Article

Insights
Apr 02, 2025 // 12 min read
Dental Business Management Part 3: Marketing
Tom Reason
Colin Campbell
DOI: 10.3290/iti.fi.45748
Dental practice management small business marketing
Series overview

In October 2023 the ITI launched its Digital Dental Entrepreneurial Program powered by the Campbell Academy. This innovative and interactive online modular course is designed for dental practitioners to enhance and improve their knowledge of business concepts, to improve their practice, their team and their patient experiences. It is hoped that this course will be able to inspire a new generation of dentists to improve their working environment for both themselves and their teams, and therefore improve their satisfaction, their well-being and their enthusiasm for the industry.

This course is set around six modules over a four-week period and the modules include vision setting, dental practice finance, marketing, human resources and leadership, and sales and strategy, together with discussions regarding social legacy and corporate social responsibility.

To accompany the launch of this course, a series of short papers have been devised around the subjects of the modules in the course to assist practitioners in their understanding and learning and to augment the course material. It was felt that this course was necessary, and indeed that these publications were necessary, because it is clear that healthcare practitioners throughout the world are struggling with overwhelm, burnout and difficulty in organizational management. There is a raft of research and evidence related to this, including physician burnout in the United States, which in some cases is reported to run at approaching 50% (Shanafelt et al. 2012). In a recent study in the United Kingdom 43% of practitioners said that they were very engaged with dentistry (BDJ 2019). But the sad part of this is that it means more than 50% of practitioners are not highly engaged in dentistry. Certainly, one of the things that lead to burnout and stress and disillusionment is the inability to create and nurture organizational structures and strategies to reduce the overwhelm of administration and non-clinical tasks. Developing an excellent structure in dental business not only improves the lives of the practitioner and potentially their appreciation and satisfaction in their work, but also improves the lives of the team, the supplier-partner relationship and, most importantly, the patient outcomes.

This series of articles, in conjunction with the ITI Digital Dental Entrepreneurial Program powered by the Campbell Academy, is designed to augment clinical education and development for practitioners around the world, ultimately feeding into the aspiration of the ITI to improve patients' lives worldwide.


Introduction

New patients are a dental practice's lifeblood, so the importance of marketing to an effective business strategy cannot be overstated.

However, marketing can often be overwhelming for practice owners. It is an area of business where most dentists have had very little formal training. Moreover, there are such a vast number of platforms, tools, channels, and technology available to service the marketing world, and the list continues to grow. This is demonstrated well here. On the one hand, this data shows us that for anyone with a story to tell and a product to promote, there are ample opportunities for you to get your message out to others. But on the other hand, it undoubtedly adds to the feeling of overwhelm, creating confusion and a loss of focus on what matters most when marketing a dental practice. The truth is that dentistry is an industry where success is usually driven by word of mouth (WOM).

WOM is driven by providing an exceptional experience across the entire customer journey. It is simple to understand but much harder to implement effectively. It is hard to implement because it cannot be achieved overnight. It doesn’t satisfy the question often asked, ‘How do I get new patients quickly?’ It involves turning up daily, month after month, year after year. Turning up and delivering an exceptional experience across the entire customer journey and creating a service and product worth talking about.

It involves creating a brand and building a team behind that brand that supports you in delivering that experience day after day (Fig. 1).

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Fig. 1: The trinity of marketing