Summary of Video on New Patient Acquisition
This video provides a comprehensive analysis of new patient acquisition for dental practices, focusing on the critical factors that influence growth: traffic and conversions. The presenter emphasizes the importance of understanding these two components, outlines common misconceptions, and offers strategic advice on where to focus efforts for optimal results.
Core Concepts
- New Patients = Traffic × Conversions
- Traffic refers to the attention, awareness, or visibility a practice receives.
- Conversions refer to the percentage of that traffic that actually becomes new patients.
- Success occurs when both traffic and conversions are high—having many aware people who are also attracted to the practice.
Insights on Traffic
- Traffic generation is largely a solved problem in the dental industry.
- Many practitioners get overwhelmed by the variety of methods and conflicting advice from agencies, freelancers, or influencers.
- Traffic-building activities can be split into:
- One-time setup tasks: Google Business Profile, Facebook profile, review systems.
- Repeated activities: Advertising, SEO, social media content creation.
- The industry tends to overvalue repeatedly done activities because service providers have a financial incentive to sell ongoing services rather than one-time setups.
- Advertising is the primary and most effective method to gain scalable attention across platforms like TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Google.
- Platforms operate as pay-to-play ecosystems; free organic reach is limited and often ineffective for local patient acquisition.
- Organic content creation often targets mass audiences and may not attract the specific local patients a dental practice seeks.
- Despite some outdated advice advocating SEO as a primary traffic source, SEO effectiveness has declined since around 2018.
- Conclusion: While foundational setups are necessary, the last and most reliable method to generate traffic is paid advertising.
Insights on Conversions
- Conversions are often neglected because they are difficult to outsource or delegate.
- Increasing conversions requires more than superficial changes (e.g., just redesigning a website).
- The key is to create deep alignment between the practice and the target patient’s beliefs and values.
- First step: Define the target audience by understanding their beliefs about dentistry, risk tolerance, and treatment preferences.
- Position the practice to occupy a clear and meaningful place in the patient’s mind through a carefully crafted narrative.
- Narrative elements include:
- Practice name and location
- Office decor and atmosphere
- Staff uniforms and demeanor
- Patient experience and service speed
- This narrative creates mental alignment, helping patients decide if the practice fits their expectations and values.
- Benefits of strong conversions:
- Patients are willing to travel further and endure more effort to engage with the practice.
- Practice can avoid price competition by offering a differentiated, value-driven experience.
- Patients who align with the practice are willing to pay premium prices.
- Good conversions drive organic word-of-mouth and referrals, amplifying future traffic.
- Poor conversions mean increased traffic alone won’t help and may even harm the practice’s reputation and growth.
Key Takeaways
- Traffic generation is mostly understood and should focus on paid advertising.
- Conversions—creating meaningful patient alignment—are underappreciated and critical for sustainable growth.
- A practice that focuses on conversions benefits from loyal patients willing to pay more and refer others, creating a virtuous cycle.
- Attempting to grow solely by traffic volume without conversion alignment is ineffective and potentially damaging.
- The ideal strategy balances adequate traffic from advertising with high conversion through targeted positioning and narrative-building.
Additional Notes
| Aspect | Description |
|---|---|
| One-time traffic tasks | Google Business Profile setup, Facebook profile, review systems |
| Repeated traffic tasks | Paid advertising, SEO (declined effectiveness), social media content creation |
| Platforms owning attention | TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Google |
| Misconceptions | Overreliance on SEO and organic social media for patient acquisition |
| Conversion focus | Defining target audience, narrative creation, patient experience |
Conclusion
The video concludes with an invitation to a free course covering conversion strategies in depth, promising to help dental practices create remarkable patient acquisition systems by emphasizing conversion over traffic volume alone.
Overall, the critical insight is that dental practices must shift from chasing traffic alone to cultivating deep, belief-based alignment with their ideal patients to sustainably increase new patient acquisition.
00:00:00
Hey, welcome to this video. We’re going to take a deep dive at new patient acquisition. So, what that actually looks like, what you need to do to get more patients, and also importantly, what you shouldn’t do because it’s either going to be a waste of time, a distraction, or just a bad investment. So, let’s get into it. Everything we’re going to talk about hinges around this one equation right here, which is new patients come from traffic times conversions. So traffic is essentially
00:00:27
attention awareness or visibility and conversions is of those people who are aware of you who whose attention that you have of that group how many of them can you turn into new patients. So you can think of it as volume and quantity or like attraction other words quantity and quality right so if we have a lot of people who are aware of us yet we do a very poor job at attracting people we’re still going to end up with a few or if we have very few people who are aware we exist but we do a great job at being
00:01:06
attractive for those people then we’re going to get a couple of new patients And the magic really happens when we can get a lot of traffic, a lot of people who are aware of us and also be very attractive to them. Right? So that’s the work that we’re going to be engaging in today. So first let’s take a look at traffic. And what I want to say about traffic is for the most part it’s solved. That we understand how to get traffic that as in dental industry we focus so much on traffic and all the activities that go
00:01:37
along with it that we understand it intimately. and you can it’s very easy to find a freelancer someone who you know a relative or in an agency who can help you with traffic that this here is not the competitive advantage anymore and all you need to do here is understand what works what doesn’t work and then we can move on to conversions all right so traffic the only trip up that I see the biggest trip up is that people don’t know what method to take there’s so many methods that all all
00:02:09
these different agencies are saying that you need to do. All these different people are saying that you need to do. YouTubers are are saying that they need to do all which all with their own self-interest. So, let me break down what it is that I recommend and because I’ve done all of it. I I’ve tried all of it and this is kind of what I found is that advertising. All right, before we get into that, my thesis is going to be advertising is the last traffic method left. But let me also do this.
00:02:45
There are activities, traffic building activities that are done once or traffic building activities that are done repeatedly. For the most part, the things that we have to worry about are the things that are done repeatedly because here it’s easy to make investments that don’t work. It’s easy to put in time and energy and effort into things that don’t work. And the costs are going to be bigger more often than the things that where we have to do it once. Yet also the potential for rewards are
00:03:21
higher for things that are done repeatedly. All right. So what are things that are done once? things like setting up your Facebook profile, setting up your Google business profile, setting up a system for getting reviews. These are things that are done once. What’s done repeatedly, things like advertising where constantly at individual um every individual person is seeing an advertisement um SEO where you have to continuously be creating content, social media where you’re constantly creating content there
00:03:51
as well, right? These are things done repeatedly. And what I noticed is a lot of people who sell their services to dental practice owners exist in the realm of things that are done repeatedly. No one’s really out there saying, “Hey, I’m going to help you set up a Google business profile and then I’m done.” It’s going to be, “Hey, I’m going to set up a Google business profile and then I’m going to do the work of constantly posting on your Google business profile.”
00:04:16
So that’s the incentive. The incentive for people is to sell things that are done repeatedly. So I think we have a deliluted in the industry. We’ve been deluded to think that all these repeatedly done things are very valuable when in fact they’re just perceived value because someone with their self-interest in doing things repeatedly have said it’s important. What we see is that all we care about in this equation is that we want attention. We want people’s awareness of us. All
00:04:48
right. So, let’s take a step back and let’s shove other people’s self-interest for a while and let’s take a approach of how are we going to get attention and awareness. Think of the platforms that have it. As we’ve moved away from yellow pages, from phone books and move onto a digital economy, a digital place where attention lives. Think of the platforms that own attention. social media platforms Tik Tok, YouTube, Facebook, uh Instagram and search engines, Google, Yahoo, etc.
00:05:24
These platforms that own our attention where we want to engage with in order to get some of that have made it so that it’s a payto-play game that if you want their attention, they know that they have the attention. It would be a terrible business model for them if they gave it away freely. if all you had to do was set up something up and you get all that attention. So, yes, they’ll give you some of it. If you do set up your Google business profile, they’ll give you some attention because
00:05:56
you’re helping their ecosystem. You’re becoming you’re playing into their ecosystem, but they’re not going to give you the whole kingdom. The way you access, the way you leverage attention at will is going to be by and large advertising for all of these platforms, for Facebook, for Instagram, for all these things. The alternative is kind of what I alluded to where you become you you you add onto their ecosystem. You become a player that helps their ecosystem so that they can get other attention on board. So, you
00:06:29
either pay for advertising or you become an employee of them. you do the work of giving them stuff that they want to get other users to come. But now the problem with that, the problem with the second approach is that when you decide to become an employee, so we see this a lot in doctors who decide to get famous on social media, you start to create content that is very different from the content that would get your people to visit you at the dental practice. that it’s content for general mass audiences at a global
00:07:02
scale. Whereas what you actually care about are local audiences who have deeper you want to create deeper meaning not shallow 30 second clips. You want to create deeper meaning so that you can get traction and ultimately create conversion into becoming a new patient. So therefore, the approach of becoming an employee, doing the things that these platforms want, going the organic route is a very lousy method for actually getting new patients. That said, if you care about the attention, if you care
00:07:40
about um subscribers for subscribers sake or because you have it’s part of a bigger strategy somehow, then it can make sense. But what we’re talking about right now is what are the activities we can do to get new patients. And what I’m saying is that advertising is the last solution for getting traffic. So um this so this misconception is everywhere that I’ve seen huge huge um marketing providers like one who is the licensed provider for a very very famous um pharmaceutical drug
00:08:17
that dentists can use. Um, they were recommending offices do SEO, which is super outdated, which is proven to have stopped around 2018. And so, a lot of this misconception still exists. I just want to break it down that if you’re looking at traffic, it has to be advertising. Obviously, do all the other stuff. But what you’ll find when you do Google business profile, what you set up local SEO, um all these other things is that the amount of leverage that you get is so small that these platforms understand
00:08:51
that now businesses have a level of dependence on them and they’re trying they’re actively trying to create situations where you have to pay to play. And that’s just the reality of traffic. You can either say I’m wrong or hate it, but that’s what I’ve experienced. Alternatively, you can go the route of conversions, which is what I’m trying to propose. Now, I think that traffic, the stuff we can get from the do once stuff gets us a decent amount of tra decent enough amount of traffic so that when we
00:09:26
work on conversions that we can actually get new patients that I think all you have to do, I don’t even think you have to go so deep into traffic. I don’t think you have to hire agencies. I I want to show you how you can just work on this so you can be completely self-reliant. All right. So, conversions, this is super neglected and I think it’s because again back to the idea of it’s difficult to outsource that you can’t get an agency to come in and work on your conversions. It’s very
00:09:58
difficult. So, what is actually conversion? How can you become more attractive? Well, you’re going to have to change a lot more than just your website. That creating meaning, get connecting with people and getting them attracted to you as a practice requires a lot more than just lipsticking the pig or whatever term they call it, right? It’s much deeper than that, right? So, what we want to understand here first is who is it for? Sorry, that’s a terrible F. So, when it comes to creating a practice
00:10:50
that is attractive, the first place, the foundation of it, you’re going to have to start with who is it for? What am I making or who am I making this attractive for? because it’s impossible to make it attractive for everyone that today everyone has so many different beliefs that I have a certain belief about what is right and wrong what is good dentistry what is bad dentistry what am I more conservative in general or am I more risk averse in or risk averse in general and conservative or am I looking to do more am I more
00:11:24
risk-taking do I believe in more non-surgical approaches non non-invasive approaches is or am I happy? Do I trust, you know, modern medicine to basically take over and do what they need from me or do what they need to me etc and etc. That we have all these different belief systems about what better means. And so if we try to create something that’s better and more attractive, we have to first understand what are the belief systems that we’re actually becoming better and more attractive for. And once we do
00:11:56
that, what we’re interested in doing is positioning for the people who I’ve chosen to serve for their beliefs. What position in their mind should I occupy in order to create the most alignment so that they work with me the best? So let me give you an example. Let’s say that who is it for the p the group that you s you seek to serve are the people who believe that dentistry is something to be invested in to be proactive about to proactively visit so that they don’t run into problems before it does.
00:12:44
That’s massively going to change what type of practice they’re interested in. And so they’re going to see all these different dental practices as they go around whether they’re doing their research or whether they’re just driving around and they start placing they start positioning the different practices in their mind. Oh, this is one that you go to if it’s if you’re um someone who’s interested in saving money. This is one that you go to if you want a luxury experience, right? It looks a bit too
00:13:14
expensive for me because I’m not that kind of person. That could be a story. Or maybe this is one where the doctor is more conservative etc and etc. And as we take up a position in someone’s mind or or the way the method the mechanics of falling in to a certain position in someone’s mind comes down from creating narratives. A narrative. So a narrative is a story that we can hope to tell by aligning all the elements of our practice. So everything from your website from to the name of your office to where it’s
00:14:01
located, the address, the city to the plaza to the uniform your staff wears to how quickly they’re greeted to how slowly they’re greeted to the interior decor of your office. All of these things tell a narrative about what kind of practice you are and therefore you end up in a position in their mind. And I’m not saying it’s a position of up down or something. It’s a mental graph of what type of office is this and is this the type of office that I want to engage with based on what their beliefs
00:14:33
are. And when you’ve created this, you’ve worked on uh conversions, you’ve created attraction. And this is the mechanics for how any type of attraction is created. Is this the type or for for that individual person with their beliefs? Am I creating a narrative that I’m that kind of person or my business is that kind of person or this product I’m trying to sell is that kind of product? That’s all attraction really is. It’s alignment to what they believe is good and bad.
00:15:04
So that’s it. When you can increase traffic by working on advertising by understanding that most of this is solved and you work on conversions, then you can increase the actual number of new patients that you get. It’s really straightforward. Like I said, we’ve all focused on traffic for a very long time. And because of that, we’ve really neglected conversions and we’re missing out on a lot of the benefits that working on conversions can get us. So, what are some of them? The first is
00:15:38
that when you create alignment this way and when you’re not just getting patience because you happened you played the volume game, you played the it’s a numbers game and you’ve happened to get lucky and get more people. What what happens when you create alignment is that you get patients who are willing to go through more hoops to work with you, who are willing to drive further distances. Because when you worked on this now you’ve deeply created alignment with what these group of people want that
00:16:14
you’re the only person who takes up that position and you become a sort of a need if they want to get dentistry that feels right to them. So you get people who are driving further to visit you and you also get to remove yourself from price competition. That you’re not just another option anymore. That you’re actually standing for something and that you’re telling a coherent narrative about what it is that your practice represents and people who align with that want that and are way are willing
00:16:44
to pay pay a premium for that. And moving on into the future, you we start to see that today the individual has been empowered with a megaphone for communication that we have social media, we can post, we can leave reviews, we can text, we can email. Communication has been scaled to an infinite degree. And when we create this, what we create is essentially word of mouth because we create deep meanings and we like to talk about things that are meaningful to us. So when we actually work on conversions,
00:17:20
we actually work on traffic that that’s why I said that if you don’t want to do advertising, if you want to neglect this entirely, that this is going to be the path forward because when you can start with small traffic but very deep conversions and get these people to engage with it, then you create more traffic in the future. Whereas you can pump as much traffic you want into something that has terrible alignment, terrible attraction and it’s not going to help you in the future. It’s actually going to hurt you in the
00:17:54
future. Right? We see this all the time with bad marketing where a big budget gets put into it and because of that budget it actually flops. It doesn’t have the time to improve and change itself before it faces public um backlash or public scrutiny. And so I think we’ve focused on traffic for too long. I think it’s very important to focus on conversions. So that’s new patient acquisition in a nutshell. If you want to look at the actual work of working on conversions, uh I’ll put my
00:18:29
course in the description below, completely free. We’ll go over all the concepts that we talked about and by the end of it, you’ll have a truly remarkable practice. Thanks for watching this video. I’ll see you guys in the next one.