How Targeting Aunties and Uncles Built a 6-Location Dental Business in 3 Years

One Procedure, One Audience, SGD 20K Per Month

They ignored every other dental procedure and put 100% of their Google Ads budget into tooth implant keywords, running bilingual campaigns in both English and Chinese to reach adults over 50 who were actively searching for implant solutions. This is Singapore, so half the target demographic searches in Mandarin, and ignoring that means ignoring half your potential patients. Separate ad groups, separate landing pages, and separate call scripts for each language, all running simultaneously.

The monthly ad spend was SGD 20K or more, and every dollar went into one procedure category. That sounds aggressive, but the math worked because a single converted implant patient can be worth SGD 3,000 to SGD 8,000 depending on the case, which means you do not need many conversions per month to make the numbers work.

All ad copy stayed compliant with the Healthcare Services Act (HCSA), the law that governs how clinics in Singapore can advertise. That meant outcome-focused headlines instead of specific pricing, while the landing pages in both languages handled the actual conversion with clear next steps: call this number, fill in this form, get a response within minutes. The entire funnel was designed around medical marketing compliance requirements while still being direct enough to generate action.

The 5-Minute Reply System That Made the Ads Work

This is where most clinics fail. They spend SGD 20K on ads, leads come in, and the receptionist calls back 3 hours later, by which point the patient has already called two other clinics and booked with whoever answered first.

They had a hard rule: every enquiry gets a human response within minutes. Not an autoresponder or chatbot, but a trained receptionist with a specific call script designed for implant enquiries, someone who knew the procedure, knew the pricing tiers, and could handle the most common objections on the spot.

The call script was designed to accomplish two things in a single phone call: book the appointment and collect a deposit upfront for the initial consultation. That single step changed the economics of the entire funnel, because once a patient pays, they show up. No-show rates dropped dramatically compared to clinics that rely on free consultations and hope the patient remembers to come in.

The result was a clinic that did not just generate leads but generated committed patients with money already in the system before they ever walked through the door.

The Numbers Behind 6 Clinics

Six clinics opened in approximately 3 years. Each location followed the same playbook: implant-focused Google Ads, bilingual campaigns, 5-minute response time, and deposit collection on the first call. The system did not need to be reinvented for each location. It needed to be executed consistently.

SGD 20K or more per month in ad spend sustained profitably across all locations. The cost per acquisition stayed within target because the campaign focused on one high-value procedure with clear intent signals. Patients searching for "tooth implant singapore" or the Chinese equivalent are not browsing. They are buying. That intent quality kept conversion rates high even as ad spend scaled.

The implant-focused strategy created a clear market position that competitors could not easily copy. Not because the ads were secret, but because they could not replicate the operational system behind them. Any clinic can bid on the same keywords. Very few can match the 5-minute response time, the trained receptionist, and the deposit-on-first-call process that turns a click into a committed patient.

The takeaway for any healthcare practice: your marketing problem is probably not your ads. It is what happens between the ad click and the first appointment. If you want to find out where the gap is in your patient acquisition system, get a free marketing audit. Fifteen minutes of honest analysis can save you months of wasted ad spend.