Dropping Insurance? Buying a Practice? Your Marketing Matters More Than Ever

So if the marketing agency that you're working with doesn't have the ability to track leads, right, there's an in-between, right, between your leads that you're generating through your website and your patient management system. You need some sort of in-between to be able to track the leads that are coming in and if your staff are dealing with them appropriately and if they're actually converting. Because that will tell you if the marketing that you're paying for is actually working. If you don't have something like that in place, you just kind of have to go off of the word of your reception staff, right? And if they say that the marketing is not working, that is going to go to you, and then you're going to get mad at your marketing agency, and then there's going to be a disconnect between the three of you. Welcome to the Dr. Phil Klein Dental Podcast. As dental practice owners, we're faced with a constant stream of decisions, some of which can ultimately be game changers for our growth. But they often come with a fair amount of risk. That's where a strong marketing strategy can make all the difference. It helps guide us through uncertainty and positions the practice for long-term success. Take dropping insurance plans and moving to a fee-for-service model. It's a bold move, one that many of us know can lead to a painful short-term dip in patient flow. Or consider acquiring another practice where the current owner is nearing retirement. There's a real risk that when the former dentist leaves, a large portion of patients might leave too. These are just a couple of examples where smart strategic marketing can help stabilize the transition and move the practice forward. In this episode, we'll share proven strategies that can help you rebuild and retain a strong patient flow, especially during major changes like these. We'll also highlight the common marketing mistakes that can derail even the best intentions. We'll tackle some foundational questions like, what does it really cost to generate a lead? And how much should you expect to invest to convert that lead into a loyal long-term patient? Our guest is Brandon Bosch. He's a very smart guy that knows a lot about dental marketing. He's president and founder of Dr. Marketing. and a certified marketing expert specializing in the dental space. He's worked with hundreds of dental practices to build high-performing websites and dental campaigns across North America. He lectures at many of the major dental meetings, including New York, Chicago, Anaheim, Florida, and so forth. You can reach Brandon by visiting drmarketing.io. Before we get started I'd like to thank all of you for tuning in. If you're enjoying the show please follow us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and even better leave a review. By doing so you're not only showing support for what we do here but your reviews are instrumental in getting more dental professionals to listen and benefit from our content. We really do appreciate it. Brandon it's great to have you on the show. Thanks, Phil, for having me. So we're going to talk a lot about marketing today and how important it is and how to do things right and how companies like yours can help the dental practice. Let's begin with dentists that are doing it on their own. They don't know a ton about marketing. What are the most common mistakes they make in their marketing strategy? So some common marketing mistakes that people do is they include things from the association like their educational background, their positions that they hold. They cannot do that. You can't make yourself seem better than somebody else. If they are responding to reviews in an aggressive way, right? I got a negative review. Yeah, well, you don't like coming into my office. Don't come into my office, right? Do not do that. Also responding to reviews that breach HIPAA compliance. Someone says, hey, thanks for having us in our office. You know, we're looking forward to our next appointment. The response should not be, thanks, Susan, because right away you just broke HIPAA compliance. You cannot mention the patient's name in the review. You can't mention any of the services they have. You have to leave the review very generic, very, very, very generic, but also understand that Google indexes the review. So you should also make sure that the review response is keyword rich, right? So thanks so much for the review. positive or negative. We want to make sure everyone has the best dental experience, something like that, right? People overspend on their budgets, overspend or underspend, right? If you're underspending, you could have unrealistic expectations. You could be spending thousands more than you could. I spoke to an office the other day who was spending $3,900 a month. When we did an analysis on their actual budget, their budget should be somewhere around $2,400 a month. So they were spending an extra $1,500 a month and that was what was that based on just complacency was that they just were sitting back and letting the company they were working with Just bill them and they weren't paying much attention to what they were getting? It was certain services should only cost a specific amount of money. Something like search engine optimization, as an example, should only cost between $300 and $500 a month. This one company was charging $750 a month. Blog writing should cost $300 a blog post. This one blog company was charging $500 a post. Certain things they were vastly overpaying for. Social media, they were charging $1,000 a month for two posts a week. And I'm like, well, over here at Dr. Marketing, it's more like custom posts with proper hashtags and tagging. It's more like $300 or $400 a month. Right. Not a thousand. So they were overspending on some very basic services. So you have to be you have to be you have to be scrutinizing your your bill with your marketing company and getting comparison quotes from other from other agencies to make sure that you're not overspending on stuff. So responding to reviews, making sure that you're not you're not overspending or underspending, that you're not making yourself seem better than somebody else using proper terminology. You can't call yourself the best dentist. You can't say that I'm the supreme dental ruler. Right. You can't, you can't say these things. And so using proper terminology and verbiage, uh, in your, in your text is also important. Um, and then don't offer discounts on your service. My God, like that, that's like the biggest, all right, listen, if you're a Medicaid office, sure, you can offer discounts. If you're not Medicaid, like if you're a PPO or fee for service, don't offer discounts on anything like that. So when you see, I see an ad once in a while, come in for a, uh, checkup and your x-rays are free. Save. $75 on your x-ray on your first checkup you don't encourage that no I don't because they're basically they're there for the incentive and then gone when you try to recall I think the recall if you get a patient from a promotional item or promote or promotion that you're running the recall on those sorts of patients is between 30 and 40 percent all right so you're self-selecting patients that you really don't want in your practice it's not going to help you grow your practice let me get Back to something you said earlier about doctors overpaying for their monthly fee on their marketing services. What do you suggest to a dental practice so that that doesn't happen? How do they know, other than doing a comparison study with other marketing companies, that they're being overcharged? So if the marketing agency that you're working with doesn't have the ability to track leads, right, there's an in-between, right, between your leads that you're generating through your website and your patient management system. You need some sort of in-between to be able to track the leads that are coming in and if your staff are dealing with them appropriately and if they're actually converting. Because that will tell you. if the marketing that you're paying for is actually working see if if you don't have something like that in place you just kind of have to go off of the word of your reception staff right if they say that the marketing is not working that is going to go to you and then you're going to get mad at your marketing agency and then there's going to be a disconnect between the three of you between your marketing agency your reception staff and you and so who's right in that situation so i understand the three parties that are involved but as far as the dentist making sure that he or she is getting the most out of the dollars spent to the marketing company what would you recommend that dentist to do track the leads that are coming to make sure there's no disconnect between you, your reception staff and your marketing agency. And then what you want to do, I want to look at your patient management system to see how many new patients actually did come in and compare that to the amount of money that you're actually spending. And what should a lead, what should a new patient cost? Anywhere between $150 to $450. Well, that's a big, that's a big span there. The reason being is because on $150 or less, these are more emergencies, cleanings, and pediatric patients. On the higher end of that spectrum, that's more cosmetic services, implants, and orthodontics. It'd be hard for you to be able to convert. Let's just say you get it. Now, mind you, these are patients. I'm not talking leads. Leads are going to be less expensive, right? These are patients. So the average office, when it comes to patients, will convert at about 40%, right? So if you're generating 50 leads, or let's just... around numbers, 50 leads, you're going to get 20 patients out of that. And so you have to make sure that what you're spending correlates to the amount of money that you're actually getting out of those patients. And so if there is a disconnect between you, your reception staff and marketing agency, you got to look at the number of patients, the amount of money that you're spending. As long as there's a correlation there, you should be fine. So who in the office should be discussing on a regular basis, the effectiveness of the marketing budget regarding bringing in new patients, And how often should that discussion take place? Before we get back to our guest, I'd like to give a huge shout out to our sponsor, Voco, the Prevention Pros Dentist Trust for products that truly make a difference, like Pro Fluorid Varnish. This isn't your typical thick, sticky varnish. It's thin, transparent, tastes great, it has seven flavors, and delivers the ADA-recommended 5% sodium fluoride for a strong burst of protection. VOCO's unique procolophony formulation helps the fluoride stay in the teeth longer for extended uptake. And that's exactly what you want. And then there's Admirer Protect, VOCO's light-cured nanofill desensitizer that keeps patients' sensitivity free for up to two years. It's a great practice builder. And yes, CDT Code 9911 makes billing simple. If prevention matters in your practice, join the thousands of dental offices that depend on VOCO. Visit foco.dental. Yeah, the office manager and the owner should be talking at least once a month on various topics. Like they should talk about their insurance policies and their internal policies. They should talk about hiring and marketing should be one of those items that they talk about. Unfortunately, majority of offices, even clients that we have, when we reach out to do our monthly or quarterly meetings with our clients, no, I just like I'm good with what you guys are doing. They just kind of leave us alone. I am not surprised to hear that. With everything that's on a dental practice's plate, I am not surprised to hear that. So describe to me in your mind what you think the most successful kind of practice is for you to partner with. In other words, in order to get the best results from what a dental practice pays a marketing company, they have to do their share, right? What's the responsibility of the dental practice? Describe that kind of practice that you work best with that most likely will succeed with services that you offer. That is a great question. I say it's a great question because I like to choose the kinds of clients that I like to deal with. We will not just take anybody who calls us and offers us their credit card. That does not work with Dr. Marketing, right? And so there has to be a personality fit between the office and us. And so the location of the office doesn't really matter. I've literally got a client in Guam, the middle of the Pacific Ocean. So the location doesn't matter. The size of the office doesn't matter. The fact that they're... right anybody within the dental space we can work with personality is a big is a big thing right I don't want to be working with just anybody as a marketing agency I like to work with people who want to work with me and so if you don't see value in what a marketing agency actually does then you should probably maybe try to do the marketing yourself so you can appreciate it a little bit better so you can hire someone to actually do the things that you know you don't have time for. So I'd say maybe try to work it out yourself first. And if it doesn't work, then you can hire somebody. But to find the right type of person, a lot of it has to do with personality. Budget, we work with offices that spend $100 a month. I work with offices that spend $25,000 a month or more. So you might encounter a dental practice that's very hands-on. They want to know everything you're doing. They want to have a lot of meetings. And then you have the other practice who trusts you and sees good results and they go, Brandon, keep doing what you're doing and they just pay their bill. I assume you would prefer the latter. As we start to get to know each other. I will find that most offices typically give us more and more distance, more and more leeway. We find in the first few months, they kind of keep us on a short leash to make sure that the content that we're producing is accurate, that the brand we're conveying is accurate to what they want to see, that we have open communication back and forth. But as time goes on, they have more and more trust in our ability, in which case we find that the communication starts to separate a little bit. We will still reach out. But we find that they don't typically reach back to us. I mean, that's the way it should be. I mean, the dental practice is super busy with all the clinical stuff they got to do. They got their plate full of all the tasks that a dental office needs to handle just by running a business. And they're relying on you to handle the marketing, which I think makes sense. We only really ever hear back from our clients in two instances. One, when they have to update a piece of technology or a staff member. Or two, if there is something wrong. If there's something wrong, we have to fix it, whether it's a spelling mistake on a website or updating a piece of graphic or removing a picture or maybe the amount of leads went down this month. We don't really hear too much of our clients in that instance. Usually, in most circumstances, they're just kind of giving us updates. Holiday hours, our holiday hours are changing, we're moving offices. circumstances in which we hear from our clients and just say, Hey, I want to run a promotion for Invisalign or orthodontics. I want to do something for teeth whitening or cleanings this month or emergencies, or, you know, I want to run some, some form of specific campaign. So a lot of times, like we'll reach out and we'll give ideas back to people. And usually we don't hear back from them unless one of those ideas is like, Oh, that seems like a good idea in which case they respond. When I first moved to Austin 13 years ago, I didn't have a dentist. And, you know, the best way for me to get a dentist, being a dentist, is to get a recommendation from another dentist. But I didn't know any dentists in Austin, believe it or not. I know a ton of dentists in the world, but I didn't know any in Austin. So I got this postcard in the mail. And the postcard was very nicely laid out. And the guy's, you know, address and hours were on it. And I said, let me check this guy's, I needed a dentist. So this... a old-fashioned method, literally using the US mail system. But it came as a card, nothing to open up. We were new. I guess they got some sort of listing from the real estate companies when a new house changes over. I'm still a patient of this, guys. And he turns out to be one of the best dentists in Austin. And of course, I got lucky. And I would certainly leave the practice if I didn't think he was a good dentist. And then I had to go to an endodontist and the endodontist said, the doctor you're going to, the dentist you're going to is one of the best ones in the city. So what would you say to that? Sending out cards. Postcards. Yes, they are archaic. The cost to generate one lead is usually one in a thousand pieces. So if I'm mailing out a thousand. cards i will get one phone call that phone call might not necessarily become a patient so it's very it's very difficult to to make print marketing as effective as digital marketing right you can get digital digital leads for you know $20 to $60, right? Like $20, $70. It's not expensive to generate a lead digitally, but print, yeah, it can be pricey because the average cost per print, depending on the frequency of your send, the quantity in which you're sending, the size of the piece of paper you're sending, as well as the actual thickness of the paper will all determine your cost. So to print it off and distribute it usually can cost anywhere between 25 cents to as much as about 40 cents per piece. That means you're spending $320 to generate one phone call. that is that is very expensive now mind you depending on the size or the location of your area as well as the size of your marketing budget print might actually be you know better in terms of your results sometimes you can get leads for as low as 120 bucks right depending on your location is that part of your services at all do you ever recommend oh absolutely Yeah, absolutely. So we work with a company called Teradel, which is they do all of the distribution for pretty much all flyers throughout North America or throughout the United States. And so we would negotiate those contracts on your behalf to figure out what kind of rate you can get. We would do all the print. We would do all the design work. Like literally, you just have to say, sketch something out. Here's what I want it to look like. Here's what I want you to do. That's great. We'll design it. We'll print it. We'll get the quotes for you. We even can print off, you know, six different postcards with different QR codes going to six different economic areas around you to find out which one of them is actually scanning and getting the better results. And so it's pretty interesting doing stuff like that. And then we could just look at the QR code scans and say, all right. We're only going to focus on this area because this area generates the best results for you. Like an A-B test. Exactly. And so we take care of literally all that for you so you don't ever even have to touch it. So we'll say, all right, going forward, here's the area we're targeting and here's why. I want to ask you about the short and long-term approach to marketing. And we touched on that in a different episode, but it's important to hit that again, to reiterate that. So explain to our audience what it means to have a short-term approach versus a long-term approach. From my mindset, if I was building a practice, I plan to stay a long time. Long-term is important. I'm looking for long-term. I'm looking for good quality patients that are going to be with the practice for a long time. But short-term is important because you've got to pay your bills. So what's your recommendation on that approach? We'll be right back to our guest in a second. But first, when it comes to chairside milling and same-day crowns and bridges, speed usually means compromise, but not anymore. Katana One Speed by Curare is a major breakthrough in Zirconia CAD-CAM blocks. It allows sintering in as little as 9 minutes without sacrificing strength, fit, or aesthetics. That means faster turnaround, true same-day possibilities, and less downtime in your lab or practice. With the unparalleled flexural strength and aesthetics Katana is known for, you get predictable clinical outcomes and the ultimate in patient satisfaction. The bottom line is efficiency matters and stunning beauty is non-negotiable. And Katana One Speed delivers both. Join the growing number of dental offices and labs embracing faster workflows without compromise. Learn more about Katana One Speed at curaredental.com. I want to make sure we're talking about two different things here. So short-term patients would be like emergency cases, being like, you know, I have a tooth pain. I need a root canal. I need something extracted. Those sorts of patients, usually you're only going to see once, mostly because they don't have dental insurance. They usually can't afford it. They're waiting to the last minute to come into the office. You deal with them once, you probably never see them again. Long -term patients are more like families that are just moved to the area and that you're going to see for a long time. Short and long term in terms of patience. There's also short and long term in terms of marketing. So long term marketing, we're talking about like search engine optimization, blog content, updating directories, posting on social media. Those will not generate results for you immediately, but will generate more and more traffic over time, right? Just like the stock market, you look at it, it just continuously goes up, but it's not going to go up like crazy like the crypto market. Right. And so short term marketing is more related to ads, Google ads, print ads, radio ads, YouTube ads, meta ads, stuff like that, where you're paying top dollar to get found right away. And so depending on the approach of your office, we can target short term patients for a long term strategy. Right. So if you want to target emergency patients. we can create a long-term strategy for that. Or if you want to target emergency patients with a short-term strategy because you want them now, you can absolutely do that as well. So mixing and matching services and promotion types, we can absolutely change it. It just depends on the goals of the office. So I assume, Brandon, you've talked to dental practice owners that are in the process of trying to extricate themselves from the encumbrances of insurance companies. They want to be fee-for-service. They do not want to... be controlled by an insurance company. And besides the compensation and the profitability of working with insurance companies is getting worse and worse all the time. So what's the best way to build that message into a practice’s advertising? Is that something you run into with your clients? Absolutely. And so I actually had another office that just dropped Delta Dental. And so they did see a huge drop in business from Delta Dental, obviously. And it took a... I want to say just dropped. It was about 14, 15 months ago that they dropped Delta Dental. And since then, they went from about $85,000, $86,000, $89,000 a month, something like that, down to about $65,000. So it was a huge drop, but now they're back up to almost about 80 right now. This particular office was a general dentist, so they did not like doing things like endo. They did not like doing perio. They didn't like ortho. It was pretty much just like fillings, crowns, extractions, and cleanings. And so we built out content solely related to those things. And so it took a long time, but at least they've seen their increase back up. I mean, yeah, they took like, you know, that extrapolated over the last 14 months, they took like $150,000 hit, $180,000 hit when they dropped Delta. If they didn't use your services, could they have gotten to that point? No way. No way. No way, because it's a very strategic form of marketing because you have to get into the psychology of the patient. And since they dropped Delta Dental, you have to attack a different type of patient. It's the patients that don't mind paying upfront and will submit the insurance claims on their behalf. And how do you portray that in advertising? Second opinion is a big one, right? Need a second opinion? Insurance not covering everything? Give us a call. Or if you have an in-house financing plan or if you have an in-house membership plan, those are big forms of marketing like, hey, insurance not covering everything? We have an in-house membership plan. Or if they're doing, let's just say they're doing an extraction, it's like, hey, if you need help with financing this, we work with Cherry or we... with care credit or something like that absolutely finance that and so pushing more of the financing actually helps them to close bigger cases which helps boost their revenue and then they get those patients on for a long time and then they can end up recalling them so that's how they've kind of like built that up is that they actually yes marketing wise we were able to help bring in the types of patients that they want to see that we don't mind paying for it but it was also partially on them because they had to learn a different approach. They couldn't just rely solely on pushing Delta Dental. Now they're trying to learn, like the reception staff and the doctor and the treatment coordinator are learning, how do I push this procedure into dental financing and then pushing that through? And so it was partially on us, but also partially on them. And it was conversations back and forth and talking to us that they were able to realize, okay, we are actually able to close. more business. We just have to kind of do it in a different way. Yeah. And I think a dental office needs to expect to take a few steps back when they separate themselves from insurance, especially a company like Delta, who probably works with a lot of employers in the area. Were you working with that office prior to the office deciding to drop Delta? Yeah, about two months before they started with us. But when we started working with them, he told us upfront, yes, we are in the process of cutting Delta Dental. So we have to kind of build this strategy knowing that they were going to do that. So it's pretty clear that in the situation where dental practice is cutting a dental insurance plan, they're going to take a hit, hopefully short term, and then they can rebuild it. And it certainly helps to work with a company that has marketing expertise to guide that dental practice through the process of getting the best bang for their buck to rebuild that deficiency and hopefully surpass it. What's another example where a dental practice does something where they need to really get the expertise of a company like yours? Like another scenario that's very similar is if, let's say, a dentist just bought another office and then the old owner doesn't work there anymore. And so just like the insurance, they're going to have to learn a new strategy because they will lose patience because of the old owner not being there and having to rebrand. So it's the same sort of situation, like having to restructure things in a way that would be convenient for how the owner wants to take the business, whether it's dropping the insurance or buying a new dental practice. Either way, you're going to have to make adjustments to your strategy. And I think, Brandon, one of the take-home messages of this episode is, not only how important marketing is strategically, but also to partner with a company that understands the dental space because a lot of companies have generic services. where they put you on Google and social media and they do print and they throw you a mixture of all this different stuff. It sounds like to me that companies like yours takes more of a consultative approach and being strictly in the dental space, you have that expertise and you understand what it's like to run a dental practice. For instance, giving up dental insurance, like you mentioned, buying a practice where the owner leaves. You've seen this stuff before, you've gone through it. So it's not as much trial and error. And the customer, which is the dental practice, doesn't have to pay as you learn along the way on their dime. Absolutely. Just to kind of bring something up. One of our clients that we transitioned several years ago, they were working with a company that specialized in automotive. And so they were like, yeah, they're a really good company. They're locally sourced, right? Like they're down the street from us, down the street from this dental practice. And we decided to work with them. And so I was like, no problem. Let me just give you an analysis on how things are going. When we looked at it, they were spending thousands of dollars in Google ads, but some of the keywords that this automotive marketing agency were promoting for the dentist was DDS services near you. For those of you that can't see me, I've got my hand over my face, like a facepalm. Why would you advertise for something like that? And it's just because they don't specialize in the dental space. It's like the person who's running those marketing campaigns doesn't know. what that what dds actually is right and plus there's a lot there's a lot of dmds out there too and nobody does that search though they don't dds dmd like dentist dental like like i've seen the stupidest keyword combinations believe it or not like just so many bad keyword combinations and so it's very important to make sure that you're working with someone who actually understands the dental space what you can and cannot say according to the dental association and not only that it's like promoting for A dentist. and getting a patient is very different than promoting for another business and getting a client. These are patients we're talking about, not clients. These are two totally different spectrums. And so we have to make sure we're using the right verbiage and the right psychology behind the designs and the structure of our verbiage to make sure we are tracking the right types of people for your office. It's very, very important to make sure. That is very critical. Yeah. And by you having that interview with that dental practice, you'll be able to determine what kind of patients they're looking for. and and and and in what time frame they're looking to get them which is exactly which is all part of it very good discussion I think we covered a lot of stuff here and I think our audience got a taste of what's important in marketing and it's also important to work with the right company and if you want to get in touch with Brandon Bosch he is at drmarketing.io. That's drmarketing.io. He's also at a lot of the major dental conventions. He speaks. He's invited everywhere. Hinman, Florida, New York, Chicago. So check out the local dental conventions in your area. And he usually fills the room. And he has a great lecture series on dental marketing, and you can meet him there. Thank you very much for your attention, everybody. And thank you, Brandon, for your time. I hope to do this again soon. Absolutely. Thanks, Phil.