[00:00:00] Narrator: Welcome to the Dental Marketing Podcast, a podcast that helps dentists win in the online world of modern day marketing. Each week, we cover the most cutting edge marketing tactics and strategies that are working right now across our client base to drive leads, phone calls, and more new patients for dentists.
[00:00:21] Now here’s your host and founder of Kickstart Dental Marketing, Chris Pistorius.
[00:00:29] Chris Pistorius: Hey everybody. Welcome to another edition of the Dental Marketing Podcast. I’m your host, Chris Pistorius, the CEO of Kickstart Dental Marketing. Today I want to talk about a couple of things that are absolutely critical in terms of having a successful marketing campaign or not.
[00:00:46] And quite frankly, a lot of the dentists out there, I think, that have had bad experiences with marketing in general and haven’t had good success probably have gotten this wrong. And this is really two things that if you don’t get right, nothing else is gonna matter. And these are the first two things that you should think about before entering into any sort of marketing venture, if you will.
[00:01:10] The first thing I want to talk about is identifying your dream patient. And what I mean by dream patient is if you could describe the perfect patient for your practice. What would they be? Right. And to put that on paper. So, you know, I think that, I don’t think I actually know that practices that get so obsessed with the services they offer, you know, crowns and bridges and root canals and implants, stuff like that, sometimes they become obsessed with that and that’s all they think about.
[00:01:44] But what we find is that practices that do obsess with that ultimately have a very high percentage chance of failing. And that’s because they’re not obsessing about the things that they should, and that’s their dream patients, who they want to work with on a daily basis. And if you can’t identify that, then anything that you do marketing wise is just throwing up a bunch of stuff against the wall and hoping something sticks.
[00:02:09] Right, because if you can’t identify who it is you’re going after with marketing, then you’re just hoping and hoping just is not a good way to go into a marketing strategy or really any other type of business strategy.
[00:02:23] So, what I want to talk to you first of all, is kind of how do you identify what that dream patient is and you know, well, I can’t tell you what that is because you know, you have to identify that my company helps our clients do that quite a bit.
[00:02:37] It’s one of the first steps that we do in any marketing campaign, but you really need to look and understand your patients better than they understand themselves. And how you do that is by looking at things like, okay, if I’m an implant dentist, who is it that I really want to come through that door? And who should my target demographic be?
[00:02:59] You know, is it the 45 to 65 year old that you know, needs a little bit more cosmetic work? Yeah, probably. If you’re a pediatric dentist and you’re thinking about, all right, who should my dream patient be well, obviously that’s gonna be kids, right? But you’re really targeting the parents, right? So your demographic is probably that 25 to 45 year old female with two and a half kids and a golden retriever, and maybe they own their own home.
[00:03:25] Right. These are the things that you’ve gotta look at. Now, if you’re starting a brand new practice, right? This is a little harder because you haven’t have any experience yet. And so maybe we kind of open the floodgates in the beginning and then we figure out who we want our dream patients to be, right?
[00:03:41] But if you have an existing practice, like most of you do, this drill becomes pretty easy because you’ve got a database full of thousands of patients that you’ve worked with in the past, and you should be collecting demographic data about them, like age, maybe not income, but we can get to that. But marital status, you know, things like that that can lead to other things like homeowner.
[00:04:05] Just different types of demographics. So, you need to look at your books and you need to see and pull data and, you know, put it into flow charts so that you can understand who it is that’s working with you, who’s spending maybe the most money in the services that you want them to, and then you can profile that person and come up with one of your new patient avatars, if you will or your dream patient.
[00:04:28] And guess what? It’s okay to have more than one dream patient or more than one, you know patient avatar, right? But you’ve gotta know those avatars and you’ve gotta understand who they are. And you’ve gotta put that on paper and agree to it with the other stakeholders in your company, whether it’s a business partner, the front desk, everybody in the office should really know who that patient is and, what they look like and the reason why this is so critical, we talked about just throwing stuff up against the wall and hoping something sticks.
[00:05:00] You know, we definitely don’t want to do that, and that’s why a lot of marketing ventures for dental practices fail. I see it every day almost is because we don’t have a really well defined patient avatar. But you know, the other thing is that once you can identify that new patient avatar and the dream patient, then you can go figure out where they congregate online, right?
[00:05:20] So you know that that 25 to 45 year old female, two and a half kids in a golden retriever. That stereotype, if you will, they hang out in certain places online, certain groups in Facebook like on Facebook, like mom groups and just places like that. And, you know, you can figure out what YouTube channels they watch and what they’re interested in.
[00:05:41] And then once you figure out where they congregate online, then you can put your message in front of them because you know who they are. You know their age range, you know, then where they hang out and then you get your message and you buy your media based on those demographics of that dream patient, and you put your message in front of them in those places, whether it’s a Facebook group or a YouTube channel whatever it may be, you know, that’s how you do that and that’s how you come up with a successful marketing campaign.
[00:06:12] That’s just the foundations of it though, right? That’s not the, the whole ball of wax. But you also, you know, SEO is, you know, there’s always been this buzzword in dental marketing, you’ll get your website to the top of the search engines on Google and yeah, that is important. It’s a big part of what we do here as well.
[00:06:30] But you know what, when you can identify who your patient avatars are who your dream patients are, you can also figure out how they do searches online and how they look for a dentist like you online. What keywords do they use. And then those are the keywords that you target. The ones that your dream patients are using, Right?
[00:06:51] And that could be completely different than the keywords that maybe you’re not so dream patients using. Right? It definitely could be different. And so this is what we see also with failure in terms of dental marketing, is that, you know, a lot of companies out there they have their dental marketing campaign and it’s up on a shelf and whenever they sign up a new dentist, they get it off the shelf.
[00:07:12] And it’s that exact same campaign that they use for every dentist that they sign up. And I get it. It’s an easy way to scale an agency and get a ton of clients. Unfortunately, it’s not the way to get best results because they’re not structuring and customizing that campaign based on what your dream patient looks like, what their demographics are.
[00:07:34] They’re just blanket, this is our campaign and that’s gonna lead to failure as well. It’s not gonna work very often. Right. So you’ve gotta work with a company or if you’re doing it yourself do it yourself, but make sure that you’re using a customized approach versus just a stagnant, you know, one size fits all approach. Okay.
[00:07:54] Narrator: Are you looking to grow your practice but are a little unclear on what the best way is? Let us help you out. We have over 13 years of experience in helping practices just like yours, increase new patient growth. Just go to KickStartDental.com and sign up for a free strategy session where we will give you some great insights on how to take your practice to the next level.
[00:08:21] The other side of this is once we’ve really gotten our dream patient figured out, or dream patients and new patient avatars figured out, and we’ve got that on paper and everybody agrees to it, we’ve also gotta figure out something that’s called the USP It’s been around for years, right? It’s called, that’s short for unique selling proposition.
[00:08:41] And when I bring this up to dentists, it’s almost like a cringe wordly moment for them, when they hear the word selling or sales. Well, you gotta get over that, in my opinion, as a dentist, okay? Because guess what? You are selling something, you are. That doesn’t mean that your approach has to be like a used car salesperson or a timeshare presentation, something like that.
[00:09:01] That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m am saying though, that whoever answers the phones and responds to people that call you and ask questions about your practice potential new patients, they have to understand the value of your practice. And then they have to understand how to convey that value to your potential new patient.
[00:09:20] And if they’re not doing that effectively or if they’re not doing that at all, I see that a lot, then you are not going to get as many new patients scheduled and in the chair as you want to. You have to have some sort of sales component to your practice. You do. It’s just way too competitive now, corporate dentistry is invading everywhere. You have to be able to tell your story.
[00:09:43] And so USP’s, unique selling propositions is where we work with our clients, along with the new patient avatars of, okay, so you’re not the only shop in town. We know that, right? We did a competitive analysis and there’s 35 other dentists that do pretty much exactly like you do, right?
[00:10:00] So why should somebody choose you? What’s different about you? Why should somebody choose you versus the 20 or 30 other dentists in the area? What makes you different? And a lot of times I kind of get this deer and headlights look and I get it cuz it’s happened to me years ago too. And somebody asked me this and taught me this, but it’s kind of like, and then they rush and they say something kind of knee jerk like, well I’ve been around 20 years, or we’ve got the best technology or we’ve got the best staff.
[00:10:30] That’s great, but guess what? That’s what everybody else is saying too. You’ve gotta come up with something unique selling proposition keyword there is unique, right? We’ve gotta have something a little bit different that separates you from the competition. And I would say 95% of the new clients that we take on don’t know what this is.
[00:10:50] Right. And I get it, but it’s an eye opener for them. And we work with them on figuring out what is gonna be unique to them. Right. It could be something very little like they’re open Saturdays, Right? Or it could be something more extreme where they actually go to people’s houses, right? And do appointments in home for special needs people.
[00:11:10] You know, that’s a pretty obvious one, right? But there’s something that makes you a little bit different, and that’s something that we use as marketing to exploit and make you unique, but it’s also something that the front desk has to understand and be able to convey to a potential new patient.
[00:11:28] So if you have those two things, if you have your dream patient identified, you’ve got your unique selling proposition, it could be more than one unique selling proposition as well. If you’ve got that on paper and everybody understands it, including your front desk, your staff, your marketing company, if applicable
[00:11:47] If everybody’s on the same page there. Then you’ve got the foundation for a very powerful marketing campaign because we’ve identified who we want, where they are. And then we know how we’re unique and how we’re different and better than the competition. Simple as that. Once you’ve got those two things, then it’s just all about execution.
[00:12:08] Chris Pistorius: So anyway, I’m gonna cut it off there. If you need some help with identifying your new patient avatars, your dream patients. If you need help understanding what your unique selling proposition is and how you can stand out from the competition, please let me know. Go to my website, KickStartDental.com. There’s a free strategy session button right there.
[00:12:29] And I do all of those personally myself. Just schedule a time that works for you. And we can go over everything about your practice. I’ll give you some tips and tricks on some things that I see that you know, could help out other than your USP and your your dream patient. But do that schedule the time.
[00:12:43] I’ll be more than happy to help you and walk you through it. But anyway, this has been another addition of the Dental Marketing Podcast. Thanks so much for your time, and I look forward to speaking with you soon.
[00:12:53] Narrator: Thanks for joining us this week on the Dental Marketing Podcast. Make sure to visit our website, www.KickStartDental.com/podcast, where you can subscribe to the show in iTunes, Spotify, or via RSS so you’ll never miss a show.
[00:13:09] 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 KickStartDental.com and click the free strategy session button and give us 15 minutes of your time to change your practice forever.
[00:13:32] 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.
