What kind of patient is your dental marketing actually attracting?
That’s a different question from asking how many leads it generates.
A $19 new patient special may get attention quickly. So can free whitening, a steep discount or another offer designed to give someone an immediate reason to call. But if the goal is to build a practice around patients who stay, refer family and friends and continue choosing the office even when price isn’t the lowest option, the message probably needs to do more than promote a deal.
That’s the idea Shane Simmons, CEO and founder of Crimson Media, discussed in Episode 87 of The Dental Practice Launch Podcast.
Shane’s point is simple: the marketing a dental practice puts into the community doesn’t only influence how many people respond. It can influence who responds in the first place.
Why Discount Marketing Attracts a Different Type of Patient
Discounts aren’t inherently bad.
They’re easy to understand, they can create urgency, and they may help generate leads quickly. That’s part of why aggressive new patient specials have become so common in dentistry.
The problem comes when price becomes the main reason someone notices the practice.
If nearly every advertisement leads with the cheapest exam, free whitening or another limited-time offer, price is doing most of the work. As Shane explained during the episode, what a practice puts into the market tends to attract a certain type of patient.
Marketing built primarily around being cheaper can naturally appeal to people who are actively comparing practices based on cost. That may work for certain business models, but it can become a mismatch for a locally owned practice trying to build longer-term patient relationships or reduce dependence on insurance networks.
The marketing has to match the practice the owner is actually trying to build.
What Relationship-Based Dental Marketing Looks Like
Price isn’t the only reason someone chooses a dentist.
Patients also want to know who they’re dealing with, what the office feels like and whether they trust the people behind the practice. Relationship-based marketing starts answering those questions before the patient schedules.
Instead of making every piece of content an offer, a dentist might record a short video explaining what a first appointment looks like. Another video could introduce the practice to the community. A patient story could highlight an actual experience, while another piece of content might simply explain why the dentist enjoys practicing in that area.
Those ideas don’t depend on a discount.
They give prospective patients a chance to become familiar with the dentist and team before they ever need an appointment.
Shane describes that process as helping people know, like and trust the practice before they walk through the door.
That also gives dental social media advertising something more meaningful to work with than another generic promotion.
A paid Facebook or Instagram ad can put that content in front of people who don’t already follow the practice. Someone may not be ready to schedule that day, but they may remember the dentist later when they are.
Why Familiarity Takes Time to Build
This is where relationship-based marketing can feel slower.
Someone might watch a video today and do nothing. They see another one next week, then a review, then another post a few weeks later. Months later, they finally need a dentist.
Now the earlier marketing matters.
That’s why judging this type of strategy after only a few weeks can be misleading. The return may not always show up immediately in a form submission or phone call.
Shane compared the process to fitness during the episode. Someone can exercise for six weeks and see a little progress, but the difference becomes much more obvious after sticking with it for a year or two. Marketing familiarity can compound in a similar way.
Each individual touchpoint may feel small. Over time, the practice becomes more recognizable.
That’s also the idea behind the omnipresence approach to dental marketing Shane frequently discusses.
The goal isn’t to rely on one advertisement. It’s to give prospective patients repeated opportunities to encounter the practice across different channels.
Consistency Is Where the Compounding Effect Starts
One of the easiest mistakes in marketing is changing direction before the strategy has had enough time to work.
A practice runs ads for several weeks. Results don’t immediately look extraordinary, so the message changes. Then the offer changes. Then another strategy replaces it.
The audience never gets enough repetition to remember anything.
Relationship-based marketing works differently. The practice keeps showing up with a consistent identity and message. People repeatedly see the dentist, recognize the practice and begin associating it with something specific.
Shane shared an example during Episode 87 of a dental office Crimson Media had worked with for roughly four years.
When the relationship began, the office was seeing about 20 to 25 new patients per month. It later grew to approximately 90 to 100 new patients per month. Shane’s point wasn’t that one campaign caused that jump. The practice stayed consistent long enough to become recognizable in the community.
Eventually, the dentist started getting recognized outside the office by people who had seen him repeatedly on Facebook and Instagram.
That’s the compounding effect Shane was describing.
It’s difficult to create that kind of familiarity when the marketing changes direction every few weeks.
Make Sure the Patient Experience Matches the Marketing
There is one important limitation to relationship-based marketing.
The relationship can’t exist only in the advertisements.
If the marketing presents a friendly, recognizable local practice but the actual patient experience feels completely disconnected from that message, trust breaks quickly.
The phone experience matters. Scheduling matters. The way patients are greeted matters. Communication matters. What happens after the first appointment matters too.
Marketing can create an expectation, but the practice still has to deliver something consistent with it.
This is why dental practice growth depends on marketing and operations working together.
Generating attention is only the beginning. What happens after someone calls or walks through the door determines whether the relationship continues.
This Matters Even More for Practices Reducing Insurance Dependence
For some practices, the long-term goal includes dropping certain PPO plans or becoming less dependent on insurance participation.
That makes the reason patients choose the office especially important.
If the primary relationship is with the insurance network, leaving that network can give patients a reason to leave too. A stronger relationship with the dentist and practice gives them something else to evaluate.
Do they trust the dentist? Do they like the team? Do they feel comfortable there? Does the experience justify staying?
Shane raised this directly during the episode. For many practices Crimson Media works with, the goal isn’t simply attracting someone who will schedule today. It’s attracting the kind of patient who may still want to stay if the practice changes its insurance relationships later.
We’ve also discussed some of the larger forces behind that shift in why dentists are dropping insurance networks.
Marketing can’t guarantee that every patient stays, but it can help build a practice identity that gives people more to connect with than network participation alone.
What Should Your Dental Practice Put Into Its Marketing?
Start by looking at what patients currently see.
If someone encountered five of your recent advertisements without knowing anything else about the practice, what impression would they get?
Would they know anything about the dentist? Would they understand what the office feels like? Would they see patient stories, team members or community involvement?
Or would every message come back to price?
That doesn’t mean removing every offer. It means deciding whether the overall body of marketing reflects the kind of practice you’re actually trying to build.
Useful content might include:
- What a patient’s first appointment looks like
- Short introductions to the dentist and team
- Real patient experiences, when appropriate permission has been obtained
- Questions patients commonly ask in the office
- Why the dentist chose the profession or community
- Helpful explanations of treatment or the patient experience
- Reviews that show what existing patients value
- Community events and involvement
The format matters less than the message.
The goal is to give someone a reason to remember the practice, not only the promotion.
What You Put Out Is What You Attract
Relationship-based dental marketing isn’t especially complicated in theory.
The practice needs to stay visible long enough for people to recognize it, understand what it stands for and remember it when they’re ready to choose a dentist. The hard part is staying consistent when the immediate return from an individual post or ad isn’t obvious.
Not every video will generate appointments that day. Not every social ad will produce a direct lead. Not every person seeing the practice today needs a dentist today.
That doesn’t make those impressions meaningless.
Over time, the practice can go from being another name on a Google results page to a dentist people already recognize before the search begins.
That’s the larger point Shane returned to throughout Episode 87:
What you put out is what you attract.
If the marketing is almost entirely built around discounts, price is likely to remain central to the patient conversation.
If the marketing consistently gives people reasons to know the dentist, understand the practice and trust what they see, it can attract patients for a different reason.
At Crimson Media Dental Marketing, we help dental practices build that visibility through strategy, content, paid advertising and long-term relationship-based marketing.
The goal isn’t simply to get more people to see an ad. It’s to help the right patients remember the practice when they’re ready to choose a dentist.