Most squats start marketing the week they open. By then you’ve lost three months you’ll never get back.
The Bigger Brand is a Manchester-based dental marketing agency that launches squat practices across the UK and Ireland. We cover pre-launch visibility, Google Business Profile set-up, the website, local search, paid advertising and patient registration campaigns. Work usually starts three to six months before opening, and is reported as registrations, treatments booked and revenue on the way to break-even.
An established practice has a patient list to fall back on. A squat starts with an empty appointment book, so in the early months almost every new patient arrives because of something your marketing did.
Those first patients matter well beyond their own appointments. They leave your early reviews, they mention you to friends, and some go on to become treatment cases. Get enough of them through the door quickly and the practice starts to build its own momentum.
That’s the whole problem with a squat, and it makes squat marketing different from every other kind of dental marketing.
You have no patients, no reviews, no Google history and no word of mouth. Nobody in town knows your name, and the practice down the road has been there since 1987, with four hundred reviews and a sign everyone drives past.
Meanwhile there’s a fit-out invoice, a lease, equipment finance and a repayment schedule that started the day the money landed.
The practices that get this right start marketing before the builders finish. They claim and verify the Google Business Profile early, put a holding page live to collect registrations, and build local awareness while the chairs are still in boxes.
The ones that struggle open the doors, put a sign up and wait.
Here’s how a squat launch runs, from the months before opening to the end of the first six months.
Claim and verify the Google Business Profile. It takes longer than people expect, and you can't rank without it. Register the domain, put a holding page live to collect interest, and start building citations so your details exist across the web before anyone searches.
The full website goes live, with treatment pages built and indexed, because SEO needs a running start and won't deliver on day one. Local awareness campaigns begin, and the content shoot happens as soon as the space is presentable.
The registration campaign moves to full spend, with opening offers if you're using them. Local press, community groups and anything else that gets your name around town all help. Confirmation and reminder systems are built before the first enquiry arrives, not after.
Run a launch event or open day, and ask your very first patients for reviews. Early on, how recently reviews arrive matters more than how many you have.
The focus shifts from registrations to treatment. Follow up everyone who registered and never booked, then start building the higher-value treatment side once the general patient base exists.
Thirteen million adults in England can’t access an NHS dentist, and up to 96% of practices aren’t taking on new adult NHS patients.
So a large part of your town is already looking for a dentist, and has been for a while. They don’t need persuading to switch. They have nowhere to go.
That’s a huge advantage for a new practice, and most squats under-use it because their messaging talks about the practice instead of the problem.
“Now accepting new patients” is a sign. “Struggling to find a dentist in Stockport? We’re taking new patients from March” is a campaign.
A new practice with four reviews looks risky next to one with three hundred, however good the clinical work is.
So review generation can’t wait until month six. It’s built in from the first patient.
An automated text request goes out after every appointment. There’s a clear process for who asks and when, and every review gets a reply within a couple of days.
Forty genuine reviews in the first four months changes how you look in the map pack. It’s entirely achievable if the system exists from day one, rather than being remembered in the autumn.
Tell us where you’re opening, when, how many surgeries you’ll have and which treatments you plan to offer.
We’ll come back with a month-by-month plan from now to opening, a realistic patient number for the first 90 days, what it would cost, and what the local competition actually looks like in that postcode.
It’s free, and it’s useful whether you work with us or not.
The sooner we start, the fuller the diary on opening day. Tell us your opening date and we’ll show you what needs to happen between now and then.
Ideally three to six months before opening. Google Business Profile verification, the website build and citation building all need lead time, and local search visibility doesn’t appear overnight. Practices that start marketing on opening day usually build their patient base more slowly than those that start before launch.
It depends on location, fit-out cost, fee structure and local competition, and is commonly estimated at 12 to 24 months. Practices in areas with poor NHS access and little private competition usually build a patient base faster. Pre-launch marketing and early review generation both help a practice reach break-even sooner.
Through Google Business Profile visibility, local paid advertising, a pre-launch registration campaign, community and local press activity, and an opening event. In areas where NHS dentistry is hard to access, campaigns that speak to the difficulty of finding a dentist usually outperform messaging about the practice itself.
There’s no magic number. For a new practice, a steady flow of recent reviews matters more than the total. An automated review request process from the very first patients lets a practice build meaningful numbers within a few months, which helps both local rankings and credibility against longer-established competitors.
