Setting a realistic dental digital marketing budget
The risks of spreading resources too thinly.
Periodically we are asked to review the overall cost of the marketing we carry out on behalf of dental practices; typically at budget time or perhaps when new associates have joined and appointment books need to be filled.
This usually takes the form of an enquiry to see if the level of marketing can be increased for the same fees – typical requests might be to introduce new social channels, send additional e-newsletters or perhaps extend the scope of existing Google optimisation or pay-per-click work.
Whilst this is understandable, and indeed you would expect such negotiations with diligent business managers, there is the risk of pushing too far and severely diluting existing campaigns and the level of success.
Critical levels of activity
With many marketing channels, dabbling around the edges doesn’t really work and there is a critical level of activity needed to achieve and maintain results. As an example, SEO is not a one-off project and success is only sustainable if you stick at it and adapt to the ever changing landscape in Google. So even if you’ve already made it into prominent search positions, winding back your activity and pushing resources elsewhere, usually means that you simply give the competitors around you an easier job to catch up and you watch as your rankings progressively decline.
Similarly, if you’ve been adding content consistently to your blog, for sure you will have benefitted with additional web traffic and better ranking results. Backing off here is also short-sighted.
Unfortunately most elements of digital marketing are not “fire and forget” – they need ongoing commitment and resources.
AdWords vs organic SEO
Partially switching the budget for organic search optimisation into paid ads is another favourite and one that needs to be evaluated carefully – as it’s often counter-productive. Your SEO team will have budgeted the amount of work needed for that activity and diverting a chunk to dabble in AdWords is likely going to be negative on both fronts. Firstly you risk diluting your organic search campaign and secondly, you likely won’t have enough budget to get traction with paid ads anyway.
There has to be a degree of realism here – for example, if you are seeking paid traffic for terms such as dental implants or some of the main ortho treatments, depending on where you are based, your cost-per-click will range anything from a few pounds to ten pounds or more. Consequently you need a realistic budget to place your ads. in a prominent position and to attract enough clicks to make the campaign worthwhile.
For this example, it’s easy to see why a few hundreds pounds per month is likely going to be insufficient. So diverting a chunk off your organic SEO budget to try out AdWords will likely be counter productive on both fronts. Simply put you, likely won’t have enough momentum to make much of a difference in either channel.
Notwithstanding that all businesses run to budgets, the sensible play is to allocate an additional, realistic sum of money to each new marketing channel so it has every chance of working. It’s easy to measure the return on investment so you will have full transparency with regards to what works and what doesn’t.
Summary
Diluting one channel to spread budget too thinly elsewhere usually doesn’t work and can compromise what is an already successful marketing programme. So it does pay to heed the advice of an experienced digital marketer before making an arbitrary decision. If you are achieving good return on a particular channel, don’t compromise it and pull back on the budget unless you are absolutely confident that you can achieve better elsewhere. Of course, if your existing channels aren’t delivering, then that must be reviewed and alternatives investigated.
If you need help to understand how your marketing budget is performing and recommendations on what might work better, please call the Dental Media digital marketing team on 01332 672548 for no-obligation advice.