It’s only March — if you haven’t mapped out your marketing plan yet, there’s still time to get organized and set yourself up for a profitable year.

A solid orthodontic marketing plan isn’t just about promotions, ads and social media posts. It’s how you attract more patients, track what’s working, and make informed decisions about where to invest your efforts next.

In 2025, marketing your practice is non-negotiable if you want to grow or maintain — and without a structured plan, marketing is guesswork. 

Here’s how to build a plan that allows you to confidently adjust, refine, and repeat the strategies that bring you the best results.

No time to read? Check out this 8 minute TLDR video. 

Are you covering the essentials?

Before we dive in, run through this quick checklist. 

• Do you have clear goals for your marketing efforts this year?
• Is there a system in place to track new patient sources?
• Have you set a marketing budget that aligns with your practice’s growth goals?
• Are you consistently running promotions or incentives?
• Do you have a calendar to organize your campaigns, social media, and community outreach?
• Is there a dedicated team (internal or external) to execute your marketing strategy?

If you answer ‘no’ to any of these, it’s time to put a plan in place. Let’s break down what goes into a successful orthodontic marketing plan.

1. Set a clear picture of where you want to be (and a way to track it.)

Before you can calculate an appropriate marketing budget, plan your campaigns and track your success, you have to define what success looks like for your practice. How will you measure what’s working and what’s not?

Are you aiming to maintain your current growth, or significantly increase new patient starts? Your strategy should be tailored to your specific growth goals.

Start by setting some goals, such as: 

• Increase new patient consults by 15%
• Grow Invisalign cases by 15%
• Strengthen dental referral relationships and increase patient flow from specific offices

Once you set your targets, setting up a system to track your referral sources is critical. If you’re not measuring, you’re guessing — which makes it challenging to not only track your successes accurately, but to define your goals in the first place.

Referral Tracking 

Referral tracking is absolutely key to knowing where your patients are coming from. Those insights will tell you whether to double-down on your current marketing strategy, or make adjustments. They allow you to make informed decisions of where to allocate your marketing dollars, and where to shift your efforts to increase your new patient starts.

Reach out to your PMS (practice management software) representative to ensure that your system is configured for accurate referral tracking. 

Your team also needs to understand the importance of tagging each patient’s referral source accurately. For example: If your team members are selecting “doctor referral” for every patient’s referral source, you won’t have an accurate understanding of how new patients are finding you, and you could be spending unnecessary dollars in areas that aren’t giving you the return you need.

• Train your team to consistently and accurately tag referral sources. 
• Consider using analytics software, like Gaidge, to easily track referral sources, as well as new patient starts, case acceptance rate, treatment modality, production vs. collection, and more. 
• You can also just use a good ol’-fashioned spreadsheet if necessary! What matters is that your new patient data is tracked consistently and accurately.

As always, if you don’t know where to start, or you have questions about tracking, drop us a line and we’re happy to help. 

2. Calculate a budget that aligns with your growth goals.

Marketing is a non-negotiable investment in your practice’s growth — it takes money to make money. Today more than ever, your potential patients are flooded with marketing from your competitors. Marketing for orthodontists is no longer a luxury, but a necessity for reaching new patients, strengthening referral relationships and keeping current patients engaged.

What should my marketing budget be? We recommend designing a budget around the collections goals you want to meet. This can range from 5-10% of your collections goals, depending on your market, how established your practice is, and how aggressive your goals are.

Marketing Budget Allocation

Once you determine your percentage, divide it into marketing categories that align with your strategy. Your specific categories will vary based on your unique goals, but here are some general ideas to start:

• Internal patient promotions – Loyalty programs, patient contests, and referral incentives.
• Dental referral relationships – Lunch-and-learns, appreciation events, and direct outreach.
• Community engagement & sponsorships – Local events, sports teams, and nonprofit partnerships.
• School support – Back-to-school promotions, sponsorships, and direct outreach.
• Digital marketing – Google Ads, Facebook/Meta & Instagram campaigns, SEO, and website updates.

Within each category, allocate:

• A bulk of your budget to what you know works based on past successes
• A percentage to test new initiatives
• A small portion to try out experimental tactics and out-of-the-box ideas

This is why tracking is so important — it gives you the insights you need to refine your budget over time and ensures that your dollars are going toward the areas that are proven to help you reach your goals. Planning drives success.

3. Create a marketing calendar to keep your initiatives organized. 

A structured marketing calendar keeps your campaigns organized and ensures consistency in your marketing efforts. It gives you a visual of what’s getting done, who to divvy up responsibilities to, and which initiatives to strategize and plan for in advance.

The more info, data and organization you create, the more informed your decisions will be, and the more effective and efficient your efforts will be.

Your calendar should include all of your marketing efforts — any initiatives that serve the purpose of getting your practice out there in the community:

• Patient promotions & incentives
• Social media content schedule
• Community events & sponsorships
• Digital ad campaigns
• Office-wide engagement efforts

Decide who has access to the calendar, and what their role is in keeping it up to date. You could organize this through a project management marketing calendar software, in a simple spreadsheet, or use something more visual like Canva. 

If your practice is busier during certain times of the year, mark this in a calendar roadmap to  prevent last-minute scrambling and to plan strategies throughout the year.

4. Partner with a team who supports you.

Take a deep breath — we’re here for you! Marketing is a team effort, and it can feel overwhelming to try to tackle it alone or with a small team. 

We like to say, “the best way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time.” We’re here to help you break it down into manageable steps and optimize every aspect of your orthodontic marketing. 

For the past 20 years, we’ve helped practices of all sizes — from single-location start-ups to nine-location powerhouses — to hone in on their goals, identify specific marketing needs that feed each of those goals, develop a custom marketing plan, and execute it.

Many of our clients initially come to us for a website or branding, then experience growth that evolves their marketing needs and goals. We adapt alongside them, building partnerships that last for years.

enox is here to meet you wherever you currently are, and guide you to the place you want to be. Let’s take your marketing plan one step at a time, starting with a discovery call.