How to choose the best dental implant marketing company

Most pages that promise to compare dental implant marketing companies are written by one of the companies being compared, and the one that published the page always wins it. That tells you who built the table. It tells you nothing about what will happen in your practice next quarter.

A full-arch practice is buying started arches rather than advertising, and between the ad and the started arch there are a dozen places a case can be lost. Only a few are marketing. Judge agencies on criteria instead, each answerable on a call in a sentence.

• Who contacts your leads, and how quickly.
• What the return figures they publish are actually dividing.
• Whether their reporting reaches started cases, or stops at leads and cost per lead.
• What they do first when results stall, before they ask for more budget.
• Whether anyone coaches the person who sits with the patient and presents the plan.
• Whether they measure started cases or stop at leads.

Ask every agency the same six questions and write the answers down.

A full-arch inquiry is someone who has lived with a failing mouth for years and has finally decided to do something about it, usually late at night, after looking at more than one practice. The value of that inquiry falls fastest in the first few minutes.

What to ask

• Does anyone on your side call the lead, or does it arrive in my inbox?
• Are the people calling my patients your employees, and are they trained on full-arch conversations specifically?
• What happens to an inquiry that comes in at seven on a Friday evening?
• How many attempts does a lead get, over how many days, and who confirms the consultation once it is booked?

Dental Implant Machine answers this in one of two ways. With DIM Generate your own team makes the calls and ours coaches them. With DIM Convert our Setter Center contacts, qualifies and books every new lead.

Every agency publishes a multiple. Very few publish the arithmetic behind it, and that is where the differences live. A return figure has a top number and a bottom number, and you are entitled to ask what each is.

Return on ad spend divides treatment value by the money that went to Google and Meta. A figure that divides by what the practice paid the agency as well is a different calculation producing a different number, and an agency should be able to tell you in one sentence which it published. Then ask where the top number came from. Treatment value is usually reported by the practice, because the agency cannot see the practice management system. That is normal. Failing to say so is not.

What Dental Implant Machine publishes

Every figure on this site is return on ad spend: practice-reported treatment value divided by ad spend, for a named practice over a named period.

The six practices we report are set out side by side, with what each figure measures and over how long, in our dental marketing case studies.

Treatment value in every line is reported by the practice, and the periods are different lengths, so the multiples are not a league table. The Esthetix Dental Spa line divides by the spend Google reported, because we hold no billed advertising spend for that practice and found no Meta account for it.

Most agency reporting is written by the people being measured. It contains what they choose and stops where the numbers stop flattering them. What matters is how far down the path it reaches, and whether the method stays the same from one month to the next.

What to ask

• Does reporting start with the first month of spend, or at the end of a quarter?
• Does it stop at leads and cost per lead, or carry through to consultations booked, consultations shown and treatment started?
• Can I open an individual lead and see what was said and when it was called?
• Does the practice hold its own advertising accounts and its own lead records?

Every Dental Implant Machine client is reported spend, leads, consultations booked and shown, treatment starts, practice-reported treatment value and return on ad spend, from the first month. It is the same set our own team manages the account against.

Every account has a flat month. Markets move, a competitor opens, a doctor takes leave. The question is what the agency does in the first week after it happens.

If the first answer is more budget, you have learned something important. More budget is sometimes right, but it is never the diagnosis. There are three places a full-arch practice breaks. Generate is whether enough of the right patients find you. Convert is whether they are contacted and end up in your chair. Close is whether the patient in the chair says yes. More leads do not help a practice whose leads are never called, and faster calls do not help a practice whose consultations stall at the price.

What to ask

• When a month goes flat, what is the first thing you look at?
• Who reviews my account, how often, and what triggers a full review?
• Tell me about a time you told a client to stop spending, or to fix something inside their practice before adding budget.
• If the problem turns out to be inside my office rather than in the advertising, what do you do about it?

The Full Arch Framework is a diagnostic rather than a package. It finds the gate where a practice is breaking before anything is recommended, and that is the work we do on the first call, whether or not you become a client.

Marketing ends when the patient sits down. Everything spent to get them there is decided in the twenty minutes that follow, by whoever presents the plan and the money, and in most practices that person has never been coached on a full-arch conversation. A practice can generate well, convert well, and still lose the case because nobody in the room is comfortable saying the number out loud.

What to ask

• Who coaches my treatment coordinator, and how often do they actually speak?
• Is the coaching based on our real consultations, or on a library of videos?
• Does anyone review what happened to the cases that were presented and not started?
• Is the doctor included, if the doctor presents plans?

ArchCore is the Dental Implant Machine playbook for coaching implant practices, included in every engagement. Our account managers use it to coach your treatment coordinators and doctors on patient consultation and treatment case acceptance, and meet with your practice every month to review performance.

Cost per lead is the easiest number in marketing to improve, and the easiest to improve dishonestly. Broaden the targeting, buy cheaper traffic, drop the qualifying questions, and the lead count rises while the cost per lead falls. The report looks better every month and the surgical schedule does not move. The measurement that matters follows one patient the whole way, so ask to see the chain rather than the first link.

1. Ad spend, by channel.
2. Leads, with their source.
3. Leads actually contacted, and how fast.
4. Consultations booked, and consultations that showed up.
5. Treatment plans presented.
6. Treatment started, and the value the practice reported for it.

If an agency reports the first two lines and goes quiet, nobody owns the rest of the chain, or the outcome you were buying.