196: Digital Marketing Essentials for Practice Growth

Start thinking about yourself as a specialist, right? And then like, what? What do I want to specialize in? Because that gives me the client avatar to start working towards online marketing. Hi, I'm Emmett Scott and just like you, I've had my ups and downs in the dental industry, but times are changing. The DEO has built a map of how to succeed in one of the most challenging industries to navigate. On this show, we talk to dental industry leaders, solve problems, and get you the answers you need to face these challenging times and thrive. Welcome to DEO's Growth SOL Secrets podcast for dental organizations. Now let's get started. Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of DEO Grow Secrets. I'm your fearless host, EMT Scott, and today I'm excited to have Max Bayback with us. With over 14 years in the field of public relations and marketing, Max has worked with a diverse clientele ranging from tech startups to large institutions such as UCLA help and publicly traded Fortune 500 companies like AT&T. So having co founded Now Influx Marketing back in 2014, he spent the last 10 years focused on bringing modern patient acquisition strategies to private medical practices with an emphasis on high value cash pay patient acquisition. Over that time, Influx has grown to become one of the top medical marketing agencies in the country with the company appearing on the Inc 5000 list for the past three years running. Welcome Max. I'm excited to bring you into dental. You know you've been in a lot of the medical piece and I was looking at your website and some of the work you've done. Man, we need that upgrade within dental. So appreciate having you at deo. And for those who don't know, Max has already been super generous. They are sponsoring Vern Harnish coming to the deo. For those who don't know who Verne Harnish is, by the way, like if you've ever heard of the entrepreneur organization eo, Vern started that, right? So like, if you've ever heard of like the Rockefeller Habits or Scaling up those kind of books, those were all written by Vern Harnish. He's going to be at our event sponsored by Inflex Marketing. So that's the DEO Summit event, June 13th through the 15th out in Orlando, Florida. If you haven't signed up for that, go to deodental group.com. anyway, so thank you Max, that was very kind of you. I'd love to hear how you went to the medical side because it sounds like your experience, you know, has been much broader than just medical. But man, we Got you. So tell me how that happened.

Well, first of all, thank you so much, Emmett. Thanks for having me on the show today. I do want to just say we're very. We're very proud to be able to sponsor, to be able to support the DO in any way with the upcoming summit. I'm really excited, actually, to learn from Vern in his keynote. And. And I do just also want to say I have. I've had the opportunity several years back to speak. Was that a couple different little seminars that I went to that were sort of satellite seminars to the DO and I got to meet a lot of the members. We actually from that made some connections with some members who became our clients and are still our clients today. So I've gotten familiar over the last. A little before the pandemic that that happened, but I've gotten familiar with the DO in that period of time and from the very first. And I actually got to go to one of the summits back in Orlando.

Okay, we're back there again. Yeah.

Yeah. Right. So it was at the Ritz that one year I went, and I was really impressed by the caliber of people that I met. What they were all aspiring and striving to be or already were was something so differentiated in dental, and was very clear to me that I was in very different company. And so the opportunity came for us to potentially sort of be able to support the DO in the summit and the keynote this year. And I thought it just made a lot of sense for us. So I feel like there's a lot of alignment in our philosophy to. To what I think is just sort of intrinsic in the core sort of values of the DO and their members. And so I'm really, really happy to be a part of it. And so. So thank you for being so welcoming. Thank you for having me on the podcast today. And yeah, I'll tell you a little bit about my background. As mentioned, worked in public relations. That was actually in the family business. And I got a chance to work for public companies where we were handling all of their. Their corporate communications, their investor relations. So you really have to get everything, all the regulations, all the cross, all the T's, dot all the eyes, but also make sure that you're helping them to get their message out to potential shareholders and existing shareholders. Over time. I struck out on my own to go into marketing and found myself in a lot of different industries. As mentioned, I did work for UC, UCLA Health. We did work for DirecTV and AT&T when the two became one years ago. I think it was 2015 or 2016 and there was a point where we were, we were working in Los Angeles at the time, my business partners and I and we started getting, I don't remember the exact first thing that we ever did, but we did something with aesthetic medicine actually plastic surgery in a client in the Beverly Hills area. And that's you know, one of the toughest markets, one of the most sort of red oceans when it comes to medical tourism, high value medical patients in a cash pay industry that, where marketing is key. And the, at the time, are you

saying it's, it gets harder and harder to differentiate because everyone's playing at such a high level, right?

Absolutely correct. And on top of it, if you're, if you're looking at a lot of the ways that patients were being acquired them then and it's still true today, is, is Google and that's a bid system. Right. So people are just driving those bids up. So what were you doing again to differentiate aside from just bidding more and getting your costs driven up? And what we found is that were a number of people at that time were looking to really in that field and in medical esthetics. But it also quickly became cosmetic dentistry. Were looking to differentiate themselves with an elevated brand presence. And they were coming to us because we had built a name for, for high fashion design. We were doing it for tech industry, we were doing it for fashion industry clientele and they wanted that. And my business partners and I saw something in that. As it became, as the demand became more and more clear, we thought maybe we should lean into this. And so we did. But as mentioned, it wasn't long before a lot of cosmetic dentists were seeking us out because we built a name for ourselves in aesthetic medicine that was largely plastic surgeons. But over time it became heavy med spa as well. But cosmetic dentists are kind of the next logical progression there where they would say, you know, I'm looking, I have high, especially in Los Angeles, you know, a lot of, a lot of things you don't see elsewhere in the country you do see, but you see a lot more in Beverly Hills veneers and purely cosmetic. Not even, not even reconstructive technically, but just purely cosmetic. But they were, they were high, high ticket cases where they really needed again to impart trust, impart differentiation, impart expertise. And it came down to that design. Over time we really honed in on being able to not just design beautiful websites, but design websites that converted and campaigns that converted. And that just kind of came our niche across all medical specialties where there's cash pay component.

What, what did you notice as you've refined your craft here that differentiates? You know, my brother in law knows how to do websites, blah, blah, blah, right? Can throw something up, it looks nice, whatever. If you're fine tuning, you know, you kind of grew up in the toughest neighborhood, so to speak, right? Like the most competitive neighborhood. What were some of those elements that maybe even for yourself you're like, okay, we've got to upgrade our capability around X, Y and Z.

You know, a lot of it is in intangibles, but I'll try to break it down. And for us I would say actually then it was easy. Today there's a lot more people who are, are elevating websites and so we have to continue to push our game. But at the time it was kind of table stakes just even, it wasn't even table stakes yet to even have a website. Actually, you know, some people were first coming to us for their first website. So just having a website I think felt like a pretty big accomplishment. But it is just becoming to the point where consumers were starting to differentiate between hey, this is a slow, clunky, kind of looks medical. I want to be sold a little bit more of a lifestyle. And just being able to create that actually was an easy win for us at the time. And I would say that the same things apply, but it's more and more challenging today. But we saw that we needed to essentially, you know, there's a split second and this is really baked into our philosophy. There's just that instant, it's not even a full second where a consumer really makes a decision, especially if they're looking, they're doing that research for hey, I'm going to do a bigger case here, I'm going to spend some real money and I want to shop around for the, the, the real expert that I feel is the right person to spend my money with. This is not insurance based. I'm going to really need to, I'm reaching deep to make this happen and I want to really trust this person. There's, there's an instant where they make that decision and they're not even really conscious, conscious of it. They're simply making that decision on the fly. A lot of it is tacit with what they see. A lot of it has to do with the image assets and the visual assets that you see, the way the site performs, how quickly they can get to the right information. So it's a lot of little things kind of coming Together.

What I've noticed working with members is that in developing out their marketing piece, they often jump to the medium that they want to, you know, utilize a website, whatever it might be. But, and I noticed this in, in your design, I'm curious, do you help people with this, clients, members with this? But this first step is understanding who your customer avatar is, right? Because am I, you know, pediatric Medicaid, am I some type of geriatric, you know, solution, do I have some cosmetic, etc. And one of the things I really push back on is dentists will talk from a clinical perspective and say, we do bread and butter dentistry, but that doesn't give us any of the demographic psychographic clarity that you really need to target. How do you work with clients who, you know, maybe initially they just haven't thought this way, right. They're just like, I just know I need a website and it probably needs like my address and some pretty pictures on it. And here's my team and here's my, you know, spouse that's gorgeous or whatever it might be. How do you help them really think through that process? Is that something that you support them in or they have to do that work on their own?

It's absolutely something that we would support them in. In fact, we're going to fail if we don't help do that work upfront. And we really want to, you know, the way we'll work with a client is we'll build their website, but we're, we are establishing a relationship to help them with whatever parts of their marketing they may need help. But there's certain things we do and we do really well. There's certain things that, that should be done in house and we'll be very clear about the things we do. But there are certain things that will take on ongoing. Certainly one of those things is sort of owning the website and making sure it's performing, making sure it's bringing in leads, making sure it's updated when they need assistance with updating it. So the success of that website relies in the foundation, the strategic foundation that we sort of place that website in. And that all begins in the initial sort of when, when we begin that creative process. It's. There's a whole strategic survey that we want to understand who you are, who you're trying to reach. And absolutely, you're right. Every channel that you decide to market on your web being your website being maybe the broadest example, you need to really think about who are you trying to reach and then do whatever you're going to do on that channel, on that website or on that ad campaign or on that organic marketing channel, like let's say SEO, you need to think through who you're trying to reach. It's also why, you know, going back to your original question, you said, how did you end up kind of from generalized marketing with all sorts of different sizes and shapes and sizes of companies into this is that we foresaw that marketing at one point it was good enough to sort of understand digital marketing pretty well, but that that was going to become more or less a commodity and that this, the where you were going to really be able to win is being specialized. And that even pertains to the medical. You know, just we used to say we do medical marketing. That is nowhere near enough now too. So the medical specialties that we go into, we want to be really deliberate about each and every single one. I always say that there's sort of like this 1% in every market that reaches out to us in every specialty that says, look, I'm just looking to differentiate myself. I've seen you've done these other cosmetic cash, pay type physicians. Hey, can you just work with me? So we'll take it on. We have a podiatrist in New York that only does aesthetic, you know, podiatry, and, and that's kind of a rarity. So we'll do those things. But for the most part, we try to be deliberate about entering into, into a vertical in a specialty so that we really understand it. And then we can help in turn back to the question that you just asked. We can help our clients really understand, make sure we understand who they're trying to reach and that we're connecting those two things together in an informed way.

I was just meeting with a member and you know, general dentists sometimes struggle with this because they classify themselves as general dentists. So as soon as you say specialty, they kind of go, oh, I guess it's not me anymore. But the thing I asked them to do is go back to your practice management software and pull the demographic info. You actually do have a specialty. You just have never thought of it, right? Like, is it primarily women between the age of 35 and 45 coming into your. Or is it men 60 and older? Like there is a demographic there and look at the procedures you're doing, right? Are you doing implants? Are you mostly doing fillings and crowns? Like that is your specialty. To us laypeople out in the world, we don't know general dentists versus, you know, these other ortho endo, et cetera. We know, like, I'm in pain or I want this cosmetic outcome or those kind of things. And so I think it's really cool to, for individuals, no matter what line of dentistry you're in, to start thinking about yourself as a specialist. Right. And then like, what, what do I want to specialize in? Because that gives me the client avatar to start working towards online marketing, which makes operations easier to train. Front desk knows how to behave, who they're serving. Like, the website piece does much more than just the external. It also internally tells us, you know, who we are, etc. I wanted to ask you, you mentioned marketing channels. That might not be a term. Some of our listeners know. Can you kind of talk through, you know, they're thinking like DirecTV or YouTube channels. So what is marketing channels?

Yeah, absolutely. Let me clarify. It can be. The term can be somewhat loosely used and, and you can hear it used in ways that might seem conflicting. For example, you might say digital advertising is a channel, but then you also might hear Facebook advertising as a channel and Instagram advertising as a channel and Google advertising as a channel. So you can hear it specific to a brand or, or kind of overarching to a way of reaching people.

It's the medium for your message. Right. So are you using a flyer or are you using Facebook ads? Right. Those are each different channels that need to be managed.

You got it. And so sometimes people use them in more overarching ways and they might say, you know, you hear words in advertising that are maybe that aren't not very illuminating. Like you hear traditional or outdoor. And that means printed things, that means billboards and bus benches when you hear outdoor. But then you could be more specific and say billboards, flyers. Right. Instagram ads. So, you know, I'll try from here on out to speak about the exact medium, not just the overarching category of meeting, but it is the medium. And on the other side of that medium, you have a prototypical user for that medium. So if, you know, I'm trying to reach people between this age and this age, I'm trying to. Or let's back it up even further. I know I'm trying to do a focus on a specific procedure which is generally going to happen at this person's, you know, at a certain stage in life, let's then go look at the channel where those people of that age spend time or where they are receptive to marketing communication and then, you know, sort of back engineer it from that. And that's kind of what you're getting at there, Emmett. Right.

Yeah, no, super helpful. I think as people strive, you know, as. As entrepreneurs move to these executive status, if you will, and that's what we talk a lot about at deo. You move from clinician to entrepreneur to executive. There's new jargon on each of these, just like there's jargon within clinical to understand. So tell us a little bit about, like, which channels and platforms and mediums you guys primarily focus on and kind of the why behind that. Clearly the website, that being, you know, the landing page, if you will, of. Of all other channels, people eventually are like, I just want to see what they're. You know, it's the calling card, the business card, other pieces that you can help with.

Yeah, let me break it down for you. And then I want to put a pin in one thing. You brought up something earlier about specialization. Yeah, well, maybe I'll just dive into it right now. Yeah, I definitely will answer your question there. So, yeah, there are different, you know, again, definitions of specialty. And I understand what you're saying that there's a. There's a specific definition there where a general dentist would say, I'm not a specialist, but. So I am using that a little bit interchangeably as well. But you brought up something really important, which is that I think everyone can have something that they specialize in, and it's important to be deliberate about those. So if we go back to a time when maybe there was less competition, maybe in your specific field or in your market, it was a little easier to be general and just sort of put out a sign, put out a website, put out something, and sort of, you know, people would knock on your door. And in fact, actually, some of these earlier seminars that I got to go to that were do. Affiliated, I was impressed by some of these people that were out in the boonies. And I would call it a phone book practice, because all you did is look it up. There it is in the phone book. I don't know if that's a term other people use. I. I say it, but.

Sure. Just proves that we're old. But yeah, go ahead.

I guess it does. But it's just simply being in the phone book was enough because you got no competition, just to be blunt. Right. You know.

Right.

And. And they were doing very well. But as soon as competition comes in, one of the most important things you can do is have a niche. And I talk about this quite a lot because people ask me about marketing and I go, well, let's back up from marketing to your business strategy. Because any marketer who's telling you they can market your way out of an and a business strategy that's not really clearly considered and clear is probably just trying to sell you something and it's just going to be, it's just going to end up not working out for either of you. So there's no sense in that. For our perspective, we go, if you can get these ducks in row, then we can really help you. And if you can't, we probably won't help you. We'd rather be transparent and just avoid heartache down the road.

Yeah.

And in, in very competitive markets, having a specialty, again, I'll use it as more something that you specialize in or having a niche or being deliberate about what you're targeting, certain procedures, certain types of patients goes such a long way to cut through that noise. And as you brought up Emmett all the way across your whole practice, I, I think this is where the flywheel effect in business comes into play is it starts with your business strategy and then it goes into your marketing where all of a sudden every asset you create on social media, for example, you get out, you're getting back what you put out. Right. So if you're putting out stuff that's not related to the thing you want, then you're not going to get back what you want. All of a sudden, as you said, your phone scripts, your front desk training, you know, all of this, all of this becomes completely who you are. So, so I really firmly believe in that. So whether or not you're a specialist in the traditional sense, having something that you niche down into and becoming the, the expert in X if it makes sense. It may not in, in some cases, but if there's an opportunity there, go grab it. And you know what, we as marketers are going to be able to really run with that when you have enough

on the back end. You know, sometimes Dennis will say but I can do these other procedures, blah, blah, blah. But you always start with that. And like you said, there's always the other percentage that you're willing to do. I, I follow retail a lot because I feel like for first of all technology and the retail environment, so competitive. But you watch what's happening there. I mean with your in n out, your Chick Fil a etc, it's more and more niche. Single. I mean in and out is probably the most extreme of just like single product. A canes, another great one, like single product. And I think it's because for us, we just want you to be really good at something. And then here's the fun part. Once we know you're really good at that one thing, we kind of want to do everything else with you. Right. We kind of would like you to. I mean Amazon's the classic example, like be really good at books and then just expand out there from there, you know.

So those are great examples. I've given the Amazon one but I have not given the, you know, the, the Chick Fil A in and out example. Great, great examples. And I always say that if there's two practices right across the street from each other and you're looking to do make a big investment in a specific procedure and both practices do that procedure but one of them, they're positioning across all of their marketing assets and their website says I am the national expert in blah. You can guarantee where that person is going to go spend their money more than likely unless there's something else they're doing that's off putting or they go in and they. And that's another thing. It really has to, you know, you have to be consistent what you say on your website and your. And in all your marketing assets needs to carry through when they said put in your practice to achieve that final conversion. But if all of that is equal, all things being equal, that person is who specialize is going to be the winner. And there is absolutely a strategy to still doing more. I, I've given this talk before which I've called niching down without boxing yourself out because people, you know, very clearly have a. It's hard to let go of all these things that you've trained and learned and to say I'm not going to do any of that. You don't actually have to give it all away. There's ways to kind of put it second in line and tertiary, secondary and tertiary of these treatments and services and just sort of make sure that your messaging is not bombarding someone with all the things you can do up front. But as you said, I mean letting them learn about those and once they develop you develop a rapport with them, they're going to want to do it all with you. There is a way to specialize without saying I have to give up all of this stuff. So I just wanted to make that.

I think that's always the fear. Like if I niche then they won't know that I can also do this. Just niche. Trust us. I asked you a question about what you provide. I'm going to ask it a little bit differently. What, what would be the stack of services you're providing to your best customers right now. So, like, what are they doing with you that's really driving results. So kind of walk us through the process and almost like the marketing stack, like first they're getting established, then they add on this, etc. And then you can kind of be like, and then they do this stuff, but we don't do it or whatever.

That's a great way to frame the question, actually. I love that. So we'll do a website and when that's the first piece. And we're, we're learning a lot about their business, we're learning about what's working and what's not, at least from their perspective and from. Through a marketing lens.

By the way, you need to go to their website, influxmarketing.com it's gorgeous. But anyway, keep going.

We really want to learn about their business and, and learn about where they're trying to go as well. They're coming to us for a reason, and people do come to us at different times in, in their career and practice trajectory from very, very first website ever. But I would say if we're going to talk about those best customers, they've built up a going concern, they have a good practice going and they're ready to level up to that next level, both to create a better online presence for themselves and because they want to start kind of sculpting out the, the patient base that they really want. It's not to say, you know, obviously we're all here in medicine or I'm not a medical practitioner, but people are in medicine, are there to help everyone, but eventually you do kind of go, okay, there. I can make some choices about the ideal patient for me. So we want to try to understand who is that ideal patient, and we want to create a deliberate web presence that caters to them as, as we've been kind of just talking about here. So we have, we do have different entry points into that. If you want to go 100% customer or you want to start from something that we know works really well, but even that, it's really not a template. It's something that we customize heavily to you. It's just a matter of if you. Some people occasionally do want something that is, you know, not one pixel can be found somewhere else.

Right, Right. Sure.

Nothing looks, nothing looks the same. It's all tailored heavily to you. We write a lot of content. We also take your existing content, we'll move it over and there's a lot of thought given to how do we, how do we restructure or reorganize some of that content? As it may be better for Google because you might have good content, but it's kind of scattered all about the site and it's not there in the right way. We spent way too much of our lives analyzing what kind of content is going to work well on Google. The short answer is cater to the human first and make sure you're answering their questions and everything else. There's a few other things to know, but don't try to trick Google or play a game. Just create great content that answers great questions. But we want to invest again, going back to what we talked about, we want to invest the time into building content that really maps back to the things you want to focus on. Some people say I need to have content and everything. Okay, you can, but we want to have robust pages on the things that you are expert in and that you really want to attract a lot of patients for. So we're going to invest in the, let's say, the top 10 things and it can be more and you're going

to help with the copy because writing is so painful for most business owners. Like, they're like, I don't know, we're just really good and our customer service is fabulous. Like they don't know how to articulate some of those things well. And on the website, you know, pages like about us are pretty critical, right? Like, isn't that one of the, I don't know, but isn't that one of the top pages that people go to?

I would say specifically the, the Dr. Bio pages are where they really spend their time and they want to learn about you. And then if you have any kind of a gallery for showcasing any work where a gallery is relevant, a before and after gallery that's also heavily frequented, of course, homepages people spend a lot of time on. And then what we'll try to do is get each of those individual pages that are specific to a service ranking pretty well on Google. And you'll see a lot of frequents, people frequenting those pages because if we're doing our job well, those become the points that they enter the site through a lot of times again, people will have a list of all the services they provide but not much content on the ones that are really important to them. So once we delineate the ones that are important, we'll create robust content and, and we've figured out pretty good formulas for getting these things ranking in your market in Google, on Google and we Drive a lot of traffic that way.

Which one of the things Max is hitting on here, which I think is critical, I mean, if that can happen from your SEO organic, that's fabulous. But definitely having this too for your pay per click. Too many people do a pay per click that goes right to the homepage rather than to a landing page that's talking about. And the example I give is if I'm looking for motorcycle insurance and I click on an ad for motorcycle, it just takes me to a general Geico page and now I gotta go through and search like they just missed out. Right, Right. I'm just going back because I'm too lazy and I'm just clicking on the next ad to like take me right to motorcycle insurance or whatever it might be. Like this is those, these are those little opportunities to get, you know, a 40% more return on your spend by having this streamlined and niched down.

Couldn't agree with you more. Great example. Especially you just spent money for that click. You know, with paper advertising you might, your ad might be shown and you won't be charged until they click. But when they click, you're paying against the other people bidding. And, and depending on how you have your campaign set up, it can, it'll drive up your cost to your, your bid to the bid that, that wins. And if you're the winning bid, you're paying. So you really just want to remove all the friction you can because that's your money going out the door. To your point, Emmett will build specific pages on the website about that procedure and we'll drive an ad campaign to those. But actually more often than not, we're even building a separate landing page just for pay per click because there are even. You even want to shorten that timeline even more a person searching organically. And when I say organically means they've typed in something and they've clicked on something that wasn't an ad on Google. And there may be oftentimes they've gone a little further down the page past the ads and there may be oftentimes a little more willing to research and they'll spend some time on this page. You're shortening the timeline even more for a person who has an, maybe even an urgent need or you know, maybe just time is condensed for everyone these days when they're going to sit down and do this research. They just want to find what they need to find. Fill out a phone call, book it, you got it. So we even have landing pages that condense down that timeline. Even More for that.

That's awesome. It's awesome. So is that the place you help is on the pay per click side?

Yeah. So I'm kind of dragging this out. To answer your question, I'll just try to shorten it up here. We're going to create robust content. If you, if it's something that you don't feel like you have and you want help with, we'll also help you create excellent original media assets. We don't do this on every website. It really is case by case if someone wants our media team to travel out. But I think, again, this is where being specialized has helped us. We have really honed how the craft of spending a day or a half a day, depending on what you want to do in your practice, getting a huge catalog of marketing assets that you can use that don't feel corny and staged, you know, oftentimes kind of how those patient doctor interaction shots can feel and some shots that really help to exalt you as the physician, as the doctor, because that's so important. Again, people are going to that doctor page and they need to kind of see you in a certain light. I know it makes some dentists and doctors a little uncomfortable, but we try to find the balance that fits their personality but exalts them. So we'll create excellent assets that might be video as well, together with that written content and visual content and a custom design or a highly customized design will create for you a standout web presence that's number one. Baked into the core of our websites is a code base that is fast, that you know, that that functions very quickly, which is important for both.

That's important because again, my Uncle Henry, who can do like throw up website, you know, then you're on your, your phone and it's taking like forever to load. No go.

Right, exactly. And you know what a lot of agencies are getting, have gotten really good. They're creating very performant, fast websites and they're good on mobile. But I will say, and this is where we have sought to differentiate ourselves, is they're able to do that by sometimes stripping down what's on that website and just keeping it lean, which is okay. And again, for a lot of practice types, that works fine. You have a website, you're pulling in general, family dentistry, you really shouldn't spend all that much on your marketing because the payback may not be there depending on what you're doing. But if you're going for kind of. That's why I made a point to mention to you that like our, our niche is in that high value cash pay, patient acquisition because there the competition is such that you do need to stand out. And when you start entering in these slicker elements into websites and higher design, it slows things down. It may not translate well on mobile and that's where it actually becomes infinitely more complex. So we, we've really tried to bring those two things together into a marriage of performance and, and aesthetic pleasing, aesthetically pleasing websites.

Have you been able to optimize? Because I know in the past like having a lot of aesthetics can kill the SEO. But does the SEO still work even with all the aesthetic piece?

I mean that's what we've just spent the last 10 years really perfecting is how we can do both. And you know, we take a very robust section of copy for a page and we break it down into really again we're prioritizing the human experience first. We break it down into really logically compartmentalized, you know, subsections where a consumer can read through, find the thing that matters for them. We'll have a lot of little conversion things that make the website convert better. Like we have a little in page menu that'll let you jump to a section that you want to get to. We'll have on mobile so it's just easy to get where you want to go. We'll have on mobile you know, making sure we have what we call a sticky call to action so it doesn't disappear when you swipe up or down kind of sticks at the footer there. And a lot of these things are not rocket science but it's the, it's bringing them all together to make sure that that site always converts and always performs. So to just to give you to kind of put a period on, on the question you asked. Well then make sure that website ongoing. We're working on optimizing that website and making updates. When you need both content updates, you offer a new service, you've added a new dentist, a new doctor. And also there are technical things that need to happen to keep the site up to date. A few years ago Google made a huge shift in the way, the way that they were essentially going to be evaluating websites and we had to go back in and change a lot of what was under the hood. So that's a part of our role ongoing to make sure your website is staying at the cutting edge. Then we'll handle your, your Google advertising. If so you mentioned what are some of our best clients doing? They're spending, they're investing in both their SEO and their advertising, paid advertising. Over time though, we do have some who, who build up enough of a base and they build up a strong organic presence where they're ranking in their market on Google organically and they're able to decrease their dependency on advertising. And they can sort of think about advertising as a lever when they want to push a new procedure or treatment or they want to just kind of ramp things up or they're bringing in a new dentist, a new associate, so they can think about advertising that way. Rather something that they're entirely reliant on, which often when you begin, you really are reliant on that advertising.

Yeah, yeah.

A few more things that I can get into that we do, but maybe I should.

No, no, that'd be great. I mean, I'm curious. Anything around Google Maps or how would you think about, you know, that piece? So, so many of us are jumping on using Google Maps as almost our search engine for products now.

Absolutely. So the basic, the basic service that we do is optimizing both your website and your local presence. So the, the difference, for anyone who's maybe not clear on that will. It'll get referred to broadly as just local. And what we're talking about is the ability to find your business on. Oftentimes it is Google Maps, but it could be any other mapping service, any other review service, any other business directory. We're helping you to be optimized across all of those. And that honestly I would say that

is because Google's always asking, where are you, Emmett? Where are you, Emmett? Because they do, they want to serve. And frankly, I'm happy to tell them because I want to know, you know, the Asian restaurant close to me, not the one back at my house or whatever. Right.

So absolutely, I, I'm all for pixel me, track me, because everything's going to be more relevant to me.

Yeah.

And there are quite a lot of basic things that you need to have in place to make sure that you're not kind of handicapping yourself when it comes to that hyper local optimization so that the people right around you can find you. And a lot of dentistry is covered, a lot of dental marketing is covered by that and a lot of dental marketing companies a really good job of that. And just that and, and that might be all that you really need to invest in that for us is a big part of what we do upon taking you on, onboarding you and launching your website. So your website and your entire local presence gets optimized and there's ongoing efforts made to try to improve that. But it is a red ocean and the minute that you are going, hey, I want to really sit out above the pack here, I think it requires that you take your own online presence, meaning your website itself, not your Google profile, and elevate it. Also, when people are looking to spend a little more dollars, spend a little more, they're willing to travel a little farther so that hyperlocal doesn't become irrelevant at all. But it's suddenly not the only thing that you're thinking about when you look at your optimization. So we're doing both of those things.

Yes. Yeah, it's awesome. Anything else for our listeners that you would say, hey, if you're thinking about marketing, like, I don't know, just some key points that they should be thinking about. I think we hit on a ton of. But any place you've kind of put a cherry on top.

So yeah, you know, we talked a little bit about, about advertising. We didn't really talk about the meta side of advertising or doing social media. And I, and I really think the practices today, this isn't even something that we would take on entirely. Let me back up and say this. So one of the things we'll do for people is also helping them with their meta advertising. That would be their Instagram or Facebook. We would just put it under the umbrella of the parent company, meta. But I think something that's so important is as you're, if you're doing digital advertising and you're looking at Google, you're looking at meta, there are certain procedures that make sense. So we talked about channels earlier, Emmett, and there's, there's the right procedure for the right channel. There are certain procedures that don't make sense to advertise on certain platforms. So you really want to be thinking through the right procedures for the right channels. And then if you are doing things on, let's say meta, for example, where you have a visual component, Google is entirely text. There's there until you get to that landing page. The ad itself is just text based. What we're really seeing right now is that people who are running ads on meta are winning when they're using, utilizing video assets. Generally it goes back to what we're talking about, about kind of elevating your presence, letting people peek into your practice a little bit more and get a sense of who you are generally media

assets, a trailer to the movie. Right?

So yeah, perfect way to put it. Generally, I think people who are investing in that and they might not even be using an Outside company. They don't, they don't necessarily need to. If you can kind of put together a decent setup in your own practice to create media assets, I think people who are doing that are really differentiating and winning. We don't do any sort of fully outsourced social media. We really think that that needs to mostly be done inside your practice. We, we offer what I call support services. Social media is like hiring a physical trainer. You, you can get, you can get a lot of gain but you have to put in you, you need the guidance. Got to put in the effort. It is not a farm it out and I'll sit back here while you do the work for me. So we try to be really clear to people and we'll, we'll give them a little bit of coaching, maybe some support, some scheduling and posting and writing captions, but they need to actually really be driving the content engine. Why I say that though is that, that's another thing that I think where people, if they're really putting out content, I think you can't discount even just putting out content regularly. Even if it's not every day and even if it's not, you feel, you know, even if you don't feel that it's at the highest caliber content, just get yourself in the habit of putting out regular content. I think those type of practices are really differentiating themselves. And then a last thing, we didn't really talk about it, but a thing that we focus on a lot, especially since we've talked about high value patient acquisition is, is the follow up process. And it's not specifically that lead, nurture and follow up. Once we bring in the lead to your practice, it's not something that, that is specifically one of the services we provide because it has to happen with the team in the practice. But we, we end up very often kind of helping to consult and guide in that process because here we brought a high value lead and we want to, we want to see it get over the finish line. And I think when people talk about marketing, sometimes they overlook how much, how much gain there is to be found in the low hanging fruit of just improving that process. I'm sure it's something you at the do talk about a lot.

We do, we have our own OPS assessment and it's really built on constraint theory. So you know, to give numbers to it. If half of your phone calls aren't getting called then that means your marketing is twice as expensive. Right. So you don't want to be, you know, pouring water in, just having it go out the side. So we, we have a very specific process to make sure exactly what you're saying. Because you hate that by the way, as a marketing person, you build this beautiful thing, pour it in and then nobody answers or they answer, you know, in a way that doesn't really convert, etc. So we help people really prioritize that out. So they're getting the highest, you know, ROI on these dollars. They're spending so big time.

I think it's one of your biggest opportunities and I think people are not thinking through the numbers the way you said them, that it's as simple as that. If half of them are being called, your marketing is twice as expensive.

Marketing average, by the way, is 40% of calls. So, you know, I'm pretty close to like you're spending twice as much as you need to. And I love that you guys help track some of that attribution rate and so forth. Okay, one quick thing and then we've got to close this out. But there's a, there's rumors that Chat GPT might have like their own search engine, etc. Like, what do you think about that from a marketing perspective? Is there an opportunity, you think, to market? There's.

I think there is going to be. You know, there was some rumors this week and then OpenAI did an event yesterday where a lot of people thought they were going to be announcing. There was a lot of people on Twitter kind of Internet sleuths who were, who had found certain activity inside of their code base that said they were going to be launching a search platform. They didn't explicitly do that yesterday, but they kind of launched this next generation of ChatGPT which is this very emotive human like assistant. And what I could see is that that human like AI assistant is going to start helping you to search the Internet. And I think that that's, I think it's going to be a shift in the way that we think about search. Now. We're always way too early to the game on these things before they're really actionable. But we have to think about this. But the last two weeks there was these rumblings that a search engine was going to come from, from OpenAI. The, the creators of Chat GPT hasn't entirely materialized just yet, but I don't think that means that it's not going to. I know they have to watch. Yeah, I know they have Google in their crosshairs and where. I think it's actually going to. I'll just put this quick button on it for You, Emmett, is. There was a time and it's always going to be relevant in dentistry to, to focus on your reviews, on your, on your patient feedback and getting great reviews. And it's. We talked about local SEO. Reviews is a huge, huge piece of your local. Right. Dentistry has been historically actually the best of any medical specialty in my opinion, at this review game. Now if we think about AI and we think about how it surfaces, results, it's being fed data and has to learn that data when it comes to consumer questions, hey, who's the best dentist that I should go to in my market? What data can it be fed? Well, I think I firmly believe that it will be reviews that will actually dictate how AI helps to recommend service providers. Dentistry is actually quite well poised and I think that we might even see where you have to actually validate that you are a true patient, potentially somehow or your, or the reviews where there is a validated patient will be weighted more heavily. So I actually think that's going to be the opportunity if I have.

All right, so there's, there's your warning shot. If you haven't gotten your reviews, you better get them going because that's. Yeah, I think it's, I think it's awesome. Max, if people want to reach out to you, chat with you more about this, what's a good way for them to communicate with you?

Well, they can always go to just influxmarketing.com and fill out a form there. You can always reach out to me directly if you want. I'm just Max. Influxmarketing.com and I'm going to be there in Orlando along with a couple other. Couple other members of my team at the summit, which we're really excited about. Emmett.

Hey. Thank you. Yeah. That's June 13th through the 15th at the Gaylord Palms Resort in Orlando, Florida. The deo Summit for 2024. Thank you so much, Max. I really appreciate it. For those who want to talk through this more, come over to our Facebook page at DEO Growth Secrets. And until next time, keep smiling. Thank you for listening to deo's Growth Secrets podcast for dental organizations. Continue the conversation on our Facebook group and meet other dental leaders, get questions answered and the strategies you need to succeed. Plus, we have some free resources for you right there on the Facebook page. Remember, you're not not alone. Let's do this together. Join DEO's Growth Secrets Group on Facebook. And until next time, keep smiling.