46: The Wonderist Agency with Michael Anderson

Foreign.

Okay, Mike. From Wondrous Agency. From the Wondrous Agency. Mike, you've been in the dental game for, for quite a long time. I know that you and I have worked together with a number of clients, but I want all of our listeners know how you got started, what got you in the dental space, what got you into marketing, specifically, kind of the rundown.

Yeah. So we're coming up on our 10 year anniversary at Wondrous Agency and.

Wow, that's awesome.

You know, really, my wife and business partner Laura deserves all the credit. So, you know my background. I rolled out of college. I like to joke, I'm a recovering English literature major with an emphasis on poetry. You know, no one ever sort of grabbed me by the shoulder and said, hey, you gotta plan for what you're gonna do after school. And, and you know, my first job worked for Depew Orthopedics at Johnson and Johnson and was in, you know, hundreds of surgeries, slinging knees and hips and, and so kind of in the medical space.

And the job that really opened things up for me and kind of opened up the world of marketing. I worked for a Fortune 500 company that was in the health insurance space in a skunk works division where our job was to create startups, grow them. And so it was just, it was a lot of fun. Learned a lot about digital marketing, boots on the ground, marketing funnels. And I met Laura when I was working for that job and she had really developed Wondrous in the first two years to be a consulting company. So she was working with about three clients and you know, had had a lot of success with those clients coming in and really focusing on a data first approach to marketing. Let's measure everything, let's cut the stuff that doesn't work and let's lift up the things that are which, you know, a lot of marketing professionals talk about but very few follow through with. And she was great at that. She did a really good job. And then the other piece of it was, you know, really being authentic in, in what you say. You know, one of the things you and I have been talking about a lot is like, what makes you different as, as our, our own companies? Like, how do we stand out in this space? Are we just one other marketing agency or is there something that makes us special? And so, you know, when we met, I kind of brought the, the tactical side of, of execution and said, hey, listen, as opposed to working with other vendors, which is frustrating, frankly. There's a lot of bad marketing agencies out there. Why don't we do it? And so we sat on a couch, just the two of us. And from there the company has grown. And Today we've got 60 people in our office in San Diego that do marketing for dentists all over the country. And we do everything from websites, branding and photo video to tell your story, to SEO, Google Ads, social media marketing to get the word out there. And then the really cool thing we're excited about now is we're actually building these lists of leads for people and measuring roi. So Dennis can come to us and say, I spent this much money. How much did I get back for it? And we can point to that list, show them the ROI, and really maximize.

Those dollars, which everybody, as you said earlier, will tell you that they're doing that. But you and I have spoken about some really unique ways in which you're actually carrying through with that, with that promise. And so maybe elaborate a bit on, on the types of lead lists that you are generating and how you're actually achieving that, that measurement.

Yeah, I think before we do that, I'd almost go back to the problem. Right. So if you think about the average person that's, that's doing marketing today, if you're spending a thousand dollars or more, you know, you might be getting some, some, you have some Google Ads out there, hopefully you're doing call tracking, which means that at the end of the month, the company you're working with is going to say, we generated 15 phone calls, 40 phone calls, and you can see what those phone numbers are. And that lives in kind of a call tracking program. And then maybe you're doing some social media marketing, and you might have a few people that comment on some posts. You might have a form that people fill out. You might have live chat on your website. I just listed three or four different areas, and all of those independently have some version of a list. Right. And it could be actionable, or it could just be something that you can look at and say, okay, I got five people that chatted with me this month.

That's not really that great when it comes to the workflow of an average dental office. Right. You don't have time to find a spreadsheet from last year over here and log into the live chat program that you forgot the password for. Like, that doesn't work. So what we've done, we've created a system that is built around a program where we integrate your website chat, your call tracking, the forms on your website, the messages that, that you come and that people message to you on Social media and it brings all of that into one platform. So you see all of those people listed out and it's good for really two things. The first is we get clear data, right? We get really clear data to say this is how many leads we generated and this is where they came from, these are the campaigns. But the best thing about it is we get to follow up with those leads. I want you to think about this for a minute. Right, right now, the majority of dentists listening, your marketing I like to call it, it's a 1 swing of the bat marketing. You put a Google Ad up and somebody picks up the phone and calls and says, hey, I'm interested in all on fours. Well that's not a casual decision to make. I need some information there. Right? So they might get a little information and they'll say, I'm going to call you back. Well, does your team have a process in place to follow up with them? This system does. We can take all those leads and we can automate text messages and emails to those same people for months and months and months and months, taking the burden off your team and making sure that we maximize follow ups. So we're not just swinging the bat one time anymore. We are swinging over and over and over until we get that home run.

I know that everybody, every one of our listeners can relate to this next piece. I'm going to say when you're talk, even talking these days, maybe you're talking about a new brand of clothing that you like or you click on a specific Instagram ad that you like and then the next like six months you keep getting these retargeted ads from that brand and brands very similar to that one. And so what Mike I think is saying is he's giving the power of retargeting to Dennis. That used to be reserved for these big Instagram, Facebook related engines. And he's helping to build this data driven engine that allows people to retarget from across all of their platforms. Is that fair?

Yeah, I think staying in front of people consistently is essential. There's a lot of data out there. There's a famous study that every marketer likes to quote that says for someone to make a successful purchasing decision, it often takes seven touch points with a brand. And that might sound ridiculous at first, but you think about touch points, right? It could be getting a direct mail in the mail and throwing it away, right? You just like your brain sees the brand, you throw it away, then you drive past the practice and you kind of notice it out of the corner of your eye and then you see a Facebook ad and that's the third. And then you go to a website and then there's just these little touch points that snowball. And now when you ask that patient, where did I hear, Where'd you hear about me? Oh, Google. Right. It's as simple as that. But how many touch points before that got them there? And once you get their attention, this is what I love about what you're saying. How do you stay in front of them, especially for those big cases? Right. If someone's going to spend thousands of dollars with you, they're going to sit on that decision for a bit, and it's oftentimes the last person to get in front of the patient that's going to ultimately get the. Yes.

What about maybe take it just another step further too, and talk about the, the, the benefits of the filtering process that this provides. Offices, and maybe more so for offices that are flirting with their capacity limits potentially. And you know what this is going to like, translate to in the, in the form of conversions and less wasted chair time, that sort of thing.

Yeah. So I think for me, you know, everybody knows that data is, is important to making good decisions, but we can have death by data, Right. At a certain point, you could have so much data, you can't make a good choice. And that, that is absolutely where filtering comes in. Let me give you an example of where filtering might be helpful. The oftentimes where dental practice gets the majority of their phone calls is from Google my business. Right. So that's going to be that listing that is, that shows up in Google Maps. And when people start searching for Dennis near me, it pops up. Well, if you're a marketing agency, I can show you data to say, listen, last month your Google my business listing got viewed 7,000 times, and there were a hundred phone calls generated from it. And I might try to take credit for all those, but a savvy dentist should say, well, wait a second, I've got a bunch of existing patients that called through Google my business. So you can't take credit for all those. Well, with the system we have, we're able to match the lead list we have. We can see phone numbers in there, and we can actually look at the practice management software that you have, Open Dental Dentrix or Eaglesoft, and we can say, are there phone numbers in there that already exist? And now by looking at those two lists and crossing them over, I can create a filter that shows you just the phone calls of people that do not appear in your practice management system already. And that gives me a lot more confidence to say, here's the number of new opportunities we generated, and I can tag those and watch them mature over time. So, you know, that might sound complicated, but for us, it's something that is built into the setup. All of our clients that are new clients are onboarding with this and it gives us clarity of data to make really good decisions.

In some, in some respects, this is actually going to make you potentially look like you're doing a worse job than your competition. So how if I'm. If I'm a dentist and I'm out here trying to source the best marketing partner, which everyone should be looking for the best, not the cheapest, but the best. And they're showing. And they've got this plethora. They've got the 7,000 phone calls. I mean, the. A hundred phone calls and the 7,000 Google visits. And you're showing them a thousand Google visits and 30 phone calls. Like, how do you show, how do you get that person to understand what the other marketing company is doing? And how do you prove to them? By, you know, virtue of them going and testing it themselves? Potentially.

Yeah, you know, it's a great question. We do run into that. I think that the more you improve your data, sometimes it's a smaller data set.

Right.

And. And it could be you've got a bunch of spam traffic going to a website. It's unproductive. And we filter that out. It could be a bunch of things being tagged as conversions that really don't predict a successful patient. We filter that out. But at the end of the day, what I've found is you can throw as many marketing metrics at a practice as you want to. There's a few metrics that don't lie, and that's number of new patients, the production and collections that that practice is seeing in a month. And that's where a lot of Dennis, I think, have a good gut feel. They're like, you know what? I'm talking to this marketing agency. They're telling me everything's going great. I'm not seeing it in my bottom line. And so that's what we come back to. And the thing I love about the system that we're looking at is it gets back to a butts and seats approach. Rather than just talking about phone calls, just talking about keyword ranking, we're talking about names of prospective patients with their phone number and their email, and we can see if those patients come in or not. And so it's it doesn't get too much easier than what are your goals as a practice? You're getting 25 new patients a month. You want to be at 45. And then is the company you're currently working with delivering that? Who Cares if it's 7,000 impressions for Google My Business or 5,000 doesn't matter.

Do you have a list of leads that you can look at each month and say, this is the at bats they gave us and is that list making you happy or do you feel like that list is too short? And if it's too short or there's no list at all, that's where we come in and say, listen, let's build that list for you.

Let's take a step back. Let's talk about the marketing landscape as it stands right now in the dental space and then outside of maybe the data pieces and the measurements that we were just talking about, kind of give us a framework for what is the marketing, what does it even mean in the dental space right now? And how is Wondrous trying to, as you said, create authenticity and create this lane in which you're operating and creating the surplus value for your clients?

I think if I had to sum up what marketing looks like in the dental space right now for the vast majority of dentists and for the vast majority of marketing agencies, I want you to picture a group of people that all kind of look the same, standing together and they're jumping up and down with the hand in their ear and they're saying, I'm a dentist, look at me over here. That's what it looks like, right? Even if you're doing Google Ads, even if you invest in a website, why is that? Go look at your competitors. Everybody's got the same stock images, everybody's saying the same things. It's very, very.

Marred in just this sort of ubiquitous similarity, same approach to everything they're doing. And so what we focused on is going back to the basics of marketing, which is saying something that helps you stand out and be memorable. And that is so essential. I love that you talked about authenticity. That is the core of marketing. So rather than talking about how can we have better SEO strategy or what is the secret sauce to great Google Ads optimizing keywords, you need to come back to, am I saying something that makes me different than other dentists? And I think a lot of times we ask Dennis this and they pause for a second like, well, I don't know, I'm not sure if I'm different. And if you want to cheat here, the easiest thing to do is to ditch stock images today. If there's one thing you take away from our conversation here, it's stop hiding behind that perpetual Cialis commercial. Grandma and grandpa sitting in a field in a tub with their dentures in, and they fit so great. You know, like, no, I want to see you. I want to see the practice. I want to, even if it's imperfect, even if you're waiting to upgrade, you know, six months from now, be real with people. And I think that's the first step to standing out in a space that increasingly is focused on content. What's the key to good marketing? Good content. That's what it's all about.

One of the things that attracted me to Wondrous for everybody out here, I was how aesthetically pleasing a. But also how unique their portfolio of clients, websites and content was on, you know, out in the ethos, from websites to their social and. And then I was like, looking at that for, you know, comparing that to not only other marketing companies a but also like, where these people were, these dentists were in their sort of timeline of their personal development, but also business development. And a lot of these people were fairly young. And I was like, how do they have such a profound personal and business brand before they really even know who they are, both as people, but also as clinicians? And I say that candidly, even for myself too. I mean, even to my age, everybody's still trying to figure out who they are. But when you look at what wondrous put out there for people to see and patients to see, it just looked like they had such a profound personal brand already. And so maybe talk a little bit about how you are able to cultivate that for people who are still even in early stages of their career.

You know, it's so funny. I think about most purchasing decisions that we make, most partnerships that are formed, and the dirty little secret in just about every professional space is that most partnerships are formed over a beer, over a good feeling. You know, it's not through rigorous. It's not because someone comes in and audits your business and says, you get a gold stamp. And that applies tenfold to dentists, right? If you think about it, most dentists are worried about their hand skills and margin and all this stuff that really matters to them and it should matter to the patient. But the average patient, the things that are top of their list, price, comfort, trust. Do I like you? Do you seem like a nice person? Is your chair comfortable? Does your office smell good? That's what it comes down to. And so that's a huge advantage for younger dentists, entrepreneurial minded dentists that I think can understand the customer service side, the sales side. That dirty word we don't want to use in dentistry. Right. We don't want to sell. Right, wrong. Like you have to sell yourself. You have to sell an experience to people and do it for the betterment of their health. And so for me, I think younger dentists often feel the weight of. I see all these other dentists out there that I know have more experience, I know they have bigger patient bases, there's more trust. But guess what? If you look at those, Dennis, Google my business page, they have five reviews because they haven't prioritized it. If you look at their, their website, it doesn't show the space that they're in. It doesn't create that personal connection. And as a patient doing research at 10 o' clock at night, you got to make some gut calls. And people are going to do that based on how you make them feel. And so I think that's where a little bit of content goes a long way. Whether that's having someone on your team take ownership of pulling their phone out and get some behind the scenes candid photos and videos. Every month of your office, you go out for a team lunch. Take a photo of that. You go to a. I love this. People go to these continuing education events, they'll go to Scottsdale, they take this great course. They didn't take a photo the whole weekend. Take a photo, let your patients know you're doing this thing to get them excited. That's what it's all about. And I think the dentists that are having the most success right now are not necessarily the ones with the best work. They're the ones that are merchandising the experience patients are going to have and creating personal connection. That is so well said.

Merchandising the experiences that patients have with you, whether it's interactions online or in person, it's all, it's all for the better of the, of the practice in the business and obviously the personal growth of the doctor as well. So what are things that you guys do outside of like, I mean, I know that you have a media team in house, they go out to the site. You know, even if you have zero camera and speaking experience, I know that you guys do a really great job of sort of guiding them through making them look and feel as good as they sort of always envisioned that they wanted to. But you know, dayto day the maintenance side, the, the content maintenance, right, where you're sending pictures from a CE event or you're taking videos in the office, what are things that people listening to this, whether or not they're working with you or not, could go out there and do to sort of take that content up a notch, right, from the quality. And maybe you, maybe you sort of do that as, as a, as a coaching feature from, for your, for your clients. But is there any like, course that they can take or, or things that you would suggest to help them with, with the quality of their content that they're sending either you or another marketing partner?

We live in this amazing moment in time where 15 years ago, if we've been having this conversation, there's just no question that you'd have to, you'd have to spend thousands of dollars to get professional content created. It's just, it's non negotiable. And today we all have this amazing thing in our pocket that we call a phone that you know that's, that's gonna go away. It's this little amazing computer camera more than anything, right? And if you look at your office, I guarantee in each office there is someone there that is taking great photos of their kids with their phone at soccer and posting that on, you know, their Instagram account. And it's something that's just baked into our day to day life. It's a skill that so many of us now have as part of our own personal skill set to merchandise ourselves. If you're dating right now, guess what? You probably take decent photos because you have to, right? Not even because you want to, you have to. So what I think you need to do, rather than going out and chasing another course as a dentist, you know, finding more time in your day, process and ownership. Creating content in your office is probably not something that a dentist should be doing. And I think that when you think about writing job descriptions, hiring, promoting people, right now there's a lot of people coming around asking for more money to stay in an office. Well, this might be a good point of negotiation to say, listen, I'd like to, we want to keep you. And that's, we're going to do that. But I need some ownership when it comes to content creation. I've noticed you take really good photos and so I'd like to ask you to take two photos a week that we can post. So I think more than taking courses, it's about process and ownership and setting expectation. And, and if you were to say, listen, I want two photos a week of either something that's happening in office or in our personal lives and we can humanize ourselves. We can create connection with the community. That's something that's incredibly doable. Now for us, we have a great social media guide that we give to all our clients. I'm happy to extend to the community that you guys have. So we'll have our contact info at the end of this. You guys can message me and I will send you. It's, I think a 25 page guide that's got a list of challenges and things that you can do. But for clients that work with us, what we found oftentimes they'll say is, listen, I have someone that can take photos. We just don't know what to take photos of. We can take a video. I don't know what to do. We do a weekly challenge that we send out every single week and we'll say, you know, it's usually topical. It's fourth of July. Make sure everybody wears their fourth of July themed outfit for the day. Take a photo with your team and we'll cue that up to post on the 4th of July. And so we create that accountability, that process and put those ideas forward as part of what we do for our clients.

Very well said.

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Okay, next question. In the in this is a always a very hot topic when anybody is either getting their first marketing partner or they're thinking about switching marketing partners is a lot of the conversation is always about around the website, you know, the new design build or taking over a website. Why is there so much friction there? And, and, and then from, and from the marketing partner's perspective, why is it so important?

Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, I'll, I'll speak to like the transition thing because that's where a lot of times people come to us, they're like, hey, I, I just built a website, I'm not interested in changing that. I'd like to come over. And I think a lot of times people feel like there's this gamesmanship with marketing agencies. We're like, well, you have to build a website to come work with us. And that's not always the case. What we do is we evaluate a website and we see is it a site we can take on or not. I will tell you, as we've grown as an agency, we used to take on most sites that people would bring to us and now we take on fewer and fewer. And the reason for that is frequently if you're leaving your marketing agency, there's a reason their performance wasn't there. And that could be a design thing. Site full of stock images, it could be a technical issue, the site's loading slowly, it's older, it's built on a old version of WordPress that isn't able to update anymore, creates problems. And I think that the biggest reason that we've ultimately found is that, you know, for us to do our job well and to maintain the type of profit margin. It's another dirty word you don't think you talk about a lot, but that hey, guess what? We need to have a healthy business to serve you right. That's important for us to be able to continue to support our team, promote them, do all those things. You need to have a process. And the minute we pull somebody else's website in, it breaks our process. We build on a specific platform, Webflow. We used to work on WordPress and it just slowed us down. It broke all the time. So we work on a new platform, we've got set processes and how we do things. And the minute we get pushed outside of that, it makes us less efficient. It creates problems where the client gets frustrated with us and says, well why, why didn't this update happen? Well, we didn't build the site and that part of the site's broken and now you're frustrated with us and you left the last company because you were frustrated with them. It kind of perpetuates the problem. Now this is not to say that every time you shift agencies you should build a new website, but I think that there should be some understanding that if you make a bad choice and you work with an agency that cuts corners when it builds a website, when they build a website for you, it may mean that when you're changing agencies a year later you're building a site again that you maybe didn't have to build. Which is why we recommend putting quality first when you're evaluating any business partner, whether it's marketing or otherwise.

We talked about retargeting the power and being able to get back in front of people that have shown interest on one platform or another. Given the current marketing landscape in dental, in sort of your outlook of the future changes that are going to on the horizon, where are other areas of opportunity for practices to take advantage of? Or maybe it's paid ads, maybe it's it's social like paid social media ads. Maybe it's podcasts, like what other areas other than retargeting, which we know is super powerful, do you see still either still holding weight because it's a tried and true method, or is it an emerging place for people to explore and see some really great results?

I think your, your, your traditional stalwarts that, you know, anyone that's looking at seriously growing their practice in a semi competitive to competitive market space. SEO is, has not gone anywhere. I, I, every month I get an email that says SEO is dead and there's something else replacing it. The Reality is more people than ever are going to search engines and using those search engines to solve their problems. And so having a strategy to make sure that you're showing up for those important search terms, whether it's service specific for nectomy, dental implants, you know, airway health, whatever that is for you, or those really king maker terms like best dentist, dentist near me, that's fundamental. And our best practices, the ones that just blow it out of the park, that go from 800,000 to 1.3, 1.5, they have robust SEO strategies. While those strategies are building, Google Ads is really important to make sure you're not just crossing your fingers and waiting saying, okay, maybe next year we'll have great, great organic traffic. No go after and go after those leads. Emergency cases, dental implant questions, specific services, that's what works really well for Google Ads.

Specific services, any specific services that are stand out above the rest.

Emergency is great for Google Ads because you think about it, someone's in the mindset of I have a problem, I need help right now. A lot of times that's going to be a time crunch issue. And so they're, they're clicking the first solution in front of them. What I like is for people that want to place more implants recognize that emergency is often the pathway to that, right? Some, sometimes we get docs like I don't want to see emergency. It disrupts my schedule plan for that because those are the cases that come in. Someone's got a cracked tooth, that's an extraction, that at the least is going to be a bone graft. And once you bone graft someone, you're going to check back on them and say, hey listen, are we ready to do that implant? I know if I had a big gaping gap in my mouth, the first thing I do is fix that, right? I'm going to spend money on that. So emergencies are a gateway to a lot of those procedures that you want and advertising through Google Ads for that is a really good system.

What is your stance on Google reviews, patient review management and where does that sort of stack up in the hierarchy of ROI on time and, and money?

Essential. Essential. And for me it's you have to again, systems, right? You need, you need to have a software system that is going to ask every patient to leave a review. And more important than that, you need a process in your office where when a patient's getting ready to leave, the first thing you need to do is they need to come in front of the desk and they're going to reappoint hey, let me. You're not asking a question, you're telling, let's find that time for you. And then you can say, how was your experience today? And if somebody says I was great, I love my hygienist office is so great. What you say back is, you say, I love hearing that and it means a lot to our team. And I'll tell you what, we, we're really trying to get Google reviews right now and we all sit around together and we read those reviews. So you're going to, I'm going to text you say, I'm going to text you a link after this and it's going to invite you to leave a review. I know your life's going to get busy, so if you could take one minute and share what you just shared with me on that review, it means so much. You're going to see your reviews skyrocket and that has a direct impact on your SEO.

So do you, I know this is a tough one to be a tough question for you. Do you have one that you would recommend above the else, above the rest, or do you sort of just have a few that you would recommend here for the patient review management?

You know, it's funny, if you'd asked me that five years ago, I would have unreservedly said podium. And I think Podium kind of led the charge for a long time, but their price point has remained high and I think swell came out in the last two years and really challenged Podium and we've seen very similar results come from that. Birdeye has always been another good tool that's been out there. I think in the review space. What we're seeing is that certainly four years ago, two years ago, we would have pushed you towards use a software that is specifically built for this. And I think that over the next few years there's going to be more and more parity in the space and, and sorry, less and less parity in the space. And it's, it's something that is being built into and absorbed in lots of the software that's preexisting to your practice. So, you know, for right now, I think we'd say best in class is swell and Podium, those are the ones that, you know, have really proved themselves out time and again. And, and we'll give a nod to Bird Eye as well. But, but you know, you're going to continue to see other software that you know you're using for different purposes have reviews in them and those review management solutions are going to catch up and they're going to be just as good.

One of the things, this could just be one or a few instances. And now I'm just sort of generalized bird eye to be really great at this one particular thing. But bird Eye, in my experience, they consolidated business, Google business listing pages really, really well and they were able to tie in the doctor's name and, or, and if they had a dba, you know, a different name for their practice other than their professional name. Regardless of which one you searched, the same Google listing page would show up. And for the life of me, I still couldn't figure, I can't figure out why like I'll go like to a new client, they'll have like three Google listing pages, you know, reviews here, reviews there. I can't find them when I search their name and I can find them when I search their practice name. And I don't know, Bird Eye was cleaned that up for a few of my, my clients and I thought that was pretty, pretty neat. But maybe that's just, maybe that's common across all of them and that was just experience.

Yeah, I mean Dr. Len Tao, who's kind of spearheaded the dental side of bird eye for years now, you know, he, he's a phenomenal digital marketer, phenomenal SEO mind. And I think it speaks to the fact that because he brings that experience, he probably takes and, and their team takes a little bit more of a holistic approach to solving solutions outside of reviews. Whereas you know, some of the other software, they're going to say what listing do you want to choose? They're going to hook that listing up and, and from their perspective, they're going to say it's user error. If you have these other listings, that's your choice. And oftentimes that happens because people work with multiple marketing agencies. Someone can't get access to something, they're like, I will just create a new one for you. And that's usually an overeager 22 year old sales rep who's focused on closing the deal, not serving the practice.

So Mike, give us some, give us some more. I think that you just got so many awesome like perspectives, not only what's happening currently, but what's, what's emerging in the marketing space. What are some other, some hot topics that you want to chat with our users about today?

Sure. I think that, you know, if we look at the next, the next two years, the things that are going to have the highest impact are content creation. And if you want to be specific about that, looking at social media and Specifically focusing on video is going to help your practice. And that's a, it's tough, right? That's a tough muscle to build. But I would really start to create ownership and focus on who's going to be working out at the gym for you. And creating photo video content reels specifically are getting significantly more impression time and more engagement. And why that is is because these platforms are selfish. They have an algorithm that pushes what they care about and they care about pushing video content and reels right now. So if you think about Instagram and Facebook, they're competing with Snapchat and TikTok, right? So that's where their heads at. They're like I, from a business perspective, I want to match those companies. So they're putting more of their resources into that. And that means that as a business you want to chase what they're interested in because their algorithm is going to get you in front of more people if they do that. So I think focusing on Instagram reels is a really great place for dental practices to be right now.

And then I think coming back to this idea of capturing leads and having funnels that are built in automations, we live in this era where we're understanding that data is driving more of the decisions that we're making in our businesses. And data by itself is nothing without some degree of automation. And so I think making sure that you're putting your practice in a position to automate follow up for leads and existing patients. One thing we haven't talked about a lot is reactivation. So much of marketing is let's get new patients in the door. Well, there's a leaky bucket that you're just dumping water into. What you want to do is go back and look at those patients that you have put treatment plans in front of for Invisalign, for all on four for you know, these high producing procedures, implants and follow up with them. And what do you follow up with? You follow up with short personal invitations and social proof. What do I mean by social proof before and after photos and video testimonials. And the greatest thing about this is we heard video twice there reels and social proof. If you do one other thing today besides ditch stock images, it's get a system in place to find your cases where you do video testimonials. And what that looks like for me is sitting down with someone and saying hey, I'm really excited about your case. You're a perfect case for me. And what I'd like to do is I'd like to offer you a model agreement discount. I'm going to knock $500 off of this implant and you're going to sign this agreement. And as part of that, I'm going to take before and afters. And you're also going to let me document this. I'm going to sit you down at the beginning and ask you a few questions with my camera out. And at the end, we're going to show off the results. I'm going to ask you how it feels. Are you okay with that? And who doesn't want to be a model, right? Heck, yeah, I'm a model.

All right, cool.

I'll sign that. And now if you can get, let's just say one of those, a quarter. And you text that out to prospective patients doing the same case that, hey, I thought of you when I did this case. Do you think you're going to get more cases in the door? Absolutely.

So it's being intentional about it, number one. Clearly, from what you're saying, it also sounds a little daunting to get started. But it's one of those situations where, you know, once you have done it for maybe a few months and the content starts to accumulate and you're starting to maybe get some positive feedback from maybe just your general friends and like, you're like, oh man, this is starting to feel like it's working even if it's not at scale yet. How do you, how can people be efficient and be even better? How can people be self sufficient with the content creation, the dripping of this content through these, all these platforms? Is there a centralized place for you to sort of upload things and get things out to the masses, sort of, you know, automated, so you can maybe film like one or two days a month and have content for three, or maybe that's something that wondrous helps. I'm just, how do you, how can you distill this down for people so it doesn't feel as daunting and they can have a place to go, take their first step, you know, tomorrow even?

Yeah. So for me, that first step is pick a platform, don't do everything. And whether that's your website or Instagram, I would ask, first of all, what's your goal? And if someone says, I want to place more implants, I'd say, great. Why would someone choose you over anybody else that wants to place implants? Well, I don't know. Do you have any before and afters? I'm not good at taking before and afters. Okay, well, let's start There. Let's take one before and after next quarter and let's put that on your website. Three is a crowd. Think about that. The minute you have three of anything, you're like, all right, I'm convinced, right? There's three before and afters, three different cases. This doc's really got it going on. So you don't need a lot. But it's all about process and setting expectations. I think it starts with your team and sitting someone down and saying, listen, you know, you've been asking for more opportunity, you asked for a raise. I need you to do this. And this is now part of your job descriptions. We're big believers in job descriptions over here. I would physically write a new job description, put it down and review it with them and say, this is what I expect. And then it's about building that process. If you're going to ask someone to do a video, where do they go? What camera do you use? Do you have a camera? Do you have a phone? That's an office phone that, that's the one that's, that's being used. So you have to choreograph the whole dance. And I think once you do that and you practice with one person, a friendly patient, a family member, it gets a lot easier as to how do you do this bigger cool thing of, you know, sending all these different texts and emails out. That's where you need a software like what we offer, which is called the wonderful CRM. It's a lead management tool. It's a, it's a professional tool. And I think that while there are certainly lots of DIY ways to do it, if you're excited about the idea of automating, follow up to the leads coming in to existing patients and really nurturing them in a funnel, that's where you'd want to reach out to an agency and work with a professional partner to get that done.

Speaking of your wonderful CRM system and sort of the ability to retarget people, as we talked about before, what about your advice for the way that you get people through that filtering system to begin with? Right? When someone. If I call off the ethos anywhere, maybe it's a. Maybe it's your Google business listing page or maybe I found it from a friend. Anyway, any way I get to call your office? Is there advice that you can give or how important is it for the person that's answering the phones to be a part of this whole sales process, starting with the marketing partner AKU guys?

Essential. And it's one of the Biggest mistakes we see practices make, right? They look at the front desk and they're thinking insurance verification, they're thinking scheduling, they're thinking smile when someone walks in the door. And the reality is that's your sales team, right? That's someone who's really there to take an awkward conversation and make that something that helps someone make a decision. What I mean by that is someone calls and says, hey, how much does this cost? No, I'm sorry, I can't give that out over the phone. That's a no. How do you like, how do we, how do we have a system that's going to nurture that into a yes? And so I think one of the things that front desks love about the wonderful CRM is it starts to bring a few more things into the world of text message. Now I'm old school, I will pick up the phone and call anyone. That's how I like to talk. I know we've got about 59 other people in this office that I'm sitting in today that would disagree. Our team is like, text me, don't call me. Right? And that's the way the world is turning. So get this. I'll just leave this little tidbit with our wonderful CRM. If someone calls your office and your front desk misses.

Sends a text message to that phone number automatically says, hey, so sorry, we just saw we missed your call. How can we help? And that saves so many new patients where they say hey, I was calling to see if I could get a new patient appointment. And why is that important? Because they were about to go look at someone else, better yet existing patient, hey, I'm going to have to cancel tomorrow. Well, that's saves about a minute phone call. Now we're just messaging back and forth. And so moving things to text message has been a huge win for those front desks and it creates efficiency in the practice.

You know.

I'm kind of like, you know, going through my clients experiences just in general. Not just, not with necessarily with wondrous, but just in general. And like we've talked about two different functions within the office from, from a. As part of the sales process that is completely independent of your marketing partner. And that's how you answer phones and it's how you create content in a world that is in a lot of ways doesn't care how good of a clinician you are. They care about the, the, the image and the perception that you're creating to the public. And I can, and I can empathize with them and like the. How daunting it kind of feels like it was. Like, if I go get wondrous, I know they're the best, but then I got to, like, train them and be intentional about getting my assistant to take pictures. And I guess what I'm. What I'm. I'm asking is what can. What are things that you help your clients with to sort of ease that, like, just to step them in. I know that you talked a little bit about just like, okay, let's take one picture. Was take one after pict picture. But what about sales phone training? Is there. Are there courses or there. How does. How do your account managers interact with their team to sort of unify your approach across what wondrous is doing, but what also is needed in the office?

Yeah, two parts to that. The first, from the content standpoint, you know, we recommend for all of our clients that we come out and do a content creation session for them to start the relationship. And that that really takes a lot of pressure off the team. So our best case scenario is always to create ownership where they assist in ongoing content creation. Because, let's face it, there's seasonality to our lives. Right. If it's Christmas time, I want to see photos of your office during Christmas, and you probably don't want to pay me to come out every time you want a photo taken. But we can also create that bank that often lets us go for two years without significant interaction from the team. So that's the first part as far as assisting on the sort of front desk side. You know, we've been lucky enough to partner with a lot of great dental consultants out there, and I think we respect the fact that that's really their area of expertise. We want to stay in our lane. And at the end of the day, we're marketers. Doesn't mean we don't have opinions. And I think where we really assist is in creating accountability. So we do call tracking for every campaign we have, which means that our team gets to listen to those calls. And the two things we look for, one, are those calls getting answered, and if we're not answering calls during hours, that's a red flag for a client in the monthly reporting calls that we have. The second is going to be looking at what's being said in those calls. We can listen to those calls and we record them. And, you know, what I always look for are, one, is the front desk being friendly? Are they, you know, are they open to these patients and getting them to talk? Are they using our best practices what's the first thing that happens in a call? Hey, before we go any further, can I get your first name, last name, and a phone number in case we get disconnected? Why is that? Because when we get to that awkward stall. Oh, let me talk to my partner about this. You should have that number so you can call them back. That's the key. And then, you know, are, are we handling questions appropriately? And so we're not always going to be the ones to coach them, but we're going to be the ones to flag that for the dentist. Then we've got some great partners that we work with that we're going to lift those up to and say, hey, listen, you guys might benefit from a little bit of phone training or oftentimes those consulting relationships already exist, and we can just be another accountability partner to trigger a better conversation and part of.

Your, your, your, your system too, I think, you know, if it's like a specific type of case that, that may be better approached or better tackled by the doctor or the clinician that's at the office. You kind of have your, you kind of train your offices to tell them to log on to or have the patient that's calling log onto the side and actually go through the steps of your. That your system sort of has created. Maybe walk us through that, that part a little bit.

Yeah, so, so you're absolutely right. There's. There's really two awesome things that we've done. So we have Wondrous Agency, which is the marketing agency, and then separate from that, there's a company that is called your virtual Consult, and they're based out of Schaumburg, Illinois. So they've got an office. There are teams out there. And that's a very specific product, and it's a very specific workflow. It works great for full arch cases, for Invisalign, for dental implants. And what we're doing there is we're helping solve that problem. When someone calls your front desk and says, hey, listen, I'm interested in pricing, can you give it over the phone? And you say no, and it gets awkward, and that 50% of those people leave, we're turning that no into a yes. And how that happens is we say, go on our website and we offer virtual consults. Click this button and we're going to ask you a few questions, and then we're going to have you take a photo and that then queues up in a software that we've built. It's amazing. It lets you. It has a whole workflow that lets you create this awesome consult experience where you record a video, a personal video back, and you get to say, hey, you know, thanks for sending me that footage. The most powerful part is use their name right. Hey, Michael, thanks so much. And they're getting the dentist time and you get to overcome that. And maybe you can give a quote. Maybe you have to say, listen, I have no idea. Still, let me tell you about the practice of what I do. Here's our next steps. Or you give a price range. And we found that is a great way to weed out people that are going to waste your chair time and have a better conversation with people that really are excited to move forward with treatment, but are just looking to get past that awkward first phone call with the front desk and find a place they can trust to go into. And so virtual consults have been huge. It's been something that Wondrous has been happy to be part of as a sister company. And for anyone that is doing full arch cases, dental implants, Invisalign.

Gosh.

Pediatric practices are using this for anxious parents. It's been huge. And I would encourage you guys to look@yourvirtualconsult.com the digital workflow is phenomenal. Just talked to a dentist yesterday, he's an oral surgeon, used the platform. He's had this workflow for about a year. It's been a million dollar workflow for him just from virtual consults. Pretty cool.

And I love the pairing of your virtual Smile consult with the Wondrous, you know, website design. It's just. It all kind of just feels like it's the same, you know, it's the same company, even though they're two separate products, but the synergies between them obviously are so, so awesome. And that's been my experience with the clients that have used that use Wondrous that also have the. Your virtual smile plugin. The patient's able to get a flavor of who that doctor is and what the prices are. And if they're still coming and calling, if they're still calling to schedule with you guys after they've gone through that process, the conversion rate's pretty, pretty cool to see.

Okay. All right, skipping gears. Back to Reels and TikTok. What's the future of TikTok from the, from a dental. From. In the dental landscape. And how could people leverage that?

I've been wrong many times. I think for me, TikTok is going to help a few practices. And TikTok for me is more of a. What they did a good Job of is they created a content creation platform that democratized the ability to create these little, these little videos. I think Instagram is still going to be more of a discovery platform for local businesses. Right. It's really baked in if my wife and I are going to go to a restaurant. Instagram is one of the first places I look to see what the experience is going to be like there. I think dental offices are the same way. People might not always find you, but they may decide to go to you because of that. Reels, however, have that ability to attract new patients because the reach and the push is further. So I really focus on Instagram reels over TikTok. I think TikTok created the culture of content creation that's sort of these little video vignettes. But I think as a platform we see less success in a repeatable fashion for the average dentist. You're going to have your bigger influencers that will disagree and say, oh, I've blown my practice up. I think there can only be so many of those and I would focus on reels over TikTok.

Interesting. And I guess because reels too, you get led back to the. This sort of repository of, you know, content that they've been building for however long. So they, you could continue to leverage that. But the reels allow for as you ex. As you said, like instead of me going to find this dentist that I already know about, I'm getting introduced to them via a real video and then I'm like, oh, that sounds that look pretty interesting and then bobbing over their profile and checking out. So it really is creating new engagement that didn't otherwise exist on, on, on that platform. What about real from a reels perspective? What type of content is working right now? Like what type of videos?

That is super easy in that what you need to do is copy paste. So you want to follow the trends. And I think what we found is that it's very dependent on trending sound.

So. Right.

I think everybody's kind of. Hopefully if you, if you're on Instagram a little bit and you check out reels, we all start to hear the same earworms over and over that 15 second snippet of music and it gets in your head and it's there for two months and then it's gone. You want to see those trends emerge and either use the sound and you can use it in your own creative way, or there's also a video companion that goes along with it. It could be a dance. I'm not a dancer. It'd be hard pressed to get me to dance in front of the camera. Maybe someday or sometimes there's just these sort of, you know, goofy little performances that, that, you know, you kind of like hit the screen and a little bubble pops up. And that's where honestly, you're either going to do work with a professional agency that sort of knows how to combine the audio with the video editing effect, or you're going to have to identify someone on your team that has an interest in this. And the cool thing is these softwares have made it easier and easier to have every person do it right. There's a reason that this is popping up all over the place. Not all these people have video editing degrees. It's something that you can learn as a weekend warrior. You just have to have the interest. But if you want to see a benefit, find the audio, the music, the songs that are trending and then copy the trending dances and the trending challenges that are out there. And you will absolutely see an impact based on that.

That's really sage advice. Is there a creative way to.

Find what's trending? Like what, like what audio clips, what dances or what combination of the two? Is there a, like a reply, like a data source somewhere that's like, just like this is what's trending right now or, and, and where is that famous.

Plug you can follow our account at? So it's@wondrous agency.com that's going to be our Instagram account. And we do talk about this, right? So we're gonna, we're gonna probably once a month give you a few sounds, you know that, that are trending, going to give you some tips. But there's also some other great ways to do this and I hate to just go back to Google, but frequently, you know, there's not even just one site. I will go to Google and just type in trending sounds on Instagram or stories. Sorry, trending reels. There we go. There's so many things to know, right? Talked about stories, trending reels. And you will get a list right away from that. I think that's going to be your best go to. And most of the time Google again is king. It's going to give you the most current trending sounds. If you click on one of those top two results.

I wonder if this works for finance and investing. Do you think I can make some reels?

You know, it's, it's if, if it works for dental, it's definitely going to work for investing, right? That's the thing I love about the industry is so when people come and talk to me, they're like, oh, you know, I'm having trouble with my marketing. I'm in the landscape business. I'm like, well, we work in dentistry, you know, like, and, and most of the time people don't want to go to the dentist. People want their grass cut. People want their portfolios to grow. And so I think that there's, there's ample opportunity.

I've plenty of crossover there. It is a service based business. So you're, you're right in that and you know, you're, you're promoting your own personal and business brand. That's, that's the name of the game. Well, awesome, Mike. That's, that's, I've had so much fun. Anything else before we, before we adjourn here that you want one of our listeners to know?

Yeah. So if anyone's interested in learning more about Wondrous Agency, you can go to wondrousagency.com, you can schedule time with our team to, to introduce yourself. We ask a lot of questions to learn about you and make sure we understand what your goals are. And then we'll get a proposal that's really clear cut with pricing over to you. You can also check out our sister company, your virtual consult@yourvirtualconsult.com and then as I said, follow us on Instagram. Wondrous Agency is the handle and it really gives you a great sneak peek into our office, our life. Hopefully you feel like we eat our own dog food and that there's no stock images there. It's only content that we create for our clients and a behind the scenes at what our team and our office look like. So, yeah, it's always, always fun to jump on and chat with you and, and yeah, we'll have to do it again soon.

We will, absolutely. And I can attest to the culture at the Wondrous Agency office. I've been there. It's fun. These guys have fun and it shows in their work. That is for sure. Well, again, thank you, Mike for joining us today and giving our listeners a really good scoop on the emerging trends in marketing and what's working. And I know everyone very much appreciates that. So thank you again.

My pleasure.