Understanding Return On Investment From Dental Marketing Initiatives

Understanding Return On Investment From Dental Marketing Initiatives

Look at the results as well as the cost….

Earlier this week I received an email from a dental client for whom we are running a very successful social media ads campaign, or at least I thought! The dentist concerned advised that he’d looked at his bank account and realised that he was spending just over £900 per month to run the campaign – this included click-costs and our management fee.

What took me completely by surprise is that the dentist had looked at the spend, panicked and decided that the campaign was wasting a lot of cash. However, unfortunately he hadn’t been looking at the fortnightly reports we send which indicated that the campaign had resulted in a large influx of patients with a cost-per-enquiry of just over £20 – a very good result.

This analysis was based on completed contact forms from the campaign landing page and did not include a large number of ‘phone calls or direct messages also stimulated by the campaign. So the actual cost per enquiry would have been much less than £20 – very good value for targeted new patient enquiries and one where most dentists would, as they say “snap your hand off”. Following explanation and a gentle nudge to read our reports, the dentist concerned was more than happy to continue with the ad campaign.

What happened above is actually very common in UK dentistry where dentists very often look at the cost of marketing but don’t connect that with the returns it delivers. This sometimes causes dentists not to proceed following an initial marketing proposal, or causes them to quit early because they incorrectly feel that active campaigns are not returning.

We also see dentists generally not spending anywhere near as much on their marketing as their counterparts overseas do. For example in the UK, dental marketing spend on average is less than 3% of practice turnover, whereas in the US it is over 10%. Of course within that UK average there is a huge variation, with some dentists spending well in excess of the average whilst many others spend next to nothing.

What are the typical returns for different forms of dental marketing?

Given that dentists are sometimes reluctant to spend on marketing I thought it would be useful to indicate the levels of return you might expect to see from a variety of marketing assets and campaigns. These are good rules-of-thumb to help you begin but of course you should also be confident that your dental marketing partner will provide transparent reporting so you can see exactly how your own campaigns are performing.

The dental practice website

I can’t stress too much how important a high-quality website actually is, particularly given how competitive dentistry has become. We cover the correct structure and content for your website elsewhere in this blog so I won’t go over that again now, but suffice to say that your website is effectively your shop window to the world and if it’s poor, then the perception you give will be poor as well.

Whilst you can get a cheap website built using a DIY tool such as WIX and the like, a good quality, professional website will cost anywhere from £3 – 4k. The return on your investment will vary depending on Google position and how many new patients it pulls in, but typically good websites with decent search engine rankings will pay for themselves in well less than a year, often just a few months. Please also keep this in mind when your website is getting stale and needs updating. Those dentists who are very successful with web marketing typically look to upgrade their websites every 3 or 4 years with regular updates in-between times.

When it comes to return-on-investment, a good quality website really is your first priority and it’s also the cornerstone of all your other marketing initiatives.

Search engine optimisation

A good website is not achieving anywhere near its potential if it is back on page 2 of Google. You really do need to be on page 1 as a minimum with a medium to long term objective of getting into the top 3 positions if not the top spot itself. Once you achieve that, new patient enquiries will become a regular thing.

To give an idea, our marketing clients are all typically in the top 3 search positions with many taking the top spot in Google for a range of search terms. These clients enjoy anything from 10 to 60 new patients per month dependent on location. With SEO costing anything from around £300 to £800 per month currently, the worst case payback here is at least 3 times the spend. Best case would be way higher than this, as much as 20 to 30 times the cost of the marketing to achieve it.

As with websites, optimisation for search ranking is a priority for high return on investment.

Paid advertising

Done well, paid ads on Facebook, Instagram and Google can produce excellent returns. That said, as competition increases and click costs rise, it is quite a lot harder to achieve the returns today that were enjoyed 2 or 3 years ago. Add to this adverse effect of the current economic climate and you’ll understand that expectations are understandably less than they were.

However, despite the gloomier outlook and competitive pressures, we still need to keep in mind that typically we are advertising for high value treatments and if just 3 or 4 enquiries per month turn into treatments, then a typical advertising spend of around a thousand pounds per month is quite easily covered. Make that 10 or 15 enquiries and we are making very handsome returns on our investment – this is still achievable although factors such as location and demographics play an important part. The key take-away here is that you actually don’t need that many bookings to easily cover quite a substantial marketing spend; thereafter the incremental benefit is huge.

E-mail marketing

The return on email marketing can be very good indeed as it is a highly targeted way of presenting your business and offer directly into the inbox of your subscriber. Of course it takes time and patience to build a comprehensive email list in the first instance but it is very worthwhile. Once you are set up and your email list is ready, sending a targeted email every month or so can really help to sell new treatments.

The cost to carry out effective email marketing is actually quite low and relies more on the diligence of your team to help build the list and create content than anything else. It costs a few pounds per month to subscribe to a suitable e-news service such as MailChimp and you may need to enlist the help of a professional to assist with email content, but this should amount to no more than a few hundred pounds per month. You can even do some of it yourself if you are happy to allocate a little time to learn.

Traditional advertising

The return from this type of marketing, for example an ad in the local newspaper, is harder to quantify as we do not have digital tracking mechanisms to help us most of the time. However some tracking can be achieved via the use of dedicated contact ‘phone numbers as part of an overall practice call tracking system.

Experience suggests that this type of advertising can still be very worthwhile, with spends of just a few hundred pounds on a local newspaper ad often attracting a lot of interest from potential new patients. It’s certainly well worth trying and you don’t need to sink a lot of funds testing it.

Summary

Whilst a lot of UK dentists are quite reluctant to spend on marketing/advertising, it’s relatively easy to demonstrate that excellent returns can be made. This remains true even as we hit into a cycle where the economic outlook is relatively poor and more dentists compete for fewer patients who are able to afford more expensive treatments.

As I’ve hopefully demonstrated, it only takes a few high-value treatments to pay back quite a considerable monthly spend on marketing and the incremental gains over and above break-even can be extremely attractive.

If you would like to get moving with marketing for your own practice, please get in touch with the team at Dental Media on 01332 672548 for more advice and a detailed proposal.