Hierarchy of marketing activities.

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Hey, welcome to this video. In this video, my goal is to share with you the different elements that go on within marketing. Because especially in dentistry, what I’ve noticed is a lot of owners will jumble up their understanding or they have their understanding of marketing jumbled up and as a result, they’re not able to utilize all the different tools that go on within marketing. When they say marketing, what they’re actually talking about is advertising. when they say branding, what they’re actually talking

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about is a logo. And so because of this even vernacular or or semantic me mixup, what happens is we’re not able to open ourselves up to the other stuff and therefore gain the advantages that they can provide you. So the best business owners and the best entrepreneurs that I’ve seen are very intimately familiar with the different elements of marketing and when it comes to actually marketing their stuff, they’re at the helm rather than leaving it up to uh an agency or someone else to do. So I think that is

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the approach that you should take as well to understand marketing at least at a fundamental level so that you can see what it can actually do for you. Um, so with that said, let’s get this started. And here I have a couple of terms that are frequently used in marketing and I think these are the most important things that you need to understand. Um, so this is in no particular order. And what I’ll do is I will try to not only explain each but kind of map them out in a hierarchy so you can see

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where they how they all fit in together and which ones that uh which ones you think you might be best off focusing on at the moment. All right. So let’s start with um let’s start with marketing. Let’s start with the actual definition of marketing. And as I do this, I will cross them out so we so I can keep track of which ones we’ve done. All right. So marketing. So we understand marketing very it’s a very abstract term. It gets thrown out a lot. Sometimes we say when we need more

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patients, hey, we need to do more marketing or if we have an event coming up and we need more attendees. Um what marketing strategies can we do? All this sort of stuff. Um, it’s very overused and it’s used in places that it has because it’s an umbrella term. It’s just used in places without understanding all the nuances within. All right. So, what does it actually mean? Marketing is the work of developing a system that consistently gets your audience, the people you seek to serve, to choose and

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make a decision that you want them to make to basically bring about a change to your audience. Right? Right? So if you think about it um and those words are very intentional um I forgot my actual definition that I wrote in my book but um that is the essence of it. The work of building a system. So marketing is the is the overall work of building this system which will consistently and predictably bring about a change among the people you seek to serve. We are not interested in a oneoff event. We’re not interested in going to each

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individual and trying to market at them. We are trying to build a system that many people can go through and once they come out at the end of that system, they are inclined to accept the decision you want them to make. So the change we seek to bring among the audience we seek to serve and the change is that decision. So it might be from from someone who is not going to the dentist from to someone who is visiting the dentist regularly or from someone who is dealing with uh pain in their tooth to someone who is

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receiving treatment for that pain. Right? That is the change we seek to bridge from um where they were to where they want to be with your marketing system. So that is what marketing is. Um it’s the work of developing that system. All right. So now let’s take uh so let’s map it out here. So let’s say marketing is this um I’m worried that this is too small but let’s roll with it for now. All right, this is marketing. The work of systems, the work of understanding your people, the work of bringing a change

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among them. All right, so let’s take a look at strategy. Now here I have a book called Blue Ocean Strategy and the essence of that book is they are promoting or they are urging people to take the strategy of seeking out audiences that are underserved and building for what they would consider to be better. And that is a strategy that you could take. Another strategy that you could take is let’s take a look at our demographic or let’s take a look at our like a five mile radius from our

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office. Let’s take a look at our radius and let’s take a look at what searches are trending related to dentistry to give us an idea of the actual volume and needs of this community and let’s only offer those services. So that’s another strategy and there’s an infinite number of strategies that we can take. So what strategy is is it it’s that it’s like this. So at the top we have your goal which might be to have a thriving practice to have maybe 60 new patients a month or

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whatever that might be. And underneath your goal is your strategy is how will we achieve that goal? Well, we do that by taking the affforementioned strategy of developing um or or taking us um an understanding of what the local community is searching and then fitting services to meet that or will it be a strategy of the blue ocean strategy or will it be a strategy of creating so much content on Tik Tok that people build a global or we build a global brand uh and because of that our local community will like us. so many

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different ways to achieve the goal that we seek to achieve. So strategy is very um there’s no right answer and there’s a lot of different ways of doing it. Now underneath strategy are tactics and these are the things that these are the hundreds and hundreds of activities that we will do in order to live out that strategy. So this is doing the market research. This is doing the um Google trends analysis. This is understanding how to create the best content for Tik Tok and so on. Um those

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are all tactics. All right. So goals, strategy and tactics. So when we talk about marketing strategy, it the question is not just what will go on in here is how will we uh like what will we put in here? because when you have a strategy that is different from someone else’s, the actual tactics and elements that go in here are going to change as well. All right, so that’s strategy. Now, let’s take a look at uh this grinds my gears a lot. Brand and logo. Um very distinct things and logo. If I if we said this is 100%

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of marketing um and this is a representation of how important something is. This would be logo. Let me do this in a different color. Let’s do black. All right. This is how important your logo is. Think of any company that goes through a logo rebrand. Either people love it, nothing changes, or people hate it, and nothing changes. It doesn’t really affect the actual day-to-day business that goes on with the logo. Yet, people obsess this and it creates a lot of headache where I don’t think

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there needs to be. It’s kind of like a first name or your full name or whatever. You might not like it or you might have wished you had a different name or you might love it. At the end of the day, it doesn’t change our experience with you as a person as much as the individual themselves might think. All right? So, this I think focusing way too much on logo is a bit of a um amateur-ish mistake, but at the same time, it is also a touch point that lends to your brand. Um, I won’t go into

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touch points, but brand. All right. So, let’s take a look at brand. A lot of times when people say, “Hey, we need to improve our brand or work on our brand.” They’re actually talking about logo and they’re they are very very separate things. So the people who don’t understand this think that they have their brand covered when they pay a graphic designer to design a very nice logo for them. But the uh that is the furthest thing from the truth. Your brand enables this entire thing

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called marketing. So it would be like almost as big as this entire thing. Um maybe a little bit smaller because it doesn’t actually include the other elements, but here is your brand. So the principle of attraction is the idea that people are attracted to you. They want to work with you as a doctor provider. people are attracted to you maybe if you’re they want to be a business partner with you um or even as a spouse or a personal relationship. People are attracted to you if you have alignment to their beliefs of what a

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good business partner or good dentist or a good partner is. If you have strong alignment with those beliefs and they have awareness of it. All right. So here we go. Attraction equals alignment times awareness. That’s a key principle of marketing. And brand is trust. So it’s a trust. It’s a feeling of how people expect you to show up. And I’m kind of going back and forth here, but brand is the trust element of align alignment because you can see someone, let’s say you meet them at an event and

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you are interested in a personal relationship and they seem just perfect for you. They are perfectly aligned with everything you believe a man or woman should be. And so there is and you’re aware of it because you actually met them. So you’re very attracted to them. And if there weren’t any circumstances that prevented you from um working with them in whatever capacity, um you would. But the problem is another element of alignment is trust. Because I could see something that looks amazing and I could

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be aware of it, but there might be some things that hold me back from actually engaging with it because the level of trust hasn’t been there yet. Like someone could show up as one way, but it’s going to take repeated consistent um interactions at that same level for me to develop a certain level of trust that this person is actually aligned that the way with the way they present themselves. And so brand is basically a development. It’s something we develop. It’s an asset we can develop by making promises and

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keeping promises. So Apple doesn’t have a hotel, but we have a understanding of what their brand is. So if they were say to develop a hotel, we could have a pretty decent idea of what that might look like. We could see the very high premium um polish, the minimalistic aesthetic, um premium, you know, a lot of stuff that are going to be centric and also tech forward, right? That is a brand association that we have with them. And if that that is basically trust and you develop it by making a promise by Apple

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saying hey we are going to be tech forward. We are only going to invest in high quality stuff. Sure we’re going to charge a premium but um if you like that then if that’s if you’re our audience then you’re going to align with it and you will actually find more value in that. And so as they make those promises and as they keep those promises by releasing good and good um products that meet those um meet meet satisfactory those promises that they made. They start to develop a brand asset and people who align with it

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and trust them are willing to pay more for simply the brand now not like the name of the company rather than the actual thing that they release itself. That’s why they can charge a ridiculous amount for ridiculous looking headphones u without even looking into the tech and the specs of it. People will trust Apple and buy those things because they developed a strong brand with those people and brand loyalty with those people. So this is a trust aspect of alignment and it’s also something that’s very valuable. Um

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another word for this a similar word could be reputation. All right? So you can build it and you can break it and it’s going to follow you everywhere um that you go. All right. Now let’s take a look at advertising. The thing that people mistake for what marketing is and if I had to say uh advertising would probably be around like this much. And I’m not going to put numbers to this is very uh a feeling because there is no like mathematical science to how much it actually represents. But this is where

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ads are now. And the thing funny thing about it is that it’s shrinking. If you look at the trends of the world, how things are developing. In the past, advertising was huge that you can uh New York Times Square when that was developed, it was developed for advertising. TV shows were develop or TV channels were developed because we needed another place to put ads. So they made TVs and then um ran TV shows. So and then just spammed it with advertising. And you probably remember there when when I

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forget was it cable came out and there were like more channels what they would do is the they would collude and show advertising all at the same time. So even if you change channels you would see ads. That was in the past. Now what we’re seeing today is people are removing removing themselves as best as they can from this world of advertising. They’re removing themselves where they’re the product where they’re being sold to by the people who want to advertise and leverage those platforms. So we have ad

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block, we have people who are leaving um social media where the algorithms are just pumping ads and information into people. Um, not only that, there’s growing distrust in authority. We see the CDC. Uh, my cousin works in internal or infectious disease and, um, he says vaccine hesitancy is real. Um, when you see a Black Friday discount now or even on Groupon, you see all those specials that are going on and you’re very skeptical to whether they’re real or not. And so all these different trends

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create a condition where advertising is becoming less and less important. But I still think it has a place. And the place is to connect our our brand with the people we seek to serve and to do it quickly because if we don’t leverage ads, it will work out as long as you have strong alignment, but it’s going to take a longer time. Um, word of mouth takes time to develop, that people aren’t going to immediately rush out and start spreading the word about you, that you can have a great reputation with someone, yet they aren’t

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recommending you to all their friends. Um, because that’s just human nature. It’s we’re we’re not you’re not automatically getting salespeople under your wing just because you give them a great service, right? Right? So word of mouth takes times and advertisement is the way that we can leverage this to create more awareness with people who are already aligned um in the short run so that eventually you have enough people who have you’ve built a brand uh asset with who are

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willing to um basically spread the word about you. And when that metric, when that number, the number of people who are coming in through word of mouth exceeds the number of patients you need, then you don’t need to advertise anymore. All right? So that’s the new idea with advertising. And the reason I put this up here was that we commonly mistake advertising to mean marketing. When marketing is all these different things, marketing is the work of bringing change among people. Advertising is just the visibility

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aspect of it. It’s the work of like, hey, I built this great thing and advert uh the marketing is the entire thing and advertising is just showing it to people. All right? A lot of the times we don’t need to worry about ads because we haven’t done the other work that’s much more important. Yet, frequently people jump the gun and run into ads without having considered are they even creating alignment with the people they seek to serve. All right. All right. Now, let’s take a look at um organic and paid. So, this is

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just some nuance um that I think would be helpful to understand. In the world of marketing, when it comes to awareness, there’s going to be two methods of getting awareness, getting visibility. And the two methods are one is paid, which is advertising. Of course, you pay a company to run advertisements to on Google or Meta. Um you pay a billboard company to have your design on a billboard. you pay a conference to show up as a sponsor um to show your products or even to like advertise in their little booklets that

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they make, whatever that may be. That that is paid where you’re paying to leverage a platform that someone’s already built in order to get visibility there. Now, organic is when you create or when you’re able to do free stuff. You don’t pay anyone. You create content, you write blogs, you show up as a speaker. Those are or organic elements, organic ways to get visibility and attention. Um, that’s all really the separation that you need to understand. One, uh, maybe another one is that paid

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is infinitely easier. you you’re just using money to get in front of someone and to speak at them or to show your advertisement to them. But organic has more trust with it. has more brand and it has more engagement that comes along with it. That if you’re getting aware, if you’re getting a,000 views from paid advertising and a,000 views because people you had strong alignment and they’ve wanted to do this or they wanted to look at your content, then that’s very different. All right? So, they both

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have their place. Um but I will say organic platforms that we’ve typically thought to uh in the past to approach organically. So for example, social media that it doesn’t work the way we thought anymore. And if you understand why, it’s because in the early days, social media needed more users. They needed more people to come and create content for them. But now they have way too many content creators and they don’t need anymore. So back then what would happen is if you created content they could give you good reach

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and the people who stood out were simply people who were making content because there weren’t many of them. But now as we get more and more content creators the organic approach means you have to do better than the other content creators. And what we know about content creation. So let’s kill two birds with one stone here. is that if you seek to, let’s say, get big on YouTube or Tik Tok or whatever media, you’re going to have to create content that is entertaining or otherwise engaging. So, it might be like

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educational or etc., but it’s going to have to be engaging. And the problem is engaging content doesn’t translate to the actual goal that you want of new patients. If you AB tested everything and looked at all the metrics and made tweaks along the way to increase engagement and you did this ad infinum, you would end up with a pornography website. That’s just how things lead towards if you just follow the metrics. So what we see is with engagement or we can’t focus on engagement because it leads us

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directions that is not serving our people. If our goal was to get more new patients, our strategy shouldn’t be to create engaging and entertaining content because it doesn’t actually support our goal. The goal should be traction and and so what we see with content, so content is the idea that you create content on platforms like Tik Tok and YouTube hoping that they will give you the magic algorithm will give you awareness and visibility. But again that is flawed because what the social media platforms

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want is engaging content so that more users will stay on that platform so that advertisers will be attracted to that platform. So engaging content whereas you want traction you want to earn trust and build trust with people so that they can move forward. Right? So that’s the distinction. So content has its place but it’s not going to be to get you visibility. What you should do with content is focus on building trust, building that brand asset, um building alignment, showing people the backside, uh the back end of what

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you do and um creating more trust there and awareness you would solve with advertising and word of mouth and so on and so forth. So we should stop looking uh at content as a way to build awareness. We should start looking at as a way to build more alignment. All right, audience. Um, when people say that this is our target demographic or this is our target audience or this is um we serve this community, I think they are not getting as detailed as they should be because if you take a look at a or sorry before we get into

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audience, let me kind of uh organize my thoughts here. So organic and paid content. So content social media I think is rather important. I think it’s um slept on to a certain degree because it’s hard to it doesn’t directly lead to metric like the content I’m promoting that we create doesn’t lead to engagement. So a lot of the times it’s discouraging to see maybe like 10 likes or something or five likes on a post that you created with a lot of heart. Um, but that’s okay because a lot

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of the times the people will come, they’ll see if your practices align with them, but they might might not necessarily like and subscribe or follow. That’s not the point. We’re just trying to build trust with them. And at the start of a trust building relationship, they’re not going to be all over you, and that’s okay, too. So social media or yeah social media or even content if you’re just doing a blog like a genuine blog then I think there’s a lot of trust that you can be

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build with um alignment which will ultimately get you attraction and get you to the uh goal that you seek to achieve. Okay. So that organic and paid it’s not really something in here. It’s more of like a criteria. Uh, so content and now audience. So people don’t get as specific as I think they should get with who they seek to serve. They say they’re going to serve a 5 mile radius or they’re going to serve this community or they’re going to serve this uh age um age category, but those are demographic

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descriptions. And when we see or what we know from demographics is that they don’t tell us much. that if you take everyone who is between the ages of 30 and 55 who are male and have a certain income level um and let’s say have two kids. If you get that specific as a demographic, it still won’t tell you much. It what tells us more is their psychoraphics, which are what are their beliefs? What do they think about dentistry? Do they believe it’s something that should be invested in? something that should be

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prioritized, something that they should be proactive about versus reactive. Like those psychoraphic elements are going to tell you way more about how this person aligns with you rather than what zip code they live in or how much money they make. Right? Psychography, it’s about aligning with beliefs. It’s about aligning with their psychology, not aligning with their zip code, not aligning with whatever. So when we say we seek to serve an audience, we have to understand what’s the psychology we’re seeking to serve.

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Is it people who believe dentistry should be a luxury or people who believe dentistry should be a premium experience? Because if we seek to serve those people, we’re going to show up a very different way than if we seek to serve those people and people who believe that dentistry is something to cheap out on or something that every doctor is the same. And when we take a demographic approach, we jumble up all those different beliefs into one group and try to serve them. But that doesn’t work out. We create no

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alignment. So what we do instead is figure out what psycho psychography are we going to serve. And what happens with that is we create so much alignment. And when we create awareness with advertising or word of mouth that they’re attracted and when they’re attracted, they’re willing to drive 20 minutes, an hour. Some people fly to to places they truly care about. And when you have strong alignment and and and like you say, people won’t fly that far to dentistry. Well, maybe you’re seeking

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to serve people who don’t care that much about health or don’t care that much about dentistry or or whatever. What if you could be remarkable and so deeply aligned with people who care a ton about dental health, right? That’s a totally different ballgame. So when we think audience, we have to be very clear with who do we seek to serve. What do they believe? And this is so important because this is going to determine how your business shows up. If you choose to serve people who don’t care, who don’t

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have money, who don’t want to spend money, that’s going to influence everything. If you want to succeed in that game, you’re going to have to show up a very different way than if you choose to serve people who believe in spending a premium for dentistry, who believe in proactively getting treatments, etc. and etc. who who trust the doctor rather than who are skeptical of doctors, right? Choose your audience, you choose your future. This is critical here. Um, again, audience is and it’s just the

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whole thing as well. It’s your your marketing is for the people you seek to serve. It’s there to serve them. Uh so that’s where audience would go. And finally, I just put this in at the end. Um website and landing page, it’s really not important. I would say that it covers about as much as your logo, which is very funny because we get paid a lot to do websites. And first let me make the distinction between a website and a landing page. So a website is your typical website people go on and they

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use that to gain information um so on learn more about you and ultimately hopefully book. A landing page is a dedicated single page that you use to run advertisements onto. So yeah, while while this might be your entire website, this might be your landing page. Just might be a couple of pages that um takes up some of your website that when someone clicks on from an ad, they go specifically onto the landing page, not the website itself. And what you’re able to do with the landing page is you’re

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able to really optimize it. You’re able to remove a lot of the links that aren’t related to booking. you’re related to remove a lot of um other things they might not care about. So, let’s say we ran an ad for dental implants. This would be a dedicated landing page just for dental implants. It would have nothing about veneers, nothing about bonding, um and it would just be about implants. And the purpose of it is to increase the rate at which you get the result that you want, which would be

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leads. And so if you run advertisements onto a website just like your homepage, you are going to convert very low like around two to five percent or two to 3% I think is industry average. If you take it to a a landing page, we’ve had conversions as high as 25% of people. So it’s very important that you understand when you run advertising, you need more than a website. You need a landing page. Um, but in the overall scheme, it’s a very small portion of it. That brand and people say that, okay, we need to work

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on our website to attract this certain type of people. Your website isn’t going to do the heavy lifting here. People aren’t going to look at a website and be like, oh my god, this is the place to go. Like, it t it’s going to take more than that. It’s going to take branding. It’s going to take alignment at every every aspect of your practice. um are you creating content and social media that aligns with it? Right? If if they care a lot, they’re going to do the research beyond

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just the website. So that’s the reason why it’s so small. All right, so that’s the end of this video. Hopefully that put everything in context and I hope you have a stronger understanding of what it means to actually do the work of marketing, the different levels of importance. So where are you stuck? Like are you stuck at the strategy level? Do you not know what approach to take? Um, are you stuck with figuring out what your goals are? Do you not know? Do you have a goal and a strategy? You just

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don’t know what the t tactics are. Um, and I hope this video was helpful in kind of getting you to think that way and understand these principles and tactics so you can apply it for yourself. All right. And if you want to check out uh a course, a free course on how to build word of mouth, build this brand asset such that you get more word of mouth. I have a course in the description. I’ll put it there. Check it out. I think you’ll find it very valuable. And I’ll see you guys in the

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next one. Thanks.