Summary
The video challenges the common belief that dental practices primarily struggle with awareness and visibility in the market. Instead, it argues that awareness is a relatively easy problem to solve in today’s digital age, where prospective patients can effortlessly find numerous dental offices online. The true marketing challenge lies in how attractive and engaging a practice is—specifically, how well it connects with the unique needs, beliefs, and fears of the patients it aims to serve.
Key Insights
- Awareness is not the core issue: Most dental practices already have sufficient visibility online through websites, reviews, and social media presence.
- Attractiveness and engagement matter more: The key question for patients is whether a dental practice is the right fit for them personally, beyond superficial markers like photos and reviews.
- Patients are diverse: Today’s communities consist of individuals with varied beliefs, fears, and expectations about dentistry, requiring tailored approaches rather than generic marketing.
- Standard digital marketing tools fall short: Websites, reviews, and generic content do not fully address the patient’s deeper questions or create meaningful connections.
- Marketing should focus on serving specific belief systems: Practices should identify and target groups based on shared mindsets and worldviews to build a unique identity and create remarkability.
- Remarkability drives word of mouth: When a practice resonates deeply with a specific group, it becomes the only logical choice for them, leading to organic referrals and sustainable growth.
Problems with Current Marketing Approaches
- Overemphasis on awareness, traffic, and advertising leads to a race to the bottom in terms of advertising costs and margins.
- Increasing competition in advertising drives up costs, squeezing profit margins and encouraging ethically questionable practices aimed at maximizing revenue per patient.
- Dental offices are spending more on advertising, yet this does not guarantee loyalty or alignment with patient values.
Proposed New Approach
- Shift focus from transactional marketing to relationship marketing: Instead of striving to acquire the next patient through paid ads, build a practice that naturally attracts and retains patients by aligning with their values.
- Create a remarkable patient experience from start to finish, not just online but throughout every interaction, ensuring the patient feels understood and served.
- Use word of mouth as the primary growth driver: An exceptional, value-aligned practice encourages patients to refer friends and family without costly advertising.
- Choose a group defined by beliefs and mindsets—not an overly narrow avatar—and build your messaging and services around serving them uniquely.
Quantitative Data
| Metric | Value/Insight |
|---|---|
| Cost to boost a social post | Approximately $5 |
| Increase in dental office advertising spend in 2026 | 25% increase (compared to previous year) |
| Competitive advertising bids per lead | Approaching the value of the lead (e.g., $990–$999 per $1,000 lead value) |
Benefits of the New Approach
- Escape from the increasingly expensive and competitive advertising “rat race.”
- Reduction in pressure to maximize profit per patient, enabling more ethical dental care.
- Easier case acceptance as patients are pre-aligned with the practice’s values and approach.
- Sustainable growth through remarkability and word-of-mouth referrals.
Conclusion
The video emphasizes redefining dental marketing from simply generating awareness to creating meaningful connections built on shared beliefs and values. It encourages dental practices to develop a unique identity that resonates with a specific community, leading to more authentic patient relationships, ethical practices, and sustainable growth through word of mouth rather than costly advertising battles. The ultimate goal is to create a remarkable patient experience that naturally inspires referrals and long-term loyalty.
Keywords
- Awareness vs. Attraction
- Remarkability
- Word of Mouth
- Patient Alignment
- Ethical Dentistry
- Marketing Experience
- Belief System Targeting
- Advertising Competition
- Patient Engagement
00:00:00
You’ve probably been told that you have an awareness issue, that people aren’t able to find you and that when people are searching, you’re nowhere to be seen. But more often, what we find is that it’s not an issue of awareness. Awareness is very easy to solve. Everyone, in fact, every dental practice has for the most part solved this issue. The main issue, the core of the problem of marketing is how attractive are you? How engaging? How how much of a connection can you create with the
00:00:33
person who is searching who is looking for the right dental practice for them? And what we find is that it’s very easy to find dental offices. It’s very easy for me to look around at the market and to see what’s available. Internet has solved that for us. So the issue is not awareness. It’s how well can you present yourself in such a way that you become attractive to that group of people you seek to serve. But the problem is that you can’t solve this question at the marketing at the at the digital
00:01:08
marketing level. You can’t show it by reviews. You can’t show it by just your office website. Like these are superficial things that at the end of the day don’t answer the true question that the patient has when they’re looking for a dental office which is is this practice right for me? There are unique beliefs about how dentistry should be done. There are unique fears about what dentistry could do. And what we have to understand is that the population around us, the community around us has become very diverse.
00:01:43
Today, no one is everyone. No one wants the same things. No one believes in the same things. People care about different things and people know different things. And as a result, if we engage how we’ve always been engaging, which is to show up as just another option, no wonder it seems that we have an awareness problem. People are seeing us, but they’re just not taking action with us. They’re not choosing us. And the marketer’s solution to this is to suggest that you work on your website,
00:02:14
you take some photos, you get some reviews. But again, that doesn’t answer why is this practice right for me? And so we get to the heart of the issue, which is starting with those you seek to serve, creating messaging, creating an identity for them, creating a practice that serves their unique needs. So much so that it creates remarkability that when they hang out with the people who have similar beliefs, who have similar interests and behaviors, which they’re always going to be, that they have no
00:02:46
other option but to suggest your office because you’re the only office that does it that way. So what I’m suggesting is that we stop focusing so much on awareness. It is not a competitive advantage. Everyone can get awareness for very cheap these days. It costs $5 to boost a post on Instagram. It costs a couple bucks to create some content and back links for SEO. You get the idea. It’s not going to give you the advantage that you seek. The conditions for having people come find you and choose you. The
00:03:18
conditions are going to be created when you choose a specific group of people. Not the patient avatar that’s too specific, but choose a group of beliefs. Choose a group of mindsets and worldviews that people have and seek to serve that belief. Seek to serve that belief system in a way that it creates remarkability and word of mouth. Now, when you do this, you get a lot of benefits. First is you get to leave the rat race that is advertising and awareness. It’s necessary to engage with, but you get to have an escape plan
00:03:53
for that. The problem with existing in that realm of advertising to continuously get your next patient to focus on the next transactional moment is that the costs of advertising are increasing. There’s more advertisers than ever. There’s more dental offices advertising. Um reliance on advertising agencies in the next year in 2026, so I guess this year is increasing by 25% among dental offices. And so when you get more dental offices advertising, what happens is that margins decrease. If you seek to gain $1,000 from a lead
00:04:32
who comes in from advertising, another office is happy to pay $990 for that and you might be happy to pay $995 for that and they might be happy to pay $999 for that. So at the end of the day, the competition in the advertising space becomes one of margins. And who wins that game? It’s the person who is able to increase the margins in the back end to increase the value of each lead that comes through the door. And unfortunately, what that causes a bit of unethical dentistry when you’re forced
00:05:03
to maximize patient profit. So, you get to leave that less ethical way of being or at least the temptation to be less ethical. And what you end up cultivating is word of mouth. A growth through word of mouth. Growth where you don’t have to push treatments that you don’t believe in. And word of mouth where people are aligned with what you the change you seek to bring to them, the things you want for them, they align with it. So you also get the benefits of easier case acceptance. They come in the
00:05:39
door understanding what you’re about, understanding what you want for them, understanding what you need them to know so that by the time they’re in the chair, they’re ready to go. But we’ve fundamentally focused on the wrong thing. We focused on traffic. We focused on eyeballs, attention, and shouting. We’ve narrowed our focus of what marketing is, and that’s caused all these problems. So my challenge to you is to expand your scope on what marketing can be. On how we can create
00:06:08
an experience so remarkable from start to finish, not just from your website to your online booking page, but from start to finish. How can we instead of making the transaction the goal, how can we make word of mouth the goal? How can we create a marketing experience from start to finish such that at the end they’re inclined to refer you to everyone they know? So, this is the new approach and I hope it gives you some ideas on how things can be done. Thanks.