203 The Best Marketing for Dentists Who Want to Grow a Successful Practice

Hi guys, and welcome to another episode of the Delivering WOW Dental Podcast. Today, we're talking all about the best marketing for dentists who are wanting to grow a successful practice. So I absolutely love talking about this topic. As many of you guys know, we have done some pretty cool things inside of my dental practice with marketing. We have for years now been able to get over a hundred patients a month, which is crazy. We obviously keep growing and we've been adding on associates. But the great thing is that we are at the point now where we're not having to really look at much in terms of marketing. So what I'm going to be doing today inside of the episode is actually sharing how you too can get to that point where you have more patients than you perhaps need and more patients coming in without you really having to think about a lot of paid marketing, expensive marketing.

So let's talk a little bit about the journey of a patient and that journey typically will start with them not knowing who you are. As you're bringing them into your world, they are first becoming aware about your practice, about what makes you different about, how you serve the community, about the services that you provide. From there, we are looking at taking people along a journey, from awareness to making a decision to pick up the phone and call to coming in and having a great experience to becoming a patient who's a raving fan, and then ultimately, ideally a patient that will be with us for life, for them and their families, right?

So as we start looking at building out these raving fans, people who can't stop talking about us, because to be honest with you, if we can focus in terms of marketing on creating an army of raving fans, then again, marketing gets really, really easy because they're actually doing the work for us. So the first thing I want you to think about is number one, are you providing a great experience? Are you doing dentistry that you can really be proud of and that people will want to talk about, right? So if not, then obviously that's where we want to start. But once you know that you're providing a good service, then what we want to look at is how can we start the process of getting known in our community?

Many of you guys know, I'm a huge fan of Facebook marketing for a few reasons. Number one is the target demographic of who we are wanting as ideal patients are primarily using Facebook as far as their social media channel. So what do I mean by that? I'm looking at patients who are between the ages of maybe 38, 55 people who are at a point where they are able to take care of investing in themselves in terms of the investment, the financial investment. They're starting to perhaps see their parents age and understand that right now is a time to take care of yourselves, right? So I love using Facebook marketing. It's also super, super cost effective as well. Honestly, I've never seen anything work like it.

We have worked with hundreds and hundreds of practices and what's really cool is they start to build this following in the community where people are coming up and saying, "Oh my God, aren't you the doctor at so-and-so." Or they are having patients coming in and saying, "I've been following you for a while and I've been telling everybody about you." That's so cool and we can get to that point. So you definitely want to look at number one, are you utilizing Facebook marketing? Are you using Facebook effectively to actually showcase what your practice is known for and to get out there and start doing some community service events as well, really showcasing the culture of your practice? Because let's face it, dental practices, many of them, they'll all provide hopefully a similar level of quality of care.

What makes your business stand apart is the culture. It's what people see when they walk in, the smells. It's how you make them feel, right? So utilizing social, you're able to essentially put a lens of the outside world to what's actually happening in your business. So one thing that we love to do for doctors that are in our platinum mastermind and also within our training program, our Dental Boss Academy is we want to make it easy. We want to make it easy for you to do marketing campaigns. So getting out there and doing a community-based marketing campaign

every month where you are using social media, where you are integrating in internal marketing and you're involving your patients and you're putting up flyers around the office, and you're sending out emails, really enrolling, again, not just your potential patients, but also your existing, because once you start focusing on how to effectively market to your existing patients, and all of a sudden, they now start doing the marketing for you, which is really cool, right?

So a few things that you can look at doing in terms of the internal marketing is, again, if you are doing something, maybe you're having a coloring contest, then you want to be able to have an online version. You want to be able to involve your patients, have them to participate. Now, you can get out there and you can talk about it. You can do Facebook lives. What's really cool is that any of these campaigns, again, these are awareness campaigns where people may or may not have heard about you before. All of a sudden, you are doing videos. Maybe you're doing a small makeover competition. You're talking about it. Maybe you're implementing a new service and you're talking about that. Then now you can take anybody that's watched those videos.

Again, there's some strategy there that is really, really simple, a few little steps. Then from there you start to build, and anybody who's watched those videos or have comment on your posts, now you can start to show them Facebook ads for those high value services, which is really, really cool, right? So again, for me, the best marketing that we want to look at is how do we build this funnel, right? How do we take people from awareness to raving fan, but also how do you create marketing campaigns that allow for this organically happen? What's been really cool is seeing practices that we've worked with have a budget of a few hundred dollars a month and they're now bringing in $50,000 cases or having an extra 20 grand coming in because they are getting people in who already believe in them before they walk in.

But what's, I guess, really most exciting, all of this if you really think about it, is how many more lives we're serving, how many potential lives that we're literally saving. If we start looking at doing sleep appliances and things like that. I mean, imagine doing a Facebook live effectively with the correct targeting where now all of a sudden you're talking about sleep apnea, you're talking about what happens when people snore and how do people stop breathing and you can talk about CPAPs versus oral appliances. Again, with the effective targeting now, anybody who is seeing those videos, they can see specific ads for sleep apnea, which is really, really cool, right? So hopefully those tips are helping you. But again, as fast as possible, I do recommend that you start thinking about how can you build out your marketing strategy where you can continue to not only get the community talking about you, but your patients as well.

All right, guys. So hopefully that helps. So if you have not done so already, I'd love to invite you to get access to our free marketing plan, training and templates. To do so, you can head on over to deliveringwow.com/marketingplan. Within that training, we're actually going to show you how to create your marketing plan. We're going to give you tons of ideas to be able to do that as well and to give you some video training to help you get started. All right, guys, that's it for today. I look forward to chatting you in the next episode. Until then, keep Delivering WOW.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Delivering WOW podcast with Dr. Anissa Holmes. We'll catch you next time.