Marketing for dentists: what is worth doing, and what to measure

Dental marketing advice tends to arrive as a list of tactics with no sense of scale. Practices then spread a small budget across all of them and cannot tell which, if any, did anything. Here is the same list, with an honest note on what each is worth and how you would know.

0. Before any of it: what kind of patient do you actually want?

This comes first because for a great many UK practices it decides whether the rest is worth reading.

If you hold an NHS contract, your UDA allocation is a ceiling. Delivering above it is not paid, and delivering below it is clawed back. A marketing campaign that brings you NHS patients when you are already on track to hit your contract has not grown anything; it has added chairtime you cannot bill and a waiting list you cannot serve. Practices in that position sometimes need fewer new NHS registrations, not more.

So the first question is not which channel. It is which of these you are:

• NHS at or near contract, in which case growth means private and plan work from the patients you already have, and general "dentist near me" visibility may be actively unhelpful.
• NHS under contract, where general local visibility is exactly right, because you are paid for delivery you are currently missing.
• Mixed with private capacity, where the target is specific treatments rather than registrations, and the marketing should name the treatment.
• Fully private, where everything below applies in the ordinary way.

Almost every article on dental marketing is written as though the fourth case were the only one. It is not, and a practice that spends against the wrong one wastes the budget and the chairtime together.

1. Your existing patients, which is not marketing but pays best

Before any channel that finds new people, the cheapest growth in most practices is the patients already on the books who are not currently booked. Lapsed patients, treatment plans that stalled, hygiene recalls that quietly slipped.

It is unglamorous and it has no agency selling it to you, which is precisely why it stays undone. It is also the only channel where you already have the contact details and the relationship. Do this before you spend on strangers.

2. Local search, the map pack

When someone needs a dentist and has no one, they search. Three practices get a map place above the results and take most of the clicks.

Worth: steady and high intent, though modest in volume. A market town carries a few hundred relevant searches a month across every practice in it.

Cost: the profile work is free. Doing it properly costs an afternoon. Paying an agency cost one Cheshire practice £540 to £780 a month including VAT, which is a single data point rather than a market rate.

Measure: your share of the search value in your town, and who holds the three map places. Not "our position", which changes with where the searcher stands.

3. Google Ads

Worth: instant and controllable, which is its real advantage. You can be visible tomorrow and stop on a Friday.

Cost: it varies more by treatment than most people expect. Across 1,068 UK patient-facing dental searches we measured in August 2026, the median cost per click ran from £2.75 for cosmetic terms to £17.47 for orthodontic ones, with London terms considerably higher.

Measure: cost per booked new patient, not cost per click and not cost per enquiry. The gap between an enquiry and someone in the chair is where most ads budgets quietly disappear.

Ads and search are not alternatives. Ads buy the top of the page while you are earning it, and the sensible pattern is to run them on the terms you cannot yet win and stop on the ones you can.

4. Social media

Worth: genuinely good for reassurance and for showing the team, which matters more in dentistry than in most trades because the barrier is nervousness, not awareness. Genuinely poor as a way to reach people who are not already aware of you.

Cost: mostly time, which is why it is usually underestimated.

Measure: be honest that this is hard to attribute. Judge it on whether new patients mention it, and do not let a follower count stand in for a result.

5. Local presence and referral

Sponsorship, community involvement, being visible locally in ways that have nothing to do with a screen. Slow, cumulative, hard to measure, and in a small town frequently the thing that actually moves the needle.

It also has a search side effect worth knowing: local mentions and links from local organisations are exactly the signals that feed the "prominence" part of local ranking. A community relationship often pays twice.

The one measurement that keeps it honest

Every channel above has its own vanity metric, and each one is available in a chart that goes up. Impressions, followers, clicks, "reach".

The question that survives contact with reality is narrower: how many new patients did we see this month, and can we say where they came from? If the answer is no, the second job is not more marketing, it is asking at registration and writing it down.

Where most practices go wrong

Not by picking the wrong channel. By running four of them at once, at low intensity, with no measurement, and concluding after six months that marketing does not work.

Pick the two that fit your practice, do them properly, measure one thing each, and give them long enough to be judged. That is duller advice than most of what you will be sold, and it is what the practices that grow steadily actually do.