Touchpoints build alignment and trust.

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So today I was in the process of erasing what I had covered yesterday which was and if you haven’t seen the video already I went over the hierarchy of marketing. So in this thing that we understand as marketing which is doing the work of creating a system that consistently and predictably gets people to choose a decision that we want them to make to bring a change about the people we seek to serve. in this thing that I left out what the main part of it is besides brand and if we go back to the idea that attraction is created when

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we have alignment with what they believe is good. So if they believe good dentistry is a doctor who is proactive, is a clean atmosphere, is no waiting line, whatever that might be, whatever their beliefs are, if we’re aligned with it and they’re aware of it, then we have a chance of creating attraction. And we went through this hierarchy and what I left out was all the space in the middle right here that isn’t covered. Uh because we also covered in yesterday’s video that brand is a trust building

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aspect of you can have alignment but if there is no trust associated with that alignment then it kind of falls apart that you need alignment and trust because it’s easy for someone to show up one way but the next time you meet them they might show up a completely different way. So with continuous repetition, we build trust, we build brand. But what is the stuff that fills the gaps here? The main thing, and I would argue that the main thing here are touch points. And touch points are all the

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different little elements of a person’s experience of you when it comes to your dental practice. Or if it’s if you’re seeking to attract people for like let’s say a business partnership or a sponsorship or a uh venture capital, you’re looking for an investor, it would be all the things that um or touch points would be all the things that interact at that level. And touch points are probably the most important thing because it creates alignment. At every touch point you have a chance of telling the person

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without words but through experience that hey we are in alignment and through repeated touch points and repeated experiences you start to develop a brand and therefore strong alignment is and trust with that alignment. And as we also saw yesterday, awareness is moving away from our control, from our ability to run advertisements, our ability to influence awareness. It shrinks as people start to move away from advertising, as advertising becomes crowded with people who are looking to sell, therefore dropping uh profit

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margins. That awareness is largely going to be solved when we do the work of creating more alignment and thereby leveraging word of mouth which is exponentially increasing today as communication becomes cheaper and cheaper. Um, think of how expensive it was back then when there were landline and operators and fax machines to today where we all have cell phones and we live in a more connected economy than ever before. All right. So, in this video, what we’re going to cover are touch points. And what they are, and I’m

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going to have uh two examples to illustrate here. So, let’s get into it. And as I mentioned before, touch points are some the opportunity for someone to experience you. And that is everything. So, and there’s infinite numbers uh there’s an infinite possibility of things that could be touch points. So, let’s say you go to a German restaurant that sells, I don’t know, specialty German hot dogs and sauerkraut and stuff like that. Then the way they speak, their accent, the types of beer they

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have in the fridge, the uniform they wear, the flags that they have, the decorations on the wall, all of these are touch points. So that people who for people if you seek to serve people if you seek to attract people who want that kind of thing then that’s going to be the touch points that you want to align for. Whereas if you seek to serve and align with a diff different group of people you might show up as something like wiener snitle which is totally different than like an authentic German restaurant that I went to in um

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what’s it the grand in LA the Grand Central Station. Um what touch points do is it creates alignment but you have to start with the smallest viable audience. Who do you seek to serve? Because from there you can understand what it is that they want. And who you seek to serve is so important because in order to deliver what it is that they want like after you understand their belief patterns and see what they’re actually uh what they believe is good alignment with them subconsciously or consciously

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that who you choose is going to influence what type of product or what type of service or what type of practice you develop. that if you choose to serve people who want fast food, who don’t believe in who don’t care about eating healthy, who don’t care about or who want something more convenient, then you’re going to end up going for more volume. You’re going to end up going for a different type of business model. Then if you choose to serve people who care very deeply about let’s say German food

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and want a more or are willing to pay a premium for a more authentic or a more I don’t know German experience. All right. So let’s take a step back and let me illustrate a different touch point here. Um so I have these two uh toothpastes. So this is by Dentiste or Dentist. It’s a Korean brand and um I got this as a gift and when I looked it up, this goes for about $25ish. And this is Colgate. Uh you can buy a pack of three for about $10. So about $3, a little more than $3 here. And I’ll

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put this here to illustrate. So who you seek to serve is going to influence the type of product that you develop or the type of practice that you develop or the type of service that you develop. So Colgate is obviously going for a very different audience than Dentiste. I’m going to call them Dentiste. I don’t know if it’s pronounced that but and to call these compet like competitors would be kind of a misnomer because they’re not seeking to compete with each other. They have totally different audiences. Someone who

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buys this isn’t going to be someone who buys this and vice versa. Someone someone who buys Colgate or Colgate is seeking to serve people who want value. They want cost efficiency. They want to solve a problem without thinking too much. They don’t care so much about the different innovations that are happening within toothpastes. Dentist is serving a very different audience. They are looking for people who care more about health, who are willing to pay more to protect their health or people who are more sensitive

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to health and therefore have to care more about their health. Right? And because of that there they c this is this represents two very different business models and in dentistry let’s let’s take the analogy to dentistry. Now, this could be a more mass consumer bas or or for a volume type of practice. And this could be for a more niche um high price point uh practice. And both are valid. You can do very well with Colgate. It’s just a very different business model and it’s going to be very different types of challenges

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where you’re now dealing with more operations. You’re dealing with more systems because you have to have an infrastructure that supports volume. Whereas here you’re looking at a bit more craft, a bit more artistry, a bit more um when it comes to like the creative aspect of creating alignment and uh figuring out what these people want. Um, and let’s talk about the actual financial side for a second because I think this is also important to illustrate that how the people you seek to serve are going to influence the

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types of touch points you need to create in order to create alignment. And because of those touch points, it it’s going to impact your business model. And let’s take a look at what the financial aspects of that could look like. So, this is about $3.33 per tube. And this is about $25. I hope you can see that. Um, I don’t know how much it costs Colgate to manufacture, but I would go out and say I have a little history of sourcing some stuff. So, let’s say this costs them about 60 cents or let’s say let’s say

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it’s a dollar to produce, right? So their profit margins here are going to be about $2.33. All right, complete estimate. I don’t know the insides of what goes on. And let’s say dentist they for them it cost them let’s say cost $3 to produce, right? So they are netting um $22. And of course, the actual costs of designing and implementing might be a little bit higher from for this, but compared to the actual backend of what they’re going to make in the future, um it’s really negligible. And what we can

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see here is that for each unit sold, they are making about 10 times more profit than Colgate. So that is massive. To compete, Colgate has to sell 10 times of 10 of these for each one of these. And that’s a very different problem to solve. How do you sell 10 of something to someone versus one of something to someone? Right? So, Colgate has to solve the problem of repetition of volume and scale whereas these people have to solve more of the problem of alignment. And I think the future is in selling more of this. So as

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we see trends, we’ve been empowered now with the advent of the internet and especially online shopping people, online communities, niche groups, all this stuff allow people to choose things that are more meaningful to them and it empowers people to choose things that typically were considered niche and hard to find. I won’t go into the specifics, but like think of online shopping. They don’t have to worry about square footage, return on square footage. They don’t have to worry about inventory going bad.

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They just list stuff and people can choose. People have the ability to search for information, find information. There’s many niche groups. There are people are empowered to travel now. Like we didn’t have many cars back then. We didn’t even have air airplanes, commercial airplanes um till relatively recently um way after marketing was invented. And so as people start getting more niche, the entire flavor, the the the tastes of people have been shifting and trending towards desiring more niche things. And

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Chris Anderson in the long tale, I think I have his book somewhere here. In the long tale, he wrote that in his research that niche and more meaningful items were now out selling and doing more profit, more revenue with higher profit margins than more mainstream headline or what he calls header uh products that are more popular, more mainstream, more focused on volume. So this is where the future is trending towards. All right. and and these people have a much easier job when it comes to the actual sales and delivery and

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attraction of people whereas Colgate is looking at mass distribution, mass production, mass advertising and so on. All right. And okay, let’s illustrate touch points now. Let’s take a step step back again. Take a look at these two uh products. And let me actually open this So you could consider everything a touch point and it’s our job to be very creative with what we take into our sphere of what we control and say that we are it’s up to us to influence this aspect of their experience

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with us. So if you look at any very um renowned, very reputable fine dining restaurant, they have been very successful because they took every aspect and took responsibility for it. They take responsibility for how the parking lot looks. They take responsibility for where the location of their um restaurant is. They take a they take responsibility for the scenery, so on and so forth. and and the most successful ones are the ones who take ownership and responsibility for as many touch points as they can. Whereas the

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other ones, the people who don’t have that level of passion and dedication to crafting this experience don’t put in that level of detail. They take as many few touch points into ownership as possible. Just the bare minimum. All right. And that’s kind of what we see here. Here we see Colgate with the standard uh toothpaste packaging uh standard cap and everything. And so if you wanted average, then this would be a pretty good choice. It would be a good choice. But the problem is there’s a lot

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of average. Colgate is probably competing with a lot of other toothpaste manufacturers who say that they can produce a cheaper toothpaste. And so they have a there’s challenges to showing up as a commodity and showing up as very average. But now like take a look at the touch points that go on here. This isn’t even a traditional standard tube. It’s you got to like pump down on it. Um there is like the I don’t know what’s this what this is called but like the silver uh strap that

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goes around it the band um that’s a touch point. The choice to put natural like mints here is a choice. The choice to put like crystals here is a touch point choice as well. And all of these it’s it’s not apparently it’s made in Germany. Um, but all of these are things that you can take into consideration. And so let’s extend an analogy once again to dentistry. The uniform your staff wears could be a touch point. The way you speak is a touch point. The accents you have are definitely touch

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points. The things people wear. Why do Japanese sushi restaurants have Japanese people working behind the counter? U maybe more traditional ones, but that’s a touch point. The um website is definitely a touch point and all of these things what we seek to do in this thing we call marketing is creating more alignment. What it’s doing is at each experience point we are reinforcing the idea that we are aligned and that we are a good choice for them. So what are the touch points that lead to decision- making? So

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throughout their journey with you, let’s say a patient comes into your office, there’s going to be a patient journey from before they even knew about you to um them deciding to learn more about you on your website or on your social media or wherever to them deciding to book a call or or book a appointment or schedule an appointment or call you on the phone to their decision to actually showing up to their decision to accepting treatment or not and to their decision to continue coming back. All of these are decisions and

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they’re being influenced by touch points because it’s going to affect whether or not there is alignment or not. If you seek to serve people who want a more high-end uh service or high-end experience and they’re showing up to your website and they see that it is out of alignment, you’re not going to create as much attraction. I don’t think website’s the end- all beall, but it’s a very important step before they make a decision to actually visiting you because what how else are

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they going to gain um alignment? How else are they going to know that you’re aligned um besides the online experience first? It’s very rare that they would walk in, learn everything about you, and then make the decision of scheduling an appointment. All right? And then after they come in and and like make that decision, what are the what are the touch points that are going to influence the next decision? And you have to think about what the potential touch points could be and work on creating alignment for the

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next decision and so on and so forth. All right? And that is the that is the hardest part of marketing is creating alignment doing this work of piece by piece making things better and better for the people we seek to serve. So much so that you start to leverage word of mouth and you create massive amounts of attraction. All right, so hope this video was helpful. Um, there was a lot and I kind of went all over the place, but to quickly summarize in this work of marketing, doing the work of creating a

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system that consistently and predictably creates change among the people we seek to serve, touch points are going to be a crucial and one of the most fundamental things that you’re going to be doing. It’s going to be creating alignment with the people you seek to serve. things like your logo, things like your website, social media, all these things, touch points to create alignment with the people you seek to serve so that they can be attracted and so that you can grow and thrive as a practice. All

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right, if you want to learn more, I have a free course in the description. It’s going to walk you through everything. It has a lot of different exercises on how to identify the major touch points, the major touch points that people are going to experience before they make the next decision with you. Um, it’s going to have much more on things like positioning, how to position yourself as a practice that is perfectly aligned with these people that you seek to serve as well. So, check it out. I think

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you’ll find it very valuable and I’ll see you guys in the next one. This.