A practical guide from Onboard Marketing Group to building a marketing budget around growth goals, patient acquisition, SEO, GEO, paid advertising, and measurable ROI.
Marketing is one of the most important investments an orthodontic practice can make, but determining how much to spend isn't always straightforward. Should your marketing budget be based on collections? How much should go toward paid advertising? Should an established practice spend the same percentage as a new practice or a practice opening a second location?
The answer depends on what you're trying to accomplish.
Rather than choosing an arbitrary dollar amount or copying another practice's marketing budget, orthodontists should build their investment around their growth goals, market conditions, patient acquisition needs, and the performance of their existing marketing system.
Quick Answer: How Much Should an Orthodontic Practice Spend on Marketing?
There isn't one percentage that's right for every orthodontic practice. As a useful dental-industry reference point, the American Dental Association suggests budgeting approximately 2% to 3% of collections for mature practices and 3% to 6% for new practices. The ADA also notes that a practice entering a period where it wants to bring in additional patients may plan to invest approximately 5% to 7% during the first year.
Those percentages should be treated as benchmarks rather than universal rules.
An established orthodontic practice with strong referrals and little desire for additional growth may require a very different investment than a practice opening a second location, entering a competitive market, or trying to significantly increase new patient starts.
At Onboard Marketing Group, we believe the better question is not simply, "What percentage should we spend on marketing?"
It's:
"What are we trying to accomplish, and what level of investment will realistically support that goal?"
Start With Your Growth Goal, Not a Percentage
Marketing budgets are often created backward.
A practice decides it wants to spend $3,000 or $5,000 per month and then determines what marketing activities can fit within that amount.
A growth-focused strategy should begin with the desired outcome instead.
Suppose your practice wants 15 additional starts per month. Before determining your marketing budget, you need to understand how many additional exams are required to produce those starts, how many inquiries are needed to generate those exams, and what it will realistically cost to create those opportunities in your market.
The process becomes:
Growth Goal → Starts Needed → Exams Needed → Leads Needed → Marketing Opportunities Needed → Budget
This turns marketing from an expense category into a measurable growth strategy.
If your goal is simply to maintain your current patient volume, your investment may look very different from a practice trying to add 100 or 200 starts over the next year.
What Does a 3%, 5%, or 7% Marketing Budget Actually Look Like?
Percentages are easier to understand when you translate them into real dollars.
Consider an orthodontic practice collecting $2 million annually.
At 3%, the annual marketing budget would be approximately $60,000, or $5,000 per month.
At 5%, the annual budget would increase to approximately $100,000, or $8,333 per month.
At 7%, the practice would be investing approximately $140,000 annually, or $11,667 per month.
These examples don't mean a $2 million orthodontic practice should spend one of those amounts. They simply demonstrate why choosing a percentage without considering your growth goals can create problems.
A practice investing $60,000 per year and trying to maintain steady growth has a very different objective from one investing $140,000 because it is entering a new market, launching another location, or pursuing aggressive patient acquisition.
The percentage provides context. Your growth objective determines the strategy.
What Should Be Included in an Orthodontic Marketing Budget?
Another reason marketing budgets can be difficult to compare is that practices don't always define "marketing" the same way.
One practice may only count its Google Ads budget. Another may include its website, SEO, advertising, branding, community sponsorships, technology, photography, and other initiatives.
Your complete marketing investment may include your website and ongoing website maintenance, SEO and GEO strategy, Google and Meta advertising, ad spend, content development, branding and messaging, photography and video, marketing technology, analytics and call tracking, community initiatives, events, sponsorships, and other patient acquisition efforts. Understanding the total investment matters because these channels don't operate independently.
A Google Ad may introduce a patient to your practice, but that patient may visit your website, read reviews, explore your social media, compare your doctors with competitors, leave, search your practice again later, and finally schedule a consultation.
Marketing rarely happens in a straight line.
Your Practice Stage Should Influence Your Marketing Budget
A mature practice with strong name recognition and consistent patient volume has different marketing needs from a new orthodontist entering the market.
Established Practices
An established practice may be focused primarily on maintaining visibility, protecting market share, strengthening SEO and GEO authority, and generating predictable new patient opportunities.
These practices may fall closer to the lower end of traditional marketing benchmarks, particularly when they already have strong brand recognition and referral networks. However, being established doesn't mean marketing can simply stop. Patient behavior changes, competitors enter markets, search results evolve, and AI-driven search continues to reshape how people discover providers.
Growth-Focused Practices
A practice that wants significantly more new patient starts may need to invest more aggressively.
Increasing your growth goal without increasing the resources supporting patient acquisition creates an obvious disconnect. If you want significantly more starts next year, something in your growth system generally needs to change.
That could mean increasing advertising, strengthening organic visibility, improving website conversion, expanding into new audiences, addressing weak points in the new-patient process, or some combination of these efforts.
New Practices and New Locations
New practices and new locations face another challenge: they're building visibility from the ground up.
There may be little brand recognition, fewer reviews, limited organic search authority, and less historical data available to guide decisions.
This is one reason the ADA's general dental guidance provides a higher marketing range for new practices than mature ones.
Opening the doors does not automatically create patient demand. Your market has to know you exist.
Market Competition Matters More Than Many Practices Realize
Two orthodontic practices with identical collections may require completely different marketing budgets because they operate in completely different markets. A practice competing with several established orthodontists in a fast-growing metropolitan area may need a more aggressive strategy than a practice with limited competition in a smaller community.
Competition can affect paid advertising costs, organic search difficulty, the amount of content needed to establish authority, the strength of competing brands, and the time required to gain visibility.
This is why copying another orthodontist's marketing budget rarely works.
Their numbers may not reflect your market.
Don't Increase Your Marketing Budget Until You Know Where Patients Are Falling Out
This is where marketing and practice operations have to work together.
If your marketing is generating leads but those leads aren't becoming exams, increasing the marketing budget may simply create more leads that don't convert. Before increasing your investment, examine the entire new-patient journey.
Are calls being answered?
How quickly are online inquiries contacted?
How many leads schedule an exam?
How many scheduled exams actually show?
How many exams convert into starts?
Where are prospective patients dropping out of the process?
Imagine two practices each generating 100 new patient opportunities.
If Practice A converts significantly more of those opportunities into starts than Practice B, the solution for Practice B isn't automatically "more marketing."
The first priority may be identifying why existing opportunities aren't converting.
More leads don't automatically mean more growth.
Marketing works best when visibility, conversion, and operations work together.
What Marketing Metrics Should an Orthodontic Practice Track?
Clicks and impressions can help diagnose marketing performance, but they don't tell you whether your practice is growing. A strong measurement strategy should connect marketing activity to business outcomes.
Cost Per Lead
How much are you spending to generate an identifiable prospective patient?
Lead-to-Exam Conversion Rate
Of the leads generated, how many actually schedule a new patient exam?
Exam Show Rate
How many scheduled patients arrive for their consultation?
Exam-to-Start Conversion Rate
Of the patients who complete an exam, how many begin treatment?
Cost Per Start
How much marketing investment was required to generate an actual orthodontic start?
Marketing ROI
What financial return is the practice generating relative to its marketing investment?
Looking at these metrics together gives you a much clearer picture than simply asking whether website traffic increased or an advertisement received more clicks.
Calculate Backward From the Number of Starts You Need
One of the most useful exercises an orthodontic practice can perform is working backward from its desired number of starts.
Here's a simplified example.
Suppose a practice wants 10 additional starts each month.
If 60% of completed new-patient exams become starts, the practice would need approximately 17 additional completed exams to generate those 10 starts.
If 75% of qualified leads ultimately result in a completed exam, approximately 23 qualified leads would be required.
Those are hypothetical conversion rates, not industry benchmarks, but the exercise demonstrates an important point:
Your marketing budget becomes much easier to evaluate when you know exactly what the practice needs the investment to accomplish.
Instead of asking:
"Can we afford to spend another $2,000 on marketing?"
You can ask:
"What would this additional $2,000 need to produce for the investment to make sense?"
That's a much more useful business conversation.
Where Should SEO and GEO Fit Into Your Marketing Budget?
Paid advertising can create visibility quickly, but practices also need to invest in building long-term digital authority.
That's where SEO and GEO become important.
Traditional SEO helps search engines understand your website and connect your practice with relevant searches. GEO focuses on making your content clear, authoritative, and useful within an increasingly AI-driven discovery environment.
Google's current guidance for appearing within AI search experiences emphasizes many of the same fundamentals required for strong traditional SEO: technically accessible pages, internal linking, a good page experience, useful textual content, and helpful, reliable, people-first information.
Google has also specifically emphasized the importance of creating unique, valuable, non-commodity content for generative AI search rather than simply reproducing information already available elsewhere.
For orthodontic practices, that means answering the questions prospective patients are actually asking.
What does treatment cost?
Does insurance cover braces?
When should my child see an orthodontist?
How long does Invisalign take?
What happens at an orthodontic consultation?
Do I need a referral?
Why should I choose an orthodontist instead of another provider?
A strong SEO and GEO strategy creates a library of useful information around your doctors, treatments, locations, expertise, and patient experience. Over time, that content can help build visibility beyond any single advertising campaign. Paid advertising and organic visibility shouldn't necessarily be viewed as competitors for the same budget. They serve different roles within the growth system.
Should You Spend More on Google Ads or SEO?
This is another question without a universal answer.
Paid search can help a practice gain visibility for high-intent searches quickly, while SEO is generally a longer-term investment in organic visibility and authority.
For many growth-focused practices, the strongest strategy isn't choosing one over the other. It's determining how each fits into the patient acquisition system. Paid advertising may help generate immediate opportunities while SEO, GEO, website content, and authority-building strengthen the practice's long-term digital position. The appropriate balance depends on your existing visibility, market competition, growth goals, website performance, and available budget.
What About AI Search?
Search behavior is changing.
Patients are no longer discovering orthodontists exclusively through a traditional list of Google results. AI-powered search experiences can help users research providers, compare treatment options, understand costs, and ask increasingly detailed questions before ever reaching a practice website.
That doesn't mean practices need an entirely separate "AI marketing budget."
Google's own guidance states that the foundational best practices of SEO continue to apply to its AI features, including AI Overviews and AI Mode.
The bigger opportunity is ensuring the marketing investments you're already making produce useful, authoritative, well-structured information that both people and search systems can understand.
This is why SEO, GEO, branding, website strategy, and content should work together rather than existing in separate silos.
When Should an Orthodontic Practice Increase Its Marketing Budget?
Increasing your marketing investment may make sense when the practice has capacity for additional patients, wants to accelerate new-patient growth, is entering a more competitive market, is opening another location, or has identified marketing channels that are consistently producing profitable patient acquisition.
But spending more isn't automatically the answer.
If your practice doesn't have the capacity to handle additional exams, struggles to answer new-patient calls, has poor lead follow-up, or converts a low percentage of exams into starts, those issues should be evaluated alongside your marketing strategy.
Otherwise, you may simply pay more money to send additional opportunities into a system that isn't prepared to convert them.
Marketing Should Be Measured as an Investment, Not Just an Expense
A $100,000 annual marketing budget can sound expensive when viewed only as a line item.
The better question is:
What did that $100,000 produce?
If the investment generated profitable growth, strengthened brand recognition, increased patient starts, improved organic visibility, and created a more predictable patient acquisition system, the number needs to be evaluated in that context.
Likewise, a smaller marketing budget isn't automatically more efficient.
Spending $30,000 that produces little measurable growth isn't necessarily better than spending $100,000 that generates a strong return.
The goal isn't to spend the least.
The goal is to invest intelligently.
How Onboard Marketing Group Helps Orthodontic Practices Build Smarter Marketing Strategies
At Onboard Marketing Group, we don't believe an orthodontic practice's marketing strategy should begin with a generic percentage.
It should begin with the practice.
What are your growth goals? How many new patients do you need? What is currently generating opportunities? Where are patients dropping out of the journey? What does your market look like? How visible is your practice in traditional and AI-driven search? And how effectively are your current marketing investments contributing to starts?
Our comprehensive approach brings branding, website strategy, SEO, GEO, paid advertising, analytics, and consulting together so that marketing decisions aren't being made in isolation.
Because ultimately, the question isn't simply:
"How much should we spend on marketing?"
It's:
"What should we invest in to reach the next stage of growth, and how will we know whether it's working?"
Frequently Asked Questions
What percentage of revenue should an orthodontic practice spend on marketing?
There isn't one universal percentage for orthodontic practices. The American Dental Association provides a broader dental benchmark of approximately 2% to 3% of collections for mature practices and 3% to 6% for new practices, with higher investment potentially appropriate when a practice is actively trying to attract additional patients. The appropriate percentage for an orthodontic practice should ultimately depend on its growth goals, market, capacity, competition, and historical marketing performance.
Should a new orthodontic practice spend more on marketing?
Often, yes. A new practice typically needs to build awareness, search visibility, reviews, website authority, referral relationships, and patient demand from the ground up. The ADA's broader dental guidance similarly allocates a higher percentage of collections to marketing for new practices than mature practices.
How much should an orthodontic practice spend on Google Ads?
There is no universal Google Ads budget for orthodontists. Competition, geography, search volume, treatment focus, conversion rates, and growth goals all influence the appropriate spend. Rather than selecting an arbitrary amount, practices should evaluate how many qualified opportunities and starts the campaign needs to generate for the investment to make financial sense.
Is SEO part of an orthodontic marketing budget?
Yes. SEO should generally be considered part of the practice's broader marketing investment because it supports organic search visibility, website traffic, patient education, and long-term digital authority. GEO increasingly complements this work by considering how content may be discovered and understood within AI-driven search experiences.
Is paid advertising better than SEO for orthodontists?
Neither is universally better. Paid advertising can create visibility more quickly, while SEO builds longer-term organic authority. Many practices benefit from using both strategically rather than relying entirely on one acquisition channel.
How do you know if an orthodontic marketing budget is working?
Look beyond impressions and clicks. Track qualified leads, scheduled exams, show rates, starts, conversion rates, cost per lead, cost per start, and ultimately the return generated by your marketing investment.
Should an orthodontic practice increase its marketing budget every year?
Not automatically. Your budget should change when your goals, competition, capacity, locations, performance, or market conditions change. The objective isn't to spend more each year. It's to continuously determine where marketing dollars can generate the greatest impact.
Does GEO require a separate marketing budget?
Not necessarily. GEO should complement your broader SEO, content, website, and brand strategy. Google's guidance for its own AI search features reinforces that many traditional SEO fundamentals remain important for visibility in generative search experiences.
Final Answer
So, how much should an orthodontic practice spend on marketing?
The most useful answer isn't a single percentage.
Industry benchmarks can provide a starting point, but your marketing budget should ultimately reflect where your practice is today and where you want it to go. A mature practice maintaining steady patient volume shouldn't automatically invest the same percentage as a new practice, a rapidly growing practice, or an orthodontist opening another location.
Start with the growth goal. Determine how many starts are needed to reach it. Understand how many exams and qualified patient opportunities are required to generate those starts. Then build a marketing strategy capable of supporting that objective and measure whether the investment is actually producing results.
Marketing shouldn't simply consume a percentage of your collections. It should have a job to do.
If your practice is ready to better understand where your marketing investment should go, book a discovery call with Onboard Marketing Group. We'll help you evaluate your current strategy, identify opportunities, and build a clearer path from visibility to conversion to sustainable growth.
