Dentists Who Invest Podcast

Here's How To Get More Patients (...And Minimise White Space) with Marius Satraru [CPD Available]

• Dr. James Martin • Season 4 • Episode 408

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Empty chairs aren’t fixed with louder ads; they’re fixed with smarter systems. We dive into the real reasons diaries have white space and map a practical route from first click to accepted treatment, together with Marius Satraru of Align Media, who builds lead engines for dental practices. Rather than throwing money at SEO or Google Ads, we explore how to repair the funnel: a website that looks human and loads fast, multiple ways to convert (booking, forms, click‑to‑call, chatbot), and a CRM that treats your database as an asset instead of an afterthought.

We get specific about the moments where leads leak. Missed calls after hours quietly erase demand, so we talk through AI reception as a night‑shift helper that books or sends links, speeding response without replacing your front desk. Follow‑up time matters just as much; personalised auto‑replies that reference the enquiry keep attention and reduce comparison shopping. We also unpack why fee pages cause exits, how a deposit policy can be tested to lower friction, and why clear finance options and next steps turn price browsing into bookings. For campaigns like Invisalign open days, we show how to start with your existing database: targeted emails, plain‑English benefits, strong subject lines, and simple booking paths.

Once foundations convert, then scale. That’s when SEO earns clicks and ads make sense, especially with focused landing pages that mirror ad promises and track results beyond leads to booked revenue. Throughout, we use a simple rule: stop self‑diagnosing. Audit answer rates, response speed, website conversion, CRM automation, and email cadence; fix the largest drop‑offs first, then widen the top of the funnel with the right channels. Want the full checklist and examples you can act on today? Listen now, subscribe for future deep dives, and leave a quick review with your biggest bottleneck—we’ll tackle it next.

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Disclaimer: All content on this channel is for education purposes only and does not constitute an investment recommendation or individual financial advice. For that, you should speak to a regulated, independent professional. The value of investments and the income from them can go down as well as up, so you may get back less than you invest. The views expressed on this channel may no longer be current. The information provided is not a personal recommendation for any particular investment. Tax treatment depends on individual circumstances and all tax rules may change in the future. If you are unsure about the suitability of an investment, you should speak to a regulated, independent professional. Investment figures quoted refer to simulated past performance and that past performance is not a reliable indicator of future results/performance.

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Dr James:

Dentists often wonder how they can reduce white space in their diaries, and therefore, in order to do that, we need more patience. That's why I'm joined today by Marius Satraru of Align Media. Marius' company specializes in getting more leads for dentists. So we're here today to find out all the methods available to us dentists to achieve this. I'm looking forward to this episode as ever. I'm also happy to share that there is free verifiable CPD associated with this podcast episode. Whenever you finish the episode, all you have to do is click the link in the podcast description. It'll take you right to the Dentists Who Invest website. You'll be able to complete a short questionnaire. And once passed, you fill in your reflections, and we'll go ahead and email over to you your verifiable CPD certificate, which is entirely free. What that means is this podcast episode will be able to contribute towards your verifiable CPD hours during this learning cycle. Marius, there's a billion ways under the sun that dentists can get more new patients. But I guess what I'm here to ask today is what, in your opinion, is the best way? Tough question, I know, but I'm gonna I'm gonna throw it out there. I want to see what your response is.

Marius:

Yeah, yeah. No, I get it. I mean, um, when it comes to getting new patients, is always the option to spend money and chase new patients. But a lot of times I feel like dentists are just neglecting what they already have. So by having a website that has good system in good systems in place, you can actually make the best out of all the patients and all the leads possible, not just chasing new patients.

Dr James:

A thousand percent, right? And here's the thing about marketing, and I see this an awful lot. There's a lot of methods that you can use to market. And as dentists, as principals, you go to a marketing company, and let's say they do meta ads or Google ads, or even or even they make uh leaflets and flowers and stuff like that, or even they do like paid media where you get on the radio, every single one of them will say yes to your business, right? As in if you go to them and you're like, hey, I need more patients, can I give you some money, just make this happen? They'll all say yeah, but which one does your business need specifically? Because as you say, if somebody is think of it like a funnel, like a marketing funnel, right? You need to actually create the funnel first, as then you need to assemble the business first, so that when you pour water into the funnel, as then you pour leads into the funnel, that there's no holes in it, and they're they're they're appropriately moving uh down the the marketing funnel in terms of increasing value as prospects and as clients, right? But the problem is no marketing company will ever tell you that. If you've got a dodgy funnel, they'll just sell you the stuff, take the money. What they will do, it will help, but it's not going to be the full solution. And this is kind of what I'd like to highlight today. And this is maybe one of my gripes a little bit about marketing. Whereas what is more useful is when you have someone maybe similar to yourself who actually handles a lot of different components of marketing. So you can be like, hey, your website needs to be fixed before we do any of this. And then you might say after that, right, now you need meta-ads or something along those lines. So it's important to be a full stack marketer, if you wish.

Marius:

Yeah, of course. No, I completely agree. Um, most of the time we get dentists asking us to do SEO, for example, and just because you know they've been confused, and it's a lot of unclarity online. Everyone is trying to push SEO and push this and push that. But what we figure is that most of the time, I mean, most of the time, sometimes you don't actually need SEO if you don't if you don't have a proper website. So exactly what like you said, if you slip leads, if you're losing leads due to a bad website, then SEO is not worth doing. And I find this to be very interesting. Um, if you think about it, if you get 100 leads per month or 100 inquiries, and only 10 of them become actual patients, what happens with the rest of 90? So that's why we created a system where you're not actually buying a website, you're investing in a system in a system that you'll get your money back and you'll help you lose that. It will help you not uh lose leads anymore. Let's say, for example, out of those 90 that I was just telling you, if you keep nurture them and send them email marketing campaigns and SMS marketing campaigns, then obviously that increases the chances of your leads getting more leads. And especially when you're running ads and when you're spending money, and you know, every click is worth between two pounds to up to ten pounds. So you know you're spending money with every click, and then you're just ignoring 90% of your leads. You know, I don't think it makes sense to invest in marketing unless you have the foundations right.

Dr James:

Thousand percent. And you know, just a quick just a quick, how can I say this? Uh, what's the word I'm looking for? Analogy, really, or uh a metaphor on that front. You know, dentists, when the patient comes to the dentist, the patient just says, I've got pain and it feels like it's in my mouth, right? Yeah, what do I do? Yeah, and that's where the dentist is like, okay, well, let's take an x-ray, let's do a vitality test, let me do an extra oral uh how can I say this inspection of the of your soft tissues and what have you. And uh it's when the dentist gathers all the evidence that they're able to say, right, here's the diagnosis. Now, if the patient tried to self-diagnose, there's a good chance they're gonna get it wrong. But that's actually what dentists are doing a lot of the time with their marketing and their business. They they're experiencing sometimes financial pain or emotional pain because they're not having as many patients as they would like, and they think to themselves, well, I've heard about this SEO thing, it's probably that, right? And then they self-diagnose. And the problem that that leads to is that you then go looking for an SEO person who will probably say yes to your business because you've approached them, but are they actually gonna be the thing that fixes your problem or the person that fixes your problem? And unless they're able to see the entire field of play, this can create issues. Because when you you actually don't get the answer as to whether or not the SEO is working until it's like three to six months down the line, right? And it's only really at that point you're like, crap, maybe I needed a proper website in the first place, or maybe I just needed to follow up my leads better. I didn't actually need more leads, I just needed to follow up the ones that I have even more thoroughly, something along those lines. What I'm saying is it's important to not self-diagnose and self-treat your own pain. Because if the patients did that, Dennis would find it ludicrous. But we do it all the frigging time. Anyway, I just wanted to throw that out there for the benefit of the audience. That is a little thought that's crossed my mind often because I've been in those situations where I'm trying to diagnose what's going wrong in something in one of my companies, and I'm like, oh man, if I just would have realized about six months ago that it wasn't SEO, it was something else that would have saved me a lot of time. Anyway, life's full of lessons and it's all about learning, isn't it? But anyway, Marius, you mentioned that there's a little bit of a strategy or a method that you have to deduce what is actually going on in the business. Because I imagine you get a lot of dentists who come to you and they're like, Hey, can you fix my SEO? And then when you have a look into what's going on, you realize the problem is completely different or something else. How do you figure that out? What's your what's your process?

Marius:

Yeah, so most of the time dentists approach us for marketing, they don't specify I need a CEO or I need that or I need that, I just need more leads, right? So we look at pretty much everything. And we had situations where dentists were obviously running Google ads, meta ads, they were recording content, so a lot of content going on. But you know, we felt like the website was not reflecting any of it. And that was the gap, that was the thing that were not making enough money for them to continue invest, if that makes sense. So we analyzed a lot, a lot of websites, and we figured that most of the time is you can get more bookings. I mean, you can double your bookings by either doubling your budget, which would be the first thing that comes into your mind, or you can double your conversion rate. So when it comes to websites, the conversion rate is anywhere between uh 1% to 2%. So if you manage to double that to 4%, 5%, that's already you know, double bookings. So we figured we figured, okay, how would dentists lose leads? Well, first of all, is calls. After hours and weekends, no one's uh picking up the phone to answer. So we found an AI system, an AI receptionist that will be able to, it's very basic, but you'll be able to answer the calls and book appointments for next day or for next open day. And then out of those leads, we also went a bit deeper and we thought, okay, what about those that haven't booked? What are we doing with them? And then we we kind of invested in uh an SMS chatbot that will engage patients. So even if they're not booking, they're still in a system, so you still have a chance to make money off it. And we took down every single uh conversion possible on the website. So we started with the calls, then we went to um forms, so form inquiries, and then chatbot, and then up to the booking system. So we wanted a system, we we just didn't want a website like a brochure. We wanted a website as a system that can tackle every single conversion possible and make the best out of it.

Dr James:

Nice. Again, it comes back to what we were saying earlier. It's looking at the entirety of the funnel rather than just one little component. Okay, let's start at the top of the funnel, right? Because this is this is fun, you know. So I'm referring to hopefully everybody in the audience has heard of Russell Brunson. If you haven't read his stuff, he's he's kind of one of those people who gets a little bit of a stick in the internet marketer world, right? Russell Brunson, uh Marius, doesn't he? Uh from the from the real OG old school marketers, because he's kind of he's very much a lot of his stuff is for uh people who are just starting out on their marketing journey. And let me see, I read that stuff, I read it back in the day, and it just came along at the right time for me, and I was like, right, this is very useful because even though it is the grade school stuff, the entry-level stuff, it means that I now have a framework in which to input further knowledge. I'm gonna try to put it in dental terms for every everybody. If anybody's ever read Pickard's Manual of Operative Dentistry, that book, which does the round on first-year dental courses in the UK. It's that book was so useful because then I understood like G V Black's classification fillings and what have you, and then everything else goes from there. Russell Brunson is flipping G V Black, that is who Russell Brunson is, or he's pickered himself, something along those lines. The dental audience will get that reference. Uh, so he is he is who that person is, he is the uh equivalent of that person in the internet marketing world. So I really liked his books back in the day, and the the the funnel that I'm referring to is the way that he describes businesses. He's like every business is a funnel. At the top, it is wide as it goes continuously downwards, it gets narrower and narrower. So every business should try to widen their funnel as much as possible, but also try to plug the hole so you're not losing leads and stuff like that. So the top of the funnel, would you say that that's the website for you, Marion? If you're a UK dentist and you wish to add to your verifiable CPD portfolio for this learning cycle, it's worth knowing that DentistWhoinvest has over a thousand minutes of free verifiable CPD on our website. Just simply head over to www.dentist whoinvest.com and hit the videoslash cpd tab, and you can go right ahead and help us out to as much CPD as you need. You'll also find a link that takes you straight to the CPD section of the Dennis who invest website in the podcast description.

Marius:

Uh for us, yeah. It was the website and it's your.

Dr James:

Ah, so that's the first place to look. That's the first place for dentist dentists to tighten up on when it comes to the marketing. Is that fair to say?

Marius:

Yeah, because the reason why is like I said, when it comes to doubling your bookings, it's easy enough to instead of spending 4,000 a month to think of spending six, seven thousand a month. And then you can do that, but that's that doesn't guarantee any more leads. It's just a way of you know spending money basically. But if you can double your conversion rate, which is sometimes such an easy thing to do, is this just a matter of changing a few buttons or implementing a booking system or just making the best out of your current database? And that will give you double the bookings without actually investing double the money in marketing.

Dr James:

I hear you a thousand percent. So tell me what makes a good, apart from the things that you've just said, if you were auditing this for a client, what makes a good website versus a bad website? Can you give us a little bit of a checklist of easy things to improve?

Marius:

Yeah, of course. So the way I see it, and I always look at this from my perspective, as if I was a patient. So what do I want to see? Am I a nervous patient? Am I just looking at my financials? So do I need to know the cost? Do I need to know the experience of the dentist, or do I just need to see, you know, a website? And when it comes to website conversion rate, the first things that you can do to increase the conversion rate is obviously not using stock images and videos. So use your content and make sure you show your face. People want to see people, so they want to know who they're working with, especially in dentistry when you know it's essentially healthcare, so they want to know who they're who their dentist will be or who they're fixing their smiles, right? And then also, apart from content, it's also the booking system itself. So, how do you want to get the leads? Do you offer enough conversion uh methods? Do you have a booking system in place? And do you have what it needs, what what patients need to book? Because sometimes you just have a form on the website, which in my opinion that's not enough. People will just complete their details, they might submit, sometimes they not, because we track most of our websites we track with recordings, so we see what they do. And patients sometimes they just complete the details, but they don't submit for some reason, and that could be a lot of things. You you won't know until you pretty much record like a thousand patients, and then you'll be able to see a pattern. So it's small things that just make it more personal, make it more approachable. And if you're talking about technical stuff, obviously make sure it loads fast and the content is easy to read and understand because you know you can write about dentistry for so long and you can have so many pages of content, but people won't actually understand it. So see it from a patient perspective, and that will increase the conversion rate guaranteed.

Dr James:

Nice. Tell me about CRMs because dentists, a lot of for a lot of dentists out there, I'm gonna say that CRM, the even the term CRM is not something they're familiar with. So maybe if you were able to give us an explainer as to what that is, and then we'll go from there.

Marius:

Yeah, so the CRM um should be basically a booking system that will help you and help the patients, make it easier for both of you. So there's a lot of CRMs out there that you can try and test it out. Some of them offer like free demos, and you just need to find the one that works best for you. But from my perspective, what I'm seeing is a lack of uh working with a current database. So all the CRMs are focused on booking new patients, exactly like you would with your marketing. So always chasing new patients and chasing new patients. And when you have a database of hundreds, potentially thousands of patients, you just you just only send appointment reminders, which you know is not enough if if you want to grow with your, you know, if you want to create a relationship with the patient and you want to grow, then that type of CRM is is in my opinion, is not enough. So we need something to be able to access the database and send email marketing. Imagine how easy it would be if you want to launch, let's say, an Invisalign openly, and obviously you're gonna expect to pay a few hundreds, if not thousands, to get the audience or to get a few leads. But what if you send an email or just a couple of emails to a thousand patients or two thousand patients? You know, you increase your chances, and if that CRM can offer that for free, it's it's really a no-brainer.

Dr James:

You know, I see dentists do this a lot. It's it's like you have very easy ways that you can market yourself, but maybe we're spending a fortune on Invisalign open days and things like that, and it's like, dude, you already have all these uh addresses ready to go, we're just not leveraging them. I see people do that a lot in marketing, they make it too complicated, you know, or they they they they try to there's there's multiple ways that you can generate more leads and they default towards the more complex, expensive one, perhaps because they don't know what CRM software is, or perhaps because they haven't uh, you know, uh how can I say this? Uh they they haven't designed, they haven't built it into their website, you know what I mean? They haven't integrated it with their website effectively. Okay, fine. Yep. Interested to know, I was curious as well. Let's talk about go back to the funnel that we were talking about the second ago. So we've got the website, we've got the CRM, maybe we thought a little bit about SEO. So now we're getting we're getting the we've widened the top of the funnel, so to speak. We're getting more leads in. Yeah. What about the next layer? What happens after that?

Marius:

So obviously, when you have a website and you know everything's done properly, you have a good foundation, then you can start SEO. And what SEO does, it's obviously the idea of SEO is to rank higher on Google. So ranking higher on Google, we end up with more clicks, and more clicks end up in in more bookings, obviously. And then after that, you can consider I mean you can consider starting Google ads or starting meta ads if you haven't done already, and then just making sure that you make the best out of the leads. Because most of the time, like I said, and I know I'll repeat myself, but I like to emphasize on this because I see it on so many places and so many businesses are always chasing for new patients and new new clients and new leads, but they always ignore, almost always ignore the the current database. So it's so much more you can do by just just having a good foundation. And I feel like the more you go down the funnel, you need to make the best, always make the best out of your current database.

Dr James:

It's the low-hanging fruit. Question How often should we email our patients?

Marius:

I what I normally do is it depends on what you want to promote. So if it's like a normal content, I would say once a week, once every two weeks, you can do that. And if you obviously offer to subscribe to unsubscribe at any time, uh that will you know reduce the complaints and whatnot. But when it comes to promoting something aggressively, like uh open day, so you know, if you have an open day, let's say in a month's time, then do it at least once a week. So you know, you can do it twice this week and then a time next week, and and then try to keep them engaged if that makes sense.

Dr James:

What about the content of the emails, the copy, if you will? Is that something that you suggest dentists should do themselves or should they hire somebody to do it for them?

Marius:

I always say they they need to hire someone because I mean they can they can have their input because it makes a difference. But when you have someone that it does this for a job, it makes a huge difference. It's it's there's things like you don't even think about uh just changing the headline of an email can have a huge impact on your conversion rate.

Dr James:

Hell yeah.

Marius:

So instead of saying, you know, Inviseline Open Day, 1st of November, you can say we offer free Invisalign consultations in a month's time, or you know, things that would make sense for patients, not for you as a dentist.

Dr James:

Thousand percent. Okay, let's go back to the top of the funnel that we were talking about earlier. You know how you said in the example that you said you put 100 leads into the top of the funnel and only 10 become paying patients, shall we say? Only only 10. Uh, how can I say this? Accept a treatment plan, right? Yeah. So there's a whole load of steps there. There's initial contact, there's follow-up, there's getting them booked in, there is uh ensuring they attend the appointment and also accept the treatment plan. And because every time there's a next step in the funnel, there's always loss, there's always some drop in terms of the people who sequentially go from the top to the bottom. So the idea is to have as few layers as possible.

Marius:

Yep.

Dr James:

In your opinion, where do dentists go wrong on this? Where do you see the biggest drop-off in their funnel when they're losing leads who are great leads? They're inquiries, they come through the top, and they you know, in those dental practices that you work with that tend to lose a lot of leads before they get to the bottom of the funnel and actually become paying customers and accept a treatment plan. Where do you see dentists most commonly? Where where what are the big mistakes? Like if you had a checklist and you were like, okay, well, it's probably this, or it's most commonly this, or this, or this, or this, I'm interested to know.

Marius:

Yeah, of course. Um, first of all, the calls, that's the main thing, because obviously no one will answer the phone after hours. So when we implemented this system, we've seen a huge increase in bookings. Just because, you know, if you think about it, people work until five or six, which is similar to your practice. So they only after they're looking for an appointment, only after they researching. And they probably not be able not being able to book during their working hours or whatever. And I find that having an AI reception is the answer phone calls and guides patients, that would be the first thing to look at. Then also, how fast do you reply to patients? So let's say they submitted a form on your website and it's 8 p.m. You're just home, you don't care, you know. And then the first email they got is the next morning, which is, you know, they probably won't even remember that they submitted the information. So I would say be engaging, try to create automations so they get a reply straight away, and it's personal, it's not just a random thing, you know. If they inquire for checkups, make sure that email will mention checkups, and it's just keeping them engaged as fast as possible. And then also obviously having a chatbot which will be more personal, it acts like a almost like a human, so they feel like they speak to someone rather than just having no chatbot or you know, just a sequence chatbot. And it's just you know, keeping them more engaged. I think I think that's that's where dentists lose a lot of patience.

Dr James:

Interesting. Okay, one for the AI cynics in the audience. Is AI good enough in 2025 to handle patient inquiries to dental practice?

Marius:

Um, not all of them. I mean, I always say it's a tool that can be used to improve, not to replace anyone, you know, like a receptionist or someone that's human and answers phone calls. It's just a tool that you can use after hours or during the weekend, and even if it increases your conversions by, I don't know, a couple of leads a week, you know, it's still something is you're still missing calls. And this is something that you could you could help your practice to gain more um gain more bookings.

Dr James:

Makes complete sense because during office hours you might have someone there. Outside of office hours, your options are either make them wait to the next day and then hope that your receptionist that he or she has enough time because they're so freaking busy, right, to actually get back to the leads. This is another huge problem. Um that happens a lot in dental practices. They get leads, but they can't actually get back to them. Um so if your options are make them wait or get the AI bought, in your experience, AI is at such a level now that the the uh the the speed that it is able to react offsets any potential well, it won't be quite to the same standard as a receptionist, so it the the speed that it responds offsets that slight drop in person personableness, I guess is the word. Yep. Yeah, or or the the the slight drop in the authenticity factor of having an actual person calling you, it uh it's worthwhile. So dentists, dental practice should should look at this, is what you're saying.

Marius:

Yeah, of course, yeah.

Dr James:

Interesting. And tell me this the AI bot, should that book people in, or will it just talk to them and say, hey, a human is gonna call you back soon? How does what does the AI bot actually say to these people?

Marius:

Yeah, it depends what system you use, but most of them they can do both things. So providing that it's they're based on the same system, they can book appointments directly, or they can just send like an SMS or uh an email with a booking link. So just trying to make it as simple as possible for patients, even after hours. And there's one thing that I didn't mention, I completely forgot about. Uh, when we track websites, when we track the patients to see what they're doing on the websites, sometimes we see that they just visit the fee page and shortly after that they just exit the website without booking an appointment. So it's also how you structure your fees. And I know you can't really change them based on the patients, because obviously it's your prices. But if you have too many of these, then obviously you need to do something about it because you're losing patients just because you mentioned that you need a 100 pounds deposit, for example. And you know, if you change that to 20 pounds, 40 pounds deposit, that might actually have an impact. So when we build a website, we look at all of these things. We don't just build a website, we look at your systems as well and how we can implement them to convert more.

Dr James:

Nice. So the website is top of the funnel, and basically, all these methods of gaining attention SEO, meta ads, Google ads, organic socials are basically all funnels or methods of generating of driving traffic towards the website, in your view.

Marius:

Not necessarily. No, I mean you can nowadays you can just get leads by having ads with the landing page, or I mean, essentially you'll need a landing page because you make a huge difference. But there's so many things of getting leads nowadays that you know it feels like you know the website becomes just a brochure. But my point is don't leave it as a brochure because if you do, that's what you will become. So I'm not saying to guide all the traffic towards your website, I'm just saying, you know, there's things that you might be missing out just because of your website. So simple things like I said, just changing, adding a booking system or changing the photos that could actually improve your conversion rate.

Dr James:

Nice, Marius. If anybody wants to reach out to you off the back of what we've talked about today, either about a website or more general marketing, where are they best off finding you?

Marius:

Yeah, so I always say, you know, I'm not here to sell websites to people, but I'm here to provide information so they can ask the right questions before making a decision. So if they uh if they have any questions, they can find us on alignmedia.co.uk or on Instagram, Facebook, align media everywhere. And if they personally Want to contact me just info at a linemedia.co.uk, and I'll be able to reply myself.

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Dr. James Martin

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