A national orthodontic group grows lead volume by 73% with full-funnel paid media

One of the largest orthodontic groups in the U.S.: orthodontists from across the country united under one organization, with hundreds of branded and non-branded locations in many states. Their shared idea: patients come in with a smile and leave with an even bigger one.

The group was ready to invest in marketing seriously. When they came to us, they had a few direct mail campaigns and Google Ads campaigns run by another agency. But conversion rates, brand awareness and lead volume were all falling. The in-house team was small and quick, but needed a partner to take on strategic media management.

They had also never tried Facebook advertising — a big blind spot. The orthodontic market is getting more competitive because of direct-to-consumer aligner brands that invest heavily in social media.

To grow awareness and stay competitive, they needed paid advertising run by experts who know the industry.

The client came to us with an immature paid media strategy and low brand awareness. In the first month of paid social campaigns we saw strong results, and that led to a full media contract: paid social, paid search, smart display and video ads. The biggest gains came from restructuring the existing accounts and sharper audience segmentation by age group and demographics.

First we reviewed current campaign performance and researched the client's online competitors. Based on that, we set performance baselines and used enhanced bidding to see which audiences worked best.

What does “account restructuring and consolidation” mean? Over time an ad account collects many campaigns and ad groups, each with its own keywords, audiences and goals. We start with a full audit, including keyword and audience research, then add, remove or merge campaigns. The goal is to collect as much conversion data as possible within a single campaign, so the algorithm can learn faster and perform better.

Our creative team wrote, designed and built new landing pages for each ad campaign. They followed paid media best practices, raised click-through rates, lowered cost per acquisition and gave us another way to retarget people who engaged with an ad but didn't convert yet. Since launch, landing page conversion rates are up 35%.

Our formula for high-converting landing pages:

To grow awareness and reach the people most likely to convert, we used a full-funnel approach across social media, smart display and other digital channels.

Most people on Facebook and Instagram aren't looking for orthodontic care, and they aren't ready to book right away. If you target a cold audience broadly with generic ads, you can burn the budget without getting qualified leads. So the goal at the top of the funnel was awareness and finding warm prospects.

Then we used top-funnel data to build custom audiences and campaigns matched to each person's stage in the buying cycle and engagement level. Because these audiences were warmed up first, bottom-funnel campaigns converted leads at a lower cost.

A full-funnel strategy means showing each person the right message for where they are in the patient journey:

Since the new strategy launched, calls and form submissions grew by 73% and cost per acquisition dropped by 28%. Leads from paid search are up 82%, and the paid search conversion rate is up 28%. For a dental group in a market where every lead counts, that's a strong return on ad spend.

Brand awareness, a key need we saw from the start, grew too: search, display and social campaigns increased branded searches by more than 69%, with impressions up to 300% higher. Today more people search for the brand by name, and its ads show at the top of search results. In a market as competitive as orthodontics, owning high-intent and branded searches can be a game-changer.