What should a Perth dental practice spend on marketing?

The honest answer is that a budget figure on its own tells you very little. It tells you what to spend, not whether the spending worked. The better question is what you get for the money, and whether you can tell afterwards.

Here is the arithmetic for three options, and the two numbers worth having before you choose any of them.

Option one: do it yourself

Many smaller practices start here. The principal or the practice manager writes the posts, chases the photos, replies to messages and boosts a post when there's time.

Put a number on it. If it takes ten hours a week and you value that time at $80 an hour, that is about $40,000 a year. Use your own hours and your own rate; the point is to count it.

The cost isn't the only problem. Marketing done by the owner tends to stop when the practice gets busy, which is exactly when steady work would have added up.

Option two: hire someone

Work it out with your own figures: salary, plus super, plus leave, plus the months it takes a new person to learn dentistry, your patients and the advertising rules for health services. Then ask whether one person can cover every channel you need.

For a large practice, an in-house hire can be the right answer. For a single-site practice it is a lot of fixed cost against a return you may not be able to measure.

Option three: a monthly plan

A team runs your marketing on a monthly plan, without the salary, super, leave or turnover. Ours start at $799 a month, with a 3-month minimum and then 30 days' notice. All prices are published.

Whatever you choose, the more useful question is what it will be measured against.

The two numbers most practices don't have

Before comparing prices, try answering these two questions about your own practice.

1. What did a new patient cost you last month?

Not what you spent. What each new patient cost. That means knowing how many new patients arrived, which channel sent them, and what you spent on that channel. Those three facts usually live in three different systems that are never joined up.

2. How many patients who were due for a recall haven't rebooked?

Your practice software knows, based on the recall interval your dentist set for each patient. These people have already chosen you, already have a file, and cost nothing in advertising to reach. It's often the least-worked list in the practice.

If you can't answer those two questions today, the budget conversation is early. You'd be choosing how much to spend on channels you can't evaluate.

Fix the measurement first

This part sounds boring and matters most. Before any content, a practice needs:

• Analytics on the website that count a booking or enquiry, not just page views.
• A tag manager, so tracking can change without touching the site.
• Tagged links (UTMs) on every post, ad, email or SMS, so you know which one sent each booking.
• A Google Business Profile that is set up properly and linked to the website.
• The recall list checked, so the gap is a number rather than a feeling.

That's roughly a week of work. After it, every channel has a number next to it, and the budget question gets much easier: spend more where a new patient costs less, and stop where it doesn't.

We set this up in week one, before any content goes out.

What a month looks like

On our Growth plan ($980 a month), a normal month for a Perth dental practice includes:

• Instagram and Facebook: oral-health explainers, team introductions, opening hours, public-holiday closures, and offers that always show their full terms. We don't post photos of clinical results on social media.
• Google Business Profile: weekly posts, plus an optional, neutral review request after visits. Reviews are never reused in your advertising.
• A blog post or a patient email: answering the questions people ask before booking, such as cost and what a treatment involves.
• Recall reminders: at the interval your dentist recommends, only to patients who agreed to be contacted.
• A weekly report: new patients, cost per new patient, where bookings came from, and how many recalled patients came back.

All of it is written to the advertising rules for health services: no testimonials about treatment, no "specialist" without specialist registration, no urgency, and offers with their full terms. Your practice signs off before anything goes live. You can read how we work within the rules.

So what should you spend?

Spend what you can evaluate. If nothing is measured yet, the right first spend is the week of measurement, not the campaign. Once it is measured, the question stops being a percentage of revenue and becomes a simpler one: keep paying for new patients while they cost less than they are worth to your practice.