[00:00:00] Narrator: Welcome to the Dental Marketing Podcast, a podcast that helps dentists win in the online world of modern day marketing. Each week, we cover the most cutting edge marketing tactics and strategies that are working right now across our client base to drive leads, phone calls, and more new patients for dentists.
[00:00:21] Now here’s your host and founder of Kickstart Dental Marketing, Chris Pistorius.
[00:00:30] Chris Pistorius: Hey everybody. Welcome to the No BS Dental Marketing podcast. I’m your host, Chris Pistorius, and on this show we talk about straight to the point, no BS tactics, tricks, and strategies to help you grow your dental practice. Now, there’s no fluff here. Just great information that you can start using today to increase your bottomline.
[00:00:51] So if you’re a dental practice owner, a manager, front desk professional, or really whatever, be sure to click the subscribe button on this page so that you can keep up with all of the latest tips and tricks. So today I want to talk about something that most dental practices kind of ignore or maybe don’t even realize that’s important in terms of marketing, and that’s the power of branding, authority, and credibility.
[00:01:17] Now, In the past, branding, marketing type campaigns have been for the Coca-Colas of the world, Chevy, Ford, you know, major Fortune 500 corporations who have pretty much unlimited budgets to be able to just do branding. And what I mean by branding is, you know, no direct call to action just to get your name out there and you know, just to float it out there so people can continually see your name and logo over and over again.
[00:01:48] Typically these are in the forms of like billboards. You know, anything display like print wise can be considered branding opportunities as well. And like I said, most of the times these have always been known to be used by big major corporations with big budgets. Well, that’s not the case anymore.
[00:02:08] And when we run marketing campaigns for dentists and with Kickstart Dental Marketing, we do a lot of this kind of credibility and authority, and some branding play because not only can it be done cost effectively but it can also gain big rewards and results when it comes to driving new patients into the door.
[00:02:32] So today I’m gonna concentrate on those subjects and I’m gonna give you some real world tips and advice and things that we do here in our agency to do this for our clients so that you can do it on your own or at least start thinking about, you know, compiling a strategy for that. So, a few reasons why I think it’s important to do this kind of credibility, building credibility and authority.
[00:02:53] And let me separate that for a second. When I talk about building authority and credibility, what I mean, I want you to be, if you’re an implant dentist, I want you to be the go-to source and the expert for dental implants in your market. Okay? Whether it’s Tuscaloosa or it’s Farina, Illinois, whatever it may be, the real goal here is for you to be the overall authority and credibility so that after you do this for a while, people think of dental implants.
[00:03:23] And if you’ve done your credibility and authority campaign well enough, they’re gonna think of you first. That’s really the goal here. And the reason you do this is there’s a sincere competitive advantage here. So what that means is that when we take on clients, we’re always looking for kind of that, what we call a U S P or Unique Selling proposition.
[00:03:44] What makes you different from all the other dentists in your market? Why should somebody drive past 10 different dentists to get to your office. Right. And this can be a big part of it because there aren’t a lot of other dental practices doing the things, and using the strategies that I’m about ready to talk about.
[00:04:05] And so when you can start doing things that your competitors aren’t doing, that makes you stick out and you’re a little bit different, right? And that’s really what marketing’s all about. Marketing’s all about getting somebody to know you, like you, and trust you. You know, that’s really kind of the bottom line.
[00:04:21] And building credibility and authority about general dentistry or implants or whatever you may be, is really gives you that competitive advantage. And we’ll talk a little bit more about that in a second. It gives you also, when you do this correctly, it gives you some pretty clear competitive advantage in terms of SEO.
[00:04:43] And if you’re not familiar with seo stands for Search Engine Optimization, and it’s basically just a, it’s a marketing tactic on how to get your website to rank highly on Google in the organic section, the non-paid section. And there’s a lot of things that go into a good SEO campaign. Things that you do on your website, things that you do off of your website.
[00:05:06] But when you’re doing credibility and authority building and branding there are some things that natively spin off of that, that will help you with SEO. For instance, one of the strategies we like to employ and we’ll talk about in just a minute is content. Content is king and you’ve probably, if you watched this podcast or listened to this podcast a lot you probably have heard me say that a few hundred times, but content is king in this world of marketing we live in now.
[00:05:34] And there’s been some changes at Google over the last just few weeks that’s really even made that more important, and we can talk about that in another episode. But content is king. And when you’re doing authority and credibility marketing, you’re gonna be building a lot of content, okay? And don’t think of it like you gotta sit down with a pen and write out all this content.
[00:05:54] That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m gonna give you some specific strategies that you should start using tomorrow or today that will help you create this content and then get it published in the right places. So another thing is that goes, I think, into building authority and credibility as social proof.
[00:06:12] And you know, for the past several years everybody’s talked about getting more reviews from your patients online, Google, Yelp all these other places, right? And that is important. It is still is today. And you should continue to that. However, we’re living in this world now where everybody knows it’s important to get reviews and everybody has reviews.
[00:06:32] If you go search for a dentist in your market, you’re very likely to see many practices with several hundred reviews now over the years, because. Technology’s made it easier now, right? You’re, you’ve probably got software now that will automatically send a review request to your patients, you know, if they’ve been there for that day.
[00:06:52] So technology has come a long way in helping to get these reviews onto websites and to make that process easier. However one thing that we try to stress is, yeah, we help our patients, we help our clients with those text-based reviews as well, but what we’re seeing has way more power than those are actual video testimonials from patients.
[00:07:16] And the barrier for video testimonials has always kind of been, well, I gotta have, you know, my patient come in, I gotta have a film crew come in, maybe you know, I don’t exactly know how to do it. It’s gonna be a lot of money and I just don’t have time to deal. Well, we’ve come up with a way, and I’m gonna give you a little bit more details this in a second.
[00:07:38] A way that you can just simply send somebody a link. A text message essentially, and when they click the link, essentially a video will pop up from you and it’ll say, thanks for your visit today. If you don’t mind, it would really help me out if you could answer these four questions for me and send them back to me.
[00:07:56] And so when they go through the process, they actually record the answers to the questions that you’re gonna give them on their cell phone camera. And at the end they just simply hit they check market box that, yeah, this is all hipaa, cool. And you can use this in your marketing campaigns. And they hit submit.
[00:08:15] And basically their responses come to us as an agency and we edit the video, put the to nice background music and, you know, put their name on it and we turn it into a video testimonial essentially. And it just takes a few minutes for the patient to do. It’s really straightforward and basic and they just hit submit in the convenience of their own home.
[00:08:40] Now you won’t get as many of these as you will review on Google or Yelp or wherever it may be because, you know, it is a little bit more work because they have to actually be on camera. Some people don’t like that. But we give them the choice to leave audio reviews as well, so they don’t even have to use the video portion.
[00:08:59] But that’s not really the point. Even if you got one or two of these a month, right, that starts to add up and over a few months, you’ve got 10, 12, you know, 20 video. Testimonials from your patients, and there’s more than one marketing study out there that shows that the power of a good video testimonial from a patient is umpteen times more powerful than just a regular text-based review.
[00:09:27] So we do, we built this technology out to allow our clients to be able to get more of those video testimonials, cuz they’re already doing a pretty good job with getting text-based reviews on Google and Yelp and whatever. This just supplements that. It kind of puts it on steroids. And so what we do is once we have some of these videos, we can really leverage them for credibility and authority, right?
[00:09:50] Because then we can take them and we can share them on social media. Right. We do some Facebook advertising and boost those videos to people within the community that are kind of within their demographics. We build out a special section on their website that’s video testimonials, and we place all of those there.
[00:10:10] We put these video reviews on YouTube and multiple places online where it can be found. There’s a lot of ways to leverage it. We can take snippets of those videos, like a little 15 second snippet of somebody saying really nice things about you, and use that in an advertisement on YouTube or on TikTok or on Facebook.
[00:10:33] Things like that. So kind of circling back to that content as king, these video testimonials will create tons of great content for you that we can leverage in a lot of different ways. And it makes you stick out because, yeah, there’s other dentists that have video testimonials, right? But there aren’t very many.
[00:10:52] If you look around and even though they have video testimonials, they don’t necessarily leverage them the right, right way. They’ll just put them on their website and call it good. But there’s a lot of different strategies and different plays that you can make when you do this the right way. How we do that is we’ve got some software that we use internally.
[00:11:10] There are other companies out there that allow you to, to do this. You may want to take a look at a company called Video Ask, V I D E O A S K. They’ve got a pretty good platform for it. You will have to build it out, and kind of customize it. But that’s a similar solution to what we’ve built that allows that to happen.
[00:11:29] So, and then we also do some automated marketing connected to it. So it’ll automatically send that out so somebody doesn’t have to manually send each one out. Right. So we typically get a list of every month of, you know, maybe 10 or 20 patients that are like friendlies, right? That you know, is gonna, you know, bend over backwards to help you out.
[00:11:48] And that’s typically who we send those to. Very powerful strategy. Again, not many people doing it. They exist out there, video testimonials, but not quite like this. So definitely would recommend that as part of your authority, credibility, social proof type marketing package.
[00:12:05] Now the next thing is, might get some strange views here, but we really encourage our clients to get into podcasting.
[00:12:15] Basically what I’m doing right now, and I’ve been doing it for quite a while and it’s really helped my business, honestly, because it is an authoritative type play. It builds credibility, right? People see me and they hear me talking about specific things within marketing that I know a lot about, and it makes them typically feel more comfortable about hiring my agency versus maybe somebody else.
[00:12:42] Right, so it’s the same thing holds true for dentist. Right. You know, we do a what’s called a podcast in a Box. Yeah. So somebody signs up with us. One of the things that we really want them to do is podcasting, and we make it easy for them. We send them a box. It’s got a nice camera in it. It’s got a nice microphone in it.
[00:13:01] And it’s got detailed instructions on how to do the podcast, some topic ideas, things like that. Okay. We send that out to them, and we have them once a month and some clients do it more often than this, but once a month at least do a podcast on a particular topic, right? It might be, you know, if they’re an Invis, big Invisalign provider, they’re talking something about Invisalign.
[00:13:23] I mean, there’s 10 podcasts you could talk about. Just different things within Invisalign. Right. But it’s not, doesn’t have to be just about their services. It can be things like, you know, behind the scenes here at ABC Dental. Right. And it’s also, we have some clients that’ll interview other employees or interview vendors.
[00:13:40] Right. So maybe you get a vendor like from Invisalign, right? Somebody from the company actually doing an interview with you, and you ask them questions about Invisalign and things. There’s a thousand different topics really, that’s not necessarily the point, but what happens is that they shoot this podcast, they send us the files, so it’s typically a video file and an audio file.
[00:14:02] We make it real easy. We detail exactly. You don’t have to be a techy person to do this at all. Once you do it once or twice, that’s usually about you. You become an expert almost. And they send us, our team the files and we produce it for them. So that’s where kind of the magic happens, because we’ve got some video editors that will actually, you know, like mine they’ve got like an intro and an outro and a logo like the one you see here.
[00:14:28] We create all of that stuff for them. And then we actually take the finished podcast and we put it out onto Spotify and Apple Podcasts and YouTube and all over the place. But again, guess what we’re creating here. Awesome content. Content is king, right? So we’re having our clients produce this really expert type advice to potential new patients.
[00:14:52] And it’s got so many benefits. So the things that we just talked about, we’re creating tons of content that we can take snippets and clips of and create ads with. We do create kind of a podcast page on our client’s website where we list all of our podcasts by title so people can go back and review those.
[00:15:11] It’s just incredible authority and credibility because people go to your website, let’s imagine, right? Okay. And they see all these video, you know, testimonials there. That’s great. Real people talking about their experience with you. They see now podcasts where you’re actually talking about a potential service that they need and they’re actually watching the doctor or somebody that they’re actually gonna interact with.
[00:15:40] And that’s impressive. Right, because you know, obviously if they’ve gone to these lengths, they know what they’re talking about with Invisalign or implants or whatever it may be. So really big authority and credibility play here. Just tons of good things that can happen out of this. Podcasting will also help SEO results because as we publish those podcasts out, they create back links to your website.
[00:16:05] So you’re getting back links from very high-end type podcasting websites, and that’s gonna help. A backlink is a link from another website to your website, and it’s still a big ranking factor in the eyes of Google, like how authoritative the links. Coming from to your website and, you know, people will share these podcasts, they’ll download these podcasts.
[00:16:28] It’ll get a lot of traffic to your website, which is another ranking factor with SEO. So a lot of good stuff happens from this. Right. And you may think, and I gotta be honest with you, I did too in the beginning you may think, who in the heck is gonna listen to a podcast from a dentist, right?
[00:16:47] Well, you would be shocked because we track this and we can track how many people have actually downloaded the episodes or seen the episodes, whatever it may be. You’d be shocked by how many people actually pay attention to this stuff. So they do like it. So not only is it, you know, credibility and authority, it’s people are actually getting good information from you about services that they’re probably gonna buy at some point.
[00:17:09] So just a lot of good stuff here.
[00:17:11] Narrator: Are you looking to grow your practice but are a little unclear on what the best way is? Let us help you out. We have over 13 years of experience in helping practices just like yours, increase new patient growth. Just go to KickStartDental.com and sign up for a free strategy session where we will give you some great insights on how to take your practice to the next level.
[00:17:38] Chris Pistorius: The next thing that we like to mix into our authority, credibility type campaigns. Our Facebook ads, Instagram ads, and TikTok ads. Okay. And we like to use the video portion of all three of those. And we’ve already touched on this a little bit.
[00:17:56] We’re taking all of this content that you’re producing with video testimonials podcasting episodes. And we’re basically putting them into clips on ads. Okay, so we use the video portion of the ads in all three platforms. What I like about, especially Facebook and Instagram ads is that, and if you’ve tried Facebook ads and Instagram ads before, and you might have the opinion that they’re not good or they cause you know, not very good quality leads, you’re probably right.
[00:18:29] But if you’re expecting good quality leads from Facebook ads and Instagram ads, Then you’ve probably been misled because when you think about Facebook and Instagram, when you run an ad on those platforms, it’s really called what I consider disruptive advertising. Because you’re actually distracting someone when they go to Facebook or Instagram.
[00:18:53] They’re not looking for a dentist. 99% of the time, they’re not looking for a dentist when they log into Facebook and Instagram. Right. What they’re doing is they’re trying to catch up with friends or see what their friends are up to or bragging on their kids or whatever it may be. Right. It’s disruptive because the ads that show up there are, you know, nobody’s buying anything off of Facebook typically.
[00:19:16] Okay. So, it’s just kind of distract advertising. And so when you do that, a lot of dental practices make the mistake of putting on there like, Hey, $49 free cleaning an exam, or, you know, free consultation or trying to sell them something. Well, look, they’re on Facebook. They’re not wanting to buy anything.
[00:19:37] They’re not looking for a dentist, and you’re trying to force not only your message on them, but you’re also trying to force them to take action on an offer that they’re not interested in. Now, that’s completely different on a platform like Google, right? Because with Google, when we do ads, we can target people that are specifically typing in dental implants in my city.
[00:19:59] We know that they’re actively shopping for implants or Invisalign or whatever it may be, right? That’s when it’s appropriate to show them an offer like that, like a hard close offer, not when they’re just browsing Facebook and they have no intention of hiring a dentist. Okay? So the way you’ve may have done Facebook ads and Instagrams in the past could be off a little bit.
[00:20:21] Now on the other side of that, when somebody’s on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, things like that, they’re looking for entertainment. They’re kind of in relaxed mode. It’s okay to advertise on those platforms. It’s how you advertise. Don’t throw an offer at them. Get your name out there. Share important information that your demographic would be interested in.
[00:20:41] See, Facebook and Instagram are so powerful because it allows us to target exactly who it is we want to. We can target a 25 to 35 year old female with two and a half kids owns a golden retriever, owns their own home, and they live within this zip code or this circle that we draw. That’s how powerful that is. And only those people that we target in that demographic will ever see your ad or your name or whatever it is.
[00:21:06] So that’s why it’s very important to know who it is that you wanna bring into your practice and what those demographics look like. But it can be very powerful if you send the right message. Most of the times with our Facebook ads, we’re just trying to send a message of, hey, we’re here. Have you heard of us? If not, you will. And kind of that repetitive game of just showing your name.
[00:21:26] We show a video of a satisfied patient with a video, right? We show you talking about dental implants or teeth whitening in your podcast. And we start slowly gaining the trust of these people. And so when it does come time where they need to take their family to a dentist or whatever it may be, guess who they think of.
[00:21:46] They think of you because you’re the local expert in whatever it is you are an expert in. Because we’ve been promoting that for month, over month, over month, and you don’t have to spend thousands of dollars blasting Facebook and Instagram. It’s pretty affordable to do this in most markets. Way about, you know, maybe as much as half the price as it would be for Google Ads.
[00:22:08] So when you mix in video testimonials, podcasting, Facebook ads, it’s a very powerful strategy that will get the attention of a lot of people, and it will get your name out there. It’ll create a buzz. You’ll become the industry expert in implants, children’s dentistry, Invisalign, whatever it may be.
[00:22:31] These things are heavily overlooked in our industry, and these are things that you can do starting today to start building credibility and authority in your market. We can even help our clients write books. Even what we typically have them write are short ebooks. Okay. And there’s multiple ways to do this.
[00:22:52] If you have the time, you can sit down and write, you know, a 40 page ebook about dental implants or about Invisalign, whatever it may be, right? But we get these eBooks done. There’s also technology out there now that can help ghost write these books.
[00:23:08] There’s all kinds of debate going on in the digital marketing world right now about a service called Chat GPT. Check it out. It’s a free ai, artificial intelligent tool that’ll basically, you give it some ideas of what you wanna write about and it’ll kick out 500, a thousand words on that topic. And you basically use it as your own. You can go in and rewrite some things and There’s a lot of debate on whether this stuff should be be used.
[00:23:37] Personally, my agency uses it more as a reference tool, so like, we’re like, you know, we need a new way to talk about dental implants, so we’ll put that into the, the AI bot and it’ll kick out some ideas for us. We don’t just copy what they put in and say, all right, here’s the content. We rewrite it, but it gives us a fresh perspective and some new idea that we can use.
[00:23:58] So anyway, that’s how you can produce eBooks pretty quickly. Okay. Or you can sit down and absolutely write it yourself too. But these are things again, along with, you know, the video testimonials, the podcasting. These are things that we can leverage as well, because we can take an ebook on Invisalign and we can put it on your website.
[00:24:17] And oh, by the way, just, you know, give us your, this is 29.99 on Amazon, but if you just give us your name and email and phone number we’ll email it right to you now, for free. Well, there’s a lot of power in that because then you’ve captured a lead, right? Because anybody that’s willing to give up their information for an Invisalign ebook probably means that they’re interested in Invisalign of purchasing Invisalign, right?
[00:24:42] You can leverage it that way. Again, we can do paid ads on your ebook to get it out there. We do typically like to get our eBooks published on places like Amazon because then you become a published author on Amazon. It’s fairly straightforward to do. I’ve done it. I have a book out there right now.
[00:25:01] It’s back there. Oh, back here. The blue book right there. You can find that on Amazon. Getting ready to write another one. Again, credibility authority. So if I’ve written books about marketing for dental practices, there’s a pretty good chance I have a pretty good idea of what I’m doing with that, right?
[00:25:18] So again, credibility, authority, but we’ll get these eBooks typically produced onto Amazon. It’ll be for sale on Amazon. It’s not about making money off the sales of the book on Amazon. It’s about getting on there and the credibility and authority that goes with that. I think I’m gonna wrap it up cuz I could keep going on this, but I think you get the point by now.
[00:25:38] I’ve given you two, three, maybe four different strategies that we use here at our agency to help our clients become more credible and more authoritative in their markets. And it works awesome. It makes them stick out from the competition. And it just will build marketing assets for you that will continue to pay off for years to come.
[00:26:00] So I really urge you to do that. And so at least e even if you do one of those things that we talked about, you know, you’re a hundred percent ahead of where you were yesterday, right? So I really recommend you start doing that if you have any questions on it. Or if you do need some help with it a shameless plug.
[00:26:18] Let me know. Just go to our website at KickStartDental.com. There’s a free strategy session button at the very top of the website. Click there, schedule a time. It’ll be with me personally. I do all of our initial consultations and I can give you some ideas on what I would do for your practice specifically.
[00:26:36] But do something right. Do do something like this. Cause I really believe that it’s gonna help your practice. So anyways, thanks so much for listening in today. I hope it was helpful. If you did like the episode please hit that subscribe button like we talked about before, we released new episodes like this every week.
[00:26:52] And I’m even kicking around the idea of doing like a dental marketing tip of the day if I can actually find the time to do one every day. So hopefully we’re gonna start producing that pretty quickly. But you know, really I think that, you know, busy professionals like you who’s either running a practice, own a practice or whatever, just need some no nonsense advice and straight to the point type advice.
[00:27:14] And that’s what we try to provide here. So if you hit that subscribe button, you’ll get alerted about all of our new episodes. Okay, well, thanks again and looking forward to our next episode next week.
[00:27:24] Narrator: Thanks for joining us this week on the Dental Marketing Podcast. Make sure to visit our website, www.KickStartDental.com/podcast, where you can subscribe to the show in iTunes, Spotify, or via rss so you’ll never miss a show. While you’re at it, if you found value in the show, we’d appreciate a rating on iTunes or if you’d simply tell a friend about the show.
[00:27:47] That would help us out too. If you are ready to grow your practice, then you might want to schedule a free strategy session with us. Just go to kickstart dental.com and click the free strategy session button and give us 15 minutes of your time to change your practice forever. Be sure to tune in next week for our next episode.
[00:28:05] And thanks for listening to The Dental Marketing Podcast by Kickstart Dental Marketing, where dentists go to win online.
