“New Year, New Math” — How to Budget for Dental Marketing in 2027

In the most recent episode of the Dental Marketing Mix, Dan Brian, co-founder of DentalScapes, starts with a simple question for practice owners: how did you actually arrive at your marketing budget this year? Not how much it is. How you landed on that number.

The answers he hears most often sound familiar. It’s about what we spent last year. It’s what our old agency said we needed. It’s whatever is left after payroll and supplies. Or a long pause, followed by “I’d have to ask my office manager.”

None of that is a knock on dentists. You went to dental school, not business school, and nobody hands you a marketing playbook with your license. But as Dan puts it: if your marketing budget is whatever’s left over at the end of the month, you don’t have a budget. You have a hope.

Mid-October is the right moment to fix that for 2027. Here’s the framework Dan walks through in the episode.

How Much Should a Dental Practice Spend on Marketing?

It’s the first question everyone asks, and industry benchmarks vary depending on who you ask. The ranges you’ll hear most often look roughly like this:

• Established practices in maintenance mode: low to mid single digits as a percentage of collections
• Practices in growth mode (adding an associate, opening operatories, filling a schedule): mid to high single digits
• Startup practices: a much larger share of projected revenue in the first year or two, because there’s no existing patient base to lean on

Those ranges are a fine place to anchor. But a percentage is not a strategy.

Why the Same Percentage Produces Different Results

Two practices can both spend 5% of collections and get wildly different outcomes. One puts that money into a website nobody has touched in six years and a few directory listings no one looks at. The other runs tightly managed Google Ads, a strong local SEO program, and a Google Business Profile that’s actually maintained. Same percentage, completely different results.

Three other factors shape the right number for your practice:

• Your market. A small town with two other dentists costs less to win than a metro area with a practice on every corner and a DSO with a big ad budget down the street. That’s not a judgment, it’s just math.
• Your growth stage. Maintaining and growing are different goals with different price tags.
• Your capacity. If hygiene is booked out for weeks, pouring more money into new patient acquisition may not be your best move. Shift toward higher-value cases, retention, or reactivation instead. If you have open chairs and an associate with gaps in their schedule, every unfilled hour is costing you money, and an underfunded budget is part of the reason.

Benchmarks are the start of the conversation, not the end of it.

Build Your Budget Backward From Your New Patient Goal

Instead of asking “what percentage should I spend?”, Dan recommends starting with how many new patients you need and working backward.

A Simple Example

• Goal: a general practice wants 30 new patients a month in 2027
• Cost per acquired patient (CPA): about $200, blended across all marketing channels
• Required investment: 30 × $200 = $6,000 a month, or $72,000 a year

Now sanity-check it. If the practice collects about $1.2 million a year, $72,000 is 6% of collections, right in the growth-mode range. The number passes the smell test.

Marketing as an Investment, Not an Expense

Here’s the part that changes the conversation. Say a new patient is conservatively worth $1,200 in their first year alone. Thirty new patients a month at $1,200 is $36,000 in first-year value every month from a $6,000 investment. That’s before counting the years that patient stays, the family members they bring in, and the friends they refer.

Looked at that way, marketing stops being an expense you try to minimize and becomes an investment you try to optimize. That mindset leads to much better decisions.

What If You Don’t Know Your CPA?

That’s really common, and it’s the first thing Dan would fix. If you can’t connect marketing spend to actual booked patients, you’re making budget decisions in the dark. Getting call tracking and conversion tracking in place should be step one of your 2027 plan, before you decide how much to spend on anything else. (CPA is also one of the few numbers that really matters, as Dan covered in our episode on vanity metrics.)

For orthodontists and pediatric practices, the logic is the same with your own numbers. Orthodontists might track new starts and cost per start. Pediatric practices are marketing to parents, so track new families. The framework doesn’t change: goal, cost to acquire, required investment.

Split Your Budget Between Foundation and Acceleration

Once you know your total, Dan divides marketing dollars into two buckets:

• Foundation: everything that builds value over time and keeps working month after month. Your website, local SEO, Google Business Profile, reviews, and content. These are assets. They compound, and the work you do this year makes next year easier.
• Acceleration: everything that drives patients in the door right now. Mostly paid search: Google Ads and Local Services Ads. Paid campaigns produce results quickly, but they stop the moment you stop paying.

The right mix depends on where you are. A startup usually needs to lean harder on acceleration early, because organic visibility takes time to build (Dan covered this in our episode on local SEO timelines). An established practice with strong organic visibility can lean more on foundation and use paid search selectively. Most practices land in between, and the ratio should shift as results come in.

Give AI Visibility Its Own Line in 2027

More and more patients are asking AI platforms like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Google’s own AI features which dentist they should see. Whether those platforms recommend your practice depends on many of the same fundamentals as traditional SEO, but not all of them.

Dan’s suggestion: 2027 is the year AI visibility gets its own line in your marketing plan. Not necessarily a big line, but not an afterthought buried under SEO either. If you don’t explicitly plan for it, it won’t get done, and the practices building that presence now will have a real advantage over the ones that wait. (Learn more about GEO for dentists.)

Set Aside a Small Test Budget

Dan also recommends reserving a few percent of your total for trying something new. New ad platforms and channels keep emerging, and early movers often get the best results before a space gets crowded. DentalScapes has seen that firsthand with some of the newer AI-driven ad platforms. You don’t have to bet the farm, but give yourself room to experiment.

4 Mistakes That Wreck a Good Marketing Budget

Building the plan is half the job. Sticking to it intelligently is the other half.

1. Cutting what’s working during a slow month. Marketing has a lag. The patients you see this month are often the result of visibility you built over the past few months. Cut spending during a dip and you’re often setting up a bigger dip later. If something produces patients at a healthy CPA, protect it.
2. Spreading yourself too thin. Google Ads, Facebook ads, a billboard, mailers, radio, three directory subscriptions, and a social media agency. Each gets a sliver, none gets enough to work, and none gets measured properly. Fewer things done really well beats everything done halfway.
3. Letting vendors set your budget. Every sales rep has a product to sell, and every one will tell you their channel is the one you’re missing. When your budget is built from your own goals and numbers, it’s easy to say “thanks, but that’s not in the plan.” Without a plan, the last person who pitched you tends to win.
4. Setting it and forgetting it. A budget isn’t something you build in October and ignore until next October. Put a quarterly review on the calendar: new patient numbers, CPA by channel, and progress toward your goal. Move money toward what’s working and away from what isn’t.

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TL;DR

• Use benchmarks for context, not decisions. Factor in your market, growth stage, and capacity.
• Build backward from your new patient goal: goal × cost per acquired patient = your investment. If you don’t know your CPA, fixing your tracking is step one.
• Split between foundation and acceleration based on where your practice is today, and give AI visibility its own line.
• Protect what’s working, focus on fewer channels, and review quarterly.

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