Exploding Your Mailing List with a 3 Step Opt-in

The Mirror Effect

Your Patients Self-Diagnosing Their Own Mouths

The Patients Falling Through The Cracks In Your Marketing

What does a success dental web marketing campaign look like? Here is one example from “click” to “cash.”

The 4 (or 5) Costly Bloopers To Avoid With Your Next Dental Website

*2013* Dominating The Web With Video Book

Our Elite Program

How Marketing Has Changed Since 1907 (…Or Has It?)

Why 30% of Dentists Get 70% of the Patients

Marketing Tools vs. Marketing Solutions (Part 1)

Plastic Mailers to Turbocharge Your Directmail Campaign

How to Brand Yourself The Celebrity Dentist

Google’s Penalties for Over-Optimizing Your Website

Entering The Conversation Already Going on in Your Patient’s Head

The Maturity of Your Patients Searching

Wanted to talk today about the maturity of your patient searches. I was actually flipping through dental town earlier and saw that there was a doctor asking about the differences between short tail and long tail keywords and he really didn’t want to worry about the long tail keywords right now he just wanted to know more about what people are searching for in terms of short tail keywords and the problem with that is is that people searching for short tail keywords aren’t the kind of people you want to attract. People searching for short tail keywords are immature searches and you have to look at the progression of how people search and how their search evolves as they educate themselves and as they acquire more information about what it is they actually want. What you see is at first you might see somebody searching for “dentist Indiana,” “cosmetic dentist Indiana,” then they’re going to go back, they’re going to look at that first page of search results and they’re either going to find somebody they like and that’s the end of their search, more than likely they’re not going to find somebody they’re looking for with that simple of a search. They’re going to go back and look at “cosmetic dentists in southern Indiana,” or “cosmetic dentist in New Albany, Indiana.” They’re going to look through those search results and they’re going to revise it a little bit more, “cosmetic porcelain veneers in New Albany, Indiana,” and now you’re getting into the nitty gritty of what somebody is going to be searching for, that they’re actually going to be ready to click on and I talked a little bit about this in Episode 32: “the keywords that actually generate phone calls for you,” and those are actually the long tail keywords, those are the things that you want to identify, you want to optimize your site for, that’s what somebody that is searching that is actually looking at what you have to offer and they’re going to pick up the phone and call you. When you go after the short tail keywords when I say they’re immature searches that’s not a dig at the person it’s that they haven’t gone through that process of maturity to know what they even want and that’s what the searching process does. Statistically, 80/90% of your people searching are not going to click to page two, they’re going to go back to the top and they’re going to revise their search. Think about when you search yourself, I know that when I search I do a couple searches and I go back to the top and I revise it and go back down and keep looking at results and tweaking my search. Find out what the long tails are, find out what people are actually searching for when they’re ready to call your office. You can do that through a number of ways: phone call tracking, you can do something as simple as asking people what they searched for when they call you which you can be very effective. Asking somebody on the other side of the country or your buddy you went to school with might be a good starting point as well for your long tailed searches. I’m sure they’d be glad to give you the information as long as they’re not competing with you. The thing to realize there is you’re going to see different keywords in every geographic area and in every town that you’re in. You know, up in New York they use different words than they do down in Texas, than they do in California so it’s going to vary geographic area to area, dentist to dentist, everybody has a different approach a different type of patient that they want to attract. So keep that in mind when you’re trying to optimize your website, trying to use keywords that it’s not that you don’t want the short tail keywords but the short tail keywords are not going to generate as many phone calls for you as the long tails do. If it was just easy as picking cosmetic dentist out of a hat every dentist would be doing that.

Facebook vs. Google AdWords PPC Ads

I got a question this morning from a client talking about Facebook pay-per-click advertising vs. Google AdWords pay-per-click advertising and I want to spend a few minutes and talk about the differences in each and the advantages and disadvantages and pros and cons of both. With Facebook pay-per-click advertising, you do have the advantage of selecting all kinds of demographics based on the information that facebook has, you can advertise specifically based on race, age, likes, hobbies, interests, geographical location, all kinds of different information, but keep in mind when you are marketing on facebook you are marketing repeatedly to that same pool of people over and over again. It’s similar to Google AdWords content network vs the search network. Pay-per-click with the Facebook and the Google content network are very similar in design. You are putting up advertisements based on a passive action that somebody has taken, they’re looking at something on the page Facebook or Google are reading that information and putting an advertisement over on the side that is related to that. With Google search advertising, it’s more of an active marketing medium. When somebody searches on Google they’re looking for an answer at that moment to a specific problem or issue that they’re having, they’re looking for a dentist, they’re looking for an answer to a problem that they’re having in their mouth. With the Google AdWord search network you are putting your ads in front of a new group of people constantly that are actively searching. What that means to you is that if you’re doing Facebook paid ads and you’re not rotating your demographic typically what we see after a period of three or four or five months your ROI on that Facebook ad precipitately begins to decline because you have absolutely saturated that demographic selection with your advertisement already. Where as with Google AdWords you’re getting a fresh search volume and constantly new people are searching for problems so based on the keywords that you select you can continue to market on Google AdWords without seeing that eventual decline in your results. Now of course keyword trends do change and you have to stay on top of that with Google doing different split testing and making sure your quality scores and your landing pages are all up to snuff but for the purposes of this short video I just wanted to touch on the differences between Facebook and Google in their paid marketing programs, how you can best monetize both of them. Both of them can produce good results, but keep in mind Facebook is not a set it up and let it run for 12 months type of marketing medium. After three, four, five, six months you’re just going to see results just drop through the floor. We’ve done a lot of paid marketing on facebook and that’s almost always the result we get especially in our own market it’s a little bit different when we’re marketing with dentists, we have some Facebook marketing for dentists that runs almost around the clock but that’s a national market not local market like you’re in with being a locally based dentist so if you’re doing Facebook ads keep a look on it, keep your eyes on it, make sure you’re watching your tracking metrics and you are keeping track of how much you’re spending and how much you’re bringing in, same with AdWords, you need to be watching your calls, making sure those calls are converting, recording the calls and making sure that marketing is actually producing results for you.

The Dental Consumer’s IQ

I want to talk today about dentist industries IQ. Was reading in a trade journal this morning that another marketing consultant had stated that the consumer IQ is at an all time low which I’m not sure I agree with. He went on to say that you need to make sure that you’re relating the benefits of your treatment to your patients in a way that they understand. They’re not on a college level talking about clinical options and too many details are certainly is not an approach that is going to, that they’re going to be able to relate to but as far as the dental consumer index goes I would have to say that within the past 50 years of dentistry if we’re looking at how educated and how informed the general public is about what dentistry can do and modern advances in todays world we’re at the pinnacle of the educated gentle consumer. The reason for that is the internet. Never in history have we had the information and instant availability of the internet, WebMD, Wikipedia, of Youtube where they can literally look and see other people’s mouths and crazy videos that people are posting, see what’s going on and see what options are available to them, never before in history have they the accessibility of information that they can go on to these sites and they can look in their local market area and find and compare providers without ever stepping foot, not only into your practice but without even stepping foot out of their house. Consumers are making decision in today’s world in a way that they’ve never made them before. They don’t have to come in for a consult to find out who you are. They can look at your website, they can look at your videos, they can read your reviews. People don’t have to call your office to see if you have a likable staff, they can go on your website to see who you are, to see who you’ve hired, watch videos with your staff, find out if you’re a likable dentist or not, people do business with people they like. The dental consumer IQ in my opinion is at the highest level it has ever been in human history because of this availability of information. People have developed what I call digital attention deficit disorder which is if they can’t find the information that they need right now they’re going to skip onto another place or another time and keep looking. Your website has to be delivering this information to them on a silver platter that they can not only read and take in but in bite sized portions that they can digest and consume because it you just throw a buffet at them that’s not something a consumer can digest. You have to give it to them in a method, in a way that they can understand, that they can consume, that they can read and then they can make an educated decision on. When you’re putting together your website don’t just talk about the services you offer, consumers don’t care about what services you offer, consumers can about how your services can help them. There’s two real ways you can compete, you can compete on price or you can compete on value. If you compete on price and you go for lowest price, it’s a slippery slope. The race to the bottom is not one you want to win. If you compete on value and the expertise that you provide, you compete on the value of your services to the consumer you’re going to attract more and better patients of the more and upper affluent class the type of patients that you want to attract.

The WRONG Video On Your Website

Wanted to chat a little bit today about procedural vs educational video and what it means for your practice marketing. We get on a lot of sites and see the clinical videos, the KC videos and the smile vision and how the implant screws into the jaw and how you prep for a crown and all these videos that explain clinical procedures and how these procedures work and in my opinion the dentists that are using this type of video are missing a termendous opportunity to connect to their patients on a level that for one you’re speaking the language of the patient and to connect to the patients on a level your competition is not. If a patient is interested on how you prep for a crown or how a dental implant works you’ve got the WebMDS, you’ve got the Wikipedias, the Youtubes, you’ve got all these bemis of information out there that can give you all the clinical information you need. The video specifically that is on your website should be answering three or four extremely important questions that your prospects are asking: Is it going to hurt? How much does it cost? Does this guy really know what he’s doing? Showing a video of how a crown is prepped or a veneer is prepped or how a dental implant works, first of is going to scare off the patients that go “Oh my God, he’s going to drill my toothe down or he’s going to drill into my jaw.” Secondly, it doesn’t tell the patient anything that you’re going to charge them a fair fee or that you even know how to prep a crown correctly, that you’re going to do the work correctly and we even see dentists that take it a step further and they have pictures of these clinical procedures and process with the gum flap back and they show the teeth before the cap goes on and while it’s prepped and they have the spatulas I call them pulling their gums back and it’s horrible for you’re marketing. Your video should be connecting with your prospects and showing them you have a genuine concern, your passion for what you do and answering their burning questions, not the questions that you think they’re asking but the questions that are really going on in their head, how much is it going to cost? Does this guy know what he’s doing? Is it going to hurt? And if you answer those three questions with a video on your website you will dramatically increase the number of new patients that your website brings you, number of phone calls that translate into new patients in you dental practice.

The Pitfalls of Your Website Hosting

To better illustrate the points talked about in the video, I compared a WordPress based dental website on a shared hosting platform to one on a dedicated hosting platform. Over the past 15 minutes I ran the shared hosting website (Dr. Payet) against a dedicated hosting website (Salem Dentist).

The speed differences ranged from at lowest, dedicated hosting site 53% faster, to worst with the dedicated hosting site 20x faster (852 milliseconds vs 16,672 milliseconds). Average over all tests was the dedicated hosting being 300% faster with Salem loading 3.2 seconds faster than Dr. Payet’s.

This perfectly illustrates the pitfall of shared hosting. When your shared host gets busy, you suffer the consequences.

Test your site and compare for yourself @ www.WhichLoadsFaster.com

Had some thoughts today about the platform that you’re building your website on. There’s a lot of different options out there that you can use to build your next website. Some of them proprietary, some of them nonproprietary and I want to spend a few minutes today talking about the different options that exist. Some quick pros and cons of each and what those really mean to you as a dentist when you hear different words thrown out with Joomla or WordPress or proprietary content systems and what that really means to you as a dentist. When you’re building your website there’s some kind of back in that has to store that information, there’s a system that has to manage and control that information, that’s what we’re talking about today is those systems that really are seamless. It’s kind of like your practice management software, you can run eagle soft and soft den and curve and all the different systems, they all have pros and cons and what does it really mean to you, which one do you want to do. Here we actually run all WordPress, we run a modified WordPress platform that we have dubbed Snap and what Snap does for us is it gives us some increase security, it gives us increase reliability, we do daily backups for all of our clients, it’s a complete managed WordPress solution. In addition to offering a dedicated hosting platform, and what dedicated hosting means is we see a lot of WordPress sites that are hosted out on hostmonster of blue host or these shared hosting platforms and all of the sites almost without exception are laggy, they’re slow to load, they’re slow to pull up. If you go to any of our websites you see that they come up instantly, we’ve got 100 meg pipe to the internet that has a dedicated server, we also got redundancy in Atlanta, Georgia as well as here in Louisville. When you look at one of our sites versus a WordPress platform that’s hosted elsewhere you notice it loads a lot quicker, that’s because we’ve got a lot more processing power in here in house, we’ve got more server capacity and we’re also not hosting like bluehost and hostmonster where they might host 1,000 or 2,000 or 3,000 websites on one server machine, we’re only hosting a fraction of that so our threshold is a lot lower which delivers a lot higher quality of service. We also have a third party monitoring service that we use to insure that our websites stay up 24/7, we have over I think the past year something like 99.99% uptime availability of our website which is, if you look at anything across the internet Google offers 99.9% uptime with their business services and we’re running at .99% which if you do the math I think it comes out to something like 6 hours that the website is down per year, the majority of that is in the middle of the night when we’re running scheduled updates and the site is down for five to ten minutes at a time but we’ve actually installed our monitoring on hostmonster in the past on several occasions on hostmonster and found that they usually run anywhere from 87 to 94% uptime. So you have a lot more availability, a lot more speed, a lot more processing power, overall quicker faster experience. Getting back to the platforms that you can run: proprietary vs WordPress or vs Joomla or what other system you might be looking at out there. The main benefits to running an open source platform, anybody can build a platform you could use but the problem is then you’re locked in with that platform. If you go to prosites or there’s a lot of companies out there that offer the template of IDA comes to mind, you cannot transfer their websites, you can transfer the domain but the website itself is built on a proprietary platform that once you build that site, you’re locked in, that’s the end of the road, it can’t be expanded, it can’t be transferred, you pay for it as long as you’re with that company and if you decide to leave you have to build another website. If you decide you want to redesign your website build another website. When you’re working with a WordPress platform or an open source Joomla platform, for one you’re portable, if you decide that you’re not the best provider for your needs if you decide that whoever you’re with you don’t like them anymore you could pick it up and take it with you. If you decide you’re tired of paying the fees of managing your own website, I’m sorry, having your webmaster make all the updates for you, with WordPress you can instantly go in and make changes to your website yourself, if you can edit a word document, you can edit your own website with WordPress,it’s just that easy. Often times when we’re going through some changes in the website with a client, we’ll have them on the phone, we’ll be making changes in real time while they watch and I say click refresh and you can see the changes we just made. Often times with proprietary platforms you’re often very reliant upon the provider because you don’t have any portability or control to do things such as security checks and backups because they are in full control of the system because it’s grown there’s not any way you can backup your data. Really there’s not a purpose to backup your data because even if you have a backup of your website and it’s from a proprietary platform you still can’t really do anything with that data. It would be like, for instance if you have Eagle soft in your office and you have a backup and your server crashes and then you install Softdent, you can’t just restore your Eagle soft backup and you’re off to the races, you have to convert that Eagle soft to Softdent and then it would be able to read it, well same way with proprietary platforms, if you are able to do a back up you’re still not portable, you’re still locked into that platform. Most proprietary systems don’t allow you to do that kind of backup and security checks just because it’s an inherent flaw of how the overall scheme of things work. With WordPress or any other platform you also have the availability of the third party market, you have the ability to go out to the WordPress marketplace by themes, by plugins, expandability add-on features very easily and in many cases for free without having to pay for an expensive web developer to develop it for you. If you’re on a proprietary platform then you’re going to be stuck paying for somebody to do that for you as for WordPress somebodys already invented the wheel out there somewhere and they’ll allow you to download it for free or a small fee, 10 to 20 bucks vs paying a developer a $100 bucks an hour to create something for you a function your website does. Maybe its a contact form, maybe it’s a little floating widget on the side of the screen, maybe it’s a notification bar at the top or whatever it may be, you have that third party marketplace with all kind of availability.

How Google Fools You

I’m going to talk today about localized search results and what it means for you, what it means for your patients, what we’re seeing dentists running into as far as problems with checking their own search results with the localization and personalization that Google and Bing are doing right now. In the good old days you could go out to Google and you could search for yourself and you could see where you’re ranking and to a degree you could still do that today. I talked a little bit about yesterday with the blending of search results. Search engine ranking reports really don’t matter anymore not that they ever really mattered because search engine ranking shouldn’t matter to a dentist at all. It’s an okay metric to look at for “I’m doing good, or I’m doing bad, or I’m on the right track,” but if you’re not tracking phone calls if you’re basing all your success on your search engine ranking reports I’d be really concerned but with the blending of search results search engine ranking reports have just really gone out the door, they hold no value that they hold no purpose anymore. With localization and personalization of search results what Google is doing is they are you use to be able to go out and search for say Santa Cruz dentist and a dentist in Santa Cruz, California, a dentist in Salem, Washington, a dentist in Chicago, Illinois. a dentist in Florida would all see the same organic search results appearing for those searches. Now of course the adwords results are tailored based on location but that’s not what we’re discussing here, we’re talking about only the organic results and now a days what we’re seeing is not only are the paid results, which have always been tailored by location, we’re also seeing the organic results and with the blending of the search engines the local and adword search results that are also being tailored based on the location of the searcher. The search engines Google and Microsoft Bing are getting increasingly adept at pinpointing somebody’s location whether it’s on your cell phone and they’re using your GPS transceiver or there are even phones that do not have GPS, if you’ve been on Google maps in the last two or three years for phones that don’t have GPS, Google Maps offers a triangulation feature, if you ever watched NCIS or those cop mystery shows on TV where they find the killer before he kills anybody and they have those little antennas on the top of their vehicle as they’re driving around trying to find somebody on their cell phone, same concept, they are triangulating based on signal strength between the cell towers to locate your position within a couple dozen meters if there’s several towers in the area that they can triangulate from if you’re in a rural area and there’s only a couple towers around they may only be able to pinpoint your area within a half mile radius of the tower if you’re only within receiving range of one tower. They know where you’re at on your cell phone, with your computers they have your IP address they know where you’re at to a certain degree and they are tailoring these search results to where you are and what they think is the best content to deliver to you. You really have to put yourself in Google’s shoes, spin the table, Google is just trying to make money and they are testing, they are the king of the split test, they are going to find every possible way to deliver the best possible results to their customer and their customer is you or your patients, the person that is searching. They want to deliver the best possible results to them because that’s how they make money. If they started delivering crap results people would stop searching, they’d go to other search engines so this is why Google controls 80% of the US market share of searching because they’re the best. When you’re searching for yourself and maybe you drive 15, 20, 30 minutes home at night and you’re on the computer late at night, kids are in bed and you’re checking out your search engine ranking for yourself keep in mind that if you have driven away from your office, if you’re not in the area, even if you’re right down the road if it’s a metropolitan area Google is localizing those search results. Now talking about personalization of search results, also make sure when you’re searching that you’re searching you are logged out of your Google profile. In the top right hand corner if it has your account in the corner you’re logged in and Google is actually personalizing search results based on your past history. You can go into your Google account and pull up all your history forever for your past searching and if Google sees you’ve clicked on this website before, you’ve searched for Chicago implant dentists ten times in the last six months and everytime you click on your own website Google knows, hey I have to deliver this result again and they’re going to deliver that to you so make sure you’re logged out, I would go as far as clear your cookies maybe even do a private browsing session in Chrome because without a doubt Google is doing everything they can to monetize their customers right now and cookies, there’s been a lot of research data on tracking browsers without even using cookies. Think of your fingerprint, the ID that your computer has, the browser, the version, the type of plug ins that you have, the fingerprint of your browser without using any cookies, without using any kind of tracking system strictly only looking at the type of browser and computer that you have when you’re accessing their website has been proven to be unique like one out of 300,000 was the study that was done a couple years back. Even if you’re logged out, you clear your cookies Google and the search engines can still practically uniquely identify you just based on the fingerprint of your computer. I would go so far as to tell you to pull out your iPad or device you haven’t used before, go down to Starbuck’s, you really want to get a fair sampling of your search results to the average person because of personalization and localization, you practically have to be crazy about it these days. That gives you kind of an overview of where things are at with that in regards to search engines these days.

Google’s Blender

Had a doc call in earlier today very dissatisfied with the results he’s getting from his web marketing but it had a little bit of a twist. He was getting great ranking, had a dominant presence online organically, but he wasn’t getting any phone calls from his website. He recently installed call tracking and was savvy enough to be testing what he was doing and knew that even with this number one ranking he wasn’t getting any phone calls from it. Went in and did a little research on him and the problem that he was running into was a result of Google’s blended search results that they’ve really been pushing over the past, in many markets 18 months, some markets now only a few months depending on where you’re at. Blended search results is Google’s latest change where you may have a number one organic ranking but you might not actually appear on the first page until ranking 10 or 12 or you may not be on the first page at all. In some markets, I’ve seen recently in Chicago google for a search in dentists may not display an organic ranking on the entire first page so your SEO report you’re getting may show you as having a number one ranking but it may not even be on the first page and the reason is because Google is putting a lot of adwords on the first page which is their cash cow. They have the whole first page filled up with local search results and paid search results and there is no organic results there. In some markets there’s some organic results at the bottom or there may be some in the middle or there may even have some locals and organics and some locals and organics sprinkled about throughout the page so when you’re looking at your organic search ranking make sure that you’re actually going out there and testing the searches for yourself and in tomorrow’s podcast I’m going to talk a little bit about localized search results and why you can’t always 100% determine your ranking even by searching because of localization and personalization of search results but for the purposes of today’s podcast talking about blended search results make sure you’re physically going out there and checking because your number one ranking might not be worth squat in the real world on Google and Bing.

The Keywords that Generate Phone Calls

Phone Calls From Keywords
Total 33 Calls
Reporting period 2/12 thru 2/18
Client in Old Bridge, New Jersey

(not provided) 6
http:www.bestnjdentist.com 6
old bridge dental care 2
bleeding gums 1
can lipstick mess up tooth enamal 1
dental help 1
dental implants oldbridge nj 1
dentist best day 1
dentist laser gum treatment near 07036 1
dentist old bridge weisfogel 1
dentist on route18 1
dentists in somerset 1
different dental implant splinnting o fleepping 1
dr avi weisfogel 1
dr. avi weisfogel 1
dr. weissfogel dentist old brige 1
inplants in old bridge,nj 1
neighborhood health working hour 1
old bridge dental care, pa 1
same day inplants in old bridge nj 1
what age does dental implants make sense? 1
what are the cheapest dental care in nj for a priv employee innj 1

Phone Calls From Keywords
Reporting period 2/12 thru 2/18
Total 69 Calls
Client in New Albany, Indiana

(not provided) 14
new albany implants 8
newalbanyimplants.com 5
dental implants 3
new albany implants prices 2
newalbanyimplants 2
teeth in 1 day or all-on-four louisville ky 2
all on four permanent dentures cost 1
artificial tooth flipper isn loose on one side of my mouth and tight on the other side 1
best place to get all on 4 dental implants louisville ky 1
cheap mini implants 1
dental implants new albany indiana 1
dental inplants 1
dentist performing the most mini implants in 1
denture implants 1
dentures made in new albany. in for $200.00 1
does permanent dentures have warranty? 1
dr receiver dentist new albany 1
dr receiver dentist new albany in 1
dr ronald receveur new albany in 1
dr. ronald receveur 1
georgiadit.com denturesimplants 1
how much does it cost to get dentures in southern in 1
how much does sedative cost for dental implants? 1
how much does tooth implant cost in kentucky 1
http:www.newalbanyimplants.com 1
i don’t want to die from a dental problem 1
mini dental implant dentists in new albanyindiana 1
mini dental implant dentists in new clarksville indiana 1
mini dental implants cost in louisville ky 1
mini implant dentures 1
mini tooth implant in new albany in 1
newabanyinplants,com 1
newalbany implants 1
newalbany implants .com 1
permanent denture care 1
receveurcoat of 1
should i get any kind of warranty for dental job 1
southern indiana bad credit mini dental implants 1
warranty on dental implants 1

Had a crazy night last, we were in Pittsburgh for a video shoot. Airline industry is a real pain these days, the ended up canceling our flight and ended up driving back through the night last night from Pittsburgh back to Louisville to get home. Had a late night and early morning, my son had his first doctors visit this morning, his one month check-up, everything went great he’s in the 60th percentile in height and weight. Right down the middle I suppose.
I had some thoughts today about the keywords that you’re targeting. A lot of dentists go online and they search for cosmetic dentists their city , dentists their city and yeah those are important to show up to some degree but what I want to talk about a little bit and I’m going to be posting the actual keywords that I’m talking about right below this video for reference is two keyword reports of actual search queries that people searched for over the past seven days on two of our clients’ websites and the interesting thing that I’m finding here, just to give a little background information these were keywords that were searched for that directly led to a phone call being generated to this doctor’s office something we can track through our zetetic software, and something I noticed about these keywords is there’s very few searches in here that have less than three, or four, five keywords that this person searched for. I’m going to be posting these keywords here below this video, take a look at them I don’t want to spend five minutes going through every keyword and what exactly it says because the video will be mundane and boring and you’d stop watching me, so I’m going to post the list below, you can skim through it quickly and again these are keywords that generated phone calls to this doctor’s practice in the past seven days. There will be two list of keywords for two practices. Take a look, leave a comment below, I would love to hear what you think.

Dominating Google to Crush Your Competition

Yesterday, I made my podcast about dominating Google to protect your eggs. In other words, how to spread the money you’re spending on your own line marketing around to protect yourself against the whims of Google from changes in algorithms to changes in the search result pages and today I’m going to talk about that same philosophy but from a different perspective. Dominating Google to eliminate your competition to get more patients. Essentially, when you’re dominating Google you’re taking multiple listings on the first page. When you’ve got a peg listing on the top, organic ranking, a local places page, maybe an adwords express listing over on the side, videos, press releases down below, your facebook page, you’ve got 4, 5, 6, 8, we’ve seen 10 listings on the front page of Google, not only are you protecting yourselves against any changes Google might make like I talked about yesterday but you’re also eliminating potential properties that your competition can occupy. If you’re taking five spots on the first page, that’s five spots that your competition is not in which pushes them to the second page. Statistically, 80% of your searches are not going to click to that second page, they’re going to revise their search term in the top and search again or take action on one of the search results that’s already in front of them. So, it’s really an anit-competitive measure, of course, when you have five results on the first page if you want to talk about branding or just simply being seen a lot more often. Having five listings on the first page you’ve got 500% more chances than if you had one listing on the first page for that patient to see you for them to click into your website and the other important thing to realize is that patients all people are looking for different things. We see about 60% of clicks coming in through the organic side, your local places, your videos, organic listings, press release, whatever, we about 40% of all clicks coming out of google on the paid side so if you only have one listing on Google, you’re missing close to have, at least half of all the potential patients that you could be pulling in. Take a look at where you’re ranking at, make sure you understand the different search engines that Google offers. There’s a lot of different opportunities out there. If you got any questions, I’m glad to do a quick little demo on the different search engines Google offers, where you can possibly be found as well as a demographic report on your market area to show you what kind of potential exists.

Dominating Google to Protect Your Eggs

I wanted to talk a little today about insulating yourself against the whims of Google. Protecting yourself from the big gorilla in the room that we know is Google. We see a lot of marketing companies out there that only advocate doing organic search engine optimization and there’s a lot of dental marketing companies that only push SEO and they only say do content and on page SEO and there’s all these companies that advocate all these positions of marketing on the internet and I’m sure some of them do that job really well, the very specific task that they’re advocating. The problem with a single mode of online marketing is that a big change such as what we saw last year in April, May with Google they rolled out their panda and penguin updates such as what we saw in 2010 when they really started ramping up their local marketing stuff such what we saw in late 2010 when dozens and dozens over a period of 6 months we saw the number of dentists marketing on adwords in 60 to 70% of the markets here in the United States double or triple in a very short period of time. When you only have a single presence on Google you are open to the whims of not only Google changing but advertising conditions changing in your market. Let’s go back to the days of yellow pages when yellow pages was the only marketing that most dentist did and when the yellow pages started to go down hill it was kind of the frog in the pot, if you crank up the heat slowly the frog will never jump out well a lot of guys that were doing yellow pages did it very successfully for years, if they had seen overnight the changes that took place over a period of two years they would have jumped out really quick out of the yellow pages but it was a slow downhill decline and by the time they made the change they were literally flushing the money down the toilet. The point I’m making is don’t put all your eggs in one basket, don’t only go after SEO, don’t only go after local search, don’t only put your money in adwords, get your videos up there on the first page, get your local places up and on the first page. Google is now looking at social metrics, your facebook, your google plus, your social media profiles as a sign of authority. In other words, Google’s position is most of the scammers and spammers that try to fake google out to get on the first page don’t have social media profiles. While we don’t advocate social media as a means to find you new patients, you’re simply not going to get new patients off facebook, it is still necessary to get that great Google ranking to have social media and have many other tactics in place. Make sure you’re doing a holistic type marketing campaign where you have presence in all the different search engines you have your eggs spread out into many different baskets.

Automating Your Patient Followup

Today’s fast thoughts are about ways you could automate your dental marketing. A lot of dental practices are dedicating a lot of resources right now to keeping in touch with their patients. Front office staff that are doing follow up phone calls and sending out letters and emails and all of this repetitive contact stuff to follow up with patients that aren’t moving forward with treatment or have inquired or whatever the case may be and I want to do a quick illustration of how powerful technology can be if you embrace it the right way. Let’s assume right now that you’re getting one contact a day, let’s say one patient a day is coming to your website and requesting more information or calling you wanting to know more about services, they’ve come in for a treatment plan and they haven’t gone forward, one person a day. Hopefully, you’re getting a lot more than that. One person a day would mean you’re getting 30 a month, first month, second month, let’s just assume you’re getting one patient a day for each month. By my calculations that’s 30 the first month, 30 the second month would be 60, third month would be 180 and let’s assume you’re making two contacts with each of these patients or contacts each month. Comutively, going out to a 12 month period if you made two contacts a month with each of these warm or cold leads, however you want to classify them, that’s going to put you at about 4600 contacts in the first year. If you go out to two years, you’re at 14,040 contacts. Your front office staff would probably pull their hair out and you’d be hiring full time people to be able to make 14,000 touches if you were doing this manually. Thankfully, there’s companies like Infusionsoft that offers software that can do this for you. You can send out emails, text messages, postcards. Some of you watching might be familiar with Infusionsoft and you might be saying well I don’t how to use postcards with Infusionsoft, I thought Infusionsoft only did email, it can do a lot more than that. So much of Infusionsoft is lost because it’s so complex and it’s so extensive, you can do an incredible amount with it but the average person doesn’t have the time to sit down and learn it. We hear from dentists frequently that they bought Infusionsoft, they laid down 3, 4, or 5 grand to jump in, maybe they even sent some of their staff out to Arizona to do training for 10 grand a person and they could just never get their arms wrapped around it and it is a very complex software but with complexity comes a huge feature set and a huge potential if you know how to embrace it. 14,000 contacts that you could be making right now with all of your cold leads, warm leads that have not moved forward in the past two years all for a couple hundred dollars a month at most and that’s if you’re using your own Infusionsoft app, if you go through a company like us for instance who leases out part of their Infusionsoft app to their clients much less than that.

The Language Your Patients Speak

I want to talk a little bit about the ancient city of Babylon, you’ve probably heard about the city from the Bible, the ancient city that is talked about Babylon and the languages there everybody spoke different languages. If you really go back to the core if you say the Hebrew Bible and you look up the root of what Babylon means, the definition of babyl means confusion, if you look at the verb form of babyl which I’m not sure I’m going to pronounce this correctly but it’s bibyl it means to confuse. Why am I talking about Babylon on a dental marketing video? In many dental practices the language that you’re speaking is not being heard by your prospects, your patients, your prospective patients are speaking a completely different language than what you’re speaking when you’re trying to market to them about how you can help them. Many dentists out there, dentistry is not just a job to them it’s a profession, it’s a hobby, it’s their passion and when you’re very passionate about something it’s hard to remove yourself and think about how the other side feels. It’s been said many times that the smartest people in their given field are horrible educators because they assume that the other side knows things that they don’t and when you’re trying to educate your patients, when you’re trying to market to your patients and speak to them they don’t hear the same things you’re talking about. I did an interview with Dr. Woody Oaks last year and Woody made the comment that a lot of dentists spend more time selecting their new handpiece than they did selecting their spouse that they spend all kinds of time trying to get the right tools, the right equipment and the next greatest thing that’s going to help out their patients but they don’t relay it to their patients in a way that their patients can understand the benefits and that is what your patients are looking for. You have to speak the language of benefits, translate that new handpiece into something in emotional terms and how that’s going to effect that patients life. That new handpiece, it’s not just the latest thing and it does x and x rpms and it can prep a crown with these new diamond drill bits and x this and all this so much faster . Here’s what it means to the patient: 80% less noise, don’t like the buzzing sound and the noises that you’re custom to hearing at the dentist, this new handpiece that we have you won’t have any of that, less time in the chair, you don’t like to have dentists’ fingers in your mouth, that’s ok, with this new equipment this high-tech stuff and equipment we have you’re now going to spend 60% less time in the chair, there’s all kinds of different pain free tools out there these days. There’s topical creams you can put on, there’s different types of syringes and all kinds of stuff out there that is coming out these days that is doing painless injections. Don’t talk buzz words talk in plain simple terms: we can give you an injection we can numb you up and you’re never even going to feel it. Fear of the dentist: did you have a previous bad dental experience? We can fix that. That is the language that your patients are hearing, make sure you’re speaking that language. Things patients are going to look for in a dentist: they want to know the dentist is experienced and skilled and has the latest equipment. What they don’t particularly care about or they don’t necessarily understand is it’s your job to educate them so that they understand is what the alphabet soup of accreditations and continuing education actually means. Don’t just list all of your credentials on your website or on a brochure tell them what that means to them, what does it mean the you went to the Las Vegas institute, what does it mean that you went to Portugal to study under Dr. Mallow and you have all this all on four training, what does that mean to the patient? When you can speak the language of the benefits you’ll attract more of the patients that you want.

The One that Questions Who YOU Are Attracting

I want to ask you a question: are you marketing to your patients or are you marketing to other dentists? The reason I ask is we see a lot of dentists who have websites that look like they’re trying to get other dentists to become their patients. We see procedural videos, clinical videos showing how you prep crowns and how you do dentistry. We see before and after videos with the big meat hooks pulling back on their cheeks showing how great and perfect the cases are and how immaculate they look. We see case studies and papers with dozens and dozens of pages on them talking about different, new advancements in dentistry and new technologies that have come out and how so and so is leading the pack and educating this and that and it really makes me wonder there’s a lot of dentist that are out there that are educators and of course you want to stay with the latest and greatest but does all that belong on your website? Is that putting your best foot forward with your patients giving them all this clinical jargon and knowledge and just giving them absolute information overload with the technical how to portions of what you do as a dentist? I don’t think so. Patients are concerned about very simple things: Is it going to hurt? How much is it going to cost? Is this guy the right guy for my needs? Is he the best at what he does? Posting a 25 page case study or clinical videos on how you should be prepping a crown or should be prepping a tooth for a veneer or should be putting an implant in doesn’t answer any of the driving questions in a patient’s mind. When you’re developing your marketing and your website think to yourself, you’re a dentist, you love dentistry obviously you became a dentist, are you marketing to your patients or is this your passion and you’re truly marketing to other dentists with your services?

The Cost of Doing Nothing

Wanted to talk today about the cost of doing nothing. I had this thought about the cost of doing nothing, what if I did nothing and just kept on doing what I’m doing, I would keep getting what I’ve always got. I wouldn’t have a plan to retire on it some point on in the far, far future. Maybe having my first child a couple of weeks ago has got me thinking more about long term goals and where I want to be in 20 or 30 or 40 years. With your dental practice what is the cost of doing nothing? What is the cost of continuing to do just as you’ve always done? What if you had another ten years like the year you had last year or the year before or have for this year? Would that be good? Do you want to grow from that or do you want to stay right where you’re at or if your trend is going down do you want to continue to decline? We talk to dentists everyday that are trying to ramp up their practice to sell, businesses that are just getting started and wanting to add in associates. We have many booming practices that are wanting to take it to the next level and all those guys, I think, would agree that their cost of doing nothing is being in a place where yeah they were happy with last year but they were happy with last year because it was the improvement over the year before that and the year before that.

Mass Deletion of Your Emails

I had an interesting conversation with a doc today who was questioning the viability, the purpose, the results, the effectiveness of email marketing and reaching out and touching people who have raised their hand on your website to get more information to learn more about you and specifically his question was, Colin I’ve got all these email lists I belong to , I get 100 emails a day and I delete 97 of them, what good is there for me to send out emails to my prospects or my potential patients or my patients when everybody I know just deletes this stuff all the time? I answered his question with a question and I said to him, the three you didn’t delete what were they? He told me one of them was an investing newsletter that he reads that he was getting ready to make some investing decisions and I think he was getting ready to do a Roth IRA rollover, one of them was a personal hobby he belonged to I believe it was scuba diving, we exchanged some stories I enjoy scuba diving a little bit too and I don’t remember what he said the third thing was and I said the 97 that you deleted what were they about and he said it was stuff I wasn’t interested in and I said you answered your own question. People are going to delete a lot of your emails. People sort their email with their delete button, just as when they go out to their mailbox they walk into their kitchen and they are literally sorting their mail over the trash can, not even opening stuff that doesn’t look interesting, they’re also sorting their email with the delete button or in my case I don’t even use the delete button I use the mass delete button. I go down my email and put checkboxes on everything I want to delete and then I click the delete button once and get rid of 50 emails at a time. A lot of your prospects are going to delete a lot of your emails but that doesn’t mean the ones that have the immediate interest in what you offer and what you do those are going to be the ones that read what you have, digest the information that you give them, those are the ones that you want to be putting stuff in front of. There’s no way to know where exactly somebody is at if they’re in the early research phases or way down the road in which they already know what they need or what they want they’re just trying to find the right provider or maybe they already know you’re the right provider and they’re ready to pull the trigger but they’re just right on the fringe so unfortunately a lot of times when you’re emailing out to your list you’re don’t know which one’s which, that’s why email’s so cheap you just send it to everybody, the one’s that don’t want it delete it and the one’s that do want it appreciate it and become your patients because of it.

Form -vs- Function

Today’s thoughts I want to talk about form vs function. We see this alot with dental websites out there that there’s a lot of only focus on the form or maybe they do focus on the function but it’s not the function that generates new patients and what I mean by that is we hear from a lot of docs that want to have automatic bill pay on their website and they want to have a log in system that patients can schedule their own appointments. Those things are novelty and cool but they’re not going to create new patients for you, you’re not going to get new patients in your practice or really in my opinion save a lot of staff time from paying from what I’ve been seeing several hundred dollars a month to have a system that allows patients to schedule their own appointments and from what I’ve seen from those systems you lose a lot of money because there’s no relationship. It’s something that a patient can log on and click and cancel their appointment, make an appointment, there has to be a relationship there, that is what is going to keep people coming back. A lot of website designers only look at form, a lot of dental websites out there are pretty and that’s all you can say for them but your dental website need to be doing a number of things beyond just being pretty. I’m sure everybody in your office thinks your websites great, you probably have patients coming in saying your website is great but I challenge you to look at the results, use a call tracking number and see what you’re getting. If your website has been up for six months and you’re not getting 50 phone calls a month or if your website has been up for 12 months and you’re not seeing 100 phone calls a month coming in from your dental website that should be a sign that something needs to change. Either your website is very pretty but it’s just not converting, we see a lot of different design flaws that run off new patients that are really pretty but run off new patients. Maybe your patients aren’t converting into phone calls, maybe you’re not following up, maybe people when they look at your website they are categorizing you as just a run of the mill dentist and they’re looking at what you do and thinking this guy just does what everybody else does I’m looking for somebody special, a dentist that is really going to take care of me. There can be a number of reasons why but make sure when you’re building your dental website it’s a lot more than just form. There’s a lot of function that goes into it and I don’t mean function as schedule appointments online because I don’t believe in that silliness I call it, a lot of functionality for communicating with your patients and setting yourself up to be the expert in their eyes.

Using Infusionsoft

Hey, good afternoon. Colin Receveur here. Today is Wednesday, January 30th and had some thoughts following up to yesterday’s podcast. Had some people that were confused about my position because I talked about kinda contradicting Vaynerchuk’s position, but then I also said that we offer automatic follow-up systems. So, I wanted to clarify what we do, how we do it, and why we don’t advocate spending hours a day on facebook that’s never going to get you new patients. Spending hours a day on facebook is, you know, something that if you want to build a following of a couple thousand local facebook people, that’s how you do it. You get on there, you engage, you check, talk. In our experience we’ve done it, we’ve never seen any results come from it so we don’t push it anymore. But if that’s what you want to do that’s how you do it. There’s all kinds of companies out there that do it well. We’re external marketing guys. So, when we talk about automatically touching people we’re not interested in getting on facebook and making status updates and posting tweets and doing all that stuff. When a prospect comes to your website and they raise their hand and ask for more information, we’re going to automatically send them more information over a period of months, years down the road. So, they come to your website and they plug in their email address and get your free report on the miracle of dental implants or dental comfort breakthroughs talking about sedation, or maybe you’re a GP and we have a free report that is the six blunders to avoid before choosing your dentist. Now that you’ve got their email address we’re going to send them that free report automatically and then we are going to drip on them once every couple weeks to a month forever with more information on that topic. And, you know, talking about dripping and staying in front of people and automatically communicating, that is how we utilize technology to stay in front of prospects. People that have already raised their hand and show interest. People that are on facebook, you know, mass type communications like that, you know, you’re only going to hit a very small percentage of people that are interested. We focus our time on talking to people that have already raised their hand and are already interested in having that other, that next cup of tea with you. So, that’s our philosophy we use infusionsoft with every dentist that we work with is set up on infusionsoft because they have a tremendous platform. They have a great system that you can keep in touch with your prospects until they’re ready to move forward and buy. Until they’re ready to accept that treatment plan or that large case that you proposed to them or whatever it may be until they’re ready to choose their new dentist. So, that’s all my thoughts for Wednesday. Keep moving forward.

How to Make Money with Facebook

Hey, Colin Receveur here coming to you with another fast thoughts on dental marketing. Today is Tuesday, January 29th and I posted a cute little picture on our facebook profile last week and I wanted to talk a little bit more about why I posted that picture and I’m actually going to show you the picture here, it’s about how you can make money on social media in three steps. No games, no silliness, three simple steps you can take right now to make money on facebook in your dental practice and I’m going to show you here. I’m actually going to show you the image that I took here on, posted on our facebook profile (shows image) Alright, so here we go as you can see: Step 1 is you click on, go to facebook and you click on your account settings button. Step 2 is you press deactivate your account. And step 3 is you go to work. Now, if you follow me for awhile you’ve probably heard me harp about facebook just not being an elegant marketing tool for dentists or really any businesses for a long time and the reason behind that is that facebook, you’re just not going to find new patients on it. You know, look at how facebook works fundamentally. You have people liking you, following you, adding you as their friend, people aren’t going to do that if they’ve just heard about you, if they’ve just came from google and they’ve searched and they found your name or even say they had a referral from a friend, they’re very unlikely to start liking and following all of your stuff. This is going to be something they do after they meet you, after they’ve had that first impression. So, facebook as an external marketing tool just does not work. As the internal marketing tool, keeping in touch, doing some reactivations, you may see some limited success. We have a lot of docs that we’ve grown their social medias to three or 4,000 local people and even still then they just don’t see any results come from it. You know, Gary Vaynerchuck once said that he was sitting in a meeting once with a prospective client who kept hammering on him about the value of social media and finally frustrated he exclaimed, you know, what’s the ROI on your mother? You know, all those years she put into you, helping you, guiding you, walking you through it, you can’t put a value on that, you can’t put a value on what your mother did for you all those years and that was the point he was trying to get at. The question I would pose is Gary, why should businesses be trying to spend 20 or 30 years of their life nurturing a client along? I mean certainly you need to be nurturing clients, you know, that’s one of the biggest parts of the system that we offer is automatic follow-up with prospective patients, you know, nurturing them, helping them along, but, you know, we’re talking about a six month to 18 month sales cycle. You know, the ROI of your mother is something figured over 20 or 30 years. I guess you could argue that the principle, the same principle is just carried over a longer period, but, you know, for those guys that want to see results and see results in the near to midterm as in from now over the next 18 months, social media is just not your bag and who knows, you know, in some markets like Australia for instance, right now facebook has stagnated with the number of users they have. In other words, the number of users leaving facebook in Australia equals the number of new users signing up. You know, we’ve seen a declining trend in the number of new sign-ups on facebook even here in the United States. You know, I’m not saying facebook is going to be gone in 18 months, but there’s a lot of new technologies out there coming out that are really going to give facebook a run for their money. So, my advice would don’t be put all your eggs in the facebook basket thinking long term, thinking you’re going to do all this. It just isn’t a great place to be spending your time and energy right now if you’re looking for new patients, if you’re looking for those patients that you want to attract in the near or mid-term. So, that’s my fast thoughts for Tuesday. Keep moving forward.

Polishing Turds

Hey, Colin Receveur here. Today is Monday, January 28th and today’s fast thoughts I had on my mind really brings to mind the old adage about polishing a turd and let me tell you a quick story about a client that I spoke with last week. Actually, I’m sorry, not a client, a prospect that we ended up deciding that it wasn’t a good fit for what we do here and we ended up turning him away. But we had a prospect come to us, a dentist, who has website, thinks he has a great ranking, thinks his website is doing magical things and all this great stuff and he came to us wanting us to take over his pay-per-click campaign to see if we can improve it and he says his pay-per-click campaign is doing great and I thought to myself, “I’m sure it’s doing great, that’s why you’re coming to us, wanting us to improve it right?” And upon further inspection I looked over his website, found that he has a ton of flash on his website and motion graphics and his before and after photo gallery is filled with pictures of missing teeth and pockets and pus and decay and chips and not full face photos, you know, very clinical stuff, very and frankly, disgusting photos, found that he doesn’t really have any good video on his website. He’s got a couple of videos here and there, one on his homepage that’s a little intro, doesn’t really talk about who he is and why somebody should choose him over every other dentist in the area and I brought these issues up to him and I said look, “I think you’re, your pay-per-click and frankly your website in general is not sending you patients because it’s not your pay-per-click campaign, it’s your website.” And he said, “Well, I’m not interested in doing a website right now.” He said, “I just want to revamp my pay-per-click campaign.” And I said, “you know, so let me get this straight, you want to sign up with us at $2,000 a month for 6 months, $12,000 you want to spend on pay-per-click, but you’re not willing to make changes or develop a new website for $4,000 that’s actually going to make that $12,000 work three to four times as much.” And he said, “No, I’m just not interested in doing that right now.” You know, I guess he thought we were going to sell him a bill of goods and he didn’t really think we were going to turn away $12,000 of his business. But, you know, people wonder, you know, why marketing companies won’t do SEO on an existing website or on certain websites or why marketing companies won’t do pay-per-click on, you know, an existing website and this is a perfect example: we can do pay-per-click on it, we can do SEO on your existing site, this specific case, but we’re about creating predictable results and if we just do these marketing services for everybody that comes in our door we’re going to get the reputation that, you know, the guys that bring us sites that are no good, like this guy’s, they’re going to be unhappy in 6 months and they’re going to cancel and they’re going to tell all their friends that we didn’t do any good for them and that’s just simply not the reputation that we command. So, you know, that’s my for today. If you’ve got a website, you know, if your website isn’t converting clicks into phone calls, if you’ve got clicks coming in the top and you’ve got phone calls coming out the bottom and your website’s not converting clicks into phone calls I don’t care how many more clicks you shove in the top of your funnel, you’re not going to get more phone calls out the bottom. So, before you look at more visibility, consider developing a web presence that’s actually going to convert. There’s only so much you can polish that turd. So, that’s all for Monday. Have a great week.

Why Your Prospects Opt-Out

Hey, happy Friday. Today is Friday January 25th and this is my first video podcast in about a week. I did my last one on Friday and took a few days off. My son was born over the weekend, Benjamin Leo, 9 lbs 22 inches long and doing great, doing great. Mom and Ben are both doing great. So took a few days and spent a little bit with the family and jumped back into the office Wednesdayish Thursday and so today, getting back in and I had some thoughts about compelling offers on your dental website. We see a lot of newsletter sign-ups, you know, sign-up here for our monthly newsletter, sign-up here to get special offers, you know, enter your email address here to get on our mailing list and, you know, we see a lot of this stuff used and the doctors go well I’ve got this auto responder technology, I’ve got this automatic follow-up, but I’m not getting anybody into the funnel, I’m not getting anybody that is signing up for my stuff, what’s going on here? And, you know, the reason is primarily your offer. You know, everybody’s got a plain, boring, vanilla, you know, enter your email address here to get coupons and offers and sign-up for our newsletter. You’ve got to do something that pulls at their heart strings. Offer them a free report that talks about the six blunders you can make when choosing your new dentist. Right a report on the miracle of dental implants, the nine secrets you must know before having implants in your mouth. Write a report on, go after, you know, say the fear in sedation aspect if that’s something you’re touching on in your practice and write a report on the myths of dental comfort or a guide to dental comfort breakthroughs, a free report for those that especially hate going to the dentist, you know, prevent pain, save money type deal. Offer a free report. Offer them a book. Offer them even a white paper as long as it’s not too clinical and technical. Offer them some kind of substantial offer, you know, say sign up here to get a $1 exam and x-ray, you know, speaking of offers and how to structure your offers, I did a podcast last week, and I’m not remembering the day, but it was on free services vs free offers. Definitely something to watch, it’s about four minutes long, but back to the offer on your website: put something on there that is going to compel people to take action. People aren’t going to sign up just for, just because you asked them to, just because you offer them a free newsletter or a free mailing list, give them something of value, pay it forward and it will come back to you in the long run. So, that’s all for Friday. Have a great weekend.

How to Have Video on Your Dental Website and Still Go Broke

Good Evening. Colin Receveur here. I want to show you how you can have video on your dental website and still go broke. I’m going to show you two examples of video that I’ve been talking back and forth with a client today showing them what they need to do to get their phone ringing, how to structure their way of marketing to actually generate new patients and not only generate new patients but provide a measurable way for us to prove to them that hey we’re generating 50 or 100 phone calls a month and x dollars in revenue. So, I’m going to show you two different examples of video here and then I’m going to talk a little bit about the philosophy behind each of them and why we advocate the type of video that we do, why one is successful and one is not successful. So, here we go:

(Video one plays)

Ok, so, a lot of you are going to be familiar with that, it’s a video straight out of implant vision, talking about options and consequences of separate missing teeth.
Now, let’s hop in and look at another type of video and we’ll discuss it a little more in just a moment: (Video two plays) ok, let’s skip forward just a little bit (video two continues playing)
Alright, so as you can see, two starkly different types of video going on between those two websites. One of them is a very clinical, very clinically educating video talking about the consequences of missing teeth and treatment options that are available and the how and the tools of what is available out there for consumers. The other one, a very emotionally charged, deep storyline about a young woman who had a cleft palate, who went through this very reconstructive surgery in her mouth, very complex case with multiple doctors involved that is now, as you can see, had a great experience and is strongly endorsing this dentist and that the video is also interlaced with testimony from the dentist talking about, you know, what they were able to do and the complexity and the difficulty to the case that finally arrived at the conclusion. So, the reason I’m making this video on video is if the video on your website is talking about the how to and the clinical of what you do, patients are not going to choose you. Patients already know by enlarge what options are out there in the market. What they are looking for is the right person to do the work for them. You know, they already know, I’m going to use a very basic example here: patient already knows they need a filling, now do they want the assistant or the EDDA that’s straight out of “dental assisting school” with no experience to be doing that filling for them or do they want the 30 year veteran who’s done 10,000 fillings to be working in their mouth? And that is the same principle that video on your website should follow. Patients have an enormous, enormous resource called the internet these days that they can look up and they can find out what’s available out there. They know that there are permanent teeth options, they know there’s invisalign, they know there’s cosmetic and restorative and all these different dental options out there. They don’t have to go to the dentist to learn about consequences and what options are available. The reason that people that find you are going to choose you is because you are the expert in their eyes, you are that authoritative source and you have testimonies like Kim here who is endorsing you, who is your social proof that, you know, Dr. Smith, Dr. Receveur, whatever your name is, he is the kind of guy that will take care of you, that you can trust that will charge you a fair price. You know, it’s not about the money to Dr. Receveur, he genuinely cares about his patients and he was able to, you know, help this lady who suffered with a cleft palate for her entire life, to be comfortable, chew comfortably, and be beautiful and that is what patients are going to base their decisions on. Especially, as case size increases. So, that’s all the fast thoughts for today . Keep moving forward and have a great weekend.

Building Your Tribe and NOT Acting 19

Happy Humpday! Today is Wednesday, January 16th and the topic today that I’ve had on my mind is, you know, I’ve talked about in some of my past podcasts about not marketing like that 19 year old dude. You know, the 19 year old guy when he wants to get a date he tries to close the date on the first phone call, you know, he goes straight for the gold and when you’re marketing with your patients especially, if you’re marketing for specific types of larger case sizes, whether it’s invisalign or cosmetics or large crown bridge cases or implants or implant supported dentures or any variation thereof, what you have to realize is that as the case size goes up so does the level of trust required for that patient to pull the trigger and move forward with treatment from you and what we see with a lot of advertising is that doctors are going out and they’re buying print ads or their website or whatever it is is they’re trying to motivate that patient to call right now, right at this minute, you know, call now, this offer expires in three days and, you know, there is going to be some result from that approach because you’re going to get somebody that’s, you know, is in immediate pain that has a problem right now and they see the carrot, they see, you know, you give them a special offer or $1 exam or whatever it may be and they move ahead with that, but there’s a huge, huge portion of the patients that will need care that by doing only that approach you’re missing out on and that is the people that are right now in today’s world at this very moment, the ones that are searching because they know they need the care, but they aren’t yet ready to make the decision and by structuring your marketing funnel by using automation such as infusionsoft or Aweber or constant contact by writing a free report, by giving away some sort of free information or a daily newsletter or a monthly newsletter or whatever it is that is your “carrot” to dangle in front of people to get them to give you their personal information so that in turn you can reach out and contact them once a month or twice a month for the foreseeable future you can keep your name in front of these patients that are going to need your care but not right now and when you can build your tribe, when you can keep your name in front of all these people that know that they need your care, and that you can drip good information on them, you can become an authoritative source of information, you can become the expert in their eyes and when they have a problem, when they finally get to that point where they have to make a decision or, you know, their kid falls off a trampoline or they finally are tired of being embarrassed or they can’t chew or whatever it is your name is going to pop into their head and they’re going to call you. So, that’s today’s thoughts for Wednesday, Happy Humpday.

Systems, Systems, Systems

Good Morning. Colin Receveur here. Tuesday January 15th, 2013 and wanted to talk a little bit today about systems, systems, systems, systems, systems, systems. A lot of doctors out there and they do this with all their marketing, it’s not just limited to their website, but they only are doing one piece of the puzzle and they are not getting the results that they want and with websites since we’re exclusively a dental web marketing firm let me give you an example: we see docs that are only doing SEO. Maybe they have a website that they had company A build last year or five years ago, they hire this other firm to do SEO and they have another firm that is doing pay-per-click and they’re paying all these fees and all these different companies are doing one piece of the puzzle of what’s needed to actually get new patients. It’s not really coordinated, it’s not really put together, the pieces aren’t put together. When you do piece mail marketing you’re not putting the pieces together and you’re simply, your phone is not ringing. Having a website and successfully marketing yourself online is not about just doing SEO or just getting to the top of google or just having a website, you have to have the system that actually captures the patients, generates the lead, captures the patient, nurtures them, tracks them, and converts that into a phone call, and into an appointment, and into a paying patient. If you are missing any of the steps in there, you’ve got a big crack in your system and you’re leading your patients, they’re falling into the cracks and you’re not getting money back from your investment. So, make sure that with your marketing campaign you’ve got a complete system behind it that takes your leads from the front of google all the way through the phone call until that lead is getting handed off at your front desk and make sure that your front desk is actually converting those leads into phone calls. So, that’s my thoughts for Tuesday, January 15th. Keep moving forward.

Marketing Firms & Their Contracts

Happy Monday! Colin Receveur here. Had a couple thoughts for today. I wanted to make quick video on you may have noticed that my resolution for 2013 is I’m going to be making these quick video blogs everyday or at least working my hardest at it and I’m going to try to get thoughts out that I have that from working with dentists on a daily basis and from finding out what’s really getting results out there in the trenches with guys. One of the big complaints I had about the video podcasts I did last year was it took some time, of course, to put together the ideas and the notes and to get all the thoughts organized in my head as well as a little bit of video editing on the back end to put the intro on it and put some titles, and urls, and some things in the video and it took, you know, about a week to put something together and get it out. This year I’m going to get things out instantly. When I have a thought, going to make a short video here in the morning. I’m shooting for under five minutes a video. Very quick, succinct, to the point and what I was thinking about this morning is contracts, contracts with marketing companies. Lot of companies out there are requiring contracts six months, 12 months, I’ve seen 36 month contracts for web marketing, websites, different kinds of work and it kind of strikes me unusual because if you’re a marketing company that is doing good work and you’re getting results for your people, for your clients, I don’t really understand the need for a contract. You know, if you’re providing results, your clients are going to come back. You don’t need a piece of paper that locks them in to 12, or 24, 36 months of paying you or paying me to do work. If the phones ringing, if people are coming in, people are going to keep coming back and doing more business with you. Yeah, I think the flipside of that principle is also by not having a contract it puts the burden on the marketing firm, every month to insure that they are providing a very high level of service and a high level of results to their clients. So, that what my thoughts for today. Keep moving forward.

Putting Your Print Ads on Steroids

Hey, Colin Receveur her. Today is Friday January 11th and I saw an interesting blog post from Seth Godin talking about clean bathrooms and Seth was talking about the facilities in Disneyworld, how clean the bathrooms are at Disney World and he was saying people don’t clean them because they charge you to use them. They clean them because if they didn’t you would have a reason not to come and you know, this is an important philosophy with not just Disney World and their toilets, but also in your dental practice. You know, when you’re putting together your marketing, you image of your business, you do a lot of things that are not profit centers. You’re not going to make money off of cleaning your bathrooms. You’re not going to make money off of, you know, having marble countertops in your office, but you do it because it creates the environment people want to come to. You do it because it doesn’t give them a reason to say no and what this got me thinking about is the amount of doctors that we see that do print advertising and have a crappy website and the statistics that we see of doctors that do send out the same post card to the same demographics of mailing lists and get double the results because they have a killer website. How many of those people that get the postcard google your name, look you up, see that you have a killer website and killer web presence and then they call your office vs the doctor that can’t even be found online. So, if, you know, when you go online and you google your name and you see a lot of negative reviews and bad press about you, that’s going to look bad on your patients and even if you’re not marketing online, even if you are a print only dentist that print only marketing dentist, your patients are still playing game online just because you’re not playing in the game doesn’t mean the game isn’t being played, it’s just being played without you. So, that’s all for today. Keep moving forward.

Free Offers vs. Free Services

Hey Colin Receveur here. Today is Thursday January 10th. My wife is 40 weeks, due today. So, it’s kind of an exciting day. No baby yet and no we don’t know what the sex is either. But I had a couple quick thoughts I wanted to shoot this quick video on my cell phone and talk about. I want to talk about today: promoting your practice with free offers vs free services. Let me explain a little bit about what I’m talking about. We see a lot of dentists that are using promotional offers on their marketing. Great way to bring in patients. Great way to get new blood into your practice, new patients. You know, make money. The different kinds of offers we see, we see some dentists that are maybe offering a free consult or a free consult and x-ray and we see other dentists that are offering a $49 cleaning and exam or $99 whitening or $79 cleaning, exam, and x-rays, whatever it is. I often get asked, “What do you think is the best kind of offer to pull in patients that appreciate you and appreciate the value that you as a dentist has to offer?” My response is that, you know, think about the mentality of patients you are trying to attract. If you are offering an in-service such as a cleaning or a whitening or a service that patients are coming in thinking that they need you are going to attract people that are just looking for cheap. If you put a Groupon out there and you offer a $49 cleaning you are going to attract people that have a dentist they like, possibly, maybe they don’t like their dentist, but you are going to attract people that are only coming to you cause they want a $49 cleaning vs if you put an offer out there for a free consult or $1 exam and x-ray, now you’re putting an offer out there that somebody that is just looking for cheap is not going to come to you. Now, yeah, they see $1 exam and x-ray, maybe they know they have a problem that they need to get fixed, but the exam and x-ray is not what the patient wants, the patient wants the pain to go away or they want their teeth to be cleaned and they are either teetering on the fence with making a decision to find a new dentist or making a decision to call their existing dentist, maybe they’re just looking for a reason to call somebody new or to call you. They see the $1 exam and x-ray and they pick up the phone and call you because it’s an offer they can’t refuse. They get to come in. There’s no risk, there’s, you know, they’re not going to walk in the door and walk out with $300 bill because they know it’s only $1, I can get checked out, get my x-rays, and then I know what I need and then I can go from there vs you know, what I said before is if you offer the service at a discounted price, now you’re discounting what you do, you’re discounting your services you’re going to attract people that are only looking for cheap services and you’re devaluing what you do. You know, if you do a cleaning for somebody for $49 and then they come back 6 months later or 3 months later if they have “3:43?” issues and now you tell them it’s $119 for a cleaning, exam, x-rays and oral cancer screening, how do you justify the price increase? Now you are arguing with them that oh well they got the special offer before because they only came to you looking for cheap. So, that’s all my thoughts for Thurstday, so keep moving forward.

Dental SEO Reports

Hey Colin Receveur here. Just wanted to make a short, short video. I’m actually recording this from my cell phone. I had a couple thoughts on my mind that I really wanted to put out there and get some feedback from everybody here on our facebook, social media, and twitter pages and generate some conversation on what I’m seeing and some of the concerns I have. We are seeing a lot of dental marketing companies out there right now that are basing the success of their clients, the success of dentists on these ranking reports and search engine optimization and building a hundred links a month and doing SEO and pay per click and all this alphabet soup and all this stuff and one of the big concerns I have with all this is that i think dentists have been sold a bill of goods really by the marketing industry in general. You know, they’ve been told for years and its been this hammered home just time after time again that you have to do the link billing, you got to do social media, you have to do facebook, and you got to do SEO, you got to do jump on every new technology that comes out and dentists go out and they drop all this money and they jump on the new technology, they are doing all this social media, and they are doing all these adwords, and they are doing all this SEO, and they’re just not getting squat from it and then right in line with that we see a lot of dental marketing companies that when they are determining the success of their campaigns of their marketing abilities, their clients’ success, they are basing that on if they are number 1, number 2, or number 3 on google. Now don’t get me wrong, ranking number one on google is extremely important, but if the pinnacle, if the epitome of your success online is being rated by where you rank on google, I would challenge you to look at how many dollars and how many phonecalls your website is actually generating. I just never understood how a marketing company can base a successful marketing campaign on some arbitraty ranking on a search engine. You know, dentists make money through phone calls, make money through converting those calls into patients, consults, treatment plans, and people sit down and write them a check , or credit card, or cash, or whatever it is, but the point is some ranking on google is not going to be an accurate indicator of your success or your failure. You know, if you’re not getting phone calls, if the phone calls are not coming in, if your phone is not ringing, I don’t care if you have 3,000 first page rankings, and you have 1,000 visitors on your website everyday, it’s simply not a good marketing investment, and that’s what marketing is. It’s and investment, it’s not an expense, and that’s not my RA-RA speech because I operate a marketing company, that’s just the way it is. If you can put a dollar into a marketing campaign and get five dollars backu out, why not do that 100 times? That’s what marketing is, it’s a big test, it’s a split test. Finding out what works, finding out more importantly what does not work with your dental website or any of your marketing really. That’s what you need to be looking at is number of phone calls generated, listen to those calls, find out, hey, who’s actually calling my office. Are these new patients? Are these junk patients? Are these patients that want free or wanna know if you accept food stamps? Or are these good qualified patients that have insurance, have an ability to pay, and coming into your office and actually paying? Stop looking at the ranking reports. The ranking reports, they’re just horrible to base your success on, for your marketing campaign. So, that’s all my thoughts for today. Til next time, keep moving forward.

He owns a slew of certifications with Google, Microsoft, Cisco; they all come with lots of little important letters after them. More important than those letters is his intimate knowledge of what we’re up to as dentists and his ability to tie all of the pieces together on the web.

The fact that he gets it is why he’s rapidly become known as a ‘Google god’ for dental professionals.

He has online technologies allowing us to leverage our time, effort, money and energy to be in more places at once than we’ve previously ever imagined in front of our patients, our prospective patients and to stay ahead of competitors.

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Colin has been hailed as the “Google God” for his ability to build websites that actually work (and work insanely well!!) by Dr. James McAnally & Dr. Mike Abernathy.

He currently is helping hundreds of dentists to “Crush It” online.

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