Pediatric Dental & Orthodontics
When growth isn't happening and the marketing is producing leads, the problem is hiding somewhere else.
This multi-location pediatric dental and orthodontics group had strong digital marketing that produced hundreds of leads per month. Their conversions were low and they didn't know why.
Sector: Pediatric Dental & Orthodontics
Scale: Multi-location group
Role: Embedded in-house Marketing Director
Tenure: 5 months.
The marketing was already producing leads — hundreds of inbound calls a day across six locations. That wasn't the problem. What hadn't been examined was what happened to those leads after they called. From the first ring to a booked appointment, each step in the patient journey was either working or it wasn't. Most of them hadn't been measured. The work was finding where they were breaking down.
50-84%
Group call answer rate across six locations
$63K recovered
Estimated patient value recovered across 4 month period.
Challenge 01:
More than $10,000 a month in ad spend — and half the leads it produced were reaching voicemail.
The Situation
The group already had a strong digital marketing vendor and was spending more than $10,000 a month on ads. Leads were coming in — hundreds of inbound calls a day across six locations. The marketing was working. What became clear when the patient journey was examined was that the leads were reaching voicemail, and many of them were never heard from again.
Half of all inbound calls were going unanswered. Not in a bad week — as a baseline. The group had no call tracking in place, so there was no number to see and no number to react to. The problem had been invisible, which is the only way a problem that size stays in place. As the owner put it afterward: "Before this, I would have just paid for more ads. I would have never realized we were losing so many."
The Approach
The first step was making the problem visible — which meant building the infrastructure to measure it. Once there was a number to manage, the operational decisions followed from the data. Changes were made at the coverage, process, and staffing level. Weekly coaching gave each team consistent visibility into their own performance, which is what turned a one-time fix into a sustained result.
The Result
Group call answer rate moved from 50% to 84% across all six locations. The gains held even through periods of short staffing — a sign the improvement was structural, not situational.
Challenge 02:
Answering the phone was step one. Booking the patient was a different problem entirely.
The Situation
Once calls started getting answered, what happened on those calls became visible for the first time. Call-intelligence software made it possible to see not just whether the phone was picked up, but whether the call turned into a scheduled appointment. The conversion data was immediate and clear: a meaningful share of new-patient calls were ending without a booking. In the first measured month, the estimated value of those unbooked opportunities — patients who called, reached someone, and left without an appointment — was $57,218 across all six offices.
It wasn't a staffing problem or a volume problem. It was a conversion problem — and it had been invisible for the same reason the missed-call rate had been invisible. No one had been measuring it.
The Approach
Once conversion was trackable, it became a weekly coaching metric alongside answer rate. Teams had regular visibility into both numbers — with accountability and incentives built around them. What the data consistently pointed to was where the gain lived: not in the follow-up, but in what happened on the first call.
The Result
An estimated $63,000 in patient value was recovered between June and September. Additionally, as the new process took hold, a pattern emerged: teams were scheduling more patients on the first call and not needing to follow up at all.
Before you spend more on marketing, find out what's happening after the call comes in.
Most practices have a patient journey problem that looks like a marketing problem. The phones go unanswered. The calls that do get answered don't convert. The marketing gets the blame — but the marketing was working. The journey wasn't.
That's the sequence Brightforge runs for every client: diagnose the patient journey before adding spend. Because more marketing into a broken journey isn't growth — it's waste with better branding.
If your marketing is producing leads and your patient volume isn't following, the gap is in the journey — Brightforge can help.