Full-arch advertising that brings patients who can say yes.

General dental marketing sells a visit. Implant advertising sells a decision the patient has often been avoiding for years, that costs more than any dentistry they will ever buy, and that they will discuss at home before they do anything at all. Almost everything that works for a hygiene special fails here.

• The audience is small. In any market the number of people currently ready to consider full-arch treatment is a narrow slice, and reaching more of the wrong people is not progress.
• The consideration window is long. A patient may see your advertising for months before they inquire, and then inquire as though they had just discovered you.
• The offer is a conversation, not a discount. Nobody chooses an implant surgeon because of a coupon.
• The measurement is slow. Campaigns are judged on started cases, which arrive after consultations, which arrive after leads.

We do not run hygiene campaigns or clear-aligner campaigns. That is a positioning choice and also a practical one, because the targeting, the creative and the follow-up for full-arch have almost nothing in common with them.

Both, doing different jobs. The question is usually asked as though one channel has to win, and practices that force the choice tend to end up with either too few patients or too many unqualified ones.

The two channels in a full-arch campaign. How the budget splits between them is a market decision, not a package.

A competitive market with high search costs supports a different split from a market where nobody is bidding, which is why we score the market before launch rather than applying a standard allocation.

Creative decides more of the outcome than targeting does, and it is the part a practice has least control over when it buys advertising built from a template.

• Your doctors on camera. A patient choosing full-arch treatment is choosing a person to operate on them, and stock footage cannot do that job. Dental Video Marketing sits alongside the advertising for this reason.
• Your own patients, where they have consented to appear. Real results from your own market outperform anything produced generically.
• The problem named honestly. Advertising that works speaks to the experience of failing teeth, not to a product name the patient has never heard.
• An offer that is a consultation. The next step is a conversation about their mouth, not a discount on it.
• A landing page that matches the advert. A patient who clicks an advert about full-arch treatment and lands on a general practice homepage leaves, which is what Dental Website Design exists to prevent.

When a practice tells us its advertising is not working, the advertising is the cause less than half the time. These are the leaks, in the order we check them.

1. Out of area. Leads arriving from beyond any distance a patient would travel for surgery, which look like volume and convert to nothing.
2. Wrong treatment intent. People inquiring about single implants, dentures or routine work, counted as implant leads because they clicked an implant advert.
3. Mismatched landing pages. Traffic sent to pages that were never built to turn a full-arch visitor into a booked consultation.
4. Leads never reached. The most expensive leak of all, and the most common. A lead called back the following day is a different asset from a lead contacted within seconds, which is the job of our Dental Call Center.
5. Consultations that do not show. Booked and then lost, usually because nothing happened between the booking and the appointment.
6. Consultations that stall at the number. The patient arrived, heard the plan and left to think about it. That is the close gate, and it is what ArchCore sales training addresses.

Only the first three are advertising problems. Spending more against the first three while the last three are open is the single most expensive mistake in full-arch marketing, and it is why our Find Your Gap assessment asks about the whole path rather than about the campaigns.

By started cases, and by return on ad spend, which is treatment value divided by ad spend. Clicks, impressions and cost per lead are diagnostic numbers. They are useful for working out why the real number moved, and they are not the real number.

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.

Those figures are for DIM clients over the periods shown, with treatment value reported by each practice. The range is wide because the practices are different sizes in different markets with different close rates. Any agency quoting you a single expected multiple before it has looked at your market is selling you a number rather than a forecast.

Every one of these figures is reported to the practice as it accumulates, rather than arriving afterwards in a monthly summary.

Leads arrive quickly. Started cases do not, and the gap between the two is the most misread period in the whole relationship.

A patient who inquires this week books a consultation, attends it, usually thinks about it, arranges financing, and then appears on a surgical schedule that is already partly full. A month of advertising is therefore judged properly over a quarter rather than over the month itself. Practices that judge the first four weeks on started cases tend to conclude the advertising failed at precisely the point the first patients are deciding.

What should be judged in the first weeks is different: whether leads are arriving in the right area with the right treatment intent, whether they are being reached quickly, and whether consultations are being booked and showing up. Those are visible immediately, and every one of them predicts what the started cases will look like.

The most useful questions sit outside the advertising. They are about what happens to a lead once it exists.

• Who calls the lead, and how quickly?
• Does the reporting reach consultations and started cases, or stop at leads and cost per lead?
• How is your published return calculated, and what exactly is in the denominator?
• When results stall, where do you look first, and what do you do before recommending more spend?
• Do you advertise for anything other than full-arch, and does the team running my account do this all day?
• What is the creative built from: my doctors and my patients, or a template?

Our guide on how to choose a dental implant marketing company sets these out at greater length, along with the answers that should worry you. If you would rather start with your own practice than with a vendor, Find Your Gap names which of the three gates is costing you cases, and the answer is not always the advertising.