The Dental Marketing Guide: What to Do First, and What to Skip
Everything we do for clients, written down. If you want to run it yourself, this is enough to do it properly.
Nine channels, in the order they should be funded, with the numbers that decide each one and the things I would not spend money on. Every section links to the full detail.
The one decision that determines everything else
Before any channel, answer this: is your problem visibility, conversion, or capacity? Almost every wasted dental marketing budget comes from treating one as another.
Capacity first, because marketing can't fix it
If you're booked three weeks out, you don't have a marketing problem. More visibility buys patients you can't seat and reviews complaining about wait times. Fix hours, hygiene scheduling or staffing, then come back.
Then conversion, because it's cheaper than visibility
If people are finding you and not booking, buying more traffic multiplies the leak. A missed lunch-hour phone, a site that hides the booking button, a rating of 3.9 — each of these costs you patients you already paid to attract. Fix those before you increase spend.
Then visibility, in this order
Only once the first two are handled does buying attention make sense. And even then, not all channels at once. If you run a general practice, the stage-by-stage version is on marketing for general dentists.
Nine dental marketing channels, ranked by what to fund first
1. Patient reactivation — the cheapest production you will ever buy
Your dormant chart is worth more than your ad budget. Multi-touch campaigns book 12 to 22 percent of the people they reach; single-touch manages 4 to 6. Start here, always, unless you're a brand new practice with no list. Full detail.
2. Reviews — roughly a quarter of local ranking, and it compounds
Velocity beats volume. Ten to fifteen a month, asked by text the same day, every review answered. This lifts your map pack position and your Local Services Ads position simultaneously. Full detail.
3. Google Business Profile — free, and most profiles are misconfigured
The single most common failure is a primary category set to anything other than "Dentist." Services empty, products unused, hours wrong. All fixable in a fortnight at zero media cost. Full detail.
4. Your website — the asset every other channel points at
One page per treatment, booking above the fold, three-field forms, fast on cellular. A 3 percent conversion rate against a 10 percent benchmark is the ads budget being wasted after the click. Full detail.
5. Local Services Ads — top of page, pay per lead
File the verification first because it takes three to four weeks. Both insurance certificates, or it stalls. Responsiveness is a ranking factor, so answering the phone literally improves your position. Full detail.
6. Facebook and Instagram ads — cheap contacts, spend on retargeting
Cold reach is the least valuable thing Meta sells a practice. Retarget people who read your implant page and didn't book. Under $2,000 total ad spend, this plus LSAs beats search. Full detail.
7. Google Ads — powerful, and the easiest budget to waste
$2,500 a month is the realistic floor. Implant clicks run $12 to $35. One campaign per treatment, its own landing page, and a negative keyword list on day one. Full detail.
8. SEO and AI search — slowest, and it keeps working
Treatment pages, problem pages, cost pages. Answer first, then depth, in your own numbers. Increasingly the goal is being the source an AI Overview cites, not ranking fourth. Full detail.
9. Direct mail — the only channel where you choose the houses
Your own lapsed list pulls 5 to 15 percent; cold neighborhoods 1 to 3. Track with a dedicated number, a QR code and a bring-this-in mechanic. Full detail.
The dental marketing benchmarks worth memorising
What things cost, roughly, in 2026
These are ranges from published industry data. Your market moves them, sometimes a lot, but they are the right order of magnitude to plan against.
How much should a dental practice spend on marketing?
The percentage rule, and why it misleads new practices
The conventional figure is three to five percent of collections for an established practice, and ten to twelve percent for one still building a patient base. It is a reasonable starting frame and it breaks in one specific situation: a practice doing $600,000 with empty chairs does not have a $24,000 marketing problem, it has a capacity utilisation problem, and spending a percentage of a number that is too small keeps it too small. Work backwards from what you want the schedule to look like instead.
Work backwards from chairs, not from revenue
Decide how many new patients a month you actually need to fill the gap. Multiply by what a booked patient costs to acquire in your market — $70 to $150 for general dentistry, $200 to $400 for implants and specialty. That number is your media budget, and if it is larger than you can fund, the honest response is to start with the channels that do not need media spend at all rather than to under-fund the ones that do.
Splitting management from media
These are two different line items and conflating them is how practices end up confused about what they are paying for. Management is the work: strategy, building, running, reporting. Media is what goes to Google and Meta. Anyone charging a percentage of media as their management fee has an incentive pointing the wrong way, because their income rises when your spend rises regardless of what it returns.
Conventional industry ranges. The chair-based calculation above is a better guide than either percentage for a practice with a specific gap to fill.
The tracking setup that makes every other decision possible
Without this, everything below is opinion
You cannot decide where to spend next month if you cannot say what produced patients last month. Most dental practices genuinely cannot, and they are not being careless — nobody ever set it up. This is a two-week job that pays for itself permanently, and it should happen before you increase any budget.
A tracked number per channel, not one for the practice
Search ads, Local Services Ads, your Business Profile, the website and each mail campaign each get their own number, all forwarding to your normal line. That single change turns "the phone has been busier" into a number per channel. Keep your real number as the one published everywhere a patient might already know it, so nothing breaks for existing patients.
Call recording, because it settles arguments nothing else can
When a channel looks like it is failing, the recording shows whether the leads were bad or the calls were mishandled. Those are different problems with different fixes and, without the recording, two people guessing. It is also occasionally uncomfortable listening, which is the point.
Booking source captured at the desk
A code or a source field entered against the appointment. This is the step that connects a click to production, and it is the one that requires a human to cooperate. It takes four seconds per booking and it is the difference between measuring leads and measuring patients.
What to do in your first ninety days, in order
Days 1 to 14 — the free work and the long pole
File Local Services Ads verification immediately, because it runs three to four weeks in the background and nothing else depends on it. In parallel, fix the Business Profile: primary category to Dentist, every service entered with a real description, hours and holiday hours, photographs. Install the tracking above. Pull your lapsed patient list and your unscheduled treatment report. None of this costs media spend and all of it is prerequisite.
Days 15 to 30 — the first campaign that pays
Run the reactivation sequence against the dormant list. This is the largest single lift most established practices will see and it costs a text message per patient. At the same time, switch on the review request system so every patient from this point contributes to the rating. If you are running ads, this is when they go live against real landing pages rather than the homepage.
Days 31 to 90 — let the slow things compound
The Google Screened badge arrives and Local Services Ads begin. Map pack movement typically shows around week eight to twelve, which is when the profile work and the review cadence start registering. Ad costs fall as campaigns exit the learning phase and the negative keyword list tightens. Treatment pages published in month one begin ranking. Budget moves monthly toward whatever is booking patients cheapest.
Ads and reactivation produce inside the first month; that is their job in the mix. Earned visibility takes eight to twelve weeks minimum and often longer in a competitive metro. Practices that cancel at day 45 have paid for the slow channels and left before collecting them.
How to tell whether your dental marketing agency is working
Six questions, and the answers you should get
You do not need to understand campaign structure to audit an agency. You need to ask questions where a vague answer is itself the answer. These are the ones I would ask if I were hiring someone else.
"What did a booked patient cost us last month, by channel?"
The single most revealing question. An agency that cannot answer it is either not tracking to appointments or does not want to say. "Cost per lead" as an answer is a redirect — leads are not patients, and the gap between the two is where most disappointment lives.
"What negative keywords did you add last month?"
Applies to anyone running Google Ads. If the answer is none, or the list has not changed since setup, nobody is reading the search terms report. It takes them thirty seconds to answer honestly and it tells you whether the account is being managed or merely hosted.
"Which of our pages produced organic calls?"
Not rankings. Calls. An agency reporting positions without connecting them to phone activity is reporting a leading indicator as though it were a result. Rankings that rise while calls stay flat mean the search volume is not there, which you deserve to know early.
"What is not working, and what are you changing?"
Every month has something underperforming. An agency that never volunteers one is either not looking or not telling you. This is the question that separates a partner from a vendor, and the answer should arrive before you ask it.
"Who owns the accounts if we leave?"
Your website, domain, ad accounts with conversion history, Business Profile, reviews and phone numbers should all be yours, with the agency working as a manager. Anything else makes leaving expensive by design, which is a decision somebody made about you.
- Impressions and reach on page one. Not outcomes. A report that opens with them is designed to look busy.
- "Keywords in the top 100." Moves constantly, means nothing, makes a flat month look active.
- Percentage-of-spend fees. Pays them more to spend more of your money.
- A twelve-month contract. Protects the agency from the consequences of month three.
- No named person. If you do not know who works on your account, probably nobody consistently does.
What to skip, whatever anybody tells you
The spending that survives because it is easy to report on
Every item here gets sold to dentists constantly. None of them reliably produce patients.
- Percentage-of-ad-spend pricing. It pays the agency more to spend more of your money.
- Fifty templated city pages. Thin content at scale and a cleanup job later.
- Bought or incentivised reviews. Against Google policy and FTC rules, removed in batches.
- Keywords stuffed in your business name. A leading cause of profile suspension.
- Boosted posts. No real targeting, no conversion optimisation.
- Reports that end in impressions. If it doesn't end in appointments, it's designed to look busy.
- Twelve-month contracts. They protect the agency from the consequences of month three.
- A website you can't take with you. Common in dental, and it makes leaving expensive by design.
Dental marketing questions practice owners ask
How long before dental marketing starts working?
It depends entirely on the channel, which is why a single answer is always a sales answer. Reactivation books appointments in the first fortnight. Ads produce calls inside the first month. Local Services Ads take three to four weeks just to clear verification. The map pack typically shows first movement at week eight to twelve, and organic rankings for competitive terms take longer still. A sensible programme runs the fast channels to carry the schedule while the slow ones compound underneath, which is also why judging the whole thing at day 30 tells you almost nothing.
What is the single cheapest thing a practice can do?
Work your own lapsed patient list. A structured multi-touch sequence books 12 to 22 percent of the people it reaches, against 4 to 6 percent for a single message, and it costs a text per patient. Most practices with a few years of history are sitting on several hundred dormant patients and a separate list of accepted-but-unscheduled treatment. Nothing you can buy competes with production you already paid to acquire once.
Do I need an agency at all?
Not necessarily. Everything on this page is doable in-house if somebody owns it and has the time, and the profile work in particular is free. Where practices struggle is consistency — review requests that stop when the front desk gets busy, search terms reports nobody reads, campaigns nobody adjusts. If you have somebody who will genuinely own it weekly, run it yourself. If it will become the thing that happens when the phone is quiet, it will not happen.
How do I know if my website is the problem?
Look at conversion rate per treatment page rather than at the design. Dental paid traffic converts at roughly ten percent when the page is doing its job. Below five percent, the page is losing patients your ads already paid for, and the usual causes are a headline that does not match what was searched, a dodged price question, a booking action below the fold, or a slow load on cellular — in that order.
Should I sign a twelve-month contract?
I would not, and the reason is structural rather than moral. A twelve-month term protects the agency from the consequences of month three. If the work is good you will stay anyway; if it is not, a contract converts a bad decision into a year of one. Month to month with thirty days notice keeps the incentive where it belongs.
What should I do first if I only have a few hundred dollars?
Fix the Business Profile, because it costs nothing. Correct the primary category, fill in every service with a real description, set holiday hours, add photographs. Then start asking every patient for a review, same day, by text. Those two things move the map pack and cost no media spend at all. Put whatever is left into Local Services Ads, where you pay per lead rather than per click.
Or have us run the whole thing
Everything above, for one flat $1,500 a month, with no markup on ad spend and thirty days notice to leave. Twenty minutes on a call and I'll tell you which two channels to fund first in your market — whether or not you hire us.