Dental Media offers a comprehensive dental marketing service — website, SEO, PPC and more. But like most agencies in this space, the website is theirs, the contract is long, and the pricing is bundled in ways that make performance very hard to evaluate. Here's what that actually means for your practice.
The Problem With Dental Media
Dental Media is a full-service dental marketing agency — website design, SEO, PPC, social media, and more. Their breadth is their pitch. But breadth without transparency is a problem: when everything is included in one monthly retainer, it becomes very difficult to know whether any specific part of the service is actually working.
Dental Media clients regularly report that their monthly reporting shows activity — things done, keywords tracked, content published — but struggle to tie that activity directly to new patient enquiries. That ambiguity is structurally convenient for agencies charging monthly regardless of outcomes.
"The reports looked impressive. But when we sat down and asked how many new patients had come from our Dental Media website in the last six months, nobody could give us a straight answer."
At 78 Dental, every service is scoped, priced and reported separately. You always know what you're paying for — and you own your website from day one.
What Dental Media Clients Typically Report
Reports show tasks completed and keywords tracked, but rarely make a clear link between marketing spend and new patient appointments.
Dental Media presents their sites as custom — but the underlying structure and design patterns are shared across their client portfolio.
Minimum terms of 12 months or more are standard. Practices that want to leave before the term ends face significant contractual complications.
The website and its content belong to Dental Media. When you leave, so does everything they've built — you start again from nothing.
Side-by-Side Comparison
| Dental Media | 78 Dental | |
|---|---|---|
| Website ownership | Dental Media retains the website — lost on exit | Yours outright from day one |
| Website type | Template with custom branding applied | Fully bespoke — built from scratch |
| Code quality | CMS-based, variable Lighthouse scores | Hand-coded HTML/CSS — 100 Lighthouse score |
| Copywriting | Template copy adapted per client, limited originality | Written entirely from scratch for your practice |
| Monthly cost | £700–£2,000/month ongoing | £2,500–£7,500 one-off (+ optional £495/mo SEO) |
| Contract length | 12+ month minimum terms | No contracts — ever |
| Reporting transparency | Activity-focused, limited patient attribution | Clear monthly reporting with direct attribution |
| SEO approach | Bundled into package, hard to evaluate independently | Dedicated SEO retainer, evaluated separately |
| PPC / Google Ads | Available but bundled, opaque spend management | Available, transparent — client owns the Google account |
| Who you speak to | Account managers across multiple service areas | The person doing the work — directly |
| Delivery time | 10–18 weeks typical | 4 weeks guaranteed |
| What you keep if you leave | Nothing — site and all content stays with Dental Media | Everything — full file handover |
| 5-year total cost (estimate) | £42,000–£120,000+ in retainer fees | £2,500–£7,500 + optional SEO retainer |
The Three Biggest Dental Media Problems
When website, SEO, PPC, content, and social are all bundled into one monthly fee, it is structurally impossible to evaluate any single component. Dental Media's reporting tends to show activity — pages written, keywords tracked, ads running — but rarely shows a clear, attributable line between marketing spend and new patient bookings. That ambiguity benefits the agency, not the practice.
Dental Media offers everything — and that's partly the problem. When an agency is managing your website, SEO, PPC, social media and print in parallel, none of it gets the specialist focus it deserves. At 78 Dental, we do three things: websites, SEO, and Google Ads. We do them to a high standard because we're not spread across every possible marketing channel.
Leaving Dental Media means losing the website, the content, the SEO history, and — if your Google Ads were run through their account — potentially your campaign data and historical performance. Starting from scratch after years with an agency is a significant hidden cost that never appears in the monthly retainer figure. At 78 Dental, everything you pay for belongs to you.
From a Former Dental Media Client
"We left Dental Media after 18 months. We were paying over £1,400 a month and when I asked our account manager to show me how many new implant patients had come from our marketing, they couldn't. That was the moment we decided to switch. 78 Dental showed us patient attribution from month one."
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