Creating a Powerful Brand for Your Practice – Episode #369

When marketing, dentists tend to list their selling points rather than focus on the reputation they’re trying to build. Here’s the problem with that approach … without a core brand you look just like everyone else. On this episode of the Dentist Money™ Show, Ryan welcomes Grace Rizza, CEO of Identity Dental Marketing, to discuss how branding creates patient loyalty.

Show Notes
IdentityDental.com

 

 

 

 

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Podcast Transcript

Ryan Isaac:
Hello, and welcome back to another episode of the Dentist Money Show brought to by Dentist Advisors. A no-commission fiduciary, comprehensive financial advisor just for dentists all over the country. Check us out at dentistadvisors.com. Today on the show, we have Grace Rizza. Grace is talking to us about all things marketing and branding from Identity Dental Marketing Group. Grace has been around for 14 years in the dental industry and knows a ton of stuff and has so many cool things to say. I loved this conversation, and I think it will lead to many more in the future.

Ryan Isaac:
There’s so many places we could take this, but there were some really great advice. Many thanks to Grace for spending time with us today and sharing her wisdom and experience with our audience. Thank you Grace for that. And thanks everyone for being here and tuning in, if you have any questions for us, go to dentistadvisors.com and book a free consultation chat with one of our advisors, we’d love to hear from you and point you in the right direction, answer any money questions you have. Again, thanks Grace, and thanks to all of you for being here. Enjoy the show.

[music]

Jess Reynolds:
Hey there. It’s Jess with Dentist Advisors. Did you know we recently launched a new service called the Dentist Money Membership? It’s an affordable way to support your personal financial strategy with cutting-edge technology and guidance from dental-focused CFP advisors. The Dentist Money Membership includes the Elements Financial Monitoring App, an annual financial check-up, CE courses, an automated investment platform and more. To learn more about the Dentist Money Membership and to get started, go visit dentistadvisors.com/money.

Announcer:
Consult an advisor, conduct your own due diligence when making financial decisions. General principles discussed during this program do not constitute personal advice. This program is furnished by Dentist Advisors, a registered investment advisor. This is Dentist Money. Now here’s your host, Ryan Isaac.

Ryan Isaac:
Welcome to the Dentist Money Show, where we help dentists make smart financial decisions, I’m your host, Ryan. And I’m here today with a new friend of the show, Grace Rizza. Grace, thanks for being here. How you doing?

Grace Rizza:
I’m great, thanks for having me.

Ryan Isaac:
Grace, we were just chatting how we’ve been around the dental industry for quite some time and we’ve never cross paths, but I have heard your name, I’ve heard clients talk about you for a long time, but we’ve never met. So thanks for being here. This is really cool.

Grace Rizza:
Yeah, pleasure’s mine, I appreciate it.

Ryan Isaac:
So you’re coming to us from Florida. Can you… For those who don’t know who you are, would you mind just introducing yourself, what you do, what you do with dentists, what you love doing? Just a little background.

Grace Rizza:
Happy to, thanks. Yeah, so Grace Rizza, CEO, Founder of Identity Dental Marketing. Been in dentistry since March of 2008. I remember my initiation like it was yesterday. It’s been a really fun career of just helping dentists navigate their growth decisions primarily in the form of branding and marketing services. I do a lot of just educational events, and I think one of the things I’m most passionate about is just similar to you, is helping dentists make wise decisions and helping them to avoid some common pitfalls that we see all over the place, they’re kind of like landmines all over the dental industry.

Ryan Isaac:
And they’re hard to see, it’s hard to see where you’re stepping a lot of times, especially, you know as good as anybody, dentists are so busy and there’s just so many things on their plate. Ironically, the more successful they become, the less time they have to get to everything, and it can be quite a bit. I’m curious about your start, ’08, that was about the time we started, wild times. What got you into this? How did you… What did you begin with when you were doing this?

Grace Rizza:
Yeah, so I was fresh out of Marquette University in Wisconsin and looking to get into advertising, I thought I would be an account executive at an ad agency, and I’m sure for those of you who were in business in 2007, 2008, it wasn’t the time to enter the job force. So I just humbled myself, applied everywhere that I possibly could and got hired by a couple of wonderful doctors and went to work for them and really just mastered the marketing side of dentistry. And at that time, started recognizing some of the problems and pitfalls in the dental marketing space, and it was… Dental marketing at the time was kind of like a newborn baby. It really didn’t exist quite yet, and there was no one really talking about branding or differentiation or any of these things that I just came out of school learning about, I’m like it doesn’t exist in this dental space. So I was like, I’m gonna do it, I’m gonna bring branding to dentistry. And here we are. Yeah.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah. Do you remember the… I remember a lot of those early days when we were first getting new clients, and I would go look for a website, and I was surprised at how few dentists at that time had a website, it just wasn’t a thing. In fact, you probably know a lot more about this than I do, but how many people were advertising in Yellow Pages at that time?

Grace Rizza:
Yeah, we were. Yeah, we were at the time, yeah, yeah. I go back far enough to do Yellow Page ads, yeah.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, a lot of our listeners do too. It’s changed so much since those early years, it is crazy to think about how fast it’s come. I’m wondering if we could dive into the difference between… In marketing, I think when people hear marketing, they think of the strategy like ads or a website, but then there’s the brand, there’s the story I’m trying to tell with all these marketing implementation tools like a… The website’s a tool of implementation and ads are a tool, but there’s the brand and the story behind that. Can you talk a little bit about what that means to develop a brand that’s… It feels like it’s so much more than just… Even a good website, it’s so much more than that.

Grace Rizza:
Absolutely, I think some people over-complicate branding because they wanna charge a whole lot for a three-hour meeting, but it really is very simple. In my mind, it’s about defining how you want to be known, it’s about defining your reputation in an intentional manner, so that when people go, “Oh, Grace Rizza, that lady that does whatever,” that they’re all saying the same thing and making sure that whatever what I call your unique selling proposition, whatever that thing is, that it’s clear, that it’s defined, and that everything that you do in your business or in your marketing feeds and contributes to that one clear reputation that you’re intending to build. And it’s really hard for dentists to stand out with one thing and to be focused on one thing.

Grace Rizza:
They tend to want to list all of their selling points, and there’s a difference between a selling point and the core of your brand or the intentional reputation that you’re aiming to build. So I often ask the question of, okay, well, when your patients refer to you, when you meet a new patient and they say, “Well, I chose you because… ” Or, “My friend told me to come here because… ” What is the thing that you’re hearing most frequently about yourself? And when they reflect on that question, it usually becomes really clear what their main thing is. And when it’s not clear, I encourage them to take a step back and define that and to commit to that because without that core, you become just one of all of the other dentists, you don’t have that recognition, they don’t remember you. So I really push people outside of their comfort zone when they’re thinking about their marketing to define themselves.

Ryan Isaac:
Okay, that is really cool. So I wanna repeat that back. You said the question you’re having them ask is when a patient comes in and they say, “My friend said you should come to this office because… ” Is that how you phrase it or could you say that again?

Grace Rizza:
Yeah, I would say what’s the main reason patients mention… What’s the main reason they mentioned you? What is the reason they refer to you, what is the reason they stay loyal to you, what are they telling you about you? What’s the compliment you’re hearing over and over and over again? Because they can start their practice with, “Oh, I’m gonna be the best cosmetic dentist on the planet,” and then that’s not really… Maybe they are, but maybe that’s not what actually makes them stand out, maybe they’re hearing from patients over and over again, “It’s because I trust you. It’s because you’re funny, you make me laugh. It’s because you sing and you have joy when you’re providing dental care.” I had a friend who would sing when he was doing dentistry.

Ryan Isaac:
Really? Okay. [chuckle]

Grace Rizza:
Yeah, and it’s because you have a joyous environment that I come to you, and so you might think it’s one thing when you’re starting, and then you might have to pivot that brand and that energy of your brand.

Ryan Isaac:
Do you find that that’s a pretty common scenario? I think what we hope people think about us or perceive about us is probably usually different than what people actually perceive about us, good and bad. Do you find that that’s the case when you ask a dentist, “Hey, what’s your brand about? What’s your biggest selling point? What makes you you or unique or why do people see you?” Is it usually different what they want people to think than what patients would come in and tell them like in your example?

Grace Rizza:
I think they just don’t care. I think they just… They’re inconvenienced by the question because they just got out of 10 different Facebook groups where people were bragging about having a 100 new patients a month, and so they’re missing the boat. They’re focused on that transactional marketing, that short game marketing, that trackable marketing, and they’re focused on the tit-for-tat type of exchange instead of digging deeper and building that reputation, which is what ultimately over time creates that demand for the brand, so they’re missing the meat and it’s just hard to watch on a daily basis.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, okay. So how do you coach people through that? Maybe that’s a peek behind the process a little bit. How do you… I think you said it earlier, you try to get people to be uncomfortable a little bit, how do you do that?

Grace Rizza:
I don’t. I don’t. And it sounds really bad because I know this, I have this arsenal of knowledge when it comes to branding and marketing and what works long term, but I’ve learned in dentistry that I have to meet people where they’re at, and then I educate and over time eventually a light bulb goes off and they go, “Oh, I’m ready. Okay, now I’m ready to commit to a brand. I get it now, and really wanna make some movement. I’m ready to invest and do it right.”

Grace Rizza:
But sometimes we do have to just meet them where they’re at and play the short game and play the transactional marketing piece, because they have to be at a point where they have a healthy cash flow to be able to get out of survival mode and invest time, energy and money into pushing that brand forward, that intentionality piece forward. So I don’t try to take them if they’re in survival mode. I don’t try to show them this ideal situation. I get them out of their suffering and then I gradually educate them through things like this, and over time, then more people become ready to go into that long game, brand building marketing.

Ryan Isaac:
I really respect that. I love seeing people really in any industry that tries to lead with education and teaching, but you’re right, sometimes you just have to solve an immediate pain point or immediate problem. If someone just needs a website built up because they literally don’t have one, or it’s been 10 years then maybe you just have to get that done if that’s the right example to use, but over time, continue to teach them. A little bit of a plug for you then, we would get to this later anyway, but how do you do education for people, what are you doing in your business, what does that look like for you to educate and teach?

Grace Rizza:
So we’ve got a Facebook group called Dentistry’s Growing With Grace. And every time I have a thought, I just go live. [laughter] So I’m very…

Ryan Isaac:
I love that. Yeah.

Grace Rizza:
I’m very sporadic. Whenever I’m inspired or I come up with a new marketing strategy or something, I just go live. And then we have a podcast, Dentistry’s Growing With Grace, where I interject things here and there, but we interview people, similar to this and then really doing things like this to just get the word out and share what I’ve seen and what I know just freely. I’m all about just getting it out.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, I respect that a lot. That’s really cool. I like people who run businesses like that. I think those are long-term businesses, and I think it creates a lot of trust in an audience when you say like, “Don’t hire me, it’s okay, but just listen to the free show every once in a while and eventually we’ll click and you’ll like my ideas [0:13:35.2] ____ or we’re gone, and that’s okay too.” I think that’s really cool. I’m thinking about this from a couple of different angles, we have a pretty broad audience, brand new. We have students that listen and people who are retired.

Ryan Isaac:
Could we take it back a little bit and ask a couple of questions about if it’s… If someone is listening and they’re new and they’re just coming out of school and they’re building a business, maybe they’re buying something that needs to have a little bit of a refresh in the brand or they’re starting up a practice, what are some common… Maybe just some common best practices getting started early in career with marketing, branding, asking yourselves these tough questions, getting uncomfortable a little bit to ask these questions, what’s good for a new dentist to think about and some common pitfalls new dentists fall into?

Grace Rizza:
Alright, I’ll say that you need mental stamina, you need to not be so short-sighted, that when things don’t go the way you expect it that you’re ready to give up and quit and lash out on people. If business ownership was easy, everyone would do it, it’s not. Be careful who you compare yourself to. Comparison is the thief of joy. And you have a lot of people out there, marketers and practice owners bragging on the best month they’ve ever had, or inflating their numbers, or they’ve popped up in an under-served market so they want you to think it’s normal. Your first day in business to have a 100 new patients, know where to put them because they’re the only dentist in a 20-mile radius.

Grace Rizza:
So just know what you’re reading online is not reality, the ads you’re seeing from other people are not necessarily realistic expectations for your market, your budget, or your ability to take risk. I would say be kind to yourself, you probably just got beat up for several years in dental school, and now you’re having to unlearn perfectionism, you’re having to put yourself out into the world. And if you can stay positive in the process, stay appreciative to your team and to your patients who do choose you, you’re gonna grow a lot quicker and you’re gonna enjoy the journey and embrace that challenge of business growth and leadership. I see just too many people, they just have no idea what to expect, and then they get into it, and then it leads to this place of self-loathing because they feel like a failure, and I just wanna pick them up and give them a hug and…

Ryan Isaac:
You’re like, “It’s okay.”

Grace Rizza:
It’s okay, we’ve all been there. It’s not a magic trick, it takes time for people to know who you are, for you to break into a market and I get it. Every podcast, every guru, every person is gonna give you their secret formula, but it’s not easy.

Ryan Isaac:
And it’s not your secret formula yet, you have to develop your own.

Grace Rizza:
Yes.

Ryan Isaac:
I love what you said about comparison. In our side of the business, in our industry, people do that with, oh man, Facebook groups are just the notorious things too. They’ll come away from a Facebook group with like, “My friend makes a million dollars and doesn’t pay any taxes, how is that possible? I wanna do that too.” You’re like, “That doesn’t… That’s not a thing.” [laughter] But…

Grace Rizza:
It’s not a good thing ’cause you…

Ryan Isaac:
It’s not a good…

Grace Rizza:
Might go to jail. I don’t know.

Ryan Isaac:
It might be a thing, but it’s not a good thing. Yeah. Or yeah, my friend has a no-risk investment that got 20% return guaranteed every year, and it’s like… Yeah, what you hear is not always reality, and unfortunately, people say things in groups, in Masterminds and Facebook groups that they don’t quite fully understand themselves either. They might have gotten 100 new patients that month, but they don’t really understand why, to your point, you know?

Grace Rizza:
Yeah, I can run an ad right now that says free dentistry and get you 100 new patients. Are they a fit? Is that… You don’t have all of the details.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah. I love that. I think that’s really sound advice, and we talk a lot about on our show, like most things in life, whether it’s a long-term investment, a business like health, fitness, relationships, whatever, it just takes a… You just gotta be in it for a long time to make it work and you gotta go through the ups and downs of it. What about that same question for let’s say a mid-career dentist, they’re successful, they’re doing fine, they’re good, but maybe it’s time for… Maybe they’re behind the times on their branding, their marketing, their image, the way they’re telling their story, conveying messages, teaching their patient base, their community, what’s it like to do a brand refresh in the middle of a career?

Grace Rizza:
My favorite thing, it is my favorite thing.

Ryan Isaac:
It’s like bread and butter? Okay.

Grace Rizza:
It’s not. It’s not bread and butter. I work with a lot of startups, but I really enjoy this middle phase career, and I think it’s because they’re not necessarily doing it to survive, they’re doing it to breathe new life into the business. They’re doing it to take their already existing core values and exemplify those. They might be doing it to really involve the team, unite the team, just redefine who they are and what they stand for, ’cause it’s probably changed since their vision when they started five, 10 years ago, whatever that looks like. And so this is just… It’s really fun because it’s not out of survival necessarily, sometimes it’s…

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, no desperation.

Grace Rizza:
Yeah, it’s out of desire and want, and so it’s a more joyful experience a lot of times when you have the pleasure to work with an established leader. And it’s fun and they have something to compare us to. So for me I enjoy it because they’re like, “Wow, this is so much better.” Whereas the startup, we could be the best that there is on the market.

Ryan Isaac:
They don’t know.

Grace Rizza:
They have no clue.

Ryan Isaac:
It’s a little expensive. I don’t really think that I wanna do it anyway. You’re like… Yeah. [chuckle]

Grace Rizza:
Of course it is. Everything is right now. You have no cash at all.

Ryan Isaac:
Everything is. It’s all… You haven’t… Yeah, you’re broke, man, you’re just starting, that’s okay. So, someone in mid-career, yeah, different motivation, a different reason to do it. What’s a typical… What are they typically looking for when they’re trying to refresh in the middle of a career, what are they trying to change or what does change?

Grace Rizza:
So, there’s different goals. I always start with the goal, so I always say, “What do you want this to accomplish for you? What has prompted this call?” Sometimes they start to see a dip or they start to level out and that makes them a little bit nervous, so they just wanna see an uptake in new patients, and that’s fine, we can help with that, usually it’s a very simple fix at that point. Other times they’re overworked, they might be calling because they’re like, “I don’t have anywhere to put new patients.” You wouldn’t think marketing for that, but you can run a targeted campaign and you can bring in bigger cases and you can…

Grace Rizza:
Maybe your goal isn’t quantity but it’s a specific type of patient, it’s a quality type patient, and so… Or they just went to a new course and now they’re doing Botox or sleep ap or whatever, and how do we get the word out about these things? Or sometimes they’re just too busy. We used to do all of our social media in-house, but we’re just ready to get an expert handling this for us. So there’s a lot of different reasons, and I think that the most important thing is that you as a marketer, you learn what those reasons are before you provide a solution, you know what the problem is, as simple as that sounds, most people don’t do that.

Ryan Isaac:
What about… Okay, so on the same topic, what about someone who’s built a dental practice around their own name, and… You hear this a lot lately too, when they’re trying to bring in associates and partners and they’re trying to get some clinical off their plate and phase out of some clinical day-to-day, not get out of the business, but how do they get away from their own… I always wonder this too, how do you get away from your own name when you’re trying to entice other new associates who wanna be partners in the business eventually too? How do you do that?

Grace Rizza:
It’s appropriate to rebrand, it’s appropriate to go back to that unique selling proposition we talked about, and to say, “How do we wanna be known? How are we known and how do we wanna be known going forward?” And then choose a name and choose a tagline and choose a logo that actually represents that, and it’s not hard to announce a new name to the patients. I think the doctor’s panic over this kind of change.

Ryan Isaac:
It feels like a big deal to them. Yeah, it’s huge.

Grace Rizza:
Oh, they make it such a big deal, it’s not a big deal. Like hang a sign at the front office and put your name on the logo, they’ll know it’s still you. And if you’re doing SEO, we always optimize for the doctor’s names, we always optimize for the business name too, it’s nothing that an eblast and a letter can’t solve, it’s really not a huge deal. But it does set you up if you’re looking to bring in associates and expand in that way, or you’re wanting to sell in the future, it does set you up in a way where you’re not the brand, you’re not synonymous with the brand. And you want people on your team to be able to handle different things with patients, that’s how you grow is by elevating other people. And so if you are the center of that brand, you’re also the center of every difficult conversation, every responsibility, everything. So I think there’s a whole lot of value in creating a brand that’s bigger than you.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, inclusive of more than just yourself. What about when you’re implementing something, whether it’s a brand new startup or a mid-career person, how do you… I have two questions, but they’re kind of similar, how do you involve the team in all this stuff? Because obviously the doctor can’t be the only person trying to take on the new responsibilities, ask the new questions, especially if you’re trying to push in a new direction, so how do you involve the team and then how does some of this stuff get tracked, how do you know it’s working?

Grace Rizza:
Oh, I’m gonna give you such unpopular answers here. I’m gonna really upset…

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, I like that, I like those actually. I give them all the time.

Grace Rizza:
I’m gonna really upset some people with this, okay? Don’t involve your team in every decision that you make. You wanna certainly involve them… Okay, this is my analogy here, it’s like when you’re having a baby, I have two kids, I have two little girls, and I remember my husband uttered a name in front of his mom like, “Oh, we might name her whatever.” And you would have thought that was the name of a serial killer in town or something, it was the worst thing we could have ever done, and luckily it wasn’t even the name, she didn’t even hear it right. But she was all up in arms about this decision being made without her. But instead, when you just go, “Meet baby,” right?

Ryan Isaac:
Meet the thing I built with my… It is mine, so meet her, yeah.

Grace Rizza:
Meet your grandchild, Denisee, right? When you present the thing with the name, all of the sudden, people connect to the baby or the name and they embrace it and they love it. So part of being a leader means that you choose who you involve what, and it’s intentional. And a lot of these people on your team, they might be fabulous people, but did they study branding, did they study business naming, do they know the psychology behind a color and a font? There’s a reason you didn’t hire your dental assistant to design your logo, maybe you should present the baby with the name instead of getting everybody together and what happens is…

Ryan Isaac:
Brainstorm.

Grace Rizza:
And ruining really good branding and just destroying it with unqualified opinions. So there’s maybe a couple of people you involve, maybe a spouse, because it’s a personal… They’re personally connected to the business, but the dental assistant that’s gonna quit the second she gets a dollar raise from somebody down the street, you want her to buy into the brand, but you don’t want her making decision-making processes. I love that.

Ryan Isaac:
Or killing ideas off, yeah.

Grace Rizza:
Yeah, I love dental teams, I love working as a team, but when it comes to branding your business and what you stand for, you need to make those decisions with the advisors that you hired to help you make those decisions.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, I’m just thinking… I think that’s really good advice, and I think it applies in a lot of ways in business decisions, probably not just marketing, but presenting the thing, because you’re right. People in a team, customers, patients, whatever, they wanna follow a leader, that’s just what we like doing. And there’s a fine line between a leader who’s taking in contacts and information from other people who, your words, qualified people, that’s awesome, but then there’s a fine line between that and then a leader who’s like doesn’t really know, and it’s just like too much input and then too much chaos, too much debate. And then the mother-in-law’s mad about the baby and doesn’t even like their grandchild anymore, and then…

[laughter]

Grace Rizza:
And listen, in business we know, you and I know, in business that quick decision-making is like a weapon. It keeps you from this pit of indecisive, confused leadership, and so there comes a point where, and it’s some time after dental school, ’cause this is the thing you have to unlearn, is that perfectionism thing, is you’re not making rash decisions, but you learn how to make decisions, and that’s why I really like that seasoned practice owner. I like working with and for someone who knows who they are and knows how to make decisions that fit their business, not that they disregard expert opinions, but they don’t spend an eternity in deliberation and that really holds people back.

Ryan Isaac:
It does, yeah, and it prevents that leader from just taking that commanding, I don’t know, position in perception, and then just being like, “Follow me, let’s go, and it’s gonna be great and we thought through this, and it’s gonna be awesome.” People gravitate towards that. What about… I guess… How do you… Once something’s implemented then, maybe it’s a system or something you’re gonna try to do in the practice from a marketing standpoint. How do you track this stuff? I hear this a lot, like, “Oh, we hired someone once, but I have no idea if it worked or not,” I’m like there’s gotta be a way to know if it works.

Grace Rizza:
Okay, well, now I’m gonna vent, okay?

Ryan Isaac:
Please do. Yes, I love it.

Grace Rizza:
We track everything, and you gotta show up for your meeting, doc. If you wanna know your stats, show up.

Ryan Isaac:
Yes. Okay.

Grace Rizza:
Hey, and guess what? Your new patient numbers, they’re in your system. It takes 30 to 60 seconds to print that report, but they don’t make time to work on their business. And I don’t blame them, I know it’s hard for them, but all the stats are there, there’s no marketing agency right now in 2022 that doesn’t have statistics. No, it’s basic, it’s 101. It’s just you’re not looking at them. If you’re being honest with yourself, you’re not reading the emails, you’re not keeping your meetings, and you’re not looking at your numbers. So do your part, and then you can see if other people are doing their part.

Ryan Isaac:
Awesome, I’m gonna use that forever now, I’m just gonna be like… If I hear that ever again, I’m just gonna be like you…

Grace Rizza:
Just take this clip of me yelling at people.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, I’m just gonna play this really fast.

Grace Rizza:
And just… This is what Grace does, yeah.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, you’re right, the data’s there in everything. If anything, there’s probably an overwhelming amount of dashboards and notifications and reports and charts and graphs, it’s there, the data’s sitting there.

Grace Rizza:
Yeah, and they over-analyze and they miss the important data by over-analyzing the non-important data. So, important data, new patients, important data, leads. And if you’re running a branding campaign, important data, impressions. It’s not hard.

Ryan Isaac:
Okay, I like that. I like when people get fired up, that’s real opinions. I like that. Thanks for doing that.

Grace Rizza:
I just got a text from someone before this meeting and she’s like, “I don’t know what my data is,” and I’m like, “You blew off your last meeting, you didn’t… ” It’s all there. You have to talk to us.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, that would be… Dentists hear this all the time from annoying patients like me, like, “It’s not working,” and they’re like, “Well, you didn’t come to your cleaning and you’re not flossing and you’re not brushing your teeth and you’re not wearing your retainer, so what do you want me to do? I told you what to do and you just didn’t do it.” So we all deal with that.

Grace Rizza:
It happens. Yeah, there’s some home care involved here, is just look at your numbers. So then what happens in these situations is they pull it and then their numbers drop and then they notice their numbers and then they come back. This could have been avoided altogether.

Ryan Isaac:
Okay. I feel like we could just do this for a long time, but I can’t keep you forever, so I want to do… I went to your page, so this is gracerizza.com, is that where people can find you? Is that the best spot?

Grace Rizza:
Identitydental.com is our more main website and it’s going through an update right now, but gracerizza.com is good for my educational stuff, yes.

Ryan Isaac:
Oh yeah. Okay, so sorry about that. Here’s what I was gonna say, I really like… I’m just on the page that shows some of the topics you talk about, and I just wanted to highlight this as I went through this and I thought this was really cool.

Grace Rizza:
Thanks.

Ryan Isaac:
And things people can hear when they come see you speak or watch webinars, listen to your podcast, which I want you to talk about, but you have things on new patient attraction, I like this one, marketing truth bombs, what most marketers won’t tell you. I like that. Let’s see, social media secrets, man, I feel like that could be a whole episode on marketing with social media. Psychology of dental marketing, sale is not a four-letter word. I love the concept of bringing some integrity back into sales, and it’s not this bad thing.

Ryan Isaac:
Sales is teaching really when it’s done the right way. Scale, big case marketing. You were talking about that earlier, creating targeted, specific ways for a practice to just bring in… Even a busy practice who doesn’t have room, just bring in certain targeted big case marketing. Anyway, I just like some of those things. Can you tell us where… Okay, so tell us again, best website to find you and tell us about your podcast, where can they… Where can we find that?

Grace Rizza:
Thank you. Yeah, identitydental.com is our agency website, and they can find me… Dentistry’s Growing With Grace is our podcast and our Facebook group. And yeah, we’re…

Ryan Isaac:
Is this an open… Sorry, is this an open group? Anyone can come join, do they have to be part of your clientele or anything?

Grace Rizza:
It is semi-open, it’s mostly for owner doctors, American-based owner doctors, and then advisors, if there are people who wanna share value in the group, I’m open to that as well.

Ryan Isaac:
Cool, okay. Anything else, you wanna leave parting words of wisdom to our audience?

Grace Rizza:
Yes, I would say when you ask if marketing is working, you have to just define what it means for marketing to work. Some marketing methods are meant to build brand recognition, some marketing methods are meant to generate leads. You should know the goals of that marketing and have expectations set for it before you start the marketing. You are not the first person to do these things, and a honest, positive marketing person will be able to tell you what to expect and in a realistic, honest, straightforward way.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, awesome, I love that. I think about that. We’ll get questions, for example, is real estate the best investment? Is it best to have three practices instead of one? Are stocks better than real estate? And you have to take a step back and you have to ask like what are you trying to get? What’s the goal here? What’s the end game? What do you want? You can’t maximize for everything at the same time. So you’re saying something to increase brand recognition and maximize for that maybe is not the same thing as maximizing the most new patients to walk through the door in the next 30 days. Those could be two…

Grace Rizza:
That’s right. They are two totally different things. And so if you try to leverage a brand recognition type method or strategy and you expect to get leads out of it, you’re gonna be disappointed. You can’t get apple juice from oranges.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, not where I’ve been anyway, that’s true, yeah, that’s very true. Well, Grace, thanks for being here. I hope this is the first of many things, I feel like there’s so many topics we could talk about, maybe we should do a webinar sometime too, where you can maybe present some things live to an audience, especially around social media. I think that’d be a really fascinating topic we could do next time.

Grace Rizza:
Sounds great.

Ryan Isaac:
Thank you very much. And thanks to our audience for listening as always. If you have any questions, go to dentistadvisors.com, we’d love to chat with you. And we’ll catch you next time on another episode of Dentist Money Show. Thanks everybody. Thanks, Grace. Talk to you later. Bye-bye.

Practice Management