By Luc Wade, Marketing Director at Hive Business.

There’s no doubt that digital marketing can deliver fabulous return on investment. We’ve seen it work almost everywhere; social media’s even enabled Jeremy Corbyn to land his job and hang onto it despite mainstream party opposition — pretty impressive, however you feel about it.

On the high street, John Lewis is a traditional retailer that’s invested heavily in digital marketing. Its strategy has helped it transform from a fusty middle-aged brand into Middle England’s favourite shop, outperforming major rivals M&S and Debenhams. Its massively anticipated Christmas TV ads debut on YouTube and are seen by millions, generating an enormous buzz on social media which has helped to nearly triple online sales since 2011, with tablets and phones accountable for the lion’s share (this from a 150-year-old retailer).

Perhaps something slightly akin to that in dentistry is Bamboo Dental in Cardiff, which was bought out in 2012. It had no digital presence bar a holding page and Dan Rogers, the new owner, did not mince around. He sank serious cash into an online marketing campaign which saw new patient numbers rise by 400 per cent in six months. With each new patient bringing in 12 times what it cost in marketing to acquire them, the ROI was outstanding. It was almost unbelievable in fact, at 1,200 per cent. There can’t be too many businesses seeing that kind of ROI anywhere else (on the right side of the law, at least).

Rogers puts his crazy ROI down to five golden rules:

1. Be clear on your proposition
2. Be consistent in your data gathering
3. Use your website as a marketing tool, not a vanity project
4. Outsource your social media
5. Always keep working on your organic rankings

These tips are about more than the technical side of digital marketing; Rogers puts his proposition at the heart of his campaign’s success. Success was no accident, and without a clear proposition and decent data gathering it would have been impossible.

Internet advertising spend rose 17.3 per cent last year, nearly 10 per cent higher than the UK advertising sector’s overall growth, and dental brands that are brave, like Bamboo, are clearly happy to spend — and some of them win big from doing so.

Another principal told me recently that if he was starting again he would buy a squat for £250k and invest £250k in marketing, with the lion’s share online. He couldn’t understand why you wouldn’t double up each time you saw that it was working.

But how much digital marketing spend is too much? And how do you know when you’re overinvesting? Is that even possible? It all depends on the kind of campaign you’re running.
Here’s the problem: we see many practices get stuck and waste money. They either move too quickly into unconnected, poorly conceived activities before they have acquired appropriate digital assets (website, photography, video, measurement tools), or they simply fail to test these valuable channels.

But the big guns are just as likely to rush in and start flapping around too. Recently Procter & Gamble cut its marketing spend on Facebook because it didn’t work; it had been targeting specific consumer groups but got carried away and went far, far too narrow. Its budget may well have dwarfed other Facebook advertisers but even so not enough people were seeing its stuff.

You can imagine how bamboozled the pale-faced suits at P&G would have been by the young hipster techies at Facebook telling them all about how they were going to segment their target audience and get Pantene ads in front of exactly the right girls and Gillette ads in front of the right blokes but, seriously, who doesn’t buy Pantene shampoo, Gillette razors or Vicks? They’re hardly rarified products, they’re everyday items bought by everyday people.

This is a common conversation I have with dental practice owners. They often think small and suffocate marketing campaigns by accident, not realising that getting reach and precision is a fine balancing act. The reach of Facebook and Google and the granularity of targeting means you can pinpoint any audience you like but your volume (the number of people seeing your ad) becomes exponentially lower the more you segment, so the number of leads you get diminishes.

You can compensate for that by appealing to viewers so effectively that you increase the conversion rate (the rate at which viewers become enquirers). If you do that really well you can still make your campaign pay. But it’s not easy. Otherwise all you’ve done is discover an effective way to throw money away very quickly like P&G.

I’m saying this not to scare you, but it’s worth taking a long hard look at what’s being done online in the name of your business. Question how you’re allocating your digital marketing spend and figure out whether it’s actually driving patient numbers.

You might find you’ve overinvested in particular areas or, rather than a single USP in the market, you may consider several USPs (or propositions) so you can pinpoint different audiences in different ways, getting your viewer volumes up to healthy levels.

Ultimately how much your brand invests in digital will be down to your strategy and the outcome you’re looking for but it seems to me that a business that adopts a methodical approach to marketing investments and judges each channel on its merits will be the most effective at growing its revenue.

So even if a campaign works really well on its own terms, if it’s only engaging a tiny audience it might not be worth it — even if it looks cool and all the trendies you know buy into it. Don’t forget, you need to keep your eye on the big picture, the whole marketing operation, and someone immersed in delivering campaigns in a single channel will never be able to give you reliable oversight and strategic advice. How could they if they’ve only ever delivered social media campaigns?

If you would like to discuss your marketing strategy with us call 01872 300232 or email us at hello@hivebusiness.co.uk.