Dental Marketing That Works in 2026 with Stephen Taylor of Delmain

"Hey, welcome to Stenidad Adjust. I'm your host, Dr. Melissa Cybert, helping you stay on the cutting edge of evidence-based dentistry. Close to 40% of patients now use AI to help them choose where to get care. So does your website still matter to you? Student Healer of Domean says yes, and he backs it up with what's working in 2026. A Houston practice that tripled its results just by running that it adds only when somebody was entering the phones and a New Jersey practice that grew new patient opportunities more than 20% on SEO alone." Our guest today is Stephen Taylor, director of marketing at Domean. A Domean marketing agency named a 2026 Google Premium Partner. Stephen has spent more than a decade building marketing strategy in agencies and in-house roles, spanning SEO content, social media, e-mail, serum, and analytics. He is twice served as a judge for the international content marketing awards. All right, let's jump in. 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If you send me a screenshot of your rating at Dr. Dot Melissa Sybert at gmail.com, we'll give you access to the course. Thank you for supporting us. It means a lot to both me and my family. You know, I'm with a very special person today and with Stephen from DelMine. And every so often I like to do business related and marketing related podcasts. We'd largely focus on clinical dentistry. But I think it's a really important topic that makes you well-rounded. And especially if you own a practice, you're thinking about owning a practice. This is all relevant because you could be the greatest dentist in the world. But if you have no patience coming in, you're not going to really get a practice dentistry. But what makes you guys so special is that you all have really been my long-standing industry partners. Truly, like I deny most other marketers coming on because you all have such a special place in my heart. But now I'm building a practice and you all are my marketing company. And actually, I'm doing a Denovo startup which is very scary. But I have so much faith in you guys that I'm like, yeah, I can do this. So let's jump in. Let's talk all about marketing the dental practice. Most dentists get into dentistry to be dentists not to be marketers or have a business. So they really trust that marketing company. So let's talk about this. What are your marketing trends that work in 2026? I think as a starting point, Melissa, it's really important to talk about things that have not changed, things that marketers have been doing a long time and the dental practices have been doing a long time that are still here and are still working. So for instance, we had a quick anecdote. We had a partner of ours in Houston that we were running meta ads for. So ads on Facebook and Instagram and our ad specialists made a recommendation to change the hours of when they ran their ads just to business hours, not to run any ads outside of business hours. And the reason he did this was he saw the data that everybody who clicked on the ads was then calling the practice and they're usually calling right after. So they're not, they weren't even booking online. They were picking up the phone and calling to book an appointment, but they only want to do that during business hours. So he made this change and immediately the, I think they were getting like 10 a month, 10 new patients from these ads a month before. They got more than 20 the next month and they got up to three times as many in the same performance period within two months by I can change the hours to meet when the phones were available, when the phones were getting answered at this dental practice. So like what is working or people are still on Facebook, people are still on Instagram, that's still working. And then people are still using the phone, which sort of boggled my mind when I thought about at the beginning of this year that so many dental practices are still getting the majority of their patient bookings through phone calls, even when it happens via their website or via an AI search or something else. So that's one of these base level things that is still happening. If you don't have a phone, get a phone for your practice, I then connected to that. The website, if you don't have a website, we've had Dennis ask, should I get one this year, does it matter anymore with how patients are using AI? And the answer is really clear that yes, you do need a website this year. In 2026, we've seen changes in how patients are using the internet to interact with Dennis, but still in terms of being visible, being found, and then meeting patient expectations, the website is essential. So those are things that again might feel old school at this point, but that are so essential to have for your marketing. And then I've already mentioned some of the things that are starting to be newer. I mean, AI search has been happening for years now, but it's never going to be less present than it is now. Like it's not going to go away as little as it is present now. Like it will just get more involved in your patient's lives. And the latest numbers we're seeing on this are the close to 40% of all patients for any health service are using AI to not just get advice, but to make a decision about who their practitioner is and where they go. And most of them are making that decision within a day of doing a health-related search with an AI tool like ChatGPT. So for 2026, if you want to show up, this does add a new challenge of finding out not just how do I show up with a website. How do I make sure they can get me on the phone, but how do I make sure ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude can find me as well. And that can be a lot of work to do. Okay, let's talk about this a little more because what I would never want to happen is for a dentist to waste their money on misplaced, misplaced ad dollars. Is it even worthwhile to spend money anymore to be sponsored on Google so that you can show up first because, frankly, the way I'm searching for businesses in the area is largely Gemini. Yeah, this is a great question because the, I mean, individual experience is going to be so different for, you know, how one patient searches versus another. I changed practices not too long ago and used Google search to find my new dentist. And so I would have been exposed to ads there. I don't remember now whether I saw an ad or it was organic, but I was one of those people who would have been exposed. If I did it today, I would probably just see an AI overview first. So it depends on where your patients are looking. A lot are actually starting their search in Google Maps or even Apple Maps rather than in Google itself. And so that is where it's really your appearance of your website, your location showing up with a Google business profile, things like that are going to matter more than am I running an ad to appear. But the other thing we're seeing is from our practices that we support, the partners, our partners who are running ads, we are seeing most of them get really good returns on their ads. They actually are driving patients back to their website and they're getting patients that book. And we've been able to track this with a full loop of not just did they called, they do an online booking, but tracking through to did they show up. And so as much as people are using AI search, Google ads or meta ads or other things like that are still effective for nearly every market that we work in geographically. It's going to change the nuances of what is going to work based on if you're in New York City versus, you know, if you're the only dentist in your county or something like that, if you're in a rural part of the country. But we've seen this in both metro areas and rural areas that Google ads can still be really effective because there's enough audience that is still using traditional Google search or being or other things like that to find their dentist. What about search engine optimization, right? I feel like in 2018 that time frame that was all the rage where, you know, someone would spend a lot of money to a marketing agency and marketing agency with keyword stuff. And it was really simple, simple but not always easy. I feel like to show up on Google in first place to that, even matter anymore. Yeah, so this is one of the areas that probably has the most myths and the most pitfalls if you don't want to live and breathe marketing because search engine optimization has always had elements of mystery. Google keeps it that way on purpose. They're very specific in their language about occluding some facts and kind of, you know, clowning the waters. So, but I want to give this clear answer as possible, which is that yes, SEO matters a ton. And the really good news here for dentists is that if you're doing the work to show up in traditional search engines, like Google, that is going to be a huge part of also showing up in evolving search experiences, like Gemini, AI overviews, or even chat GPT things separate from the browser itself. So the overlap between creating content that helps users find you through good old Google, that's going to be a lot of what you need to do also to show up in AI search. So we always recommend that practices have a basic program. Now, I shouldn't say always, but we pretty much always recommend a basic program for SEO visibility as well as other visibility because again, the people are used using it. As much as AI search is present, people still use Google, and those old. Keyword stuffing isn't going to get you, but there are other SEO techniques that still totally will get you to the top. So, a case in point, we have a practice in New Jersey where, you know, basically the whole state is New York City or the suburb of New York City, and it's a competitive market, like you can find another dentist without going very far, and this practice didn't want to do ads, they just wanted to focus on SEO. And in the past six months, we were able to just with SEO increase their patient opportunities by over 20%. So, you know, what they're actually able to do in terms of production and then collections is seeing this big spike just because they show up in organic search. No ads at all. And, I mean, there's going to be AI boosts from it because they're showing up in traditional search. But this is still this organic hungry audience going out looking, and we're still doing some of the same things that we did last year and year before, which are we answer real questions for real patients. We make sure that a practice's website is clear about what services they do offer, what services they don't offer. You know, we make it clear, this is our address, these are our hours of operation. All these kinds of things that patients want to know when they first go looking, still make a difference for your visibility in SEO and are still driving actual monetary gains for the practices we're doing this with right now. What are the ways in which dentists are wasting money with marketing dollars? Probably the biggest thing, the biggest potential for waste is if it's ad hoc, if you don't have a system in place to measure whether it's working and then connected to that, making sure that your marketing is connected to practice management. So, this could be that you're spending a ton on ads that aren't working. It could be that you're spending a ton on SEO and you're in a market where maybe everybody already knows who you are. If you're the only dentist in town and people are just deciding do I like the guy or do I want to go to the lady over here or if it's an easy decision because everybody already knows you, then you probably would be wasting a lot of money on any given marketing channel. What we do to answer this question is we try to make sure that we pay as much of your marketing data as possible with actual practice management outcomes. So, for instance, going back to this practice in New Jersey, it's great if we can say, "Wow, your web traffic is, they actually reported that their web visitors were up over 80%. But that only drove a 20-something percent in actual collections and production and collections, right?" So, the difference between web visitors and making getting patients to come in and keep appointments, that's a big gap. If you can fill that gap by tracking not just who came to my website, but who became a patient, who showed up, who paid for their appointment, that's when you can really quickly say, "Okay, in our market, in our practice, we don't need to do ads for this specialized service. That's a waste." Or, in our specific city, in our, let's say you're a super GP and you do everything, maybe you find out that ads for implants are doing great, but you don't need to do any ads for general patients. They're just going to find you organically. To answer those questions, you've got to start connecting your data, your marketing data, and then as much as possible your practice management system. So, we've made a big investment to make that possible, to make that as easy as we can for our dentists. It is not easy at all, but when you can get those two talking to each other, that's when it becomes easy to answer the question of, "Is this a waste or is it not?" So, I don't know if that answers your question totally Melissa, because again, it's going to change market to market, but the data you need to answer it will be basically the same, no matter what kind of practice you are. Yeah, but this becomes very, very important because I talk to a lot of dentists all day every day. It's just part of my job. It's part of what I do. And what I'm hearing a lot of is people feeling like they are paying marketing companies, an enormous amount of money, but they're not seeing the ROI there. And of course, there's a lot to dissect about why they're not getting the ROI, but one of the most important variables, sexually measuring, are my dollars getting me the outcome that I want, or just leaving to perhaps. Not, I don't want to call it vanity metric, but yeah, people clicking on the ad, that's awesome. But down the road, that's not leading to actual patients in your chair, it's a waste of money. No, you're totally right. And there's a similar thing that we face as Domain is a marketing company. You know, if we run ads for ourselves, right, we run meta ads and Google ads for ourselves to increase our, to grow our business. And we can look and see, okay, the people who came in through meta ads, through Google ads, did they actually become our partners, or our clients, you know, we call them partners, but answering that is really important. So for dentists, same thing, if you can track with your calls, for instance, and say, okay, going back to this practice in Houston, we know that these people who saw a meta ad clicked on it, and then they came to our website, and they saw our phone number, and they called, and we've tracked this person called and booked an appointment. And then we know that they actually showed up, and they paid for their services. Then it makes, it becomes so clear where to keep investing, and then where to, to scale back, to like not investing in running ads in your hours where nobody's picking up the phone was the, the clear answer for this practice. So they reduced their investment and spend an out of office hour ads, clear decision because they had the data to support that decision. Again, the getting the data is hard, but once you get that data, then you can quickly answer, or, or much more quickly answer. It still takes a few weeks to really, you know, be statistically significant and all that, but you can start to answer, yes, ads are working here, or, or my AI visibility is working there, people are using the website, people are using my phone, any of the things, any of the variables. When people work with you, all, what are you all typically seeing? And this is important for me myself, even though, what are you all typically seeing with the average amount of new patients that come to the practice? In other words, if a dentist were to hire a good marketing firm, what can they expect? Well, that's a tough question to answer. There'll be, I mean, probably the biggest variability is going to be what kinds of production that practice does. So, like we work with specialists like, you know, a periodontist or orthodontist that their sales cycle is a little different, where, you know, you're probably going to come in for an orthoconsult, right, before you become a patient. And so their numbers are going to be a lot lower. What we do pretty much with any type of practice is try to give benchmarks based on what is the service you're offering. So, for instance, for a lot of our GPs, some of them are looking for 20 or 30 new patients a month. And that's what they're getting. Some of them are looking for 80 patients a month, or 80 new patient opportunities, 80 new patient inquiries. And we're getting numbers like that for some of our practices as well. So, we had someone last, I think was last week who said they had five emergency cases in the same day. And he's not even an emergency dentist. He just, you know, kept some time on his schedule for emergency procedures, I guess. And, you know, so answering that question first of what service are you're going to offer will be really important to figure out how many patients you need to, you want to get to reach your goals. But for any practice, like your schedule will, it'll be clear to you if your schedule is empty or not, right? You probably know I could have met with four more patients today. I could have, you know, I could have spent two more hours at the chair than I got to. And so that's where we'll say, okay, if you need 20 patients per month, if you need 40 patients per month that are new, what we will do is we'll create a plan to meet that goal. And then if it's 20, the plan might be a little simpler. And if it's 40, we might add on some additional sources of those patients to make it fit. So I, I don't want to, I don't want to dodge the question more than I have to to say like it all depends. But, but that's sort of the process we would go through to answer this with the practice we'd be working with. Ping me a picture here. If I want, and I do, let's say 20 new patients a month, what would our strategy be? What will our strategy be? Because I'm working with you back. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so let's say for a minute, just for, for sake of painting the picture, if you were brand new and had done no marketing yet, no matter what kind of practice you are, we're first going to say, let's get you a website. Let's build a website where patients can find you organically and also where we can get AI citations where patients can go and get clear answers about, I provide this service and this service. This is the financial model, a payment model that's, that's available to you. Here's some, you know, answers to questions about insurance. So that's, that's square one is getting a website. Some of the next things we're going to do, again, we would almost always say, let's do some work to make sure that website shows up in search engines. We're certainly going to add, build out a Google business profile so that it's easy to find you not just in Google, but in maps, Google maps. A lot of times it makes a big difference to do this in Apple maps too. Now that Apple is, they're getting close to 30% of market share for searches for locations. So, I mean, big, big cut of what Google used to do with Google maps. So getting those profile set up is going to be, again, basically square one. And then from there, the strategy will build out will be around making sure that your practice shows up authentically and that you get a steady drumbeat of patient reviews when your practice is live. So, so much of the matter of getting found is going to come back to our patients actually talking about me, or am I just talking about myself? Are we the only voice on the internet saying anything about our practice, but getting a system to curate reviews, you know, to solicit them from your patients, and then to use them in your marketing as well, to use their voices and testimonials organically. That goes a long way. And again, this helps not just with findability for Google, but for for AI citations as well. So that's another thing we're going to work with on work on with pretty much any practice. And then a lot of times we will say, "Hey, let's run some ads." Because we've seen a lot of success. In 2026 running ads on Google, on Facebook and Instagram, places like that that patients are spending time and are spending money and are making decisions. So that might be the sort of cadence how we go about it. Some practices will launch ads before they've actually opened their doors to just book patients for the grand opening or whatever it is. We usually don't wanna do that too far in advance since most patients aren't gonna be ready to, they're gonna wanna book six months in advance for something typical if they, unless they've just been to the dentist or something. So that's part of the strategy we would figure out is the timing of when do we do things like ads? When does that make sense for your practice and your goals? And then some of the last things in addition to this will be ongoing content. We try to make sure that your website once you built it stays fresh and stays relevant. And so making sure that people can find information about the actual healthcare providers, the people who are gonna be with them at the chair. You know, not just the dentist, but who their team are. Showing your degrees and credentials, your certifications, any of those things will get content to update as you hire new employees or content that helps answer questions patients might have. Like if it's educational, if they wanna know, do I really need this procedure? Or informational content about, hey, here's this new change in Medicaid or HIPAA or any other things that are connected to their experience with you. All of that can make a difference on your website. And so some of the ongoing work is a lot of times building out that library of content and keeping it fresh and relevant on your website. So that's mile high view of what this might look like, but all of those are pieces that we've seen a lot of value in with more than 200 partners this year alone. - Let's talk about organically social media here a little bit. So let's say that you're a dentist and you really wanna grow an Instagram following that's direct to patient or a TikTok following direct to patient as a way of marketing yourself. We'd love to hear your thoughts on this because I'm gonna tell you my conviction. And a large part of what I do is my social media really speaks to dentists. But I, and often I see people say things like, you know, you're gonna have a running start with your practice because why is it doing fireworks like that? I hate that. You're gonna have a running start in your practice because of your social media. And that's not true because my account is directed toward dentists. Patients are not going to find that. It's not gonna speak to them. But here's my conviction with social media is that your account really has to reach an exit velocity for it to be effective in recruiting patients. So what I mean by that is, and this is my conviction and I'd love to hear your thoughts. But, you know, let's say that you really want to get more aesthetic patients, more cosmetic cases into your practice. And so you set up Instagram. Unless you were really committed to that account have content that really sticks and have a large following, you're very consistent. I don't think it's gonna bring new patients in the door. If your practice has like a thousand followers, it's posting once a week and it's just post, I don't get a lot of engagement and traction. I don't think it's gonna really do much. But I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. - Yeah, this is a really interesting topic for, I mean, dental practices and so many other types of businesses right now. - Two things I'd start with. First, we're seeing a shift in what when you talk about exit velocity or sort of like what is the threshold of when you're actually gonna see a return from this? - Traction. - We are seeing a shift in micro influence where people are much more likely to engage and make decisions in conjunction with much smaller accounts and social handles. And so, you still have the macro influencers who have incredibly massive following. So, you know, the tens of millions. But more than ever, we are seeing people make decisions based on micro influence. Now, putting that caveat aside, your best voices to be influencers for you are not you. If I were gonna bet money on social media, I would want to bet, invest money in two things. One, an ad's first is what I would do. And the next thing would be any investment that gets my patients talking about me on social media, rather than me talking about me on social media. And so, here's quick anecdote on this, if I can. This is not dental, but there's a guy I'm connected with professionally who's an SEO expert. He got hired by a daycare to help them get new recruits, get new signups for their daycare. And he thought, oh, easy, you're local. All parents who are sending their kids daycare want a short drive, I'm gonna make you the winners in local search. I'm gonna make you so visible that everybody finds you and they look at daycares in my city in this zip code. And so, he invested a lot of effort in that and it didn't work. And here's what he found that all of the parents making decisions about daycare were making them on Facebook by talking to each other. So, the best place to show up was in a Facebook group, a closed Facebook group for parents. And he could not pay his way in there. He couldn't do it by posting on the daycare's social handles, that wouldn't do it. But having parents talk about him organic or the daycare organically, that got them in the groups. And so, what they did is they just said, hey, you're a happy parent will incentivize you to talk to your friends, to give a referral. And that worked. So, if I were a dental practice, that's the kind of organic social that I would start with. Again, paid ads on social, total different beasts, and we've seen that be really successful. But as much as social media is important for your engagement and can be really good for keeping your long-term patients engaged and active, it's not where I would start. Again, it's not what I would invest in first. You're gonna be much better served incentivizing your patients to talk to each other, or to talk to other people in your community on social media. People do make those decisions on social media, people do spend money. I mean, one and a half trillion dollars on social shopping last year alone. But most of it is because they listen to micro influencers, and the dental practice is probably never gonna be that influencer, the way that somebody's neighbor or somebody's friend is gonna be that influencer.