Dental Marketing Plan: New Patients, Recall and a 12-Month Calendar.

A dental marketing plan should run two engines at once: new patient acquisition through Google Business Profile, Local Services Ads, search ads with a landing page per service, and online scheduling; and hygiene recall through consented text and email reactivation of the patients you already have. Everything is tracked from the source captured at scheduling in your practice management software, and everything respects HIPAA, which means no patient information in ad platforms and a business associate agreement with any vendor that touches it. This piece lays out both engines, the pages and tools that support them, the compliance guardrails, and a twelve-month calendar organized by quarter.

The definition that anchors the plan: a dental marketing plan is a written, dated set of channels, pages, offers and measurements that a practice commits to for a year, with an owner for each item and a number reviewed monthly. Ideas without dates are not a plan.

Two Engines: New Patients and Hygiene Recall.

New patients are what most practices mean when they say marketing. A new patient has a value over time that includes the first exam and cleaning, whatever restorative or cosmetic work follows, and years of hygiene visits if the practice keeps them. That value is why practices spend on ads, and why the second engine matters more than it gets credit for: hygiene recall, meaning the system that gets existing patients back on schedule for their next cleaning and gets lapsed patients back at all. A practice that fills its hygiene chairs from its own charts spends less on ads and produces more restorative work, because the dentist sees the same patients regularly and finds the work early.

So the plan has two budgets, two sets of measurements and two owners. New patients: calls and bookings by source, new patient appointments kept, and the treatment accepted from those patients. Recall: percentage of active patients with a next hygiene visit scheduled, reactivations per month from the lapsed list, and hygiene chair fill rate.

Google Business Profile With Services, Photos and Reviews.

The profile is where most new patients meet the practice. Set the primary category to dentist and add the secondary categories you offer (cosmetic dentist, dental implants provider, emergency dental service, orthodontist if applicable). Fill every service with a short description. Add photos monthly: the front door, the reception area, an operatory, the team, and the doctors. Set hours accurately and add special hours for holidays. Turn on the booking link to your online scheduler and the messaging feature only if someone will answer it within the day.

Reviews are the compounding asset. The ask should be a routine: at checkout, a team member asks patients who had a good visit whether they would leave a review, and a text with the direct link goes out the same afternoon from the practice's own messaging tool. Reply to every review. In replies, never confirm that the person is a patient or mention any treatment; thank them and keep it general. That is the HIPAA-safe way to handle public review replies, and it also reads better. We covered the process in how to get more Google reviews.

Local Services Ads and Search Ads by Service.

Local Services Ads appear above regular search ads for many local categories and charge per lead rather than per click. Where Google offers them to dentists in your market, apply: the practice goes through a screening and verification process, the ad shows the practice's reviews and a call button, and you pay for calls and messages that meet Google's definition of a lead. You can dispute leads that are not legitimate. Because LSAs pull from your Google Business Profile reviews, the review routine above feeds this channel directly. Our explainer on what LSA means in marketing covers how the program works.

Search ads fill in what LSAs do not: high-value services and emergencies. Build separate campaigns for dentist near me and new patient terms, emergency dental terms, dental implant terms, and Invisalign or clear aligner terms. Each campaign lands on its own page. An emergency page has a phone number, hours, and a plain statement of what you can see today. An implant page explains candidacy, the process, timing and financing. An Invisalign page shows the consultation offer. A general new patient page shows the new patient visit, insurance accepted, and the scheduler. Use call tracking that swaps the number by source, and count calls over a reasonable duration and scheduler completions as conversions.

Insurance, Financing and Online Scheduling.

Three pages remove the reasons people do not book. An insurance page lists the plans you accept and explains what happens if a plan is not listed, with a short form to verify benefits before the visit. A financing page explains payment plans, third-party financing you offer, and any in-house membership plan for patients without insurance, with the price of the membership plan stated plainly if you have one. And online scheduling, connected to the practice management system or a scheduler that syncs to it, lets a new patient book a specific time without calling. Real-time scheduling captures bookings at night and on weekends, when every practice's phone is off.

Each of these pages should be reachable from every landing page and from the Google Business Profile, and the insurance page should carry the scheduler too.

Recall and Reactivation Texting With Consent.

The second engine runs on the practice's own patient list, and the channel is texting with email as backup. Recall is the automated reminder sequence for patients who are due: a text when the next hygiene visit should be scheduled, a reminder at intervals if it is not, and a confirmation sequence once it is. Reactivation is the campaign for patients who have not been seen in a defined period: a personal-sounding message from the practice, a reason to come back, and a direct link to book. Both run from the practice management system's own communication module or a patient communication tool that has signed a business associate agreement with the practice.

Consent is required and it is the practice's responsibility. Capture it on the new patient forms with plain language that covers appointment reminders and practice communications by text, record it, and honor opt-outs immediately. Texting from a standard ten-digit number at volume in the United States requires A2P 10DLC registration through your provider; most dental communication platforms handle this, but confirm it before launching a reactivation campaign.

HIPAA, Tracking Pixels and Vendors.

Most dental practices are HIPAA covered entities, which shapes every tracking decision. The practical rules.

Capture Source at Scheduling in Your PMS.

The measurement that makes the plan honest lives in the practice management software: Dentrix, Eaglesoft, Open Dental, or whatever PMS you run. Every one of them has a referral or source field on the patient record. Make it required at scheduling with a fixed list (Google Business Profile, Google Ads, Local Services Ads, website scheduler, patient referral with name, insurance directory, sign or drive-by, social, other) and train the front desk to ask how did you hear about us and record the answer before the appointment is saved. Online scheduler bookings should set the source automatically where the scheduler supports it. With that field filled, the monthly report is possible: new patients by source, kept appointments by source, and treatment accepted by source. Without it, the plan is running on impressions.

Do this alongside the same discipline we bring to other medical practices: source on the record, no PHI in the ad platforms, and one report a month that ties spend to patients seen.

The Twelve-Month Plan by Quarter.

Here is the plan we build for a general practice starting from a decent website and a neglected profile. Adjust the sequence if a piece is already in place; the order is set so each quarter's work feeds the next.

The fourth quarter deserves a note. Patients with dental benefits that reset at year end respond to a plain reminder that unused benefits expire, and hygiene and restorative schedules fill from that single campaign. It is the one time of year when the two engines pull the same direction, so put the recall campaign and the new patient messaging on the same theme.

Mistakes That Waste a Dental Marketing Budget.

• Mixing PHI into ad platforms: a pixel inside the scheduler, a form that sends the reason for visit to a conversion event, or a patient list uploaded as an ad audience without legal review.
• One landing page for every service, so the person searching for an emergency dentist reads about teeth whitening.
• Ignoring recall: full ad budget for new patients while a third of the active chart has no next visit scheduled.
• No source field at scheduling, so the practice cannot tell which channel produced the patients who accepted treatment.
• Review replies that confirm someone is a patient or mention their treatment.
• Texting reactivation campaigns without consent records or A2P 10DLC registration, and losing the channel when carriers filter it.