Dental
What a dental clinic can and cannot post
Dental is one of the few industries where the best content is also the most legally sensitive. The material that would work best is the material you often cannot use, and clinics tend to respond by posting nothing but stock images of teeth.
A note before anything else. We are a content company, not your compliance advisor. Everything below is about how to make good content inside the constraints. What the constraints are, in your specific case, comes from your regulatory college and your privacy advisor.
Consent is specific, not general
The mistake worth avoiding is treating consent as a box that gets ticked once. A patient consenting to treatment has not consented to appear in your marketing, and a patient who agreed to a photo for their chart has not agreed to Instagram.
Consent for content should name what is being captured, where it will appear, and make explicit that declining changes nothing about their care. That last part matters, because there is a power imbalance in the chair and consent given to be agreeable is not really consent.
It should also be revocable. People change their mind, and a clinic that takes a post down without argument is a clinic patients trust.
What to film when you cannot film patients
This is where most clinics get stuck, and it is a much smaller problem than it looks. The highest performing dental content we have seen is almost never a patient.
Film the team. Patients are choosing a person to trust with something they are afraid of, and meeting the hygienist before the appointment does real work. Film the room, especially if it is calm and modern, because a lot of avoidance is built on a memory of a clinic from twenty years ago. Film the sterilisation process, which nobody outside dentistry has ever seen and which quietly answers a question everyone has.
Film the answers to the embarrassing questions. What happens if I have not been to a dentist in ten years. Will you judge me. Does it hurt. Can I stop partway through. Those are the searches, and almost nobody answers them like a human.
Anxiety is the actual competitor
Clinics tend to market against other clinics. For a large share of the people you want, the competition is not another dentist. It is continuing to do nothing.
That changes what content should do. Persuading someone to pick you over a clinic down the road is a small market. Persuading someone who has been avoiding it for six years to book at all is a large one, and the content that does it is reassurance rather than credentials.
Where new patients actually come from
For a local clinic, most of it is search and reviews. Someone decides they need a dentist, searches, and picks from the map results. That means the Google Business Profile and the reviews attached to it are doing more work than the feed.
The feed does something different. It decides whether your name is familiar when it appears in those results, and it is where a nervous patient goes to decide whether you seem safe before they call.
The front desk is part of the marketing
This is the least popular thing to say to a clinic and the most reliably true. A missed call from a nervous first time patient is not a missed call. It is a person who has now used up the courage it took to dial.
No amount of content fixes a phone nobody answers.
Common questions
Can a dental clinic post patient photos on social media?
Only with the patient's clear, informed and documented consent, given specifically for that use. Health information is protected and a patient agreeing to treatment has not agreed to appear in marketing. Written consent that names where the content will be used, and makes clear the patient can decline without affecting their care, is the standard to work to. Where there is any doubt, your regulatory college and your own privacy advisor are the authority, not a marketing agency.
What can a clinic post if patients will not consent?
A great deal. The team, the technology, what a first visit actually involves, answers to the questions people are too embarrassed to ask, the sterilisation process, what happens to a nervous patient. None of that identifies anybody, and the anxiety-reducing content usually outperforms before and after photos anyway.
Are before and after photos allowed in dental marketing?
They are common, but they carry both privacy obligations and advertising standards obligations, and the rules on what you may claim vary by regulator. Consent has to be specific to that use, and the images must not imply a result you cannot reasonably promise. Check your college's advertising standards before building a strategy around them.
What kind of dental content actually brings in patients?
Content that lowers fear. The single biggest reason people avoid a dentist is anxiety, not price and not distance. Showing what a visit is actually like, who they will meet and what happens if they have not been in years does more to convert a nervous patient than any offer.