Navigating Dental Marketing: Insights from Pain-Free Dental Marketing – Episode #575

On this episode of the Dentist Money Show, Eric Hubbard and Andre Santos from Pain-Free Dental Marketing join Ryan to talk about their journey in the dental marketing industry. They discuss the challenges of marketing for dental practices, the importance of authenticity, and understanding patient needs.They review current marketing trends, how to track marketing effectiveness, and misconceptions surrounding effective marketing. Learn how you can make your practice’s marketing and patient engagement strategies more effective.

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Podcast Transcript

Intro: Hey everybody, welcome back to another illustrious episode of the Dentist Money Show, where we help dentists make smart financial decisions. Today we’re talking marketing with Eric and Andre from Pain Free Dental Marketing. The big question for me today was, what does marketing even mean? What are the pitfalls?

What are the common mistakes? What’s going on in the industry now, 2024? My thanks to Eric and Andre, Pain Free Dental Marketing. If you have any questions for us, go to dentistsadvisors. com. Click the book free consultation button. Let’s have a chat. Thanks for being here. Enjoy the show.

Ryan Isaac: Thanks for joining me today, guys. We really appreciate it. We got Andre and Eric from Pain Free Dental Marketing and yeah. Where are you guys recording from? Where are you at by the way?

Eric Hubbard: We’re about, you know, six feet from each other, but no, we’re in, we’re in Dallas, area.

Ryan Isaac: , cool. So you guys are down in Dallas, in the proper Metro or there’s like, where do I always end up Dallas Fort Worth or Frisco?

I always end up at Frisco for

Eric Hubbard: Frisco is great. Yeah. Every, you know, you can hit a seven iron from dental office to dental office in Frisco, but no, we’re down the street. We’re right by the airport. Grapevine.

Ryan Isaac: Oh, okay. Cool. And one more, piece of Dallas trivia that I recently got to experience was, a banker who had connections to, Is it called the Cowboys club, the restaurant at their practice facility? Do you know what I’m talking about?

I I’m not like Cowboys lore. I don’t know. I don’t know all this stuff, so forgive me, but we went to that restaurant and it was really, really, really cool. It’s so good. And just seemed very, very private, very elite, not my normal taco stand. You know, which one I’m talking about at the

practice

Eric Hubbard: I don’t even know about it. So it, it,

Andre Santos: Yeah,

Ryan Isaac: It was someone I knew who knew someone so that’s how it worked out It was a beautiful facility. I was surprised. We went there on a I think a Friday night and A couple high school teams were playing at the indoor practice facility.

It was just Gigantic off the charts huge for high school football on a Friday night, you know, I was surprised but I guess that’s Dallas That’s Texas from what I understand. So well cool Andre and Eric You know, I’d love to hear kind of an intro of, who you guys are, what you do, and our audience does like to hear the story of how you got your business started, where you began, you know, our audience are mostly entrepreneurs in the dental space.

And, it’s always an interesting story to hear how people began. So either one of you guys take it away. Who are you and where did this all begin for you guys?

Eric Hubbard: Yeah, thanks Ryan, I’ll take this one. Andre and I, we’ve known each other for a long time. you know, my wife is from Brazil. Andre is from Brazil. And, you know, we were working at GameStop and I had, my wife would make some Brazilian food now and again, and I would bring it. And, you know, at some point this, this random guy walks over and is like, what do you got there?

And it, it started this conversation that became, you know, an amazing partnership and relationship. But the company really began. to go back to the, the good story versus the real story is, I grew up in the middle of, red dirt, Oklahoma, and, had all the, you know, my parents had all the problems that you have in growing up in rural America as it relates to, oral health.

And, once my mom reached about 50, this was back in 2000, 2000, 2001 era, she developed cancer. Now she was going through chemo. There was this dentist who just got put in her path for a very specific purpose and You know, she’d always struggled with her smile And you know was never very happy with it And as she got into chemo and some of the bone loss associated and things she began to have more challenges and this dentist His name is john barosso.

He’s still around still a client. He literally just He would go sit with her during chemo, man. he would make partials. he was just constantly working to keeping her smiling through a time that she didn’t have a lot, you know, going for, for, and, you know, she ended up passing away and he was incredibly benevolent and always so kind.

And she was really just a patient to him. Right. I mean, just, just, just a patient, right. But, you know, not a family friend didn’t, you know, she didn’t teach his kids, anything like that. And, that was in 2001. Fast forward to 2014 and, you know, stitch in the story of me and Andre meeting between there.

And we had done, marketing for Procter Gamble. Andre and I worked at GameStop at the time, building the mobile apps and some other stuff, consumer facing things. And I was getting a crown prepped and John was behind me and just saying, Hey, what are you working on?

And He started talking about how over the last 14 years, you know, in that gap that I didn’t see him for a while, you know, he had gone through some personal challenges. He had fallen out of love with dentistry. he had start taking every insurance in the world to keep patients, the technologies passed him by.

I mean, he had these real world challenges and he said, you know, man, if you could just help me, I’d appreciate it. I mean, of course I was going to help him. Right. I mean, how can you not help that guy that meant so much to my mom. And so I called Andre and was like, Hey, there’s this guy that needs our help.

And, you know, I I’d like to really help him, can you help me do some on the technology side? And we really just ran that practice on the side as kind of a side hustle for a while. And at some point one client became three and three became 10 and 10 became 12. And next thing you know, you know, here we are 10 years later and the staff of 38.

But I really believe that John was put in my mom’s path and then I was put in John’s path for very specific reasons, but that’s how the company got formed and

Ryan Isaac: man.

Eric Hubbard: we’ve tried to stay true to the tenants of helping the solo practitioners. we don’t do a lot of work with, private equity back DSOs.

Our goal is to come in. And be the marketing team to give them best in breed marketing. Just keep them current from SEO to social media, to good websites, to all the way into the phone skills. And we want to plug in and just be amazing partners and just handle their marketing.

Ryan Isaac: Yeah. I’m always, curious what people’s first impressions were when you got into the dental space, trying to do this service for them. does anything stand out to you as like, well, this is a unique industry or, you know, it’s really cool in some ways or challenging in some ways. What was your, some of your first impressions as you got into it, started doing the work?

Andre Santos: So as Eric mentioned, my background was technology. I was a software engineer. I never thought about marketing or anything like that. So when we first started working with John, I approached it the same way that I approach every other, every other problem in technology and trying to figure out, okay, what is my ideal state and where am I now?

And how do I get there? And I think what stood out to me in the early days was, All of the assumptions that I made as far as what should work, or what I researched in terms of ad campaigns, or whether it be Google or Facebook, all those things, it didn’t really work the same way that it worked at GameStop.

You know, at GameStop we had user flow diagrams of What is the user journey for a 17 year old that can’t see mature content, for example, versus their parents versus the 35 year old gamer that spends a lot more money on games than the 16 year old. Like we thought some of these things would apply. And I think two things were different.

Number one, I think in dentistry, we’re often talking to the dentist, of course, about what the marketing should be, but they themselves are really, really far away from. The person that the market is supposed to work on, right? In the sense that they’re usually not in the age demographic range. They are not in the income bracket, but we were taking their lead on what they thought looks good or sounded good or the marketing should be.

So pretty early on, we had to figure out how do we do the things that work. But while trying to match their tastes or taking the advice from them. And I think that was challenging. I think the second part of it was really challenging early on was that at an e com like GameStop, it was very clear on this ad campaign drove this visitor that drove this add to cart action with this dollar amount to a checkout to an ROI on.

I spent this much and I got this much in return as we’re in dentistry. I still don’t understand why that is, but there was like this adversion to online scheduling or any sort of technology, it’s like the most archaic industry that I’ve ever encountered in sense that in the early days, when we were working out of the house, I actually use my technology background and I tried to build some APIs to connecting to open dental or, dentrics, and it’s just really, really dated.

So all that adds up to a lack of visibility in terms of. As compared to what I was used to at GameStop, knowing what happens after that phone call in dentistry, you’re flying blind after that. So there was a lot of learnings in those days, but I’d say those two things, the, advertising piece, you’re taking the lead from not the people that we need to reach and there’s just lack of visibility.

Ryan Isaac: yeah, interesting, Eric,

Eric Hubbard: think That plays a big role in today’s problems that dentists face because there’s ambiguity in how to determine effective marketing ROI. there’s, two predominant paths that dentists either feel they’re either fear sold based on, your site’s going to, Google’s going to punish you or you’re never going to rank again, or you’re never going to know their patient, or I can guarantee you 37 patients.

If you just spend 20, 000 on Google ads and the lack of ambiguity leads to a lot of bad behavior in the marketplace. The truth of the matter is, it’s no different than every patient who walks in the door, every office is going to be unique in that a very high end fee for service office in a really great area.

Google ads may not perform as well as really quality user generated content where. PPO driven office, Google ads may kill it. And, so, well, you can develop playbooks around how to handle the age of the dentist, how long they’ve been in practice, the socio economic area they’re in and things like this.

Every practice in every dentist, because their focus is different, does need a very unique approach to the strategy of marketing. And when you fall into either the fear base or the, I can guarantee you 38 new patients a month, if you just, if you just follow this one simple rule, you know, you, you start to get into some dicey behavior.

Ryan Isaac: yeah. It’s usually the one simple rule they don’t want you to know.

Eric Hubbard: Yeah,

Ryan Isaac: that’s interesting. Thanks for that. thanks for the backstory. I always find those fascinating. what gets people into this industry and what they find when they get in here to our business is really similar and started in something kind of adjacent and dipped our toe in a dentistry and then dove in and it was, Huge learning experience and really interesting and fascinating and exciting and frustrating and all those things.

So that’s really cool. I think a lot of what our audience likes to hear around marketing are usually what’s current, what’s working, what’s not working, maybe blind spots they might have, uh, places the average dentist is not. considering how marketing could help or where they might be falling behind or mistakes they made, anything around that area.

Curious if we could dive into that, or anything else that’s like top, really top of mind for you guys right now that you’re seeing out there as you work with so many offices around the country.

Andre Santos: Yeah. So, I’ll give you two or three and I’ll see what Eric got. But I think for me, number one is the average dentist. When we tell them that you’re going to have to generate content for marketing, they get anxiety. They don’t want to be on camera. they don’t know what to say. They don’t know, you know, they don’t want to do tick tock dances, all of that anxiety.

Right. And I think they over, yeah, like that. And I think they make it in their head. Like it’s something really, really difficult and you have to be funny or you have to be busy. You have to do that. But I think that the number one overlooked thing is that the average patient. They really have no idea if you’re clinically average or mediocre or phenomenal.

They’re going to judge whether that doctor is the right doctor for them based on gut feeling on how does this, how do you sound? How do you look and feel in the practice? And so I think if doctors would just focus on putting themselves out there exactly as they are, don’t try to be someone else. Don’t try to copy anybody else’s content.

Just take any question that a patient has ever asked you from, um, Does it hurt to how long is it going to take to how much the cost and talk about it enough in a casual setting using your phone, for example, because what we’re seeing that’s a really big shift from 10 years ago, for example, is that the more authentic and sort of raw and unfiltered content is the more trust it has, and the more connection it builds with patients, and this is only going to get more authentic.

Important as we are now able to generate really, really realistic videos, for example, using AI. You know, when we started doing marketing, we invested a lot of time and energy on production value. You’d bring crews with expensive cameras and lighting, trying to get this really polished product because we thought that would elevate our clients against your competition.

But as time has gone on and people are now just so saturated with advertising, the moment that a patient can see that it’s an ad on their feed, They scroll right past it. So you have to go the opposite way now and you have to make it look like it’s just a regular person, selfish style talking and sharing the secrets of their trade with, with people one on one and that kind of content performs so much better than any sort of scripted planned advertising piece.

So I think that’s, to me, the biggest shift

Ryan Isaac: can I just jump in there too? I, I like the idea of, let’s say you have two dentists, let’s say one of them is very, Plugged in social media friendly. They like TikTok dances. They like doing skits there. They, they feel like they’re charismatic, funny, off the cuff people. And then let’s take a dentist that might be a little bit more, maybe quieter, more introverted.

Let’s say they really love to intellectualize, the craft of dentistry, the art of dentistry. They really like the clinical. They like to speak. to the clinical side of dentistry in a very scientific way. You’re saying both of those people don’t need to be each other. They can just show up and be who they are.

They just have to be who they are, engage with their audience, talk to their people in a very normal selfie style, cell phone video, answering a simple question in 30 seconds or less. I think the average time that we, sit on a video is like 30 seconds. Six seconds on average it’s quick. so you’re saying that, there’s not one personality type that works, it’s just a matter of doing it and probably doing it frequently and consistently.

Andre Santos: 1000%. In fact, you know, we actually had a client for some time in New York that his content was super engaging. It was entertaining. We had tens of thousands of followers, but when we first started engaging with them, his words were, yes, there’s a lot of engagement, but I’m not actually driving growth from this because it became an entertainment sort of account, right?

People, people from all over the country are following the account and engaging that way, which prompts the algorithm to. Chase more people like them, but they weren’t even people in his state to be able to become a patient. Right. And I think the other piece of it is Ryan is that when you talk about the things that you care about and you’re passionate, number one, people can feel that that’s authentic.

and number two, it attracts people who are like that, who care about that and who resonate with that, which are ultimately who you want in your practice anyways. Right. because just think of like, I don’t know, you sell really luxury The goal isn’t to get everybody to come do a test drive because not everybody can afford that.

You need the people who can afford and care and value those things. So if you are that quieter dentist, talk about in a way that you would talk to your patients about the procedures and answer frequently asked questions. Talk about the difference between Snap on dentures and all in fours and who is it for.

It can, because people are gonna connect with you and understand how you approach it. Because to learn about a procedure, you can go to WebMD or, you know, somewhere else. It’s not about

Ryan Isaac: Will tell you, yeah.

Andre Santos: Right, right. But I think the nugget here is that if you look around, Google Dentist near me right now, as you’re listening to this podcast, pull up any dentist that shows up nearby you, click on their site, and tell me how many videos you find.

I’d be willing to bet 20 bucks. If you find one, that’s an anomaly. Most people aren’t out there at all. So the fact that you are doing anything, you’re giving people a chance to hear your voice, and see your demeanor, and just connect with you, that’s where the magic is. It’s much less about the actual topic.

It’s giving people a chance to feel like they know you before they’ve ever met you.

Ryan Isaac: That’s awesome.

Eric Hubbard: Yeah, just to build on what Andre was saying. The best videos that we see perform is the dentist holding a phone starting at the front door right and walking the prospective patient through the practice there’s something about you’re getting to see them you’re getting to see the personality and you’re getting to see what through the eyes of a patient and For me that’s one that I want every office to go through is I want them to pause and not see the practice as their place of work, not see the practice as the dental office.

I want them to schedule a new patient exam and go into the practice, park where the patients park, walk in the way they walk in, look at, pay attention to the way the rooms look, pay attention to the way the doors work, pay attention to being escorted back. the better we can get ourself into. the patient experience through their eyes and free ourselves of, you know, this is my job.

And I told them they needed a, you know, 2, 000 implant, abutment and crown. Why don’t they just pay for it? Well, gosh, I mean like the average American does not run around with 2, 000 in free capital. Right. And seeing that through the eyes of the patient can help really hone the things to talk about, because even though, yeah, you answer these questions all the time.

Every prospective patient has the same five or 10 questions when they come into the door and answering those in a way that reflects your style is incredibly powerful.

Ryan Isaac: Yeah. I like that the message of authenticity and let people see you. That resonates a lot with me in this business. we’ve been around for about 17 years and we probably saw our highest trajectory of growth and engagement, especially nationwide, when we started the podcast, which I know alienated some people.

Some people listen and they’re like, you guys are so annoying. I don’t like the way you talk or look or sound or the things you think about and say, which is great because. The other side of that is the people who go, Oh, now I’m comfortable. most people who call and engage with us are people who have engaged with our content already at an arm’s length, and they already know how we sound and the way we think and philosophy and the way we work.

And it’s, and it’s not polished. It’s not perfect, by any means, but I really love that because you just try to be yourself and speak your mind and give as much like help and education as you can to the community and. The people who are going to be your best patients or customers will engage with you.

So I like, I like that message. I was curious as you guys are talking about this, the barriers to dentists getting involved in doing more effective marketing. We talked about the reluctance to want to do social media or, you know, create content. What about the reluctance to pay for marketing? Do you run into that a lot?

Is that a, is that an issue across the country?

Eric Hubbard: It is. And I don’t know, just like in anything in life, it’s what are they value and what do they want? Most of our offices, Ryan are spending somewhere between three and 6 percent of their collections on marketing.

Um, 3 percent in a competitive space is probably table stakes to stay relevant.

6 percent if you’re adding an associate at a lot of dentists are adding a tarot’s or a cone beams and they want to start getting into new procedures. that requires a different budget, but 3 to 6 percent is, pretty normal for what we see. Now, if You take the average book.

There’s a whole lot of offices, not even spending 1%. Now we’re going to get into what is marketing is sponsoring a T ball team. No, that’s not marketing. I mean, there’s a lot of things on that PNL line that are not in fact marketing. But, when it comes to having a great website every, you know, five, seven, eight years, when it comes to making sure your brand is represented, it comes to doing a photo shoot to make sure your team’s well represented.

Those things take, take time, energy, and money. And. as the DSOs come in and I forgot the number, but Heartland is investing a massive amount, you know, I want to say 20, 000 a month in, in DeNovo’s. And that’s a massive spend. And you’re starting to see this separation between the have and the have nots in dentistry, the people that are becoming great leaders, great CEOs, developing cultures in the organization.

They’re starting to invest in marketing and separate from the pack, if you will. and the competition has brought about this heightened awareness. And the truth of the matter is there’s enough patients out there for everyone. You’re not competing with other dentists. You’re competing with your own bias of what marketing is.

and maybe a fear of how you’re represented. Those are really the barriers today. 3 percent of collection sounds like a lot of money, but when you start getting into listening to the phone calls and articulate working with the front desk around how to bring these patients in and the scheduling around it’s really not a big, a big number.

it’s our own bias of what marketing is that we’re fighting against.

Ryan Isaac: Yeah, Andre.

Andre Santos: I was gonna say, In the doctor’s defense, I do empathize with them from the perspective of oftentimes they have been burned, right? They spent some money and they really weren’t sure what they got for it. I think there’s, you know, with globalization, so to speak, you can get marketing for 1. 99 a month out of, you know, a third world country and you have no idea what is it that you’re actually getting.

And so I, can relate not being a professional in the space, not being able to differentiate what is better about. Spending 3 percent versus spending 300 bucks. I can see why they feel hesitant on that as well So I think it you know on our side as a matter of education and communication So that they feel you know, confident This is going to yield return right because obviously a thousand dollars that yields nothing is way more expensive than 3, 000 or 5, 000 that yields 20 grand in return, right?

So I think that’s the challenge that we have is that education piece as well.

Ryan Isaac: Yeah, I’m glad you said that. I know you both do and, empathize with them. I mean, since, maybe 2021 or so, the PNLs on most and dental practices have gone up 10 percent just on people costs. we all know what overhead has been doing in a lot of industries and businesses. So yeah, you can see where, you know, especially in an office that’s maybe in a growth area or community where it feels like a lot of natural.

Walk in business is happening. Maybe the need doesn’t feel like it’s very urgent to get there, but I actually want to go to the thing Eric just said. I think this is a fascinating topic, which is what is marketing? What does that even mean? is it a billboard on the T ball stadium down the street?

Is it, you know, in Texas, is it a. hundred foot LCD screen of the local football team.

Eric Hubbard: That’d be nice.

Ryan Isaac: Yeah, it would be nice. What is marketing? Yeah. Can you guys talk to that? And maybe what are some of the misconceptions and maybe even where the focus should be on what is marketing?

Eric Hubbard: This is a perfect Andre question.

Ryan Isaac: Okay.

Andre Santos: all right. So I think at a high level, I’d say marketing is any engagement that you have with a prospective patient. At any time at any touch point with the patient you’re marketing to them Whether it be on your social media, it would be on your website. It can be on the phone call you know to the patient experience, one of the things that I would always Anyone listening if you’re thinking about spending money on marketing?

I think the first question you need to ask yourself is how are you handling the patients you already have? Right in the sense that we know that if our practice is healthy They usually get about 50 percent of their new patients every month from existing patient referrals. When that’s not happening, that’s an immediate red flag that they have some operational challenge, in which case spending money on advertising on ads.

Isn’t going to take them to the promised land because internally there was something not there again, whether it’s, you know, the phone experience or the, the patient experience, and that makes it challenging to make any sort of external advertising piece work. But I know the spirit of the question wasn’t all of the things that are marketing more specifically, you know, what is good advertising things are going to return on investment in the short to medium term, I think my number one advice would be looking at their Google listing.

posting to it, make sure you have good reviews, make sure you have videos and photos because that is the number one driver of new patients for dental practice, just because that’s where most patients start their journey. It’s on Google and having good reviews helps with. showing up higher and the social proof that this is a phenomenal practice.

A lot of other people like me are having good experience there. And so I’ll start there. Then I think this is where the first fork in the road happens in like Eric was saying earlier, if you’re in a really high end area, the traditional pay per click Google ads works a lot less often than in a low income area.

And I think it’s easy to sort of connect the dots to get there in the sense that If you’re looking to spend a lot of money on dentistry, you’re not going to type Dentist near me and just pick the first person. Like you require more selling. So to speak, you want to know what the office looks like. You want to know what kind of person you’re going to be engaging with.

And this is where that authentic content that we talked about earlier comes into play. And so once you have a good website, that’s mobile friendly, there’s another sort of constant that we see the majority of practices as they’re going through the website building journey. Their development team is on the desktop and the doctor is looking at it on the desktop.

But guess what Ryan over 80 percent of the website traffic is on mobile devices

Ryan Isaac: Yeah. Yeah. It’s almost annoying these days to search something on my computer. Like I would rather pick up my phone on a small screen and a little thumb keyboard. Yeah. It’s so weird. That’s true.

Andre Santos: Especially because you know, you’re going to do business on that phone Anyways, you’re going to call to book an appointment. You’re not doing massive research here, right? so but once if that’s in place, this is where the advertising piece comes into play now, it’s Trying to get people who have not been to the practice yet To know the kind of person you are, the kind of office you are, the kind of team culture you have.

And this is where using Facebook, if you’re an older, you’re targeting an older population. Instagram, if you’re targeting a younger demographic. We’re actually having quite a bit of success now with YouTube campaigns. As more and more people cut cable, they’re going to subscription services like YouTube TV, and this is a great platform at a really low cost to get people to watch your own video talking about, you know, those questions of dentistry that you care about.

Um, I think after that, the next piece of advice in terms of what we focus on marketing wise is the form. You know, as I mentioned earlier, very few offices have true online scheduling. And so the majority of the new patients are coming through a phone call. And this always boggles my mind in that most practices they pick like The least educated, the most junior person, sort of whoever they could find, and they put them on the, on the phones.

But when in reality, that person is the first impression of the practice, they’re controlling the schedule, they’re often engaged with the billing and insurance piece. So I think that person needs to be elevated in the practice and make sure that they feel invested in the success of the business.

Because if they don’t, what we see is that the phone rings, They have a patient right in front of them. There’s someone trying to check out the doctors asking for something. That new patient phone call is just more work. And, you know, if they’re not,

Ryan Isaac: aren’t there some pretty big statistics on the amount of phone calls that go unanswered?

Eric Hubbard: Massive, massive.

Andre Santos: I want to say 25 30 percent of them was a week track straight up unanswered. So you can mentally think about you spend 1000 and you just lit 300 of it on fire because, you know, what it be rolling launches or, you know, and these are not all after hours either. That’s usually the first The first pushback I get is no, no, there must be another weekend or don’t worry, we call every patient back.

But the thing

is, we see maybe 15 percent of voicemail rates. Go ahead, Eric.

Ryan Isaac: Wow.

Eric Hubbard: Yeah. And Ryan, it’s easy to say if you’re, if, you know, I can imagine Dentist being like, not my team, my team, great. We work with amazing offices and the, and these are folks that, you know, are going to Coyce. They’re going to these incredible study clubs. They’re getting leadership training.

They have coaching and their teams are still missing a lot of these calls and, and. It’s just the fact that when the office gets busy, the phone becomes a distraction.

Ryan Isaac: Mm.

Eric Hubbard: and that’s bad. And, you know, every company has their dirty little secrets, right? the things, you know, they don’t want you to know.

It is wildly frustrating to have a dentist invest three, four, five, you know, percent, you know, five, six, 8, 000, maybe a month. And to have marketing fall down just because the phones aren’t answered

Ryan Isaac: Oh, yeah. yeah.

like the lowest possible hanging fruit is,

Eric Hubbard: right. And, and, and the, the truth of the matter is, you know, I’m going to take you back to high school or, or, you know, psychology one on one think of the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs,

Ryan Isaac: Right, yeah.

Eric Hubbard: Okay. if you’re not responding to reviews, if you don’t have a review management system, a website and a good front desk,

Ryan Isaac: Mm.

Eric Hubbard: That’s just the base of the pyramid. If you don’t have that, don’t, don’t call me. Right. I mean, you know, again, like, I’m just going to be wasting your time and, and, you know, I’m going to be wasting your money and my time.

I think if we can get you a good website and you can get the culture of your front desk kind of honed in and, you know, we’re going to respond to reviews for you. Now you can get into some of those things that Andre was talking around, around what’s your story and how do we get it out.

And once you have that second level of pyramid, then you can get into, now I want implant cases. Now I want cosmetic cases, but you know, for us, having an office come to us, just say, no, I just want cosmetic cases. It’s like, well, okay, but I’m going to have to build the base of this pyramid up and it starts with the culture of this admin team.

Because a PPO practice, if you just have to say, do you take my insurance? Yes or no, that’s an order taker and it’s fine. They, they deserve to be taken care of. I’m not, you know, but the biggest barrier to joining your practice is in fact about the insurance, yes or no, where when you’re getting into fee for service, which most of our offices are doing, the culture of that admin team is changing into, it is a true sales role around whoa, whoa, whoa, Ryan, tell me before we get into the insurance question.

What are you, what’s going on? why are you calling me today? Help me understand what you think you need. And trying to do that under duress of patients in front of you under I’ve got all these holes to fill in hygiene and these calls to make is incredibly challenging. And that is an area of the practice that most dentists have tend to have a blind spot to because they’re trying to save a couple bucks.

And in reality, it’s just, it is having a cascading effect on their marketing in a negative manner.

Ryan Isaac: Yeah. Thanks for sharing those two things as you’re both talking. I’m wondering the question, is there a tracking problem in marketing as well? it seems like there’s a lot of things you need to be organized about and tracking well in order to know what’s even. What’s even working? Where are people calling from?

What, what happens after that? Is that hard for dentists on top of all the other million things they have to keep tabs on in a practice? It’s just tracking the results of marketing.

Andre Santos: I think it goes back to the question on culture. I think, yes, there’s a tracking problem in the sense of, if we’re talking about technology driven tracking, whether it’s something like call rail or another platform, that’s going to track phone calls or something that integrates into the PMS, you can get really complicated with tracking, but it doesn’t have to be.

It can’t be as simple as agreeing with your admin team member that every time the phone rings, you’re going to ask them, how did you hear about us and you’re going to write down their name. And at the month, you’re going to balance that list against all the patients you got. Like, it can be simple. Now, simple doesn’t mean easy to do, like Eric was saying.

If there’s all this chaos in that practice, you’re probably not going to get to build a rapport and asking all these questions, you’re going to just cut through the path of these resistance. But I think it can be simple. And, you know, obviously we sell marketing for a living and we’re trying to make people’s lives easier.

That’s why we call it pain free. See what I did there. But, you know, I think, but I think it can be a lot easier. Like you don’t need somebody like us to have success in your, in your marketing. If you follow those simple things of, Yes, make sure that your admin team member is supported and they’re invested and committed to the success of the practice so that they want to ask those questions because they care and they want to take care of that patient.

They want to take care of the business, right? I think step two is putting yourself out there in any way, shape or form. The only failure is not doing it, whether it’s be via Instagram or Facebook or the website, but just try to tell your story, talk about what you care about, interview your own team members, or answer some questions that your patients get on video so that it can be out there and then make sure it’s out there.

And it can be as easy as posting organically on your own Facebook and Instagram. if you’re not super technology adverse, you know, click the boost button, at least get Get some traction. You’ll see which content people are reacting to and watching, and then you can do more of that.

Now, obviously, from that layer of simplicity, you can get a lot more precise in terms of targeting and demographic and geography and all those things. But you know, this is where someone like us comes in. But I think if you do those things and then to close it to close the full circle when someone is in the practice, Make sure that they feel like they’re the most important person in the practice today.

So when they leave, they tell a couple of people about how different it was at this visit than any of the other visits they had before. That way that can turn into a couple more patients and believe it or not, as simple as it sounds, most people aren’t doing those things and they could have a lot of success.

Ryan Isaac: Makes sense. Yeah. Thank you. I’m still thinking about something you said earlier, Andre, about, I think you said 50 percent of new patients in a healthy practice come from referrals without the right statistic. And that if that’s not happening, which again means you’d have to be tracking that some, some way, but if that’s not happening, then spending a bunch of money on maybe ads or, or things externally or not.

It’s not going to fix the real problem inside. thanks for sharing. Eric, any other, things you’d bolt onto that? Any, final words of, marketing wisdom here? And I think we’re leaving a lot on the table to do another, follow up episode on this, again soon, but anything you’d add to that, Eric?

Eric Hubbard: Just that we’ve seen the market shift, DSOs and the high investment they’re making in marketing has raised the stakes of all of it. And, you know, if you’re talking to a marketing team that sells one thing, It’s tough. Cause you know, if you, you know, postcards are the great example of, you know, the old postcard guys, when postcards didn’t work, you know what, you know what the answer was buy more postcards.

Ryan Isaac: Okay. Do more.

Eric Hubbard: Uh, yeah, just do more. And I think that gets really challenging in today’s and a marketer would call it multi channel attribution. Right. and all that is, that’s really just a fancy way of saying the days of me saying, Hey, Ryan, I go to this dermatologist, you should go. Right. You’re probably not just going to call.

You’re going to look at, Oh, gosh, I wonder what, you know, okay. Eric had XM. Okay. Well, how I have XM. So great. okay. Now I associate my, what I want. Now I’m going to go do research on, do I think that has my challenge in life? Okay. so what you’re doing is you’re getting referral, but then you’re validating it against the reviews.

You’re looking at the website. You may look on social media. You know, you said you mentioned your phone. That’s happening today in dentistry and outside of your wife telling you to call a practice You’re probably doing some attribution in other channels and we’re seeing this rising tide raise us all ships You don’t have to be cute and amazing on social media you do have to have a presence and You do have to have a website that looks good and you do need to have your reviews responded to And there are simply some table stakes to stay in the competitive You In the game in 2024 that didn’t exist five, six years ago.

and they’re out there today.

Ryan Isaac: yeah, in a follow up conversation, I’d love to talk about something else DSOs are doing, similar adjacent, which is the marketing around team members of recruiting and hiring, which is totally different than marketing for patients, but they they’ve also raised the stakes in

recruitment and, building a team.

So we could save that for part two.

Eric Hubbard: Yeah, no, to tease it up a bit. We’ve definitely now have practices say, can you start posting some of our cultural values to make us more appealing as an employer?

Ryan Isaac: Yeah. I

Andre Santos: We need a hygienist.

Ryan Isaac: when I said that.

Eric Hubbard: Need

Ryan Isaac: I just, we need, we need people.

Yeah.

where can people reach out? How do they reach out? Where do they find you? What can they expect from an interaction when they do reach out?

Andre Santos: Yeah, the easiest place is pain free dental marketing dot com. We are on all the channels you’d expect on Instagram, on Facebook, on YouTube. You know, as far as an interaction, we’d love to jump on a call and just give us some advice in terms of what we see in terms of marketing opportunity, you know, as friends of the podcast, so to speak, you know, it’s going to go to Time with you telling what we think the opportunities are and what we think even if you’re ready for marketing, right?

Because that’s the other thing like should you even be doing marketing at all? We should be going and taking care of these things first, you know, because for us, you know It’s there’s a little bit of self serving here in that I don’t want to take someone’s money if they if we don’t believe what we can and they are ready Grow from that because otherwise they get frustrated.

They feel like marketing doesn’t work. And so I think there’s sometimes a value is telling them why we shouldn’t be working together quite yet so that they can have success when they decide to do so. That’s

Eric Hubbard: Eric and Andre, Eric and Andre dental marketing, pain free Eric, dental marketing, if you can’t find your marketing team after Googling, we might not, you know what? Right. It might be a bad

Ryan Isaac: try too hard. You shouldn’t have to try too hard.

Eric Hubbard: You shouldn’t have to try too hard to find

Ryan Isaac: I’m going to also tease for part two, our audience of savvy and interested investors, heard you work for GameStop earlier in the conversation. They’re going to want to hear some GameStop lore. So we’ll save

that for part two as

Eric Hubbard: that that’s definitely part two, part two, part three.

Ryan Isaac: After hours. All right. Andrew, Eric, pain, free dental marketing. com. Thank you both so much for spending time and I’m sure we’ll do this again soon. Thanks you to all of you for tuning in and we’ll catch you next time on another episode of the Dentist money show. Bye bye now.

Andre Santos: Thanks so much, Ryan.

Keywords: Dental Marketing, Pain-Free Dental Marketing, marketing strategies, authenticity, patient engagement, marketing trends, tracking marketing

Finance 101, Practice Management, Work Life Balance