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How Do Patients Choose A Practice Now? Story, Search, and Six Points of Contact

Alex Rasmussen watches it happen every year at the big orthodontic meetings: doctors roaming the exhibit hall, comparison-shopping dental chairs. His question for them has become his calling card.

“How are you going to spend $40,000 on chairs and not spend $40,000 to put butts in those chairs?”

Rasmussen is the CEO of Neon Canvas, the Memphis digital marketing agency he co-founded with Dr. Kyle Fagala — an orthodontist who built his own startup practice from nothing on the internet, no referral base, no family name. The origin story tells you something about the man: Neon Canvas landed its first five clients at an orthodontic conference where Rasmussen didn’t buy a booth. He rented a hotel suite across the street, stocked the bar himself, invited fifty orthodontists to hear a “million-dollar marketing plan,” and bartended his way to roughly $600,000 in business on a $3,000 budget. We had him on the Dentelligentsia podcast, and the hour was a masterclass in how patients actually choose a practice now.

You’re Yoda, not Luke

Rasmussen’s core discipline is storytelling, and his reasoning is neurological before it’s creative: brains conserve energy, which means people tune out messaging — but they lock in for story. The only two hours anyone focuses completely anymore is inside a movie.

So build the practice’s marketing as a story, and get the casting right. The villain is the smile the patient hates — the confidence they don’t have. The hero is the patient. And here’s where doctors go wrong: “The doctor wants to make themselves the hero. They want to be Luke Skywalker. But they’re not — the patient is Luke. The doctor is Yoda.” Ten years of education makes you the guide, not the protagonist.

Then tell the story you actually have. Everything communicates — the logo colors, the office design, the dog in the lobby. A third-generation practice should lean hard into sixty years of serving the same families; the two-years-out doctor competing against that legacy leans into technology, speed, flexibility, and the fact that he wears sneakers and stocks Dippin’ Dots. Neither story is better. The mistake is telling someone else’s.

His favorite proof is personal: Dr. Fagala built his practice in Memphis, where a large share of the population lives below the poverty line — no one’s idea of a dream demographic. By aiming the story at families who never thought they could afford treatment, and structuring payments to match ($500 down, insurance applied, affordable monthly), the practice now starts hundreds of cases a year and grew into a multimillion-dollar operation serving the inner city. “You don’t have to go to Austin or Phoenix. Lean into where you’re at.”

Six points of contact — and the AI answer engine

Nobody chooses a provider from one ad. Rasmussen’s working number, from decades of marketing research: it takes six or seven points of contact before someone’s ready to buy. The practice name on the kid’s hockey jersey, the blog post a mom found at 11 p.m., the drive-by signage, the friend’s recommendation, the pleasant front desk on the phone — no single touch converts, and every touch counts. That’s why he splits every budget into two kinds of dollars: branding dollars (jerseys, billboards, grocery carts — getting known) and conversion dollars (search ads, the website — getting chosen), with more weight on conversion.

The touch that’s changing fastest is the question. Patients don’t just search “orthodontist near me” — they ask long-tail questions: when should my child see an orthodontist, why do my teeth hurt when I chew gum. And increasingly they ask those questions not to Google but to ChatGPT, Grok, and Siri. The practices whose content — blogs, YouTube, podcasts — actually answers those questions are the ones whose brand shows up inside the answer. (You may notice that’s the exact strategy behind the article you’re reading. We’re not subtle.) The blog post rarely converts directly; it makes the practice the name the family already trusts by the time they’re ready.

The math, and the budget rules

What separates Rasmussen’s sales process from marketing hand-waving is that he opens with the market’s actual numbers: how many people search for braces or Invisalign in your area each month, how many competitors split that demand, what share your site captures, and what percentage converts to consultations and starts. From there the investment conversation is arithmetic, not faith — his benchmark being that $50,000 to $60,000 a year well spent should return $500,000 to $800,000 in production.

His budget rules by stage: a practice in growth mode — startup to roughly $1.5 million — should spend a minimum of 10 percent of revenue on marketing. “If you’re trying to grow and you’re not investing at least $50,000 to $70,000 — good luck.” A humming $5 million practice can throttle back toward 5 percent, and at that level $250,000 buys everything: search ads, sponsorships, influencers, billboards, the works. For a true startup, his package runs on a $30,000 to $50,000 budget covering the brand, logo, website, SEO, and Google Ads — the highest-ROI activities first.

And one structural warning that costs nothing to fix: the hodgepodge. Your sister’s brother-in-law runs the Google Ads, a buddy sells you a billboard, a former employee sold you the practice software — five vendors, no strategy, and whoever coordinated it just quit. Consolidate with someone accountable for the whole return, “one place focused on the biggest return on investment,” and stop paying five people to not talk to each other.

Where the money actually works

On Google Ads, the discipline is intent plus profile. An ad that fires on every search containing “dentist” pays for people googling how much dentists make. Rasmussen’s targeting for a practice looks like: within four miles of the location, household income above a threshold, at least one child — and only searches that signal someone choosing a provider.

On social media, he’s refreshingly honest for a man who sells it: don’t expect patients from it directly. Its two real jobs are signaling to Google that the practice is active and legitimate, and proving you are who you say you are when a referred patient checks you out before booking. Judge it as part of the holistic return, not by counting likes.

His current favorite arbitrage: local influencers. Not celebrities — the neighborhood mom with 2,000 followers who copy where she goes and what she buys. Free treatment in exchange for authentic posts can reach a hyper-engaged local audience for almost nothing. His caution comes from the same place: you’re dealing with individuals, not businesses — sometimes they don’t post, and you cut your losses.

And on AI, his advice is the same as every sharp operator we’ve had on this show, with a twist worth stealing: the output is only as good as the input, so learn to prompt. Ask the bot to ask you questions back. Demand depth. And — his actual tip — give it urgency: “Your AI loves when things are on fire.” The difference between “give me a marketing plan” and a specific, urgent, refined request is the difference between generic mush and something you’d pay for.

Bet on yourself

The personal advice landed as well as the professional. From his father: pick your battles — most interpersonal friction in a practice isn’t worth the fight it invites. From Gary Vaynerchuk’s playbook: jab, jab, jab — give your knowledge away relentlessly, because the reciprocity comes back when it matters, and “if you’re really great at what you do, by the time they copy it, you’re on to the next thing.” And to his 20-year-old self: bet on yourself. He started Neon Canvas at 34 and wonders where five earlier years of failures and lessons would have put him. “Why people don’t bet on themselves will never make sense to me.”

His parting instruction to any dentist serious about growth was characteristically direct: increase your Google Ads budget today — and if more spend doesn’t produce more return, fire whoever’s running it and find someone good, because that channel is as close to a hot-water tap as marketing gets.

The full conversation with Alex Rasmussen, “Build a Brand Patients Love: The Art of Storytelling in Dentistry,” is on the Dentelligentsia podcast. And when the story needs a setting — the visible, parkable space the brand deserves — talk to us.

And follow Alex Rasmussen on Linked In or check out the Neon Canvas website.