Summary
- Marketing works by understanding current feelings and desired feelings.
- Creative blocks happen when you don’t start from how the audience feels.
- The job of marketing is to bridge people from confusion to clarity.
- This applies to treatments, websites, ads, content, and permission assets.
- Many practices lead with what they think is “better” instead of what patients feel.
- Features and technology don’t matter unless they move people emotionally.
- Misaligned messaging only creates small results and limits pricing and case acceptance.
- Understanding belief systems helps you accurately identify feelings and guide decisions.
I’m going to make an assertion. If you’re here watching this video, you’re likely feeling confused, possibly overwhelmed about what to do with marketing. Instead, how you’d like to feel is to know what to do, to feel a bit of clarity, and to feel like you’re in control of your marketing and your practice’s future as a result. That’s the power of understanding current feelings and desired feelings.
A lot of the time, when we run into writer’s block or content blocks, we don’t know what to create. What should go on this design that I’m going to be taking to the farmers market? What should we put in as speakers for an event we’re trying to host? Who should we put in as speakers? What topic should we have? These questions of how we best serve our audience often lead to creative roadblocks, and desired feelings are how we get over that at every point.
We have people coming in, and we’re going to make an assertion about how they’re feeling. We identify current feelings, and then we also make an assertion about how they want to feel instead. When we understand that people coming in are likely feeling confused, that they’ve probably looked at other videos and feel overwhelmed by all the things they need to do, and that it still hasn’t clicked for them, we can see that their desired feeling is clarity. That’s how they want to feel instead.
Then our job is very simple. In everything that we do, not only in your treatments, which should take them from how they currently feel to their desired feeling, but also in things like your permission assets, the design of your advertising, what it says on your website, all of it should simply be the bridge between how they currently feel and how they want to feel.
Why is this such an advantage? It seems simple, but most people don’t start with this level of empathy. Instead, they design their messaging around what they feel is best, what they feel is better. Things like having the latest iTero intraoral scanner feel important to them. It’s a significant investment, and they’re excited about what it can do. They assume patients want to see an inside scan of their mouth. They don’t appreciate that everything in business is about taking people from their current feelings to their desired feelings.
Marketing is simply a way to help people understand this by creating cohesion at every level of the business. If a practice doesn’t understand this, it leads with its own sense of what “better” is. But what looks better to the practice may not look better to the patient. Instead of moving people directly toward their desired feelings, some messaging goes in the wrong direction. The net result is only a small improvement. As a result, that limits how much you can charge, how likely people are to accept treatment, and all the downstream effects.
This is the power of understanding current feelings and desired feelings. To accurately assert them, you need to understand your audience’s belief systems. If you don’t know how to do that yet, check out the strategy course we created. It walks you through how to identify belief systems and, from there, how to determine current feelings and desired feelings.