00:00:00
“foreign hey we are here with Chris Pistorius who is the founder of Kickstart Dental marketing they have been consistently listed as one of the top Dental marketing companies in the country by up City and they pretty much do everything that you need if you are a dental practice they do online advertising social media front desk training reactivation campaigns SEO website managing your leads figuring out your”

00:00:32
“unique selling proposition ideal patient so many things so much to talk about Chris how the heck are you I’m great man thanks for having me on I appreciate it I’m glad to have you on and and you know how podcasting goes you never know who is driving by who is listening and ideally hopefully there is some densest office who is struggling out there who needs help who needs the team at Kickstart Dental to really kick start their practice in the high gear and I feel like as a layperson a lot of these dentists really have so much of their”

00:01:02
“social media dialed in they consistently post on social media they have beautiful Graphics they have testimonials but from an out as an outsider it looks extremely overwhelming all the boxes to be checked all the bells and whistles and so as far as the way you see it what’s the average dentist office struggling with where are they stuck and what do they need help with yeah it’s a great point and I’ll tell you you know even 10 years ago it was a much simpler process and probably more like 15 years ago”

00:01:32
“because back then you could put an ad in the Yellow Pages I mean who the hell even knows what yellow pages are anymore uh but you could put an ad in the Yellow Pages you can do a little direct mail and you’re kind of set and it worked well and that’s kind of was the complexity of your marketing campaigns well nowadays there’s 500 different places that you can Market just online right so the internet’s really caused you know some complexity and marketing for not just dentists but really any local businesses so we created Kickstart Dental marketing to kind of help untangle the web a little bit if you”

00:02:03
“will and fine you provide a safe place if you will for dentists and simplify some of this and mostly our clients see us as kind of being their marketing department their digital marketing department so we have 12 years of experience in Dental we have a great pulse of what works for Dennis and what don’t what doesn’t um and we’re able to to kind of hit the ground running take that stress of it out of the out of them they’re great at being a dentist let them go run their dental practice let us be the ones that are that are driving new leads and new”

00:02:34
“patients to the practice and when you find these these dental offices what’s the starting point is it a matter of like they aren’t doing marketing they’re doing marketing but it’s all themselves and they’re so busy is it not paying off what’s the before picture look like it’s a little bit of everything um what we see more of that more often than not is that it is so complex and they don’t know what to do and they don’t know where to turn to and sometimes they’ll just kind of do what I call the ostrich method of marketing and”

00:03:05
“they what will happen is they’ll kind of stick their head in the sand and do nothing right and that’s because it’s too complex they don’t understand it they’re not they don’t want to make a bad decision and waste a bunch of money right so um and that’s the worst thing that you can really do if you want to compete I mean Dentistry is more competitive now than it’s ever been I mean if in most local cities towns there’s multiple choices to go to the dentist so you have to be able to compete and digital marketing is where people are finding new dentists and that’s where you have to be visible and it not just visible”

00:03:36
“but you have to be found which is the visibility part but you have to give people a reason to choose you as well and that’s that’s even a bigger part of it is you know do you have a unique selling proposition you know why should somebody Choose You versus the 50 other dentists in town what is it that you do different right and we help with that part of the marketing process um as well because if we get that aligned and in place then it becomes marketing becomes a little bit easier and we know who to Target where to Target and how to really talk to that”

00:04:06
“particular market so that’s kind of the process but we find we find dentists that are doing nothing right now we find dentists that you know perhaps are doing marketing now but they’re just not having a great experience with their current agency and and they’re looking for something a little bit different so kind of all kinds of across-the-board people is what we find and that’s interesting how you break that problem down into kind of more manageable pieces right you said that there’s first of all the issue of being known at all even being discovered at all and then there’s the issue of uh”

00:04:38
“like you know these days people they do their research they check reviews they there’s a lot more uh like I don’t know like education happening and then there’s this kind of like the uniqueness this unique selling proposition and on that point as far as the USP what comes to mind just in general is in my town There’s I would say like maybe like 25 30 dentists and the the only ones that really come to mind as far as just like thinking of who I visualize is there’s one that’s a kid’s dentist and their logo looks kind of like the cover of”

00:05:08
“Highlights magazine where it looks like it’s drawn in crayon and then there’s another one where it’s called like Symphony of smiles or something and there’s like a piano in the front room and it’s it’s kind of I don’t know it stands out for some reason I’m like I’m not sure what a piano has to do with the dentist so so like how how how does a dentist be unique because it’s like well everyone’s got got teeth everyone needs teeth clean how do you get from just being just a dentist to something like that yeah it just kind of depends but some examples are like we have a”

00:05:40
“pediatric dentist who specializes in kids obviously and they have a part of their business that really uh encompasses like special needs kids so we really I mean that’s different that’s unique not all dentists do that not even all pediatric dentists do that so that’s something that we want to show people what they do and it makes them very unique um for others it can be we have a client that went to Harvard dental school right we don’t want to overdo that but we want to definitely highlight that look this person went to a really good school they”

00:06:10
“graduated top in their class at Harvard school or Harvard dental school so for for that particular situation it’s education and experience so you know it’s a little different for each one and that’s where you know a lot of other marketing companies think of a dentist as a dentist right and they’ll take on you know 20 clients in one city and then they’ll move on and go to the next city well we’re a little different we only work with one practice in each market and we don’t believe a dentist is a dentist we do believe that there’s a unique selling proposition for each and every one of our clients and that’s what”

00:06:42
“we try to really expose the most and how do you discover that like if a dentist is top of their class in a Harvard dental school is it a matter of like asking a bunch of questions or like just like talking to them like how do you dig deep and and arrive at something like that it’s the first part of our process once they sign up with us we have a kickoff meeting it takes about an hour and a half and it’s with the dentist and you know his top staff and we die we have kind of a set number of questions that we ask that drive towards figuring out what that unique selling”

00:07:12
“proposition is and then my team will strategize on how to word it and message it and We’re Off to the Races and so what do you think is like the low-hanging fruit these days as far as like you know Dennis there’s there’s always a million things to be done right you need maybe like a website or like text message reminders or maybe like clean up bad reviews on social media but what you say is there something timely like the last year or so that like all dentists are really missing out on that they need to pay attention to yep it’s called Next Door I don’t have you heard”

00:07:43
“of next door oh yeah yeah yeah so it used to be that you couldn’t even really do advertising on Nextdoor uh and for the people listening that don’t know what next door is it’s like a local community website but they’ve got one for like every community in the country so like I’m part of one that has several thousand residents in it and you know it’s only local to people that live there well now you can local businesses can now market and advertise on those channels and it’s pretty affordable and not many other dentists are doing that right now they haven’t kind of they”

00:08:14
“haven’t really figured that out yet so we’re placing our clients in these advertisements and they’re doing great so that’s something certainly within the last year that uh is working great for our clients fantastic and so so what does that look like exactly just like you run an ad someone’s using the app and then there is that go to like a phone number or a website or like what’s the path from someone is seeing the like the dentist on this app to their book for an appointment yeah we try to break it out in a different campaigns and think of each campaign as a different”

00:08:45
“type of service so like we might have a campaign just for dental implants right or a campaign just for teeth whitening right and so when they click on that particular campaign ad say teeth whitening um they’ll click on it and they’ll actually go to a landing page that we built we don’t just send them to the website a landing page that talks all about their teeth whitening Services any specials that they have and there’s a phone number on it that we we track phone calls that go through and then there’s also a form online if they want to just you know fill out a form and send it in we track that as well and”

00:09:17
“there’s also an online chat button where they can actually speak with somebody at the front desk through chat if they’d prefer to do that way Manny you thought of everything and I feel like man it’s only seven minutes into our conversation where we’re both going at such Breakneck speeds I feel like this is uh kind of like a rapid fire session right as we’re uh as we’re kind of like talking about all these things and so you’re mentioning uh all these things like you know monitoring phone calls and landing pages and so I imagine that a dentist out there at this point will be thinking well what’s like the cost involved I know that there’s”

00:09:48
“probably like different levels of packages but like what’s the general cost involved and then what’s what’s the timeline because I’m sure that like there’s a period of time like you said of like figuring out that client and then establishing things and letting ads and things run so like what kind of budgets are we talking and what kind of tile lines yeah you’re right it varies and some clients probably 70 of our clients bring us on to run the whole show kind of Head to Toes were like the full-on marketing department for them and about 30 of them will just kind of say you know what I really want to do some Facebook ads or some Google ads can”

00:10:19
“you just run that campaign for me okay can you just build a website for me and we do some of that work kind of piece work as well and pricing just really we don’t have like standardized gold silver bronze packaging it’s impossible to do that because every Market’s different in competitiveness and you know at San Francisco versus like um you know Strasbourg Colorado for instance way two different populations it’ll make it way easier in Strasbourg for us to get somebody ranked and visible online than”

00:10:50
“it will in San Francisco so San Francisco’s budget will be quite a bit more money but we have clients that spend a few hundred dollars with us a month not that many but we have probably the the sweet point is a few thousand dollars a month um just kind of just kind of depending on what’s going on okay fair enough and since we’re mentioning clients it’s always fun to talk about like success stories right where we can talk talk you and your team up and and especially when they’re like say you found a practice that really needed help and really like had a few things working but but not everything”

00:11:21
“and so do you have any fun success stories like that where there was like before and after and your team jumped in and just like really made it a well-oiled machine yep absolutely this is the the pride and and the joy of doing this you know it’s you know we’ve done this a few times now where a client has come to us and they’re kind of on their last rope they’re like we’re struggling you know we this particular one I’m thinking of is you know we took over a dental practice we bought it we’ve got this debt his patient base is just going away”

00:11:52
“they’re not actually coming to us um we need help right and so over about a course of a year we turn them into not only being hugely successful without one practice but within that year they actually bought another practice and that one is doing gangbusters as well and we’ve had multiple clients you know do that you know rebound their current practice grow it and then if they are the type that likes to expand we’ve had several that have gone on and bought other”

00:12:22
“practices so it’s a great success story and those are the ones that uh you know keep you smiling every day when you come into work well fantastic and I mean speaking of rebounding you know there’s this whole pandemic thing that who knows if it’s come and gone but either way it disrupted a lot of us in a lot of ways from like occupancy but it seemed like so many businesses figured out the internet figured out the apps figured out like appointment uh systems and getting people in and out the door and I think just as a marketer in general who”

00:12:53
“I like marketing but like the dental uh space doesn’t really interest me personally that much but it’s still interesting to see like what’s being done especially in these niches where it’s really dialed in so have you uh had to adjust with your your clients or had to like improve their process at all with all this pandemic stuff happening we haven’t changed much in the process but what did help us I mean every dental practice in the country pretty much shut down for at least 30 days and some 60 to 90 days so basically every one of our clients saw no new patients for a”

00:13:24
“minimum of 30 days okay so a good chunk of those said hey Chris we’ve got no money coming in so I can’t pay you so we took the strategy of okay we see light at the end of the tunnel it doesn’t look great right now but we are going to come out of this at some point so we don’t want you to lose progress in marketing based on you know the next 30 to 60 days so we took the kind of on I don’t know the best way to put it but kind of the scary step is saying look we’re going to keep working for you”

00:13:54
“we’re not going to charge you anything until you’re back up and running and seeing new patients again but we’re going to keep your marketing we’re not going to let off the accelerator at all and it worked out I mean of the people that paused with us um about 90 percent of them wound up coming back it built seemed to build a great relationship with them because they were very um glad that we took the time and the money to keep investing in them even though that they weren’t bringing money in and they weren’t paying us but during that time I didn’t”

00:14:25
“we didn’t lay anybody off we didn’t let anybody go I just kind of dug my heels in and we took when we when a lot of people didn’t have much to do like particular departments we really took the time of looking at our process and procedures in terms of you know how we get work done you know how we can be more efficient and we were able to realign a lot of work to streamline our process a little bit more so that we can hand a few more clients and still have a small team so that allowed us to refine our internal processes and just build”

00:14:55
“mad loyalty with with our current patients and our current clients and it’s worked out well awesome so instead of of panicking or instead of shutting everything down you said we’ll keep doing it but you as the client don’t have to pay us until you back up and running and will also turn this into a positive by figuring out how to do a better job here so like fantastic and so uh kind of diving into some of your services and things like that the the lead uh flow lead management thing that that’s really interesting because like one thing that”

00:15:26
“blew my mind as a little kid I think I was maybe like 10 years old was they like the dentist had me write like address a postcard to myself as the reminder for the appointment in like six months or a year or something and so I totally forgot and then a year later when a postcard showed up it appeared there in my handwriting and it also makes me think about in the in the present day I sort of dropped out with my dentist like I I was going to our dentist like twice two or two or three times a year and then the person that would usually see me she went on”

00:15:57
“vacation and then when she came back we couldn’t get her schedules figured out and just fell out of it and then years passed and they never followed up with me and if they had I probably would have gone like five or six times since then and it seems like there’s a lot of just really simple things like that especially if there’s software and our miners involved so can you kind of tell us a little bit about what this whole like lead generation lead management uh stuff is all about with Dennis yeah it’s it’s awesome obviously I’m biased because I kind of created it but what we”

00:16:28
“found is exactly what you just talked about sometimes like for instance let’s just use this as an example let’s say somebody signs up for uh more information about being a new patient with your practice they fill out a form online right that gets forwarded to you well you follow up with them no answer you send them an email no response well the thinking behind that is that it’s very easy to fill out one of those forms but then it kind of buyer’s remorse kicks in because nobody’s thrilled about going to the dentist that’s just the way it is and they keep putting it off putting it”

00:16:59
“off they see who’s calling him they see who’s emailing and they’re like I don’t really want to go I’ll put it off well most dental practices don’t have a system in place or the Personnel to be able to follow up five six seven times which study shows is what it takes to actually get some of these patients into your chair you know they might call once or send an email once but that’s about it that’s all they have set up so we’ve created a system that will actually follow up with them um an appropriate amount of time so that we’re not overdoing it and you know just”

00:17:29
“trying to harass them but we have a system that’ll automatically follow up with them so the front desk doesn’t have to until we do are able to connect them with the front desk and then our sequence stops so front desk Personnel don’t have to worry about constant follow-ups we take care of that for them on the flip side of that though when somebody fills out a form online or you know sends in whatever you have a 391 percent better chance of getting them into your chair if you can respond to that lead within one minute okay and”

00:17:59
“that this is kind of for all types of small businesses not just Dentistry but the quicker you can respond to an online lead the better so if you get that lead notification and you might wait a few hours to call them back there’s a good chance you’re not going to get them because think about it they’re probably on Google or some list looking for a dentist they reach out reach out and they keep going down the list right well it’s going to be kind of the first person that gets back to them is going to have a really good chance of getting them in the chair so we’ve created that same system as if during business hours they fill out a form or whatever it”

00:18:30
“actually automatically calls the front desk and says hey Chris has filled out a form off of Facebook press one to connect with him now the front desk presses one and within 60 seconds of that person filling out the form they’re able to connect with that lead immediately and we’re seeing that that is driving a huge conversion rates and getting a lot more of those online leads and shares so and there’s a lot more that this lead system does but those are two of the two of the to the biggest features probably that’s amazing that’s mind-blowing and in our conversation today and in”

00:19:01
“thinking about the way that you and your your team break down the things that are needed like with the leads and the SEO just what comes to mind is that there are so many businesses out there especially Dennis where they things are going great but just kind of almost by chance just like they’ve maybe lucked into it and that there are so many things that could be like repeatedly predictably just done and system is high so that way it just happens without uh without anyone having to think about it your team just handles it it’s a thing”

00:19:31
“that just happens and I like your your mindset here of like taking things to the extreme and almost being superhuman I mean uh having someone fill out a format and within a minute to get a a phone call from any business right any kind of like contract or Home Service dentist anything to get a phone ringing in a minute I mean it’s a impressive amazing and uh easy enough to do with the right software the right system and if there’s someone at their front desk who’s working 40 hours a week anyway why”

00:20:01
“not plug into that when it’s possible when they’re just playing on Facebook anyway so like this is so many cool things to be for us to be thinking about and so if someone out there in podcast land is watching or listening they say a lot of this makes sense I’m super duper interested in Kickstart Dental I want to find out what you guys are all about I want to get a conversation going what’s the next step here if someone says I’m in I want to contact Chris and his team and get a phone call back in one minute or less what’s the next step yeah just go to our website kickstartdental.com”

00:20:32
“there’s a button there for a free strategy session I do all the strategy sessions the initial one so it’d be with me personally we just kind of go over what your practice is into what’s going on what your goals are then we kind of take it from there fantastic short short and sweet go there right now kickstartdental.com and as we wrap up wind down our conversation as and as people are going and typing in kickstartdental.com even before the episode’s over just so that way the browser tab is there it’s on your phone and all that stuff do you think there’s anything that either like we left out of”

00:21:03
“our talk today Chris or anything that you just want to say is some final parting words of advice yeah I think it’s my my final words of advice would be to take action if you want to grow your practice or any local business that’s out there listening to this or watching this take action do something doing nothing isn’t going to grow your business right do something take action I don’t care if it’s going out and going door to door and trying to sell your whatever service you have or sending out letters to targeted customers do something that’s going to”

00:21:33
“grow your business foreign”