The modern dental marketing strategy.

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Imagine that you’re a finch on the Galopagos Islands. You have many different types of beaks that you can choose from. It can be wide and large or it can be narrow and small. And each beak is good for a different thing. The large ones crush nuts. The small ones are good for boring into trees and picking out insects. What if the environment was full of nuts and didn’t have many insects? If your goal was to grow and to thrive and reproduce, your strategy, the choice you make of what beak to have in order

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to achieve the goal of survival and thriving would be to choose the the wider, thicker beak that can crush nuts so you can survive better. That is the essence of business strategy is choosing which beak that we’re going to adopt in order to take on the environment. But the reason it’s so tricky and the reason we can’t simply look at the environment, develop a beak, and everything is going to be okay for the rest of time. The reason that doesn’t work is because the environment is

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changing and it’s changing more rapidly than ever. And today is going to be the most normal things are ever going to get. So when we do the work of adopting and developing a strategy, what happens is that by the time we develop a strategy for the current environment and by the time we finish developing it, the environment will have changed and this process is getting rapider or faster and faster. So the approach we have to do is to predict the future to understand principles to see trends observe trends

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and to align our strategy for what the future environment will look like. Because if we can do that, if we can do the work of accurately predicting how the future will look, how the future environment will look, if we can analyze and say, okay, in the future there will be more insects rather than nuts, then we can do the work of developing a beak for insects. And so by the time the environment comes around, we can ride that wave. We can benefit from the environment. And we see this all the time in

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organizations who created something before the environment was ready. So they’re not looking to adapt necessarily. They’re predicting the future. So Google back in 1998 uh they started Google and back then the environment the the time the environment wasn’t perfect for Google to thrive but as more users joined as it became more commercial as it became more mainstream then the environment happened that Google was able to thrive but they were working on Google way before that act that actual environment arrived so we

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have to do this approach of seeing trends or sorry understanding principles, observing trends and aligning our strategy with what the future will hold. The alternative to doing that because that approach it it’s costly and you’re likely to make mistakes but that’s the path of being a leader in the industry. So like Meta for example, a few days ago they just closed down the metaverse and it’s reported that they spent over 80 billion or 80 I think it was 80 billion onto the metaverse and nothing came out

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of it. That was Zuckerberg’s guess at what the future would look like and aligning his business strategy around it to bring it about. And obviously since then they’ve shifted. But that’s an example of how even at the top level people are making these bets on what the future will look like and it’s either paying off or it’s not. But this is a process we have to engage with and we get the the thing is that we get better at understanding the principles. We get better at understanding the

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trends and we get better and better at predicting the future. The alternative to doing that is to see what’s working for other people, to see what others are doing, and to adapt our strategy to follow them. But that approach is even more costly than the seemingly costly route of predicting the future and aligning your strategy for it. Because when you adopt the strategy of following the leader, of being another copycat, you show up as a commodity. You show up as an average provider who is providing an average service for

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average people. And when that happens, what happens is the way to attract patients becomes cutting costs to making it a bit cheaper for them to choose you. And that’s race to the bottom or to make it a little bit more convenient, which is why so many people focus on the five mile radius and hope that a better competitor doesn’t show up. So we have to engage in the work of understanding principles so that we can observe the trend and say that okay now there’s going to be more insects and

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understanding the principles that narrower and smaller beaks are better for insects in that environment adopting and aligning our strategy to meet the future. All right. And if you see how things are going right now, if you see the trends that are happening, the fundamental overarching trend, the shift that’s happening is that the power to influence decision-m is moving away from companies and corporations and organizations and it’s moving towards the individual. So you and I and someone else, you know,

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like the individuals are being influenced less and less by big organizations and we’re being influenced more and more by other individuals around us. With that in mind, we have to totally change our approach because the approach we’ve been taking before when it comes to marketing was from an environment where organizations had the say. They had a captive audience on three media channels and advertising was everywhere and you couldn’t there there was no control. But now the individuals are empowered.

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One individual can start a YouTube channel. they can amass hundreds of thousands of view viewers or millions of subscribers and completely change um how information is distributed and this happens every day. So as we see that the individual is now holding the megaphone and it’s not up to the corporations, it’s not up to you and me basically in order to influence people. We have to engage with the work of creating deeper alignment with people because now the principle that we have to understand is attraction. how we get

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to work with someone, whether that’s from a provider and patient relationship or a business partner relationship or in like a personal relationship. Attraction happens when you get alignment times awareness. And alignment is simply do I or does that thing align with what I consider better? like the beliefs I have about what is good and bad like good and bad dentistry or good and bad partner or good and bad investment if there’s alignment and then the next thing is awareness is do they know about

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it if there’s a strong connection if there would be a strong alignment but there’s no connection there’s no awareness then there’s no attraction or if there’s very poor alignment and they’re aware of it there’s no attraction either So these two elements we focus so much on the awareness of it these past couple decades that when people talk about marketing their definition of marketing is simply awareness. They think of things like advertising of visibility and so on and

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so forth. And we forget that alignment is a central part of marketing. that if you can create strong alignment with people who come and visit you, they’re now the ones holding the megaphone, that they’re going to be the ones impacting your marketing more than your advertisement budget could be. Uh, I have clients who are spending thousands of dollars a month on advertising. And contrast that with Liquid Death when they started, they spent about $1,500 on ads. And because they had such a deep alignment with the

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people they chose to serve, those $1,500 translated to 300 or three million views or something like that and 100,000 followers on Facebook, which at the time was more than Aquafina had generated in their entire existence as a business with $1,500. It wasn’t the advertisement budget anymore. It’s not the ad budget that is going to spread the message. It’s going to be the individuals who you have who you have strong alignment with. So the question becomes how do we create stronger alignment?

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And the temptate the tempting thing to do and the approach most people take is that they attempt to create alignment with everyone that they seek to be the best dentist whatever that means. And that fails miserably because you can’t be the best for everyone. that if you have a group of people, they’re going to have very diverse wants, diverse needs, and diverse beliefs about what is good and bad. And so when you try to appeal to everyone, you end up appealing to no one. You become very boring and average. when you try to

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average out a very diverse group of people. So the approach that we have to take is we have to start seeking to serve the smallest viable audience, a small group of people who share similar beliefs about what dentistry should be like. And when we choose a small audience, now we have a chance of creating delight and remarkability with that small group of people who share a who share similar beliefs about the industry. And a common fear people have at this point is that since they’re shrinking

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down their quote unquote target audience from the general masses to the smallest viable, they think they’re missing out. But there’s actually only gains that they can get because they were appealing to no one at the mass level. They were they had very small alignment and they were focused on creating as much awareness as they could. But what we see today is that awareness, like I said before, is is for the most part solved. Our ability to transmit information, to search for and find information, that isn’t the

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issue anymore. and and the work of solving that for others or creating that through advertisement and such is not work that needs to be done if you have the alignment. If you have people with megaphones who are spreading the word about you. So back to alignment, you seek the smallest viable audience. You focus away from the masses. You seek to become remarkable for a small few. And again, the fear of shrinking is not really a fear because you weren’t attracting people to begin with. And then when we

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take a look at the actual numbers of that smallest viable audience, we see that that audience exceeds the number of people that you actually need in order to thrive. I’ve done this exercise with clients and what we find is they might need let’s say 1,500 people to sustain themselves to or or to more than sustain themselves to thrive to be very successful. And when we do an analysis, we find that there’s about 30,000 people in a small competitive area around them who share those like-minded beliefs.

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So now instead of targeting let’s say 2 million people they choose to target 30,000 people but now they have a chance at becoming very remarkable for these people who share a certain type of belief system about what dentistry should be like. And now this practice can do the work of aligning with that belief versus looking at the market and just trying to appeal to everyone because when they do that they appeal to no one. And we we see this everywhere with dentists who are choosing to be average for average people. It attracts

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no one. People today are empowered to choose. We have cars. We can drive. There’s planes. We can fly. I know people who I know dentists. They see value in a seminar. And so they’re flying to Florida. They’re flying to Mexico to take these courses. Yet we assume that our patients won’t do the same for us. And I think it’s because we haven’t done the work of being remarkable and instead we focused on this small 3 to five mile radius. And so we’ve kind of locked ourselves in to

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where we’ve chosen we’ve chosen patients who are only willing to travel 10 minutes to to visit the dentist. So we’re aligning ourselves with that type of mindset and we’re wondering why things aren’t working. So what if you could become meaningful to a much wider radius? Let’s say not even 5 miles or 5 miles, but like a 30 mile radius, which is only an hour drive. If you’re in a city, it’s not inconceivable to drive an hour. and you look at the map and you see a 30 mile radius is almost the

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entirety of Southern California. And you realize if you could be remarkable to a 30- mile radius, which is millions and millions of people, you have a much better chance of doing well and thriving than someone who is focused on a five mile radius looking to be average. Right? So step one, pick the smallest viable audience. Become remarkable for them. Understand. Step two is understand their belief patterns so that you can start to work on step three which is to aligning all the elements of your

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practice so that ultimately by piece by piece becoming better and better until one day you become the best for them where you become remarkable and then as as you become remarkable the word will get out visibility will come. There will be no need for you to push people to push visibility to pay for stuff like advertising because people will know about you. If people want that type of dentistry, they will they can look for it. They can find it because the word will be out that you are remarkable. That’s the new

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environment that we’re moving towards and that is to some degree already here. So focus The shift is moving away from the corporation’s ability to influence people. It’s moving towards the individuals. Will you continue existing relying on advertising which is getting worse dayby day which more people more competitors are joining hopping onto that boat increasing the amount of costs or increasing the costs decreasing the amount of profit margins that you can take away from it with increased

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regulations increased um privacy uh data privacy it’s making tracking harder therefore making advertising more costly and more time consuming in order to produce profits. That is the environment. That’s what’s happening right now in the advertising and traditional marketing world. We’re shifting to the ones where we’re shifting to an environment where the individuals are empowered. They have the ability to find meaningful things and they’re choosing to engage with more meaningful things. Niche

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interests are taking over. Very few people do very average things these days. And so when we see this, it’s very clear that we must make that transition as well. So if you have a dental practice and you’re looking to become remarkable, check out my course. I’ll put it in the description. It’ll take you more in depth into the concepts that we covered here. And by the end of it, you’ll have a strong road map of how to align your practice for who, who is it for, what is it for, how can you make it better, and

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so on and so forth. All right, thanks for watching this video.