A dental marketing audit that ends in a plan, not a list of ideas.

Nine areas, every time: measurement, paid search, paid social, spend efficiency, website and funnel, organic and AI search, offer and positioning, competitors, and lifecycle. For a group we read them at two levels, group and practice, so spend per location and service line, the website and scheduling path, phone handling, reviews, local search and recall marketing are all inside the scope. The output is a findings workbook with evidence and severity, plus a 90-day action plan.

Access and reconstruction on days one and two, measurement testing on days two and three, then spend, website, phones, local search, reviews, recall and competitor analysis through day five. Day six is judgement, where each finding is written with its evidence, a severity band and the cost of inaction. Day seven delivers the action plan and the handover call. The scope is fixed so nothing gets skipped when the week gets busy.

A checklist tells you what to look at. An audit tells you what is true in your group. We use a fixed nine-area scope so nothing is missed, but every line in the workbook comes from your analytics, your ad accounts, your call recordings, your practice management reports, your invoices and your live website. Findings are ranked by severity and cost of inaction rather than listed in the order the checklist happened to run.

Yes, on one restated set of definitions. Spend, enquiries, new patients, kept first visits, cost per new patient, local search position, listings health and review velocity are reported practice by practice, so a strong location stops subsidising a weak one in the reporting. Where a practice is genuinely better run, the workbook documents what it does differently so the group can transfer it.

Yes, and it is often where the largest finding sits. We place live calls and appointment requests, record answer rates, hold times, how each enquiry was handled and whether it reached the schedule at all. Henry Schein One's 2026 Catalyst Index puts average new patient lead time at 25 days against 4.5 days for the top 10%. We audit the process and the evidence; your operations team owns the staffing decision.

It does, under lifecycle. Recall, hygiene reappointment reminders, treatment plan follow-up and reactivation campaigns are judged on kept visits and production, not on open rates. Planet DDS platform data puts hygiene reappointment at 63% and case completion at 47%, so weak follow-up is a revenue finding rather than a housekeeping note. Redesigning the underlying economics is growth advisory.

No. We are not clinicians or lawyers and we do not advise on treatment, patient privacy law, insurance contracting or dental advertising rules in your state. We audit the marketing function with evidence. Where a claim on your website, a form or a tracking setup looks risky, the workbook flags it as a question for your own counsel and compliance team rather than answering it.

A fixed fee quoted after a scoping call, with deliverables and dates written down before you commit. It varies with the number of practices and ad accounts in scope and the state of your data, so publishing a rate would mislead most readers. For context on scale, The CMO Survey puts marketing at 9.0% of company revenue and 33.6% of digital activity in the hands of outside agencies. Book a meeting for a scope and a number.

Not as part of this. The audit is a project with a defined end, and no retainer is attached, which is what lets the workbook say that a channel we would happily sell is not worth funding for you. Your in-house team, your current agency roster or another firm can execute the plan. If you later want us to run something, it is scoped and quoted separately.

No, that is part of what the audit measures. Validity's 2026 study found 62% of organisations lost revenue to poor CRM data and only 41% had a named governance owner, so waiting for clean data means waiting forever. We document what the data can and cannot support, label directional findings as directional, and put the repairs in the plan. Building that layer is marketing operations consulting, quoted separately.

Growth is exactly when waste compounds across locations. Planet DDS reports case acceptance at 58% and average daily production per practice at $8,764, which means a large share of the demand you already pay for stops short of production. A measurement error repeated in every practice is the most expensive thing in the group that nobody has priced.

Direction of travel. The audit looks backwards at evidence: what the marketing function has been doing, what it produced, and what is broken. Dental marketing strategy consulting looks forward and decides service-line and location priority, positioning, channel roles, budget and measurement. Many groups buy the audit first because a plan written on unverified numbers is a guess with headings.

Scope of the question. Growth advisory hunts the commercial constraint on growth wherever it sits, including case acceptance, case completion and hygiene reappointment. The marketing audit stays inside the marketing function and produces evidence and a 90-day plan. If you already know marketing is the problem, the audit is the cheaper first step.

Whoever owns marketing for the group, one operations leader who knows the practices, and someone who can grant access to analytics, ad accounts, call tracking, practice management reporting and invoices. A cooperative office manager or two helps, because their numbers are the reality check. Expect roughly four hours of your team's time across the week: a kickoff, short interviews, and the handover call.

Your team runs it, and every action has a named owner and an acceptance test. Many groups book a review at ninety days to check the leading indicators, which takes half a day and is optional. Where you want a standing numbers habit, scorecard advisory sets one up and hands it back, and the parent engagement is the marketing audit itself.