How Much Should a Dentist Spend on Marketing?

Ask around and you will be told to spend somewhere between 3% and 8% of turnover on marketing. It is a real benchmark and it is nearly useless on its own, because it tells you what other practices spend rather than what you need.

A practice turning over £800,000 gets a range of £24,000 to £64,000 a year from that rule. The gap between those two numbers is a whole strategy.

Start With the Cases, Not the Percentage

Work backwards from what you want.

Say you want three implant cases a month that you would not otherwise have had. At a typical UK fee of £2,000 to £3,500 a case, that is £6,000 to £10,500 a month of additional treatment.

Now ask what it costs to generate three. If a paid enquiry costs you £60 and one in four becomes a case, three cases needs twelve enquiries, or about £720 of ad spend. Add the fee for someone to run it.

The number falls out of the arithmetic. It has nothing to do with what percentage of turnover anyone else spends.

You will not know your real figures at the start. You use rough ones, run for two months, and replace them with what actually happened.

What Practices Actually Spend

For a single-site UK practice doing private work, the usual shape is:

• £400 to £1,000 a month on ads. Enough to get data quickly. Below about £300 it takes so long to learn anything that you give up before you know.
• £300 to £1,500 a month on the work. Whoever builds and runs it. Wide range because it covers everything from a profile being managed to full SEO, ads and content.
• Something one-off for the website. Most practices need pages built or fixed before any of it performs. Sometimes a few hundred, occasionally a rebuild.

So £700 to £2,500 a month all in, for a practice that is serious about it. Less than that is not nothing, but it is a slower version of the same thing.

Spend It on One Thing First

The commonest mistake is spreading a small budget across everything. A thousand pounds a month split between ads, SEO, social, print and a directory listing does nothing measurable anywhere.

The same money aimed at one treatment produces a number you can act on. Once you know what an implant enquiry costs you, every later decision gets easier.

When the Answer Is More Than You Have

Sometimes the arithmetic says you need £1,500 a month and you have £500. That is worth knowing rather than ignoring.

The honest options are to aim at a cheaper treatment where enquiries cost less, to accept it will take longer, or to fix conversion first — if half your enquiries never get called back, more of them is not the problem.

Reception answering the phone is free, and it beats any budget increase we could recommend.

The Number Nobody Watches

Whatever you spend, the figure to judge it by is cost per enquiry, and then what share of enquiries become treatment.

Practices that watch impressions and click-through rates feel busy and learn nothing. Two numbers, checked monthly, tell you whether to spend more or stop.

What our packages cost, or how we report on it.