Are Your Marketing Dollars Going to Waste? – Episode 72

Marketing pioneer John Wanamaker said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” As a practice owner, you might feel the same way. The challenge of measuring marketing results can be especially difficult for small businesses that have plenty of questions and not enough time to answer all of them. In this Dentist Money™ interview, Reese welcomes Wendy Phillips, founder of Big Buzz, who implements customer-focused dental marketing solutions for practice owners across the country. She highlights the most common marketing mistakes in dentistry, describes what to look for in a marketing agency, and provides inexpensive solutions for market research.

Show notes:

Free book excerpt:

http://www.bigbuzzinc.com/yes/

5 Things Corporate Dental Teaches us:

http://dentistryunchained.com/5-critical-things-corporate-dental-teaches-us/#_ftn1

Insights of Corporate Dental:

http://dentistryunchained.com/a-peek-at-the-insights-of-corporate-dental/

DSO’s:

https://dentistryunchained.com/top-5-reasons-dsos-exist-and-how-best-to-compete/#_ftn1

Link to Start with Why:

https://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspire_action

Partners for Starting a Group Practice

Coach/Consultant – Fortune Management – Kim McGuire <kimmcguire@fortunemgmt.com>

Lender – Wells Fargo Practice Solutions – Brandon Finazzo <Brandon.Finazzo@wellsfargo.com>

HR and Business Support – Avitus Group – Chris Balster<cbalster@avitusgroup.com>

Buyer’s Group – Dentistry Unchained – http://www.dentistryunchained.com/

Podcast Transcription:

Reese Harper: Welcome to The Dentist Money Show, where we help dentists make smart financial decisions. I am your host, Reese Harper, and today I have a special guest, Wendy Phillips from Big Buzz. Wendy, how are you doing?

Wendy Phillips: I am great, thanks for having me.

Reese Harper: Ya, I am excited because I was going through my email about a month ago. I was thinking this product/solution/the ultimate dental marketing solution looks amazing. I couldn’t believe that I had been to Denver in and out so many times and we have never met. I reached out to you and said, “can we please do a marketing podcast?” You were gracious to take some time and do it. I am really excited about this.

Wendy Phillips: Happy to do it, thanks for having me.

Reese Harper: We are going to jump right into content and not talk about my diet, pizza, and other things I usually like to talk about. I will try to stay away from all of that and I will ask you to give us some background about your own situation. How you got into marketing, dentistry, and what led you to where you are right now?

Wendy Phillips: Sure, I love it. I started my career working for a big marketing agency where I worked on large accounts, like Microsoft and Wells Fargo. That is actually where I learned the process that I will share with you today. I figured to myself there has got to be a way to distill this down to its most essential parts and make it affordable so that small private practices or health care organizations can access it. That was ten years ago and we have been working with dental organizations and practices ever since delivering it to them.

Reese Harper: If I am thinking about what mistakes dentists make when it comes to marketing, what are the general big picture mistakes that you see dentists make?

Wendy Phillips: I would say there are three main things. First, the majority of dentists are going to cobble together various solutions, or various vendors, so all kinds of different people. You have a brother in law doing SEO over here, an online marketing outfit over here doing some google adwords, and it is very inefficient and ineffective.

Reese Harper: Sorry to interrupt you there, but the inefficiency come from the time you try to spend coordinating with all of those people, but also in my experience they can’t really see what one another are doing. The SEO guy does not communicate with the direct mail person, who doesn’t communicate with the social media outsourced hire, etc.

Wendy Phillips: That is exactly right.

Reese Harper: All of these people have individual campaigns with no strategy.

Wendy Phillips: Exactly, you nailed it.

Reese Harper: That is what I would assume, but it seems like a lot of dentist struggle with that because they don’t have time generally to manage the strategic part of the marketing anyway. That is sort of their theoretical role because they own the company, but rather than managing and quarterbacking all of that it just ends up being five or seven vendors doing their individual jobs with no one looking at results.

Wendy Phillips: That is right, they are in their silos with their blinders on not meaning to hurt the marketing, but if this person just does SEO than that is all that they are doing and they are not looking broad picture. You hit it on the head when you said they are not working on a singular strategy which is a must have in marketing.

Reese Harper: That’s great. What’s another mistake? I interrupted with before number two.

Wendy Phillips: The second most common mistake, I would say, is what we call dart in the dark marketing. Let’s try a little bit of social media, let’s try redeveloping our website, let’s try direct mail, let’s try print advertising, also very inefficient and ineffective. It is not strategic to your earlier point. Always better to start with an overarching strategy. What are we trying to accomplish and why? Then what media are we going to use to get there, and then deploy. Rather than trying a little bit of this and that. The third thing that I see and this is something recent that I have noticed. There are all kinds of dental marketers and I put that in air quotes. Everyone and their mother can do SEO for a dental practice all of a sudden. There is a lot of noise in the marketplace and dentists are inundated from all of these marketers. I would advise all practices to use hoovers.com, to have a look at what those marketing companies have achieved for their own revenues. If you are relying on a marketing company that has not financially achieved for their own company, what you seek to achieve for your practice, then by default there is an issue there. It is always good to always look under the hood and see what they really can do before signing a big contract with anyone.

Reese Harper: Interesting, tell us a little bit about, for people who don’t know, what is the Hoover’s database and what does it do?

Wendy Phillips: On hoovers.com you can search any company and get a snapshot of their annual revenues and other pertinent data about them. I believe the information is just gathered through public tax records. It can be very helpful when you are vetting marketing agencies, in particular. I am a big believer that if you haven’t taught yourself how to do what you’re saying that you can teach me, then I’m out.

Reese Harper: I don’t know if that is hard for people to perceive, but when I am looking at someone as a marketing consultant or someone who can give me marketing advice, I look at their website a lot of the time and I can be very confused by it. To me that is not a good sign. If their own branding, strategy, and marketing confuses me as a customer. A lot of my friends who are in marketing will tell you, “I just have a challenge doing marketing for my own business because I don’t have the time. I am so busy doing stuff for my customers I don’t have time to do my own website and marketing.” I can relate to that at some level, but it is spooky when the person you are going to get help form hasn’t taken the time to engage in their own marketing campaign.

Wendy Phillips: I would say what is even spookier is the fact that we are marketers and are really good at spinning a tale. What is spookier to me is the marketing company that looks like a big, well established marketing firm on the outside, with a beautiful, well designed website. It appears to be a large company with great service, but the dentist hasn’t looked under the hood and asked important questions. Such as what is this organization’s track record? How long have they been around? How many clients have they worked with? What results have they produced for those clients? Can I talk to a client of theirs and vet them that way? Try to look past the smoke and mirrors and get down to the nitty gritty of who are these people and what are they actually going to do with the money we invest with them.

Reese Harper: I liked that. Let’s pivot for a second and talk about another question that I have. Which is, how can a dentist eliminate all of the guesswork from marketing in order to achieve better returns from that? It is hard to eliminate that dart in the dark, right?

Wendy Phillips: It is, and you said it the right way. There is a lot of guess work. There is a lot of ammo for any dentist that is looking today. All of our competitors are doing dart in the dark or guessing. It is not a terribly complicated strategy but going back to the same strategies that drive fortune 500 companies, conduct some market research. Survey your patients, and I am not talking about surveying the masses. In most cases, with dental practices, we are much more interested in replicating a certain type of patient. The practice might want to attract more implant cases or crowns and bridges or simply fee for service patients. Get together a very small pool of those patients who you would deem the happiest or the most loyal or the ones that you really want to replicate, and survey those folks. Ask them, would you pay attention to direct mail? Did you see our ad on google? Do you pay attention to online reviews? That way you can understand what media they are consuming and thereby what their peers are consuming.

Reese Harper: I guess a dumbed down version, I will play the dentists devil’s advocate because I am sure you have answered this question a ton. I think a lot of people when they think about doing customer research or surveying feel like, “well, Wendy, can’t you tell me what people want?” You have already surveyed people, so you just tell me what the surveys say! I think some people are hesitant to want to do it themselves. It can be a time consuming and expensive process too. Personally, I believe it is quite essential, but I am playing the devil’s advocate here.

Wendy Phillips: Absolutely, and I am so glad you are because this is exactly what we get from our customers.

Reese Harper: Like, “why can’t you just tell me what people want!”

Wendy Phillips: A couple of points on that. You don’t really want to pay any marketing outfit to tell you what your competition is doing. You don’t want to replicate what is out there in the community, right? You want to really stand apart. We have worked with practices that are right down the street from each other and they don’t have a problem with us representing both of them because when you survey your own patients it is not just about asking how they consume media but also other questions I love. We ask, “what do you love best, that you can’t find at any other practice?” These patients light up, Reese, and they tell these stories of transformation that you and I can not recreate if we tried. That stuff is marketing gold. That is the stuff that I am not going to take that from your competitor and apply it to you. We want to adjust for the print what makes you unique and put only that to market. That is what is going to get you the market share. Secondly, we get this all the time too. It sounds expensive and time consuming. The whole process of surveying, thanks to the internet, is so much easier. A simple survey monkey survey sent out to ten of your best patients. You will get responses back in a heartbeat and you can disseminate all of that information. Survey monkey helps you disseminate that information so when I say it is a fortune five hundred strategy, the most important part is to remember to distill it down to it’s most important parts. This is accessible for a dental practice to do on their own.

Reese Harper: No question. I want to hit back on something that you said. You alluded to the analogy of dusting off to find the unique fingerprint or footprint about the unique attributes of a practice that make the patient say, “this is why I go to this place.” I think this is one thing that people underestimate about marketing. They don’t realize that there are unique attributes about your practice that you probably can’t put your finger on, but your patients will be able to do that for you. It is funny, it is like the truth comes out eventually but not always from the people who are working in the business.

Wendy Phillips: Exactly.

Reese Harper: The truth about what they love might just be the location for all we know! You might think it’s the way you treat patients, but we realized out of the ten surveys that came out our location was such a big factor for all of these people. It totally threw us for a loop and we are going to double down on location, right??

Wendy Phillips: That is exactly right. What we find is that our doctors use clinical language and they talk about state of the art technology. Your patients talk about the relationship with them and how you changed their lives. It is stuff that you would have never been able to come up with on your own. It is hands down the most delightful thing that I do. When I get to present this information, even to a very old practice, to show them these results or practices that do this on their own when they get these results back it is just really eye opening for them. It is just a great light bulb moment to see how great they are and what an impact they are making in the community. It allows them to have continuity in their message and to make a message that matters and resonates.

Reese Harper: The essence of surveying patients gets me a few outcomes. Can you summarize the point of those outcomes for me?

Wendy Phillips: We encourage dentists to either develop or have developed for them three things out of this process. One, you can develop brand messaging and of course for an existing practice they already have some brand messaging established, so this is about taking it to the next level and then that brand messaging is derived not from what the doctor thinks and feels or some marketer thinks and feels but from those verdatum. Three devotional really lovely comments that their patients actually made about them. It is like testimonials on steroids. The second thing that is born out of them is what we call a mood board in the business. A mood board is used by architectural firms, interior design firms, and marketing firms to determine an overall mood for all of the marketing. It will be the visual representation of what is written on the brand messaging. Those two things, the mood board and messaging, side by side become the song sheet form which everybody sings. It takes the guess work out. They don’t have to go back to the drawing board every time they create something. Third and last is a marketing plan. If there are fifty different things we have determined that there are fifty different tactics that a dental practice could deploy from marketing, you will get the ultimate clarity from your surveys to tell you which five or six are right for the practice right now. You can focus on those over the next twelve month period instead of dart in the dark.

Reese Harper: That’s awesome. Let’s finish talking about that original question that I asked, “how do I eliminate the guesswork?” We have talked about target market research and surveying patients and a few other strategies that are part of the fortune five hundred categories blueprint. What are some of the other things in the tool kit?

Wendy Phillips: Sure, so the main three are the messaging, mood board, and marketing plan. I like to think of those as the dental marketing labs. Just like they have a lab in the practice to go to for diagnostic purposes, the same thing is for this. They will have these three tools to come back to every single time. It helps tremendously. Their phone and fax machines will be ringing off the hook with all kinds of offers from very savvy and good marketers and very good sales people. It can be overwhelming. Should I do it? Do I invest here? I don’t know. They can always come back to that marketing lab as a litmus test and say, “well, it is not on our strategic marketing plan for this year. We can look at it next year.” Then they have a wrote response that they can have their front office give to folks who are inundating them with offers and more than that they can have peace of mind, “I made the right choice. I know that I made the right choice because this is a strategic plan, I didn’t create it. I did the research I was supposed to do in order to be sure, and now it is just a matter of staying the course and measuring those results.”

Reese Harper: Do people sometimes want to pull the plug on their marketing plan because it costs money and they don’t see instant results? From my own experience looking at dentists I see them pull the plug on a lot of their marketing practice early on in the cycle of letting the results flow in and documenting what they see and continuing with that marketing lab concept. It just seems like it is not an easy thing to wrap your head around and say I am going to commit to doing this my whole career. That seems like a challenge for some people. Maybe you are finding the people that this is not a challenge for, I don’t know.

Wendy Phillips: Ya, the majority of practices that we work with or that pick up my book or hear me lecture on this, they are in enough pain that they want to try something that is going to work. So they give it a good go. I will say that where I see folks pull the plug is when it is not actually a marketing problem. There is really a trifecta here. There is marketing, operations, and then financials. It is usually when one of those other two areas is lagging, that is when the marketing is not working very well. I will give you an example. I saw a practice do this process and achieve what they wanted which was twenty new patient calls in a month. Every one of those patient calls went over to a voicemail that was not checked for two weeks. That is an operational problem. That is an operational hole that has to be plugged before the marketing is going to work well. Another problem is a practice that under invests. So instead of trying to do five or six things for marketing they say, “this year we will just do one thing.” Financially, they don’t have enough cash flow to fund the marketing, but then it is like putting on half of an oxygen mask. I can’t breathe and I don’t know why I can’t breathe. Those cases are few and far between. Typically by the time they get to a pain point where they are tired of cobbling together a solution, they understand marketing, they have cash flow to invest in marketing, they understand that marketing is an investment and it works well for them.

Reese Harper: You are getting people who have already kind of pre screened themselves to determine that this is the thing that they need to do. They have been through enough pain to know that it needs to be implemented effectively.

Wendy Phillips: Right, yes.

Reese Harper: Tell me a little bit about this idea of measuring results and how you would measure results as a dentist. Do you just set everyone up with new patient goals that they want to achieve each month? That is a component of it. How do they document their success? How do they feel good about continuing to invest in it?

Wendy Phillips: We encourage all dental practices to put pen to paper and document and share with their team a measurable goal. That typically, as you said, takes the form of new patient traffic. So for example, they could be getting ten new patients a month and they would like to be getting twenty five new patients a month. Communicate that to the team, and even if they are still cobbling together various vendors, make sure that they have communicated that goal to every one of those vendors. Then asking whomever they are working with on marketing to understand how they typically measure results and how they report them. Then there is clarity on both sides and you would be so surprised, Reese, I see so often this step missed between marketers and practices. It is the simple step of, “how do I communicate?” Does the doctor communicate expectations and how are those expectations reflected back to them in terms of measuring results? We rely very heavily, of course, on analytics. There is so much data being gathered on search engines, your website, social media outlets connected to your practice. It can very readily be accessed with a simple log in.

Reese Harper: Interesting.

Wendy Phillips: Many, many doctors are not aware of that and/or if they have cobbled together people they don’t want to log in to six different marketing platforms to see how their results are after a long day of work. Many marketers, us included, offer a dashboard that you can log in to one place and see everything. Even a lot of the software like Dentrix, Eagle soft, they can help with that sort of thing too. We typically work with practices on a case by case basis depending on what sort of software they are using already and then connecting the dots so that we can get all of the results in one place. If they decide to work with a multitude of vendors then they need to ask those vendors if they have a singer dashboard where we can pipe in all of the results so we can see it in one place. They can help you manage that. Outsource, outsource, outsource, the more the dentist can remove from his/her plate and have working for them rather than working in it the better.

Reese Harper: That is great advice. I had a question come to mind. A lot of dentists feel like the industry is evolving quickly right now, right? You have a lot of DSO’s and group practices that are bringing in patients in an effective way and you have a lot of sole practices and maybe two to three location practices that are being managed by one dentist that is also an entrepreneur. A lot of people wonder how to compete. Will I be able to compete because a large organization is going to be able to out market me, and they will be be able to out service me. I imagine from a marketing perspective you probably have a unique perspective on this. You see larger and smaller practices and the chance to know what actually drives a patient. Do they even know anything about the size of a company and how big it is, or how many locations there are? What drives their psychology? Does a small practice, that doesn’t have the resources, can they effectively compete with a large organization and still have a bright future ahead for them? That’s their fear I think.

Wendy Phillips: Ya, you bet. This process, the way fortune 500 companies develop their own marketing strategies, that process of downloading from the patients what they love best about the practice is going to help tremendously in that. The patient who is going to go to mom and pop dentistry versus the patient who is going to go to corporate XY and Z dentistry down the road, has a totally different patient profile. They have very different needs, socioeconomic backgrounds, values, and different goals for their oral health. With all of that said, when you get into the minds of the patients who are your type of patients whether you are mom and pop dentistry or you are corporate XYZ dentistry, either one of them when they get inside of patients minds and start delivering to them what they really want then it makes the competition really obsolete. The organizations that are really good at this that we see right now are Apple and Starbucks. They are constantly gathering information from us on how we are using their products and how we are using their services. Things that we like and don’t like. There is a new update to the iPhone every time we turn around because they are gathering that information from us, the users, the one who are paying their bills at the end of the day and then delivering to us more of what we love and diminishing the things that we don’t love so much. They are doing it in rapid time. Anymore that is what a consumer expects, even from their dentist. The more that a practice can get inside of their consumer, the patient’s mind, and deliver more and more of what they love and reinforce what they love and diminish what they don’t, than the more competitive edge they get no matter how saturated the market is.

Reese Harper: I think that is really good insight. It gives a lot of people peace of mind knowing that it is within their control to sort of drive their own destiny. Price isn’t the only factor that drives growth of a business. Apple has proven that people are not as price sensitive about computers as we once thought. Just because a competitor is less expensive, or because they have a bigger brand, or maybe you are the competitor with the bigger brand, budget, and you are less expensive. Ultimately the same lessons are applying to both cases. You have to know who your customer is and know why they are using you, and why they are choosing to use you, what attributes make you stand out, and keep fighting for those types of customers. That is the only thing you can do to be proactive. I think a lot of people who are not doing research and implementing a feed back loop, who don’t have a marketing plan, they feel like they are victims of their circumstances. You don’t have information. You don’t know what you can do to grown because you are not able to pinpoint the way to get new patients in your city, on your street corner, in your community with the type of people that live there. I don’t know, marketing to me creates a lot of peace of mind. Once you have an effective marketing plan in place your business feels so much healthier.

Wendy Phillips: Yes.

Reese Harper: You are just not worried about every little problem that might occur with your current customer base. You don’t let little pieces of feedback throw you off as much because you know you have a steady stream of new patients that are the right type of patient, and the right type of customer for your practice. Perhaps a few of those patients who are causing you problems, you are not as concerned with them choosing to go to a different practice. I don’t know, it just gives me a ton of peace of mind. Sorry about my own little tangent there. Did that resonate with you at all?

Wendy Phillips: Yes, and we see practices use this methodology whether they have engaged with us as a client or just using my book as a handbook. We see clients who use this methodology typically use it year after year. This just becomes the way that they do it so that, as you said, it eliminates the guesswork and takes the edge off. They know that they are walking the walk and talking the talk they are able to train existing staff and new staff on the way we talk about the practice and the most important things we say. It really does give them peace of mind and takes the edge off.

Reese Harper: Let’s pivot to a different question real quick. What is hot in online marketing right now?

Wendy Phillips: Sure, and again this is one that we always get from dentists and often it is about SEO. “What should I be doing with my SEO?” It is one of those questions that we sort of caution the dentists that we come into contact with, we caution them to not get so caught up in what is hot. It is more important from a financial perspective that the practice deploys the marketing that is right for that practice right now than it is to do what is trendy or what the competition is doing. It is like squirrels out there, so many shiny objects. Every time we turn around there is something new, like SnapChat advertising for Orthodontic practices. Is it right for an orthodontic practice that is listening today? I am not sure. You would have to look under the hood and get to know your patient base and how they are interacting with the community before you pull the trigger on something cool and hot like that.

Reese Harper: So ultimately do you think that question when people say, “what is hot in online marketing?” The caution is don’t totally get caught up on that, there is a foundational science more than capitalizing on the latest trends, right?

Wendy Phillips: Exactly.

Reese Harper: Get back to these basics that you talked about in our first segment and stick with them. Eventually your customers will help you understand how to get more of them.

Wendy Phillips: Yes, and let your competition get side tracked with the shiny object, then you have a higher competitive edge for sure.

Reese Harper: How has SEO changed in the last few years? I don’t know how clear people are on what SEO is sometimes, or why it matters to them, or if they know where their new patients are coming from. I know that I get that question a lot, “my SEO is/isn’t good or is/isn’t working.” Tell me a little bit about how it has changed in the last few years?

Wendy Phillips: SEO is one of those blanket terms that dentists have come to understand as online marketing. There are actually dozens of different things you could do for online marketing. But it’s like in the South we say, “do you want a Coca-Cola?” That means literally any type of soda. SEO has become like that for online marketing. It is one of dozens of different things you could do to get more traction or visibility for your practice. It is about search engine optimization. So Google is the search engine and you are trying to optimize it so google really likes it. I use the analogy that Google is the most popular guy in high school and we all want to be his friends and sit at his table. That is why we are updating our website in such a way that he will look at us and say, “hey, I like you, come on over.” That said, SEO is a relationship. It is a relationship between Google and your website. It is not one and done. Any time that a dentist gets an offer, “we will get you on page one right away!” That is a red flag. That is not how you befriend somebody. That is not how you build a relationship with a search engine. It used to be that you could stuff keywords into your website. Then Google would say this website does tons of crowns and bridges. Well, the most popular guy in high school has become very sophisticated. He is very intelligent and is constantly scanning your website for the right content that is actually relevant to the people who are searching for these types of terms. Now a days when Google sees keywords stuffed into your sight he doesn’t like you and pushes you down in the rankings rather than bringing you up. Today it is important that your website is much more content driven. Make sure your website is in tip top working condition. Make sure all of the links are working and that it is linking to other websites that are appropriate. If you get your crowns and bridges done with a CEREC machine than link to the CEREC website because Google likes to see that you are friends with other websites. Constantly update with content with the “about us” page or whatever. Make sure that it is relevant and makes sense. Your content should actually answer questions that you hear in the practice from patients all of the time. That is the stuff that Google is really going to love.

Reese Harper: Interesting, that is really good insight. That is something that is not easy to understand. The difference between keywords and content. Dentists having some kind of a content strategy, a content plan, where there website is being regenerated regularly with things that Google will like. I am sure you do a lot of that for your clients. What would you say is the right type of content that a dentist should be using. Sometimes I think with a customer that maybe uses a practice twice a year or once to three times a year depending on their situation, do they really want to have a lot of content being delivered to them from their dentists? How many times should I be in touch with my patients? It kind of seems like a delicate balance between over communicating and under communicating, right?

Wendy Phillips: Right. Nobody says, “I want more content in my inbox,” right? This goes back to the surveys. This could be a very good time to ask patients what challenges they face, and what questions they consistently have? Also ask your team the same thing. I will get off the phone and have fifteen new emails in my inbox. If one of those emails was from a dentist that I know, and it was about what to do if you have a little bit of sensitive under a filling and I have that happening right now. That would be timely, and I would open it up and read it. That is not just some content that they have pushed on to me. They are actually answering a question that is on my mind right now. You won’t be able to answer every question that is on everyone’s mind every time you land in their inbox, but the basic formula is keep it educational. Educational never promotional and paper the world with it. When you have done a really good job answering a question with a nice piece of content put it on your blog, website, email, and social media with your community.

Reese Harper: That is great.

Wendy Phillips: I’ll add too Reese, quickly, it can help tremendously to pull together an editorial calendar. That way when you do that market research and get questions and challenges and concerns from patients. Then you ask the team, “what questions do you hear from patients?” Write them all down on a spreadsheet that is a shareable document that your team and the marketing team can access. Then when it comes time to write a piece of content than you can access the document and decide which of these great questions you want to address. You can write a 300 word article about sensitivity under a filling.

Reese Harper: I think that is really good. I have a lot of clients that are dentists. I would think that I would be on more of their newsletters, if they had them. Even the dentist that I visit though, I have probably been to ten or twelve dentists over the last 15-20 years and I don’t think that I have received any really targeted content from anyone. I imagine that I am not the only person out there thinking that.

Wendy Phillips: Ya, again, one of those things that it is not difficult. It is certainly something that you need help with. You will want a front office person to spearhead the actual writing, but when you do it, just by virtue of doing it, you automatically stand out from everyone else who is out there.

Reese Harper: Even if it is just as simple as people now remember that you are the dentist that they need to go to when the time comes up. That is enough of a seed planted in their mind, that when they need to go they will remember that you are the person that keeps sending them the information that is highly educational and valuable. I think it is so crucial.

Wendy Phillips: Bigger than that they will remember, “Oh, I should refer my dentist.”

Reese Harper: I have one last question that has popped in my mind that I want to run by you. Is there an expectation, some businesses when they look at a market they say, “my market is this big, so I should be able to get this many people from a good marketing program.” They have a market penetration goal, or a percentage of market they are trying to get. How do you translate that into a dentist’s world? When they are thinking about where they live and what is possible of a good marketing program. I don’t know if you look at a radius in your city? Then say it is not realistic that people will visit you if they are further than this radius in an area where there are a lot of dentists. But if you are rural, it is more likely that they could go to you. Do you have a goal where you are trying to get to a certain percentage of the population and I can do that if I have a good marketing program or how do you think about goal setting as it relates to a specific location?

Wendy Phillips: The way that we consult our practices is to have them tell us what they want. In a perfect world what is it that you want? The Pankey Institute teaches that when you stand in your truth, or in your true calling in dentistry, they will come. So if you say, “my goal is to be the implant dentist de jour in this total area,” or I have worked with practices where their goal is to have people fly in to see them, and they do! Once the dentist decides that and then communicates it to the appropriate people, meaning the team and the marketing, than we say the sky’s the limit. Certainly if you are looking at buying a practice than you want to look at the demographics and the competition. If you want to be the implant dentist in Denver, for example you’ll have to know a few things. Denver is a very saturated market and there is a lot of competition here on the street and online for implant dentistry. You can make some choices head on around where you want to be to create that Blue Ocean strategy if it were, which is a great book by the way. What it comes down to, Reese, it all comes down to communication. When the doctor is crystal clear on his or her vision and makes that crystal clear to the team and really inspires them around that vision and deploys the marketing that matters most to the practice, the patients will come. They will come from far beyond a five mile radius. Don’t limit yourself.

Reese Harper: That is great insight. You have covered so many great topics today. It has been insightful for me to be able to gain from your perspective and to share all of your experience. As we wrap up let’s leave people with any parting thoughts from marketing and what we can let them go with.

Wendy Phillips: Sure, more that anything, do it. You wouldn’t want to stop breathing, so whatever marketing you are doing is better than no marketing. Take the simple step of surveying your patients and asking them how they are consuming marketing and what they are paying attention to. Resist the temptation to assume that others are just like you. Be courageous to try some things that your target market is clamoring for and keep at it. Just keep going. Never give up.

Reese Harper: Thank you, Wendy. You have really given us a lot to contemplate. This will be a great resource for people to listen to for years to come. Thanks for you time. We will have all of your information in our show notes including your contact info. and web content. We will just let you go and get back to your busy day. We look forward to having you again on the show, soon.

Wendy Phillips: Great, thanks so much, Reese. I appreciate it.

Reese Harper: Thanks, Wendy, Bye.

Practice Management