The Hazards of Hiring an In-House Marketing Person

October 28, 2026 - Kaycie Smith
Category: Marketing

Some dental practices like to hire an internal marketing person. While this can be a good move, some caution is needed. While such a person can be a great asset, there have been times when we have seen these marketing hires lead to problems. Digital marketing, especially for dental practices, is a very specialized field requiring expertise in multiple areas:

• coding
• search engine optimization
• marketing strategy
• content writing
• graphic design

Your in-house person may have expertise in one of these areas, but can make mistakes if they lack training and experience in the others. We have also seen practices make wrong moves that have run afoul of Google policies, resulting in serious penalties. Let’s illustrate with some case studies.

Case Studies of Digital Marketing Mistakes

We will change some details about these cases to preserve confidentiality, but the circumstances are accurate.

First Case – Violating Google Business Listing Policies

One dental practice had a part-time marketing assistant that they trusted because she had worked for them for many years. She had an idea to edit their Google Business Profile to help publicize that they had added an associate to the practice, so she changed the practice name in the Profile to reflect that. She changed “Metropolis Dental Aesthetics” by adding “Dr. Jones and Dr. Smith” to the business name. The problem here is that it violates Google’s guidelines. The name of the practice in the Google Business Profile has to be exactly the same as the real-world business name, as documented by photographs of the sign on the building and possibly other means. We didn’t want to offend her, but we changed it back before it could trigger a suspension of the practice’s Google business listing.

Second Case – Hiring a Designer Who Doesn’t Know SEO

In another case, a client went through our normal design process and approved a re-design for their website. We sent the design to one of our web developers who began coding it. While working with the web developer, the client decided to ask for some tweaks to the design. Then the client had an idea—she knew a graphic designer that she thought was really good and asked the designer to make some significant enhancements to the design.

Then, when the re-vamped website was launched, the traffic began to drop precipitously. That brought the design issue to the attention to the rest of our company. It turned out that the graphic designer, while she was excellent at design, knew very little about SEO and the changes had confused Google as to what the subject matter of the website was, negatively impacting the rankings of the website. We had to roll back some of the changes, which, in a few months, restored the websites rankings and traffic.

Third Case – Violating Google Reviews Policies

In another case, a client’s marketing person decided to hold a raffle for their patients. If the patient made a comment in Facebook, they got entered into the raffle, and if they wrote a Google review they got three entries.  She was unaware that Google has a strict policy about offering any incentives for online reviews. So Google then sent them a warning, removed some of their reviews, and restricted them from posting any additional reviews.

To compound the problem, she then appealed the restriction without correcting the problem. Google specifically cautions against appealing before issues have been addressed because doing so can prolong the process or lead to additional consequences. In this particular instance her premature appeal resulted in Google extending the restrictions another 30 days and posting a public warning on their Google Business Profile. When we discovered the appeal, we intervened and were able to prevent any further damage and restore their reputation.

The lesson here—go ahead and encourage reviews but please let us handle these business listing matters. We have years of experience navigating SEO, websites, Google Business Profiles, and digital marketing, and we want to help practices make informed decisions before a seemingly harmless change becomes a much larger problem. When you have marketing ideas, check with us and we will be happy to lend our expertise to any marketing issue.

Fourth Case – Paid Search Mismanagement

While attempting to set up a client with Google paid search ads, we learned that something a previous person hired by the practice to run their ads had run afoul of Google policies resulting in a permanent ban from Google ads. We have negotiated Google suspensions for clients, but this was a permanent ban and there was nothing we could do to rescue their account.

Fifth and Most Outstanding Case

The prime example of the mistake of an in-house marketing person was one hired by one of our clients who had been with us for four years. While we had helped the client significantly increase her practice, the marketing person told the dentist that she could get better results from another website company, so she quit. A year later, she called and told us that their new patient numbers were down, the marketing person was fired, and asked if we would take her back. This was four years ago. She has been our client ever since and continues to expand her practice.

Our Recommendation for Your In-House Marketing Person

We have seen cases where an in-house marketing person has been a great asset for a practice. We have found that those who have been most successful in helping their practice to grow have been willing to defer to our judgment.

We’re here to help. We feel that we have, on our team, the leading minds in dental marketing. We are a certified Google partner, subscribe to leading forums discussing the latest in SEO strategy, and have hired people with high levels of expertise in marketing strategy. We have experience across many dental practices in a wide variety of marketing situations, and our purpose is to help your practice succeed. We have a number of clients who have been with us ten or fifteen years and who have learned that they can trust us to look after their best interests.