u/Symmberry

I'm the marketing manager at a DSO with 12 locations across the US. When I joined two and a half years ago we were at 9 locations, no real marketing infrastructure, and every office was basically doing its own thing. The doctors were focused on clinical work (as they should be) and marketing was an afterthought that usually meant "post something on Facebook when you remember."

I want to share what actually did it for us because, to put it simply, Im a knowledge marxist (I believe knowledge is meant to be shared not hoarded) so here we go. This may be long but I figure the detail is the useful part.

Staffing

My first instinct was to hire a big team as I thought I needed a person for every aspect of marketing. My COO talked me out of it and he was right. At our size the move was to keep the internal team tiny and outsource the specialized stuff. I hired one marketing coordinator whos basically my ops person, she handles the day to day across all locations, makes sure Google Business Profiles are updated, coordinates with the front desks on promotions, manages our review software. Thats it internally, everything else is outsourced to specialists which I'll get into below.

Patient experience

This sounds like a marketing section shouldn't include patient experience but it absolutely should because no amount of ad spend fixes a bad experience. We did two things that had outsized impact. First we implemented a same-day follow up text after every appointment, not a review request yet just a "thanks for coming in, here's your post-visit summary." Patients started responding to those texts with questions they were too shy to ask in the chair which was...unexpected to ay the least. Second we standardized the front desk script across all locations. Sounds small but when youre running 12 offices and every receptionist greets people differently and handles insurance questions differently the patient experience is wildly inconsistent.

Reviews

Reviews are everything in dental. A potential patient is choosing between you and four other offices on Google Maps and the one with more recent positive reviews wins almost every time. We set up automated review requests through Birdeye that go out 2 hours after each appointment. Before this we were averaging maybe 4-5 new Google reviews per location per month and after we went up to about 15-20, but the thing that mattered more than volume was responding to every single review within 48 hours, positive or negative. I write templates and my coordinator customizes them for each location. Our average Google rating went from 4.2 to 4.7 across all locations in about a year.

Paid ads

This was the scariest part for me because the budget is real money and I had zero experience with Google Ads when I started. We were spending about $3k/month per location on Google and getting a mix of everything, people looking for emergency dental, people looking for cosmetic stuff, people looking for a cleaning covered by their insurance. No segmentation, no conversion tracking, no call recording, and honestly no nothing because I had minimal expertise in this field. Grounds for Promotion took over our Google and Facebook campaigns about 18 months ago and the first thing they did was set up proper conversion tracking and call recording across all 12 locations which immediately showed us that about 40% of our ad spend was going to clicks that never turned into booked appointments. Once they restructured the campaigns by service line and location our cost per new patient dropped and the volume went up. We grew about 20% in patient volume across all locations in the first year and our cost per acquisition went down at the same time which I didn't think was possible.

The other thing that helped with paid was having the review numbers already strong before scaling ad spend. When someone clicks your ad and then sees 200+ reviews at 4.6 stars the conversion rate is just higher. Those two things compound on each other.

What I'd tell someone in my position two years ago

Don't try to do everything at once. We did reviews first, then patient experience standardization, then paid ads. Each one built on the previous one. Another thing: keep your internal team small, the specialists are better at their thing than a generalist hire will ever be. Your job is to coordinate, not to execute every channel yourself.

Happy to answer questions, I know multi-location dental marketing is a niche and there aren't a lot of people talking about it openly.