A patient sees your ad, clicks it and schedules an appointment.
Nice when it happens.
But after more than a decade of working with dental practices, Shane Simmons, Founder and CEO of Crimson Media Dental Marketing, says that's not how most patient decisions actually play out.
There are exceptions. Someone with a dental emergency may search, find an office and call almost immediately.
The patient looking for a new family dentist? Or someone considering a practice for treatment that isn't urgent?
They're probably doing more homework.
They may see an ad without clicking it. A week later, they notice another post from the practice. Eventually they search the dentist on Google, read reviews, visit the website and maybe check social media.
Then, weeks or even months after that first interaction, they call.
That gap between seeing and scheduling is where dental practices can get the wrong impression about their marketing.
The Patient Journey Usually Isn't Ad, Click, Appointment
Think about the last time you made a purchase that required some thought.
Shane uses buying a truck as an example.
Someone searching for a Chevy Silverado probably doesn't click the first dealership they see and immediately buy the truck. They compare dealerships. They look at reviews. They check prices. They keep looking until they're comfortable making a decision.
Choosing a dentist isn't identical, of course, but the behavior has similarities.
Patients research.
They compare.
They look for signs that the practice feels like somewhere they'd be comfortable going.
And increasingly, that happens across more than one platform.
A study from Neil Patel's NP Digital found that consumers required an average of 11.1 touchpoints before purchasing in 2025, up from 8.5 in 2021. The study also points to increasingly fragmented customer journeys across ads, posts, emails, reviews and other interactions.
Neil Patel's customer touchpoint study
That helps explain why looking at one ad and expecting it to generate an immediate appointment can give a practice a distorted view of what's happening.
Problem #1: Relying on One Marketing Channel
One pattern Shane regularly sees is a practice putting nearly everything into one channel.
Maybe it's Facebook ads.
The practice launches lead ads and expects a predictable progression:
Ad → Lead → Appointment.
Some patients will follow that path.
Plenty won't.
A Facebook or Instagram ad may introduce someone to the practice for the first time. That person wasn't necessarily looking for a dentist when the ad appeared. The practice interrupted whatever they were doing and got their attention for a moment.
That first interaction can still be useful.
But expecting it to carry the entire patient decision is asking a lot from one touchpoint.
The problem becomes more noticeable when nothing else supports the ad.
The practice isn't showing up prominently on Google. Reviews aren't growing. Social pages aren't active. The website tells a different story from the advertising. No retargeting keeps the dentist in front of people who previously showed interest.
The prospective patient sees the practice once and then disappears back into everything else competing for their attention.
This is one reason Crimson Media uses an omnipresence approach to dental marketing.
The individual channels aren't supposed to operate like separate islands.
What Omnipresence Looks Like for a Dental Practice
Omnipresence doesn't mean plastering the same advertisement everywhere.
It's about giving prospective patients multiple opportunities to encounter the practice and learn something different each time.
A patient might first see a dentist in a social media video.
Later, another ad shows an actual patient talking about their experience.
When the person finally searches for a dentist, the practice appears on Google and has a strong collection of reviews.
They visit the website. The same dentist they saw in the video is there. The tone and message feel consistent.
Maybe they still don't schedule.
A retargeting ad appears later.
Then they see another post.
Eventually, the practice doesn't feel unfamiliar anymore.
Shane describes that progression simply: familiarity builds trust, and trust drives decisions.
That's very different from repeatedly showing someone a new patient special and hoping this is finally the ad that makes them call.
A Real Patient Journey Took Five Months
One example from the episode shows how long that process can take.
Crimson Media was reviewing the call data for one of its dental clients when the team traced a new patient's journey backward.
The patient's first tracked interaction with the practice happened in October 2025, when they clicked a social media ad.
That wasn't when they scheduled.
They interacted with additional social ads afterward.
In February, they went to Google and visited the practice's website.
Then, in March, they called.
And they didn't schedule just themselves. They scheduled their family.
If the practice had judged that October ad solely on whether the person called immediately, it could have looked like the ad did nothing.
Five months later, the picture was different.
The eventual phone call came through Google, but Google wasn't the beginning of the relationship. Social media had introduced the practice months earlier.
Looking only at the final click can hide most of what happened before the patient called.
Sometimes the channel that gets credit for the call isn't the channel that first put the practice on the patient's radar.
Problem #2: Stopping Before the Marketing Has Time to Compound
The second issue Shane sees is almost the opposite of relying on one channel.
A practice may actually have several pieces working together.
Social advertising is running. The practice posts regularly. Google visibility is improving. Reviews are coming in. Paid search is active. Patients are referring friends and family.
Then the owner looks at a few months of results and decides it isn't happening quickly enough.
So the strategy changes.
Or the campaign stops.
Shane argues that this can interrupt the very thing the practice was trying to build.
Reputation takes time.
So does familiarity.
The exact timeline will vary by practice, market, location and the patients being targeted. But even a year isn't necessarily a long time when a new practice is building its name in a community.
This is where dental marketing can become uncomfortable.
The early months don't always look dramatic.
A practice may be growing while the owner is waiting for the moment when growth suddenly feels obvious.
From 30 New Patients to More Than 50
Shane shared another example involving a fee-for-service startup that opened roughly three years earlier.
During its first year, the practice was seeing around 30 new patients per month.
For a fee-for-service startup, that's meaningful patient flow.
The owner still wanted growth to happen faster.
Crimson Media's advice was to stick with the process.
The practice was accumulating reviews. More people in the community were becoming familiar with the name. Marketing continued putting the dentist in front of prospective patients.
The growth could already be seen in the numbers, even if it didn't yet feel dramatic.
Then came March 2026.
The practice brought in more than 50 new patients and recorded its best month for production and collections.
According to Shane, the owner told him she could finally see the compounding effect they'd been talking about.
It hadn't happened because one campaign suddenly cracked the code.
Years of visibility, reviews, reputation and consistent marketing had started stacking on top of one another.
Quick Wins Still Have Their Place
None of this means dental marketing should never generate patients quickly.
Shane specifically points to emergency dental advertising as an example where patient behavior can be much more transactional.
Someone with a broken tooth or severe toothache isn't necessarily spending months getting familiar with several dentists.
They have a problem now.
Search intent is different, and a well-positioned Google Ads campaign for a dental practice can put the office in front of someone who's actively looking for help.
But that's one type of patient journey.
Building a practice around families, restorative patients, cosmetic cases or other long-term relationships requires a wider view.
Not every useful marketing interaction produces a phone call that day.
Stop Asking One Ad to Do Everything
When a practice says its marketing isn't working, the answer isn't automatically to spend more.
It also isn't automatically to abandon the campaign.
First, look at what the patient is actually seeing.
Is the practice relying almost entirely on one channel?
Does someone who sees a social ad find the same dentist and message when they search Google?
Are there enough reviews to support the claims being made in the advertising?
Does the website continue the story?
Is the practice staying visible to someone who showed interest but wasn't ready to schedule?
And has the strategy been running long enough to build any real familiarity in the community?
Those questions paint a much more useful picture than asking how many people clicked an ad and called immediately afterward.
Marketing Gets Stronger as Familiarity Builds
The five-month patient journey Shane described is a useful reminder of what happens before a phone call.
The practice had to show up first.
Then show up again.
The patient eventually searched, visited the website and called months after the initial ad interaction.
A single-channel report could easily miss most of that story.
For dental practices, it helps to look at the full marketing presence and whether patients are becoming more familiar with the practice over time.
That's the thinking behind the relationship-driven marketing Shane discusses throughout the episode.
At Crimson Media Dental Marketing, Shane and the team build dental marketing strategies around those repeated patient touchpoints, connecting social media, Google visibility, reviews, advertising and the practice's broader online presence.
Want to hear Shane walk through the examples himself? Episode 83 of The Dental Practice Launch Podcast covers the full discussion.
Listen to The Dental Practice Launch Podcast on Apple Podcasts