The Complete List of Dental Marketing Services For Growth

An increasingly important consideration for private dental businesses is finding the right partner to deliver dental marketing services that genuinely gives them the opportunity to grow.

Record NHS waiting lists are forcing more patients to seek out private providers. This is creating a growing opportunity for dentists to acquire new customers and a shop window to promote more lucrative cosmetic services such as aligners, bonding and implants.

Growing acquisition opportunities come with a more competitive digital marketplace, where only the most strategic practices can succeed.

So, how do you go about turning clicks into patients? That’s where having the right partner comes in.

This comprehensive blog explains how to differentiate a superstar agency from a budget burner and which services are best for a dental business. There are plenty of good options for your practice across the UK, but finding the right fit is crucial.

What are Dental Marketing Services?

“Dental marketing services” encompasses a range of disciplines, which can be combined to create a viable marketing strategy. For Dentists, the aim is to find the right mix of these services to turn a website into an inbound sales engine.

Marketing is split into various disciplines which are often listed as an agency’s services. These can include digital marketing; copywriting; design and branding; PR; SEO; social media and content creation; video; advertising; events; email; and data.

Most agencies specialise in a few of these areas and align their offer with their ideal client’s requirements to maximise their effectiveness. At Discovery Design, we offer the perfect blend of global experience and growth-focused dental marketing services to build a reliable sales pipeline for any clinic or group.

We work with a growing number of dental clients who are not only leaning on our sector experience, but also drawing on our work in other exciting sectors to give them a unique marketing strategy and a competitive advantage.

How to Drive Growth for Dentists

The winning strategy for sustainable growth is to cultivate patient acquisition, whilst maximising existing patient opportunities and minimising resulting overhead increases.

You can’t simply allocate a budget and watch your waiting room fill up. You need to carefully balance workflows, perfect a sales process and empower your staff with the right tech.

All successful marketing strategies start from knowledge of the customer. It’s important to understand your position in the local marketplace and how potential patients will perceive your proposition.

Devise your marketing strategy from research

• How many genuine competitors do you have in the area, with the same service offering? Is there still plenty of addressable market, or are you entering a highly competitive, saturated space?
• How are you better than your competitors and can that be leveraged to attract patients? For example, you may have the latest tech and equipment, but that does not matter to your customers. Focus on what you offer that makes a genuine difference as your USP(s).
• What are the main drivers in your market?
• Where does your pricing sit within the market? Are you too expensive? Remember, there is also such a thing as too cheap.

Working with an experienced marketer can be priceless in this scenario and save considerable budget from being wasted on the wrong channels and the wrong strategies. Knowing your customer and your market makes building a brand or marketing strategy far easier.

It is also essential that your practice is set up to capture and service demand. You must make sure your lead handling process is watertight before you begin spending a budget.

Which processes need to be perfect before spending?

• Set SLAs for callbacks and booking confirmations.
• Train your staff on how you want potential customers to be nurtured until it’s second nature.
• Ensure time management and bookings software is fit-for-purpose and can integrate with marketing tech.
• Manage your data carefully and compliantly. Every patient is an opportunity for a repeat treatment, additional sale or upgrade. Value their information as both an opportunity and a responsibility.

Setting the foundations for success with dental marketing services

To generate sales from the digital marketplace you need to be able to communicate with your target market. To do that, you need channels. A website and social media with regular, quality visual content are essential in the dental market. Patients want to see how their smile could look. To deliver this impactfully, you need a sector-focused brand.

All of these elements form the foundations upon which marketing campaigns can be built. In order to audit, improve and create these foundations, you require a dental marketing services provider with experience of your market.

Using Pay-Per-Click Ads to grow

Once you feel you’re ready for growth, with foundations set and processes in place, you can invest in creating a pipeline of future patients. This is where the power of Pay-Per-Click advertising will become the fuel for your sales engine.

The effectiveness of your ads will depend partly on their own quality, but also on the strength of the foundations we’ve already covered. Your brand must communicate your USPs effectively, your content must show the quality of your work and your website must be optimised to capture leads.

How to Measure Success

You must monitor the right metrics to make sound judgements on whether your digital marketing services provider is performing and enabling you to grow.

The best marketing agencies can link every sale, every lead and every click back to an ad. But this requires developer-level expertise and is more unusual than you might expect in ad agencies. Your provider should be analysing this data on a regular basis. One successful strategic move can lead to improved campaign performance within 24 hours.

The right areas

You must ensure that you are focusing on the metrics which impact bookings and show campaign performance, not vanity metrics like follower count or traffic.

Conversion rate is a great indicator of the quality of traffic your ads are generating. Is it relevant traffic and are people high intent enough to click “Make A Booking”? It’s also the most important website metric for an ads campaign, because it demonstrates your website’s conversion ability and the attractiveness of your offer.

Cost Per Lead (CPL) is a key metric, because it tells you how much you are paying per lead. Blending this with your conversion rate can give you your Cost Per Acquisition (CPA). You should feed your CPA into your cost of sales to give you the full Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) for your business. These metrics tell you how profitable you are and guide you on the correct margin you need to apply to grow.

Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) is a key metric to give you a holistic view of your campaign’s performance. Presented as a number, 1 equals breakeven on a campaign. Less than 1 equals a loss on the campaign and anything above 1 demonstrates how much money you’ve made from every £1 invested.

Your marketing agency should create a dashboard that you both work from, featuring the key metrics that make a difference to your bookings and providing structure to your dialogue to ensure efficient meetings and alignment on strategic priorities.

The Complete List of Dental Marketing Services and Their Strengths

1. Branding
2. Marketing Strategy
3. Pay Per Click Advertising
4. Web
5. Social Media
6. SEO
7. Above The Line Marketing
8. Marketing Automation

Branding

You don’t get a second chance to make a first impression. Your brand assets must convince patients to trust you with a medical procedure or their physical appearance.

Your branding can be summarised as your “look and feel” and it is a key communicator of your brand, which is an intangible, leverageable asset existing in the minds of your target market. Branding’s use of colours, shapes, wording, psychological influences and imagery can be used to instantly make you recognisable and differentiate you from competitors.

Strong, modern, relevant branding can cement your position as a reputable and trustworthy dentist immediately and earn you the chance to gain a patient.

Some dentists we work with already have strong branding and our job is to get it in front of potential patients, whereas others require more wholesale preparation.

A branding project should culminate in a set of brand guidelines, setting rules on how to execute your branding the right way. Brand consistency is essential when growing a business.

Marketing Strategy

The marketing strategy is a key document in any business. It is the blueprint for growth which should guide your overall approach to winning new patients and keeping the ones you have.

Working with an experienced agency who understands your market can help you devise the right strategy, considering your pricing; your approach to competitors; your patient communication; your brand positioning; and your channels and tactics.
The key to a strong strategy is combining customer and market knowledge with tactical excellence.

The best dental marketing services agencies invest in senior, experienced teams of professionals who can offer clients this level of expertise, rather than inexperienced tactic-focused practitioners. Experience and seniority levels are important questions to ask when selecting a growth partner.

Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC)

Growth requires patient acquisition. To do this you must reach new customers with a compelling offer. PPC’s greatest strength is the ability to show ads exclusively to people who are interested in your service, such as clear aligners, composite bonding or dental implants.

Targeting can be refined further with location filters, particular interests or a range of other characteristics. This makes this channel extremely budget-efficient without the wastage involved with channels like TV, radio and print. Plus, you only pay if someone clicks your ad.

Google Ads

The ultimate tool to reach people who are ready to become patients. Google’s ability to present an ad to someone who has searched for “Invisalign providers near me” makes it a priceless channel for generating bookings.

Consider Google Ads as a “bottom of funnel” channel, which will capture patients who are close to being ready to purchase. The extent of its features, AI integrations and reach make for an extremely complex control console. As previously covered, it is important to ensure your foundations are set before branching out into this channel. If it’s clear you aren’t ready to deliver a strong service, you could do damage to your brand in your target area.

Google Ads fall into various categories, such as search; display and demand gen. They have various bidding and targeting controls, which can be adjusted manually or partially automated with the help of Google’s Performance Max and AI Max AI-assisted campaign types.  Knowing how to wield these powerful tools is an acquired skill which requires significant experience to become an expert. It can be very easy to waste a budget without expert help from an agency.

Meta Ads

Pay-per-click extends beyond Google and into other platforms, including social media. The widest network belongs to Meta, who allows you to utilise its ads platform to reach users of Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger and Threads.

Instagram and Facebook are particularly effective at getting your strong visual content in front of an interested target market.

They can be used to grow your social following by “boosting” high-engagement posts to reach new audiences. The content has to be interesting enough to earn a follow from a user. If you are successful cultivating a following on these platforms, they can become organic lead generators in themselves. But this creates pressure on content production and is time consuming. If you can nail a strong social media strategy, it can be a cost-effective channel and bring your overall CAC down for your business when blended with other channels.

For a more commercial use of your budget, Meta ads can target users based on their behaviour, what accounts they follow, their location and various other attributes. You can use this to get sales-focused messaging in front of them in a more creative and visual format than via Google. This ads channel does not deliver leads which are as qualified as Google; but is good at growing your reach and piquing the interest of people who have never engaged with your brand or are not yet in the market for a dental treatment. PPC is, overall, a lower-funnel marketing tactic. However, it can be used creatively to nurture potential customers into new patients.

Clicks are cheaper than Google because they are lower intent, but social media PPC does come with additional filming equipment and staffing costs, as well as consuming more time.

Again, the Meta control centre is a hive of complicated and hidden controls and should only be used by trained experts. It is too easy to spend your budget without a particular setting correctly adjusted and waste valuable money.

TikTok Ads

Much like Meta’s ads network, TikTok offers another visual way to humanise your brand and your clinic or group’s service quality.

Social proof such as before and after videos, customer reactions, guided tours, case studies and more are all useful ways to demonstrate that you’re the dentist of choice for a patient.

However, TikTok has an additional element which is important to consider. The user base of TikTok is much younger than other platforms and interacts with brands differently. On TikTok, it’s expected that there is a “presenter” or “face” on explanatory videos. You will be expected to have an engaging personality who explains your content. Humour is also more important on this platform. These time-consuming trends mean you need a separate strategy for TikTok versus your other social platforms.

The ads functionality is very similar in terms of its targeting abilities to Meta, including geographical filters and the ability to target conversations within hashtags. It has its own “Smart+” feature, allowing you to hand over control to the algorithm to find new customers or followers.

It also offers in-app lead generation forms, the same as Meta, where you can gather details from users without sending them to your website. This is a smoother conversion process, however the quality of leads from these native lead generation platforms is considerably lower than you would get from your own site.

Microsoft (Bing) Ads

This lesser-favoured ad platform can be a dark horse when it comes to profitable dental marketing services channels.

The Bing audience is older than other platforms we’ve seen. They also have a higher concentration of career professionals, due to the platform’s integration with corporate-grade IT hardware and software.

A Bing user is more likely to be affluent enough to afford cosmetic dental treatments. The targeting capabilities of Bing are also powerful thanks to its integration with Linkedin, allowing a greater level of targeting based on occupation.

At Discovery Design, we utilise Microsoft Ads as part of a carefully balanced mix of PPC platforms where appropriate and are able to deliver strong ROAS results.

Website Design and Development

When entering the digital marketplace, your website absolutely must be up to scratch.

It is your digital equivalent of someone being inside your clinic, taking a look around. Do they like how the place feels? Do they get the impression you will look after them? Do your dentists look capable?

There are two elements to consider here. Firstly, your overall website needs to be professional, welcoming and easily navigable. If someone is looking for specific information is it accessible? Does what they see and read impress them? Video is more important than ever and should be a key element of what visitors see.

The second element is how effective your landing pages are. If your website is your digital clinic, your landing pages are your digital sales manager sitting at the front desk. Their job is to make a sale, because this is where your PPC ads will send their traffic.

Landing page optimisation is an art form. Knowing what a user will be looking for at any given position and presenting that information in a consumable and convincing manner is the key to turning traffic to bookings. This is another skill which an agency can provide and its effectiveness can be measured via the conversion rate metric we covered earlier.

A great web development service will provide a website which users can navigate seamlessly, built on strong and efficient code, which runs quickly and smoothly. It will also give you landing pages with strong conversion rates. Luckily, both of these outcomes are very easy to measure.

Social Media

We have already touched on social PPC ads. But organic social can also be a useful tactic to communicate with patients and, crucially, potential patients.

Running special offers can be a short-term way of leveraging a social following, but the main social media play for dental practices and groups is the long-term one.

Gaining a follower who could potentially be a patient and nurturing them over time with brand messaging, strong content and social proof can not only build a more loyal patient, but one who could trust you with a larger treatment or repeat treatments.

Organically-generated customers tend to be more loyal and more engaged with brands they purchase from, rather than the instant-hit of a paid acquisition patient.

The catch is that it’s harder to control the flow of organic leads than paid ones. You can’t adjust your budget or increase bidding aggression like you can with your paid pipeline.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Whilst it is harder to control the flow of organic leads, there are practices you can employ to grow your volume over time. Chief amongst them is SEO.

Despite all of the changes the dawn of AI has brought upon search engine results pages (SERPS), SEO remains an essential tactic to increase your website’s organic visibility online, both in searches and AI Overviews.

A full explanation of SEO would take a blog post on its own. For the purposes of summarising it as one of the key dental marketing services, we will describe it as the way you increase your website’s relevance to popular search terms on search engines. The primary way to do this is publish useful, relevant content around key subjects (such as this blog).

There are also technical elements, such as how your site is built, its core vital performance measures and its user engagement metrics.

Local SEO is also an important practice for people in your area to find you more easily. Read our dedicated blog on how to do this.

Above The Line Marketing (ABL)

Perhaps the terminology is a little old-hat, but not all marketing is done online.

Your target market can be reached in other places, such as print and magazines, out of home (OOH) billboards, sponsorships and more.

The difference between these locations and the digital methods already covered are the difficulties with wastage and tracking.

It is important to attribute successes to the relevant part of your budget and these methods could be the primary reason someone came to your website or phoned your practice, but that doesn’t get attributed and relies on you asking them the question when you speak to them.  QR code inclusion in advertisements can help by bringing someone into a digital funnel for measurement, but not everyone will utilise this route.

It’s best to use ABL methods to drive brand awareness and not worry about conversions, or within a confined offer where you can judge your RoAS.

Marketing Automation (including email)

Marketing Automation is a great way to maximise budget and enable growth.

In short, automation is the use of technology to automatically nurture leads and customers toward outcomes. Whether it’s an expert email flow sequence or a triggered SMS reminder, perfecting your automation transforms your marketing funnel into a growth machine.

Automation is one of the least standardised dental marketing services, because every practice has different processes, systems and budgets.

Automation can come in different shapes and sizes and is increasingly AI-driven. It could be as simple as using platforms like Zapier to link together your operational systems. Or it could be building a bespoke platform which supercharges your conversion and clinic productivity rates. This is also a key point when it comes to valuing a dental practice, because owning proprietary tech increases your business value and investability.

Only the elite dental marketing services agencies can provide this level of development alongside high-performing ads campaigns, ranking-boosting SEO, world-leading development standards, beautiful design and experience-led marketing strategy consultancy.

Choosing the Right Dental Marketing Services Partner

Choosing the right dental marketing agency depends on your growth mindset and the stage your business has reached.

Any prospective partner should discuss your business’ goals with you before recommending any particular strategy or service as different tactics work for different businesses.

Also encourage your prospective marketing partner to be honest about whether your practice is ready for advertising. A good agency will set realistic expectations rather than simply taking your management fee.

There are many dental digital marketing agencies in the UK. They understand the industry, the daily pressures, and should have a portfolio of similar practices.

However, their experience is often limited to one sector, meaning they typically apply the same proven strategies across multiple practices. While this can help you keep pace with competitors, it won’t necessarily help you stand out. At Discovery Design, we combine deep dental expertise with cross-sector experience, bringing fresh ideas and proven strategies.

The Complete List of Dental Marketing Services for Growth

The digital dental marketplace now offers fantastic opportunities for dentists across the country to grow their practices with a steady stream of qualified patients.

Choosing the correct digital marketing services to use is crucial in successfully achieving growth.

Reach out to us at Discovery Design for an honest conversation around your growth objectives. We are transparent with our opinion of your potential within the marketplace and can lay out a roadmap for you to grow your practice.