Most dentist advertising advice was written for cleanings. Full-arch inverts it.

Most practice owners read up on dentist advertising before they hire anyone to run it. Almost all of that reading is about a different business.

The playbook you will find is a volume playbook

Advice on advertising a dental practice is written for a practice that wants more hygiene and more crowns. That practice is right to run it. A new patient there is worth a few hundred dollars in the first year, the treatment is routine, and the decision takes about as long as the phone call that books it. So the playbook optimizes for volume at the lowest unit cost. Wide reach, cheap impressions, an offer designed to make someone act today.

Now swap the cleaning for an arch. Case value between $20,000 and $45,000. A decision that routinely runs six to ten weeks. A candidate pool in a mid-sized metro counted in dozens a month rather than thousands. Every assumption holding the volume playbook up has changed, and the settings that follow from those assumptions have to change with them.

A discount offer selects for the person who cannot pay

This is where it goes wrong fastest, and it is usually the first thing a practice tries.

The general playbook’s instinct is to put a number in the ad. Ninety-nine dollar exam. Five hundred off. Something that makes acting today feel cheaper than acting next month.

Run that against full-arch and you find out what you bought. A dollars-off offer tells the reader that price is the axis this decision turns on, and the people who respond hardest to that framing are the ones for whom price is the only axis. In this category that is very often someone who was never going to finance a full arch at any discount you could responsibly offer. You have paid implant-keyword prices for a click from somebody shopping dentures.

The discount also does nothing about the two things actually holding a full-arch patient in place. Am I even a candidate. How bad is it and how long am I out. Nobody has ever replaced an entire arch because it was five hundred dollars cheaper this month.

What the ad should be offering instead

Candidacy, and the number.

“Find out whether you are a candidate for All-on-X, and what it costs at this practice” beats a discount for two reasons. It answers what the reader is stuck on. And it works as a filter, because anyone who clicks it has already accepted that there is a real cost and wants to know the size of it. That is a different person from the one chasing five hundred off.

It also means the ad and the page have to be built together. An ad that promises a candidacy answer and lands someone on a practice homepage has broken its own promise inside one click, which is why we build campaigns and landing experience as one piece of work rather than handing a media plan to whoever maintains the website.

You are buying repetition in a small pool, not reach

Reach is the metric the general playbook is organised around. Here it is close to meaningless.

A metro of 400,000 people holds a finite number of adults with failing dentition who are in a position to do something about it this quarter. Reaching all 400,000 of them once wastes most of the budget. Reaching the few hundred who matter, repeatedly, across the weeks they spend deciding, is the actual job.

That has consequences in the account. Broad audiences tuned for the cheapest available CPM are the platform default and they are the wrong setting. So are frequency caps chosen to avoid annoying a brand audience, when your ad is the only thing reminding somebody that the problem is fixable at all.

Say what it costs, or pay for it in the consult chair

Practices resist this one hardest. The fear is that a published range scares people off.

It does. That is the point.

Every candidate a price range frightens away was going to be frightened away eventually, and the only real question is whether that happens before the click or after your doctor has spent forty minutes in a consult room. One of those is free. The other costs you a seated consult slot, and at $20,000 to $45,000 a case those slots are the most expensive inventory in the building.

The range does not need to be exact. “Most full-arch cases here run between this and this, financing available” does more qualifying work than any form field you could add.

The one setting that carries over unchanged

Speed of response, and the general advice on it is right for exactly the same reason it is right everywhere else. A lead called back in five minutes behaves differently from one called the next morning, and no budget fixes a phone that rings out.

What changes is the size of the bill. In a hygiene practice a missed call costs you a cleaning. Here it costs you a shot at a case worth more than many practices spend on advertising in a month.

Across the 300+ practices running our system, the 2 to 5 additional cases a month we put a money-back guarantee behind come out of these choices far more often than they come out of budget size. Which is worth remembering when you interview someone to run this.

The tell is in what they ask you for first. Anyone who opens by asking for your target cost per lead is quoting you the cleaning playbook and has not noticed. Ask them what they would put in the ad, and whether the price goes in it.