7: Real Marketing Starts with an Avatar

Welcome to DSO Secrets. I know what it's like to be an entrepreneur in the dental industry. I've had my ups and downs, just like you. There's so much opportunity to be excited about, but so few resources to get answers. From here on DSO Secrets, we get you those answers so you can change the lives you're meant to bless and achieve your personal success.

When I was working as an associate right out of school, I never imagined I could own these many practices with this amount of support. So thank you.

You have helped build my marketing mind

to a whole new level. You have this natural talent, this unique ability.

Hello, everyone. This is your fearless host, Emmett Scott. And I'm glad to have you here on another episode of DSO Secrets. One of the most complex components of any business model that gets talked about consistently is the marketing and sales component. How do we attract new patients? How do we attract customers? And frankly, oftentimes the CFOs hate marketing and sales because it can be so difficult to track on roi. And it's difficult because when it comes to creating a brochure or website, everyone suddenly believes that they're an expert in it, especially in marketing design. If you've ever tried to create something quickly, people have an opinion around what color it should be and what it should look like and where the button should be, etc. Etc. But I wanted to give you a secret that will simplify everything around marketing and sales. It's not the end all, be all answer, but it's definitely the first answer to be solved. And I'm going to steal some of my jargon from an industry which I think is one of the greatest industries in marketing, and that's online marketers. Those are the guys creating different landing pages and splash pages and squeeze pages in order to get us to buy things online. And they use a term that they call the customer avatar. And so I want to steal that term and call it the patient avatar. Defining your patient avatar and who that patient really is. Now, what do they mean by this avatar component? It's not the blue guys running around from that movie. For those who've seen that, the avatar is a description of a profile of what your ideal patient looks like. Not just looks like physically, but like what they do every day. You know, what do they literally. What do they eat for breakfast? How long is their commute to work? What frustrations or fears are they facing? What opportunities or experiences are they most excited about? What music do they listen to? What's their family dynamics that they're dealing with? Day by day, what car, of course, do they drive? What house and community do they live in? And just overall, how do they think and feel on a day to day basis? This is something not to just kind of think about and pontificate on. This is something to discuss consistently and to write down to have clarity around. See, a lot of people attack marketing and sales from a component of what medium are they going to use? Hey, should we get on Facebook? Hey, what about websites? What about mail outs? What should we do over here? What about this billboard? What do you think about these colors and this design and, and all of these, you know, external kind of things? But I can tell you that if you don't know, like really know who your patient is, who your customer is, those things start to feel like you're just throwing darts blindly. I really don't have a better analogy than that, but it's amazing. When you have that clarity around who your core customer is, who is the patient that you are trying to help? Now oftentimes, I'll be honest, when you're first starting out, man, if they're breathing, you want to help them, right? You're just dealing with cash flow components and trying to launch your practice and get it going. But even at that stage, you got to sit down and say, yeah, but who's my ideal? Like, who would I love to be walking in my door every day? Not just from a financial component, but from like, which customer patient experience do I enjoy the most? What work do I like to do the most? What interaction and relationship do I like to have? And from that, start to design your ideal patient avatar. And then you got to get into to their side, who are they, what are they interested in, et cetera, as I outlined there. Now, when people talk about marketing and what is really marketing, I think a key component that they forget that the core to marketing is actually empathy. See the product or service that you're going to provide and how you're going to communicate that to somebody else is only going to be as good as you understand that somebody else. You know, if you've ever been excited about getting that big TV or buying that smoker or getting that new car, any kind of purchase that you want to do, there's probably somebody in your life that you had to sell on how important that was. But you know them and you know what's important to them. So you quickly start to reframe all the reasons you want to buy it around all the reasons they should buy it and why it would really help. All the things that are important to them in their life. Right? We've all done this. Well, the exact same thing has to happen in order for us to have good marketing and good sales is we have to understand the people that we are trying to attract to our practices. And the key component to this is empathy. You don't have to fear about guessing or being too specific. You just need to start creating a vision around this key target. And here's the best part. This formula doesn't just work for finding that perfect patient, but for those out there who are looking for that doctor associate or that staff member or that office manager, you can do this exact same exercise. Who are they? What do they do? What do they care about? And start to design. After you have that nailed down, then start to say, so what is the best way and the best medium to communicate with them? You can use this in any relationship for those out there who are dating, you know, many of you have tried it that way. So in another episode, I'll talk more about actually designing that patient experience. But this is the step one is really getting clear on who your patient is and what you want to do with them. So bottom line, when you look around at a DSO around a dental practice, what you see is everything is made up of humans. And our ability to have empathy and understand what it is that our patients really want will absolutely drive our success. We have to take the time to dissect this, to think about it, and to really understand who it is that we are trying to serve. I hope this helps for today to take the complexity that's often talked about in marketing and sales and break it down to that human component where we can go out there and we can truly serve those that we've wanted to serve and to help. So if you have more questions on this or you just want to join our listener community, go to our Facebook group, so Secrets. But until next time, keep smiling.

Thank you for listening to DSO Secrets. Join our community on Facebook at DSO Secrets and get answers and resources to some of your most challenging questions. If you want to get a copy of the seven secrets of any DSO, go to our website at DSO secrets.com and we will get that emailed to you. Remember, don't go at this alone. Let us be your team while you build your team.