Marketing for dental groups
A dental group is a set of local businesses with one balance sheet, and the marketing has to work at both levels at once.
Where the money moves.
Cost per new patient means very little on its own. What matters is what a new patient is worth by treatment type over the first year and beyond, and those figures diverge hard. A hygiene patient recruited on a check up offer and an implant case found through a search for a failing tooth pay back on completely different horizons. Budget set at group level and measured at group level hides all of it. We split acquisition by treatment category, then fund the channels producing the cases your clinicians have the chair time and the skill to deliver.
In search, a group is not one brand. It is a set of local businesses competing inside their own catchments, and each practice needs its own profile, its own reviews accruing, a page written to the suburb and its own line in the report. Practices two suburbs apart will bid against each other unless the campaign geography is drawn properly. When an associate leaves, the patients who found them by name have to land somewhere sensible, which is a structural decision made long before the resignation arrives.
The dental year has a shape. Extras limits reset on 1 January, so check up and hygiene demand builds through November and December while patients spend what they would otherwise lose, then falls away in January when the limits are fresh but the reason to act has gone. Orthodontic and implant starts cluster differently again, around school terms and around the point where a patient has finally had enough of the problem. Recall and paid spend should follow that curve rather than a flat monthly split.
The rules are tighter than a marketing calendar usually assumes. Testimonials about clinical care are prohibited under section 133 of the National Law, which reaches the reviews you solicit onto channels you control. Before and after images have to be taken under consistent conditions and cannot create an unreasonable expectation of outcome. Time limited offers and payment arrangements are treated as inducements when they are used to push a treatment decision. We write to those rules from the first draft, which keeps campaigns running and keeps the group out of a complaint.
What we run.
Acquisition by treatment
Separate funnels for hygiene, implants, aligners and emergency, each with its own creative, landing page and cost target. An implant enquiry costs far more than a check up enquiry, which is only a problem when the two are measured as one number.
One profile per practice
Every site gets its own Business Profile, its own suburb page, its own review flow and its own reporting line, with campaign geography drawn so practices inside the same group are never bidding against one another.
Recall and reactivation
The most profitable list a group owns is the one it already has. Structured recall by treatment history, reactivation of patients who lapsed after a completed plan, and a December sequence against unused extras, run from the practice software rather than a separate database.
Case acceptance
Content built for the gap between consultation and yes: what the treatment involves, how long it takes, what it costs and why, and what happens if it is delayed. Filmed with your clinicians, so the person on screen is the person in the chair.
Dentist recruitment
Associates and specialists choose a group on clinical freedom, equipment, mentoring and how reliably the book fills. That case gets published properly, and it doubles as a trust signal for patients reading about who will treat them.
Questions we get asked.
You can invite feedback, but a review commenting on clinical care is a testimonial under section 133 and cannot be used in advertising you control. The workable line is that you do not solicit or curate clinical praise onto your own channels and you do not repost it into ads. Third party platforms sit outside your control, which is precisely why they are treated differently.
For dental work, yes, with conditions. Consistent lighting, angle and framing, no editing that flatters the result, consent documented, and no suggestion the outcome is typical when it is not. The riskier ground is pairing an image with a price or a limited time offer, which starts reading as an inducement.
Geography is drawn once at group level, and each practice is given its own territory in paid campaigns and its own targeting in search. Where catchments genuinely overlap, the practices are separated by service rather than by suburb, so one carries the implant and orthodontic work while the other carries general and emergency.
You do, always. Ad accounts, the domain, every Business Profile, the patient list and every file created sit in the group's name from day one. Nothing is white labelled and nothing has to be migrated out later, because it was never held anywhere else.
Talk to us.
9 services under one team, run against the numbers your business already reports on.
Contact the Ignis Team
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