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I’ve talked in recent weeks about the mix, or division of collection dollars, in the Dental Office.

And I’ve written on several occasions on the 40:20:20:20 division of the collections, with the emphasis on making sure that the Dental Office Dentist Owner is appropriately remunerated by the Dental Office for the three distinct levels of involvement that he has, in that office.

The Dental Office Dentist Owner needs to make sure that he is paid fairly:

1. As a dentist. He needs to separate his take home reward, as if he were an associate dentist. This means paying himself, usually a percentage, for the drilling of teeth. This is usually 40% of his collections.
2. Secondly, the dentist needs to remunerate himself for the bookkeeping and administrative duties he performs. These are duties separate to the role of providing dental services to patients, and are duties that the Dentist Owner could easily be paying someone else to come in to do. This remuneration would come from the twenty percent of collections allocated to salaries within the Dental Practice.
3. Thirdly, the Dental Office Owner Dentist needs to pay himself a dividend as an owner, or investor, in the business. After all, he has his own capital tied up in setting up or purchasing, the Dental Office, and in reality, if he did not have the obligation to the Dental Office, he would have that money invested elsewhere, earning interest at least, as bonds or term deposits. This reward for funds invested needs to be paid from the twenty percent of collections allocated to capital investment and profits and dividends.

Which brings us now to the age-old question….

From which section, or sections, of the collection mix do I draw my advertising and marketing budget?

My view on this is simple.

Advertising and marketing your Dental Office should be really sourced from two sections of the collection dollars.

Because there’s really two types of advertising to be using.

Firstly, there’s everyday run of the mill brand awareness advertising.

Like weekly newspaper adverts, yellow pages entries, and website design.

These are your bread and butter routine materials that keep your business with a visual presence in the market place.

They are advertisements, or media, that your Dental Office uses regardless, day in day out, to keep your Office’s face in front of the community. So that when it’s time for the community to choose a dentist, your name, you logo, your office, is truly recognizable to Mr. Public as he goes about his due diligence in deciding on a Dental Office.

The cost of this form of marketing should be allocated from within the twenty percent of collections that are used for Operational Costs and Expenses of the Dental Office.

The second type of Advertising spend is target specific Advertising, and the dollars for this form of marketing should be drawn from the twenty percent of collections allocated to capital investment.

Good marketing of this type will bring specific types of clients to your door and will provide you with patients and income dollars that can be easily trackable for calculating ROI, or return on your investment.

For example, a target specific letterbox drop flyer, with a specific treatment suggested and offer involved, is very easy to track ROI from.

Because the offer usually requests the new client to bring or mention the flyer when they book.

Similarly, dollars for Television and Radio advertising, or specific social media campaigns, all with specific time restricted offers, should also be allocated from this Capital expenses section of your collections.

Because, again, we can see how successful, or unsuccessful or un-noticeable these specific forms of marketing are, because we can simply ask each new client or customer whether they had seen, or remembered, any of these *specific* forms of marketing.

If you’re allocating your collection dollars correctly using the 40:20:20:20 separation, the funds are already there available for some forms of marketing and advertising.

Put simply, advertising should be looked at always as an investment, rather than an expense.

Because all dollars spent on advertising should return to the business a profitable return, of some sort, or ROI, on funds spent.

Otherwise why would you do it?

Why would you spend hard earned dollars on poor returning forms of marketing?

When you look at your marketing in this manner, it makes decisions on where to invest your hard earned much much clearer.

And this in turn returns better returns…..and so on….

The Ultimate Patient Experience is a simple to build complete Customer Service system in itself that I developed that allowed me to create 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 at david@theupe.com

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