Chris Pistorius:
Hey everybody, what is up? This is Chris Pistorius. I am the CEO and founder of KickStart Dental Marketing, and also the author of the book, The Ultimate Guide to Internet Marketing for Dentists. This month will mark 11 years that my agency has been helping dental, orthodontic, and pediatric practices grow their patient bases. I’ve learned a lot over the last few years, and I’ve also experienced economic downturns in the past. In fact, I started this agency during the Great Recession, which as you probably remember, was an absolute crazy time as well. So I know that many of your practices are hurting. They’ve taken a blow during this unprecedented crisis, and many of you have even closed your offices, for the time being anyway, or are only serving dental emergencies. My agency is in the same boat. We’ve definitely been impacted as well.

Chris Pistorius:
But I will tell you that this hasn’t all doom and gloom. This is an unprecedented opportunity for us as well. My experience from other economic downturns has told me that, really, there’s two directions that you can take when you go through a crisis like this as a small business owner. Number one, you could do nothing and just sit and wait and let it go. Right? Makes sense. Or number two, you could use this downtime as an opportunity, an opportunity to position your dental practice for success for when we do come out of this. The practices that choose option number two will be the leaders going forward, and they will thrive once things do get back to normal. I’m sure you’ve read multiple times how some of the richest people in the world get rich from down economic times like this, and that’s because they keep the pedal to the metal. They see an opportunity, they realize that things are going to get better, and they do whatever they can to try to put themselves in a better position coming out of it than when they came in.

Chris Pistorius:
So we want to help those of you that do see this as an opportunity. We’re offering a completely free 60-day marketing campaign, so that you can make the most out of this crisis and put your practice in a position to be a market leader. Number one, we will build you a stunning, best-in-class website, absolutely free. We typically charge around $5,000 to develop a website like this. Now, if you don’t want a new website, or you don’t need a new website, we will leverage our 11 years of experience in dental marketing, and we’ll work with your current site to make it a 24/7 new patient generation machine. Number two, we will do a SEO campaign, search engine optimization, to increase your Google rankings. So while you’re sitting, not really getting a lot of action right now, why not increase those rankings so that when we come out of this in a couple of months, you’ll be ready for that new patient base.

Chris Pistorius:
And then number three, we will install a live chat system on your website. This is going to make it much easier for patients of all ages to communicate with you. Now, there’s more details about these services and what we will do a little bit lower on the page, so check those out. But I want to make sure you realize there’s absolutely no obligation with this, and you won’t pay a dime. And you’ll, from day one, own the website that we build for you and any other marketing assets that we create. Now at the end of the 60 days, I’m going to ask you, “What do you think of the services? And would you be interested in continuing on a paid basis?”

Chris Pistorius:
But that’s completely up to you, and none of this hinges on that. So please click the get started button on this page, fill out the information, and I will personally reach out to you to discuss the next steps, answer any questions you may have. And if you have any questions that you need answered before that, just feel free to reach out to me directly. My email address is chris@kickstartdental.com. And remember, we’re in this thing together, and we can come out of this stronger than we came into it. Thanks. And I look forward to hearing from you very soon.

Click here to sign up for this special offer.

Chris Pistorius:
Hi, this is Chris Pistorius, CEO of Kickstart Dental Marketing. I wanted to do a quick follow up to a webinar I did a few days ago about the COVID-19 crisis with dentistry and some things that you can do to position yourself right now to come out of this crisis much stronger than you did when you went in. No doubt things are slow right now and hopefully this short video will help you think of some ideas out of the box on how you could potentially grow your practice even during these slow times. So, as you can see on the screen here, I’m on a software called doxy.me, and we’ve tested a lot of these virtual consultation softwares over the last few months and doxy.me is what we would believe to be the best solution for you at the time of this video. I have the pro version, which is $35 a month, which in my opinion, is well worth the money.

Chris Pistorius:
You can do a lot of stuff and it’s very simple to use. So, if you’re not really big into technology, this is still something that you can use and be very good with if you just use it a couple of times. I’m not affiliated with doxy.me in any way. My company isn’t, we don’t make any money if you sign up with them. We just want to try to bring this to you as a value add and give you an idea of what you could do when your is even closed. So, basically doxy.me allows you to do virtual consultations with patients. So, this could be new patients or it could be even follow up or existing patients and it really does a great job of… It doesn’t replace an in-office visit, certainly you’re not going to fill a cavity doing this.

Chris Pistorius:
But what I think it can help you with is it can help you fill the pipeline of new patients so that when you do open back up, if you’ve done some of these initial consultations online, at least you’ve got a pipeline there of people that you know you need to follow up with and get them in your office. So, it could really help you hit the ground running once we come out of this crisis, hopefully in just a few weeks now. So, instead of just not doing anything, shutting down the office and just sitting and waiting, at least you can take the initiative here for $35 a month to still see some new patients if you want to see them. Now, how you promote this, what we’re doing for our clients with this is we’re running some Facebook ads, some Google ads, and we’re promoting, “Hey, do you need to see a doctor now?”

Chris Pistorius:
We run those ads only during the times that you actually want to see new patients. You can actually set up billing on this application, so you can charge for those initial visits if you want to. You can even accept insurances using this software. It’s very straightforward to set up. We set this up for our clients, get everything ready, train them on how to do this and we promote it for them. So, we put this on their website, we put this on their social media and we really get the word out. And we ask their existing patients to share this with their friends to really get the word out that you can still see a dentist, maybe even a little bit easier than you could in real life. So, I’m going to go through a demo of this so you can see the inner workings of it and what you can do and just how simple it can be.

Chris Pistorius:
Up in the top right here, you can see a video hopefully of me. This is a preview pane. This is what your patients will see once they do log in. There’s a hamburger menu up here that you can drop down and you can do device settings like change your camera, change your microphone. So, there’s some technical settings you can do here. Also in that hamburger menu you can mute yourself if you want to, turn off your camera and you can hide this preview if you want to. So, if you don’t really like to see yourself while you’re doing a video, you can hide this altogether. So, it makes it pretty simple right there. On the left side, this is your patient queue. So, if you had patients waiting to see you right now, they’d be listed right here.

Chris Pistorius:
And we’ll show you a live example of an actual patient coming in to use this so you can see a little bit more, but you can see you can go to edit your waiting rooms. So, if you click this, you can edit what people see. I’m just using the default settings. So, basically they’re just seeing welcome. I will start the video call in a moment. You can change your account settings like your billing, log in. This is important, probably the most important thing on this page, it’s the BAA. This system is HIPAA compliant, but you do need to fill this information out and click generate BAA so that you’re covered from HIPAA violations. You can set up your notifications, so if somebody does log in and they want to do a consult, you can have an alert come up on your computer, an email sent to you or even a text message is sent to you as well.

Chris Pistorius:
So, just some basic settings here. You can also see your meeting history so you can see all the meetings that you’ve done before, which is handy. There’s a help center and then you can go in and upgrade your account if you want to. Again, I’m at this pro level and that’s probably what I’d recommend for most of you, the clients that I know anyway. If you’re not a client of ours and you have questions about this, feel free to reach out to me, no charge to help you set this stuff up. So, just trying to do everything that we can to help the whole industry in this downtime. So, it’s a system that’s going to allow you to see virtual patients. It’s going to allow you to charge for those new patients. It’s going to allow you to build up a pipeline of potential new patients once you do get open to actually get them into the office.

Chris Pistorius:
So, what I want to show you at this point is just a quick demo of actually somebody logging into the system and what that’s going to look like on your end and what the communication looks like and just how easy this potentially could be. So, I’m going to go ahead and get my daughter Kaitlyn to actually log in to this and I just want to show you just what this looks like. Okay. So, you can see on the left now we’ve got a little picture here and it says Kaitlyn waiting less than a minute. So, that’s your waiting room. So, if you had others that would just list those right down the line. Oh, she just left. Hopefully she’ll log back in a second but one thing I do want to say about the patient queue, how we’ve set it up for our clients is basically that we set up an online calendar to allow people to go ahead and book their own appointments for this.

Chris Pistorius:
So, we’ll put it on their website, a button and then clicks on it and it goes to an online calendar that can integrate with your dental practice software and people can actually schedule their own appointments. So, when they do that, they’ll get a link, which you can see here for my case is doxy.me/kickstart. For you, it’ll be doxy.me/abcdental or whatever it may be. But they’ll get that link and then when it’s time for their appointment, they click it and they log into this system and you see where Kaitlyn has come back in now, into the patient queue. You can hover over her and start the call, but anyway you’ll want to set up some sort of an online calendar with this. Again, if you need help, let me know to integrate all of this and and get everything set up to be able to do these virtual consults. So, you can click here to start the call if you’re ready.

Chris Pistorius:
Or there’s a hamburger menu here and you can see a picture. Typically, a picture does show up of them and you can see how long they’ve been waiting. You can see that their microphone’s on that, their camera’s on, they’re from Colorado, they’re on their mobile phone, an Apple phone and they’re using Safari as an operating system, but essentially you’ve got chat. So, if they didn’t have video they could just chat right here online with you or you could just do audio as well and to remove them from the queue for some reason you can just right there and click remove. So, I’m going to go ahead and start this call so we can actually see what’s going on. So, you just click start call. Should just take a few seconds for her to be able to enter into the room.

Chris Pistorius:
Okay, and there she is. This is my 16 year old daughter, Kaitlyn. Say hello, Kaitlyn. Hopefully you heard that, came through clear here, but you can see she’s on her phone. It’s a great image. You can see how long you’ve been actually on the consult up here in the top left. You can do a photo capture. So, if you want to take a quick picture of her, you can do that. You could even do a group call. So, if you want her to bring somebody in on this, you could do that. You can do a screen share where actually you click on that and you can share your screen or you can even request to see her screen. So, if she had maybe for instance x-rays by chance on her computer, this is something that she could share with you.

Chris Pistorius:
So, cool to be able to do that. File transfers. So, if you had new patient paperwork or something you wanted to send to her, you could, or she could even send the file transfer back to you with signed new patient paperwork. And then this is the payment queue where you could actually have her do the payment right then and there, for that free initial consultation. So, video is very clear. The audio is good. There’s some menus down here where you can pause the video, you can turn the video off, you can mute yourself. There is a setting here that I would recommend and that is the video quality. If you are on a good internet connection, you can send that up to high definition if you wanted to. Just makes it a little bit better user experience.

Chris Pistorius:
And then you could end the call by using this red button right here. You still see your preview of what she sees for you and you can even… Kaitlyn, this is going to cost me a little bit of money, I can tell already, but if you could open your mouth so we can just see. A little bit wider please. Yeah, and this is on a phone, so you can still get… If there’s a problem or a chipped tooth or an infection even perhaps, or a sore of some sort, you could potentially be able to see some of that here. So, pretty cool technology that you’re able to actually interact with the patient on this. So anyway, I’m going to go ahead and disconnect with Kaitlyn. Kaitlyn, thank you so much for your assistance. I appreciate it. You can say goodbye.

Kaitlyn:
Goodbye.

Chris Pistorius:
So, you just click here to end the call and it goes back to your dashboard here and it shows… Kaitlyn will drop out of this queue pretty quickly here once she disconnects. But you can also rate how the quality of the call. So, pretty cool stuff. You can do a pretty good initial consultation and I think it has a lot of value and I think that this software makes it just easy enough to be able to do this on a continual basis. So again, I just wanted to show you the short demo of this and if you do have some interest, let me know. I’ll answer any questions that you have. I’ll help you set it up for free. Whatever you need. It’s just, we’re trying to add as much value as we can right now, not just to our current clients, but to anybody out there in dentistry that’s looking maybe to try to do something other than just sit around and wait. So, just let me know. You can go to my website kickstartdental.com and there’s a free consultation button on my homepage. Just click that and schedule a time with me and we can talk a little bit more about it and just see what we have. So again, let me know questions and appreciate your time today. We’ll talk to you soon.

Speaker 1:

This whole webinar kind of last minute. I didn’t send out a big notification so I wasn’t sure how many people would be able to join. But I’m getting a lot of people coming in. I see a lot of our current clients and a lot of new people too. So thank you all for being here. Dr. Kaelin], how’s it going? I hope all’s well. Wow from all over the country, actually a couple from out of the country, so it’s cool. So I’m going to go ahead and get started here. It’s funny, I started this big long PowerPoint presentation on what I was going to do and what I was going to talk about, and I got up to, I don’t know, 40 slides I think and I’m like, what am I doing? I think we just need to kind of have a talk and I want to share with you mostly about what I’ve been learning about, dentistry and what other practices that we work with and practices that we don’t work with, what they’ve been doing and things that have been working for them.

Speaker 1:

And I just really want to go over some ideas for you, even for the practices that are closed or shut down or in the process of shutting down. And there’re some things that we need to talk about and some things that I think that we can implement to bring in new patients during this time of crisis and certainly a time to slow down. So that’s the kind of stuff that I want to go over here. And if you have questions, use the chat and I’ll answer the questions towards the end of the webinar if that’s cool for everybody, just makes it a little bit easier. We got tons of people coming in, so thanks so much for joining on this last minute notice. I really appreciate it.

Speaker 1:

So, first of all I think it’s pretty detrimental to watch the news right now at least consistently because you get a lot of negativity going on right now with the news. But I think one thing that we have to realize as a society is that the news outlets are really making money off the drama of this, right? I mean, no matter what you watch, NBC, CBS, CNN, FOX, whatever it may be, they’re making money from ratings and what increases ratings is drama and things like that. Now certainly this is a crisis and this is something we’ve never seen before and we need to take it seriously. But I would strongly suggest, don’t just watch the news hour after hour just waiting for update after update because it’s going to get you in a pretty bad mood and it’s going to be pretty doom and gloom. There’s some stuff that I posted on my personal Facebook today that’s good news about this.

Speaker 1:

Things that people that are recovering, countries that are recovering and we’re starting to see a little bit of good news come out with this too. So I would really hope that you seek that stuff out through the reputable news as well. But how are you doing? I mean, how are you guys coping right now? And if you would put into the chat, you know where you are right now, if you’re open, if you’re closed, if you’re thinking about closing. A lot of state governments are mandating closures or mandating emergency only type stuff and so put it in there, kind of where you are and just kind of what you’re thinking right now in terms of this crisis. And I’ll go back a little later and go through some of those and talk about them.

Speaker 1:

So, I would love to see your thoughts on that. So please do that at some point during the webinar. But you know, it’s, I think it’s important and I put out a video a few days ago, kind of really early on in this situation, if you will, a few days ago was really early on. That’s how quick things are changing. But I think it’s important to, number one, and this was important for me, because I’m in this with you guys. Our whole business is dental and orthodontic or whatever it may be. And we’re seeing the same type of slow down and a lot of uneasy clients. So I think it’s important for us to realize the situation. Okay, we can’t sugar coat it, it’s bad. And I think the economic downturn of this may wind up being worse than the actual virus itself, even though I know hundreds or thousands of people have died and that’s terrible.

Speaker 1:

But I just hope that the economic impact isn’t going to be as bad. So I think it’s reasonable to realize that we will probably be into a recession. A recession, I believe is two quarters of sustained non-growth or negative growth, if you will, the economy. And I think that’s probably where we’re headed. However, if you did watch my last webinar, if you will, or video, you will realize that I believe that dentists or small businesses are positioned to be able to pivot and recover way more quickly in this than what others will. And we’ll talk a little bit more about that in a second. So it’s not all doom and gloom, but I think it’s important to realize where we are so that we can move on and get to a better place, sooner than better, sooner than later.

Speaker 1:

First and foremost in this crisis, you have to think of your family and safety and making sure that your patients are safe. And I think that’s why a lot of a lot of people have decided to shut down their practice or, constrict your hours or whatever it may be. And I know there’s still practices that are open. So I think it’s really important to make sure that we think a family, safety, that kind of stuff first. But then secondly, what I do think we need to think about is the future and how this can be an opportunity for you. And as a dental practice, I don’t care if you’re an orthodontist, pediatric dentist, whatever you may be, this is a chance for opportunity. I mean a lot of millionaires are made during economic recessions.

Speaker 1:

And why do you think that is? Well, because they didn’t necessarily put their head in the sand and think doom and gloom. They forged forward with whatever resources they had, increased their brand, if you will. And came out of this way ahead. So, and I’m not saying that this is, dentistry is you’re not in this to be an instant millionaire or anything like that. What I’m saying is that there is an opportunity, I believe, for you to come out of this stronger than you are going in. And that doesn’t mean having to continue to spend thousands of dollars a month in marketing services or anything like that. And that’s what this webinar’s for. Is things that you can do on your own, I believe. I mean, ideas on how to continue even to see patients during this and the cow to come out of this a little bit further ahead.

Speaker 1:

I’m just looking at notes down here because like I said, I had this big PowerPoint presentation made and I decided to just kind of ditch it and do more of a casual setting like this. So, what do you do? I mean, what is it that you think that you should do right now in terms of your practice and what is the best thing to do? Do you think it’s best just to kind of hold off, kind of just not do anything and see where this goes? Or are you looking to the future? Are you 100% positive that we’re going to come out of this, whether it be next week or next year? Let me see a raise of hand. Yes, yes, yes. I’m getting tons of yes, we will come out of it. Not sure when. Yeah, totally agree.

Speaker 1:

So here’s my question to you guys then if you know you’re going to come out of it right, then why let off the accelerator in marketing your practice or do doing social media for your practice, things like that. Because you know, at the end of this, you’re going to have to figure out a way to see new patients. The way I see this coming out is when you do come out of this and you open back up, if you are closed, there’s going to be probably a pretty big surge in the beginning. But then obviously those will be a lot of existing patients. You’re still going to need to bring in new patients on top of those to really, really balance and get where you want to be. Because after the initial surge, it will slow back down.

Speaker 1:

The existing patient stuff will die down. You’re going to need those new patients to fill in. So I’ve asked a lot of dentist’s, all right why slow down now? And most of it, it’s fear and trust me, I get it. I’m a small business owner too and I’ve seen a hit certainly, and I totally get it. But today, what I want to do is try to convince you that if you are sure and you’re 100% sure that you’re going to come out of this, then I think it’s really important for you to not be over aggressive, but to know that you’re coming out of it and to come out with a plan and see to the future. And here’s the reason a lot of your competitors in your local markets are going to do what we kind of all are thinking of doing and just kind of let’s hold off on everything, put our head in the sand. And let’s get over this, right?

Speaker 1:

Well there are some market leaders out there that are doing this and maybe you’re not a market leader now, right? So if you continue doing things, whether it’s internally or using a company like mine, KickStart Dental, to do that for you, you can leapfrog some of these big competitors in your local market. So when you come out of this, your positioned in a much better place than you were before you went in. And I hope that makes sense, but, and that’s not coming from a guy that’s looking to get money from new clients. Right now we’re not even really talking to many new clients right now. What we’re trying to do is really take the clients that we have and help them get through this and position them in a way that they’re going to be better off getting out.

Speaker 1:

So don’t think, I mean obviously I’m biased here in marketing cause that’s what I do. But I just need you to know I’ve been through these economic downturns before. I’ve seen what’s happens and they, it always gets better. Right? And if it’s going to get better, then let’s get better while we’re getting better, if that makes sense. All right. So, you need to be a leader right now in your market, not just for marketing, but you need to be a leader in your practice. You need to be communicating with your employees, constantly talking to them it’s going to be okay, here’s the bright side, here’s what things are looking like and that’s going to help you with not just your new patient retainment and you need to be talking to your patients as well.

Speaker 1:

But it’s also going to help with employee retainment because your employees are freaking out a little bit now too, right? I mean, incomes at risk. Did you already laid off people? Keeping constant communication with your patient base, let them know what’s going on. Make sure that they know that you you’re doing everything you can to be safe. If you are still open, the precautions you’re taking, things like that’ll help you forge that relationship with your current patients as well as your employees.

Speaker 1:

So you know somebody kind of talked about this kind of looking into the future stuff and I’m kind of a sports guy as you can probably see from behind me. I’ve got a whole wall of footballs and baseballs and bats and all kinds of fun stuff. But Wayne Gretzky, who was probably one of the best hockey players in the world, ever basically said when he was playing, he says, “I try to skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it is now”. Right? And so that’s really what we really need to think about when we’re talking about the future. We need to think about what it’s going to be and not what it is now.

Speaker 1:

So that if that kind of helps frame that whole scenario. Nobody has a crystal ball. I certainly don’t. I don’t know how long it is going to take us to get out of this. I personally believe it’s going to be sooner than later, but I don’t know that. And so what my job is, is to prepare our clients again for coming out of this bigger and better than what they were before. So, and that’s what you need if you’re not a client of ours. That’s what you need to be thinking about as well. Be a leader. Think about tomorrow, not today and really set your practice up. Because what you do right now I believe is what’s going to be how your practice comes out of this and how it plans on growing afterwards is the actions that you take now and the decisions that you make now.

Speaker 1:

So a couple of ideas that I’ve heard from other practices on what they’re not necessarily doing now, but things that they plan on doing once they do open up. And maybe you guys thought about this too and if you have anything new that I have I don’t cover here, please let me know. But some of them are going to extend hours once they opened back up instead of like an eight-to-five it’s going to be more like a six-to-six type thing. Open up on weekends, things like that to handle that surge that I think is going to happen once everything opens back up, especially for existing patients.

Speaker 1:

So the other thing that I want to spend some time on here is a virtual consults. So it seems a little crazy. We’ve actually been testing virtual consults for a while now and we’ve kind of put it on the back burner a little bit just because we feel the ones that we’ve tested with, we’re a little uneasy with it. It’s a whole different way to think about doing dentistry, right? But now it’s a little different framework. Now we’re in a position where I think we almost have to at least consider this. So I want to talk to you about a software that we’ve tested and I know some others have. We tested quite a few different ones, including the technology I’m using right now. It’s called Zoom. Zoom has a HIPPA compliant version. It’s not too expensive. I think it’s $40 or $50 a month. And you can do consults this way via Zoom.

Speaker 1:

However, I would suggest going with a company called, doxy.me, D-O-X-Y.me. This is a HIPAA approved company. We’ve tested a little bit. They have a free trial you can sign up for again, it’s D-O-X-Y.me. I’m going to go ahead and put that into the chat so you can I have that as a reference. There you go. And it’s a software that you don’t have to download. Your patients don’t have to download. It’s HIPPA approved all over the world. The BAA is included once you sign up. So you’re covered from that sense. And essentially what it does is it allows you to meet with patients virtually.

Speaker 1:

I’m going to go ahead and share my screen really quickly if I can figure out how to do that. So you can actually take a look at this. Here we go. Share. There we go. Okay. You should be able to see my screen. Now. This is it. This is doxy.me, it’s a free set up. No downloads. It seems very easy to use when we’ve tested it. Got some reviews here. Obviously you don’t know until you try to use it for yourself. And this, there’s going to be a little bit of a learning curve here.

Speaker 1:

And I honestly don’t know that this is just a coronavirus time to use this. I think that if we use this now, I think there’s the future of dentistry or at least part of it is going to be in this virtual type stuff. And I think that now it’s forcing our hands a little bit to use it and I think if we do use it now, we just continue it into our marketing. And this is a part of, part of the way you do business going forward. You do on digital calendar. So essentially when people go to your website, they can log on, set up a time that’s integrated with your practice management software like Dentrix or Eaglesoft, whatever it may be. You let people go ahead and create their appointments. It all integrates into this.

Speaker 1:

Let me just kind of show you what the patient view looks like. There’s a little video here that you can watch. I won’t do right now, but it’s private, it’s secure, there’re no downloads for it. There’s some patient reviews. Here are some frequently asked questions. Again, we’re not affiliated with these people at all. I don’t know anybody from this company whatsoever. It’s just we’ve tested a few different and this seems to be the more, most solid as of right now. So for providers you can kind of see what this looks like. This is the patient view. You can do a live chat, there’ll be a patient queue. So you’ve got kind of your own virtual waiting room if you will, which is, I think it’s kind of cool. You can, if they have video on the other side, that’s great. If not, they don’t have to, they can just use the audio side of it.

Speaker 1:

But obviously if they’re going to do any sort of a consult where you actually look at anything than you’re going to need to have that video. And they break it out here by clinics as well. So you can see some people that have used it, you can see how this works. You kind of have a dedicated landing page on the how they log in if you will. They, they put their, you can actually go into the room. They tried to make this as realistic as possible. So it’s a really cool software. It’s slick, we’ve used it. You can obviously use your custom branding so you know your logo, your colors, things like that. And we’ll help you set this stuff up. So I don’t think you’re by yourself. So if you’re a client of ours, I see tons of our current clients on here now. If you want to try this or at least trial it for free, let me know and we can help you get it set up.

Speaker 1:

In terms of pricing, it’s not really bad. I mean 35 bucks a month for an individual provider. I think you get a little bit of a discount if you pay for a year. It shows you what’s involved here. There’s a lot of really cool stuff you can do here. And it’s 35 bucks a month if you get one patient because of this it pays itself for years to come basically. I mean, again, we’re not affiliated with this, we don’t get anything out of this. It’s, I want to make sure you know about it. And if this is something that you are considering, I think this is a good choice for you. So some of you may be saying, kind of let me stop the share here. Some of you may be even thinking, I don’t know about this.

Speaker 1:

This is a little crazy. Well, it’s kind of crazy times too, right? And you’ve got to do what you can to survive. And there are others using this right now. There are others that have been using this for quite a while. But again, in my opinion is right now we need to do whatever we can to bring in a pipeline of new patients for when you do open, back up. So let’s say you’re closed right now, you could still do this, right? As long as you have a phone or a computer connection. Works on mobile devices as well. And what it can do, it’s not going to replace a full exam or you know you get x-rays and you can see all their mouth and teeth and the problems that’s going on. This is more of like an initial consult where you might be able to see some things.

Speaker 1:

But what we’re doing is we’re building a pipeline and we’re building a relationship with this potential new patient. Right? And again, this is focused for new patients, not necessarily existing. You can do existing if you like. This software also I forgot to mention, has billing included in it so you can bill for the consult, they can enter in their insurance information through it. It’s all slick and set up and ready to go for you. I mean obviously it’ll be a little bit of a learning curve on how to use it and things like that as with any software, but it’s pretty slick on how you can integrate health insurance benefits, your billing, all kinds of stuff. So, but again, going back to this why to use it, because you can start the process. If a new patient wants to see someone, they need medical care right now it’s not because of COVID.

Speaker 1:

People don’t have emergency cases or they don’t want to go see a dentist. It’s that they can’t. So the market demand is there. It’s just they’re trying to find somebody that can handle their request right now. And that’s where this will make the potential new patient feel safe, secure. It’s not for everybody. If you get up to that 65 year old and older, you may have some issues getting people to use this. But if you’re in that, millennials, younger than millennials, kids, I think you probably are going to get some traction with this. But we can start the pipeline. So you can start doing initial consults being their dentist on record perhaps. And then once you do open up in a couple of weeks or a month or whenever it may be, we can get them scheduled in as soon as possible.

Speaker 1:

So you’ve kind of started the consultation process. You’re building up your pipeline, even though you’re not open. I can promise you a lot of other dental practices aren’t doing this. They’re just sitting there doing nothing while you could be building up a pipeline. So how do you get people to come in and do this? Well, my suggestion would be Facebook ads and Google ads, and specifically around telling people that they can see a dentist right now. A couple of examples that I’ve seen work. Is an ad that we tested calling, “Since you can’t come to us, we can come to you”. We run that on Facebook. I’m getting tons of interest. All right? The demand is still there. They just want a safe and secure way to go see the dentist. Right?

Speaker 1:

Another one is, we talk about how the CDC recommends virtual care right now for their safety. Put that in the ads. The other thing is why wait? Speak with a licensed dentist or orthodontist right now. Financing right now is very important. So if you use care credit or any other type of financing, we want to put that in any advertising like a 0% down interest free, blah, blah, blah. Right? Again, I don’t want to give away the farm here. I don’t want to do specials that aren’t even going to make you money. Like what’s that company called? Oh, I can’t even remember. Groupon, we don’t want to do Groupon type deals where it just lessens your brand a little bit. But there are some things, creative ways, like 0% financing that we can talk about that, it can get people off their couch along with, “Hey, see a dentist now type thing”. Right?

Speaker 1:

And you can set your hours for whatever you want to in terms of these cases, but, and doing this with Facebook and Google you can really make an impact and drive new patients while your office isn’t even open. Now I talked about Facebook and Google ads and they’re two way different mediums. Yeah, they’re both online. But if you think about it, Google, when you do a Google search, and I type in something about the price of dental implants, right? Or I have it, or tooth pain, I need a root canal. You know, any searches like that, these are people more that have their credit card in hand and they’re ready to buy right now. Okay? These are the people that have intent right now. They’re ready to buy. They’re way down on the sales cycle, okay? These are people that you can pick. Kind of the low hanging fruit, they’re ready to buy.

Speaker 1:

Facebook is more of a, you’re targeting a demographic like 25 to 34 four year old female with two and a half kids and a golden retriever, blah, blah, blah. You can target those people and you can put ads in front of them and you can target a spectrum of maybe a five mile radius around your office. But these are people that are more casual browsers. You don’t know where they are in that sales cycle, right? They could not even be thinking about doing anything in dentistry right now. They don’t have an immediate need, but these are still valuable prospects because we can educate in this market, right? We can educate to these people that they probably don’t even know that they can go see a dentist virtually. Right?

Speaker 1:

And they’re like, well, I’m just sitting around and not doing anything. I might as well, start the initial consultation, right? Because nobody is offering it to me and I do need to do it. So there’s a lot of potential here and it doesn’t have to cost thousands of dollars to do this. I mean, depending on what market you’re in, some of you I can see are in very large markets like New York City and some are in smaller markets and rural markets. It just kind of depends on your market on how much money you want to spend doing that. But I think it’s a great creative, unique way for you too, to kind of stay relevant in these times.

Speaker 1:

A couple of other things you know that I want to talk about here is, again, if you are a client of ours and you’re interested in something like virtual consults, let me know. Let’s do a test. See what happens. If you’re not a client yet, just go to our website, kickstartdental.com and you can request a free consult right there. And you’ll talk to me directly when you set that up. I mean, we can talk about virtual consults, we can, we can talk about anything that you want to, you’re not going to charge anybody anything for this.

Speaker 1:

If you’re a current client, we’re not going to charge you anything to help you set up the virtual consults stuff, this is all value add to try to help, help us both get through this if you will. We’re in this together and you know, these are pretty dire times and we’re doing everything that we can to add value to our clients, whether they’re open or not open or whatever’s going on. So I think that from talking to other experts out there and just talking to other dentists and what’s working for them and what’s not is this virtual consult thing. I really think that this is an idea that if we in implement now, it’s going to continue to be a new source of new patients for you going forward.

Speaker 1:

I want you guys to go ahead and if you would put into chat some questions. We’re about a half an hour into this now, so I don’t want to take too much of your time, but I do also want to answer any questions that you may have coming in and what kind of situation you’re in. [Thrine 00:25:50] is say starting a new ortho product business going to part market and summer. Okay, cool. It’s probably good timing for you, I’m sure. Somebody here is from Australia. Wow, that’s awesome. Okay. One question I have is for the doxy.me virtual console. How do you set up the billing? I probably already answered this for you, but essentially you can set up your billing and your insurance all within the software.

Speaker 1:

I haven’t done it personally. Again, I have no part in doxy.me. It’s just a software that we tested. We tested a lot of different types of HIPPA compliance software. This seems to be the leader for our purposes and that’s what we’re recommending to our clients. So we haven’t actually gone in and set up the billing and the insurance part of it as of yet, but they’ve told me that it’s a pretty smooth process to do that.

Speaker 1:

All right. I’ve been sending out emails to patients about our status. What do you suggest saying? Okay, so here’s one of the mistakes I’m seeing right now from dental practices and I get why the first one should be like this and I’m not sure the future ones need to be. I’m getting a very serious tone, like a very serious, the CDC has implemented or the recommended, blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 1:

And I think that’s important for a lot of our clients we’ve put messages like that on their websites. Just saying, the CDC recommends this, we’re doing that, this is a precautionary blah, blah, blah. I think your next communication, and I think you should send something out at least weekly to your patient base, should be more at a personal level, right? More of like we’re talking right now, and I really think it should be in video form as well. Something like this goes way further to your patients than just an email or even just a text message, right? They can see your face, they can see your emotions, they can see that you care. And these videos are very easy to do nowadays. You can use Zoom, you can use your phone if you have questions on how to do it, let me know.

Speaker 1:

I can help you out. I’m your resident nerd. I can help you figure out the technology to make that happen and I can even help you send it out to your patient base. Whether you’re a client or not I won’t charge you to do that. So if you’re on this webinar and you’re like, Oh, I’m not a client, it’s not going to work, I don’t care, contact me. Go to kickstartdental.com, schedule a free consult and I’ll help you through it and I won’t charge you a dime. So I think you need to communicate once a week. I think it needs to be more personable, yet professional and talk about what’s going on, your challenges, what you’ve been up to, suggestions. If somebody needs a dentist, what to do. Maybe this is a virtual consult type message, something like that.

Speaker 1:

Okay. Next question here. Hold on, I’ve got to scroll through a few here. We’ve already answered a few of these. Okay. Here’s a good one. I’m constructing my practice now. We were planning on opening in April. Should I still do that? Well, again, I’m going to go back to my crystal ball. I don’t have one. I don’t know what it’s going to be like in April. I don’t know what it’s going to be like next week. My gut tells me that by the end of April I think, I believe that a lot of this will be eased in terms of the economy being shut down essentially. So if it were me I would, okay. I would, I don’t know what I would do. Honestly it’s, I don’t want to give you bad advice here, but my personal opinion is, is that you need to prepare for what it’s going to look like when you do open.

Speaker 1:

So if you don’t have a website built yet, get that built. If you haven’t started engine optimization work yet, get that started because that takes time. I wouldn’t start running paid advertising right now because that’s more of a, certainly on Google because that’s more of a people need it now type thing and you can’t provide that unless you do virtual consults. So it just kind of depends on what you’ve set up and what you’re willing to do. Let me scroll through if you have any other questions to go ahead and hit me up here on the chat. Let’s see.

Speaker 1:

Has HIPPA loosened their restrictions? I’ve heard that they have, I haven’t seen anything official on that, but I wouldn’t even mess with it. I would continue doing everything HIPPA compliant. We are 90 some percent HIPPA compliant right now. We hired an agency, a consulting company to come in and make us HIPPA compliant. So all of the marketing stuff that we do for our clients is HIPPA compliant or about to be. And as much as I hate to say it, most marketing companies out there are not even the big ones. So anything that you do have, whether you do it on your own or you hire a company like mine, made sure it’s HIPPA compliant. I wouldn’t, even though they say that they’re loosening the restrictions, I would still play by all the rules because there’s a lot of attorneys out there that are looking for reasons to sue and up to the point of this COVID-19 virus. That’s what was happening. And so everybody has to take precautions and protect themselves.

Speaker 1:

So my answer to that is I wouldn’t take any shortcuts here. It’s not worth it. It’s expensive stuff if you get caught doing something. So, what’s the best email software to use to, to send emails to patients? A lot of the good, like Dentrix Practice Management Software have this kind of stuff already in it. The ability to email out blasts if you will, to your patients. Usually when we do email marketing, we’re not as concerned with the platform that we use as what the messaging is. So I would think more about what your messaging should be versus the platform to send it out. But if you don’t have Practice Management Software, which I think you probably do. See if that practice management software provides email blasting capabilities and then work with an expert or somebody that you know perhaps on what that messaging should be.

Speaker 1:

And don’t get too caught up, some people tell me like on social media, what should I post? Just do it is what I say. Don’t get, don’t, don’t paralyze yourself to make sure everything’s perfect. Like this webinar for instance. This isn’t perfect, this isn’t what I would usually do. Right? But I think just taking action and doing something is better than doing nothing at all, if that makes sense. So also what I will add to that, if you send an email out to your patients, put that same email out on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, whatever. Send it out to all your channels because everybody uses different types of mediums to see things. And if somebody sees things over and over it’s even better, that keeps you top of mind. So when you distribute things, then I would certainly use everything in your powers to do that. Okay. I’ll do one last question here before I let everybody go. Let me see here, scrolling through.

Speaker 1:

Here’s one on virtual consults using Doxy. Can you only use video or can you use audio too? You can use both. Either you can use video or audio or obviously both of them together. So what I would recommend, anybody that wants to use Doxy, sign up for the free trial, test it out, get used to it, see what you think of it, and then go from there.

Speaker 1:

Again guys, thanks for everybody for being here. One last thing I do want to tell you is if you’re doing your own marketing and you work with Google in terms of Google My Business, your local profile, they announced a couple of days ago that if you make changes to that profile now you’re probably not going to see any updates until this virus scare is over. And the reason being is because Google has got a lot of people working from home now, or a lot of people that just can’t work right now and they’re kind of on a skeleton crew.

Speaker 1:

So any changes you make to that Google profile probably won’t be updated for quite some time. So if you change your phone number or your address or anything like that, it probably won’t update immediately. It’s probably going to take a while for it to update. Also people are not able to leave you reviews right now. I don’t know if you knew that or not, but if you have patients going to leave reviews right now, it’s not going to work. They can leave their review. The review just is not going to show up anytime soon. So just making sure you know that. And also you can’t respond to any reviews right now either. So for instance, one of our services is review management. We help clients get reviews, but we also respond to all the reviews that come in on behalf of our clients. And we can’t do that right now.

Speaker 1:

We can put the response in but it doesn’t show up. So just so you know, I would, my recommendation is just to hold off doing anything with your Google profile right now because they say you can make the changes and that it will update later. I’m not so sure. I am working with Google for almost 11 years now. I wouldn’t make a whole bunch of changes and then just hope that it will be updated in the future. I would just wait until this settles down a little bit.

Speaker 1:

So anyway, thanks again for everybody being here. If you do have questions, current clients, you know how to reach me, for sure. People that aren’t our client. Again, I will help you absolutely for free to get through this, but I just go to kickstartdental.com click on the free consult button, schedule a time with me. It’ll be with me directly, nobody else, and I’d be more than happy to help you out wherever I can. So thanks again and we’ll talk to you soon.

(00:01):
Hello, and welcome. My name is Chris Pistorius. I’m the CEO of KickStart Dental Marketing. For those of you who don’t know me or my company, KickStart Dental Marketing is a digital ad agency focused on dentistry only. We’re based in the Denver, Colorado area. I wanted to send a quick message out to our current clients. I know we’ve been in contact a few times since this COVID-19 stuff has started, but I want to send something out and, and just talk about, in detail some of the opportunities that I think we can see from this. This is just a quick impromptu video. It’s certainly not going to be perfect, so I apologize for that, but I wanted to get something out sooner than later, so that’s why I’m, I’m kind of doing this impromptu. Look, there’s a lot of fear out there, and there’s a lot of unknown which is causing a lot of that fear.
(00:50):
Of course, there’s a concern for dental practice owners on what should we do? Should we close down? Should we pause things? Should we press forward? Should we be more aggressive? You know, what’s the best way to handle this? And you know, your local dental associations the ADA, the CDC, are certainly posting recommendations as well. But I believe that no matter kind of what you choose here, there’s a real opportunity here for you as dental practice owners to come out of this thing stronger than what you were when you came into it. And I know you might be throwing your eyes a little bit and thinking, Oh, you’re a true optimist, I guess, and you know. But, what I also want to come with you with is almost 20 years of local marketing experience.

(01:42):
I’ve been through economic downturns before. I’ve even been through viral epidemics before. I don’t know if the last one was an epidemic or pandemic or not sure what it was, but you know what I mean right. but you know, I want to provide you just a little bit of guidance, not even just to my current clients, but to anybody that owns a dental practice. It might be, you know, having these same issues because, you know, I think the better that you do during this time, it will be the quicker that you come out of this in the positive. So again, I wanted to shoot a really quick impromptu video here on what I think your opportunities are. And I can also talk a little bit about, I mean, we represent a lot of dental practices throughout the country. And I can talk a little bit more about what they’re doing and how they’re proceeding with this, some of this stuff as well.
(02:27):

So you know, the reality is is that the economy is going to be hurt from this. I think that it is possible that we go into a recession. I’m not an economic [inaudible] economic person, economic professional if you will. But I’ve been through downturns before. I think where this one’s a little bit different is that I think once we get through this and I think we will that things will rebound much quicker than what happened in the great recession a few years ago. And I don’t think we will get to that point. But I do think that we will recover from this quite a bit quicker than we did the last. Now again, I’m, I don’t have a crystal bar ball. I can’t tell for sure, but that’s my thoughts. Look, there’s businesses shutting down here in Colorado. They’ve shut down all of our bars, restaurants, things like that.

(03:19):
People are staying home out of fear. They’re watching the news. Which we’ll talk about a little bit more in a second. So you know, as a dentist, if you’re a general dentist or a cosmetic dentist or whatever it may be, you’re not going to get the same amount of new patients as you did a year from now or even a few months from now or a few months you were doing prior. It’s just not going to be the same. There is going to be an economic downturn, and the sooner that we can kind of put our arms around that, I think the quicker we can heal and get through this and grow. However, what I will tell you is that with these large economic downturns, what I have seen in the past is that local businesses like dental practices can pivot, move and rebound much quicker than major corporations.

(04:04):
I think major corporations, you know, certainly in travel and entertainment, no doubt, but even other large corporations are going to rebound from this slower than what dental practices will. And that’s because you’re going to have the ability to pivot, move and, and, and come up with new strategies on how to move forward and not getting bogged down with red tape and things like that. And that happened. That’s exactly what happened in our last downturn is we saw local businesses a lot of them anyway, I’ll rebound much quicker. So I think there is some opportunity there, but I do believe that we have to just, you know, realize that we are in a, a downmarket right now. Now, here’s the thing, patients do still need your services. They’re out there. They need full mouth restorations. They need cavities filled; they need cleanings. That hasn’t gone away, right?

(04:50):
What has gone away is them probably coming into your office for those routine type procedures, not everywhere. Not everybody. There are still people that are going to want to be seen. I know that, for instance, the American dental association has recommended that dentists only provide treatment for emergency based needs. So, you know, I know some, some dental practices are doing that. Some aren’t. Either way, there is an opportunity for you to still do business. I believe during this downturn; demand has not gone away. The what the ADA and CDA recommend are, are, you know, I, I see their points in that. And I think they’re very valid, but I also believe that there are opportunities for you to be able to do business during this time. Maybe it’s more of a pivot into emergency dentistry. I know that’s a little harder if you’re an orthodontist, right?

(05:48):
But if you’re an endodontist, for instance, there’s a lot of root canals out there that are in the merge emergency status, right? I’ve had one, so I understand it. I’m general dentistry. I know some of you don’t necessarily like to do emergency dental appointments, but that’s when you had a full calendar of cleanings and extractions and things like that. So now it may be time to move your marketing to more of a, more of a situation where you’re doing emergency or even take-home teeth whitening kits, things like that. But anyway there are two outcomes here I think in your mind of how this thing can go down. Right? I think that the number one scenario is, you know, you’re probably thinking in your mind, some of you is that this is it, this is the apocalypse. This is where it all ends.

(06:34):
I’ve got to shut down the practice and, and we’re done. I’m going to go back to bed, put my head under the covers and, and see what happens, right? And then there’s the number two situation. I think that is where people believe this is short term, but this isn’t a long lift thing. Whether it be a couple of weeks, a couple months, or even to the end of the year, people do believe that this will pass. And we’ll be okay. The economy will recover. You know, it’s probably not as bad as the news makes it out to be. And you know, I think that’s probably the side of where I am as well. I won’t say probably that is where I am and I hope that’s where you are too because that is what’s going to happen. We are going to come out of this, okay. The economy is going to recover.

(07:19):
So if you do believe that way, if you believe in the second situation that I talked about, then why not keep the pedal to the metal, if you will. Right? Why not keep going because you know that you’re going to come out of this and the economy’s going to rebound and people are going to come in for cleanings again, whether it be two weeks or two months or even the end of the year. See, this is how an opportunity is created for you because of a lot of other dental practice owners are not stretched thinking strategically. They’re not thinking about what happens when you come out of this. They’re thinking about right now, right? And even if you only think about the moment right now versus what’s ahead of you and you don’t take steps to grow through this, then you’re going to be left behind once you do come out of it.

(08:06):
So that’s where I believe that this opportunity is, it’s my advice. Keep the pedal to the metal, keep marketing, get your name out there as others don’t follow that aggressive pattern, or they just kind of fall off because they put their head in the sand, and they’re not sure what to do. That’s how you take over a market and that’s if you’re a Mar, if you’re a dentist that was maybe in the lower half or the middle in terms of competition, you know, online or you know, whatever, Facebook marketing, whatever, this is something that can catapult you and put you ahead of others once we come out of this. So we know people still need your services. Those of you that agree with me and think that we’re going to be coming out of this, it’s fairly short term. I think you now understand that there is an opportunity for you to propel yourself out of this.

(08:55):
If you continue to put out great content and those who are clients of ours know that we’re already doing that. But even if you can do it yourself, you know, short videos, right? Write some blogs, whatever it may be. Put strong content out there. Cause as others that don’t do that, and they stopped doing maybe what they’re doing now, once you do this and you come out of this, you’ve got to think about where you’ll rank on Google. Just that compared to where you were before, you’ll start catapulting some of your competition here. And in terms of SEO or search [inaudible] search engine optimization, how you rank on Google, you can come out of this being a market leader versus maybe somebody that was kind of middle of the pack or below. A lot of I shouldn’t say a lot.

(09:45):
A few of our clients have decided to stop pay per click advertising, and I totally understand because we do have some practices that have decided to shut down for the next couple of weeks. So I totally get that. However, I wouldn’t stop it if you’re staying open. And the reason why is because a lot of other people are going to stop doing it. And the way PaperClick works is that it’s all driven on competition. So the more competitors that are bidding for a particular keyword on Google, the price is driven up. It’s kind of like an auction if you will. So the less people that they are there are competing for a keyword like dentist in Sacramento or emergency dental in Denver. Right. The fewer people that are competing for that term, the lower the cost will be to acquire that potential new patient. So this is going to drive down your pay per click costs pretty significantly.

(10:37):
And it will drive down the cost it takes to acquire a new patient pretty significantly. And think about it with pay-per-click, the only time you pay for paid ads is when somebody that’s actually searching for you or a service that you offer in your local market. And they decided to click on the ad, right? So again, I’ll backtrack a little bit if you know we’re going to come out of this right and you know it’s going to be relatively short term, why slow down or stop that activity? This is going to help you come out of this much bigger in the end. So also, you know, in regards to pay per click and just, you know, really almost a non-marketing issue is that, you know, this could be a great opportunity for some of you bigger practices and better positions to scoop up and buy perhaps an agency or an agency, a dental practice that is struggling, right?

(11:32):
You could maybe buy somebody right now that you know, just doesn’t even want to deal with this and they want to go back and just be a dentist, and you know, work for somebody. This may be a great opportunity for you to scoop up a dental practice if you’re planning on growing at a very high discounted rate. Again, these are all option number two thoughts, right? We’re thinking ahead. We’re thinking strategically. We’re thinking, all right, what’s this gonna look like when I come, when we come out of this in a few weeks or a few months? Right? So I urge you, keep the pedal to the metal, create some opportunities for yourself. You can’t just sit around and wait for opportunities to pop up. This world in this country is driven by creating opportunities for yourself. So it’s my advice from years of experience in this is don’t back down. Don’t put your head in the sand, be aggressive and I promise you’ll come out of this stronger than when you came into it.

(12:23):
This kind of as a review, here are some things that we talked about. You know, I believe, I truly believe that the coven 19 opportunity represents an opportunity to take market share. You know, you still have demand out there. This will build a longterm competitive advantage for you because you can dominate a market and marketing right now while as others kind of ease off, you know, be sure to emphasize. I know we’ve worked with our clients about putting some messaging on their websites about, you know, the safety precautions you’re taking. You know, just some, some things that you’re doing, telling your client or your potential new patients that you’re open for business and you know, we’ve taken extra precautions to make sure that you and your family are safe in our office. You definitely want to communicate that to your patient base.

(13:11):
This is a big focus for your organic footprint in terms of where you rank on Google as others. I know I keep saying this, but as others let off the accelerator, if you put the pedal down, you’re going to overtake a lot of these practices, maybe huge practices that have spent thousands of dollars in the past and marketing, if they ease off that a little bit, it’s not that difficult to overcome them and stay on top of them once we come out of this. Keep paid, search running, you know, it’s a lower cost per lead, it’s less competition, and there are still people out there that want your services. So, you know, it’s difficult times makes us think a lot about, you know, our business, our employees. What’s next to come. Do yourself a favor. Don’t try to watch the news 24, seven.

(13:58):
You know, maybe just check in a couple of times cause that will definitely increase your anxiety for sure. You won’t get as much done, and you’ll, you know, you’ll start scratching your head and maybe even put your head in the sand. And, and as I, as we talked about, I, I just don’t believe that that’s the thing to do. I think now is the time to get aggressive, move on, and come out of this much stronger. But anyway, thanks so much for listening to this. If you have any questions at all, feel free to reach out to me. All my contact information will be below the video here. And you know, if you’re not a client and you just have questions, I’m not going to charge you anything to, to answer questions or anything like that. So just feel free to ask me, but have a great day, and we’ll talk to you very soon.