Every popular new patient marketing strategy for dentistry. (What practice owners must know)

00:00:00
So when you start looking into marketing strategies, when you try to grow your practice by getting more patients, there is a lot of misconception out there. There’s a lot of, you know, it’s could be data overwhelm for you. So in this video, what I wanted to do was break down the most popular strategies. I want to tell you about what people are doing, what practices are doing to actually grow. Um, misconceptions about them, what people are doing that don’t necessarily work as well, yet the

00:00:31
approach we take is to do it just because everyone else is doing. Um, and I want to show you some strategies that just don’t work at all. and also finally a strategy that works better than everyone else, but uh it’s going to take a bit of consistency and a lot of time to actually build this asset. So, let’s get into it. But real quick, um I own a marketing agency myself. We have about seven agencies and about a dozen clients um almost all in the dental industry. So what we do is we focus on strategies

00:01:04
that actually work and kind of I try to educate my clients on what doesn’t work because a lot they will receive a lot of information from people who are selling things that um they come back to me about and I have to explain that hey this might not be the best strategy for you and here’s why. So I thought I would share this video with you to so that you can kind of get the advantages that my clients have uh and realize kind of or or make the decisions for yourself for what strategies that you want to take.

00:01:36
All right. So let’s start with actually SEO because this is such a prevalent and common approach to growing a new practice. Um, my thesis for this, my conclusion is going to be that SEO doesn’t work the way it did. And there’s a lot of debate on this, but hopefully you’ll understand why this is the case uh, and why you shouldn’t focus so much on the traditional SEO. And then I’ll talk more a bit about local SEO, which is very different. It has the word SEO in it as well.

00:02:18
But this is going to be very different from SEO as you’ll uh as as I’ll show you in a second here. So how does SEO work? The concept of SEO is very simple. Someone does a search on Google. So let’s say this is the search bar and they search something like dentist near me. Now, the goal is to target high intent keywords like dentist near me. It doesn’t make sense to target a keyword like how much money does dentists make. Sure, it might be someone interested in dentistry, but it might be the wrong

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audience. Now, it might be like a undergrad student looking into dentistry. or something like um does can I eat popcorn with braces, right? It’s if you’re an orthodontist, if you rank number one for that and you show up um it doesn’t really mean that they’re going to be a patient. In fact, it probably means they already have braces. Um and they could also be searching from a completely different location. Like if you’re on the West Coast, they might be on the East Coast searching for this.

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So, it doesn’t really make sense. Like there’s a mismatch there. So, what we really care about is high intent and also qualification. So, does it indicate that they’re looking for the service that you provide? And does it indicate that they’re qualified to become a patient of yours? Is it is what you provide an actual need for them uh based on what they’re searching? So the idea, so that’s the idea behind SEO and the goal was to get into the top three positions when it comes to someone

00:04:02
searching this. So if you were in these top three spots, it was very good for you. You made a lot of money and uh you were able to get the attention. Um you were able to get the top three spots for a generic keyword uh and everything was good. And if you were below the top three spots, so let’s say you were four, five, or six, this was considered losers back in the day. Um, basically it meant that if you were here, SEO wasn’t paying off. You’re likely losing money, um, paying the SEO

00:04:41
agency, uh, and you weren’t seeing virtually any results in these positions. And why is this? Well, it’s because the top three positions would get around 80 to 90% of the traffic coming in. So, if you were in the bottom uh bottom, well, not bottom three, but like if you were anywhere outside of that, you were basically fighting for scraps. You were fighting for 10 to 20% of people who were searching for a dentist near them. So, what happened? Why do I believe that SEO is not a valid strategy anymore?

00:05:21
Well, how do you rank better? What is the process of improving and getting to the top? Let’s say if you’re a position four, what would you have to do in order to push yourself up? Well, the approach and and the way to do it was by getting content plus back links. And if you ever talked with an uh SEO agency, they might have referenced it like this or they might have called it um onpage SEO and off-page SEO. So what that basically means is onpage the content actually on your website. Does

00:06:04
it match what the user is searching? If not, you have to create content that matches it that Google can see and say, “Okay, this content is relevant to this.” But now, everyone can have content, but what’s going to determine where you rank on this is going to be through back links. And backlinks is basically online trust. If a lot of websites link basically have a link on their website and if someone clicks on that link comes to your website if there’s a lot of that Google can look

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at those links and say okay since there’s a lot of websites pointing at this website that must mean this website your website is trustworthy and if other websites can trust it then I’m then I as Google am confident that I can show your content to someone who is searching for that content versus another person who has that same content but no other websites are pointing to it then Google can say okay great they have the same content but not many people trust it so I don’t know if I can trust this website to show to my

00:07:15
users either and so you’re likely to go uh a bit further down so this was the strategy that you would have to take to get an advantage age with traditional SEO. So what happened? What happened was that people started abusing this as as soon as they figured out this little equation here. And so they would create more content, dozens and dozens of pages hypersp specific to every single possible keyword that someone could search on Google. All right, so that was step one. um they just spammed content.

00:07:52
And number two was they just created a ton of backlinks, right? It wasn’t backlinks that were earned anymore. It wasn’t other websites saying, “Oh, this is a good and trustworthy website. Let’s link to them.” This became a whole industry. it became a whole uh marketplace where you could go into and start purchasing backlinks for anywhere between a dollar to $50 to maybe $300 if you wanted a backlink from a reputable source like um the Wall Street Journal or something. So as this strategy of

00:08:26
improving the ranks of SEO started being abused, we saw these symptoms of it and you likely um see that symptom as an advantage that you could potentially have today, but it’s not possible. So what I mean by that is for example, let’s say, and this was a very common thing. So I live in Laah Habra. So let’s say I search dentists in La Habra. What would happen was the first results or even the first three results would be people in totally different cities. They were other um like maybe three cities

00:09:08
away, a 45minut drive. And because they were able to abuse this so well, they started showing up. So now when I went to Google and tried to look for a dentist near me or dentists near Laah Habra or wherever, I was getting results that were for dentists not near me. And so what happened were users got frustrated with Google’s search engine results and they would use things like Yelp because what was Yelp? Yelp was all about locality. Yelp was um you could search, you could put the pin on you and

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there would be a map that shows up and you could see where all the businesses were. So Yelp solved the problem of SEO and that’s why they’re a business themselves. They solve the problem of SE this issue that came as a result of SEO strategy. All right. So Google saw this and they’re like, “Okay, this thing this this thing is giving our users such a bad experience that they’re going to Yelp.” And and so they basically gutted it. Now, if you want to get an advantage on Google, you pay Google for ads or you

00:10:16
get more reviews. Those are the two only strategies that you have for for for getting any SEO results. So, in comes local SEO and local SEO comes in right around 2020 20 uh 2016 to about 2018. All right. And this was the pres um evolution of this thing called Google Maps or Google Places or Google business profile. Google My Business, right? They’re they they’ve gone through a lot of iterations. Um, what did local SEO do and how did it basically kill traditional SEO? All right, let me show you visually how that happened.

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So, recall that if you weren’t up here and if you were down here, you were basically considered a loser. Like, not you as a loser, but you know, your your strategy was a loser. Now what Google did was this was traditionally how the search engine results page looked but from 2016 to around 2018 they introduced this thing called Google Maps. Back then it was called Google Map Pack. Now it’s called Google Places. So check it out yourself. Try like try pausing the video and do a search on Google and do one that

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indicates that you’re looking for a business near you, like a local business. Um, so something like restaurants near me, uh, dentist near me, or even like dentist Fullerton, um, best dentist near me. Anything that indicates that you’re searching for something in a specific location, it’s going to trigger this Google Places. If you search for something generic that isn’t location specific, something like can I eat popcorns with braces, then you’re not going to trigger this and

00:12:17
you’re going to see the traditional search results. But um yeah, if remember the whole point of SEO was two things. It was intent and also qualification. Can they even become a patient of yours? And location is a very big qualifier. So, we care about local SEO now. We don’t care about traditional SEO. Now, um so local SEO brings you Google Places and then down here are going to be the traditional SEO results. So, one, two, three, four. So, if you were number one for traditional SEO in the past, well, guess

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what? Now you’re pushed down here to number one in SEO, in traditional SEO, with everyone who is doing local SEO beating you, right? And so now what was considered a loser, even if you’re in the top three position, you’re always going to be considered a loser. Again, 80 to 90%. Like it’s not just that we’ve shifted down and the results are also shifted down. No, the results have stayed up here and Google understands this. So now when you do a search, you actually have to physically scroll to see most of

00:13:29
these search engine results like the traditional SEO stuff. So now if you’re even number one on uh traditional SEO, you’re again fighting for the scraps. And it’s it’s really important to realize that this shift has happened that Google understands that when someone is looking for a local service business that users are going to find it more valuable that they can see where that business is in relation to them. So it’s not some practice that is three cities away and also they can see

00:14:05
reviews. So let’s get into local SEO. So basically my conclusion with um SEO is that it is a very popular it’s still being perpetuated and people are still promoting it. Why? I think there’s two reasons. One, it’s old industries, old marketing agencies. That’s all they do and they need to survive. So they’re basically convincing you that yes, this is a strategy that still works. And two, there’s people who did very well with the old strategy. They built their practices on this. Um, so those doctors

00:14:39
will promote that idea to you. And if you ask them, hey, how did you grow your practice? They’d say, uh, it was just a focus on SEO. It really works. And they have the best intentions. They want you to help you grow. But here’s the thing, they don’t see how the landscape has changed. You know, they’re doctors first, not marketers. So with the best intentions, they tell you um how they managed to make it work. Um, yeah. So, so those are the two reasons why this is being perpetuated. But my

00:15:08
conclusion is that SEO as we knew it before 2016 and 2018 is uh very much very much not a strategy you want to rely on. Does that mean you should neglect 10 to 20% of the traffic? Absolutely not. Like if you want to um go have your SEO go like handle that. Make sure your on page content is good. Make sure you get some back links. Make sure you get your local citations. Like, this is very easy stuff to take care of, though. Like, I it’s it’s very it’s very easy to catch up when it comes to SEO.

00:15:44
So, what I’m proposing is that you stop making this a growth strategy and instead of think of it more as a way to handle the bases, like just make sure you’re covered. Um, but then again, even down here, it’s going to be so competitive. Cities, three three cities over are going to be competing with you for these placements. So, don’t be surprised if you don’t get many results from SEO. All right, we stop we stopped um even showing SEO reports in our report uh because it was just noise. like you saw

00:16:19
all the keywords you were ranking for, you saw how many um impressions that created and so so on, but at the end of the day, it didn’t generate any results. So, we said, okay, let’s shift to the ones let’s shift our focus to the ones that are bringing results. Um, and let’s let our clients also focus on those so that they’re not always worried about the thing that doesn’t really work anymore. Okay. So, we shift to local SEO. With the introduction of Google Places, local SEO starts becoming a

00:16:49
very big consideration. And now this is this has replaced traditional SEO. So how do you win the game of local SEO? Um there’s going to be four factors, well three factors. Two are which are two are two of which are kind of outside of your control and one that is within your control. So, let’s look at this um category. Or maybe I’ll do it like this category. Um reviews and location. Um, and some of the to a lesser degree, some of the stuff that carries over from uh traditional SEO. So, if your website

00:17:44
is all about dental implants, then you’re likely going to rank a bit higher when it comes to someone searching for dental implants near them, but it’s not as big of an influence as it was back then. So, I don’t really consider it a um a strategy for local SEO either because they introduced categories. So now instead of being able to hyper optimize for a specific keyword, Google is basically saying, “All right, we have a fixed number of categories, now you just have to label yourself as one.” And so if someone

00:18:16
searches dental implants La Habra there, it’s going to trigger a category. It’s not really going to trigger your website. It’ll be a tiny boost, but it’s it’s so negligible that um I don’t even consider it as one of these. So what’s really important is that you set your category right. There’s a lot of people categorizing themselves as a dental clinic when what I recommend you categorize yourself instead is a dentist because people are looking for uh the dentist. Um not not like the person

00:18:44
itself but uh dental clinic might be more of like a um hospital or corporate. You can look into the specifics yourselves. Um but dentist is generally what I recommend you categorize yourself as and what Google recommends you categorize yourself as well. So, this is kind of fixed. If you’re a dentist, you’re a dentist. If you’re an orthodontist, you’re an orthodontist. You can’t really influence that except by, I don’t know, getting a specialty, right? Um, and also location is fixed.

00:19:12
Where you are in relation to the searcher is going to impact your ranking here. So, if I’m right next to your office, if I’m 0.1 miles away and I do a search on my phone, uh, or or on my desktop somehow, like you might have noticed this. You might have noticed Google ask for your location if you’re on a desktop. If you’re on a phone, Google probably already has your location. Um, but that’s going to be a massive influence in where you show up in this positioning thing, right? This

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is fluid now. This isn’t the old ways where it was just who won. This is fluid. Um, depending on where they are. So, category is uh fixed. So, let’s stop worrying about this. Also, your location, your office is fixed. So, let’s stop worrying about this as well. Uh, and now it comes down to reviews. Uh, but real quick, let me talk about location one more time. It’s really important to understand that when you do a search from somewhere else, you might get different results than if you do a search in a different

00:20:13
location. So, no one has the answer. No one knows what what you rank at at a specific location. The best we can do is we can get um approximations. So there’s a lot of tools out there that will say hey um here is your map, here is your office. And there will there are tools that say if a user is here um your rank is going to be let’s say position four. And if a user is here, let’s say your position is one. And if if a user is here for some reason, let’s say your position is two.

00:20:53
Maybe there’s just more competitors around this area, right? But again, these are all approximations. We can’t really know. But how do you So, how do you influence how high and um low your local SEO is? And that’s going to come down to reviews. This is the one leverage that you have. Uh besides paying for ads, you can also pay for ads. And we’ll come back to advertising later. So um let’s let’s say here it’s a special case you can run ads and um you can actually show

00:21:26
up at the top for people who have ads. Again the like reviews take a while to generate all this stuff take a while to generate. So even back then SEO took a while to generate but Google as a platform always let you take the shortcut by paying ads. It’s like at Disneyland if you pay the extra for the Genie Pass or whatever it’s called, you get to cut the line. Um, that’s just the nature of the platform. And what you’ll realize later is that this platform has become Google has become so gigantic

00:22:01
that they’re that like they’re okay with making the people on that platform, the businesses on that platform relying on ads. Like they try to make this if you pay them, if you pay Google, you will get all the advantages. is you will actually see results as a result of paying ads. That’s how much control and influence Google has and they know it. So what my conclusion later that I’ll um go into detail uh more if I remember to is that uh the platform as a whole is shifting so that the advertisers are the

00:22:34
one that that are going to be winning at the end of the day. Um, as a quick side note before I go back to reviews, um, there is more advertisers today than ever, right? You pull out your phone, you can go on Instagram, you can pay five bucks, you can boost a post, you’re you’re advertis, you’re an advertiser now. So, what happens if you get a platform where you have more advertisers than ever? Now, let’s say your margin was a$1,000. You get a patient, they’ll bring you $1,000. All right. What if that platform

00:23:10
charged you $999? All right. You if you don’t want to pay it, great. Guess what? There’s other advertisers now who will be happy to pay that to make a dollar. So, we’ve gotten to this point where there’s so many advertisers that Google and Facebook as platforms are comfortable charging ridiculous amounts to reduce your margin because they know at the end of the day someone else would be happy to pay it. Um, so this is this is what happens when um advertising platforms get basically full market

00:23:46
penetration of all the businesses that want to grow on that platform. Um, and but there there is a silver lining. there is a way to leave this approach, this ecosystem that is getting worse and worse, and I’ll talk about that at the end of the video. But, okay. Um, ads. Let’s say for one reason or another, you’re not going to be looking at ads for improving your local SEO. We’ll look at ads after. Um, but let’s say for this moment, you’re not. How do you uh gain an advantage here? It’s going to be

00:24:22
reviews. right? The number of stars that you get, the quantity of stars that you get. Now, people caught on to this maybe around four or five years ago um right around 2020 when they realized that okay, SEO has fundamentally shifted. Now, we have to go into local SEO. What are the um key performance indicators or know what’s like the driving metrics when it comes to uh increasing local SEO? And we quickly found that it was reviews. So people started started obsessing reviews. Dental offices are obsessed

00:24:58
with getting reviews. And it’s starting to we’re starting to see the same shift happening again where now uh from reviews it’s shifting to ads. Um but let me explain. Back in SEO, uh content and backlinks were the way you got a competitive advantage. And you would pay for that. You would pay for an agency to build you content or you would pay for them to go out and buy you back links. Now what’s happening? Review incentives. Now office offices are incentivizing the people themselves to leave positive reviews and

00:25:34
the sentiment is growing among consumers among potential patients that Google reviews are being inflated. um the same issues that uh created Yelp as an industry to come up is creating Yelp as an industry to become a more trusted source. There’s a reason we don’t do Yelp. And what they haven’t figured out yet is Yelp hasn’t really figured out how to target by um psychography or user intent. Well, they have, but I just don’t think that’s their business model. So, they don’t engage with it that way.

00:26:07
Um so, Google and Yelp are different in that sense. In Yelp, you’re looking for specific categories. In Google, you’re looking for a specific intent. All right? So, in Yelp, it’s like, all right, dentist, it’s going to show dentists. In Google, it’s dentist but with an intent like um like how much is dentistry, right? That’s it’s the different intent than just like finding local. So, that that’s how Google and Yelp are a bit different. And so, when it comes to Yelp now, it’s a bit

00:26:34
difficult to get a competitive advantage because you can’t target based on intents. That’s a different conversation uh we could have. So anyway, um Google is looking at reviews and saying, “All right, um or or sorry, dental practice are looking at reviews and saying, “All right, how can we beat the game of local SEO and just boost how many reviews we get?” So um they engage in giving out Starbucks gift cards. They engage in if you leave a review, you can spin the wheel of fortune. um they

00:27:05
engage in automations that remind remind people email and texts um so you can get a review. All right. So this has been a val like this has been the strategy and if you do get a number a certain number of reviews then yeah you you do climb up but Google’s realizing that this is a toxic system itself. So there is a huge cap. There is a huge diminishing return when it comes to um the amount of reviews you have because what’s the purpose of reviews for Google? It’s it’s two things. It’s one can I trust this

00:27:38
business and can I show it to the users and two can users trust this? But again we go back to the idea that users are growing distrustful of um Google reviews because they see how incentivized it is. they go into a restaurant and they see that okay I can get a free drink if I leave a Google review and so um this is kind of it’s coming back to bite us in the foot the the activities that we’ve been doing to generate more reviews and so it’s becoming a a less of an indicator so uh someone an office from Florida reached

00:28:10
out to me asking me to like help them with their um local SEO and like advertising and stuff like that and when I looked at the competition in Florida so I’m in California and I I see I see what’s going on in California most of the times and when I looked at Florida oh my god like it to be a dental office there like the minimum was a thousand fivestar reviews like the the aggression they have with reviews is crazy their focus on and fixation on this thing is so insanely um hyperfixated but they don’t realize that okay this is

00:28:47
a diminishing return like at some point you’re you’re not going to like you fulfilled to Google that okay people um Google can trust you as a business and to a certain point like users like they’ve understood they got it they get it all right like we can we can trust you you don’t have to incentivize and push for so many reviews um we understand as humans that if there’s a dental office and they have 10,000 reviews or even 2,000 reviews there’s something fishy going on there.

00:29:17
All right. So, um let’s maybe also take the pedal off the uh reviews. Maybe after you reach around two or 300 reviews, I think you’re more than good enough uh when it comes to reviews. All right. So, let’s look at a next strategy. And as I go on, I’ll kind of talk um I’m going to cover more and more um effective effective uh strategies. The next one is going to be uh let’s see if you can guess it while I erase this stuff. All right, the next one is social media. Now, how social media fits into the

00:30:08
bigger picture of marketing is largely misunderstood. And I think the ones who get it can really benefit from it, but the ones who don’t get it, it it’s it’s just another thing to do for you. It’s just going to be another hassle that you’re going to be engaging with. Um, and it’s going to be very frustrating because you’re going to be doing all this content, you know, acting a certain way in front of the camera and um, not seeing the results. So let me see if I can break this down for you.

00:30:38
Fundamentally, social media exists as a platform for virality. If social media as a platform can have good content that a lot of people like, then the social media platform does very well. So what it’s looking for and what it rewards is viral content. Content that is for the masses. Content is that is not for the location around you. that is across America even across international right so here is the audience that let’s say this is your office in the center right here and this is the radius around

00:31:14
your office of um let’s say like 10 miles just throwing it out there it’s just people who are most likely to visit your practice and then we have the social media audience so this is the audience that you seek to engage you seek to influence. But then this is social media. It’s a completely different audience. And the wrong approach is to say that I’m going to use social media to get an audience into my office. It’s it’s conflicting interests. Social media wants virality. You want locality.

00:31:54
All right? So, if you engage with social media with the intent of bringing people into your office, you’re going to have a bad time. It can work, but you’re going to have to go way, way, way at scale. You’re going to have to become a social media influencer first and then a dentist second in order to see results. Dentist is a great example. This is a guy who has made social media his his main thing. Like, he probably makes more going on tours talking about social media. I’ve seen him on tour. He’s

00:32:25
great. But like he’s made social media his main thing, right? You if you want to make social media your main thing, go ahead. But that’s not most practice owners. If you are in the game of trying to grow your practice and not your social media following, then you have to engage with social media differently. You have to understand that your audience again has a there’s a conflict of interest between what social media wants as an audience and what you want as an audience. And but what social media can benefit

00:32:56
you from is that everyone uses social media. Everyone sees what you post. These people here, they can go on and see how you’re engaging with the rest of the audience. All right? So social media becomes a tool for building trust. It becomes a way for people to see you beyond the limits of your website. Your website has to be structured. It, you know, it can’t be crazy. can’t be uh there has to be some linearity to convey information in a way that’s digestible and social media you can kind of break

00:33:28
the rules a bit. you can kind of show up in a different way that is a bit less professional, that is a bit more human. And if you can use social media in that manner, it becomes very effective because now all these people who are in a radius around you, uh, when they’re in the comparison mode, when they’re looking around for a dentist, uh, social media becomes a determining point. Now, a method I propose is like you don’t you don’t have to engage this way either. There’s other ways to build trust. if

00:33:58
you don’t want to get a Tik Tok account and if you don’t want to build trust using social media, there’s so many other ways to do that um that this is just an option for you. But if you if you understand and engage with it as a way of people building a human connection, then you’ll do very well even if you don’t have a lot of followers. All right? So, let’s stop obsessing these metrics unless you want to be an influencer. Stop obsessing the metrics of views. Stop obsessing um the number

00:34:27
of followers, the number of likes and subscribes. That’s going to be independent of a human connection. Like I can I can see you making content. I don’t care that you have 15 followers. I can still connect with you. All right. So that that’s going to be the new approach of social media. Basically, what I’m saying I missed an L here. Basically, my conclusion and what I’m trying to propo uh promote is don’t see social media as like you have to build all this attention and awareness on it

00:34:58
because it’s it’s separate. It’s not going to lead to much of this at all. All right. What’s next? Give me a guess. Next is actually going to be Google Ads. All right. So, advertising is also in a weird spot as I mentioned. Um, the number of people who want to advertise, the number of people who have something to say now and have a have a microphone, like you could pay Google five bucks to get that microphone. The number of people who exist to run ads is through the roof. Um, back then if you wanted to

00:35:44
run ads, you had to go through an ad agency. You had to pay them a lot of money and they would maybe accept working with you. But now, everyone is an advertiser and everyone has something to say. And so, Google ads and also Facebook ads. All right, spoiler, Facebook ads is next. Facebook or Meta as they’re now known. And uh when I say meta, I I mean Facebook and Instagram because they’re one parent company. So now people go to Google ads and Facebook ads. Everyone has something to say. Um and so they have market

00:36:23
penetration. If you want to advertise your um your your dog clothing, if you want to advertise your dental office, if you want to advertise whatever it is, you’re going to go to them. Like this, these are now the powerful ad uh agencies that you would pay a lot of money to back then, but now it’s just a more open and inviting area. Every day they make it easier for people to advertise. Like back to the story of just boosting a post on Instagram. Um, now if you try to run Google ads, back

00:36:56
in the day, you had to know what you were doing. But now they try to get AI to set everything up for you. So they’re trying to decrease the barrier of entry for people to become ads uh advertisers and it’s working very well. And so we have this. So that’s the first phenomenon. More advertisers than ever. And as a result, advertising is getting costlier than ever. recall back to the uh margins where if your margin is $1,000 now they’re they’ll happily charge you $999 back then when they were trying to get

00:37:27
market penetration they would they they didn’t look for profit. They were eagerly if your margin was $1,000 they said hey you can run that ad on our platform for 40 bucks and uh we’ll we’ll get it out there. and it worked because they were trying to get people to see how good their advertising platform was and to get the market to engage in that. Now they have it. Google is about 27 years old. They’re fully matured. They’re charging an arm and a leg now if you want to make uh profit there. All

00:37:58
right. Sorry I rambled on long about that. Number two, uh rules and regulations. So in the past you could also do a lot of tracking. you could see exactly what people doing were how they were engaging with the ads. Um, and you can do all these tracking. And then iOS uh 15 came along and this was back around 2015 where it gutted tracking. Privacy laws went through the roof. HIPPA laws started being more concerned about digital um or digital marketing, online marketing. And so our ability to track

00:38:33
became very impacted. Why is tracking so important? Well, if you run an ad and it works well, it resonates with people and it gets them to take action and come to you as a practice, at some point, the only people left are those that didn’t resonate with that ad. So, what you have to do or what you have to have your agency do is to go and find a new ad that works, that resonates with people in a different way. How do you know if an ad’s resonating with people? You have to track. You have to tweak something.

00:39:06
You have to track does that improve or you know decrease the results and you do that constantly consistently tracking iterating tracking iterating tracking iterating until you find something that resonates at scale. And because of all these regulations our ability to find better ads that work have really been reduced. All right. So that’s effect number number one was um increasing costs because of there’s more advertisers than ever. Number two is um decreasing effectiveness of advertising.

00:39:37
And what’s number three? It’s going to be the market itself, the people that we advertise to, they are more skeptical and more doubtful than ever of promotions, of things being pushed at them. Um if you go to a Black Friday sale, you see something that’s 70% off, you kind of doubt that. Now you wonder, did they double the price and then take 70% off, so it’s actually like only like 20% off? You know, you get the idea. like we we’ve become very skeptical um because people have relied on

00:40:08
advertising for so long that sorry there’s something in front of me that um other marketers shameless marketers have put it upon themselves to create fake advertising, fake promotions, fake claims, you know, u and that’s come again full circle to bite us in the foot or the butt or whatever you want to say it. So, um, 52% of Americans have some sort of ad blocker. You can look this up as well. Um, people don’t want to be shouted at anymore. It It turns out that all those algorithmic feeds of platforms tracking

00:40:49
your interest and showing you things are unnerving. It’s kind of annoying and we don’t like that. And as these platforms have penetrated the market uh and and as their influence has grown there’s been a resistance to that influence there’s been whole industries of um you know Google ad block recently like there is a war going on with people who want to avoid advertising and advertising platforms who want to keep people in their control. Google does this by increasing how reliant people are on

00:41:22
their platforms and on those platforms they force ads. So for example, YouTube, people are very much reliant on YouTube for their entertainment. Um I mean there’s other options but you you get the idea. And if you want to watch YouTube now you have to run into these ads. But there’s this counterinsurgency of people who don’t believe that who want to live an ad-ree lifestyle and they’re fighting this war. there like you might know like YouTube revanced um it’s a way to watch YouTube on your

00:41:50
Android phone Android superiority phone um without ads um you might know um adb block that was on Google Chrome that was recently removed now you can’t block ads so everyone there was this huge movement of people migrating to Firefox where you can get you block origin and then Brave browser comes in and now you it blocks all ads right you get the idea the market doesn’t want to be yelled at anymore. It it wants to avoid or or it actually annoys them when you engage in this uh level of advertising and

00:42:26
shouting at someone. So, so all right, I went on this long ramble, but you have to understand that the landscape is shifting. Um just like SEO shifted to local SEO and local SEO is also shifting to advertising because of our abuse with um reviews, advertising is also shifting because our abuse with claims, our abuse with promotions and our our abuse of uh intrusion of privacy, right? Um you probably have some sort of ad blocking yourself. Yet we’re going to engage with people and assume that you know they

00:43:01
they want to hear from us. It’s It’s not how it works, unfortunately. All right. Um, so that’s my spill on ads. Um, if I wanted to go into it, let’s say the limitations of ads beyond that, beyond that, it’s eroding in effectiveness because we’re talking to an audience that no longer wants to hears us, hear us using a platform that’s getting costlier with methods that are getting more ine uh, ineffective and inefficient with regulations. Beyond that, Google ads and Facebook ads uh serves to connect you

00:43:35
with people who are shopping around. They’re looking for options. And at the end of the day, it’s going to come down to your offer, price, competition. Um it’s not a high quality lead. Like this was so stressed back in the day. We want to make sure we get high quality leads. You probably get emails saying like, “Hey, we’re not just going to serve you leads. we’re going to show serve you lead these that actually show up. That’s a myth, unfortunately. I I wish I could

00:44:01
have done that and I pushed hard to try that. We tried every angle. We’ve compared what we did with what other agencies do. It It’s a myth. It um the idea of being able to the the most you can do is back to the idea of intent. You can target people who have high intent. you can target people who are uh highly qualified but that’s going to be the extent what else can you do um once you get to that point then like you have to engage with all that uh price competition and things like that um

00:44:36
because it’s fundamentally flawed because of that because of the effects I was talking about now you get a situation where people come in from Facebook ads or Google ads you deal with no-shows um they come in and now you have to like push and pull to um get them to accept treatment. And it it happens because we’re engaging in a different landscape. We’re we’re engaging in ways where we can’t get so specific anymore. Um and so yeah, by far ads are the most effective. These platforms have done a lot of work to

00:45:13
make sure that advertisers are happy and they’re going to stay using their platform. So, if you want to scale, if you want to get new patients at scale, if you want to be able to do something that influences the amount of patients you get next month, it’s going to be ads. Again, you can’t grow with social media. You can only build trust, existing trust on what you already have. Um, so if if you find yourself low on trust, then yeah, do some social media, build trust like that or trust in other

00:45:40
ways and you’ll find that you get more new patients because you had a number of people who were already aware of you in your area. uh local SEO, you can’t push as far because at some point like reviews get diminishing returns and location is fixed. So even if you have 2,000 reviews, you’re not going to show up two or three cities over. Um so yeah, advertising is now the only way to uh grow at will. Like if you want more new patients next month, this is the only real leverage that you have. But there

00:46:12
is a silver lining that I mentioned and that is going to be the permission asset. Permission marketing is a philosophy. It’s a concept uh created by Seth Goden. This guy, I also have a video with him on my channel if you want to check it out. But um he pioneered this idea and it the reason this exists is based on two phenomena or one phenomena which is which is comp comprised of two parts. The phenomena is that uh it’s cheaper or it’s more expensive than ever to get someone who doesn’t want to listen to me

00:46:58
or sorry it’s it’s more expensive than ever to get someone who doesn’t want to listen to you to listen. So, let’s say I’m here and you want to say something to me. It’s going to be very expensive. Now, back in the day, sure, you had to put a lot up front, but you reached millions of people because there were only a few channels and a few advertisers. But now there’s more advertisers than ever. And you’re dealing with me, a a um listener who doesn’t want to listen to

00:47:31
you, who has ad blocks, who is leaving social media and the digital ecosystem to live a more analog lifestyle because we don’t like algorithms controlling our attention. Right? It’s more expensive than ever to get someone who doesn’t want to listen to listen. But at the same time, it’s cheaper than ever to get someone who wants to listen to listen. You can pay $20,000 a month to advertise to a group of people and get some results. And you could also pay $100 a month, not advertising, but instead

00:48:08
doing something like Mailchimp and get the same results. $100 a month versus $20,000 a month. Because if you built a permission asset, a base of people who want to listen to you, they give you the privilege of sending them information. So I would give you the privilege of sending me information that I want to hear, that I wait for and I I expect and want then you have created a permission asset. But this is something that takes a long long time. It requires building an audience. It requires understanding

00:48:44
marketing psychology, understanding, it requires creating a uh profile of people that you intend to serve, of how they want to be treated, of what kind of things they look for. It requires empathy and understanding all this so that you can finally deliver something that they want. All right? It’s completely different, but this is the new path forward. um podcasters. Think of Joe Rogan. Love him or hate him. He recently did a deal with uh Spotify where they paid him $250 million for his audience, right? To to to so

00:49:25
that they paid him $250 million so that he would release his podcast episodes, some of them only some of them exclusively on Spotify. And that’s crazy until you realize that he had uh he had 10 million active listeners. This wasn’t 10 million people that he was advertising to or like bothering them to listen. Those were his per that was his permission asset. 10 million people wanting to listen to him. And so he said, “Okay, hey, if you get my content on Spotify, Mr. Spotify, then you also get 10 million active

00:50:02
listeners.” And and so what really happened was Spotify was paying $25 per listener to be able to market at them for several years. So when you look at it from that lens, it makes a lot of sense. But it took him a long time to build his permission asset. Now, when he wants to talk to his permission asset, like it costs him virtually nothing. He records an episode. He probably pays for some editing. Um he probably pays a bit to um email people. I don’t know, but you get the idea. This is true leverage. Like,

00:50:38
I’m sure he played an influential role in the previous election because of his permission asset. That’s how strong things can get. Yet, email marketing is is very similar. It’s not necessarily email marketing. Email marketing can be permission asset if it’s with the person’s interest in mind. Typically, it’s not done that way. Email marketing is heavily um abused. but it’s the closest to permission marketing yet it’s so no one really focuses on it. I’ I’ve worked with so

00:51:11
many dental offices and I’ve seen one that leveraged uh email marketing and and they were abusing it. Right? So we we really lost touch with what it means to engage with people and connect as humans not as treating people like a metric or as something to have a competitive advantage over. All right. So these are the new patient strategies. These are what people are doing from here up are the most import uh most impactful stuff. I forgot to mention why is Facebook uh meta Facebook and IG do I consider it more effective

00:51:46
than Google ads. Um so all my clients see this and this is because we do what’s called remarketing. So Google Facebook and Instagram the limitation is that it’s hard to connect with people’s intent. Google, you get the intent. You get what they’re searching for. If they’re searching for orthodontist near me, braces near me, you know what their intent is, Facebook and IG, you can’t really do that. So, we we connect with them on Google ads first. We get their intent and then we do remarketing. We

00:52:14
put a cookie in their browser and as long as that browser shows up on Facebook or Instagram, they’re going to be seeing ads. So, the cost per conversion here, cost per acquisition is around 50% lower. Um, so if you’re paying around um 200 for acquisition here, this can be anywhere from like 70 to like $130. Um, anyway, so that’s why I put this a bit uh as more effective. So these are what people are doing. This is what I would recommend for you if you did it as well. Kind of like ignore SEO,

00:52:47
traditional SEO. Take care of local SEO. Make sure you get those reviews. Make sure you’re emphasizing them. I would highly discourage you create incentives. Google has been cracking down on incentivized reviews and it’s wiping out hundreds of reviews at a time. Uh social media, if you aren’t building trust, so if you aren’t doing the things like um photography, having someone come and take photos of you in a way where people can see your face and engage with you and see what your office actually looks

00:53:16
like. If you aren’t putting photos up on Google business profile, Yelp, and all that, um then social media can be a great way to build trust. All right. Uh and then Google ads. Yeah, this is again if you want leverage, if you want to be able to influence the number of people you get uh coming into your office is going to be Google uh and Facebook. And what I recommend, what I really recommend you start doing now is start building this permission asset. Look into permission advertising or permission marketing, sorry. Look into

00:53:46
permission marketing. See what it’s all about. Uh I think I have a video on it. Go check it out. uh you need to start building this because again we’re dealing with a system that is getting worse. Talking to people who don’t want to hear us uh and want to hear us less and less and the way for us to create something that resonates with them it’s is getting worse and worse more difficult to do. So this is the uh this futurep proofs you and also improves the amount of um or the ROI of your uh

00:54:15
marketing. All right. So I say all this I say all this and this is new patient strategies in a nutshell. But there is another thing I have to tell you that we as a dental industry have focused way too much on new patient acquisition. I I don’t want this for you. I don’t want you to have to go and do all this work. You can if you want to. You can join the other people who who are. But what I’m trying to do for my clients is to get them off of new patient advertising, new patient marketing, new

00:54:47
patient acquisition, right? And that sounds crazy, but what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to get them towards word of mouth referrals. We’re trying to get it so that um they don’t have to do all this stuff that that people who experience their practice will enjoy it so much. create an experience so enjoyable or so meaningful rather it doesn’t have to be enjoyable per se but so meaningful that they can’t help but refer their uh friends family and people who know that would like dentistry done

00:55:20
that way um now that is a very complex process and a very complex idea but just I want to plant the seed in your head because I wanted to show you that it’s a possibility it doesn’t require a lot of investment but it requires one shift one fundamental shift at how we look at marketing. And so that’s going to be to stop focusing on new patient acquisition so much and start focusing more broadly on word of mouth marketing. Make word of mouth marketing your new patient acquisition strategy. And when you can

00:55:55
do that, now you don’t have to do all this work. You don’t have to pay agencies. You don’t have to pay for advertising all the time. And what it’s going to force you to do is expand what you see as marketing. Because when we focus on new patient strategies, marketing becomes mostly visibility. But when you expand the goal to be word of mouth marketing, now marketing becomes the work of designing every element of your practice in service of the people you seek to serve. And when you can do that designing with

00:56:28
intention and coherence, then you create meaning. And coherence is very important because right now what’s happening is practice owners will build something that they find meaningful, that they find joy in, but it’s not an empathetic approach unfortunately because you are too unique. Your wants, your needs, what you find meaningful is too unique. So the alternative approach that I’m trying to advocate for is that you create with a specific persona in mind a group of people who believe certain things and

00:57:02
create for them and when you do now they come and experience your practice and now you create meaning. I saw this video recently of um a bus driver and someone started drawing this bus driver like he he drew his face on this like receipt ticket receipt and he gives it to the bus driver and you can see on the bus driver’s face like his face lights up like he has to go sit down because he’s so emotionally touched and um that’s meaning that’s meaningful. He goes out and then he shows his other

00:57:36
bus driver friends his photo and the other bus driver friends start smiling and you know and and this connection happens this human connection happens and that’s what’s possible when we create meaning when we focus on meaning and word of mouth and things and creating experiences for other people that’s possible and so back to coherence we we we lack coherence we build something for ourselves and when people come to engage with it. It’s incoherent to them to what they believe. We do they see something

00:58:10
that aligns so it draws them in. Then they see something else that is out of alignment because you know only it was meaningful to you and not them. And so at the end of the day it it’s kind of there’s still a bit of confusion. There’s still a bit of um lack of meaning and now you’re asking them to trust you and move forward. Accept the treatment and there wasn’t that alignment. So now we have to focus on sales tactics. Um how to optimize the moment instead of doing the work of

00:58:35
creating better moments, creating more alignment and cohesion so that when they sit at your chair, they’re more aligned, they’re more willing and trusting and they find they’ve found more meaning already, right? We haven’t done that work and that work is available for you. All right. Um so hope you found this video valuable. Um what I would recommend you do now is uh I’ll put I’ll put the course in the link in the description below. I I think it’s important for me to share. So the course

00:59:03
I have is the work of creating a practice like that. A practice that becomes remarkable. Um a practice where you can grow with word of mouth. Uh so I invite you to check it out. It’s completely free. There’s no upsells. There’s no profit in this for me. Uh, I’m only doing it because I worked with a client, didn’t get him the results I promised him, that left an impression on me, and I swore that I would, um, create conditions where clients wouldn’t have to experience that if they came to work

00:59:32
with me. So, um, I urge you to check it out. Create a practice that is meaningful for you and the people you seek to serve. Grow with word of mouth. Do this in the short term to prop yourself up. Do the work of becoming meaningful for a group of people. Connect with them with awareness and attention and then see your practice take off as you become a true need because you because you deliver you provide meaning not just dentistry. All right. Thanks.