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I was lunching with two Dental Offices last week during a non-Dental meeting in Phoenix, Arizona.

Well actually, it was an annual conference for a CRM Software firm.

And one of those communal lunches. Where you sit down and say “Hi” and then say:

“And what do you do?”

And coincidentally, the two other people sharing our table were both in Dental.

One was a dentist. The other, was a full time marketing manager at another Dental Office.

The interesting point on this was that both agreed that for any business to grow and thrive, it needs to have an advertising and marketing budget of ten percent of gross revenues.

Ten percent!

I found this fascinating…

Both these two people were in agreement that one in every ten dollars collected by their Dental Office needed to be invested in marketing that Dental Office.

Now that sort of number, or percentage, was a fair bit higher than I’d ever thought…

But in reality, it’s not.

Because marketing is not just about running ads.

It’s not just about attracting New Patients.

Marketing is about existing patients as well.

And sometimes Dentists forget that.

They forget to invest in the business of patient retention.

Sure their Dental Office is out there advertising for new patients.

But some Dental Offices forget to invest in their own patient pool.

And so the flow of new patients into the Dental Office is sometimes matched by the flow of existing patients leaving the Dental Office.

It’s common knowledge that it is far far less expensive to keep a customer than it is to invest in acquiring a customer.

And many Dentists and Dental Offices fail to remember this fact.

Remember that your long-term existing patients will visit more often, will accept more treatment and willingly spend more on that treatment.

Because you already have that established relationship with those long-term patients.

You’ve built that relationship.

You’ve earned their trust.

And it’s a relationship that benefits considerably from reinvestment.

It’s a relationship that will return “in spades” on any extra time and money that you invest in it.

So how’s your marketing budget?

What’s your annual spend?

And how much are you investing in *keeping* your existing patients?

Because if you’re not investing in them, your existing customer base, you’ll be leaking them, and bleeding them, straight out of your Dental Office.

That’s for sure.

And that’s not a good thing.

Marketing to existing patients of the Dental Office is the whole premise of The Ultimate Patient Experience, a simple easy to implement system that I developed that allowed me to build an extraordinary dental office in an ordinary Sydney suburb.  If you’d like to know more, ask me about my free special report.

Email me: david@theUPE.com

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