media we know that big agency fees are beyond the budget of many dentists which is why we have developed more cost-effective alternatives which still achieve excellent results.
If you would like to discuss options for your practice marketing, including the overall scope, what you might expect to pay and the potential returns, please call the Dental Media team on 01332 672548 for a no-obligation discussion.