The 3 approaches to growing a dental practice.

Summary

The video addresses strategies for growing a dental practice by contrasting traditional and modern approaches to patient acquisition and retention. It emphasizes the importance of balancing patient experience with marketing efforts to achieve sustainable growth in a competitive and fragmented marketplace.

Key Insights

• Two traditional schools of thought in dental practice growth:
• Patient Experience Focus: Prioritizing excellent service to generate organic word of mouth.
• Marketing Focus: Concentrating on advertising, visibility, and online presence (e.g., Google ranking) to attract patients.
• Limitations of each approach:
• Patient experience alone often results in slow growth.
• Marketing alone can lead to high costs and diminishing returns as competition increases and advertising expenses rise.
• Modern marketing approach:
• Integrates the best elements of patient experience and marketing.
• Involves intentionally designing a patient experience tailored to a specific target audience rather than a generic experience for everyone.
• Utilizes targeted marketing strategies to attract and resonate with a clearly defined patient segment.
• Importance of defining the target audience:
• The community seeking dental services is diverse with varied preferences and belief systems.
• Creating a patient experience and marketing message that aligns with the specific needs and values of a chosen group is more effective.
• Narrowing focus may appear risky but actually strengthens the practice’s appeal to a core group, leading to better engagement and loyalty.
• Market size and conversion rates:
• It is estimated that converting 1% to 5% of the target population sharing the same beliefs is sufficient to sustain a thriving dental practice.
• This highlights the importance of starting from a place of abundance by focusing on a manageable, well-defined patient base.
• Practical steps recommended:
• Identify the specific beliefs and preferences of the patient segment you want to serve (e.g., conservative treatment approach, cost-consciousness).
• Design all aspects of the patient experience and marketing messaging around those preferences.
• Position the practice as uniquely suited for that target group to differentiate from competitors.
• Utilize marketing to communicate this focused positioning and attract aligned patients.
• Continuously refine patient touchpoints to exceed expectations and create meaningful experiences.
• Outcome:
• A dental practice that is differentiated, meaningful, and sustainable.
• Such a practice benefits from both word-of-mouth referrals and effective targeted marketing, leading to steady growth.

Timeline Table of Concepts Presented

Core Concepts and Definitions

Recommendations & Next Steps

• Define clearly who your ideal patients are by understanding their beliefs and preferences.
• Design your practice’s services and patient experience specifically for this group.
• Craft marketing messages that speak directly to your target audience’s values and needs.
• Avoid trying to appeal to everyone, as this dilutes your impact.
• Leverage the balance of patient experience and marketing to build a sustainable and differentiated practice.
• Consider enrolling in the recommended course for a deeper dive into practical implementation.

Overall, the video underscores that successful dental practice growth today requires a nuanced, integrated approach—combining carefully tailored patient experience with focused marketing—to effectively attract and retain the right patients.

00:00:00
So when you look to grow your dental practice, there’s a lot of information and a lot of ways to do it. So what I want you to introduce to you is the idea of two main schools of thought and the older more traditional school of thought is to focus primarily on patient experience to focus on creating such a good service and focusing on creating such a good service that it begets word of mouth and people start to spread the idea about you and your practice. And the more recent um approach is to focus

00:00:33
shift that focus to marketing to what we understand marketing to be uh previously which is things like advertising uh visibility getting the word out ranking on Google all these different things and the problem both comes with pros and cons. The problem with the traditional patient experienceon approach is that it can be very slow to grow and people who focus on the marketing and visibility get patients who would be better suited and better aligned with your practice when you don’t when you only focus on

00:01:05
the experience and don’t focus on the marketing aspects. And the pros and cons of focusing only on the marketing aspect are that you get a lot of visibility. But what we understand marketing to be things like advertising and visibility, we find that it gets worse as other practices adopt those new behaviors. They start to market themselves. Um cost of advertising goes up as more marketers as more advertisers are introduced into the advertising ecosystem. Uh and as a result, focusing only on marketing

00:01:36
becomes very costly and unsustainable in the long run. So I want you to take an approach that balances both methods. One where you get the long-term benefits of increasing patient experience of an improved uh patient experience that begets word of mouth and also to adopt the behaviors the benefits of marketing visibility and all this sort of stuff. So what we have now is a third approach that integrates the best aspects of both and this is modern marketing. So, it’s going to start with you intentionally

00:02:11
designing the patient experience because traditionally how we did it was we said we would go and create the best experience for everyone and it worked for a while. But what happened now was that with the advent of the internet, with the advent of other advertisers and marketing, everyone, the community you seek to serve has become very diverse, very fragmented and splintered in what they consider to be better, what they prefer, what they like, what they know. And so if we try to build a patient experience

00:02:40
in service of everyone, what happens is that we end up building something for no one because no one likes what everyone likes. So the new approach is to figure out who we’re going to be uh creating this patient experience for. Who are we going to be striving to create visibility around? So the question shifts from how can we grow our dental practice to who is it that we’re seeking to serve first? Once we identify that then we can start working on the different elements of attracting those

00:03:11
people of building a service in service of those people as well. So who are you seeking to serve? Let’s start with that question. There’s a lot that we can go into and we could probably spend hours talking just about that one question. So what I would recommend you do is check out the course that I’ll put in the description that will get into more of the details about how exactly to identify those people. Once you do that, once you identify the belief systems that make up that group

00:03:37
of people, then you have a foundation upon which you can build the entire experience upon. Because what once you understand what they believe, what they believe is good dentistry, um are they more conservative, do they want treatment first, do they want to be cost effective, all these sort of things, then you can start building in service of those beliefs. And also you can take the approach of positioning yourself of working on how you present yourself to the market to the people who are looking

00:04:05
for dentistry. And now you can create messaging that resonates with those group of people because you show up as not just another dental office that’s good for everyone, but as a dental office that is designed specifically with those people in mind. So when you do that, not only can you create a fantastic patient experience for those people, but you can also create a fantastic presentation of how you show up and therefore attract the people. Now, one thing it’s it can be scary to take that approach of be becoming very

00:04:41
narrow and very specific because the temptation is to think that if we’re broad and we’re for everyone, we can cast a wider net. But the problem with that, as I alluded to before, is that no one wants what everyone wants. And so it might seem scary to narrow that down, that we might uh repel some people, but those people didn’t want to engage with you in the first place. There’s plenty of people who want the practice that you designed that you created for um that specific group of people. And when you

00:05:14
look at the numbers, we find that the number of people you need to actually thrive as a practice is about is a fraction of the people in that community who have that belief system that you want to target for. Um we ran a numbers and it’s somewhere between 1 to 5% of that group of people who share those beliefs that you would need to convert in order to have a thriving practice. So start from a place of abundance. You don’t have to get everyone. You can start with a smaller group of people and

00:05:45
those small group of people will be plenty more than enough for you to thrive on. Once you do that, once you figure out who they are, present yourself, position yourself in a way that shows that you’re a practice specifically for those people and um ultimately create the patient experience for those specific people. Check out the course. We’ll look at how to design all the touch points, all the elements of your practice, the different interactions that happen, um the different areas of expectations that

00:06:12
people might have, how you can break those expectations in service of them that creates a more meaningful experience. And at the end of the day, you’ll come away with a practice that is truly differentiated, truly meaningful for those people you serve. And as a result, you get the benefits of patient experience and marketing because they will surely spread the word about you. All right, thanks for watching.