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 B. S. Tactics tricks and strategies to help you grow your practice. There’s no fluff here. There’s just great information that you can start using today to help increase your bottom line. So if you’re a dental practice owner, manager, front desk professional or really whatever, just be sure to click the subscribe button on the page so that you can keep up with all of our tips and tricks.
Now today we’re gonna talk about your questions. I’ve had several questions emailed into me or through facebook or twitter. Um Just general questions about what dentists and orthodontists and implant dentists and pediatric dentists. Just what they want to know about marketing specifically. And so I thought it’d be good to go over maybe nine or 2100 of those questions and answer them with direct to the point exactly what I think in my 215 years of dental marketing experience and perhaps you’ll have a lot of the same questions that they do and hopefully you’ll find this very helpful.
So let’s get right to it. Number one chris what kind of online marketing strategy specifically do you recommend for dental practices? I can’t answer this one too directly because it really depends. Now here’s the problem with a lot of the my industry is that a lot of agencies out there. Not all of them but a lot of them just have a dental marketing campaign that they take off the shelf and it’s like an automated marketing thing and they plug it in and they use the same exact campaign for every dentist or ended dishonest or perry a dentist or dentist.
Sorry, whatever it may be and it’s the same exact campaign. And it, the problem with that is that it’s just not that effective. You have to at least some level be able to customize these marketing strategies because every city is different. Every demographic is different. Every practice is different. So it can’t be just a plug and play for everything. So I have to answer the question directly. What I’ll tell you is that it depends on what market you’re in, what your strategies should Be based on your goals and you’ve got to have some goals in place.
We’ll help you with those. But we’ve got to really start there. We’ve got to identify who it is that you want to walk through your door. What we call the ideal patient. If you’ve listened to some of my other podcasts, you’ve heard me talk about that and it really depends on what your USP is or what your unique selling proposition is. Why are you different than the 40 other dentists? Somebody might drive by to get to your office. Right? So it depends on a lot of those things.
A lot of the popular things that we use in. A lot of our campaigns are things like search engine optimization. So sc. Oh right. So it’s getting your website to rank high organically on google. But there’s some markets that doesn’t make sense because it’s just too expensive to do and it takes too long to get you in a position. It depends if you’re a new dentist or an existing dentists. There’s a lot of different um I guess a lot of different things that that could really be put into factor there.
So um facebook or not facebook but google ads are working really well for us and now they’ve just announced google local service ads. If you don’t know what those are yet. Check one of my life I think it’s my last podcast or two podcasts ago. I really get into the details of lok google local service ads. Social media is always strong if you know how to do it and you boost the right things. Content is always king. You need to be creating content every week for your practice and getting it out their content like what I’m doing now for you guys.
I’m trying to put good quality content out every week to you guys so you can get free tips tricks and advice. So those are some of the main things but there’s also you know online reviews, video reviews, there’s a text to chat on websites, we’re having really good luck with that. Um just a lot of different things out there. So question number two how can I best utilize S. C. O. And social media to reach potential patients. Yeah well um first of all the best way to utilize S. C. O. Is to make sure you’re doing it and make sure you’re increasing your visibility when somebody types in things like dentists near me or dentist in your city or cosmetic dentist near me.
Things like that. Um So utilizing it is kind of the easy part right? It’s you know doing the work that you need to do with S. C. O. To get you there. Um Social media have a pretty strong opinion on this I think paid social media in in certain cases works really well. Um I think though that just organic posting like just posting on your facebook page does very little to bring in new patients for you. Now there’s ways and there’s a Lot of social media people that will probably hear this and freak out a little bit on me.
But it’s the truth. I’ve been looking at results for 14 years almost with this stuff. If you’re just posting general information on your Facebook page and you’re hoping that it’s gonna bring a bunch of new patients in. It’s not just stop doing it because you’re wasting your time. Just direct to the point right now there are ways that you can do it to make it more engaging. You have to think about who you’re. ideal patient is and you have to write to those people so you have to write and post things that’s important to them, things that they’re actually going to be interested in hearing.
They don’t want to see you your new patients special five times a week. Okay. Sorry. They just don’t, they want to see things that are going on in the community, things that their kids would be interested in, Things going on at the schools, things like that, engaging content that they’ll trust. That’s where you can have some effect in terms of referrals and things like that. But to get new patients, you need to boost those. So that means spend a little money with facebook with linkedin with twitter with instagram and get those beyond your reach because there’s only, let’s say you have 100 followers to your page when you post something, there might only be 10 people that actually see it of your followers Because Google’s very pay to play.
But if you boost it for five or $10, you’ll get a lot bigger audience and not just your followers, but people that are actually just living in the community. Okay. One of the best ways to measure the success of my digital marketing campaigns. I’ll tell you one way that’s not the best and that is asking patients how they heard about you and you’re probably saying what, that’s, that’s how we do it. And I hear about that all the time. And let me put it this way, if you don’t have another way to gauge it or understand it or really measure it.
Yeah, that’s what that’s going to be better than doing nothing. But by the time somebody people, it’s not in their mindset to tell you where they found you. Their mindset is to check a box to do and that’s to make a dental appointment. Right. So any other question to them before that appointments actually scheduled is just like okay whatever, I’ll check the box to get past it so I can get this done. And they think of the first thing that comes to their mind, Google facebook saw you on tv.
I’ve got clients that said that they’re getting new patients from tv ads and they don’t run tv ads. Right. So it’s just not a real accurate way to measure it. What is is actually understanding where every lead comes from. Okay, how they reached out to you. Was it a, you know they call you, did they do a text to chat? Did they fill out a form? Um and there’s ways to do that all of our clients are set up so that we know um where all leads came from, whether they were good verified leads or they’re not.
We have a team of people to actually listen to every call that comes in. They looked at every form that’s filled out and so at the end of the month we can show our clients all right, Here’s 65 new patient leads that came in and they’re verified and they came from paid ads or Google paid ads or yahoo or linkedin or being or yelp or wherever. So digital marketing is capable of that. Um sometimes it’s better to use a professional though to put that kind of stuff in place.
Let’s see what’s the next one here. Um What are the benefits of using automation for dental marketing? We don’t do a lot of automation here. We don’t support a lot of automation. Um I still believe that our strategies are good because we are still kind of homegrown marketing people buy from people by interacting with people. Right? However I do think that there are ways to use automation and we do use some of those now. So like for instance some of our clients we build out you know one year or longer nurture email campaigns. Okay.
So that means they’ll say somebody comes and they download one of our e books for one of our clients and their implant dentist. And they download our download our guide for um you know the top 1003 things you need to know before you decide to get dental implants. Right? So we write that book for them, we put it on their website, they fill out a form to get that free download. Well that’s somebody that’s obviously interested in dental implants. Right? So once they give us that information and they download it we put them into this funnel and we actually send them an email about every two weeks, three weeks, something like that, just following up with them.
Um it’s called a nurture sequence. That’s something that can be automated, not the content. We write all the content of the emails but we put it into some of our technology that will automatically send those emails out every two or three weeks. So that’s where I support automation. I also use we use a lot of like chat gpt, you probably hearing a lot of the ai like content creation, you have to be very careful with that. We don’t use it to actually create content right now. What we’re using it for is to come up with good content ideas.
So we like the idea of automation assisting us but not doing all the work for us. The problem with Ai content right now is like writing an article for you or something, is that google can detect it and they can flag it as of the recording of this podcast and um they don’t like you using not real content and they could it could potentially penalize your website rankings for using that. Okay, so those are a couple of instances of automation also don’t mind automating the process of asking for online reviews.
I mean there’s 100 different technologies out there now that does it. Um it’s not really the technology of, you know, actually sending the review request. Um It’s more what you say, how you say it, how often you follow up with them to get that review. Um But the actual automation of sending those out automatically. I don’t have a problem with that either. So hopefully that helps. Let’s see, can I use chatbots and other emerging technologies to improve customer service? Um That depends on how what you mean by chatbots.
Um To me a chat bot is artificial intelligence and it’s a it’s a like a text box that pops up and they type in their question and it tries to find the answer in its database to answer it itself. To me that is a no go. That will not help your customer service. In fact it will hurt your customer service because I don’t care how good your chat bot is. It’s not good enough to handle your patients. Okay. It’s just not, it’s a in my in my opinion is a lazy way to do marketing. Okay.
No chat, no automatic chatbots. What I would recommend though is instead of a chat bot, use a text to chat feature. So what that means is like for instance for most of our clients we set up a feature, it looks like a, you know like a chat message, right? Um and they but it clearly when they click it, it says, hey do you have a question just text us so they know that they’re going to text somebody. So they type in their question our practice gets an alert, hey you’ve got an incoming text.
Get back to them immediately and then the practice can get right back to them via text or they can pick up the phone and call them to if they want to. Um That’s that’s definitely a good way to go. We get a bunch of leads for our clients that way. Um The other thing is if you do live chat that’s fine too. So that means that there’s actually a human to human connection there right? There’s somebody in your office monitoring that chat. So when somebody has a question there’s a ding that’s played or something and I don’t have a mind.
I don’t have a problem doing it as long as you can consistently and quickly respond to those people if you know they have to wait a long time or they’re just you know they’ll just get distracted and it’ll be more of a negative experience for them than a positive one. So those are the those are really the cases where I would use what you are considering chat box. Um But where I wouldn’t is the full on automation of it. Okay um how can I create effective landing pages for my dental practice.
So a landing page for those that you don’t know um is like for instance if you’re running an ad on google ads for dental implants and they click on that ad, well where they should go is really your dental implants page right? They shouldn’t just go to your homepage because they’re looking for dental implants? They clicked on an ad for dental implants and you’re sending your home page where you’ve got a whole bunch of different services and stuff listed. Right? Well you need to send them directly to the page on your website that talks about dental implants and that’s what’s called a landing page where they land after they click the add or whatever it is.
Okay, so a good effective landing page gives them just enough information to make things interesting. I’d like to say you don’t want to try to answer every question they have because after all the goal of this is to get them to actually reach out to you with questions. That’s when you have the best opportunity of actually getting an appointment scheduled. Right? So give them good quality content. Just enough put real photos on there. No stock images of your landing page video there. If you have it. Again, content is really king here in all kinds of different content.
You know, the the Oda moments of like make sure your phone number is clearly on their your address a form that they could fill out and your text to chat buttons on there as well. So you obviously want good content and you want easy ways for them to convert make it very easy for them to actually sign up to get more information. Okay. Um let’s see, I’m going through this list of questions here. Um Here’s a good one. Number nine. What tips do you have for staying up to date with the latest trends in the dental in dental marketing?
Um There’s a lot of them. I’m a part of a lot of different like groups and you know I’ve been doing this so long that I I know some of the top groups but um well I’m also part of a mastermind group where there’s a bunch of different agencies kind of like mine, not all in dental but different industries and we meet three or four times a year and we really talk about you know what’s working well what’s not working so well in other industries and we collaborate about ideas and how to get the best results for clients.
That’s really helped us a lot. But there’s some public pages out there like search engine land um Search engine roundtable I believe is another one. Um facebook’s got all these different groups about marketing and you know you can get lost in the shuffle there pretty quickly but you know I think for us it’s incredibly important to stay on top of things that are going on. I mean I can just we can just talk about the last three months and digital marketing for Dennis and it’s changed dramatically so you really need somebody in charge of that, making sure that you know they’re staying ahead of the curve and making sure that we’re positioning you in the right spots for not just now but the future as well.
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 kickstart dental. 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. Let’s see what else we got here. Um This is a good one. How can I use online marketing to make myself different from other practices?
Um This is becoming more and more of a thing. Um Even in smaller markets now we’re seeing more competition than we ever have in dental marketing. Um And then you know that’s not even to talk about corporate dentistry. The pressure that they’re putting on individual practices too because they have large budgets. But you know honestly it’s pretty easy to compete against those guys because a lot of what they do is automated and it’s at scale and when you do something handcrafted nine out of 10 times you’re going to get the upper advantage on those folks.
So I’m not so worried about the you know corporate dentistry pressure but there are a lot of you out there, it’s it’s the truth, you know, especially if you’re a G. P. Right. So I think that the big thing, I would go back to like one of my first points was you know, be unique come up with your unique selling proposition. Why is it somebody should choose you versus the 40 or 50 other dentists in your area. Right. And you know just, hey, I went to, I went to the best school or I have the best staff.
That’s not good enough. You’ve got to really get cree with us. There’s a great book out there by john Jan jan. So I believe his name is um it’s called duct tape marketing and it talks about kind of creating your unique selling proposition and creating things that are kind of uh you know, to help make you different and you know, take a look at that book. That’s one of the first books I read when I started this a long time ago and it’s got some really good advice for that in there a couple more here.
Um Yeah what tips do you have for creating effective email campaigns for dental practices? I think that there’s a lot of opportunity with email campaigns for Dennis and we have really good luck with these. But the problem is is that some of our clients say oh well I’ve got email marketing cover den tricks does it for me? I just, you know, hit hit a button and it automatically sends out, you know, reminders and you know, I can send out a newsletter and all this other cool stuff.
Well let me stop you right there. What you’re getting from den tricks or lighthouse or all these other companies that have this software just packaged in is nothing unique. It’s blah blah content that they write for hundreds or thousands of dentists worldwide. Okay. What makes an email marketing campaign effective is unique content unique to you unique to them and it’s refreshing content that they want to read. I mean I swear if I love my dentist, but if I get, you know, any many more newsletters from them on, you know, this is why you should go to the dentist every six months or eat apples and fruits and vegetables.
You know, I might lose it and you know, I try to tell them. But you know, but anyway, um write compelling content. Content is king, I’ll say it again, right, compelling content that people are gonna want to read and they’re gonna wanna share. Right? So I think just keep it real. Don’t automate it, you know, plan out your strategy when we when we do email campaigns, we write 30 or 40 emails at a time and we put them into that nurture campaign and then we keep adding to it.
So I think that’s that’s the key there, let’s see, do a couple more here. Uh huh. What are the best strategies for driving more website traffic with digital marketing. You know what I don’t care about website traffic now. We don’t really concentrate on website traffic but we concentrate on our actual new patients that are coming in right now, website traffic is one of those gauges you can look at that should lead to more new patients but it doesn’t always correlate. Right? So a lot of times we’ll see our competition sending reports to Dennis saying, oh look at your website traffic, it went from you know, 300 a month to 3000 in a month.
Look how great we are. And the website or the website, the doctors kind of scratching his head going, oh wait a minute, we actually have less patients per month now than we did three months ago. Right? There’s a lot of ways to manipulate website traffic. I mean, I could send you 1000 visits in the next hour to your website. That doesn’t mean you’re gonna get patients out of it. Right. So I would get out of the mode of worrying about website traffic in general and worry about actual phone calls and actual leads that are coming in um to the practice.
Um Now if it’s quality website traffic that you know is you know, real people not bots and they’re you know, they’re actually people in your area looking for a dentist. That that’s cool. But you it’s hard to tell that with just website traffic. All right, so I’m gonna do one more. How can I use virtual assistance to improve customer service and support in a dental practice. That’s hard. I wouldn’t do it. I don’t advise it. I would not use anybody remote. I would use somebody that’s in your office.
Um And is a live human being and is fluent in english and um is just a great communicator. Um Good with people. Right? I know that’s not changed in 100 years and it’s not going to change in 100 more years. Those are the best people that you can find to improve your customer service and support. And on that. I’ll tell you you don’t need to hire somebody with dental experience. You don’t what you need to hire with what you need to really uses a high hiring metric are people that have great attitudes.
They’re great with people and they’re great communicators. If they have those assets then you can teach them the dental stuff, right? That’s you know, that’s easy. The front desk stuff, customer service, things like that. That can be taught. But it’s really hard to teach a great attitude. Great communication. That’s that’s harder to teach. So um I’m gonna leave it there. I’m gonna do this again in a few weeks. And one of these one of these podcasts. So if you have some questions you’d like answered. Feel free to reach out to me.
I’m over all over social media. My email is chris C. H. R. I. S at kickstart dental dot com. Feel free to just shoot me an email as well. Um If you want some of these answered some of these questions answered, I’ll be willing to do this in a couple more weeks. So I appreciate you listening today. It’s very important to hit that subscribe button though to make sure that you get notified. When we’ve launched our weekly podcast, we release a new episode like this pretty much every week.
Um We just want to try to help you and give you the best advice for, you know, getting the most out of your marketing strategy. I mean there’s a lot of different people out there that can make it sound really good that they can get you a lot of new patients. Right? You see it all the time. So I just want to make sure that to help you navigate through that a little bit and then kind of untangle the web if you will. Right. So I appreciate it.
And uh look forward to the next episode and hopefully we’ll see you there. Thanks for joining us this week on the dental marketing podcast. Make sure to visit our website www dot kickstart dental dot com slash 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 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 kick start dental dot 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, and thanks for listening to the Dental marketing podcast by kickstart Dental marketing, where dentists go to win online.
