How can you leverage AI to grow a dental practice? 3 wrong ways, 1 right way.

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So, by now you’ve probably seen a lot of offers when it comes to dental marketing that talk about leveraging AI, making sure you’re on top of the AI game, making sure all this and that. And I’m here to tell you that you probably don’t have as much to worry about as they might make it sound like. Um, and so I’ll talk about the four use cases of AI that I see in dental marketing, kind of how it fits into the bigger picture. Um, why you might not have to worry about it so much, and then the fourth one is

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actually going to be how you can actually use it. The best use case that I found, and um, I hope that you can leverage that as well. So, let’s get into it. The first three which are very common use cases that I don’t think you need to worry so much about are going to be first is um leveraging AI to create content which is the most obvious use case just putting in a prompt getting content out using it for whatever content marketing that you do whether it’s a blog on your website a script for

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social media um and on and on so content marketing the second is going to be AI search And I think this has been gaining traction in terms of popularity. Um people saying, “Hey, you need to make sure that you’re showing up high on AI search. Whether it’s someone searching on GPT, Perplexity or wherever, make sure that you’re the officer recommends.” Um and I’ll talk about why that isn’t something that you need to concern yourself with. And then uh number three, which would be leveraging

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AI to create your marketing strategy. And I’ve seen this with a lot of offices who are continuously trying to do new stuff um because they aren’t certain what really works. And what they do is they end up leveraging AI to asking AI like what is a strategy that we should take and I find that very um for the most part it gets them very mediocre results because of the nature of AI. And finally the fourth is going to be um how to use AI which is going to be kind of tied in with number three in determining

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strategy. Um, and we’ll get to that at the end. All right. So, the first one, AI content. And AI content, believe it or not, has been around before Chat GPT and like the popular um, LLMs or whatever you call them. Um, in the past, I think it was around 2018 or 2019, we used to use this thing called Jasper.ai. And it was a rudimentary AI tool where we would give it a prompt and it would give us this blog content and then we would plug that content into um this other software called uh I think it was

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called surfer uh SEO. It’s been so long I forget the names um to basically see how it would do in the algorithms and improve it for the algorithms. So that was the initial onset of AI content and since that onset of AI content, Google foresaw that there would be this tsunami, this like wave of AI generated content because content was now becoming easier and cheaper to mass-produce and so a lot of the agencies would start leveraging that and giving that for their clients and as a result we we saw

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SEO this is one of the reasons why SEO started to die out and around 2018 it really start stopped being as effective was that the methods that we used to rank higher for SEO like content became something that Google shifted their focus away from. They basically said all right if this site has a lot of content it doesn’t matter much because now we can’t tell if it’s been mass-produced or not. And so they started focusing on other signals. Signals like how does the user engage on the website? how long do they stay on

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the website? And they found that to be more accurate representations of how valuable a website was and therefore rank for um search and things like this. So content isn’t as important as we might make it seem as other marketers might make it seem. It’s important to have good content. Yes. Like have a good website, have talk about your services, talk about the treatments that you do, um talk about you as a doctor, but beyond that, it’s going to be significantly diminishing returns. So,

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just make sure you have the basic content and beyond that like all the AI generated content that they might offer you, um just know that it’s not going to be as helpful as they might make it suggest. All right, second one, AI search. And this is another common one that I see a lot of people worrying about is how do we make sure that we’re going to do well on AI search and it comes from I think it comes from um understanding how search engines have worked in the past where I see this as more of a um tool. So chat GPT what

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purpose is it serving? what purpose as a tool is it serving when people are searching on it? And all it really is is trying to get the user and connecting them with the best match for whatever it is they’re looking for. So if they’re looking for a best dentist near wherever they live, then chat, Perplexity, um cloud, all these tools, their goal is to connect you with the best option that you’re looking for. And we’ve seen this time and time again where people focus so much on trying to break the algorithm

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and hack the algorithm to rank a bit higher in the short term that they never do the work of becoming the best match. Instead, they do the work of trying to show up as the best match, trying to hack the algorithm in order to show up as the best match. And what these developers have always done, Google, Yelp, Yahoo, all these search engines, they’ve looked into, they always look into how people are trying to break the system, how to hack into it to get artificially better positioning, and they use that for the next patch, for

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the next update when they remove all those artificial um boosts in ranking. Uh because their goal, the platform’s goal is to connect people with the best match. And if that platform can’t do it, another platform will. This is a big reason Google shifted away from SEO because when Google was only relying on SEO, people would do searches like, uh, what’s the best restaurant near me? And Google SEO would do a lousy job because people were gifying it. They were hacking the algorithm to show up

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for places that they didn’t belong, um, cities where they were very far away from. And so people got very bad results when they search things like best restaurants near me. And so what happened there is Yelp came along and they started showing people very local uh search results. And so a huge population started to use Yelp and Google realized okay this SEO thing is very broken. We have to implement something new which is why they um brought out Google Places. All right. I say all this to say that

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let’s stop focusing on hacking AI search for artificially boosting your results when it comes to becoming a being seen as a best match on that platform because the platform’s goal is going to be to remove those artificial boosts in order to give people true best matches. So instead of and and it’s gonna and there’s a huge industrial competition going on with all the AI all the AI search parties trying to figure out who can do that best and so it’s not our job to do that. It’s not our job to ask how

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can we show up as the best or how can we play the game to rank high because it’s that’s the platform’s job to figure out for us. Our job or your job is to figure out how can we be the best match for that person such that the platforms will recommend you in in the long run. So, it’s playing for that long run, ultimately understanding that the best matches are going to win at the end of the day, and refusing to play the short-term game of finding the next hack, having the platform patch you out,

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finding the next hack, having them patch you out, finding the next hack, because that becomes too costly, becomes too unstable, and you’re most likely going to lose in the long term. All right. So, um, AI search, not something you need to worry about as much as you need to worry about making sure that you’re the best match. And to answer that question, how do you become the best match? Um, check out our course. I’ll put it in the description. We’ll go over, um, defining your target audience. It’s not the

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patient avatar. That’s a very common misconception as well. um how to position yourself so that you show up as the best option for them as something that is a um a need that there is no other choice for a provider like you and we’ll show you how to make your practice like that um and so on. So check that out. And then number three, so let’s go back to um the AI use cases. Number three is going to be AI leveraging AI to create strategy. And what I mean by strategy versus tactics is there’s

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tiers. So we have tactics, strategies, and goals. Goals is at the top. It’s why we do marketing at all, why we do any of this. And for you, it might be practice growth. It might be to increase your profits. Whatever that goal is, we’re going to have it as the objective. And then strategy is going to be the different things that we do to achieve that goal or it’s going to be how we go about achieving that goal. So, um, I won’t go into the nitty-gritty, but just understand that for now. And tactics are how we support

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that strategy, how we bring that strategy to life. So, if let’s say your goal is to grow to get 20 more patients a month, let’s say that’s your goal. All right? And your strategy is going to be by increasing awareness. All right? and and the tactics, the way you’re going to increase awareness is maybe through advertising, maybe through some content creation and and whatever so on. So tactics, strategy, goal. Now, when it comes to tactics, um AI is generally pretty good at because AI what it’s very

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good at is giving you a definitive answer to something. Something that is already solved, it can give you the accurate answer to. But when it comes to something that is unsolved or something that has many different approaches such as strategy, how to get 20 more patients per month, there are an infinite number of ways to accomplish that goal. So when it comes to the actual strategy, it’s going to do less of a good job as the tactical level of here’s how to run Google ads. They can give you step by

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step by step on how to do that, how to increase your um click-through rate, how to in lower cost per click, all this stuff because that’s already solved. But when it comes to the strategy, what should you do to achieve that goal? How should you approach it? It’s not going to do as much of a good job. When it comes to the best strategies, the best strategies aren’t adopted by everyone. If it was adopted by everyone, it would become status quo. It would stop working as well. and then the the A players, the

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people who are on top of their game would have developed a more niche, a more forwardinking strategy than the rest. So when we come to AI and ask it for a solid strategy, what it’s going to do is it’s going to recommend to us what the majority of the population are already doing, the majority of other dentists. And when that happens, you end up creating a strategy that is very mediocre that everyone else is doing. So you lose differentiation, you lose authenticity because it’s no longer

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about you, it’s about what others are doing. And that has significant impact on the actual results that you’re going to get when it comes to um achieving your actual goal. So paradoxically, using AI to define strategy won’t work uh isn’t going to work as well simply because the way it works is to give you the most safe answer, the most average answer. And if you could prompt it, if you could ask it the right questions to give you a very solid strategy, you wouldn’t need to ask it those

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questions because you would if you know what questions to ask, you already know the answer. So the biggest part of strategy is knowing what the biggest bottleneck is know not knowing what questions to ask because if you knew the right questions then you would be able to arrive at the right answer. All right. So saying all this to say don’t leverage AI for strategy when it comes to figuring out what are you going to do how are you going to engage in the marketplace the strategy level not the

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tactics when it comes to the strategy that has to be figured out through understanding the foundations understanding marketing understanding how it works developing your own strategy from that it has to be unique to you so again this is stuff we cover in the course check it out and when you go. It’s once you determine your strategy, it’s going to be propped up by all the tactics. So, for example, one of these strategies that I have is to be someone that teaches marketing more than any of the other agencies. That’s one of

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the ways that I’m going to get to my goal, which is to get more people to um shift how they approach marketing. So, my goal, my strategy, that’s one of my strategies. Now, the actual tactics, stuff like this video, I can ask chat GPT, hey, what’s the best way to structure a video? And it’s going to give me a very solid answer that’s proven to work. But if I ask it a strategy level stuff like, hey, um, I want to get people to engage in my style of dentistry, what is very good, it’s

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going to tell me what everyone else is doing, the stuff that isn’t working, run ads, start sending out promos, all this stuff. Start sending mail out. All right, I think I’ve rambled on long enough about that. So let’s go to point four, which is how can we actually use AI? And I’ve alluded to this in the previous point, which is to ask it questions that are solved. It’s very good at telling you answers to things that are solved. So if you want to figure something out, and I I mean

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solved as in like the general audience has solved it. It’s not solved by a niche individual. So, if you ask AI how to make very good sushi, um, it might be able to tell you because there’s been a lot of intensive study around it and there’s a probably a lot of published results on what makes good sushi and what doesn’t versus if you ask it something obscure that it just or it’s too personal to you, um, it’s going to do a very lousy job at that. So ask it questions where it has a solved

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solution, where someone has gone and done it before, where they’ve documented it, where others have documented it. If that’s the case, then you’re likely going to get very good usage out of AI. Um, and the other would be to ask it questions where um you just want other options. So you want to have it challenge how you’re thinking, challenge your approach to give a second perspective. It’s also very useful for that. So, as you’re doing the strategy course or in my course, as you’re doing

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the prompts and exercises, one of the things I’ll have it I’ll have you do is plug things into AI tools, see what it what outputs it gives you. Um, and ultimately using that to challenge yourself to expand to see if there’s other perspectives that you might have not thought of that uh it could provide you. All right, so four points, four ways to use AI, three that don’t work that you don’t need to worry about. AI um content search uh as a way to determine your strategy and the one that

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works very well which is tell me what works and that is only in the realm of solved and as you go out and try to create value you’re going to be m for the majority of the part working in the realm of the unsolved in your community how can you show up as a dentist who provides this type of value you don’t know because no one has done it yet and you’re going to be the first one to do it so as to engage in the realm of the unsolved. Realize that AI um isn’t going to be able to guide you there. It’s

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going to be able to assist you, but it doesn’t know either, or else everyone else would also be doing it. All right, thanks for watching this video. Hope it’s very helpful.