Cheltenham-headquartered Portman Dental Care instigates major digital strategy

By Nicky Godding

24 February 2022

Share

The Business Magazine article image for: Cheltenham-headquartered Portman Dental Care instigates major digital strategy

Oxfordshire based creative digital marketing firm, The Evergreen Agency, is to develop a new digital marketing strategy for Portman Dental Care, the Cheltenham-headquartered national chain of dental clinics.

The partnership is set to see a renewed strategy and focus surrounding digital marketing, including search engine optimisation.

Aaron Rudman-Hawkins, Managing Director of The Evergreen Agency, aid: “Portman Dental Care is a very exciting organisation that is growing rapidly. I strongly feel this will be a fantastic collaboration for years to come and the team are excited to get to work.

"Portman Dental is providing a service that massively improves people’s lives through embedding confidence, and we wanted to be a driving force behind the growth of Portman’s mission.”

Natalie Scutt, Senior Digital Marketing Manager at Portman Dental Care commenced on the decision to focus on search engine optimisation to deliver growth: “As a business with a strong emphasis on local, we needed a partner who could accommodate this alongside providing support for our group websites, with strategic, technical & content experience. In Evergreen, we’ve found just that and we're really excited to see where the partnership can take our business in the digital landscape.”

Portman currently has 200 dental practices across the UK, Ireland and Benelux, including 16 orthodontic Portman Smile Clinics, caring for more than 700,000 patients. Its practices offer a range of specialist, private and NHS dental care services, and are focused on continual development both in clinical skills and innovation.

The company won ‘Outstanding Business of the Year’ at the Dental Industry Awards for 4 consecutive years (2017 to 2020), as well as nationally recognised awards within many of its individual practices.

Portman Healthcare turned over more than £116 million in the year 2020, with gross profits of £54.6 million, but after expenses this resulted in an operating loss of £4.2 million thanks to Covid-19 closing its practices. From the end of March to mid-June practices were closed to patients with the loss of all private fee revenue.

Sam Waley-Cohen, founded Portman Dental Care in 2009 with the desire to be the best rather than the biggest privately-focused dental group.

By Nicky Godding

Nicky Godding is editor of The Business Magazine. Before her journalism career, she worked mainly in public relations moving into writing when she was invited to launch Retail Watch, a publication covering retail and real estate across Europe.

After some years of constant travelling, she tucked away her passport and concentrated on business writing, co-founding a successful regional business magazine. She has interviewed some of the UK’s most successful entrepreneurs who have built multi-million-pound businesses and reported on many science and technology firsts.

She reports on the region’s thriving business economy from start-ups, family businesses and multi-million-pound corporations, to the professionals that support their growth and the institutions that educate the next generation of business leaders.