Dental marketing plan: a one-page template for your practice

A dental marketing plan is a short written document that says which patients your practice needs, where those patients look for a dentist, what you will do to reach them, what it will cost and how you will know it worked. It should fit on one page. The value is not in the document itself but in the decisions it forces: what to stop doing, what to spend on, and who in the practice is responsible for each part.

Why a practice needs a marketing plan

Without one, marketing tends to follow whoever rang last: a directory salesperson, a social media offer, a leaflet company. Each choice looks reasonable on its own. Together they rarely add up to a steady flow of the patients you actually want.

A plan fixes three common problems:

• Spending on the wrong patients. If your hygiene diary is full but your implant chair is quiet, general "new patients welcome" marketing makes the wrong problem worse.
• No way to judge results. If nobody wrote down what success looked like, every activity can be called a success.
• Nobody owns it. The plan names who does each job, so the Google listing does not go untouched for a year because everyone assumed someone else had it.

What are the 7 steps of a marketing plan?

Textbook marketing plans vary in their steps. For a dental practice, these seven cover what matters, in the order you should work through them.

1. Start with capacity, not marketing

Which clinicians have space, on which days, for which treatments? A new associate starting in spring, a hygienist with gaps on Thursdays, a principal who wants more implant cases. Write down the specific capacity you need to fill. If you hold an NHS contract, include where you stand against your contracted activity, since that shapes how many new NHS patients you can take on.

2. Understand your local search market

Most new patients find a dentist by searching. So look at what a patient sees when they search "dentist" and your town name on a phone. Which three practices are in the map pack? How many reviews do they have, and what ratings?

Our study of 1,489 UK cities, towns and suburbs found the median practice holding a map pack place had 113 Google reviews, and the median rating was 4.8. The bar rises with competition: a median of 70 reviews where 5 or fewer practices compete, 108 where 6 to 8, 188 where 9 to 11, and 249 where 12 or more. Those numbers tell you how far your practice is from the places patients look first.

3. Know your numbers

Work out three figures before setting any budget:

• What a new patient is worth over their first year, conservatively, for each type of patient you want.
• What proportion of enquiries book. Ask reception, or better, count them for a month.
• The most you can afford to pay for a new patient, which follows from the first two.

That last figure decides which channels make sense. A paid click that costs more than your ceiling loses money however good the ad is.

4. Choose your channels

Pick a small number of channels that match your goals, rather than a little of everything. The table below sets out the main options.

5. Set a budget and an owner

For each channel, write down the monthly spend, the person responsible and how many hours it needs. Staff time is a real cost. An hour a week replying to reviews and posting on your Google listing is cheap compared with most paid options, but only if somebody is actually given that hour.

6. Put it in a calendar

Plan the year in quarters. Some activities are continuous (reviews, listing updates, recall). Others are campaigns with a start and end date (an ads push for a new associate, a reactivation campaign for patients who have not been seen in two years).

7. Measure and review

Choose a small number of measures and review them monthly: new patient enquiries by source, how many booked, cost per booked patient for paid channels, review count and rating, and your position in local search. Review the whole plan each quarter and move money from what is not working to what is.

A one-page dental marketing plan example

Here is a template you can copy. Fill in each line for your own practice rather than borrowing anyone else's figures.

The "stop doing" line is often the most valuable. Most practices are paying for at least one thing that nobody can connect to a single new patient.

What are the 5 Ps of a marketing plan?

The 5 Ps are usually listed as product, price, place, promotion and people. For a practice they translate neatly:

• Product: the treatments and services you offer, and which ones you want to grow.
• Price: your fees, NHS bands where they apply, payment plans and how clearly they are shown.
• Place: where you are, how easy you are to reach, and where you appear online, especially in Google Maps.
• Promotion: everything in step 4 above.
• People: your team. How the phone is answered matters as much as any campaign.

The foundation most plans skip: Google

Whatever else is in your plan, your Google Business Profile should be in it. Google says local results are mainly based on relevance, distance and popularity, and that "more reviews and positive ratings can help your business's local ranking". Google also recommends replying to reviews.

You cannot change your distance from a searcher. You can change relevance (accurate categories, services and a complete profile) and prominence, which Google describes as how well known a business is (reviews, links and mentions across the web). That makes a steady flow of genuine reviews one of the few levers fully in your control, and our guide to working out a review target shows how to set one for your town.

The rules that shape a dental marketing plan

Dental marketing is regulated more tightly than most. Build these into the plan from the start rather than discovering them when a complaint arrives.

• GDC guidance on advertising. The GDC says advertising must be current and accurate, include your GDC registration number and avoid claims likely to create an unjustified expectation about results. Only dentists on a GDC specialist list can call themselves specialists.
• ASA and the CAP Code. Claims about treatment need evidence. The ASA has warned dental advertisers about unsupported claims and enhanced whitening images.
• Email and text marketing. The ICO says you must not send marketing emails or texts to individuals unless they have specifically consented, with a limited soft opt-in exception for existing customers who were given a clear chance to opt out. Check how this applies to your patient list before planning a marketing email campaign.

Autumn and seasonal marketing ideas for dental practices

Seasonal ideas work best when they are tied to real patient behaviour rather than invented occasions:

• Before the Christmas break. Remind patients who are due or overdue for a check-up to book before diaries close, and make your holiday opening hours accurate on Google and your website.
• New year. People make decisions about their health and appearance. If you offer cosmetic treatment, have the treatment pages and consultation process ready before January, not during it.
• School holidays. Parents look for appointments that avoid school days. Make it easy to find children's appointment times.
• Any time capacity changes. A new clinician is the best reason to run a campaign, because you can say something true and new.

Common dental marketing plan mistakes

1. Starting with tactics. "We should do TikTok" is not a plan. Start with the capacity you need to fill.
2. Ignoring existing patients. Lapsed patients, overdue recalls and happy patients who have never been asked for a review are often cheaper to reach than strangers.
3. No measurement past the enquiry. Track bookings, not clicks or calls.
4. Too many channels. Three done properly beat eight done occasionally.
5. Never reviewing it. A plan written in January and opened again in December is a wish list.

For the wider menu of options to put into the plan, see our guide to marketing for dentists. If paid search is part of it, Google Ads for dentists covers the calculation that decides what you can afford per click.