Marketing has changed but your approach likely hasn’t.

Today’s Christmas, and I have a gift, if you let it be, and it’s a gift in the form of a challenge. So right now, the landscape of marketing has changed tremendously. Imagine how it was before, where we had a couple of TV channels and the marketing executives would sit down in a room together and blast marketing at the consumers. Now that room of marketing executives has disappeared. Now the channels are dispersed. Now you’re the marketing executive. The landscape has changed so much.

Yet our concepts of what we should do, the frameworks of how we should approach marketing, have stayed relatively the same as back in the day. Yes, there’s new forms of getting the word out. There’s new forms like Google ads, Facebook ads, SEO, and all these things. But the concept of, “Hey, there’s our audience. Let’s target them. Let’s send our messaging straight at them,” is archaic. All right. And if you go back to how these concepts of marketing were created, marketing wasn’t some selfless thing that was created to help people, to help connect a demand to a supplier, or anything like that. It was completely selfish. Initially, marketing was created by large companies to sell more of their mediocre products to people in a way that can maximize profit, squeeze out the last dollars of the people. And that is the ancestry of marketing that we still work with. And my challenge is, most likely you have those beliefs because it was just a popular belief. Nothing bad about you. It’s just what is popular. It’s just what was always done. It’s just how things always were. And so, how can I expect you as a dentist to adopt these new beliefs? That’s not your job. So, my challenge to you today is to hopefully adopt these new ideas, see them, see if you can see the truth in them for yourself, and if it works for you, if you believe in it, I have a whole course in the description below where you can choose to go deeper.

All right, so with that aside, we’re going to look at modern dental marketing. So, unlike the traditional way of doing stuff, consider this. The landscape has changed so much. One of the landscapes is that we’re 50 times more distracted than our parents, and our parents were 50 times more distracted than our grandparents. And so we’re essentially 2,500 times more distracted than our grandparents. And we have to go through this world, this noise, this constant humming of advertising. If you want to listen to music, you have to watch a minute of advertisements first. If you go to your favorite supermarket, there’s advertisements on every aisle, new products, sales, promotions. Even before you walk in on the highway, there’s billboards. So, think of how bombarded we are and how numb we’ve become to that. Think of how many times you drive down a street with billboards and you don’t even notice them.

Consider this. 50 to 52% of Americans have some sort of ad blocking on their devices. We are actually being empowered as consumers to avoid advertising. Now, advertising has gotten so big that an industry has spawned from dissatisfaction with that to block advertisements. So, these are blockers, and it’s catching up real fast. I virtually live with no digital ads. Like, I’m obsessed with blocking advertisements. Even though I work in advertisements myself, I block all the advertisements because it takes away from my focus. It takes my limited precious attention away.

Think about this. The only limited resource we have is attention, time, energy. And then we have money, which is unlimited. But time, attention, and energy, once you spend it, you can’t get back. And there’s a whole wave of advertisers out there demanding that we give them our precious attention because they paid $3 for it. Right? So this is one of the major ways things have shifted.

So things have changed, but we don’t know what to do. So how do we market now, in this new era of people, of a jaded audience, of audiences who no longer believe in the advertiser, of audiences who no longer believe in an authority figure, in the CDC, in the government? There’s so much division. How do we create an impact with marketing? And the way we do marketing has to completely change because of not only the ancestral roots, but just lately, like we have drop shipping. It was this whole craze, a whole movement of people trying to make a quick buck by reselling something on Alibaba or AliExpress, creating no value, only perceived value. And now because of that, we have this huge tank in how people trust online sales. In the past, there was more of an inclination, a trust to buy things online, thanks to the hard work of trustworthy marketers who built up that trust. And then, in about three years, all that goodwill has evaporated because of people who realized there was this gap, where people realized that there is this unnatural level of trust, which is terrible. So, how do we do marketing today?

All right, that’s enough. I think you understand that things are so different, and how we’ve done it before isn’t going to work any longer, and how we need to do it now is radically different. So let’s start with this. Let’s start with the idea of how dentists currently market, and the approach is very simple, but I think it is too simple.

So we have this, let’s say it’s the dentist, right? So they come up with an idea, whether it is for selfish reasons or whatever, they have an idea that this is how they want to do dentistry. And for that reason they create their own private practice. So they create their own private practice and they say to the market, “Come check us out.” And the bridge between their business and the other people, this bridge is getting the word out, right? How can we create awareness? How can we get these people to be aware that we exist? Because I’m confident that I’ve created something amazing. I’ve put a lot of thought and work into designing this thing that I’m sure people will like.

It breaks down here. It’s not awareness that’s an issue. Awareness was an issue back in the day when there were new inventions popping out, when there were low hanging fruit to grab to create, when we recently harnessed better technology, better assembly lines. It was easy to, or the limiting factor was awareness, and so we bridged that with advertising and it worked. But today, awareness isn’t the issue. You pull out your phone and you see all the possibilities. We’re not insufficient on intelligence or information anymore.

So this is the issue, this concept of, “We’re going to create something I like. I’m going to hope that other people like it,” or “I’m going to create something that I think other people like and we’re just going to get them into the doors.” So it breaks down here because we have a very poor idea of who the other people are, of who we’re trying to serve. And it comes down to why there’s so many commodities in the market. It’s precisely because of this process, we try to create things that are best for our entire community. And when we try to do that we just become average, and the reason is our community today is way too diverse.

Back in the day, traditional marketing, this worked. Why? Our communities were similar. If you looked at a neighborhood, everyone had the same wants, the same desires, same dreams, same fears. Keeping up with the Joneses was a whole effect that was going on back in the day. Now it’s Keeping Up with the Kardashians, right? A very specific group of people watch that show. If you have a community, let’s say this is your community. Let’s say this is your office right here. And around this is your serviceable area. Let’s say this is a radius of 10 miles. Okay, in this community, back then, it used to be homogeneous and we could create ads, we could create mailers, and for the most part it would be homogeneous enough for us to get a consistent result with the advertising that we did.

Now people are too diverse. Now, instead of these people trying to keep up with the Joneses, there’s people keeping up with the Kardashians. More people here couldn’t give a damn about the Kardashians and they’re focused on something else. Or, “I care about vinyl records.” Other people couldn’t care less about vinyl records. “I care about marketing.” Other people could hate marketing and they could love buying luxury purses. I hate buying luxury purses. It’s too diverse today. When we try to create something in an improper targeted way, when we aren’t clear with who we’re trying to target, who we’re trying to build this thing for, what ends up happening is we become the average of diversity. And the average of diversity is boring. And the average of diversity is meaningless.

All right. So, targeting is the issue. So, how should we target? How should we target so that we can actually create something better for the people we choose to serve? Well, here lies the problem. We have to be very specific with who we choose to serve.

Back to this example, let’s say this is the entire serviceable population, right? So if you’re a GP, if you’re a general practitioner, the number of people who are eligible to become a patient of yours is quite large. Try this out. Go into an AI tool, Gemini, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, there’s a lot of them these days. So we go to an AI, we ask them what is the population of the people around me who are eligible to be a patient. So if you’re an orthodontist, who are the people who are eligible to be patients? If you’re a pediatric dentist, who are the eligible people? And you’ll find out that the number is significant. It’s going to be north of 100,000. And serviceable eligible people in a competitive driving distance is also what you want to specify. Because if you’re in a city, obviously your competitive driving distance is about 3 to 5 miles, whereas if you’re in a more rural area, it could easily be 10 miles to 20 miles. What you’ll find is you’re eligible, this is more for specialists, more likely you’re in a million, or at least 500,000 plus.

All right. The number of people in your community that you can potentially serve is incredibly massive. And the flawed approach that we take is we try to serve all of them, right? We try to create our practice to benefit all these people who will never visit your practice. So what’s the alternative? The alternative is to figure out a very specific group of people and create something that is specifically better for those people. So when they come in contact with it, it sticks out. You’re no longer like the other hundreds of practices who are commodities. It sticks out because you’ve created something that’s specifically better for them.

All right? So what we’re essentially doing is we’re standing for something. We’re saying, “Hey, this is the angle we’re going to take. This is our philosophy on dentistry. There’s no one out there in the market, at least in the competitive area, no one out there who offers it this way. And if you believe in it that way as well, come here.” And what that’s going to do is that’s going to immediately attract people, but it’s also going to immediately detract a lot of people who don’t align with that. And that’s okay because what you’ll do in another exercise, we’ll go through a scale validation exercise. So, we come here and we say, “Hey, these are the people I identified.” Again, we’re going to the AI and we’re asking, “Hey, what is the population, a conservative estimate of the number of people you think would fit into this category?” And it’s going to tell us a number like, “Hey, there are approximately 10,000 or so people.” And the number is probably going to be higher. It’s going to be around like 40 to 50,000.

All right. And then another question we’re going to ask is, “All right, how many people do we need to have as active patients in order to be thriving?” And that number is about a thousand or so depending on what type of practice you are. So it is significantly less than the number of people that are in the market who believe what you believe. All right. So we’re going to essentially, again, this number is higher. It’s probably around 50,000, right? And you need just 1,000. And I’m not talking 1,000 to survive. I’m talking 1,000, or whatever the number is, you need that number to thrive. This is the number of active patients to thrive. And it’s going to be a fraction of the new way we target people. Right? So this is a completely different approach just from the start.

So I challenge you to apply this, to see that truly there is more diversity more than ever. And because of this diversity, we can’t take an approach of targeting that is taking the average of this. We need to take a targeting strategy that is very specific.

All right. So let’s think of how we can get very specific. At the end of the day, what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to create changes in people. Marketing creates change. It’s a form of leadership. If you think of John Maxwell’s definition of leadership, leadership is influence. He says leadership is influence, nothing more, nothing less. Well, marketing is just creating change in people. It is an aspect of leadership just in a business way.

Okay. So let’s say our goal is ultimately this. We’re trying to get, let’s say this is our marketing system. And it’s a system because we want to consistently bring about a change in people. We want people who are doing a certain thing to act a different way. If they are not getting this dental treatment that you really would like them to do because it would benefit them, our marketing system is going to essentially get them to change that behavior from wallowing in pain to actually taking action and getting it treated. Right? That is all marketing.

So marketing, what we want to do is they have a default action that they’re currently taking. It might be no action at all, or it might be doing something that is actually counterproductive. It’s actually hurting their health. This new veneer craze of people doing their own veneers, of unlicensed people offering veneers could be an example of it’s a marketing problem. People believe that this path is a better path. We’ve done a poor job of marketing the idea that doing that is a terrible idea.

Okay. So let’s say we’re trying to create a marketing system to fix this issue. What we want them to do instead is after interacting with our marketing system, they should come out and take a totally different approach. So instead of going here, they should be going here. All right. So what goes, or how do we create this? First of all, it’s a system because we need consistent output. We need this to consistently get people to this direction, which is, “Hey, instead of getting veneers done by your friend, get it done by a professional.” We’re not interested in creating a one-off event. It’s a system and we need predictability. When we get a lot of people into this, if we don’t have predictable outcomes, then we’ve done a poor job at creating a marketing system. If some people are doing this, if some people are still going here, if some people are doing this, and once in a while people come here, that means our marketing system could use a lot of tightening and fixing.

Another example, marketing system to get more new patients is a very common one. The change we want them to take is to, instead of not getting their dental exam, get a dental exam. Instead of going to someone else for a dental exam, come here. Instead of choosing someone else, choose a better approach that we take that other people don’t because we’ve differentiated, which I’ll talk about later when I talk about how to get better for people.

But okay, how do we get better for people? The reason I talked about this is because I wanted to say it all starts with psychography. And recall that we were previously talking about targeting, and we start with targeting because we build a system around the inputs, right?

So we have two different people here. Let’s say they come into our marketing system and for one reason or another, person A comes into contact with our marketing system and as a result they take this approach and get a result, right? Their behavior starts to change in this way. Whereas person B comes into contact with our marketing system and does B result. He could have gone to A. There was nothing physically stopping him, but he chose to go down to B. So why? What caused this? Was this the zip code they lived in? Was it their income? Maybe.

But what’s probably more likely, like zip codes and incomes, we have a lot of solutions for this. We have payment plans. We have in-house memberships. We have insurance. There’s a lot of solutions such that income is mitigated to a very high degree. But what I would argue is that it’s not actually the income. It’s the psychology you get as an income. Or maybe income is a byproduct of psychology. That’s a thinker. But the idea is that the psychography, their mind, their belief systems were different such that when they engage with the marketing system, they produce different outputs.

And this is the thesis of cognitive psychology. People make decisions because of psychology, because of feelings, not because of their age, not because of their gender, not because of their ethnicity. It’s what’s going on in their minds, right? Because this is changed behavior. So once we understand this and once we stop doing the traditional way of targeting based on demographics, demographic features, income, how recently they moved, all these are demographic features. The new approach is to start targeting psychologically.

Who are the psychological profiles that we want to attract in order to create a consistent change? So again, I’m not going to go too deep. If you want to go deeper, actually apply it, check out the course.

What we’re going to figure out, or what we figure out in that course, is that we all have a belief system. So let’s say this is inside your head. It’s called a belief system. It’s complex. These are beliefs I have about the dentist. Are all dentists good? Are all dentists evil? Are they out to take my money? Are they out to provide me good? It’s beliefs I have about the supermarket. Do I care about buying organic? Is it a scam? Is GMO a bad thing? Is it a good thing? Right? It’s super complex. We have thousands and thousands of them going on at the same time, unconsciously, consciously, and based on our belief system our perspective of the world changes.

If we see an event, let’s say that event is you telling them or recommending that they should get a dental crown. If their belief system is such that all dentists are evil, the event of you recommending a crown is going to be interpreted massively differently than if they believe that all dentists are good. If they believe all dentists are evil, he’s recommending me a crown because he wants to bill my insurance and take as much money as he can from me. If he believes all dentists are good, he’s recommending me a crown because he wants to protect me. Right? Massively different.

So, what we need to do is figure out what belief systems we’re going to bring into our marketing system, into the thing that’s going to create change, so that by the end of it, they’re making decisions that are aligned with the change we want to create. They’re making decisions that we want them to take, such as accept the treatment. Many people won’t if we can’t do this work of marketing for them.

Marketing is a generous act when our changes are aligned, are ethical. Make sure your change is ethical first. Check out the ethical change module and make sure that your change is ethical. But once it’s aligned, it becomes a generous act. If it’s not aligned, if it’s not ethical, then you create marketing that’s like Coca-Cola, that can ruin generations of people’s health, that can take an entire country like Mexico and give it crippling diseases because you just wanted to maximize shareholder profit, right?

So marketing done properly is extremely generous. We can get someone who previously refused treatment to who needed it, but there was something in his belief system that was saying that this isn’t what I do, and then we can work with that and change it to something that he does.

But for our purposes, that level of personalization is not something we’re going to engage too much in because it doesn’t scale. If you think of hyperpersonalization on this end, the problem is that you’re not going to be able to scale it. It just costs too much to personalize things. Imagine someone wanted treatment with the specific machine, right? We don’t have the resources to do that for everyone. And on the other hand of the spectrum is mass marketing. We’re trying to appeal to everyone at the same time and that falls apart because we become a commodity.

All right. So, back to this. It is the belief systems that create meaning from the event. The dentist offered me a crown. The meaning is that he’s trying to do me harm or he’s trying to do me good. It changes based on the belief system, right? And three other filters come here at this point, and they all act together: belief system and these three filters. So this is status, culture, and past experience. These are also going to affect how we interpret the meaning.

So let’s say I offer you teeth whitening. Let’s say you are a geisha for some reason. In geisha culture, they hate white teeth. They try to darken their teeth so that their skin appears brighter. So if I told a geisha, “Hey, you should get teeth whitening,” to you and me, we would be like, “Oh, that’s great. My teeth are kind of yellow. I could definitely use whitening.” But to them, it’s going to debilitate their status.

Culture is how people like me do things. When I recommend you something and you realize no one else you know is doing that, everyone you know is doing something the opposite way, you’re going to be massively unlikely to adopt what I offer you.

All right. So status, we want to make sure we’re aligning with where they want to go. Do they want to go up in status or do they want to go down in status? Do they want to maintain status?

Culture, if it’s not something that people are doing, we have a way to hack into that and the way is to target early adopters. And then we create a new culture around the new behavior. And then we get other people, the mainstream, to buy into this using this lens as well.

And past experience, does it remind me of something that went wrong, of something that I didn’t like? If I offer you a product, does it look very similar to another product that you tried that failed or that hurt you? You’re not going to buy it. So, as a marketer, I have to be very intentional of understanding things that you might have experienced that didn’t work and package mine or deliver mine in a way that appears different at least, so that I can at least get you to create the meaning of, “Okay, this is okay. This isn’t going to harm me. This is going to be good for my status, my culture.”

And if I can create that meaning, then what happens is we get an emotional response to the meanings we create. If I believe that you as a dentist are out to harm me, if that’s the meaning I create because of a certain event and my belief systems and these three lenses, then I’m going to get an emotional response in the form of a feeling.

So I’ll write meaning here. The resulting feeling is I’m going to feel avoidant. I’m going to feel resisting. I’m going to feel distrustful. I’m going to feel disengaged. I’m going to feel closed. Right? These are all feelings that arise because of a meaning that was created because of this.

Why are feelings so important? Now, again, back to behavioral psychology. Feelings are the root of action. We do things because we feel a certain way, not because of rational behavior. We don’t think out all our stuff. We do things because we feel a certain way, and then we justify it with rationality. That is the thesis. You can debate me on it, but maybe debate all the other psychologists.

All right. So, we do things based on feeling. So this is how the entire marketing system works. We’re trying to tweak these things. We’re trying to create events. We’re trying to intentionally create events. What events do they come in contact with before, during, and after their experience with you at your practice, at your office? Right?

If they call in and no one’s picking up, what story does that create? What meaning does that create about your practice? While if these people are on top of it, it’s going to create quite a different story, quite a different meaning than that. If they come into your office, they see garbage all over the floor, what type of meaning is that going to create? What type of feeling is that going to create? Is that feelings of moving forward and engaging with you, or is that going to be feelings that are going to lead to the decision of declining treatment?

Right? So, we have to be very intentional with events. If you want to go deeper, check out the course. We’re going to look into all the different touch points that you can design so that it creates positive events and positive beliefs.

Status, how can we first identify where do they want to go in status? Do they want to go up or down? Do they want to maintain? Then how do they view status? How do they think they need to shift status? Do they shift status by enabling others? Are they more of a giving type of person in this context, or do they try to shift their status by taking, or do they try to shift status by demeaning people? Right? There’s a lot of different ways people can do this and our job as marketers is to show them how they can achieve their status goals through our service and how it’s going to help them shift. And again, if they’re choosing to demean people, we’re not going to engage with them.

And then culture. I briefly touched on it, but it’s to get the early adopters to get them to come and then to create a culture around those people using shared activities. And as a result, the mainstream come, and the early adopters are able to bring the mainstream and create a behavior where everyone chooses a similar change.

And then past experience. I think I talked briefly about that. Also, how can we break past experiences? Like, how can people come into things expecting a certain thing? How can we break that in a way that’s better for them? Like Tesla. How we used to purchase cars in the past, you would go out, you would go to a dealer and you would sit there for about three to four hours just negotiating, knowing that we’re playing this game and knowing they’re not going to their lowest price. They would go to the back for 30 minutes, come back, drop your price by $1,000. Like it was insane. And Tesla comes and they changed how it was a total pattern break. And because of that, the meanings we create are even stronger. The feelings we get as a result are even stronger. The feelings of trust, the feelings of respect, the feelings of that’s how things should be, and this was an ethical move. We can argue about what they’re doing now, but back in the day, that was the overarching feeling of the tech industry who were his target audience, right?

So, this is marketing. And when we understand this marketing system, now I explained all this just because we need to get clear with who we’re putting in. We need to get very clear with this thing that will go through this entire process that we design. How can we get clear on that?

So we have this belief system, the complex thought processes that come into contact with our marketing system, and as a result we come into an ultimate feeling. And the feeling, like I talked about with behavioral psychology, the feeling is ultimately responsible for the decisions people make. All right? And decisions are going to be how we create change, the change that we see as leaders in the world, how things should be. We want our people to be getting the treatments that they need and prioritizing their health.

All right. So, how do we create this? What we need is a consistent input into our marketing system so that the output, the decisions, are also consistent. How can we do that when belief systems are so complex? We can’t take inventory of all these different beliefs and find people out there who match all those beliefs. It’s too specific, right?

What we actually do is we find that the golden ratio is going to be about five beliefs, right? Beliefs on identity, beliefs on value, beliefs on health, these sorts of things. But once we create five different beliefs and we combine them, people who share all five of these beliefs is going to create a very specific persona, a very specific belief system profile. So what we call them is a BSP, a belief system profile. It is profiling. Yes, it’s stereotyping people based on certain beliefs that we want them to have. And we choose five because it’s a golden medium between being too specific and too general. And when we get this five, you’ll run it through scale validation and you’ll realize, wow, that is perfect in terms of specificity so that I’m no longer a commodity, and it’s also perfect in that there’s enough of them so that I can create a thriving practice.

Once we do this, the mistake is going to be to draft beliefs. It’s going to be to cherry pick beliefs and say, “Hey, this is a belief I want. This is a belief I want.” It doesn’t work because many times beliefs are incompatible. If I have a certain belief about dentists, it might be incompatible with how I see health. If I believe all dentists are good and the belief that I love getting my health proactively treated might be a conflict. It might be very rare to see that in real life.

So how do we determine a belief system profile that is grounded in reality? Well, it’s very simple. We look for three real people who we know at more than average, at a relatively intimate level. It could be a family member, it could be a loved one, it could be friends, it could be a past patient. And once we do, we create a belief system profile. And now we start creating a practice based on the events, a practice based on all these different things, that is better to these people.

And you see how things have shifted. It’s less about how we create a practice that we think is going to be better based on flawed marketing. It’s how we’re going to be better to people with this unique belief system. Now everything becomes so much clearer. This is what they want, right? This is what they believe. So this is how I should present things.

And another exercise we do right after this is differentiation. How can we become better for these people? What are the different angles we’ll have to approach it by? So I’ve done a lot of videos on differentiation, so I won’t go too much into it, but the idea, this is the first step we need to take to removing ourselves as a commodity.

Once we figure out who we’re targeting right now, we can differentiate our practice so that we can be better. Everyone’s talking about differentiation, but they can’t do it because the way they target is flawed. When they realize, “Oh, this is how we should target. This is what actually matters,” then differentiation becomes very simple.

All right. So, that is modern dental marketing 101. Trust me, there’s a lot more to it. Like, we’ve scraped maybe 20% of the depth you can go with marketing. But the fundamental changes I want you to understand is how we target, how we see consumers as no longer captive audiences, as people who are empowered to make decisions. Therefore, we can’t approach it anymore as just awareness, awareness, awareness. It doesn’t work anymore. We have to design a practice that they’re going to say is better, that they’re going to tell their friends and family about. Right? All these things come when we realize that we need to create something for a specific persona.

It’s not the patient avatar exercise. That exercise was actually pioneered, Dan S. Kennedy, right? He was an author who created a lot of copywriting. He created this concept of an avatar and we would write down their hopes, their fears, their dreams, etc. And this was a method he used to write copy, to write persuasively. This wasn’t a method he used to target people. And how we’ve messed things up were that we started targeting people using this patient avatar thing. And the problem is the patient avatar is great when we need a very specific person in mind to write to, but it falls apart when it comes to targeting because it’s so specific that every day we’re just reminded that this avatar doesn’t, someone comes in the door, they’re not the avatar. Someone comes in the door, they’re not the avatar. And in the avatar, you even have to gender them when you create the identity. So it breaks apart at every level.

This approach, you can see the beliefs happening, it’s much more powerful. Like someone walks in the door and you see, wow, this is how they believe stuff. So I hope this video was helpful.

But that’s not the challenge. Again, it’s Christmas. The gift I want to give you is the challenge of not only seeing this differently but the challenge of the gift I want to give you is essentially that, so that you can empower your practice with all the different advances we’ve made in marketing of understanding consumer behavior and so on. There’s so much of it and I see so many people not ignoring it but not taking it as seriously as they could, not implementing it. And no fault to them. The reason was there was no structure. There was no method of doing this stuff.

So what we’ve created with the course is the step-by-step structure. Again, it’s completely free, like all the exercises are there. Check it out. I hope you guys like it. I hope this video was helpful. And thanks for watching.