217: Unlock the Secrets to Patient Growth with HIP Creative

What if you could capture, you know, five to 10 more patients a month just by improving the systems that you have and not even spending a dollar more on 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 Secrets podcast for dental organizations. Now let's get started.

Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of DEO's Growth Secrets podcast. I am Jake Poole, the CEO of the DEO of the Dentist Entrepreneur organization. And with me today, I have one of the foremost experts in marketing inside of dental, Luke Infinger, the CEO and co founder of Hip Creative. HIP is kind of a name that we've been hearing a lot of inside of our do ecosystems. So I am excited to get down and get to know your business. So Luke, do you want to give yourself an introduction here?

Sure, yeah. Luke started hip Creative about 10 years ago. We have our HQ in Pensacola, Florida, but our team is all over the US and we started working with an orthodontist in 2016 who became the fastest growing orthodontist in the country, Dr. Ben Fishbein. And that is what launched us into dentistry. So Fast forward today, 67 team members across the U.S. i think we have about 260 active clients and that's across dentistry, multi specialty. So, you know, dentist, orthodontist, periodontist, endodontist, you name it. And really what we did in 2020 is, you know, leading up to that time, we really started to hone in on what makes marketing successful. You know, every, everybody kind of looks at marketing as this very sexy thing, but how do you make sure that it actually works? And that's the million dollar question, right? So we dug into that. We created a software practice beacon, which is a very simple CRM. But more importantly, we created an entire education and curriculum to help practices win. So whether it's the front desk, scheduling, marketing, sales, operations, we've written books, created courses, created education to really empower these dentists just grow their business.

So let's dig into that because I think this is a wave that's happening. I think it's always been a question which is this attribution or understanding what marketing works? And I think we're right on the inflection point because technology is really Advancing. We have smart people like you that are kind of trying to solve this problem. And I think we're kind of getting to this point where it's starting to be solvable, where we're starting to be able to see, like this patient came from this particular thing, and we can prove out our roi. The thing that I think also that you guys are different, that you mentioned is the education. So it's no longer just enough to work with the marketing agency, kind of put it off to the side and then expect, you know, patients to kind of come in. You guys are really helping A to Z. So let's walk through that education piece, because I think that really is something different.

Yeah, definitely. So, you know, to dig into the education, what we did is we looked at the core roles on the business side of the practice. You know, you have your scheduling team. Depending on how you're structured, you may have your sales team and treatment coordinators and things like that. And then you may have leadership, so management and directors. And then obviously you have the doctor. So that's where we really focused. And what do those people need to know? How do they need to be empowered? What tools do they need? What are the best practices? So that's how we've created our education. It's. It's very simple. The educated education we've created in that you can read the book or go through the course and immediately start to implement. And in most cases, we give all this stuff away. So, yeah, you can partner with us and get it, but you can also just go buy the books, get the courses and go through it. And, you know, people come up to me all the time and like, hey, we went through this. Thank you so much. It improved our office. You know, here's what that looks like. And they've never done business with us. So I think that's really the beauty about education as a whole. And where it's headed is a lot of education is free. Look at YouTube, you know, and so when you give value away, it just empowers people across the world to be able to do better. So that's how we approached it, just in a very simple, practical way where a scheduler could go through the book and course and immediately start to put things into action.

So maybe give a couple examples here. So you have education. Obviously, everything is marketing. As Fred Joyle said a long time ago ago, everything in dental is marketing. And, you know, rather than having you be on an island as the agency, you're really starting to incorporate the other parts of the office. Into the marketing. What are some of the, like, what would you teach an out front office staff or what do you train them on? The doctors? What are some examples of the stuff that you guys help train on?

Well, a good example is a lot of people think, and this is, you know, even outside of dentistry, that someone to pick up the phone is a very simple task and a very, you know, entry level, low paid team member. And if you think about it outside of marketing and seeing your brand and ads on social media, organic content, that's the first interaction with a potential patient. And so it actually needs to be someone who is highly trained and skilled and loves to do that type of job. I don't know about you, but I don't love to take over a hundred phone calls a day. I would not be the best scheduler. And so you can't just throw someone into a role. I mean this, this goes for any role, but you need to understand what type of person is going to thrive in that role. And so it even becomes before hiring, do we have a clear job description built out? We use something called the predictive index, which is kind of like psychometrics. So it does like a behavioral assessment, cognitive assessment. And how is this person set up to actually do well in the role just based off personality and interest alone? And then how are we actually training that person? Our book goes through scripting, best practices, things like following up with leads. You know, if somebody fills out a form on a website and I wait two days to contact them, which is very normal in healthcare, two, three days to, you know, call people back, you know, what if they also clicked on the other two to five websites ranking on Google as well? You know, have we thought through how the follow up is gonna look? And in most cases people want things immediately. You know, when you look at Doordash and Amazon and you know, we are trained for convenience and now and so we, we have to train our team to be able to respond to the consumer behavior that exists and what people are used to, not what's good for us. And so when we're training like you know, a front desk or scheduler, these are the things that we have to look through and then, you know, it's tracking, you know, from there. If you're hiring, right, you're onboarding, right, and training and you can mentor and grow, then how are we tracking and what are the things that we need to be looking at? One of the first questions I ask is, hey, how many phone calls do you get in a day and what's your answer rate? I would say, on average, nine out of 10 people I ask cannot answer that question. They have to go find the information. So I'd ask people watching and listening to this, do you actually need to ramp up marketing? The answer is probably yes. But what if you could capture, you know, five to 10 more patients a month just by improving the systems that you have and not even spending a dollar more on marketing?

Right. It's kind of like where in the funnel are you? And there's massive impact. The closer that you get to the patient, getting being served by the dentist and really squeezing the juice out of the dollars that you're already working. I know as an agency, it's the. One of the toughest parts is you'll send a lead, right? And then the phone doesn't get answered. You guys don't get credit for that lead at all, even though it was a good ad and it drove that. So I love how you're kind of aligning everyone's interests. It makes tons of sense. I think it makes sense to the doctors. So let's talk about then the front end, the actual marketing. Right. So you start out in ortho. Now you've added specialty. Do you kind of treat the specialties different? Cause I know you mentioned them individually. Most marketing agencies don't actually distinguish between them all. So I'm kind of curious how you treat the different specialties different.

Yeah, well, there, there's fundamentals in, in marketing. Right. And those fundamentals can apply to any vertical. And then there's nuances. So, yes, you, you have to know the nuances and what's different about each vertical. You know, dentistry and orthodontics is very different. You know, it's very similar in some ways, too. But ortho is definitely different in that, you know, you're, you may not be in pain. If you don't go get braces, you're not going to get an infection, you know, you're not going to potentially die. You don't have to have orthodontics. So it is important to know all of this and to back up. Before we actually drilled down into dentistry, we worked with every specialty. We worked with orthopedics, we worked with bariatric surgeons, we worked with pain management and plastic surgery. That helped us understand how do you work for practices within healthcare with so many things that are similar, but also nuances and differences. So we applied those same things of when we were kind of horizontal to when we went more horizontal within dentistry. But, yeah, it's very Important to know the market, know the differences and nuances. But if you think about it like this, you know, digital marketing, the fundamentals are going to be the same. So you know, you've got website, you've got SEO, you've got paid advertising, you've got organic and within that you've got platforms, you've got best practices, you know, all the way down to copy and headlines. So those are all like the fundamentals, the concepts and then even the tactics. A lot of that stuff you could apply to any industry.

Yeah, there's the principles that go across. I do think it's cool though that you at least understand, I think that's important when somebody is evaluating a marketing agency to at least feel confident that they understand the difference between those. Because yeah, I just know a lot of marketing marketing agents actually don't make those distinctions, you know, so it's important that you guys do so. So in that, maybe walk us through what specifically you're doing to drive patients. What's working best for you guys, where you spent most of your time. If you took me on as a three office group, what, what would you do?

Yeah, well, this is, this is a really great question in that we could probably spend like two hours just on this question, you know, because again, people get so jazzed about digital marketing. But you know, I think a lot more has to go into it to make digital marketing successful. And I'll kind of tell just a brief story. If you take a startup practice and you know, everybody tells you you gotta invest in marketing, you gotta invest in marketing. Even though I talk to a lot of dentists who get to the point of doing marketing and they have very little money to invest, but people are telling them if you want this thing to kind of grow and get out there, you gotta do marketing. And everybody thinks about digital, you know, Facebook within Facebook or Meta, you know, Facebook and Instagram, you've got organic, you've got paid, you gotta get a website, obviously you gotta get your branding done, things like that. But you know, I've got, let's just say a couple thousand dollars to spend a month and I'm, I start running ads. Well, how successful is that going to be versus a practice who, let's just say is five or six years old and they really invested in the community. They, you know, different, let's see, sports teams, associations, schools, parent associations, homeschool associations, and they did that in tandem with maybe some other traditional things and then they were able to layer in digital all while building five star reputations. Well, you know, obviously when we go to work with that practice, you know, case in point, like one of your members, Sparkman Orthodontics, it's like this, you know, and why is that? You know, if. If literally we take the exact same budget, the exact same deliverables and apply it to a startup, why is there such a wild difference? And I think it comes down to brand equity. You know, when we talk about that practice, building the brand equity in the community, then you get your fire going. And to keep the fire going, you just add on a log or to make it bigger, maybe you put two, two or three logs on. And so I would look at it in a more holistic way. Not just, hey, I need to do marketing, let me figure out, you know, website and ads and throw some money at it, but how am I really going to integrate my practice and the brand into the community? And really, that's where I would start. You know, I would try and do some of these other things for sure, but if I do that and I do it well, when I go to market this thing and really grow it and scale it, it's going to be so much more successful and so much more viable if I go through it the holistic way.

So are you, Are you helping offices do that? I mean, are you helping them kind of get ingrained in the community? Are you at least maybe assessing them and helping them give them to, like, how does that work? Because that's also very different, by the way.

Yeah. In terms of advising. Yes. And we do have white papers on this. We actually just started a course on it Community kit. And there, there's. Within the community kit, it's like 17 pages I break down of things practice could do in the local community. But I don't think we're anywhere close to replacing grassroots efforts. You know, again, people come to me every day and like, I don't want to do that. I don't want to staff for the position. I don't want to take the time to do it. But at the end of the day, people buy people, you know, there is still a massive human connection that trumps anything. And I actually think it's more desired in today's environment where we don't have relationships like we used to. Now AI is driving things. We're all sitting at home, vegging out on their phones, swiping on TikTok. I do it too. But we are actually craving human connection more than ever before. And so doubling down on that, really, it creates a practice or a brand that can Grow as much as you want to grow, because if you duplicate that model, it works. So, yeah, it's kind of flipping it on its head a little bit where people are like, oh, you know, I need to take a step back and think about this and look at it holistically.

Yeah. I don't know how many other agencies are doing it the way you're doing it. That's really smart. You know, when I think you run ads into, you know, community or a city and it's a completely cold ad that the, the end users never heard of this dental office, they never driven by it, they've never seen the name. I mean, you're, you're not going to land that patient. Chances are you're not going to that patient right away. They need to call. Yeah. Five other places. Right. I mean, they, they, yeah, they need to, they need to get, they need to build the trust. But if you build that community aspect, that means they've already done those five to seven touches that they need to do to gain trust. And then when they see your ad, you're just pushing that domino over that last edge.

Yeah, exactly. And you live in la. So imagine I talked to so many people who are like, yeah, I'm going to go back home to, you know, LA or, you know, New York City. And it's like, how much do I need to spend? And it's like, I mean, think about competing with businesses in New York City. Like, you know, that's, that's great if you want to go there. I hope you're successful. I lived there, love the city for a little while. But think about the competition in terms of just getting eyeballs and attention. It's completely different based on where I live in Pensacola, Florida, you know, and so you really need to think about that, the location, this is a hot topic. Where should I go and where should I open a practice? Where's a good area you need to be thinking about? How could I get ingrained in the community? How could my advertising be successful? I'm not saying go to some like hodung town, but this is really important because the dollar where I'm at it goes a totally different length or effectiveness than somewhere like la, New York City, Austin, Texas. It's just a different game. So as a small business, I would really be considering that as well.

Yeah, that's amazing. So you're, you're training the team, you are actually probably advising some grassroots efforts. You all are also running ads, you're doing website. What are you doing?

Full swing.

What else Are you?

Yeah, I can walk you through that. Yeah, it's, it's full service. So we do branding, we do web SEO, meta ads, Google Ads, you know, even organic now we're getting into. And in fact, our tool, Practice Beacon, tracks all of this. So when a lead comes in, whether it's on the website or social media, we can see how that lead came into our ecosystem. And then the engagement, like the follow up that we train on, which is called the hybrid follow up system. So how do you call, when do you call? Leave a voicemail, text and email? And how do you do that in clusters and how do you do it without annoying the person? You know, but we can, we can kind of see all of that. And the really cool thing about it is we can track the entire patient journey in our system. So we have all of that. It's, you know, front to end with digital. We even can do things like videos. We, we actually have a partner we work with that will go out, they're in our office and shoot videos at different locations. So really we can do anything. We even do design, like graphic design. So people who are doing some of these grassroots things, like we're actually designing deliverables for that, whether it be for the school or for, you know, some fall festival or something like that, billboards. So really it's end to end. But where I really get excited is the training and the curriculum because that is just empowering people to kind of do it at a whole nother level.

Yeah, amazing. I love it. I mean the thing is to actually drive patients, It's a full 360 degree effort. It, you don't just run an ad and all of a sudden have 50, you know, 80 patients coming in. It's really, it's a complicated journey. It's a complicated, you know, patient journey. It takes a lot of trust building and to really do it, you've got to do all the things that you're mentioning. You've got to be available in the community and have, have a presence. You've got to have the phone dancers, right? You got the doctors talking, right. You gotta have whole patient experience, right? So the way that you're doing it is it's the harder way, right? I mean you're, you're, you're offering a lot of services, but it's the way that works. I mean, it's kind of what works.

Yeah, I call it the big lie. You know, we, we've kind of been trained and I, I wish this was true. I, I've tried To buy things like this in the past too, where it's like ad to customer. You know, it's like, all right, let's launch this ad. And, you know, it's this funnel, whatever it is. And I've done the most complicated funnels, I've done the most simple funnels, and people are going to click on it and become customers. And it. It just doesn't work. You know, there may be some things that are low ticket, like $5 or $25 or like a $99 course or some type of monthly subscription where it could work. But even still, you're having to build credibility and trust with that person and probably give them some things for free leading up to that purchase. Right. So, you know, what does the funnel actually look like? And how can you be educating, delivering a great experience, continuing to get in front of that person and see it all the way through? And for a dentist, a lot of times it is when patients are asked, you know, how did you hear about us? It's like, oh, well, you know, Sally's friend recommended you guys. I also saw you in the community and then I saw this special on Facebook and clicked on it. So it. It's. The attribution is across multiple channels.

That's right. Well, Luke, this is the, you know, one of the truest forms of. Of strategy and marketing that, that I've heard. It's really the way that patients are driven. So I appreciate that you guys are tackling it with kind of that 360 degree approach anyone wants to get a hold of you guys, you have creative and like I said, it's a name that we're hearing more and more inside of our membership, inside the members. And what happens when they become D O members, they make friends with each other is they talk and they talk a lot about what vendors that they're using and where the success is coming. So I appreciate you doing it the hard way, offering all these things, the way that works. And then our members are referring out to each other, good companies like yourself. So thank you for that.

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