Anatomy of a Campaign is a Freshpaint series that takes you inside real healthcare marketing campaigns – breaking down the strategy, execution, and measurement behind what made them work. In each edition, we deconstruct a real-world campaign so you can:

• Understand the strategic thinking behind it
• See how it was activated 
• Learn how performance was measured
• Walk away with practical, transferable insights for your own campaigns

Imagen Dental Partners is a dental partnership group supporting 120+ independent practices across the United States.

From her homebase in Scottsdale, Arizona, Imagen VP of Marketing Allison Horn leads growth strategy across the group’s many rural and urban markets, balancing acquisition performance with operational realities inside each practice.

In one rural Minnesota market, Allison and her team launched a disruption marketing campaign that more than doubled new patient growth, increased production by 38% year over year, and maxed out practice capacity.

This is the anatomy of that campaign — and what multi-location specialty practice marketers can learn from it.

Make sure to grab the downloadable blueprint at the end.

Anatomy of the Campaign

The Market Context

Location: Rural Minnesota
Practice Type: General dentistry within a multi-location group
Challenge: Increase sustainable new patient growth without dramatically increasing digital spend.

The surrounding region included nearby towns with limited hygiene capacity and patient access constraints. Demand existed and patients needed care, and with fragmented access, there was a clear opportunity for Imagen’s local practices to expand awareness into underserved geographic pockets, while maintaining strong downstream conversion performance.

Inside the Campaign’s Growth Engine:

• Awareness expanded into underserved towns
• Search captured high-intent follow-up demand
• Operations improved show rate (51% → 80%+)
• Measurement tracked 30-day, 90-day, and 12-month patient value
• Marketing tied its value directly to revenue KPIs, not clicks

1. Campaign Objective: Drive Production Growth through Targeted New Patient Expansion

Goals for the practice were:

• Sustainable new patient growth
• Higher production per patient
• Strong case acceptance (patients accepting recommendations from their dentist for follow-on care, such as crowns or implants)
• Manageable scheduling for operations
• Measurable 12-month patient value

For Allison and her marketing team, the campaign goals were not surface-level or oriented around click volume. Marketing helped own many of the downstream outcomes, including sustainable patient growth volume and operational feasibility of patient intake.

2. Audience Strategy: Identify and Activate Underserved Demand

The objective was clear: expand the addressable patient pool. The team analyzed:

• Geographic proximity to underserved towns
• Dental visit likelihood indexing
• Insurance alignment (PPO and cash-pay mix)
• Historical production data
• Practice capacity

Instead of intensifying bidding in the same digital pool, the strategy targeted adjacent communities with limited dental competition and patients who had a high likelihood of seeking care within the next 12 months.

3. Channel Strategy: Multi-Channel Demand Creation + Intent Capture

While Imagen Dental Partners invests heavily in digital intent capture (Google Search, LSA, Meta within compliance guidelines), this campaign introduced a strategic upstream layer of direct mail to complement lower-funnel digital channels. 

Allison studies market conditions to inform channel selection, using the framework she’s developed below. Her ethos is: “We don’t default to Google. We look at market conditions first.” 

Channels activated for this campaign:

• Targeted direct mail to defined geographic clusters. Direct mail messaging emphasized immediate appointment availability, accessibility, local trust, and clear scheduling pathways, making it as reassuring as possible for patients to take the next-step action.
• Paid search to capture follow-up intent
• Dedicated tracking numbers for attribution

With search capturing the demand generated by the mailers, the channels worked in conjunction to push patients toward booked appointments.

4. Operational Alignment: Build Conversion Infrastructure Before Scale

Before the campaign launch, the Imagen team ensured practice operations were set up for success, equipping the practice with the tools, scripts, and frameworks to handle the hopeful increase in patient interest. Operational readiness included:

• Scheduling capacity plans
• Front-desk intake scripts
• Insurance validation processes
• Call tracking accuracy
• Appointment follow-up communication

This alignment produced a measurable downstream impact. Across the portfolio, focused improvements around patient intake communications and follow-up led to an increase in new patient show rates – from 51 percent to more than 80 percent – in one year. 

By taking responsibility for the full conversion path, not just generating demand, Allison’s team ensured marketing tactics translated directly into measurable business growth.

5. Full-Funnel Measurement: From Click to Production

Performance was evaluated across the complete lifecycle:

1. Appointment booked
2. Patient showed
3. Treatment accepted
4. Production generated
5. 12-month patient value
6. Retention

This lifecycle lens ensured marketing was tied directly to revenue contribution. The team measured not only volume, but also downstream patient quality, via KPIs like case acceptance, visit frequency, and 12-month value.

This allowed leadership to see that multi-channel investment was driving sustainable production growth, and not simply short-term booking spikes.

6. Results: Measurable Growth with Operational Impact

The rural Minnesota initiative was executed at a single practice within the multi-location group, and Imagen Dental Partners expanded it into adjacent towns once performance validated the model.

Within the first year, the pilot location saw:

• A 106% increase in new patients
• A 38% production growth year-over-year
• Highest production year in practice history

The campaign performed so strongly that it ultimately had to be paused, as the practice reached scheduling capacity and was booking several months out. Notably, even after pausing the campaign for nearly a year, the practice continued to grow year over year. 

This sustained performance reflects true demand expansion rather than short-term promotional lift. Awareness had been extended into adjacent underserved communities, and the patient base continued driving revenue through retention and follow-on care.

What This Campaign Proves

This campaign illustrates what happens when specialty marketing moves beyond intent capture alone.

By combining targeted awareness expansion, disciplined search capture, operational alignment, and lifecycle measurement, Imagen DPO transformed a rural growth challenge into sustained production expansion.

The lesson here isn’t “go try direct mail,” but rather that growth comes from a disciplined decision model that aligns marketing, operations, and finance around long-term patient value instead of short-term lead volume.

From this campaign, Allison distills five principles that multi-location healthcare marketers can apply in any market.

Allison’s five tactical takeaways are:

1. Don’t scale tactics; scale decision models.
2. Allocate budget based on 12-month value, rather than CPL.
3. Match channels to market conditions.
4. Fix show rates before increasing spend.
5. Build a feedback loop between operations and marketing weekly.

Together, these principles can turn marketing from a lead generator into a production growth engine.

Ready to Move Beyond Search-Only Growth?

If you want to operationalize Allison’s principles inside your own specialty or multi-location practice, we built a companion framework so you can do exactly that. Download: From Demand Capture to Demand Expansion: A Growth Blueprint for Specialty Marketers

Inside, you’ll get:

• A diagnostic formula to determine whether your channel mix is expanding demand or just capturing it
• A step-by-step method for calculating and evaluating blended CAC
• A framework to tie acquisition source to downstream production
• A structured way to design more effective full-journey campaigns
• A practical incrementality test you can run in 60–90 days

If your organization is experiencing:

• Rising CPCs with flat patient growth
• Plateauing production despite increased digital spend
• Difficulty defending awareness investments
• Leadership pressure to unlock incremental growth

Then it’s time to shift from channel optimization to growth architecture. Let us show you how.

Download the Growth Blueprint