Summary
This video provides a comprehensive framework for evaluating and prioritizing marketing activities, especially in the context of growing a dental practice. The speaker introduces a conceptual diagram that classifies marketing efforts based on two axes: ease/cost/speed and leverage (input-output asymmetry). The goal is to identify activities that provide high leverage, meaning those that produce disproportionately large returns relative to the effort or resources invested.
Core Concepts
- Input-output asymmetry: A key measure of marketing effectiveness. High asymmetry means a small input yields a large output, indicating high leverage.
- Ease, cheapness, and speed: Human motivators that drive widespread adoption of marketing tactics. However, activities that are easy, cheap, and fast tend to be quickly copied by competitors, offering no sustainable competitive advantage.
- Difficult, expensive, or slow: Activities that require significant investment and effort but create barriers to entry and long-term differentiation, thus representing true competitive advantages.
Marketing Activities Categorized by Leverage and Effort
| Quadrant | Characteristics | Examples & Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Easy, Cheap, Fast + High Leverage | Basic but essential, commonly done by competitors | Google Maps, Google Business Profile optimization, local SEO, responding to reviews, content generation, backlinks |
| Easy, Cheap, Fast + Low Leverage | Low output relative to input | Responding to reviews alone—helps signal activity but does not significantly acquire new patients |
| Difficult, Expensive, Slow + High Leverage | Creates strong competitive advantage, high agency | Photography (quality visuals), Google Ads, Facebook Ads, review generation, effective website, permission assets |
| Difficult, Expensive, Slow + Low Leverage | Low agency, limited impact despite high effort | Traditional SEO (content + backlinks), demographic targeting (mailers, billboards), activities with limited control |
Key Insights
- Baseline Activities: Easy, cheap, and fast tasks such as optimizing Google Business Profiles, local SEO, and maintaining listings are necessary to level the playing field. Neglecting these puts a business at a significant disadvantage but doing them well does not create a competitive advantage.
- Responding to Reviews: While important for customer engagement and local SEO ranking boosts, responding to reviews does not significantly move the needle in attracting new patients.
- Traditional SEO: Considered low leverage because content creation and backlinking are easy to outsource and replicate, especially with AI tools. It focuses on global competition rather than local markets and is no longer the most effective approach.
- Demographic Targeting: Methods like zip-code or income-based targeting are largely ineffective compared to psychographic targeting, which aligns with patient beliefs and decision-making processes.
- High Leverage Activities: Investments in quality photography, paid ads, review generation, and developing permission assets (e.g., owned audiences or lists) are difficult, expensive, and slow but provide sustainable competitive advantages.
- Agency: The level of control or influence a marketer has over the output is crucial. High agency activities allow marketers to significantly impact outcomes, justifying their higher costs and efforts.
- Competitive Advantage: Difficult, expensive, and slow marketing activities create barriers that competitors cannot easily replicate, establishing long-term growth potential. This concept is exemplified by Jeff Bezos’s strategy with Amazon—building a difficult-to-replicate industrial network.
Recommendations
- First, cover all easy, cheap, and fast marketing basics to avoid falling behind competition.
- Avoid focusing heavily on low leverage activities (e.g., purely responding to reviews or traditional SEO) as they offer limited returns.
- Prioritize difficult, expensive, or slow activities that offer high leverage, such as paid advertising, permission assets, and professional content creation.
- Only consider low leverage, difficult, or expensive activities (like demographic targeting) after mastering high leverage tactics for incremental gains.
- Understand marketing as a strategic investment where input-output asymmetry and agency define where to allocate resources for maximum impact.
Conclusion
The video emphasizes the importance of strategic prioritization in marketing efforts, advocating for a focus on high leverage, difficult, expensive, or slow activities that build sustainable competitive advantages. Basic, easy marketing tasks are necessary but insufficient for differentiation. Marketers should apply these principles to develop more effective and defensible marketing strategies, particularly in competitive local markets like dental practices.
For a deeper strategic framework, the speaker offers a free strategy course.
Okay, in this video I am going to attempt to definitively answer the question: what should we do when it comes to marketing? What are the different activities, what should you do, and why?
Here I have a diagram. On the x-axis, I have easy, cheap, or fast on one end, and difficult, expensive, or slow on the other. On the y-axis, we have high leverage and low leverage. What we really care about is input-output asymmetry.
If you think about how Jeff Bezos approaches investments, one thing he always looks for is whether there is asymmetric output potential based on an input. If I put one unit of input into a system, can the output be asymmetrically larger? If I diagram this, we have a marketing activity and an input. The question is whether that input can generate an asymmetric output. That would be high input-output asymmetry.
The opposite is low input-output asymmetry. That is when an activity requires a lot of input but only generates a little output. That is an indicator of a bad investment. This is what determines whether something is high leverage or low leverage. If I do this activity, will it produce high asymmetry, or will it not?
The easy, cheap, or fast versus difficult, expensive, or slow axis represents human motivators. When something is easy, cheap, or fast, your competition will be all over it. People love things that are easy, cheap, and fast. The problem is that because they are easy, cheap, and fast, they are easy to copy. If you develop a new system that is very easy to implement, it is not a competitive advantage because people can copy it quickly.
On the other hand, things that are difficult, expensive, or slow create competitive advantages. Going back to Jeff Bezos and Amazon, Amazon’s competitive advantage is an enormous industrial network of shipping, suppliers, and infrastructure. That was very difficult, expensive, and slow to build. If you try to compete with Amazon today, it will be difficult, expensive, and time-consuming to catch up. That is how competitive advantages are created.
I have broken down about 80 to 90 percent of the marketing activities involved in growing a dental practice and categorized them into four quadrants. These are not ranked in order. For example, Google Ads is not necessarily higher leverage than permission assets. I would argue that permission assets are much higher leverage. The purpose is simply to group activities into quadrants.
In the easy, cheap, or fast quadrant, you have activities like Google Maps optimization, Google Business Profile optimization, local SEO, responding to reviews, listings, content generation, backlinks, and ineffective websites. Let me clarify this.
Take responding to reviews. If you respond to reviews on Yelp or Google, you get a small benefit because it signals that your business is active. Google prefers businesses that engage with customers, and it creates a better experience. As a result, you get a small local SEO boost. However, responding to reviews is not going to meaningfully move the needle in acquiring new patients. You could respond to five reviews or 200 reviews, and the output will still be limited.
Now compare that to investing the same effort into professional photography and strong visuals that connect emotionally with people. That is high leverage. It is a one-time investment that you can use across your website, social media, and advertisements. That is an example of high leverage.
One important thing to note is that easy, cheap, or fast activities, whether high or low leverage, are things everyone is doing. Almost everyone is optimizing Google Maps, working on their Google Business Profile, doing local SEO, responding to reviews, managing listings, generating content, and building backlinks. If you do these things, you do not gain a competitive advantage. You simply level the playing field. But if you do not do them, you are at a significant disadvantage.
So what should you do? Because these activities are easy, cheap, or fast, you should simply get them handled. Not an ineffective website, obviously, but the rest should be taken care of as a baseline.
I want to make a quick note on traditional SEO. Traditional SEO is the old-school approach that focuses on global competition and ranking for keywords across the entire internet. Local SEO focuses on local competition and ranking in Google Business, Google Maps, and Google Places.
Traditional SEO relies heavily on content generation and backlinks. Thanks to AI, content generation is extremely easy, and backlinks are relatively cheap. So how does anyone expect to gain a competitive advantage through traditional SEO when the methods are easy, cheap, and fast? This is no longer the way forward. It is very low leverage.
I placed traditional SEO closer to the difficult, expensive, or slow side because people often hire agencies to do it. In reality, if you know what you are doing, you can outsource it cheaply. People just do not realize that, so it feels more difficult and expensive than it really is.
The key takeaway is that traditional SEO should simply be handled as a baseline. You need it at a minimum level, but it should not be a major focus.
Now let’s move to the difficult, expensive, or slow side. We want to avoid low leverage activities here. Low leverage does not necessarily mean negative ROI. It means that even with a lot of input, you cannot significantly affect the output. That is why I use the word agency here, not as in marketing agency, but as in how much control you have over the outcome.
With traditional SEO, for example, creating excessive content and backlinks can actually hurt you. Google may see it as suspicious, and your rankings can suffer. This is another reason it is not worth focusing on.
Demographically targeted marketing is another low leverage activity. In the past, we targeted by zip code, income, age, and other demographics. We now know that this is a very limited approach. A much better approach is psychographic targeting, because psychographics drive decisions, and decisions are what turn someone into a patient.
People do not become patients because they live in a specific zip code. They become patients because their beliefs, values, and expectations about dentistry align with yours. Demographically targeted tactics like mailers, newsletters, and billboards are generally low leverage. They can work, and they are not necessarily negative ROI, but they should only be used after everything else is in place, when you are trying to squeeze out the last few percentage points of reach.
From the start, you should be focused on high leverage activities.
High leverage activities share a few characteristics. You have more control over the outcome, and they tend to be difficult, expensive, or slow. Because you have agency and control, these activities are more valuable and cost more to execute.
Examples include Google Ads, Facebook Ads, professional photography, review generation systems, effective websites, and permission assets. Permission assets are arguably the most powerful of all.
The takeaway is simple. Handle the easy, cheap, or fast basics so you are not at a disadvantage. Ignore the low leverage activities unless everything else is already dialed in. Focus most of your attention on high leverage activities that are difficult, expensive, or slow. That is where differentiation comes from. That is where competitive advantage is built.
This is the equivalent of Jeff Bezos building Amazon’s infrastructure, applied to marketing.
I hope this helped clarify where you should be focusing your attention when it comes to marketing activities. If you are looking for a way to tie all of this into a coherent, overarching strategy, check out my strategy course. It is completely free, and I think you will find it valuable. Thanks.