Marketing Made Simple: Adding Value to Your Practice with Tooth Whitening

You're listening to The Dr. Phil Klein Dental Podcast Welcome to the show. I'm Dr. Phil Klein. Tooth whitening has a mass appeal for many patients. So how do you effectively convey this information and your services to your patient base? Today we'll be discussing marketing and how to add value to your clinical practice with tooth whitening. Our guest is Dr. Miles Cone, a key opinion leader, international speaker. author, and co-owner of Nuance Dental Specialists in Portland, Maine. In addition to achieving board certification and diplomat status within his prosthodontic specialty, Dr. Cone has earned his designation as a certified dental technician. Dr. Cone, it's a pleasure to have you back on Dental Talk. Hi, Phil. Pleasure to be back. Thank you for having me. Yeah, and we encourage our listeners to listen to the entire series we've completed up to this point. Episode one, which is tooth whitening myths, making sense of the data. That's a great podcast right there. And then we talked about tooth whitening materials, contemporary products for outstanding results. That was episode two. This is episode three, and we're talking about marketing made simple, adding value to your clinical practice with tooth whitening. So let me begin with this, Dr. Cone. What is your approach to individuals who are skeptical about the effects of whitening? You know, it's funny. That's a great question. day and age that people would recognize the effects of whitening that nobody would be you know suspect that maybe it's not maybe it's not a real thing or not but admittedly you know i understand the way that that patients view dentists sometimes you know sometimes we have this uh aura surrounding us sort of like a used car salesman or something like that so i i get it i definitely get it so the approach that we use in our office and this might be you know unpopular opinion to do this or it might be a little unorthodox oftentimes when patients come in and they're kind of a little you know wary of the process which is what we do is we say all right we are going to make you custom bleaching trays and we're only going to do it for one single arch however and we call this our single arch bleaching protocol and we we always do it in the maxillary arch we never do it in the mandibular arch because you know the six through eleven those are like the smile you know the that's what everybody sees when you smile that's like you know um the money makers like that's what people see people are usually interested in whitening you know their maxillary uh teeth so that's where we start with um this approach has a couple different benefits to it number one it tends to be a lot more economical you know if you think about sort of the demographic of folks who are coming in to do this we get a lot of you know younger younger age folks you know in that like maybe like 25 to 35 range you know maybe they started a new job and you know take home trays you know depending on what you're charging i mean can you know get into like you know the five six seven hundred dollar range again depending on your office and where you're located but so for many of our patients we we start with one arch because it's it's less expensive but the nice thing about this approach is that it allows the patient to see just how how fast and how intensely their teeth are whitening. And it allows a little bit of juxtaposition between the mandible, which is always a few shades, more chromatic, darker anyway. And within like three or four days, they can really, really start to see those changes. And this is what we do to really, really get them on board. And to date, you know, we've done this, I don't know, however many, like hundreds of times with all of our patients. I think I've only ever had, I can count on probably one hand, the number of times that people were like, you know what, I don't want to now bleach my bottom. Yeah, I was going to ask you that. Exactly, I was going to say. Yeah, this is a really effective way. Right. The close rate must be so tremendous. I mean, you're actually showing them the results. It is. My question to you now is, how are you measuring your whitening results overall? So once you get the patient to accept, they're in the treatment plan, and they're getting their whitening treatment, how do you measure your results, and how do you share those results with your patients? Oh, that's a that's a great segue question. So, yeah. So, like I said, sometimes we'll do that single arch bleaching protocol. But then there's there's other patients, you know, they bleach their teeth, you know, in the throes of their youth. Again, maybe this is a different clientele. Maybe it's the the woman that's in her her mid 50s. And now she's, you know, like the new CEO of a company and she's doing a lot of like board meetings and she wants her teeth just to like pop. Right. So she's like, hey, I bleached my teeth in the past. I know it works. We're going for it. We're doing top and bottom. but the issue that happens with this oftentimes too is we will we'll bleach the teeth you know because let's say they're gonna do they're they're doing a single veneer in the front so we gotta we gotta get everything else white so that way when we do that veneer that porcelain matches you know the the the brighter teeth right because you can't go backwards now so oftentimes you know when the patients come in they'll always tell me and this is like more often than not is they'll say i don't feel like the bleaching the at-home trays i really don't feel like it worked that well um i can't really see a big difference And so, you know, the documentation part of this is is so key. I mean, you have to document, you know, the before, the during, the after, all this stuff. And that is really, really good, not only for, you know, your Web page, you know, talking about like marketing, putting the before and afters out there. Right. But also for demonstrating to the patient. just how they have progressed. So what we use in our office, you know, whether we're doing the in -office bleaching with like the Polarapid or we're doing the at-home with the Polarapid or combination of the two is we have a bleach shade guide and Vita makes this. And I think everybody's familiar with the Vita shade guide, the Vita Classic. Everybody probably has this in their office. Most people probably have two or three of them, but most people have no idea that Vita makes a very specific bleach shade guide. And on that shade guide, you know, if you ask most dentists, you know, describe the shade guide, they'll say, oh, there's like an A2 and a D2 and a B1. And maybe, you know, they're a little bit more sophisticated and they've got, you know, the Vita 3D master. And they're like, oh, well, there's a 2M1 or an OM1, you know, and these numbers. And that's as confusing as those numbers are to dentists. It's really confusing to patients. So patients are not going to remember that they were like, you know, an A3.5 or a 2M1. Like, that's not a thing. so the vita bleach guide is so simple because it's labeled and numbered from one to 29 with 29 being the most chromatic or like the darkest shade that's what your patients would say and one is the brightest and so when the patients come in before we started bleaching we do a measurement with a vita bleach guide and we say okay you're a 17. so they've got that in their head 17. now we do the in-office bleaching you know the 24 minutes with like the polar rapid and usually we're getting them like six or seven shades so they'll go from like a 17 and they're down to like a nine or a 10 range and they're like oh wow this is awesome you know they might come back in for another in-office round or if we're making them the trays they'll come back in you know two weeks two to three weeks to check up and now they're like oh man i'm at a three and so this gives the patient like a goal line right and i'll tell you what nothing has built my bleaching practice more than this shade guide because patients remember that they were like a seven or a five And all they know is that they want to get to number one. They want to get to one and they're not happy until they get to one because that's the brightest that's on the shade guide. So this simple shade guide, this thing has pushed my bleaching practice like further, you know, because a lot of times we get a lot of one off bleachings, but now they're like, oh, I've got like a goal. They almost take it like personally that they need to get to number one. So I would highly recommend this. Yeah, that technique also ratchets up the compliance rate, I would assume, with the at home. Absolutely. Yes, 100%. Right. Yeah, that's very, very interesting. So what kind of advertising do you do, Dr. Cohn, to attract patients for tooth whitening? So I think this is really huge. And so anybody who's ever seen my website knows like I built my website myself. And I'm not like a graphic designer. I'm not like I don't know anything about coding. But I made a very simple website. It cost me a couple hundred bucks. And I've made sure to put my bleaching on there front and center. One of the really, really nice things about working with a company like SDI, and I don't know any other company that does this. And I speak like Phil, I speak for, I think like 15, 16 different companies. I don't know any other company that does this at like no charge for any clinician that's using their products just willingly. So with SDI, if you are using their products and you're ordering from, from SDI, they will make, they will make a like a landing page for you. So like if individuals, if patients are out there looking for a pola dentist, they can type in the city where they live and it'll bring up your name. And so this is just free SEO, right? This is just free search engine optimization. I know a lot of people are out there paying for, you know, Google AdWords. This is incredible. This was one of the big things I know when we first got started and we didn't have. You know, my kids were eating ramen noodles because we didn't have like five bucks together. This is how we started building our practice. I still eat ramen. I still eat ramen. I'm not giving that up. Yeah. We still eat ramen. Yeah. But you know what I'm saying, right? I mean, we were like struggling in the beginning and like the bleaching was one of the things that really, really kept us afloat. And having SDI put us on their webpage as like a Pola certified dentist was really, really great. And again, this boosts your... Like, again, your SEO, your online reputation, and your ranking, and it's totally free. And I don't know a single other company in the industry that does that, that puts you on there and says, oh, this is like, you know. Yeah, that kind of SEO perk comes with paying quite a lot of money for a franchise license, which you don't have to pay. So if you're, I mean, yeah, I mean, if you're building decks for people, front porches or whatever, and. You're using a corporate name. They put you on the list and say, hey, here's a guy that, here's a company that builds decks for you in your area. Put the zip code in and they charge you for that. So this is a great service. Not to compare dentists with people that build decks, but at the same time, it's business-wise and the SEO part of it correlates very well. That's a great service by SDI. What is your tactic for discussing bleaching with patients in a way that doesn't sound like a sales pitch? And again, you talked about it in the beginning of this podcast, which is a really interesting technique, the way you do, you know, quarter of the mouth, the moneymakers on the top, one side of the arch. What else do you do to get the patient to say, I'm in? Yeah. And again, another fantastic question. And this is one, I think I get asked this question of all the questions I get asked during my webinars and things like that. I think this is the one. that people always put out there and but here's how this usually goes they'll say like hey dr cone you know i know that you do you're a prosthodontist you're doing like really high-end aesthetic stuff and you're you're publishing in these journals and these magazines and you're on you know on the stage showing this stuff i don't have like a really cosmetically driven practice you know i'm in a rural area you know we've got kind of like a smaller a smaller office you know maybe my population they're not really so interested in in like whitening their teeth and i don't want to yeah i don't want to sound like cringy and creepy you know because if i mentioned to them hey do you want to bleach your teeth you know it starts raising questions like do i need to what's wrong with my teeth right so what i tell people all the time is like rather than focusing on the cosmetic aspects of the bleaching and i'd mentioned this before is that that that 10 carbamide peroxide the polonite that we recommend for all of our patients it doesn't matter who it is whenever they come in i always talk about you know what if these people are going out of their way to actually come to your office, chances are they're definitely into the oral hygiene aspect of dentistry, right? And so that's what custom trays with the 10% polonite, the carbamide peroxide can do. Just the oral hygiene aspect of it alone, you can talk to your patients about that and you should be talking to them about that. And then you say, oh, and by the way, you might notice that your teeth get a little bit brighter. They're going to turn whiter over time because the whitening is actually a side effect. of the oral hygiene um aspect of carbamide peroxide because that's how carbamide peroxide came about you know during world war one when they were developing it as a wound antiseptic for the soldiers and now it's used in the mouth as a as an oral antiseptic and so that's actually you know the key benefit that most people don't know so if you feel uncomfortable discussing you know cosmetics with a patient base that doesn't isn't cosmetically driven well you mentioned the oral hygiene and i'm pretty certain that they are going to be on board and go along with that because who doesn't want to improve their oral hygiene? Yeah, no, that's a very interesting approach and it helps the patient. So to wrap up this podcast, one last question. Do you feel that you've identified yourself partly as a whitening practice? And that's something that patients would seek out, which would in many ways improve your patient flow because you have identified yourself as kind of a specialist in whitening. which I think would attract a lot of patients. Has that happened to you? Yes, it did. And again, I never, there was almost like a little bit of a stigma associated with that in the beginning. Like I didn't want to be like that guy, you know, because I'm a board certified prosthodontist. You know, I do, I do, you know, big full arch cases and really, you know, complex stuff and whitening is kind of like, that's not really what I do. But now again, with the oral hygiene aspects of it and seeing what it does and anybody who's who's read my ebook um you guys know that i use bleach in i use it in dentures i use it around implants that you know have threads that are exposed you can use it in children as young as you know 10 years old you can use it in endo you know phil i don't know if you ever used you know the the super oxal right and that was like a 30 eight percent hydrogen peroxide or something you can use 10 carbamide peroxide for the walking bleach technique for endo you know oral surgeons can give this to patients you know after they've had um their wisdom teeth extracted you can make trays that the patients can wear to for again for the wound healing like there's so many benefits of this that yeah now i identify as like yeah i am sort of a an expert you know subject matter expert in bleaching and i'm proud to say that now going forward because of all of the benefits of it and how it has built up our practice otherwise and like i said how it's been there during some of the hard times like during the pandemic and during you know the slow months of the year people are always wanting to bleach and it's it's a big um it is a big practice builder and i would really encourage everybody who has thought about bleaching but isn't really doing it or only dabbling go full in you will you will not regret it yeah and it's not like you're not doing prosthodontics i mean you're still Doing crown and bridge and implants is just, you have a whole nother dimension to your practice that helps patients and is a great revenue producer. Right. And the bleaching, you know, most patients who are doing the crown and bridge, the bleaching is a wonderful adjunct to that, you know, and it's rare that I have somebody that's going to do, you know, the single central veneer that doesn't also want to whiten their teeth. So if you're not offering that, I think you're doing your patient a disservice and you're doing your practice a disservice because this is, you know, the ROI on bleaching is incredible. Thanks very much, Dr. Cone, and appreciate all your input. Excellent podcast. Have a great night. Thank you so much.