Blog - Page 31 of 55 - Dr Jesse Green

Being a great dentist is important. As medical practitioners, we should all strive to offer the best care we possibly can to our patients. However, as practice owners, we know that the ability to attract and retain patients is a fundamental business skill that every practice owner needs to know.

Just as clinical skills are necessary to be a successful dentist, marketing know-how is necessary to become a successful practice owner.

What is marketing?

Simply put, marketing is taking a stranger who doesn’t know you exist through the stages of awareness, trust, repeat business, and eventually a referrer or “brand ambassador”. Retaining patients is a key aspect of marketing because if you are leaking patients, it becomes a zero-sum game.

While there is no silver bullet that works every time, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel. You can learn from the wisdom of those around you so that your marketing journey is smooth and without bumps. To that end, here are five marketing shortcuts that will help you avoid costly potholes.

1) Invest not just in technical skills, but business skills (especially marketing).

Unfortunately, dental school isn’t built to create great business people. It’s built to create great dentists. Once you open a practice, it is important to invest in your own education to understand what dental school didn’t teach you. Because you’re not necessarily a dentist anymore. You’re a business owner. You’re in the business of being a dentist.

That’s fundamentally different. The skills to become a good business owner are very, very different from the skills that make you a good clinician. Once you transition from the mindset of a clinician in a dental practice to the business owner who delivers dental services to patients, it will become easier to see how the pieces fit together.

2) Create a marketing blueprint that informs everything.

It’s so easy to get distracted with the next shiny thing. Before, marketing might have meant paying for your business name to end up in the Yellow Pages and that was it. Now there’s Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, Snapchat. Content marketing. SEO. Print marketing. Traditional ads.

The list goes on.

And it can quickly become overwhelming.

The key is to put together a marketing blueprint. Your blueprint will help you understand where and how these pieces fit together and if you should add something new to the mix. Does it make sense for you? Where does it go? You will understand the purpose of your website, how to build it, and what creates lead conversions.

You can think about it like a literal blueprint of a house. Before you build a house, you sit down with an architect and make a plan. The same is true for marketing. Throwing everything at the wall and hoping something sticks quickly lead to burn out.

First, create a blueprint, and then you can start laying the foundations.

3) Know the difference between playing business and doing business.

You know you need to market to attract new patients and keep the revenue flowing. Maybe you even ran a marketing campaign that brought in some new business. But then something happens.

The marketing shifts from, well, marketing to branding. It suddenly feels like maybe your website needs a spruce. Then you need to make new business cards. And create a new logo.

While all of these things are worthwhile and important – you should absolutely have a user-friendly website and business cards! – the design, in itself, will not bring in new patients. Customers choose to do business with companies that offer them value. And your patients will choose your services because you offer them value.

4) Test your ideas first on a small scale.

Marketing is subjective until it’s not. You might create a slogan or a campaign that you think is going to bring in a stream of new patients and then it flops. You might not be sure about the wording on an ad, but then it offers a huge return on your investment.

Until your marketing has been out in the real world where potential patients can engage and react to it, you won’t know if your marketing is successful or not. So before you throw all of your marketing budgets toward a large campaign, try it on a small scale. See what works and what doesn’t, before you roll out a bigger campaign.

5) Identify your ideal patient.

We talk about this a lot on this blog, but we’re circling back to the idea of an ‘ideal patient’. Marketing is how you speak to your potential patients. Your message should resonate with the kind of patients you wish to see walking through your door.

To put it another way, no one’s ideal patient is “anyone”, because when you are too general, you will appeal to no one. For example, if someone wants adult braces, they might be searching for Invisalign dentist. If you are a jack-of-all-trades, even if you do Invisalign, you will likely miss that patient because they won’t find you with a Google search like that.

You can do business outside of your target market. You’re not restricting yourself to saying ‘no’ to patients that don’t fit your model, but you should still be speaking to the people that will resonate with your services and the value you offer.

Final Words…

Marketing is the bread and butter of every business. It is what brings in new business and keeps companies generating revenue so that they can continue to offer stellar services. The great news is that marketing is a skill that anyone can learn.

Start with your blueprint and stay consistent. You might be surprised by the results.

P.S. Whenever you’re ready …. here are 4 ways I can help you grow your dental practice:

Grab a free chapter from my book “Retention – How to Plug the #1 Profit Leak in Your Dental Practice”

The book is the definitive guide to patient retention and how to use internal marketing to grow your practice – Click Here
Join the Savvy Dentist community and connect with dentists who are scaling their practice tooIt’s our Facebook group where clever dentists learn to become commercially smart so that they have more patients, more profit and less stress. – Click Here
Attend a Practice Max Intensive live event
Our 2-day immersive events provide access to the latest entrepreneurial thinking and actionable strategies to drive your practice forward. You’ll leave with a game plan to take your results to the next level. If you’d like to join us, just send me a message with the word “Event and I’ll get you all the details! – Click here

4. Work with me and my team privately

If you’d like to work directly with me and my team to take your profit from 6 figures to 7 figures …. just send me a message with the word “Private”… tell me a little about your practice and what you would like to work on together, and I’ll get you all the details! – Click here

Marketing is essential for any modern dental practice owner. In this episode, I’m joined by marketing genius, Allan Dib to share with us tips for how you can improve your marketing.

Allan Dib is a serial entrepreneur, rebellious marketer, technology expert and #1 bestselling author.

He has started, grown and successfully exited multiple businesses in various industries.

One of his previous businesses was in the hyper-competitive telecommunications industry, where he faced heated competition from multibillion-dollar, multinational competitors. In four years, Allan grew this business from a startup to being named by Business Review Weekly(BRW) as one of Australia’s fastest-growing companies—earning a spot on the coveted BRW Fast 100 list.

On this episode, we discuss:

03:08: How you can learn marketing as a new skill
04:38: What exactly is marketing
05:26: Common mistakes people make with their marketing (and how you can avoid them)
11:52: The elements of a good marketing plan
16:54: What you need to know about direct response marketing
21:33: The 3 things you need to execute your marketing plan: Tools, Assets, and Processes (TAP)
25:57: How to craft a high converting offer
27:53: What is authority marketing and how do you do it
32:31: Do you need an Ideal Patient Avatar to improve your marketing?
35:14: Tips for marketing to the affluent

Find out more about Allan Dib

Successwise

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Dentistry, just like with any other business, requires courage. Whether it’s the first time you fill a patient’s cavity or the first practice you open, it requires a step into the unknown. In this blog post I discuss a few things to consider if you are feeling stuck or unhappy with your career.

My Guest Dr David Maloley asks the question,“Am I choosing courage or comfort in this particular situation?. Let’s unpack it.

On the other side of courage.

Courage exists hand in hand with fear. To be courageous is to do something that scares you. We all have moments of self-doubt, but often stepping outside of your comfort zone is the key to growth.

Within a comfort zone everything is, well… Comfortable. You know the people around you and what’s expected of you. It’s easy, but it’s safe. When you step out of a familiar space, it opens you to new experiences, new relationships and new challenges.

Your most magical professional relationships will likely blossom out of connection with people that you respect at a high level. Meeting mentors, advisors, or idols is often an act of courage. Making that introduction or going to that conference can be a challenge, but facing the fear instead of taking a step back into comfort is how people excel.

And it doesn’t have to be the scariest thing you can dream up. Sometimes it’s a small hop – just stepping slightly out of your comfort zone. Other times it can feel like jumping off a cliff and hoping a parachute opens on the way down. But it’s all on the other side of courage.

The rewards can be amazing. The places we fear the most contain the real treasure. Sometimes you have to choose to inflict a little bit of pain to find those gems. That’s where growth happens.

Quit looking for a quick fix.

It’s human nature to want to find a fast solution to our problems or our wants. That’s probably why infomercials still exist. Any sort of transformational product or service is so incredibly tempting because who doesn’t want to level up without years of dedicated effort?

The differentiator of high performers compared to the rest of the population is endurance. They have made peace with the mundane and can push through it. They aren’t looking for a quick fix. They have stopped looking for the transformational marketing tactic, the transformational hire, the transformational new procedure.

Instead, high performers chart a course. They are clear on what they want and they chip away at it. They aim to get a little better every day and those incremental changes over time turn into big changes. It goes back to a habitual nature. It’s not something they do on Friday afternoons. It’s something that they do every morning whether they feel like it or not.

This might be best shown in clinical skills. Pete Dawson worked hard to hone his clinical skills and now there’s the Dawson Academy so other new dentists can learn what he knows. Sometimes it can also show up in business. Rick Workman has 800 dental practices across the United States.

Courage is that extra step.

To bring it back around to courage, consider the decisions you make on a day-to-day basis. From getting dressed to whether you go to the gym to when you get to work, all of these micro-decisions ultimately build into the shape of your day. Then your days build into a week and then a month and then a year. During each of these micro decisions, we can always step forward into courage or back into comfort.

And it’s not the difference of one micro decision. High performers have the daily discipline to make the micro decisions into one little step forward into courage each time. It’s simply endurance to choose to practice skills when you don’t feel like it. It’s endurance to continue to walk the path you’ve charted even when it gets a little scary.

There’s a John Gardner quote that I go back to over and over again: “Excellence is doing ordinary things extraordinarily well.” But David puts it all into perspective when he described high performance.

High achievers are not necessarily high performers.

I’m defining high performers as dentists with a strong cash flow, strong practices, and high achievement, but it also entails a decrease of stress, an increase in happiness, and a strong personal identity and personal control. For many high achievers, they are not happy. They are stuck in a rat race and they can’t find the way out. They continue to reach higher and higher levels, but at the expense of other things.

Everyone’s vision of success is different. Just like the two dentists I mentioned earlier, Pete Dawson and Rick Workman. Their images of success are wildly different, but no less inspiring.

It is important to know what success looks like to you. There are so many people caught in a rat race that makes them unhappy. There are many dentists that love the clinical work and expanding to 800 practices across the country sounds like a nightmare. That’s totally fine. Sit down and really take the time to understand, This is what I want and why I want it.

When you have clarity over your path, it becomes easier to make those micro decisions that align your choices with your career trajectory.

You may be on the wrong path by adding more volume, more partners, more associates. It’s important to know how your choices play into your end legacy.

Final Words…

Stepping forward confidently with courage to change your career path for the better takes work. It requires a fair amount of discipline daily, weekly, and monthly to become a high performer. We’re socialised into chasing dollars and growing for growth’s sake, but satisfaction only comes when you know the ‘why’ behind your actions. Clarity on your path and a little courage in your choices will help you avoid burnout as you grow.

P.S. Whenever you’re ready …. here are 4 ways I can help you grow your dental practice:

1. Grab a free chapter from my book “Retention – How to Plug the #1 Profit Leak in Your Dental Practice”
The book is the definitive guide to patient retention and how to use internal marketing to grow your practice – Click Here
1. Join the Savvy Dentist community and connect with dentists who are scaling their practice too
It’s our Facebook group where clever dentists learn to become commercially smart so that they have more patients, more profit and less stress. – Click Here
1. Attend a Practice Max Intensive live event
Our 2 day immersive events provide access to the latest entrepreneurial thinking and actionable strategies to drive your practice forward. You’ll leave with a game plan to take your results to the next level. If you’d like to join us, just send me a message with the word “Event and I’ll get you all the details! – Click here
1. Work with me and my team privately
If you’d like to work directly with me and my team to take your profit from 6 figures to 7 figures …. just send me a message with the word “Private”… tell me a little about your practice and what you would like to work on together, and I’ll get you all the details! – Click here

On this week’s show, I chat to fellow dentist and host of The Relentless Dentist podcast, Dr David Maloley.

Do you want to let go of status quo and live your epic life? Dr David Maloley is all about closing the gap between who you are and who you want to be.

Dr David Maloley is a graduate of the University of Nebraska College of Dentistry. He served as a Dental Officer in the U.S. Army for five years. While in the military, he was stationed abroad in Germany and Italy. After he returned to the U.S., he moved to Vail, Colorado to start Vail Valley Dental Care in 2009. He is the co-author of Titans of Dentistry, the host of The Relentless Dentist podcast and a Certified High Performance Coach. He loves to ski and travel with his family.

In this episode, we discuss:

03:39: How to get the courage to do the things you fear
11:46: Dentistry and business lessons from the military
16:45: How to become a high performance dental practice owner
20:45: The difference between high performance and high achievement (and which you should be aiming for)
24:00: Why do so few dental practice owners have clarity around their goals
26:45: How to find clarity to build your own epic life
31:15: Why you need to start setting intentions
35:16: Tips from high performance dentists
40:09: The art of overcoming setbacks (whether large or small)

Find out more about Dr David Maloley and The Relentless Dentist

http://relentlessdentist.com

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I was recently thinking about a moment before I published my book, RETENTION! How to Plug the #1 Profit Leak in Your Dental Practice. I wrote it to help fellow dentists understand how to create an ever-expanding list of happy, satisfied patients.

I gave the manuscript to a friend of mine to read. He came back and said to me, “So Jesse, what you’re telling me is this is essentially a relationship book?”

I said, “Absolutely. It’s absolutely a relationship book because we’re in a people-to-people business.”

I’ve said this over and over again, but at its core, dentistry is built on a foundation of trust. It’s an intimate experience putting your hands in someone’s mouth. If the first exam isn’t going to be the last exam, building a relationship with that patient for future trust and mutual respect is critical.

But how do you create relationships? How do you sustain relationships? How do you do that in a professional manner?

1. Be intentional about intentionality.

Intentionality is a profound asset and should be cultivated mindfully and with discipline. In layman’s terms, intentionality means, “I meant to do it that way.”

If you look at any person’s life, especially your own, assess the percentage of intentionality in it, you will find that your success corresponds accordingly. That is, the more you are intentional about your day-to-day experiences, the more likely you are to be steering it in a purposeful direction. The direction you want.

Music legend John Denver was famous amongst musicians as he used to arrive at his venues very early. He would meet with the parking lot attendants to tell them how important they are. He believed they set the mood for the audience. He was intentional about ensuring that his audience had a smooth arrival and good experience right up until they sat in their seats and he came on stage.

Take your practice for example. Look at it, where it is. How much of your patients’ experience are you intentionally cultivating? Can you be more intentional about guiding people to good parking? Can you be more intentional about what the front entrance looks like?

Can you be more intentional about the experience a new patient has at your practice? Do you control what they see, smell, hear? Can you?

Can you be more intentional about the way you deliver bad news or a the high cost of important treatment?

Just like with your clinical skills, the way you hold instruments, the advice you give is intentional, every other aspect of your practice can be too.

If you’re not intentional, what is the result? You get what somebody else was intentional about or what chaos brings as a result of a lack of intentionality.

2. Don’t be afraid to follow up.

Sales is one of my favourite topics. I’ve noticed that other dentists can get a bit squeamish about the word ‘sales’, but sales is a necessary component of any successful business, a dental practice included.

One of my mentors in the marketing space used to always tell me that the real money was in the follow up.

It’s modern-day life that everyone is so busy. The result is that hardly anyone takes the time to follow up. If you think about your own life, how many times have you talked to someone when you were ready to buy but they didn’t follow up and you ended up purchasing from someone else?

The great thing about following up is that it’s easy. You don’t have to be a marketing genius or a smooth salesperson. You simply have to be professional, respectful, and proactive.

Don’t leave money on the table by missing a chance to remind someone that your practice exists and wants to meet their needs.

3. Offer patient loyalty – don’t seek it.

What is a relationship? As Jim Cathcart put it so succinctly, it is a direct connection between people in which value is exchanged. You can’t have a relationship with a business. You can have a relationship with individuals within a business, but not the business itself.

The key to this definition is value. Value can only be determined by the recipient.

For you, as a dentist, the value is in having a happy, patient that trusts your medical advice and continues to return to you. You want to get to the point where you are their trusted dentist and they come to you. You are no longer simply A Dentist but Their Dentist.

What you control is what you give in return when they do come back to you. Back to the concept of intentionality, you can be intentional about your patient relationships. You can ask questions like, “How can we give more value to this patient without costing ourselves a cent? How can we make him or her leave happier? How can we make his or her patient experience better? Smoother? Less fearful?”

Patient loyalty, and therefore patient retention, is something to be given by the dentist, not something to be sought.

A relationship with your patient should never be a one-sided endeavour. They must trust you with their health so you must earn that trust. If you are continually loyal to your patients as a guardian of their wellbeing, they will be responsive to that.

In turn, you will see your patient retention rates skyrocket. But it is important to remember that the only thing you can control as a dentist is your loyalty.

Final Words…

Intentionality is a powerful concept that can be applied not just to your dental practice, but to every aspect of your life. Be intentional about your continued medical training. Be intentional about the books you read and the people you spend time.

Be intentional about the loyalty you show your patients and you might be amazed by what you see in return.

P.S. Whenever you’re ready …. here are 4 ways I can help you grow your dental practice:

1. Grab a free chapter from my book “Retention – How to Plug the #1 Profit Leak in Your Dental Practice”
The book is the definitive guide to patient retention and how to use internal marketing to grow your practice – Click Here
1. Join the Savvy Dentist community and connect with dentists who are scaling their practice too
It’s our Facebook group where clever dentists learn to become commercially smart so that they have more patients, more profit and less stress. – Click Here
1. Attend a Practice Max Intensive live event
Our 2 day immersive events provide access to the latest entrepreneurial thinking and actionable strategies to drive your practice forward. You’ll leave with a game plan to take your results to the next level. If you’d like to join us, just send me a message with the word “Event and I’ll get you all the details! – Click here
1. Work with me and my team privately
If you’d like to work directly with me and my team to take your profit from 6 figures to 7 figures …. just send me a message with the word “Private”… tell me a little about your practice and what you would like to work on together, and I’ll get you all the details! – Click here

On this episode, I’m joined by legendary motivational speaker Jim Cathcart to discuss motivating ourselves and our staff, intentionality in business and so much more.

With over 40 years of professional speaking around the world, Jim Cathcart is one of the best known and most award-winning motivational speakers in the business.

He has delivered more than 3,100 presentations to audiences in every state of the US, most provinces of Canada and countries from Scotland to Singapore.

A business strategist, psychological researcher and philosopher at heart, Jim is also a down-to-earth regular guy. He has worked in warehouses, driven trucks, sold door to door and at trade shows, been a bank teller, plays guitar in night clubs and pubs, and has toured much of the world on a motorcycle.

In this episode, we discuss:

3:59: How Jim became a motivational speaker
13:38: The secrets of knowing when and how to pursue your passions
17:55: How you can learn optimism and courage
23:44: Tips for dealing with adversity
29:21: How you can motivate yourself and your staff
37:44: Why money is made in following up
40:00: Why relationships are key to sales (and how to do that well)
46:07: How to craft an intentional patient experience that will improve retention
And more!

Find out more about Jim Cathcart

www.cathcart.com

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On this episode, I’m joined by Alexi Neocleous to discuss effective content marketing strategies for dental practice owners.

The world of content can seem big and intimidating, especially when you’re busy running your own practice.

In this episode, Alexi Neocleous talks to us about creating content that attracts and retains customers. Alexi is one of the leading direct response freelance copywriters in Australia. He’s known as a copywriter who gets fast results for his clients.

As a world class copywriter, Alexi has generated hundreds of millions in sales over 18 years. As a mentor, he has trained dozens of writers who have continued on to forge their own successful writing careers. In just one recent campaign, one of our clients consistently brought in $100,000 for every $10,000 invested on marketing.

In this episode, we discuss:

6:17: Why understanding the human condition is key to good copy

9:50: Why trust is paramount for dental care copy

12:14: Where copy and content writing fit into a dental practice

17:30: How to quickly move people through a funnel & when to put an offer in front of someone

19:51: Tips for pitching an offer effectively

22:40: Creating content that works quickly and easily for dentists

29:24: Harnessing the power of direct mail

35:27: A simple process for small business owners to create effective content

37:27: Tips for delivering content consistently

42:51: Tips for dentists to grow their practice using content marketing

Find out more about Alexi Neocleous

fubbi.co

3 Secrets to Creating a Profitable Social Media Content Plan webinar

Other links mentioned:

http://www.boxerwachler.com/

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We are undergoing a lot of turbulence. There’s a lot of upheaval in the dental profession and healthcare overall. It’s being consolidated. There’s lots of big money that has found medicine and dentistry. They can source capital and just come on like gangbusters and consolidate practices, add marketing, expand hours, and then hire young dentists that are laden with debt and need a good job.

Just like with life, there are different stages of a career. Young dentists today are finishing university and facing what seems like insurmountable odds. There is so much time, effort, and cost already invested in the career that it’s not possible to turn back. Young dentists must move forward into an uncertain future.

Hopefully, at the end of a long career, dentists will be able to enjoy the fruits of their labour. However, it takes smart positioning to ensure that you will have the cash flow to enjoy the 20 or 30 years after retirement. How do you go about doing that?

The good news for young dentists is that, even if they have debt, they have time on their side.

Set the goalposts.

When you’re saving for retirement, how do you know when you have enough? What is ‘enough’? It’s important to know where to set the goalposts, so you know where to aim.

It starts with lifestyle. A lifestyle burn rate encompasses the expenses of your way of living. Things like where you choose to live and how many children you wish to have will impact your lifestyle burn rate and your cost for the future.

Leverage compound interest.

When you’re just starting out as a dentist, you won’t necessarily have the resources or experience of someone who has had a practice for decades. Dentists just graduating have more debt than ever before while the cost of entering their practice is higher than it’s ever been.

What young dentists have is time. Now is the time to make moves that will position you so you can retire well. Leveraging compound interest is one way to do this. A small investment now will have a much larger return with 30 years of compound interest than 10.

But know it’s not just about accumulation.

For many, the advice about retirement goes as far as saving. Financial advisors sell financial products like stocks, bonds, and annuities as a solution for retirement. The accumulation theory says go to work, build your practice, take your discretionary income left after taxes and bills and put it away. There’s nothing wrong with this plan, but the problem is, how do you know that it’ll be enough?

It’s important not only to accumulate capital but to turn that capital into cash flow. Actual sustainable cash flow removes the question marks from retirement. If you have passive income coming in during your retirement, there is no need to worry about “running out”.

Invest in something you can touch.

Stocks and bonds are just pieces of paper at the end of the day. The only value they have is the value we imbue in them. Consider investing in tangible assets whether that’s real estate or a dentistry practice. These types of investments have inherent value. A house is a shelter and safety. It’s a real thing you can reach out and touch.

Of course, real estate isn’t a sure thing, as no investment is. We’ve seen the housing crisis in the U.S. and how that affected families across the country, but you can also turn real estate into sustainable, predictable, inflation-hedged cash flow that will last through retirement. The great thing about these kinds of investments is that you can do them early in your career and they will continue to add value.

Find mentors to help you excel in the business world.

Younger dentists are making different decisions than their parents did. Not everyone coming out of university today feels like they necessarily have to own a practice. That’s a valid decision – and not a bad one. But there are those who have always wanted to be their boss.

It’s tougher when you have debt. It’s important to not only be a good dentist but a good businessperson. The road is mentorship.

Get the degree that you need to so you can get out into the world and start learning with boots on the ground. There’s no need to get an MBA. You just need to find the best person who is running the kind of business you want. Don’t work for free, but if you can work under the wings of someone who knows what they’re doing, consider working for less than you could make in corporate practice. Trading your time and labour for real-time, on-the-job training so you can go out and open your practice will repay itself easily.

ALB – Always Be Learning

Young dentists should also spend their time to sharpen their clinical skills. For example, if you’re interested in pursuing a boutique practice that offers a holistic experience for discerning wealthy patients, then you will want to ensure that your cosmetic and clinical implant skills are top notch. Start early and chip away at the skills you need to succeed.

Final words…

The world is changing. It’s not the same world that I grew up in and for young dentists, there can be a lot of big barriers in the way to success. But know that for young dentists, retirement is a long game. Be prudent about how you left lifestyle to build your credit. Be careful about adding more debt. With thoughtfulness now, you can retire comfortably when the time comes.

P.S. Whenever you’re ready …. here are 4 ways I can help you grow your dental practice:

Grab a free chapter from my book “Retention – How to Plug the #1 Profit Leak in Your Dental Practice”

The book is the definitive guide to patient retention and how to use internal marketing to grow your practice – Click Here

Join the Savvy Dentist community and connect with dentists who are scaling their practice too

It’s our Facebook group where clever dentists learn to become commercially smart so that they have more patients, more profit and less stress. – Click Here

Attend a Practice Max Intensive live event

Our 2 day immersive events provide access to the latest entrepreneurial thinking and actionable strategies to drive your practice forward. You’ll leave with a game plan to take your results to the next level. If you’d like to join us, just send me a message with the word “Evou’d like to work directly with me and my team to take your profit from 6 figures to 7 figures …. just send me a message with the word “Private”… tell me a little about your practice and what you would like to work on together, and I’ll get you all the details! – Click here

Content marketing has been a big topic of conversation since social media really hit the scene. As dentists, we know that we should be creating content to reach new patients and establish our expertise, but it can often be confusing. How do we know when it’s working?

Content marketing often cannot be measured in terms of Key Performance Indicator’s or other metrics. It becomes an organic process of trust building. You want to answer key questions or concerns that a patient might have yet has nothing to do directly with saying, “Buy my services!”

Here are six copywriting secrets I learned from Alexi Neocleous, a leading copywriter in Australia.

Secret 1. Build trust first.

Going to the dentist is not most people’s favourite activity. It’s right up there with the fear of public speaking for many. Not only do patients come in fearful, but then we are immediately asking them for a great deal of trust so we can put our fingers in their mouth. Building trust requires laying the right foundation of sensitivity and respect.

Think about it this way. If I was to meet you at my dental chair and said, “Hi, it’s really nice to meet you. I know we’ve only known each other 15 minutes, but you really need to spend $20 thousand bucks with me fixing these teeth.” The likelihood of someone accepting that offer is pretty low. I like to tell people to slow down to speed up. Start by building trust.

The same holds true for content marketing. Creating content should come from a place of understanding, building rapport, and authenticity. The key is a multi-step process. Take the time to slowly understand where your patients are coming from, where they’re at, and building your credentials and their trust.

Secret 2. Create a funnel of increasing “asks”.

Platforms like Facebook make it possible for dental practices to build brand and develop an audience that identifies with your message. You can then allow these people to move through your funnel. At the top of the funnel is going to be things like content-rich videos and articles that have them click through to your website. Then you can expose them to bigger “asks” like an invitation to a webinar or a live event. Maybe even an initial consultation at your practice.

The key principal guiding this is increasingly complex requests as they move through the funnel. Once you’ve got people who are engaged with your content and begin moving through your funnel, you can begin to monetise their needs.

Secret 3. Let the audience choose their own experience.

Don’t try to decide the journey. Let the audience tell you. Their behaviour will naturally move them through the funnel. For example, if you’re producing great content at the top of your funnel, but a particular user is not clicking through to your blog or opting in to your newsletter, then it makes no sense for you to aggressively pursue them with advertising and offers. This user shouldn’t get your 50% discount offers.

This is a very different from someone who visits your pricing page and opens half of your last 10 email newsletters. This is someone who is interested and might warrant a phone call, or an evite into the practice, or a special discount offer.

Secret 4. Target your message to your ideal patient.

This is something I’ve talked about on the podcast and in other blog posts. You must target your message to your ideal patient. For example; If your ideal patient is a well – heeled busy professional, it might not make sense to advertise to them by offering discounts.

Busy professionals are not overly price sensitive. They can spend more if they wish to spend more. The price will be determined by the quality of the patient experience. So instead of offering a 50% discount for first visits, you might want to focus on showing that your practice is next level.

Connect with patients by talking about the things your specific patient population cares about.

Secret 5. Create content relevant to your patients by listening to your patients.

The quickest and easiest way to create content is by mining information from patients. Do you hear the same questions popping up over and over again? Jot them down. First ask your patients core questions that will resonant with a wide portion of your audience. This will help you create a solid foundation of value on your website that patients can use as a resource (thus creating trust).

When you are just starting out, there’s no need to worry about keywords or SEO or anything extremely technical. Google’s search engine gets savvier every day and content written by humans for humans is what is prioritised.

Secret 6. Everything is a story.

Stories are our most powerful form of communication. And stories aren’t just two-hour blockbusters. They can be case studies and blog posts.

Once you’ve established a list of the things your patients care about, delve in to these by telling them stories. The best stories are patient stories (of course, change any identifying information to protect patient privacy).

The great news is that if writing isn’t your forte, you can still create compelling blog post without writing a word. Instead, have someone interview you. Get one of your staff to say, “When someone asks you this question, what do you say? What advice do you give?” Record your answer and then have it transcribed. Give the transcription to a freelance writer to work their magic.

Final Words…

Content marketing isn’t about creating the perfect piece of content. It’s about creating consistent content that your patients can relate to. Once you’ve put the effort into creating a powerful, useful piece of content your patients are going to love, make sure they see it. Post it on your website, send it out through your email newsletter, and then post it across your social media platforms.

In this episode, I’m joined by Dr David Phelps who specialises in plan B and exit strategies for dentists. We discuss strategies for all career stages: early, mid and late.There are options to suit just about everyone.

Dr David Phelps has been a general dentist business owner 27 years. He specialises in operations, marketing, succession and exit plans for professionals and business owners. He has also been in the real estate business and investment since 1980. He specialises in alternative financing methods, transaction structures enabling parties to close with or without conventional financing. Joint ventures and equity participations.

In this episode, we discuss:

2:29: Why change brings opportunity (and how to harness it)

7:30: How do you know when you’ve got enough to retire (and how to aim for it)

12:45: Why real-estate is a great revenue stream for older dentists

15:39: Plan B options for early career dentists

20:50: What skills should new graduates be investing in

24:53: Plan B options for mid career dentists and outside wealth options

29:00: What are the key risks, how to identify them and mitigation strategies

Find out more about Dr David Phelps

Freedom Founders Website

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