808: How Digital Marketing Expands Your Dental Practice with Chris Pistorius

Unknown Speaker 0:01 marketer of the Day episode 808 how digital marketing expands your dental practice with Chris Pistorius?

Robert Plank 0:13 Okay, we are here with Chris Pistorius who is the founder of kickstart dental marketing. They have been consistently listed as one of the top dental marketing companies in the country by upcity. And they pretty much do everything that you need. If you're a dental practice that you do online advertising, social media, front desk training, reactivation campaigns, SEO website, managing your leads, figuring out your unique selling proposition that ideal patient so many things so much to talk about, Chris, how the heck are ya?

Unknown Speaker 0:44 Great, man. Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it.

Robert Plank 0:47 I'm glad to have you on and and you know how podcasting goes. You never know who is driving by who is listening. And ideally, hopefully, there is some dentist office who is struggling out there who needs help, who needs the team at kickstart, dental truly kickstart their practice into high gear. And I feel like as a lay person, a lot of these dentists really have so much of their social media dialed in, they consistently post on social media, they have beautiful graphics, they have testimonials, but from an out as an outsider, it looks extremely overwhelming all the boxes to be checked all the bells and whistles. And so as far as the way you see it, what's the average dentist office struggling with? Where are they stuck? And what are they you help with?

Speaker 2 1:30 Yeah, that's a great point. And I'll tell you, you know, even 10 years ago, it was a much simpler process and probably more like 15 years ago, because back then you could put an ad in the Yellow Pages, I mean, who the hell even knows what Yellow Pages are anymore. But you could put an ad in the Yellow Pages, you could do a little direct mail, and you're kind of set and it worked well. And that's kind of was the complexity of your marketing campaigns. Well, nowadays, there's 500 different places that you can market just online, right. So the internet's really caused, you know, some complexity and marketing for not just dentists, but really any local businesses. So we created kickstart dental marketing, to kind of help untangle the web a little bit, if you will, and fight, provide a safe place, if you will, for dentists and simplify some of this. And mostly our clients see us as kind of being their marketing department or digital marketing department. So we have 12 years of experience and dental, we have a great pulse of what works for dentists and what don't, what doesn't. And were able to kind of hit the ground running, take that stress of it out of the out of them, they're great at being a dentist, let them go run their dental practice, let us be the ones that are that are driving new leads and new patients to the practice.

Robert Plank 2:43 And when you find these, these dental offices, what's the starting point? Is it a matter of like they aren't doing marketing during marketing, but it's all themselves and they're so busy? Is it not paying off? What's the before picture look like?

Speaker 2 2:58 It's a little bit of everything, what we see more than more often than not is that it is so complex, and they don't know what to do, and they don't know where to turn to. And sometimes they'll just kind of do what I call the ostrich method of marketing. And they what will happen is they'll kind of stick their head in the sand and do nothing, right. And that's because it's too complex, they don't understand it. They're not they don't want to make a bad decision and waste a bunch of money, right. So that's the worst thing that you can really do if you want to compete. I mean, dentistry is more competitive now than it's ever been. I mean, in most local cities, towns, there's multiple choices to go to the dentist. So you have to be able to compete and digital marketing is where people are finding new dentists. And that's where you have to be visible, and not just visible, but you have to be found, which is the visibility part. But you have to give people a reason to choose you as well. And that's that's even a bigger part of it is, you know, do you have a unique selling proposition? You know, why should somebody choose you versus the 50 other dentists in town? What is it that you do different, right, and we help with that part of the marketing process, as well. Because if we get that aligned and in place, then it becomes marketing becomes a little bit easier. We know who to target, where to target, and how to really talk to that particular market. So that's kind of the process but we find we find dentists that are doing nothing right now. We find dentists that you know, perhaps are doing marketing now, but they're just not having a great experience with their current agency, and they're looking for something a little bit different. So kind of all kinds of across the board. People is what we find. And that's interesting

Robert Plank 4:33 how you break that problem down into kind of more manageable pieces. Right? You said that there's first of all the issue of being known at all even being discovered at all. And then there's the issue of like, you know, these days people they do their research, they check reviews, they there's a lot more like I don't know like education happening and then there's this kind of like the uniqueness this unique selling proposition and and on that point as far as the USP what comes to mind just in general Raul is, in my town, there's, I would say like maybe like 2530 dentists, and the only ones that really come to mind as far as just like, thinking of who I visualize is, there's one that's a Kid's Dentist, and their logo looks kind of like the cover of highlights magazine where it looks like it's drawn and cran. And then there's another one, where it's called, like symphony of smiles or something. And there's like a piano in the front room. And it's, it's kind of, I don't know, its extent stands out for some reason. I'm like, not sure what a piano has to do with a dentist's so, so like, how, how does how does a dentist's be unique? Because it's like, well, everyone's got got teeth, everyone needs teeth, teeth clean. How do you get from just being just a dentist to something like that?

Speaker 2 5:43 Yeah, it just kind of depends. But some examples are like, we have a pediatric dentist who specializes in kids, obviously. And they have a part of their business that really encompasses like, special needs kids. So we really, I mean, that's different. That's unique. Not all dentists do that not even all pediatric dentists do that. So that's something that we want to show people what they do, and it makes them very unique. For others, it can be we have a client that went to Harvard dental school, right? Well, we don't want to overdo that. But we want to definitely highlight that you look, this person went to a really good school, they graduated top in their class at Harvard school, or Harvard dental school. So for for that particular situation. It's education and experience. So you know, it's a little different for each one. And that's where, you know, a lot of other marketing companies think of a dentist to the dentist, right? And they'll take on, you know, 20 colonic clients in one city, and then they'll move on and go to the next city. Well, we're a little different. We only work with one practice in each market. And we don't believe a dentist, as a dentist, we do believe that there's a unique selling proposition for each and every one of our clients. And that's what we try to really expose the most.

Robert Plank 6:50 And how do you discover that like, if a dentist is top of their class at Harvard, dental school? Is it a matter of like, asking a bunch of questions or like just like talking to them? Like how do you dig deep and, and arrive at something like that?

Speaker 2 7:03 It's the first part of our process. Once they sign up with us, we have a kickoff meeting, it takes about an hour and a half. And it's with the dentist and you know, his top staff and we die, we have kind of a set number of questions that we ask that drive towards figuring out what that unique selling proposition is. And then my team will strategize on how to word it and message it and we're off to the races.

Robert Plank 7:26 And so what do you think is like the low hanging fruit these days, as far as like, you know, dentists, there's, there's always a million things to be done, right? You need maybe like a website or like text message reminders, or maybe like cleaning up bad reviews on social media. But would you say is there's something timely like this last year or so that, like all dentists are really missing out on that they need to pay attention to?

Speaker 2 7:47 Yep, it's called next door? I don't know if you heard it next door. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So it used to be that you couldn't even really do advertising on next door. And for the people listening that don't know what next door is, it's a like a local community website. But they've got one for like, every community in the country. So like, I'm part of one that has several 1000 residents in it. And, you know, it's only local to people that live there. Well, now, you can local businesses can now market and advertise on those channels. And it's pretty affordable. And not many other dentists are doing that right now. They haven't kind of they haven't really figured that out yet. So we're placing our clients in these advertisements, and they're doing great. So that's something certainly within the last year that is working great for our clients.

Robert Plank 8:31 Fantastic. And so So what does that look like? Exactly? Just like you run an ad, someone's using the app, and then there is that go to like a phone number or a website or like, what's the path from someone is seeing, like the dentist on this app to their book for an appointment?

Speaker 2 8:47 Yeah, we try to break it out into different campaigns and think of each campaign as a different type of service. So like, we might have a campaign just for dental implants, right, or a campaign just for teeth whitening, right. And so when they click on that particular campaign ad, say teeth whitening, they'll click on it, and it'll actually go to a landing page that we built, we don't just send them to the website, a landing page that talks all about their teeth whitening services, any specials that they have. And there's a phone number on it, that we track phone calls that go through. And then there's also a form online, if they want to just you know, fill out a form and send it in, we track that as well. And there's also an online chat button where they can actually speak with somebody at the front desk through chat if they prefer to do it that way.

Robert Plank 9:29 And he thought of everything, and I feel like man, it's only seven minutes into our conversation where we're both going at such breakneck speeds. I feel like it says kind of like a rapid fire session, as we're, as we're kind of like talking about all these things. And so you're mentioning all these things like you know, monitoring phone calls and landing pages. And so I imagine that a dentist out there at this point will be thinking, Well, what's like the costs involved? And I know that there's probably like different levels of packages, but like, what's the general cost involved? And then what's what's The timeline because I'm sure that like there was a period of time, like you said, of like figuring out that client, and then establishing things and letting ads and things run. So like, what kind of budgets? Are we talking? And what kind of timelines?

Speaker 2 10:12 Yeah, you're right. It varies. Some, some clients, probably 70% of our clients bring us on to run the whole show kind of head to toes, we're like the full on marketing department for them. And about 30% of them will just kind of say, you know, what, I really want to do some Facebook ads or some Google ads, can you just run that campaign for me? Or can you just build a website for me, and we do some of that work kind of piece work as well. In pricing, just really, we don't have like standardized gold, silver, bronze packaging, it's impossible to do that, because every markets, different, and competitiveness, and you know, San Francisco versus like, you know, straw spring, Colorado, for instance, way to different populations that will make it way easier and straw spurred for us to get somebody ranked and visible online, then it will in San Francisco, San Francisco's budget will be quite a bit more money. But we have clients who spend a few $100 with us a month, not that many, but we have probably the sweet point, it's a few $1,000 a month, just kind of just kind of depending on what's going on.

Robert Plank 11:13 Okay, fair enough. And construe mentioning clients. It's always fun to talk about, like success stories, or weekend talk talk you and your team up and, and especially when they're flakes that you found a practice that really needed help and really, like had a few things working, but what not everything. And so do you have any fun success stories like that, where there was like before and after, and your team jumped in? And just like really made it a well oiled machine?

Speaker 2 11:37 Yeah, absolutely. This is the pride. And the joy of doing this, you know, it's, you know, we've done this a few times now, where a client has come to us, and they're kind of on their last rope. They're, like, we're struggling, you know, we this particular one I'm thinking of is, you know, we took over a dental practice, we bought it, we've got this debt, his patient base is just going away, they're not actually coming to us. We need help, right. And so over about a course of a year, we turned them into not only being hugely successful without one practice, but within that year, they actually bought another practice, and that one is doing gangbusters as well. And we've had multiple clients, you know, do that, you know, rebound their current practice, and grow it. And then if they are the type that likes to expand, we've had several that have gone on and bought other practices. So it's a great success story. And those are the ones that, you know, keep you smiling every day when you come into work.

Robert Plank 12:38 Oh, fantastic. And I mean, speaking of rebounding, you know, there's this whole pandemic thing that who knows if it's come and gone, but either way, it disrupted a lot of us in a lot of ways from like occupancy, but it seemed like so many businesses, figured out the internet figured it out the ABS figured out like appointment systems and getting people in and out the door. And I think just as a as a marketer in general, who I like marketing, but like the dental space doesn't really interest me personally that much. But it's so interesting to see, like what's being done, especially in these niches where it's really dialed in. So have you had to adjust with your clients or had to, like improve their process at all, with all this pandemic stuff happening.

Speaker 2 13:20 We haven't changed much in the process. But what did help us I mean, every dental practice in the country pretty much shut down for at least 30 days and some 60 to 90 days. So basically, every one of our clients saw no new patients for a minimum of 30 days. Okay, so a good chunk of those said, Hey, Chris, we've got no money coming in, so I can't pay you. So we took the strategy of okay, we see light at the end of the tunnel, it doesn't look great right now. But we are going to come out of this at some point. So we don't want you to lose progress in marketing based on, you know, the next 30 to 60 days. So we took the kind of I don't know the best way to put it, but kind of the scary step of saying, Look, we're going to keep working for you. We're not going to charge you anything until you're back up and running, and seeing new patients again, but we're going to keep your marketing we're not going to let off the accelerator at all. And it worked out I mean, of the people that paused with us, about 90% of them wound up coming back, it built seemed to build a great relationship with them, because they were very glad that we took the time and the money to keep investing in them even though they weren't bringing money in and they weren't paying us. But during that time, I didn't we didn't lay anybody off. We didn't let anybody go. I just kind of dug my heels in and we took when we when a lot of people didn't have much to do like particular departments. We really took the time of looking at our process and procedures in terms of you know, how we get work done, and how we can be more efficient and we were able to realign a lot of work to streamline our process a little bit more so that we can handle a few more clients and still have a small team. So that allowed us to refine our internal processes and just build mad loyalty with with our current patients and, or current clients. And it's worked out well.

Robert Plank 15:09 Awesome. So instead of panicking, or instead of shutting everything down, you said, we'll keep doing it. But you as the client don't have to pay as until you're back up and running. And we'll also turn this into a positive by figuring out how to do a better job here. So like fantastic. And so kind of diving into some of your services and things like that. The the lead flow lead management thing, that's really interesting, because like, one thing that blew my mind as a little kid, I think I was maybe like 10 years old was they like the dentist had me write, like, address a postcard to myself as the reminder for the appointment in like six months or a year or something. And so I totally forgot. And then a year later, when a postcard showed up, it appeared there in my handwriting. And it also makes me think about in the in the present day, I sort of dropped out with my dentists, like I was going to our dentist, like twice, two, or two or three times a year. And then the person that would usually see me, she went on vacation, and then when she came back, we couldn't get our schedules figured out and just fell out of it. And then years passed, and they never followed up with me. And if they had, I probably would have gone like five or six times since then. And it seems like there's a lot of just really simple things like that, especially if there's software and or minors involved. So can you kind of tell us a little bit about what this whole, like lead generation lead management stuff is all about with dentists?

Speaker 2 16:31 Yeah, it's it's awesome. Obviously, I'm biased because I kind of created it. But what we found is exactly what you just talked about. Sometimes, like, for instance, let's just use this. As an example. Let's say somebody signs up for more information about being a new patient with your practice, they fill out a form online, right? That gets forwarded to you. Well, you follow up with them? No answer, you send them an email, no response. Well, the thinking behind that is that it's very easy to fill out one of those forms, but then it kind of buyer's remorse kicks in, because nobody's thrilled about going to the dentist, it's just the way it is. And they keep putting it off putting it off, they see who's calling and they see who's emailing and they're like, I don't really want to go, I'll put it off. Well, most dental practices don't have a system in place, or the personnel to be able to follow up 567 times which study shows is what it takes to actually get some of these patients into your chair, you know, they might call once or send an email once, but that's about it. That's all they have set up. So we've created a system that will actually follow up with them in our appropriate amount of time, so that we're not overdoing it, and, you know, just trying to harass them, but we have a system that will automatically follow up with them. So the front desk doesn't have to until we do are able to connect them with the front desk, and then our sequence stops. So front desk personnel don't have to worry about constant follow ups, we take care of that for them. On the flip side of that though, when somebody fills out a form online, or you know sends in whatever, you have a 391% better chance of getting them into your chair, if you can respond to that lead within one minute. Okay. And that this is kind of for all types of small businesses, not just dentistry, but the quicker you can respond to an online lead, the better. So if you get that lead notification, and you might wait a few hours to call them back, there's a good chance you're not going to get them because think about it, they're probably on Google or some list looking for a dentist, they reach out, reach out and they keep going down the list right? Well, it's going to be kind of the first person that gets back to them is going to have a really good chance of getting them in the chair. So we've created that same system is if during business hours, they fill out a form or whatever, it actually automatically calls the front desk and says, Hey, Chris has filled out a form off of Facebook, press one to connect with him now, the front desk presses one and within 60 seconds of that person filling out the form, they're able to connect with that lead immediately. And we're seeing that that is driving huge conversion rates and getting a lot more of those online leads and chairs. So there's a lot more that this lead system does but those are two of the two of the the biggest features probably

Robert Plank 19:08 that's amazing. That's mind blowing. And in our conversation today and thinking about the way that you and your your team break down the things that are needed like with the leads and the SEO just what comes to mind is that there are so many business ZZ out there, especially dentists where the things are going great, but just kind of almost by chance just like they've maybe lucked into it and that there are so many things that could be like repeatedly predictably just done and systematized so that way it just happens without without anyone having to think about it. Your team just handles it it's a film that just happens and I like your your mindset here of like taking things to the extreme and almost being superhuman, I mean, having someone fill out a form and within a minute to get a phone call from any business write any kind of like contract or home service done. Ask for anything to get a phone ringing in a minute. I mean, it's uh, impressive, amazing and easy enough to do with the right software, the right system. And if there's someone at their front desk, who's working 40 hours a week anyway, why not plug in about when it's possible when they're just playing on Facebook anyway, so like, this is so many cool things to be for us to be thinking about. So if someone out there in podcast land is watching, you're listening, they say, a lot of this makes sense. I'm superduper interested in kickstart Dental. I want to find out what you guys are all about. I want to get a conversation going. What's the next step here? If someone says, I'm in, I want to contact Chris and his team and get a phone call back in one minute or less? What's the next step?

Speaker 2 20:42 Yeah, just go to our website kickstart dental.com. There's a button there for a free strategy session. I do all the strategy sessions, the initial one, so it'd be with me personally. We just kind of go over what your practice is into what's going on what your goals are. And then we kind of take it from there.

Robert Plank 21:00 Fantastic. Short, short and sweet. Go there right now. Kickstart dental.com. And as we wrap up, wind down our conversation as and as people are going and typing in kickstart dental.com Even before the episode is over, just so that way, and the browser tabs there, it's on your phone and all that stuff. Do you think there's anything that either like we left out of our talk today, Chris or anything that you just want to say some final parting words of advice?

Speaker 2 21:22 Yeah, I think it's my my final words of advice would be to take action. If you want to grow your practice or any local business that's out there listening to this or watching this. Take Action do something doing nothing isn't going to grow your business, right? Do something take action. I don't care if it's going out and going door to door and trying to sell your whatever service you have or sending out letters to targeted customers. Do something that's going to grow your business

Robert Plank 21:54 do have wine podcast.com forward Slash Free. Go there right now to see what you could be missing in your podcast. Maybe you aren't active enough on social media? Are you writing and broadcasting an email for every episode of your podcast? Do you follow up with your podcast guests? Do you do things to make your podcast interview and content creation easier? Go to d f y podcast.com/free to claim your gift right now.