The Wired Dentistry

Hiring one in-house marketing person feels like the safe, affordable choice. By the time you add up the salary, the ad budget and the gaps one person can't cover, it's often neither.
Naren Arulrajah is the founder and CEO of Ekwa Marketing and has spent 19 years helping dental practice owners get new patients. In this episode, Dr. Lorne Lavine asks him how a single marketing hire compares with a full marketing team, and what actually turns marketing into booked appointments.
What they cover:
  • Why one marketing coordinator can't do everything: one Google Ads specialist plus the ad budget is about $170,000 a year
  • When a dedicated in-house marketer makes sense, and why practices under $2 to $3 million are better served by a team
  • What a full marketing team includes: a project manager, copywriters, editors, SEO experts and webmasters
  • Why AI-written content can get your website penalized by Google
  • The difference between marketing and new patients, and why a dental specialist beats a generic agency
  • A real example: one change took a practice from one Google review a month to three a day, and two or three new patients every day
  • Why the average practice books only one in three new patient calls, and what call tracking and phone coaching change
  • How Google's constant algorithm changes affect your rankings, and how a team keeps up
  • Can you build your own website with AI and expect it to rank?
THE ONE THING FROM THIS EPISODE
Change when your team asks for Google reviews. Ask early in the appointment, while the patient is waiting, not on their way out the door. Reviews tell Google and new patients that your practice is busy and trusted today.
WORK WITH US
Marketing: book a complimentary strategy meeting with Naren's team at ekwa.com/wired. They research your practice and your top three competitors and give you a report card and a one-year plan.
Technology: schedule a call with Lorne at thedigitaldentist.com/call
Subscribe at wireddentistry.com/subscribe for the episode, plus the one thing from it worth doing, written down.

What is The Wired Dentistry?

Ransomware. PPO write-offs. A front desk that can't convert a phone call. The Wired Dentistry is where Dr Lorne Lavine, the Digital Dentist, and Naren Arulrajah of Ekwa Marketing work through what's quietly costing dental practices money — and what to do about it. Two decades each on the technology and marketing sides of dentistry, in conversations built for practice owners, not patients.