Most practices don't start thinking about marketing until things get slow. By then the patients who were looking have already chosen someone else.

Dr. Lorne Lavine interviews his co-host Naren Arulrajah on what separates the practices that dominate their market from the ones spending more every year and going backwards.

The three numbers every practice owner should know, and 95% don't. Your phone conversion rate — the average practice books one in three new patient calls. Your cost per new patient call. And what each channel actually costs: around $60–70 a new patient through organic search, against roughly $650 through Google Ads.

Why a PPO patient quietly costs $3,500 over five years — and why those same patients are the least likely to accept high-value treatment, because in their mind it isn't covered.

The practice that went from $650,000 to $1.3 million while cutting a full day off the schedule.

Plus: how patients actually search now that AI sits inside Google, why running ads can damage trust before the relationship starts, and why you only need to dominate your own neighbourhood rather than the whole market.

THE ONE THING FROM THIS EPISODE

Find out your phone conversion rate this week. The average dental practice books one in three new patient calls. The target is 70%. You cannot fix a number you have never measured, and this is the one that decides whether everything else you spend is worth spending.

WORK WITH US

Marketing — book a strategy meeting with Naren's team at ekwa.com/wired
Technology — schedule a call with Lorne at thedigitaldentist.com/call

Subscribe at wireddentistry.com/subscribe

Two things keep dentists up at night: am I getting new patients, and is my practice one click away from a technology disaster?

Most shows pick one. This one doesn't.

Dr. Lorne Lavine spent over ten years as a periodontist before founding The Digital Dentist 25 years ago — he's been inside dental practices' networks and servers ever since. Naren Arulrajah has spent 19 years marketing for dental practices, more than a thousand of them. In this first episode they explain why they stopped treating marketing and technology as separate problems.

Lorne on the number one issue he sees: almost every practice has a backup. Very few have ever restored one. New HIPAA rules will require practices to document a 72-hour restore — he'd be unhappy if his clients' took longer than 72 minutes.

Naren on the gap between marketing that works and a practice that can hold what the marketing sends it — and the four things the practices that are winning all have in common: organic search they don't have to pay for, a steady flow of five-star reviews, phones that actually convert, and landing pages that show the work. The average practice books one in three new patient calls.

Plus: who this show is for, how guests get picked, and what's coming in November.

THE ONE THING FROM THIS EPISODE

Unplug your server and start the clock. Having a backup and being able to restore from one are completely different things. If getting back up is measured in hours or days, you have a problem you don't know about yet. Forward this to whoever manages your IT and ask them to schedule the test.

WORK WITH US

Marketing — book a strategy meeting with Naren's team at ekwa.com/wired
Technology — schedule a call with Lorne at thedigitaldentist.com/call

Subscribe at wireddentistry.com/subscribe