THE MILLIONAIRE DENTIST PODCAST

EPISODE 8: THE THREE MOST EFFECTIVE DIGITAL MARKETING TACTICS FOR YOUR DENTAL PRACTICE

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EPISODE 8: THE THREE MOST EFFECTIVE DIGITAL MARKETING TACTICS FOR YOUR DENTAL PRACTICE

Today’s episode of the Millionaire Dentist podcast is part three of a three-part series to help you get your website looking great. We have "web guru" Michael Reynolds, Spin Web Marketing, on to discuss easy to use techniques and tips. 

 

EPISODE 8 TRANSCRIPTION

Announcer:

Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Millionaire Dentist podcast, brought to you by Four Quadrants Advisory. On this podcast, we break down the world of dentistry finances and business practices, to help you become the millionaire dentist you deserve to be. Please be advised, we do speak with an honest tongue and may not be safe for work. Now here's your host, Alan Berry.

Alan Berry:

Hi, welcome to another episode of the Millionaire Dentist podcast. And we are on episode three of a three-part series about dental practice and web presence. And joining me again today is Michael Reynolds, of SpinWeb. How're you doing Michael?

Michael Reynolds:

Hey, hey Alan. Good to be back for our third segment. This has been fun.

Alan Berry:

Yeah. Yeah. So in case listeners weren't with us on the first two, tell me a little about you.

Michael Reynolds:

Sure. I am Michael Reynolds, CEO of SpinWeb. We're at spinweb.net. We're a digital agency, which means we build websites and help our clients with digital marketing. And we've been doing this for 21 years and we have a lot of healthcare clients, including dental practices.

Alan Berry:

Excellent. So we started off with asking, do you really need a website? I think we came back with a conclusion, yeah, pretty much you do. And then the next part was, how do you set that website up? So now I have my website up, but everybody keeps talking about, I need to be on social media.

Michael Reynolds:

Oh, social media, the times suck.

Alan Berry:

Yeah. So tell me a little bit about why I would even consider to be on social media and then maybe what platforms I should consider.

Michael Reynolds:

Sure. So social media in general, everyone's there, that's kind of the bottom line. I mean, I shouldn't say everyone, but for the most part. I mean, think of your network and your family and friends, is there anyone who's not on Facebook? Maybe one, I mean, if anybody. Everyone's on Facebook, so. So social media has become... I know you've got some... I don't want to jump too far ahead, but I mean, in general, social media has become one of the new default networks to connect and advertise on. So for example, TV. TV has been around forever. What do you do when you want to reach people? You run a TV commercial, that's been kind of the norm forever.

Michael Reynolds:

So you pay money and you run a commercial and reach people. Social media has kind of become that, but there are two interesting sides, which I'm sure you want to ask about. But one side is the organic side, which is kind of the general communication, and the other side is the advertising platform. And I've got a lot of... There are a lot of things you could do on both, but the advertising platform on social media has reached a point where it is overtaking effectiveness over traditional forums, like TV commercials, and radio now, which is very exciting because the evolution is kind of fun to watch, especially in my industry.

Alan Berry:

Yeah. I mean, cord cutting is definitely a growing thing. I know me and my wife, we watch less and less TV. And the TV that we do watch is DVR, we fast forward the commercials. So most of the time, the only time advertisers are probably going to get to me, is through some digital Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. That's usually where I see-

Michael Reynolds:

Yeah, I've got Netflix and Hulu with no commercials and yeah.

Alan Berry:

Right, right, right. And I don't see this trend ending. I mean, none of us like, really, commercials, so. So you said there's organic and then there's paid. And my understanding is, organic's basically free, but you're going to need to put in a lot of work into your platform. Paid is a little bit quicker, but you have to pay for it.

Michael Reynolds:

I want to kind of encapsulate this into three kind of learning objectives today, because I think that's a really good starting point for our audience to kind of wrap our minds around today. So the three learning objectives I want to talk about are, one is, some tips on how can you target new patients on Facebook? And I also want to talk about how to set up your website organically to get found properly. And then I also want to talk about paid search on Google as well. So there's three things that you can start investing in right away, that I feel will give you the most bang for your buck right away.

Alan Berry:

Before we get into that, can you tell me... So there's many different social media platforms out there-

Michael Reynolds:

Yeah, there's a ton.

Alan Berry:

Right. So do I need to be on all of them?

Michael Reynolds:

I would say no. I would say, I mean, some people kind of feel like, well, the kids are on Instagram and everyone else is on Facebook and Twitter seems like a thing and everyone feels like they have to be in all of these networks. I discourage people from trying to keep up with everything. I say, if you can keep up with one network and get good at that, that's fine. Do that. Don't feel guilt about missing out on something because you're never going to keep up.

Alan Berry:

Yeah. I agree that, 100%. And plus, social media is not as easy as just putting up a picture of your office and saying, hey, look at the office today. That's not really-

Michael Reynolds:

You can do that, it won't hurt anything.

Alan Berry:

You could, but I don't know that, that has a benefit to your customers. Your social media should have some benefit to them and on the organic side. So out of those platforms, let's maybe narrow it down to one. Which one do you think would really benefit our dentists?

Michael Reynolds:

Facebook, hands down.

Alan Berry:

Give me the organic and the paid. Give me your spiel on the-

Michael Reynolds:

Yeah. Yeah. So let's talk about Facebook. So of all the social networks, Facebook is the largest. It is the juggernaut. It is the one with the most mature advertising platform, and its population is bigger than the population of China. So it is the 800 pound gorilla in social networks. You cannot go wrong, typically, by investing in Facebook. So that being said, there's a lot you can do on Facebook. And Alan, you mentioned the organic versus the paids. So the organic means, organic posting on Facebook just means you go to your Facebook page for your dental practice and you post, like you said, a picture of your office maybe, or a picture of your staff in your staff photo or a smiling receptionist or something, or you're posting a picture that's a meme of a dental tip or health tip or something.

Michael Reynolds:

So you're just posting and you're hoping someone sees it. The problem with that is, it used to be a few years ago, many years ago actually, you could post something on your page and everyone who followed or liked that page, for the most part, would see it. But in recent years, Facebook has come out and transparently said, hey, guess what guys, we're a business. We're not a charity or a nonprofit. You have to pay us to see people now. And so you have to... When you post something organically on your Facebook page, maybe 5% of your followers may see it, maybe, if even that. And so organic becomes very tough to sustain as a strategy.

Alan Berry:

So, let me interrupt. I want to make sure people understand this and that I understand that. So you're saying that just because somewhere that I liked or a friend that I friended, if they post something on their wall, I don't necessarily see it?

Michael Reynolds:

No, we're not talking about profiles actually. So profiles are different. So you, Alan Berry has a profile, and me, Michael Reynolds has a Facebook profile. I'm a person on Facebook, so when I post something yeah, it's very likely that people I interact with frequently are going to see that stuff. It's kind of a lot of conversation visible to everybody. What I'm referring to is the actual business page. And so if you're a dental practice, ideally you want to make sure you have a Facebook business page set up, which is kind of a little landing page on Facebook for your business. And those pages have very little organic reach.

Alan Berry:

So if I like a dental practice or another business page, it doesn't mean automatically that I'm going to get one of their post when they post it.

Michael Reynolds:

That's exactly right. And I see so many dental practices or businesses in general saying, hey, like us on Facebook. It doesn't matter, honestly, it really doesn't. I mean, it may matter a little bit, but I mean, I don't recommend anyone put a lot of energy behind a campaign of trying to get your patients to like your dental practice on Facebook. It just is not going to make a huge difference.

Michael Reynolds:

Now, if you get 5,000 followers, which is unlikely, I mean yeah, maybe, but it's just not going to make a difference. So what that means is, before we get to paid advertising, the strategy I typically recommend for dental practices on Facebook organically is just, use it as a fun place for company culture. It's the best thing you can do because for one thing, that's the stuff that's going to get shared most often anyway. And two, it's not for lead generation, it's simply to kind of reinforce your website or your image to say, hey, if I'm doing research on these guys, I'm going to look at their practice page and they've got pictures of their office party and smiling people and fun tips. And it's just kind of a fun place. Don't overthink it, just use it as a fun place to just kind of get stuff out there.

Alan Berry:

So if I'm posting on my Facebook business page and I'm posting the party, the company culture, that type of stuff, that really doesn't lead to new clients, does it?

Michael Reynolds:

It can, but it's not as likely to lead to new clients as the stuff we're about to talk about. So if you're going to invest in getting new patients, invest in the advertising platform and use just the general organic posting as just fun, as just kind of company culture stuff. Now, as far as gaining new patients on Facebook, this is where it gets kind of fun because Facebook has the most advanced, the most mature advertising platform out of all those social networks. So remember when Facebook started, everybody signed up and put all their information in and over all these years, Facebook has been gathering information about all of us over and over and over. So Alan, they know how much money you make per year. They know obviously your gender, then your age. They know where you live. They know what you're interested in. They know when you're likely to buy a car next. They know when you last bought a house. They know where you're traveling. They know more than that, they know all kinds of... I'm freaking you out, aren't I?

Alan Berry:

A little bit.

Michael Reynolds:

Alan's face is like, oh, no.

Alan Berry:

Yeah, wow.

Michael Reynolds:

They know all that stuff, and that's because they've gathered it from things like your activity on Facebook and your connections, but they've also developed relationships with third-party data sources like Experian, for example, and data warehouses that gather all this type of information from your financial activity. And so by aggregating all that together, Facebook has a powerhouse platform of data on all of us, which is freakish if you think about it from the consumer perspective, but awesome when you think about it from a business perspective, because what does that mean? As a dental practice, you can target people very, very specifically.

Michael Reynolds:

So I'm going to come right out of the gate with the most default, best tip I can give dental practices right now on Facebook. And that is, to target people who are new to the area because when people move to a new city or a new town or a new area, what do they do? They need new stuff. They need maybe a new place to cut their hair, new bank maybe if they don't use a big online bank or whatever. They need other stuff, a new doctor, they also need a new dentist, right? Because you can't do remote dentistry. You need to find the new dentist in your area.

Michael Reynolds:

So on Facebook, you can develop campaigns to target people that have moved into the area in the last three to six months or whatever, and you can basically run entire campaigns focused on, hey, welcome to the neighborhood. We'd love to invite you into our open house that we do once a month, for example, or every two weeks, to meet our dental team, to meet our practice, to get some free goodies maybe, new toothbrush, whatever it is, maybe a teeth whitening package or something and whatever it is, you decide obviously. But something that you can do to invite new residents into your neighborhood and develop a relationship with them, because guess what? They're not going to get around to it for a while. So you've got some time, and eventually they're going to start asking, hey, who's your dentist or whatever. If you can reach them before they start getting other connections, then you have a chance to invite them into your practice as a patient.

Michael Reynolds:

If you target your audience very specifically and do this really well, you can pay pennies per click and you can run a campaign that says, hey, this is from... I'll go back to Lakeshore dentistry or whatever. Lakeshore dentistry welcomes you to the neighborhood. We have an open house coming up next week and click to our website to register or get information. And you might pay 50 cents for someone to click and come view that event. And let's say you get 1000 people to click and let's say 50 people or 25 people show up. That's a pretty good ROI, if you get some patients out of it, which once you've got them in your office, I mean right off the bat, you're probably doing pretty well.

Alan Berry:

Would Facebook be able to tell when you switch jobs? Because I understand-

Michael Reynolds:

Yes.

Alan Berry:

The residency thing is, there's already a workflow of figuring out when people move. Lots of people know how to do that. Other advertising platforms know how to do that. What's something that Facebook can do that other advertising platforms can not? And what I'm thinking of is job changes.

Michael Reynolds:

Yep, when your job changes.

Alan Berry:

Because typically with job changes means insurance plan changes. So you're saying that you could target people that have recently changed jobs, on Facebook?

Michael Reynolds:

Absolutely. Yep. In fact, I don't know the exact window of time, but I think the window of time I've seen most recently, is you can target anyone who's changed jobs in the past six months. You can target people with kids, so if you're a pediatric dentist, for example, you can target people with kids of certain age ranges or a certain number of kids in a household. You can also now target other members of the same household based on one person, so if you want to target a household, and let's say... I'm just going to use kind of a one common example, is maybe the father in the household changed jobs or moved in the area and maybe you don't have as much demographic information on the rest of the family, you can also target the wife and the kids' Facebook feeds, based on what you know about that person, because Facebook knows they live together.

Alan Berry:

Oh, wow.

Michael Reynolds:

I know it's like NSA stuff.

Alan Berry:

So really, the benefits over the old way is not only cost, but it's also, you can be more specific. You can really drill down into what you're-

Michael Reynolds:

It's the targeting, which is powerful.

Alan Berry:

Right. Right.

Michael Reynolds:

And if you want to, I know you guys talk... I mean, this is your world, obviously, cash practice, insurance, how you manage cash flow and everything. If you want to target people with certain net incomes or certain net worth, you can target them if you're looking for that type of clientele, if you're targeting maybe a lower income clientele, you can target them. You can target all sorts of in the middle. You can target people that have certain behaviors. If you're a fun kind of progressive kind of crazy dental practice, that's kind of like off the wall, you can target people with certain interests. If you're very kind of traditional and more conservative, you can target people in that demo... I mean, there's so much you can target. People that have certain hobbies, all sorts of activity.

Alan Berry:

This sounds great as far as the Facebook goes, as far as how to advertise and find the exact client that I'm looking for. How easy is it to set up and manage?

Michael Reynolds:

It's not difficult work to do. I mean, if you can do dental school, you can do this. So it's not difficult work to do, but it is time-consuming to kind of babysit the system. And what I mean by that is, you don't just click a couple of buttons and run the ad and forget about it. You do things like build this audience and build two more audiences of different demographics and do experimentation to test them, and you see which one responds better. And you build other audiences from those results and target them differently. And you try different budgets and different landing pages and different copy and different images. And you do all sorts of things to optimize the platform, to do what you want it to do. That stuff, it's more time consuming than anything, and there's a learning curve.

Alan Berry:

In today's world, like any other topic that you're trying to tackle, you can Google it. You can go on YouTube, there's all kinds of tutorials.

Michael Reynolds:

Oh, yeah. Absolutely.

Alan Berry:

There's all kinds of... Facebook has helped pages, there's forums out there. And worst case scenario, I'm sure dentists hang out with other dentists, maybe talk to a fellow dentist. Maybe they could cue you into how to do this, or this is where you bring in the nephew or niece that's in college and maybe ask for a little bit of their help. All right, so I got Facebook also... Speaking of Google and searches, how does Google play into dentist practice?

Michael Reynolds:

Yeah. I don't want to take up too much more time, but I do want to kind of wrap up with a couple more tips. We talked about three kinds of learning objectives. So for Google, I want to talk about two learning objectives here. And these are a couple of things you can do to start really improving your findability and ability to gain new patients on Google. And so, one thing you can do is, to improve your organic presence. And organic in Google is a bit different than Facebook, in that organic is kind of the same concept and that you don't pay for it, you just kind of... Whatever Google's algorithm decides is what happens, but you have a little more control over what happens in Google. And what I mean by that is, if you optimize your website and your Google business page, you can come out ahead of your competition because most other dental practices probably aren't going as deep.

Michael Reynolds:

So a couple of things you can do. On your website, make sure that your title tag of your website, kind of the main listing of what your website says when it's at that title tag at the top, it says something very keyword specific. So for example, I'll keep using Lakeshore dental practice. I'm giving to a lot of business, apparently. So Lakeshore dental practice, you want to have the name obviously, Lakeshore dental practice, but then after that put, dash Lakeshore, I'm going to say Kansas. Lakeshore, Kansas dentist. But whatever your city is, match that with the word dentist or dentistry or dental practice, because that is what Google picks up as a search term. They look at that title tag and they say, oh, this website is about X, Y, and Z. Along with that, you want to make sure your Google business profile is very complete.

Michael Reynolds:

Excuse me. Very kind of built out and complete. What that means is, go to, right now go to google.com/business and see what happens. For a lot of you, I'm guessing nothing's going to happen. It's going to come up and say, hey, do you want to set up your profile? Because nothing has happened yet. So what you want to do is, you want to follow the steps when you go to google.com/business and make sure that you have claimed your business listing by signing in with your Google account. Go and create one, if you don't have one. Sign up with a Google account and set up your address, your office hours, your website link, put some images in there, put some keywords in there, description of your practice, basically fill out every possible thing you can fill out because that also ties your practice to Google's search database. That also lets you get reviews, so the more reviews you get as well, the more that plays a part in your ranking. So your website being optimized, plus your Google business page being optimized, tied together, can go a long way toward getting you found over your competitors.

Alan Berry:

I think, if any tip that you've given over the past three podcasts, that's probably the best tip you could give someone, is the Google business.

Michael Reynolds:

Yeah, it's an easy one too.

Alan Berry:

Yeah. Not only is it easy, it doesn't cost anything.

Michael Reynolds:

Yeah. And to think about the importance of it, just think all the times you've Googled a pizza place or a movie theater and that's popped up and you've garnered some type of information from that location or hours or phone number or websites reviews, and you benefited from that and probably chose to patronize those places. So what about your practice? You should definitely have that as well, so.

Alan Berry:

I know. Excellent tip.

Michael Reynolds:

Yeah. And so one more thing I want to wrap up with, which is super short is, start looking into advertising with Google and that's called Google AdWords, or pay-per-click. A lot of times people call it that. And that is, what allows you to pay Google for the privilege of being at the top of the search results. So if someone types in Indianapolis dentists, for example, then you can pay to be at the very top of the listing and have someone click and come to your website. Now you're going to pay per click just like Facebook. So you might pay a dollar a click, dollar 50 a click or whatever. But the nice thing is, it's a good compliment to Facebook because on Facebook, people aren't really searching for a dentist, they're just going to kind of see your ad like a TV commercial. On Google, people are searching with intent. You're reaching people that are only searching for Indianapolis dentist, which means ding, ding, they are looking for a dentist in Indianapolis.

Michael Reynolds:

So what that means is, you might pay a little more per click, but you're going to reach more applicable leads for new patients because they're actively searching for a dentist. And if they find your website and your website looks great, as we talked about in previous segments, then you've got a good shot at really gaining their trust. So if you do those three things, if you develop a strong Facebook advertising campaign, and if you optimize your website and your Google business page to be very complete and very keyword focused, and if you run even some minimal AdWords campaigns to get found, when people are searching for dentists in your area, I would, this is an unscientific, unsubstantiated fact or statistic, but I would bet that you're probably 90% ahead of other dentists in your area. They're not doing any of this stuff.

Alan Berry:

Yeah. And I got to imagine as time moves forward, the dental practice that will stay around are the ones that are doing these things because the Internet's not going away. This isn't changing.

Michael Reynolds:

I've heard it's not going away. Yeah.

Alan Berry:

Michael, thank you so much for joining us for these past three podcasts. There's just been some wonderful tips. I really appreciate your time here.

Michael Reynolds:

Thank you. It's been fun.

Announcer:

That's all the time we have today. Thank you to our guests for their insight and for sharing some really great information. And thank you to you, the listener, for tuning in. The Millionaire Dentist podcast is brought to you by Four Quadrants Advisory. To see if they might be a good fit for you and your practice, go on over to fourquadrantsadvisory.com and see why year after year, they retain over 95% of their clients. Thank you again for joining us and we'll see you next time.