By Ross Martin, Accountancy Director at Hive Business.

Here’s a question we get asked a lot: how long does it take for marketing to work? The answer is it depends on the objective. But let’s say it’s something big like delivering growth to a practice you’ve just bought. It would take you six to eight months to start to see traction.

One of our clients dreamt of buying their practice for years and finally did it last year. They made a growth strategy and planned to commit £50,000 for branding and marketing in their first year and gear it with an increasing spend month on month. The plan was signed off but eight months later they began to panic. No growth.

We had a look and noticed something extraordinarily common: only about half of projected marketing spend had been committed each month. They had only done four months’ worth of marketing in eight months and there was no real traction yet. They would have to redouble marketing activities in order to get to where they could be now by the end of the year (and miss out on the projected income stream from new patients in the meantime).

Marketing underinvestment manifests itself in many ways and can have all sorts of unintended consequences. Often we see clients get a friend to rebuild their website which results in their online business presence being reduced to a holding page for months. Often the inbound phone line continues to be answered at reception, alienating both callers and patients in the practice and causing stress to overstretched receptionists. Often the latest piece of hi-tech kit gets bought on the hoof with disregard to the budget or cashflow. Often call-tracking is rejected because of the cost, ensuring a paucity of marketing data moving forward.

Underinvestment wasn’t the only reason behind slow growth in this case though. Money had been spent on redecorating rather than on something that would produce new patients quickly, like good signage. In fact, new signage was delayed for six months even though the practice is in a busy town centre. Good signage delivers walk-ins instantaneously in that kind of environment, so this was a significant missed opportunity. And money had been spent on adverts in glossy lifestyle magazines which have a low return on investment compared to other marketing channels like signage and SEO.

It got me thinking that buying a practice is mostly about a change of mind-set. I’d say the first change is about how you see your marketing spend. When you commit a slice of money for year one you have to accept that it’s gone, as an entrepreneur would. The task then is to allocate the marketing budget. On no account should you be drawn into an agonising monthly decision on how much money to commit to marketing in relation to your cashflow situation.

In the case of this client, the £50k was indeed on their profit and loss forecast for the year. That wasn’t enough — it should have been budgeted for in real life. And I think it’s fair to say it will be in future. Don’t put yourself through that. Don’t waste time and money by abandoning your growth plan. Give it a chance to succeed by sticking to it, and if you’d like help building a growth plan, get in touch on 01872 300232 or email us at hello@hivebusiness.co.uk.