What Marketing a New Dermatology Practice Should Produce in the First 90 Days
Ninety days after you unlock the door, a new dermatology practice should be running a calendar that’s 60 to 70 percent full without you calling in favors, a Google Business Profile that shows up in the local map results for skin searches in your city, somewhere north of 25 reviews, and a paid search campaign with numbers you can read at a glance: spend in, calls out, appointments booked.
That’s the target. Most of the work that gets you there happens before you see a single patient.
Here’s the short version of how to market a new dermatology practice: build local search visibility 8 to 10 weeks before opening day, publish a real page for every procedure you want to fill, advertise the two or three services with the best margin instead of everything you offer, collect reviews from your first week forward, and make sure a human answers the phone. Most practices need 60 to 90 days of consistent effort before bookings get predictable.
You’ve probably already talked to two or three agencies who promised page one rankings in 90 days. For a domain that didn’t exist last month, competing against derm groups with fifteen years of history, that promise is fiction. Paid search buys you patients in week one. Organic rankings and your Google Business Profile are what make month nine cheaper than month one. You need both, in that order.
One thing specific to dermatology: the medical side (acne, rashes, skin checks, suspicious spots) usually fills faster than new owners expect, because those searches carry urgency and insurance attached. The cosmetic side fills slower than they hope, because patients shop, compare, and wait. Plan your attention and your budget around that gap.
| Timeline | What you’re doing | Why it has to happen then |
|---|---|---|
| 10 to 8 weeks before opening | Google Business Profile created and verified, domain live, phone number chosen, booking path decided | Verification and indexing take weeks, not days. Starting at opening means starting from zero. |
| 6 to 4 weeks before | Procedure pages written, real photos shot, review request built into your EHR workflow, referral target list assembled | Nobody writes 8 service pages during opening week. It won’t happen. |
| 2 weeks before | Google Ads campaigns built and paused, call tracking and conversion tracking installed, front desk phone script practiced | Ads with broken tracking waste your first month of data. |
| Weeks 1 to 4 open | Ads live, first reviews requested at checkout, referring offices visited in person | This is when your cost per booked patient is highest and most fixable. |
| Weeks 5 to 12 | Cut what didn’t book, expand what did, start publishing content for the searches you want to own | You finally have real data instead of assumptions. |
Step 1: Start Marketing Your New Dermatology Practice 8 Weeks Before You Open
Your Google Business Profile is the single highest-leverage asset a new practice has, and it’s free. It’s also the one thing that punishes you for waiting.
Create it as soon as you have a signed lease and a real address you can receive mail at. Google will want to verify you, sometimes by video, sometimes by postcard, occasionally by making you resubmit because the suite number on your sign doesn’t match the one on your listing. Build in time for that headache.
While you wait on verification, do the boring groundwork:
- Pick your primary category (Dermatologist) and add secondary categories for what you actually do, like Skin Care Clinic or Medical Spa if cosmetic is part of the plan
- List every service as a service item, using the words patients use (“mole removal,” “acne treatment,” “skin cancer screening”) rather than CPT-speak
- Get your name, address, and phone consistent everywhere it appears: Healthgrades, Zocdoc, Vitals, WebMD, Yelp, Apple Maps, your insurance directory listings
- Upload 15 to 20 real photos of the space, the signage, the waiting room, and your team. Stock photos get spotted instantly
Those directory listings matter more in healthcare than in most industries, because insurance directories and health sites rank well and patients genuinely use them. A mismatched phone number across four sites is a small problem that quietly drags on your local rankings for a year.
What goes wrong here: practices use a tracking number as their main listed phone number, or they list a suite that the landlord later changes, or they set up the profile under a personal Gmail that the office manager who leaves in March controls. Use a practice-owned account. Write down who has access.
Step 2: Give Every Procedure You Offer Its Own Page
A homepage with a services grid and a bio page will not carry you. Patients search for a specific problem, and the page that matches that problem is the one that ranks and converts.
At launch, you need six things live: a homepage that makes clear where you are and how to book, a page for each of your top four or five procedures, provider bios with real credentials, an insurance and payment page, a location page with parking directions and a photo of the entrance, and a booking path that works on a phone in under a minute.
Each procedure page should answer the four questions every patient has before calling: what is this, am I a candidate, what does it cost or what’s the range, and what happens at the first visit. Describe the treatment plainly and let your clinical judgment govern what you claim. Don’t promise outcomes. State medical boards regulate how practices advertise treatments and results, and the rules vary, so have your own compliance or legal counsel review your claims language and any before-and-after photo policy before it goes live.
The insurance page deserves more respect than it usually gets. A big chunk of derm calls start with “do you take my plan.” List every carrier you’re credentialed with by name. It’s the most-visited page on plenty of derm sites and it takes an hour to write.
Mobile matters more than your designer’s portfolio. Most of your traffic will be on a phone, standing in a kitchen at 9pm. If the tap-to-call button isn’t visible without scrolling, the design is losing you money no matter how good it looks on a desktop.
Step 3: Pick Two Services to Advertise, and Put Real Money Behind Them
New owners want to advertise everything. That’s how you end up spending $4,000 across nine campaigns and learning nothing about any of them.
Do the margin math instead. Take every service you offer and write down three numbers: revenue per patient, contribution margin after supplies and provider time, and how often that patient comes back. Cosmetic services usually win on margin per visit. Medical derm wins on repeat visits and referral volume. Both are legitimate answers. Pick based on which one your specific practice needs to cover overhead this quarter.
Say you’re opening a two-provider practice in a metro of 400,000 with four established derm groups already there. Three of them have 200-plus reviews and a decade of rankings. You’re not out-ranking them on “dermatologist” this year. But you can buy the click on the two or three specific procedures you’re set up to deliver well, and you can win on being the practice with next-week availability while they’re booking six weeks out. Availability is a real marketing advantage for a new practice and it expires. Use it while you have it.
Budget honestly. In our experience, clicks on competitive cosmetic dermatology terms in mid-size and large metros often run in the $8 to $25 range, and medical derm terms come cheaper. That means a $1,000 monthly test gives you a few hundred clicks and no statistical confidence about anything. Plan on $2,500 to $5,000 a month in a competitive market if you want to learn something usable inside 30 days, and accept that month one is tuition.
| Channel | What it does for a new practice | Time to first patient | Honest limitation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google Ads (search) | Buys visibility on high-intent searches immediately | Days | Stops the moment you stop paying. Costs rise in competitive metros. |
| Google Business Profile and local SEO | Puts you in the map results where most “near me” clicks go | 4 to 12 weeks | Review count and proximity drive rankings, and you control only one of those. |
| Referring physician outreach | Steady medical derm volume with no acquisition cost per patient | 2 to 8 weeks | Requires in-person time and fast note turnaround. Not delegable to a vendor. |
| Instagram and Facebook ads | Builds awareness and demand for cosmetic services | 2 to 6 weeks | Weak for urgent medical searches. Creative quality decides everything. |
| Reviews | Raises conversion on every other channel at once | Ongoing | Slow to accumulate, easy to lose with one bad front desk week. |
Install conversion tracking before the first ad serves. Call tracking on the ad number, form tracking, and booking confirmations tied back to the campaign. Without it you’ll be guessing in week six, and guessing is how a new practice ends up paying $600 for patients worth $180.
Step 4: Earn Your First 30 Reviews on Purpose
A derm practice with 8 reviews sitting next to one with 240 loses the click even when it ranks. Review volume is a conversion lever and a ranking factor at the same time, which makes it the best return on a front desk’s time of anything here.
Build the ask into checkout during your first week open. Not a campaign you’ll launch later. A habit, starting day one. The workflow that holds up: your medical assistant or front desk says a specific sentence at discharge (“we’re brand new, and reviews are how people find us, would you mind leaving one?”), then your EHR or CRM sends a text with a direct link within two hours of the visit. Text beats email by a wide margin here.
Two rules that keep you out of trouble. Never offer anything of value in exchange for a review, including entry into a drawing. The FTC’s endorsement rules are explicit about incentivized and non-independent reviews, and healthcare is not a category where you want to be the test case. And never gate the ask so that only happy patients get the link, which is a policy violation on most platforms.
When you respond to reviews, keep it generic. Thanking someone publicly for “coming in for your Botox appointment” confirms a patient relationship and what they were treated for, which is a privacy problem you created for yourself. “Thank you for the kind words, we appreciate you choosing us” is the whole playbook.
Step 5: Give Referring Physicians a Reason to Send the Next Patient
This is the channel new derm owners underuse, and it’s the cheapest volume you’ll ever get. Primary care, pediatrics, OB-GYN, urgent care, plastic surgery, oncology, and podiatry all generate derm referrals constantly. Most of them are sending patients to a group that takes five weeks to get them in.
Build a list of 20 offices within a 15-minute drive. Visit them. In person, with the office manager, not by mailing a brochure. Ask one question: what makes a specialist easy for you to refer to? You’ll hear the same three answers everywhere. Get the patient in quickly, send the note back fast, and be reachable by phone when there’s a question.
So build for those three. Hold two or three slots a week for physician referrals. Get consult notes back inside 24 hours, which is the single most reliable way to earn a second referral. Give the referring provider a direct line that doesn’t route through your main phone tree.
Then track it. A simple spreadsheet with referring office, month, and referral count tells you within one quarter which relationships are real and which drop-off visits were a waste of an afternoon. Revisit the top five quarterly. (Side note: the office manager remembers who brought coffee and who sent the note back on time. Only one of those two things actually moves referral volume, but doing both doesn’t hurt.)
Step 6: Fix the Phone Before You Raise the Ad Budget
Every launch we’ve watched leak money leaked it at the phone. You can buy 90 clicks, generate 14 calls, and book 4 patients, then conclude that Google Ads doesn’t work for dermatology. The ads worked fine. The phone didn’t.
Pull your call recordings from week two and listen to ten of them. You’ll hear some version of these: the call went to voicemail during lunch, the front desk quoted a six-week wait without offering a cancellation list, someone asked about pricing and got “it depends” with no follow-up, or the caller was told to check the website for insurance info.
Fix in this order. Answer every call during business hours, which sometimes means a shared coverage plan or an answering service for lunch and after 5pm. Return missed calls within 15 minutes, and send an automatic text to any missed call that says a human is calling back. Give the front desk a price range they’re allowed to say out loud for your top advertised services. Track booking rate per caller as a real number, because a front desk converting 35 percent of new-patient calls and one converting 70 percent produce completely different businesses on identical ad spend.
Doubling your booking rate costs a training afternoon. Doubling your ad budget costs thousands a month, every month. Do the free one first.
After Day 90: What to Keep, What to Cut
By day 90 you have data, so start making decisions with it instead of with your gut.
Cut any ad campaign that hasn’t produced a booked patient at a cost you can defend against that service’s margin. Keep the one or two that have, and raise their budget by 30 percent, not 300. Look at which procedure pages actually generated calls and write three more pages on adjacent topics, because that’s your evidence of what your market searches for.
Then shift some attention to the patients you already have. A new practice’s second-year growth comes largely from recall and reactivation: annual skin checks scheduled before the patient leaves, cosmetic maintenance reminders at appropriate intervals, and a simple campaign for anyone who came once and never came back. That machinery costs almost nothing to run and it compounds. We’ve written separately about patient reactivation campaigns, and the short version is that most practices have three months of revenue sitting in their existing patient list.
Your month four to twelve plan is unglamorous: keep the review engine running, publish two pages a month for the searches you want to own, revisit your top referring offices quarterly, and read your numbers monthly instead of annually.
If you want a second set of eyes before you spend your launch budget, book a free strategy call. We’ll map out what your specific market looks like, what your top two advertised services should be, and where your launch plan is most likely to leak patients before they ever reach your schedule.