Marketing for dental practices, priced on what a patient is actually worth

A new patient is not one exam. Price the marketing on twelve months of hygiene and treatment, and the numbers stop looking frightening.

What the search behaviour actually looks like

Nobody searches for a dentist until something hurts or something is about to be judged — an emergency, or a wedding. Everything between those two moments has to be created rather than captured.

Practices routinely price their marketing against the first exam, which is the smallest number in the relationship. A patient who stays for a year of hygiene, and a proportion of whom accept treatment, is worth several multiples of that first visit.

The arithmetic, with your numbers

Say a customer is worth $1,900 over twelve months — a year of hygiene plus a normal share of accepted treatment — and you close 30% of the leads you get. Then:

That last figure is the one that settles every argument about whether advertising is expensive. If leads cost you a fraction of it, the correct response is to buy more of them, not to negotiate the price down. If they cost more than it, no amount of bidding strategy fixes that — the close rate or the customer value has to move first.

Run it with your own numbers: how to work out what a lead should cost you, and what that means for a monthly budget.

Timing

Two predictable peaks: the start of the year when benefits reset, and the end of the year when unused benefits are about to expire. A practice that only advertises in January is leaving the December run half-used.

What we hear from dental practices

"We're already busy."

Busy and profitable are different. If the chairs are full of hygiene and the treatment plans are not being accepted, more patients is the wrong purchase — the case presentation is.

"Our patients come from referrals."

Good. Referrals are the cheapest patients you will ever get and they are also finite and outside your control. Advertising is the part you can turn up.

"We tried ads and got price shoppers."

You will get price shoppers whenever the offer is a discount. An offer built on the visit rather than the price attracts a different person entirely.

What we would build

The offer, the page it lands on, the filter that stops you quoting people who will never buy, the follow-up that reaches them in minutes rather than hours, the tracking that tells you which ad produced which job — and then the campaigns. All of it in month one, and we do not charge for that month.

After that it is $1,000 a month while we run and grow it. Four months for the price of three, $3,000 at signing. We take three new clients a week and hold one business per category per market, so the honest first question is whether yours is still open.

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