Collin Kartchner on How to Win Patients with Video – Episode 50

Remember the personal bio you wrote for your practice website? You probably started with a paragraph about where you grew up, the schools you attended, and your involvement with dental associations. Then you added a couple lines about your family and personal hobbies, and emailed it over to your web designer. Now it sits on your website like a relic etched in stone. And in today’s content-charged world, it will never be enough to drive traffic to your business. That’s where video comes in — not just video, but great video. In this Dentist Money™ interview, Collin Kartchner of Tooth Media explains why dentists need to engage patients with better video content. He also describes the difference between videos that get results and those that harm reputations.

 

Show notes:
Website: www.toothmedia.com
Email: collin@toothmedia.com
Article about video performance versus text content: http://www.fathomdelivers.com/blog/seo/videos-seo-more-likely-to-rank/

Podcast Transcript:

Reese Harper: Welcome to The Dentist Money Show, where we help dentists make smart financial decisions. I’m your host, Reese Harper. You are about to listen to a really fun interview with a friend of mine named Collin Kartchner. Collin owns a company called Tooth Media. He travels around to produce video content for hundreds of dentists all around the country. I really like Collin’s approach because I think he understands how to make his clients stand out and differentiate themselves from other dentists on the market. There are a few different reasons I invited Collin on the show. First I am a big believer in delivering great content to drive business results. Content is super important in today’s digital world and video plays a huge role in attracting new patients and keeps your top line growing. It also gives you a sense of personality. People can relate to you and you can expose some of the personal sides of your life that patients just don’t get to know about. Collin has interviewed hundreds of patients while making these videos and I thought it would be interesting for our listeners to hear from his point of view. It is kind of how patients decide what dentist to see and what keeps them coming back. We have put Collin’s contact information in the show notes for this show. He would love to hear from you if anyone has questions about video content. There is also a link to an article that I mention in the interview. While you are on the dentist money website you can also schedule a consult with our team here at dental advisors. If you haven’t already done so make sure and follow the dentist money show on Facebook and Instagram. Thanks for listening, enjoy the show, and carry on.

Reese Harper: Collin Kartchner of Tooth Media. How’s it going?

Collin Kartchner: It is so good to be here and be in the studio with you.

Reese Harper: The reason I brought you in, for people who don’t know, is because Tooth Media has really grown a lot over the last few years and you are kind of an expert in video. The reason I wanted to have you in is because dentists do a very poor job, in general, at creating marketing material. They don’t present themselves to the public in a way that is comparable to what they are used to seeing from other people. The media quality is really low. There are a lot of problems, especially when it comes to video.

Collin Kartchner: Totally.

Reese Harper: I thought first it would be really interesting to pop into your background and to hear how you started ToothMedia and how it took off and what has been going on initially and then we can kind of get into some specifics of video and pros and cons and stuff. Give us a little bit of your background.

Collin Kartchner: About five years ago, I good friend of mine Tim Row, he is a dentist and had just opened his second practice in Albuquerque. His first one was doing pretty good, but he was starting to feel the pinch of the saturated market. He couldn’t get his second practice off the ground, he couldn’t get his story out and was worried about standing out. I had not done a single dentist video up to that point. I had worked on documentaries and company stuff. He calls me up and said, “can you make me look cool?” He said I don’t want to tell you anything to do, I don’t want to give you any idea, just come down and do what you think. I know you’ve never done a dentist video, how would you make me look cool? I go down there and spend a day in his practice and I say, “hey look, I don’t care what you do in the dental practice because every dentist looks like a dentist. You all have chairs, patients, and you look like a nice guy. I want to see who you are outside of the practice.” So we took half a day and shot him with his family, with his kids, he is a big biker, not like Harley’s but like road bikes. We got some footage of him doing that kind of stuff and put together a three minute video showing him as a dentist but also as a person. Like I said, we had some with his family, kids, and stuff like that. When he watched it he said, “dude, this is amazing. This is the best dentist video I have ever seen.” Which was funny because before that he showed me a few videos on the web that he thought I could check out to get ideas. They were terrible. I mean horrible. They look like they were shot in the eighties. They were so poorly done, they were so outdated, they were so cheesy. They were awkward and scripted. Here is the thing, if you are a dentist you should listen to this. You can’t just have a video. When I go around and travel and I go to conventions and conferences they said, “we have a video,” I say, “that’s great, but it is not good enough anymore.” It has to be really good with technology today, with things like vine, with Apple and final cut and iMovie, six year olds can make really good videos. You can’t just have a video anymore, it has got to be compelling, it has got to tell a good story. It has to make you feel something.
There is so much video content on the web, on our phones, every single day. All of it is screaming for our attention, if a video doesn’t make us feel something, it is just white noise. If you need to stand out as a dentist then number one, there is no better way to do that, than putting a really good video telling your story. Not just going out there and saying, “we treat people like family here at Jones dental.” You know? The scripted cheesy lines. Consumers are too smart. If you put out a video that is just scripted materials and scripted canned answered, those kind of things. People will turn off from you. The biggest compliment and the biggest feedback that I get from these videos that I shoot for dentists is, “I love that you showed me outside of the practice.” The patients need to hear in the story why you love what you do, if it is scripted, don’t even put it on. Do not even put it on your site, because a bad video will do way more damage than having no video.

Reese Harper: It sends a message either way, right? So you are saying show who you are outside of the practice, show the authentic side of you, your personality, things you enjoy? It is not necessarily the dental competency, right?

Collin Kartchner: Everyone knows your a dentist! They assume you have got friendly staff, you probably know what you are doing, you probably have a nice office, you are probably running flip or flop on the tv in the waiting room. If you want to stand out then again, that is they key thing. If you want to stand out, the best way to do it is to share your story in a way that is engaging and real. When a dentist calls me and wants to do video with me, they will sometimes say, “are you going to send me a script?” I say, “no.” They ask if I will send them questions ahead of time, and absolutely not. If it is a canned answer it won’t be genuine and no one will listen to it. It isn’t just the footage of you, your wife, and kids. That makes people feel like you are just a cool guy, not just a dentist. This guy goes biking, and does hot yoga with his wife. I have filmed dentists dirt biking in the mountains, yoga on a paddleboard, hiking, fishing, with kids. I filmed a dentist with his scout troop…

Reese Harper: How does video play into my new patient flow?

Collin Kartchner: Exactly. How does it get new butts in seats?

Reese Harper: What about SEO and SEM and why do I care about video?

Collin Kartchner: Let’s get the technical stuff out of the way, it is really good for SEO. Google owns youtube. Youtube is the number two search engine out there. When I go type in Dental Implants Midland Texas, I will first see a paid add and then I will see a stream of videos. What google does is they promote the best content. When they crawl the web when I type in Dental Implants in Midland, Texas they look for websites with the best content and they push that to the top. Video, and I can send you the link to this later, outdoes text 53 times. If you have video content on your site. A small video about what dental implants are, and a patient who discusses their implants, that video will push you higher and higher and higher. It is really really good for SEO.
It is also really good for credibility. I am going to Austin, Texas next month to shoot a dentist straight out of dental school and she is freaking out. She doesn’t have any patients lined up, and she has built a really, really nice practice. She has never done an implant, but she wants to, she has been trained to do it, and she is ready to do her first one. We are going to go film a video of her discussing dental implants, and how great they are for securing a tooth, or fixing a denture, and that video will show the world that this lady knows what she is doing. She doesn’t, but for credibility sake it is huge.
As far as the non technical stuff that the video does is it makes you stand out. When I have a dentist call me most of the time they say something about being in a saturated market with a dentist on every corner and a lot of them have videos and they will send me a link to their videos. They will say here is our biggest competitor and I’ll say when was this filmed in 1982? They will say, “no, last month.” Then I get excited realize that we are going to destroy that. Then if you go to ToothMedia and you look at a few of the videos on there you will feel something on every single video. I will get clients that come in and when they say, “ok, what do we do?” I ask them to bring in three or four of your best patients. I want to know people who have great stories. People who couldn’t smile and now they can. People whose lives have been changed. When I interview those patients, and we can talk about that more later, I try to get the tears out, and the emotion out. You have to share that. If you are a doc and you specialize in big cases, smile makeovers, smile design, veneers, implants, whatever, you need to have someone tell your story.
That is the other thing. I don’t let the dentist do any bragging. I don’t let them talk about how great they are and how great their practice is or how amazing their team is. I let them say who they are, why they love what they do, and then have the patients brag about them. I like Sue or Joyce or Dave to come in and sit in the chair and say those things. When you go watch one of those videos and at the very end when patients are talking about how their lives have been changed and they are crying and I try to always tie in cinematic music, then you feel something. Half of the time when I send the video to the dentist and they watch it, they text me back or call me back and say, “I am in tears.” The good thing about that, I am not trying to make everyone cry, but the good thing is that if the dentist is in tears and his staff are in tears then people who watch this video will feel something. If they aren’t ready to spend that kind of money right then and there on the case, then when they are ready to do it in six months or in six years they will remember the feeling that they had.

Reese Harper: Let’s talk a little bit about some of the experiences that you have had in practices and some of the takeaways that have let you have a different angle into the life of a dentist. You are an outsider to the industry, I think there is probably some good insight that you can bring. When you interview patients, you have interviewed hundreds and hundreds of patients now, probably even pushing 1000 patient interviews. What feedback do patients give you that you think is insightful for a dentist about good or bad experiences they have had.

Collin Kartchner: Typically a practice that wants video is a good practice. They know that they do good dentistry, they have got a good patient base, they are just looking to get bigger. Maybe they have some niche stuff they want to spread the word about. When I go into these practices I think the biggest thing I get out of them is hearing what patients say. There is a specific patient profile. The patients that are spending a lot of money on their teeth, the patients who really care about their dental hygiene, they all fit a similar profile. They all say the same things. When I ask them what they love about their practice they all pretty much say the same things. When I ask them why they come to the place they come, they will say that number one, they treat me like I am a person. Which is funny because, of course, right??

Reese Harper: That seems obvious!

Collin Kartchner: Every practice should make you feel that way, right? When I dig deeper and ask what that means they say things about coming to the office and every person knows who they are. The front desk knows who I am. They greet me by name. Everyone who loves their patient is greeted by name. They say, “hey, Sue. Hey, Dave.” Number two, the dentist. It is not just the staff, but it is the dentist. When I come and sit in the chair he sits down or she sits down and pulls me chair side and talks to me. They ask me questions, how is Dave doing? Whats new with that? How was that trip? They remember things.

Reese Harper: That is interesting. The first two things, nothing has been about clinical stuff at all. Right now, that may come up, but the first two things have to do with their emotional connection with people in the practice whether that is the dentist who knows them or the staff. The crazy thing is, you would think that people would take more time to document details about their patients lives in their back systems. A lot of times they don’t! Luckily, for a lot of practices that are successful they are all done by memory. If people took a little more time to document who their patients are and invested a little bit of time in making them understand their lives a little bit. It goes so far!

Collin Kartchner: It really does. There have been a lot of patients that that is the first thing they will say. Never ever, ever when I ask someone why they love their dentist practice do they say, “you know, he’s got his diploma on the wall, and I saw he went to USC and that just sealed the deal.”

Reese Harper: Their great dental school never comes up.

Collin Kartchner: Those are the big things. It is all personal, they never say, “when he is doing a crown prep, I know he is doing a great job.” It is never technical.

Reese Harper: Is there anything else that comes to mind beyond those two? The doctor gets to know me, the staff knows me. What’s another one that comes up?

Collin Kartchner: Trust. They trust these people, and the trust comes from their relationship. There is a dentist who is a good buddy of mine in North Carolina. He goes out and speaks and is a Robert Cialdini certified instructor. Robert Cialdini wrote Good to Great and it is kind of like an Art of Persuasion, but ethical. The number one reason why people turn down treatment is because they do not trust you. You haven’t taken the time to sit down and chat and ask questions and to get to know them. Why would they spent $30,000 or $300 on something that they don’t know if they really need. They don’t feel like they can trust you, so they don’t feel like it is necessary right? Sitting down and getting to know your patients and to show that you care, if you don’t have time, than fake it. I know a lot of docs who say, “I have four chairs going, I don’t have time to sit down.” Fake it! There was one practice in Tennessee that was really busy, but as soon as the dentist would come in the assistant would offer one tip or say one little thing that happened. She would say something like, “Hey Jim, is in chair four, he just got back from his cruise.” The dentist doesn’t remember who this guy is, but Susie did, and she can help out. If you do not have the memory or time, have your team help you out to remember a couple items to build that trust, right?

Reese Harper: I think that is really good feedback. Let’s switch back to marketing a little bit and talk about if we are thinking about video. What is good and what is bad video? In your opinion? What makes a bad video? What makes a good video? We talked about authenticity, bringing out the human side, let’s start with a few bad characteristics.

Collin Kartchner: Let me share a few that I have actually found on the web. A testimonial, someone actually sent me this link. It was a lady, that probably was a patient, and has probably said something nice to the assistant at the end of the appointment, then the assistant said, “would you mind saying that again on my iPhone?” Likely because someone had told them to record these nice things. By the way, they put this on the web uncut. The lady is being filmed on an iPhone, she is sitting in a chair, mid fifties, and she goes, “Oh, umm..ya, so…I came into this practice today and I had a great cleaning. I love everyone here at Doctor Navaro’s office..what? Oh Navarene, I love coming to Doctor Navarene’s office. His staff is really great.” She didn’t even say the dentist’s name right! She wasn’t even close. The thing is when they edited it they didn’t even cut that out. People are too smart for that. You can’t do that! You can’t put unauthentic stuff and I thought this lady doesn’t even care who her dentist is.

Reese Harper: I think it is the younger generation too that is more in tune with these kind of details. That is important for a fifty five and sixty year old dentist to learn. The core of your new patient base that will continue to fill your practice and replenish it and keep your collections growing. They are in their twenties and thirties. These millennials are trained to look at things and make judgement calls based on design, ya know? They look at things and they go, “that is a weird letter, that font is kind of jacked up.”

Collin Kartchner: Is that a Serif? What is this?

Reese Harper: They see images and pictures differently because they grew up with that being their reality. So when their friends post a dumb Instagram post or a bad looking picture it has an effect on them. You see that in the likes, right? Some things get ten likes some things get 1,000 likes. People legitimately don’t click like on things that turn them off. Those are typically lame, or unauthentic stuff. You look at how important the quality of media is. It affects the design. It is a big deal, especially when it comes to video. It is so hard to do right.

Collin Kartchner: The thing is, if the design, the lobby, your logo, the pictures you post, if they look outdated then I immediately think, “if this is outdated, so is the dentistry.” If I want to go get full anterior veneers and look nice then I am not going to go there because they will look like 1985 veneers, big white chiclets. I have a buddy named Rusty, who runs a company, I shot a video for him where we went around an outside mall and he had two logos. One was really updated and one was an old logo. People didn’t know this, but it was for the same office. We just said, “based on this what office would you go to?” They chose office #1 every time. We had moms, old people, young people, teenage kids, and ten out of ten said, “oh, the one on the right.” It was the same dentist office, but the one on the left was an outdated logo. The new one was crisp, bright, and modern, and people said that is who they would take their family to!

Reese Harper: Talk to me about the shoot itself. What should I expect and what is the experience going to be like? Do people get nervous? I feel like you are comfortable with this subject matter but for a lot of people this would not be their cup of tea.

Collin Kartchner: Yes, in dental school they don’t appear to be taught public speaking 101. A lot of people will say something about how they don’t want to be on camera and being asked questions. They will have concerns about their office looking nice. When I go out and shoot a dentist’s practice though, I tell them first thing that I will take care of all of that. All they need to do is get their three or four patients to come in and block out a half of hour during lunch for an interview. I will not send you the questions and I will ask them off the cuff. I will make you sound smarter than you are. I will usually go out like a half day the day before the in office shoot, we get some footage of them and their family, we go do something fun. We film them being a fun mom or dad or this Texas shoot next month for a single lady she says, “I am un interesting.” As I poke around I found out that she likes to paint, she likes to go out to the park with her two dogs, that is cool footage. We can film you painting, and hanging out with the dogs right? I say, we want to make this a campaign video. If you are a dentist you are campaigning not for office, but for my business. Let’s get some campaign footage of you out in the park throwing the ball around or playing with your kids, right?

Reese Harper: I hope that some of this has been beneficial, it has been a uniquely insightful dialogue for me. I really appreciate you going through this, Collin. Before we let people go, talk to me about any primary take aways people should have about marketing in general, some of the things you have seen, etc.

Collin Kartchner: The number one thing is that people don’t read anymore. I read a menu, I read Twitter, but people don’t read long form text on website. You have five or six seconds to get someone. If I come to your website, I want to see a really high quality photo, and I want to see a video. You have got to have something compelling on there. People will watch videos and share videos. If it’s a good video it will make them feel something. Again, it is not just having a video, you have got to have a good video. If it is unauthentic or poorly scripted, it’s no good.

Reese Harper: Bad lighting, one shot…

Collin Kartchner: No lights, one angle, bad audio… It will hurt your practice. You are losing money. It is stopping patients from coming. It would be better to get rid of it.

Reese Harper: The difference between a good video and a bad video. It is a fixed cost and a one time experience to develop it. The difference might be a little bit more cost, but it could be sitting there for 10 plus years. It shouldn’t be, but it could.

Collin Kartchner: A lot of dentists to compete nowadays are doing everything. They are super GP’s. They are doing Invisalign, crowns, sleep apnea, everything they can to compete. The best dentists I have found don’t just do one thing, they do it all. A lot of patients will tell me that they appreciate the fact that he could do it all right here. I have heard a couple of times where I have heard them say that they referred me to a really good oral surgeon or periodontist to do that, but mostly appreciate doing it in a place where they are comfortable and love the dentist already. If you do a niche procedure you have got to have a video telling that story. It is great not just for your website but for social media. You can put it on your Facebook page. You just need a thirty second video about Invisalign. Have a video on the niche stuff that you do. I am going to Santa Barbara next month to make a video for one of the stop sleep apnea doctors. I asked him how people know about that. He told me that his website talks about it, and then I am wondering if people actually read that. He says everything is just referred. He told me that he goes to sleep doctors in the area and he talks to them about what he can do. That’s how he gets all of his patients. I told him he should put a video for the thousands of people in his patient base who snore or use a CPAP and hate it and then let them decide. People want to hear peer reviews. So you say, “here is what we can do.” If you don’t believe me, here is one of my patients who has experienced it. You can’t just have videos of just you or just staff talking either. Here is Susie, who has a gun to her head, “Our team is great!” I want to hear people who go there. I want to hear their stories.

Reese Harper: Thanks Collin, it has been a pleasure and everyone knows that all of Collin’s information is in the show notes. If you want to get in touch with him his email and phone number is there. Thanks again. Remember to like us on Facebook, check out our Instagram page, and do all the stuff that you should do to make our show grow. Thanks, we will talk to you soon man.

Collin Kartchner:Thanks for having me out, Reese.

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