Hiring a dental marketing company, doing it in house, or doing it yourself
What dental marketing actually costs, the red flags in a pitch, which pieces a practice should keep in house, and why a trial beats a twelve month agreement.
Dental practices are marketed to harder than almost any other local business. The margins are good, the owner is busy, and the list of practices is easy to buy. A typical office owner fields several cold calls a week from companies promising new patients.
Most of those companies do real work. Some do not. The difference is visible in the first fifteen minutes of a conversation if you know what to listen for.
What it actually costs
Rough ranges in the US market, monthly, excluding ad spend.
- Google Ads management: $500 to $2,000, or 10% to 20% of spend. Above 20% of spend, you are subsidizing a sales team.
- Meta ads management: $400 to $1,500.
- Local SEO and Google profile: $500 to $1,500.
- Website: $3,000 to $9,000 built once, or $200 to $500 a month managed.
- Review generation: $150 to $500 including software.
- Full service dental marketing: $2,500 to $8,000 a month plus ad spend.
- Answering service or scheduling support: $150 to $600.
Ad spend is separate and it is yours. A practice serious about implants and aligners in a competitive metro is spending $2,000 to $6,000 a month on Google alone. If somebody quotes a package that includes ad spend, read carefully to see how much of your money is actually reaching the auction.
Red flags
They guarantee new patient numbers. Nobody can guarantee 30 new patients a month. They do not control your phone, your fee schedule, your reviews or your market. Anybody promising a number is either inexperienced or counting something loosely, usually "leads" that include wrong numbers and existing patients calling to reschedule.
They will not run it in your accounts. If the Google Ads account, the Meta ad account, the domain and the Google Analytics property are not owned by your practice, you are renting your own history. When you leave, you leave with nothing. Insist on ownership in writing before signing anything.
Twelve month agreement with no exit. Six months is reasonable for SEO, which is genuinely slow. Twelve months with no performance out and a cancellation fee is a retention product, not a service product.
Reporting that only shows impressions and clicks. The number that matters is booked new patients and the production they generated. If a report never mentions the phone, nobody is looking at the part of the funnel where dental practices lose the most.
They offer to write your reviews, gate them, or reply to them with patient details. Any of the three tells you they do not understand either Google's policy or HIPAA. A vendor replying to reviews on your behalf with a patient's name or procedure is creating your liability, not theirs.
They want to upload your patient list to Meta or Google. That is a disclosure of protected health information. A vendor who suggests it casually has done it for other practices and does not know it is a problem.
They will not sign a business associate agreement. Any vendor touching your patient data, your practice management system or your phone system needs one. A vendor who does not know what you are asking for should not have access.
No dental references you can actually call. Ask for two current practice owners in a different market. A real firm hands them over without hesitation.
What to keep in house
Some of this should never be outsourced because outsourcing it makes it worse.
The review ask. No software will make the front desk say the sentence at checkout. Buy the tool if you like, but the process belongs to your team. See the reviews guide.
The phone. Nobody converts your new patient calls as well as a trained person in your office who knows the schedule. An answering service is a backstop for the hours you are closed, not a replacement for the desk. The front desk guide covers what to train.
Your prices and your offer. A vendor can write the ad. Only you can decide whether the exam special is $79 or $129 and what it includes.
Anything patient-facing that involves clinical judgment. Never let a marketing vendor publish claims about outcomes, post case photos, or write copy implying results without your review.
What is worth paying for
Google Ads and Meta ads management. The platforms change constantly and the difference between an average account and a good one is large enough to pay for the management several times over.
A website build. Practices that build their own site with a page builder almost always end up with something slow that answers none of the three questions patients came to ask. Pay once, own it.
Technical SEO, schema and profile work. Tedious, one-time-heavy, and worth having someone who has done it a hundred times.
Follow-up automation. The text-back sequences, the recall campaigns, the lead nurture. Real setup work, low ongoing effort once built.
Doing it yourself
Entirely viable if you have five to eight hours a month and an office manager who will own it. The order that produces results fastest:
- Google Business Profile complete, every field, all services listed.
- Review process running at two to four a week.
- Answer rate above 90% and missed-call text-back on.
- A fast website with real service pages, insurance clarity and published prices.
- Then ads.
Doing the first four and no ads outperforms doing ads with none of the first four. The benchmark report shows why: 21.5% of dental practices have no website linked and 37% have fewer than ten reviews, so the bar in most local markets is lower than it feels from inside the practice.
Why a trial beats an agreement
An owner cannot evaluate a marketing company from a pitch deck. The only real evidence is whether the phone rings differently.
This is why every service on this site is offered as a free 14-day trial. We set it up in your accounts, you watch the results, and after 14 days you keep it at a price quoted before we started, switch, or stop. No card is on file and nothing is built that you do not own. If a vendor you are talking to will not do something similar, ask why the risk has to sit entirely on your side.
Frequently asked
Should we hire someone in house? A full-time marketing person makes sense past roughly five locations or $4 million in collections. Below that, an office manager owning the profile and reviews plus outside help on ads is usually better value.
Are dental-specific agencies better? Sometimes. They know the vocabulary and the compliance lines. They also frequently run the same template across every client in your city, including your competitors. Ask directly whether they work with anyone within ten miles of you.
How long before we should expect results? Ads, two to four weeks. Profile and review work, one to three months. SEO and AI visibility, three to six. Anyone promising faster is describing ads and calling it something else.
Text or call (385) 832-6175, or read the FAQ for how the trial works.