Most dental marketing advice starts with "run ads." The profitable order is different — and it starts with the patients you already have, then prices every channel by procedure value instead of treating a cleaning inquiry like an implant case. Here's the playbook we run for healthcare practices.
Start with the math most practices skip
A hygiene patient books a $150 cleaning. An implant consult is a $3,000-6,000 case; full-arch runs $15,000-30,000. A new-patient inquiry is worth 20-30x more or less depending on what they came for — yet most practices run one campaign, one budget, one "new patient special," and average it all away. Everything below follows from splitting acquisition by procedure value (the full dental ads breakdown).
The ROI-ordered playbook
1. Reactivation before acquisition. Your overdue-recall list is the cheapest chair-filler in dentistry: they know you, they answered before, and a phone + text sequence restarts hygiene within two weeks at near-zero cost. Hygiene feeds diagnosis; diagnosis feeds treatment revenue. Run this before spending a marketing dollar — it also tells you whether your front desk converts calls at all.
2. Google Business Profile + reviews. "Dentist near me" is decided in the map pack. Complete profile, weekly activity, and a review ask wired into checkout — review velocity moves map rank more than anything else you control.
3. Google Ads, split by procedure value. Emergency campaigns (highest intent in dentistry, same-day booking), implant/Invisalign/full-arch campaigns with procedure-specific landing pages and financing presented upfront, and a modest general-dentistry campaign for chair-fill. Call tracking plus booked-and-shown appointment import — front-desk answer rate silently decides whether ads "work."
4. LSAs where available. Dental categories are rolling through Local Services Ads in a growing set of metros — pay-per-lead with a verified badge. Check your metro; where live, it's the cheapest qualified call in the account.
5. New-patient specials as tracked acquisition only. The $99 special loses money on the day by design. It works when treatment acceptance and 12-month recall revenue are measured against the discount — and gets cut the quarter that stops being true. Same loss-leader discipline as every trade's door-opener offer.
Compliance note
Dental advertising sits under healthcare rules: no outcome guarantees, careful before/after usage per state boards, and patient data handled per HIPAA in your funnel (form vendors, call recordings, remarketing lists). The healthcare playbook covers the tracking architecture that stays clean.
The monthly number
Cost per shown appointment, by procedure tier — and 12-month patient value against it. Benchmarks by metric are on the benchmarks page.
Want the whole engine built — reactivation sequences, value-split campaigns, LSA verification, and tracking that knows an implant consult from a cleaning? Book a free audit and a senior strategist will map your patient economics first.