How Much Should A New Practice Spend On Marketing?

What does a dental marketing budget actually buy? Where the dollars go in year one

A startup practice owner signs a seven-figure stack of commitments — the lease or the building, the buildout, the equipment, the working capital line — and then, at the end of the list, pencils in a couple thousand dollars for marketing. It’s the most common budgeting mistake in healthcare, and it comes from an understandable place: dental school teaches zero hours of marketing, so new owners price it like a utility bill instead of like the machine that feeds every other number on the pro forma.

So let’s price it properly. Here’s what a real first-year marketing budget buys, where the money actually goes, and the two mistakes that cost owners the most — drawn from our Dentelligentsia conversation with Mike Shoun, who has been filling practice schedules since 1996.

Start with the patient math, not the budget

Work the problem backward. A practice needs a certain number of new patients per month to cover debt service, staff, and the doctor’s income — for most startups, that number is far larger than friends, family, and a ribbon-cutting will ever produce. Shoun’s phrase for the alternative plan is blunt: “‘Build it and they will come’? Do the math, doctor. The math never adds up.”

Once you know the patient target, the budget becomes an output instead of a guess. Each channel produces patients at a knowable cost; the budget is whatever it takes to hit the target. Framed that way, the couple-thousand-dollar plan isn’t conservative — it’s a decision to miss your own projections.

What the dollars buy

A first-year budget spreads across work that compounds and work that produces now. The compounding side: a website built to convert, search visibility that takes months to earn (Shoun is emphatic that nobody can shortcut this — “there is no magic bullet”), and a review base that builds patient trust before anyone calls. The produce-now side: targeted campaigns — direct mail still earns its place in dental — paid search, and social, all aimed at the specific households your practice was sited to serve.

Two principles govern all of it. First, the message has to match the audience: a postcard can’t speak to young families and retirees at once, and money spent on a mismatched message is simply gone. Second, the campaign has to match the practice’s capacity and the doctor’s bandwidth. A flood of calls into a front desk that isn’t ready wastes the spend just as surely.

Read the demographics like an x-ray

Marketing strategy starts with the same document a site-selection decision starts with: the demographic report. Who lives in the trade area, what they earn, their ages, their insurance profile, how many competitors already serve them. Shoun’s caution is that the report alone helps nobody — “It’s like handing an x-ray to somebody.” The skill is in the interpretation, and it’s worth paying for.

This is where marketing and real estate are the same conversation. The location decides who your marketing can reach; the marketing decides whether the location performs. We work the site-selection side of that equation every day, and the practices that win treat the two as one plan.

The mistake that costs six figures at exit

Here’s the counterintuitive one. Owners approaching retirement almost always throttle marketing down — why invest in growth you won’t be there to enjoy? Shoun’s data runs the other way: a practice that ramps up its marketing roughly five years before a sale sells faster and for meaningfully more. “Crank this thing up five years before you sell, and you can sell your practice for another $100,000, $200,000, $300,000.” A buyer pays for a growing schedule, not a coasting one. The marketing budget, it turns out, is an exit-planning tool.

And one housekeeping rule that isn’t optional

Own your logins. Your domain registrar, your website hosting, your Google Business Profile, your social accounts — every one of them should be registered to you, the owner, not to whichever vendor or staff member set them up. Shoun has seen too many practices discover at the worst moment that a former webmaster legally controls their online identity: “Guess who owns those accounts? Whoever set them up. And they’re holding them hostage.” Ten minutes of housekeeping now prevents a ransom negotiation later.

Hear the full conversation with Mike Shoun, President of Ai Healthcare Marketing, on the Dentelligentsia podcast — including real budget numbers by practice stage and the campaign-timing advice most owners never get.

And if the plan involves a new site, a relocation, or an expansion, the marketing math starts with the location math. We represent healthcare tenants and buyers only — talk to us.

For more on our interview with Mike Shoun, check out our article, “How Much Should A New Practice Spend On Marketing? (Hint: It’s Not $2,000) .”

And follow Mike Shoun on Linked In or check out the Ai Healthcare Marketing website.