Private dentistry is discretionary spending. Most of the cases you lose, you lose to “not yet”.
The Bigger Brand is a Manchester-based dental marketing agency working with fully private dental practices across the UK and Ireland. We cover brand positioning, treatment page content, paid advertising, local search, patient experience content and enquiry conversion, with a focus on showing the clinical quality, time, materials and aftercare that private fees pay for. Campaigns are reported as treatments booked, average case value and revenue.
A private practice depends on patients choosing to pay for something they could put off. Most of that choice is made before anyone rings reception, based on what they’ve seen of you online and what they’ve heard from people they know.
Marketing is how you shape that first impression, so new patients arrive already understanding what your fees pay for. That makes every conversation in the surgery easier.
They can’t. 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 the old conversation, where private meant paying for something you could in theory get free, has largely gone. What’s replaced it is harder.
Now they’re comparing you to the private practice in the next town, to Turkey, and to an aligner brand that posts straight into their Instagram feed. Mostly, though, they’re comparing you to doing nothing for another eighteen months, which costs nothing and needs no decision.
That last one wins more often than any competitor does.
So the job of your marketing is less about proving you’re better than the practice down the road, and more about making now feel like the right time, with someone who’ll still be there in five years when it needs looking at.
“It’s a lot of money” is what people say. It’s rarely what they mean, which is usually one of four things.
Two thousand pounds is a lot for something invisible that happens in an hour. Show the time, the planning, the materials and the aftercare, and the number starts to make sense.
This is uncertainty, not cost. Cases, credentials, guarantees and a clinician they’ve seen explain it all help.
That’s a cashflow problem rather than a value one, and finance solves it.
This is the hardest one, and an unhurried explanation beats a discount every time.
Discounting answers none of those four. It usually makes the second and fourth worse, because a treatment that drops £800 the moment you hesitate was clearly never worth the original number.
They rarely compare fees, because they have nothing to compare a fee against.
They compare how long the appointment was and whether they saw the same clinician each time. Did anyone explain what was happening? How did the place look and smell, and did reception know who they were on the second visit?
Almost all of that is experience rather than clinical work, and almost none of it appears on a typical private dental website.
That’s why we put so much weight on showing the practice rather than describing it: the room, the team, the time taken and the person who’d be treating them. That’s what patients are buying, and most practices leave it entirely to the imagination.
Most private practices have one. Very few market it properly.
A plan turns an irregular, discretionary purchase into predictable monthly revenue. It also makes a patient much more likely to accept treatment later, because the relationship is already established and paid into.
It’s the best answer to a patient who can’t find an NHS dentist and is nervous about open-ended private costs. A fixed monthly figure with check-ups and hygiene included is a far easier decision than “private fees”.
Marketed properly, it fills the gap between “I need a dentist” and “I’m ready for treatment”, which is exactly where most private practices lose people.
Here’s where we put the effort for a private practice.
Forty-minute appointments, one clinician throughout, same-day photographs, a written treatment plan. Specifics, rather than “patient-centred care”.
A fee shown alongside what’s included and what the alternative involves reads as confidence. A hidden fee reads as something to be negotiated.
Put it on the advert, on the page and in the first reply. The monthly figure changes the decision more than the total ever will.
The patient journey film is the highest-value asset a private practice can have, because the experience is the product.
Private treatment marketing is wasted on the wrong postcodes. Tighter targeting to fewer people converts better and costs less.
Most private enquiries are deferrals rather than rejections. Eighteen months of low-key contact wins back a meaningful number of them.
We track the value of cases as well as the number. A practice doing fewer, larger cases is usually healthier than one doing more, smaller ones.
We’ll look at how your practice comes across online, how your fees are presented and what happens after an enquiry, and show you what we’d change. It’s free.
By making the parts of treatment visible: appointment length, continuity of clinician, materials, planning time, technology and aftercare. Patients rarely have anything to compare a fee against, so context about what’s included is usually more persuasive than the figure itself. Finance options deal with affordability separately from value.
Through local search visibility, content showing the practice and clinical team, published fees with finance options, and membership plans that give patients a predictable way in. In areas where NHS dentistry is hard to access, messaging about the difficulty of finding a dentist usually performs better than messaging about being private.
Usually not. Discounting tends to lower perceived value and rarely addresses the real objection, which is more often uncertainty about the outcome, or paying in one go, than the total fee. Finance options, clearer explanation of what’s included and steady follow-up usually work better than price cuts, and protect your fees.
A dental membership plan is a monthly subscription covering routine care such as check-ups and hygiene appointments, often with discounts on other treatment. Plans give the practice predictable revenue and the patient a predictable cost, and private practices commonly use them as an accessible way in for patients who can’t get an NHS dentist.
