Smarter Media Strategy Transforms National Ortho Group’s Patient Growth
From Wasted Spend to a Scalable Patient Engine
Canadian Orthodontic Partners (COP) knew something wasn’t adding up. Despite significant investment in digital marketing, the leads weren’t turning into patient starts, and marketing couldn’t prove its impact on revenue.
With 65+ locations across Canada and a house-of-brands model, they needed more than surface-level optimization. They needed a system built for conversion.
In August 2023, COP partnered with Cardinal to overhaul their media strategy. Together, we shifted the focus from lead volume to revenue-driving actions (consults and treatment starts) and built a scalable, data-driven model that adapts to each clinic’s capacity, market dynamics, and seasonal shifts.
The result? A flexible strategy that cut cost-per-consult by more than half and more than doubled conversion rates, proving that smarter spend leads to real growth.
Canadian Orthodontic Partners
As one of the biggest orthodontic groups in Canada, COP has more than 65 locations across eight provinces. Their goal is to help community-based clinics treat patients with personalized orthodontic services, delivering expert care and achieving outstanding results.
COP operates as a house of brands, with a network of individually branded orthodontic practices throughout Canada. They offer an extensive range of support services spanning professional development, HR and administration, and marketing. Clinics can leave everything from recruitment to email marketing in COP’s hands while they focus on dedicated treatment.
Why COP Needed a Strategic Reset:
- Underperformance across clinics created financial pressure
- Media spend lacked clinic-level precision
- No clear connection between marketing efforts and booked patients
What Success Looked Like:
- Smarter media allocation based on operational capacity and market opportunity
- Clearer visibility into campaign performance at the clinic level
- Increase high-quality patient consults and treatment starts
From One-Size-Fits-All to Hyper-Localized Media Strategy
COP’s goal was clear: drive more patient starts (not just leads) while making every marketing dollar work harder.
Cardinal built a performance-focused media strategy tailored to COP’s unique business model that could flex by clinic, scale with demand, and convert across every major touchpoint.
Our strategy focused on:
- Prioritizing clinics with more provider availability and growth potential
- Adjusting budgets by clinic need, seasonal demand, and performance
- Localizing and translating campaigns to match community demographics
- Using integrated data sources (Google, Meta, HubSpot) to guide optimization
Reaching Patients Across Critical Touchpoints
Paid Search
We developed a new paid search strategy focused on clinic-level outcomes and higher-quality leads. By combining high-intent keywords (like “braces near me”) with lower-intent terms (like “Invisalign for teens”), we captured demand across the patient journey.
Budgets were dynamically allocated based on clinic capacity, seasonality, and performance. Most campaigns used shared budgets, but low-capacity clinics received dedicated funds for tighter control.
Ongoing testing of ad copy, bidding, and landing pages ensured continuous improvements and stronger conversion rates.
Meta Ads
To stretch COP’s budget and lower the cost-per-lead, we layered Meta ads alongside search campaigns.
We used Instant Forms with additional qualifying questions to filter for leads ready to book. Not only did this change improve Meta lead quality, but it also had an impact on overall campaign efficiency.
To stay compliant with Meta’s evolving 2025 privacy policies, we adapted ad creative and messaging formats to ensure continued performance within a more restricted environment.
Performance Max
We launched Performance Max (PMax) campaigns in select markets to expand reach and lower cost-per-lead.
By combining in-feed video, display text, and Discovery placements, PMax helped COP connect with potential patients across multiple touchpoints.
Layered with search and Meta, these campaigns drove higher-quality leads by reaching patients wherever they were in their journey and delivered a measurable drop in CPL in key markets.
Reaching Diverse Communities with Multilingual Ads
Reaching all potential patients within the clinics’ diverse communities was a key objective. Working closely with COP, we identified clinics that served mostly French and Mandarin-speaking patients to find the biggest opportunities.
With Google’s support, we translated and ran engaging ads in French and Mandarin for patients in these areas.
Whether building ads for patients who speak English, French, or Mandarin, tailoring ads to meet the needs of a clinic’s local patient base was fundamental to ensure that COP’s diverse audience knows that help is available.
From Leads to Starts: A 97% Surge in Patient Consults
COP’s new strategy focused on what matters: booked appointments, not vanity metrics. By leveraging deeper-funnel conversion signals and better data utilization across platforms, we built a system that delivers performance by location, season, and service mix.
From 3/1/2024 to 3/1/2025, COP achieved:
- 97% increase in overall consults
- 58% decrease in cost-per-consult
- 105% increase in paid media conversion rates
This transformation didn’t just cut waste; it aligned marketing with operational capacity and gave COP the confidence to scale with precision.
