Canada's Specialized Dental Marketing Agency · Serving Dental Clinics Coast to Coast
Marketing for general and family practices
Most general dentistry marketing sells one thing: more new patients. A general practice actually runs two economies, a hygiene base load that keeps the schedule alive and a private-pay layer where the profit sits. We market to both, in the order that releases the most treatment, and we report started cases rather than enquiry counts.
Why general practices are different
Two economies share your chairs. Hygiene, exams and recall carry the base load. They keep the team busy and produce nearly every diagnosis you ever act on, and their margin has been squeezed for years.
The second economy is smaller and pays for the year. Aligners, implant restorations, cosmetic work, sedation and larger restorative plans take a modest share of the appointment book and carry most of what you keep.
Most agencies market only the base load, because volume is easy to sell and easy to put in a report. The new patient count rises. The owner works more days for the same drawing.
So we start from a different question: which chairs do you want fuller? Same practice, same team, a different set of appointments in it.
Six categories a general practice usually wants more of. Each behaves differently in search, so each gets its own funnel and its own budget.
The base load, and the cheapest production in the building. A lapsed chart already chose you once. Recall is also where the larger cases get diagnosed.
No new operatory and little new chair time for what a case is worth. Much of the demand already sits in your charts. We report start rate, and ours has run above 50%.
The practice found first for a missing tooth keeps the case and chooses the surgeon. The practice found second inherits whatever the patient was already sold.
Veneers, bonding and whitening are private pay, so the fee is yours to set. The decision is visual, slow, and mostly made before anyone calls you.
Someone who has avoided care for a decade rarely needs one filling. Small in volume, large in production, and very rarely marketed properly.
The highest-intent search in dentistry and a common route into a long-term chart. We build the campaign around the hours you can genuinely staff.
The sequence, and why it runs in this order
Which appointment types produce what, how much chair time each consumes, and what one started case is worth in each. That arithmetic sets the plan before any budget is.
Calls that rang out at lunch, forms answered on Thursday, no-shows nobody chased, consults that stalled after the estimate. You have already paid to create that production.
Lapsed recall, unscheduled treatment, and families who moved one appointment and never came back. Sequenced by text and email, compliantly, and it lands in weeks.
One substantive page per treatment you want more of, ordered by case value, each answering the question the patient arrived with. Our dental SEO work starts here.
Search captures people already looking for a procedure. Social creates consideration for elective work nobody searches for. Both are budgeted per treatment, never per practice.
Started cases by category, matched to source. The categories producing treatment get more next quarter. The ones producing only clicks lose the budget, ours included.
The argument this page is built on
Four levers grow a general practice. Ranked by what each releases per dollar and per week, acquisition comes last, and it is the only one most agencies sell.
Capacity is first. If the phone rings out over lunch and hygiene is six weeks out, buying demand buys a longer queue rather than more production.
Case acceptance is second. Treatment already diagnosed and sitting unstarted moves on explanation, financing and follow-up, and costs no ad spend at all.
Treatment mix is third. Marketing at the level of the procedure changes what fills the schedule, not merely how full it is.
Acquisition is fourth, and the most expensive. We do it well. We just will not start there when the first three would return more.
Relationship only. Nothing here is drawn to scale, and no figure is implied.
Rarely the budget. Three failures repeat in almost every Canadian city we look at.
Gentle, caring, modern, family. Ten homepages in one city, one sentence. A category where everyone claims the same thing contains no claims at all.
Nobody searches for a gentle dentist. They search a treatment, a price or a Saturday opening. That is where a practice can actually be chosen.
Colleges restrict what a general practice may call itself, and the rules differ by province. We write to yours before anything is published.
A competitor can copy your adjectives this afternoon. They cannot copy a genuinely useful page about a treatment unless they sit down and build one, and most will not.
One flat monthly fee, month to month, one clinic per city. Never a share of your production, which also removes any reason to send you volume you cannot treat.
A site organised around the treatments you want more of, with the private-pay work one click from the homepage instead of three.
Your Google Business Profile, categories, address consistency and a compliant flow of recent reviews, tracked apart from organic rankings.
Google and Meta budgeted per category, so the chair you want fuller gets the spend and the one already booked out does not.
DentalReviews requests, monitors and publishes reviews compliantly, because recency moves local rankings more than a lifetime total does.
Missed calls texted back automatically, recall and unscheduled treatment followed up, and every call attributed to whatever produced it.
A live dashboard rather than a monthly PDF: started treatment by category, calls answered, and where the next dollar should go.
Why Dental Marketing Canada
No restaurants, no realtors. Every account here is a Canadian dental practice, so whoever writes your aligner page already knows where that consult stalls.
One clinic per city. We will not also run the practice down the road. Month to month, because a contract should never be the reason an agency keeps an account.
Flat monthly fees, never a share of production and never a price per patient. And you own every asset: domain, hosting, site, profile, ad accounts and analytics.
Behind it runs software we build ourselves: DentalReviews, plus the CRM, call tracking and live reporting every partner gets.
See how we work with practice ownersEvery discipline, one operating system, one team.
Yes, but the goal changes completely. A full practice does not need more appointments, it needs better ones. The work becomes making the aligner, cosmetic, sedation and restorative chairs the ones that fill first, then letting ordinary attrition handle the rest. Nobody sells this version of growth, because there is no impressive lead count in it.
It is the question every owner asks and the least useful number in the building. New patients who all want a cleaning can leave you busier and no better off than half as many that include two implant restorations and an aligner start. Ask instead what your production per new patient is, and what it becomes if the mix changes. We will do that arithmetic on your fees.
Both, and deliberately in that order. The base load keeps the schedule solvent while the private-pay work is built, and recall is where those cases get diagnosed in the first place. A practice that chases implants and aligners while its hygiene column empties has simply moved the problem twelve months out. Recall automation, reactivation and reviews run from month one.
In order: reactivation of lapsed and unscheduled patients, then redistribution so the associate takes the treatment types they are quickest at, then paid search on procedures with immediate intent, then organic. Reactivation moves in weeks and costs almost nothing. Rankings on the profitable treatments take months, and they are what stops you renting that column from an ad platform next year.
Not simply that you accept it, since most practices in your city can say the same. Say what patients are actually confused about: whether their household attracts a co-payment, that a plan fee and your fee are not always the same number, and which treatments are not covered. Written plainly, that page ranks, converts, and takes a repetitive conversation off your front desk.
It might not be, and we would rather establish that on the first call than in month six. But repeated failures usually share one cause: you bought volume, the volume arrived, and nothing changed on your statement because it was the wrong kind. Ask anyone you are considering what a started case in each of your categories is worth. If they cannot answer, they are selling enquiries.
Finally, marketing built around what a general practice keeps, not how many new patients it counts.
Tell us which chairs you want fuller, what one started case is worth in each, and the city you practise in. We will show you which of the four growth levers would return most in your practice, and whether your city is still open.
Thank you. We'll be in touch shortly. Need us sooner? Call (905) 906-7066.
Speak to a dental marketing specialist
Tell us about your practice and we will come back with a straight read on your market, what we would do first, and whether your city is still available.
Finally, Marketing Built For High-Value, Specialized Dental Services in Canada.
Marketing for general and family practices