52: An Operations-First Approach to Marketing Your Dental Practice—with Ryan Gross

Welcome back everybody, to another episode of the Dental Boardroom podcast. My name is Drew Phillips and I'll be the host of today's episode. Our special guest is Ryan Gross from my CMO Share. CMO standing for Chief Marketing Officer. And Ryan I came across through another podcast where I heard him speaking very eloquently and analytically about marketing and operations and how the blend between the two ultimately dictate spend and capacity and how we're ultimately going to evolve and live into that future capacity that we have available. And so anyway, I thought he would be an amazing guest for our show and so I have him here today. And so help me welcome Ryan Gross from my CMO Share. Welcome, Ryan.

Thank you, Drew. I'm glad to be on the show today and to take my part of my first podcast with you.

Yeah, yeah, I'm excited. I'm excited. So, well, just talk a little bit about your background in marketing, Ryan, more generally speaking, and then help us segue into how you found yourself in the dental space, specifically.

Yeah, so I spent most of my career in marketing working in the attraction industry. So I worked for zoos, museums, and the Walt Disney Company. So through that time, you know, that's a lot of experiential marketing that goes on with those attractions. And it's something in my career, you know, I was on an operational and a marketing focus with all those companies. So I was able to look at how do you take marketing and how do you relate that back to operational success? That kind of segued perfectly into dentistry because there is this experiential part of dentistry where you need to create a brand, an image, a story about your dentistry to get people to convert, to become a patient. And so it kind of flows naturally. And so my background, again, heavily in operational and marketing sides of those companies. And so it kind of was a perfect fit when I started cmoshare.

Beautiful. Beautiful. And then, you know, let's talk a little bit about your unique approach to dental marketing, which is more. It's more analytical, it's like we talked about, more operational based. So give us a flavor for, you know, your process, the where you start and walk us through a client evaluation and for a standard client and what that process is going to look like for. For your company.

Yeah, so the first thing when I jump on a call with a practice, I get an overview of what the practice is about. So tell me the history of practice, you know, just to get an idea. But then the first thing I ask after that is like, tell me what your Goal is, what do you want to achieve? And so, you know, you have multiple goals in dentistry. Some people just want to do a startup where they're building up active patients. Some have, you know, a practice been 10, around 10 years. And the doctors say, you know, transitioning into them. They have two associates and they're transitioning into more specialty dentists. And so you take whatever that goal is and then you evaluate what the demand for that goal is. So if it's a practice, who's coming to me and saying, okay, we're at 20 new patients, but we have the, we want 50 new patients. You walk through the exercise and say, okay, let's look at what you're currently. And you can get a lot of this information just off their current website. So you can look at how much traffic they're getting to the site, how much is converting. You can ask them, where are your patients coming from? And some of the things that I do with that is you kind of break it down to two places. Are they referrals from other patients on typical practice, or are they for marketing? That's usually where the two sources. So you start to ask these questions to see what the current demand is. So you could say, okay, you're at this point, you're getting 20, the demand really is 20, or maybe the demand's higher, but they're just not converting on their site through their answer the phones or things like that. So then you start to create a plan to help achieve that goal. And, you know, through marketing, that would be getting, you know, brand awareness, getting people to the side, getting them to convert, and then you take that and pair that plan along with an operational plan to reach that goal. So that's the first step that we would take when I talk to a.

Practice, to kind of dive into that just a little bit more. When you're looking at, you know, you're evaluating their, their goals and ultimately how they're generating that current demand. Right. So it's all about, what are they doing today first? And then what are you looking at? Like, I'm assuming some phone data would be a part of that first step to see how many calls they're missing, what percentage of those new patient phone calls are converting, and then like, how often are you walking in and that phone call data either not exist, not be detailed enough, just kind of give us an idea of what, what things you're looking at in that first stage.

Yeah, so typically, like a practice that would come to us, you know, it's going to be a mixed bag. Some are going to have a lot of pieces in place where we can evaluate those numbers. But I would say it's probably 50, 50 that have the phone data. Sometimes before I even work with the practice, I'll say you need to get set up with a phone company that collects data, gives you an inbound answer rate, things like that, so you can actually start seeing the number of calls you have. Because this happens all the time where a practice oh, I know I'm answering the phone. Well then when we actually get the data, they're answering 58% of the calls. And so you need that from the beginning if you can to help get a baseline of where they're at when we start. It's pretty critical. About 90% of the practice we work with now have some type of phone system that will collect that data and then we are able to access it to be able to evaluate how our efforts are doing as well as their operational efforts.

And then how are in those phone like I'm going to have you plug somebody in a minute. Like who? Do you have anybody that you recommend on the phone side? A service provider.

I like Mango Voice. They're a great company. They're simple to use. They are, you know, it's easy to get in, just access the data you need. And so I'm anytime I recommend a company that's going to collect data or give you numbers is you want something that's simple. So whatever company you use, you want to be able to get that data quickly and be able to analyze it quickly. And I happen to like Mango. That's one that I definitely check out.

Yeah, I spoke to their, their CEO or one of their main founders there and recently and they added some new AI tools that I thought were pretty neat. So yeah, they, they seem to be one of the front movers on the data side as it relates to, to voips. Okay, cool. And then so within say I don't. It could be Mega Voice, could be somebody else. But within that data set, is it hard to distinguish between a new patient phone call? Are you cross referencing the phone number that they're calling on with what is pre established in the system as you know, recorded phone numbers and seeing if you can identify new patient phone calls that way or how does that process work for you?

So we take the approach. So I'm big on looking at from as high a view as possible and then going down to the weeds if need to. We know based upon all the practice we work with the week like data on to you Know, evaluate the marketing is we know what percent on average a practice should be at when it comes to inbound call entry rate. So when I say that is, you know, if you get a thousand calls, typically around 8% of those calls are going to be new patients. So you start with that baseline and then you start to validate numbers. I'm big on validation of numbers. How can you take a phone data and then validate it to marketing and validate to operation? So that's where we start with. And so if you have a thousand inbound calls and you're answering 70% of them, that'd be 700 and you took 10% of the aggro 55 to 6, whatever calls that would be or 56 possible new patients. And you start to see is that how many new patients they're getting now. And then that can give you an idea so you can look at it. If you're like a fee for service practice, you're going to have a lower actual conversion rate than 8% because the people that are calling aren't going to be qualified to always, you know, they're going to some, some practices or some people only want to work with a practice that takes their insurance, it's not out of network. So then you vary that number up or down based upon the type of practice.

And so and just to recap that last stat, it was a good one. We want to make sure that our listeners have that one. I think you mentioned that 8% of all phone calls on average are new patient phone calls.

Correct.

And then we are looking from the total pool of phone calls and looking at the con, the answer rate which in that example that you gave us was say 70%. And so we're looking at 70% of 1000, which is 700. And then we're taking 70% of 8%.

Or 8 to 8% of.

Yeah, yeah, sorry, okay. Or 8% of the 70% to identify how many new patient phone calls we answered. And then we're cross servicing our practice management software system to see how many new patients showed up and then looking at that delta or that difference.

So that's as simple as it is. You take that to start with. There is then times where you can take if you're a smaller practice and you're getting 200 calls a month, you have an ability to take with these phone services and listen to the call. So you can really go in and start cross reversing the calls to the like you can go and listen to them and dive down. But I'M big on just taking the totality of the, you know, what, what is the industry standard. Start there and if something isn't in line, then go deeper if you need to.

Yeah.

And that was one of Mango Voice's AI tools is that they're listening in and looking for keywords that would suggest that this is the first time a prospect or a new patient would potentially be calling. They're looking for conflict situations like this front office member may have answered a question in a way that didn't resonate and so friction so that you could go in and maybe, maybe you're not playing the law of averages and you can get a little bit more specific there or at least direct your attention to the things that you care about the most, which would be new patient phone calls where there wasn't a success or there was a friction point. And listen to those as supposed to listen to a thousand calls, which would be impossible. Cool. All right, so that's the phone call piece. And then so likely there's some without any even introducing ad spend.

Ryan.

Right. And I'm just kind of segueing here. Without even introducing ad spend. There's probably, with what you see in this high level analysis, there's probably room to be better on the either conversion side or the answering of the phone side. And then is that, is that typically what you see? Are you giving some general coaching and guidance on how to be better with what you have first?

Yeah. So if you know, yeah, that's a big starting point is if someone comes in, they're answering 50% of their calls. I'm going to tell them, you know, this is, I'm a big money ball fan. How can we optimize what we already have? So if someone's answering 50% of their calls, I tell them, let's first start with trying to get to 70% and let's see what happens when you answer 70% and see what, how many new patients you will get then, you know, there you can typically tell the practice too if, if they're really struggling and they're getting 15 to 20 new patients and they can get 60 in, even if they answer 70%, they're still not going to be able to build their.

Skills to reach that goal. Right?

Yeah. So that's where marketing comes into play. But yes, you want to try to optimize your operations and your systems first before you get into marketing. Because otherwise what marketing is doing is nothing more than it's just a little band aid and it's not really. You're not optimizing what your ability in marketing is. The worst thing that you can do is when you are not answering a high enough call answer rate is to pour money into marketing just to get more calls. Because here's what happens. If you're 1000 calls now and you're only answering 60% that 600 and you push more in marketing, you get up to 1300 calls, what we find is you're not going to answer 60, 60% moving forward, you're going to answer less that because you're already overwhelmed your system with calls and your employees. And so the more calls you get, the lower your call answer rate goes.

So, right. There's a fundamental reason why they're not already answering 70%.

And what do you just an idea, like a few ideas maybe or a couple. What are some of the reasons that, the fundamental reasons why they may not be answering 70%, maybe they're doing 50%. And before I, before you answer that, is 70% in terms of an answer rate, answer phone call rate, is that an industry standard or is that like an ideal standard? What, where is that in the sort of the range of bad to good?

Yeah, so that'd be like average. The goal that I tell my practices is 85%. That's, that's where you want to be. But if you look at all of the practices we work with and kind of across the board, you're looking at about a 68% answer rate, which isn't the best. You know, you have practices that are answering 95% of the calls. You have practice actually 45%. So yeah, that 70% is going to be on average. But if you really want to optimize your practice and you want to make more money without having to spend more, do anything else, you just keep calling through 85% and you'll be good. So yeah, some of the things that we do, I tell them off the bat is we look at if you know, I'll use Mango as an example, you can go in and you can look at through that software what time the calls are coming in. So you could say the calls are coming in. Say you're getting 50% of your calls between 8 in the morning and noon. Well then, you know, you might be overwhelming your staff at that point or they're getting overwhelmed with calls. So is there ways to bring in additional resources to help answer those calls? You know, have somebody else answer calls, add somebody in part time. You can also look at, you know, a lot of practices will close over lunch, but then we can look at the data and say, well, you're closing between noon and one, but you get 17% of your calls between noon and one. So you just need to make adjustments based upon what you're seeing. And I tell practices, you can actually go in and look. If you're answering six of your calls and you are getting this being new X amount of new patients, but if you average 80% and that got you an additional 20 new patients a month and that say $400 new patient, do the math there, you could easily pay for someone to come in and just answer the phone and so use that information to even help staff.

Great point, great point. So so far we've talked about answer rate. That's kind of step number one, at least as it relates to phone data. And then we look at conversion rate and conversion rate. We haven't necessarily dove in as detailed as we have with answer rate. With conversion rate. What are the things? Cause it's probably a little bit more phone training at that point identifying fit. What are some things on the conversion side that you try to help people with?

Yeah, so you're gonna look at that gets a little more tricky. So if someone's answering, you know, if they're answering a good amount of calls, like say 85% and but their numbers don't match up with, they should be, then we start to look at, okay, maybe you're getting a lot of Medicaid or Medicare calls, something like that. And so let's look at that first. And then so we can get an actual, you know, determination of if you are getting a lot of those calls, that that plays a factor in it. But if you're not and you're not converting, that's where going into listing those calls is important. Because there is going to be often a scheduling issue. And so scheduling is so important. So if you're scheduling too far out, you're gonna have a less lower conversion rate. This is the way it is, especially in, like certain markets. You know, you get to some of these, you know, into California, Chicago, you know, these bigger markets, you know, people want to get in now. And if you can't get in now, when I say now, I mean not today, but in the next few days. If you can't get in, they're gonna move on to someone else that they can get into. And so it's important to look at the capacity part of it next to determine if there's a reason why the conversion isn't high enough.

And you're right now that I've asked you that. I'm thinking about all the things that impact your current capacity. And there's a lot of things, I mean recare rates, you know, in your hygiene columns and how often you're projecting out how many new columns you need to be adding and making sure that you're adding those, that you're opening up the right amount of capacity for what you have flowing through. And so you're right, like scheduling issues could be a lot more pervasive than what they seem on to someone that's not used to looking at it that analytically. All right, so what is a good conversion rate assuming no scheduling issues? So let's take a startup for example, with plenty of capacity, right. Plenty of free Runway to schedule people as needed. What will you want to see from a conversion rate at that point?

Yeah, so on the, on a phone conversion, and we should talk about this at some point in time too, is like conversions online versus conversions, phone versus real conversions. So but yeah, from a standpoint of the phone a startup, a majority of your calls you are going to get at the beginning are going to be new patients because you have no patient based. So when you start to look at that, it's going to vary a little bit depending on where you are and what your situation is. But if you know, you should be looking at 20 to sometimes 40% of the calls coming in as a startup being a new patient, again, that varies depending on like because as a new business you're going to get a lot of those spam calls. So of course there's that that involved too. So you want to just look at, you know, some variables. But I would say 20 to 40% is usually where a startup should be of the calls coming in.

Got it. And then of those 20 to 40% of the phone calls coming in, what should, what is an ideal conversion rate there? And I know that that's again not as straightforward, but because we're using a startup as an example that doesn't at least inherently shouldn't have these scheduling issues because they should have hygienist there for eight hours with maybe only three to four people in that column that day.

Yeah. If we remove that barrier as my point, what would be a good conversion percentage that people should look to?

Yeah, so let's just take an average practice who's PPO practice, it's going to be probably around 75 to 85% as long as that practice is set up properly from the beginning. So what I mean by that is, you know, we'll take California, for example, there's so many Delta patients out in California. So if you aren't taking Delta then that can change that actual conversion rate out there. Medi Cal out there as well is going to change things up a little bit. But a typical practice 75 to 85% should be converted. If you're not seeing that number, you want to dive in right off the bat and see what's happening. Because then especially on a startup, maybe your front desk isn't trained properly and they're not converting. Or maybe from the beginning you are getting some patients that you don't want and now you're not always going to be able to just. You can't just say I don't want Delta patients. Just doesn't work that way. But what you can do though is maybe work on ways to, you know, get patients from other insurances to contact a practice. You know, there's some other, there's methods out there you can try to set up like native keywords for things and things like that. But anyway, what I would say is yeah, 75 to 85% is a usual actual conversion rate.

That's an insurance based conversion rate. Right. With dominant, a lot of those patients. And if you think about the insurance breakout in total in a dominant practice, you're going to be have 70 to 80% of your patients are going to be insurance based. So we could probably reverse engineer what the new patient conversion rate is based on those stats alone. But if we take, if we just kind of remove the insurance variable and let's talk about a fee for service practice, which is most of our listeners are probably aspiring to be at some point in time. What would it be? A good conversion percentage for a 100% fee for service practice.

Yeah, so I've seen anywhere from 25% to 85%. And why this variable is pretty large is because it depends where you are. So if you are in. There's a practice I work with in North Dakota that is clearly out of network and they convert around 85% of the patients. A very pretty large practice actually they do a phenomenal job. But here's one of the reasons why they do can convert at a high level is in their area they are premier dentists. There's not as much competition. So people want to go to the best dentist and they will choose to go out of network at that point. And the team is phenomenal there. If you get put into a situation where you're in a highly populated area, there's going to be a lower percent that you are going to actually get for a paper service practice because there's more competition and it's just harder to convert someone who is dead set on coming to you with insurance. So I've seen, I will say the lowest conversion rates I see are in California in terms of actual conversion rates for fee for service.

I would agree with that just based on what I see as well. Okay, Those are good benchmarks. 25 to 85%. 85% is more of your rural based, high performing doctor without a lot of, without so much competition. 25, 20% high volume areas like California, Chicago, maybe New York where they're. The switching costs between choosing another provider is really low because there's one on every corner type of situation. Got it. And there's, there are ways even in highly competitive markets like California, which is, you know, a lot of my practices that I work with are in California and they, we tend to hopefully do better than the averages because we differentiate and have great quality partners that we work with and we are laser focused on each independent variable that ultimately once aggregated leads to more success. So I don't get too caught up in the benchmarks, but it's still nice to have those as a, as a frame of reference and so that we know if we're meeting or exceeding at different stages from a conversion standpoint. That was more of our phone conversions then you mentioned online conversions and maybe general conversions. And I'm just going to throw one more sort of question in there with those other two areas that we want to talk about which is what CRM system or what type of. I'm not going to say CRM because maybe not every practice has a CRM and maybe you do recommend one. But how are we tracking and aggregating and potentially retargeting as a part of this phone answering, phone analytics sort of overview process that we're talking about now.

Yeah. So it just depends on again the practice. So a general practice in a, in most population bases there's enough people. So I'm, I'm a fan of. If you look at. There's enough people searching for a dentist every month that you can, you don't really need to put a lot of effort into retarding a general patient because this is not going to pay off. You know, if someone calls in and they leave a voicemail and if you get back to them a day later, there's a good chance that they have already moved on because on average it takes about five minutes for someone to search online. But to make a Online conversion, you know, if I try to schedule online or call or practice, so you have this small window to get capture them. If we're talking about big ticket items like all on X, that's a different story. Where you have months and months and months of decision making where someone does come to your site or they do call, then you put them into a system to reach back out to them and you nurture that decision. And so it just depends on the practice. And so from like a CRM standpoint, there's a lot of things you can just drop them into, like activecampaign, which is it's gonna automatically send emails based upon if they open it, they don't open it, they trigger different responses. And so you can use that for those like bigger cases, even in sometimes invisalign clear aligners. But for a general dentist, there's enough people searching that my goal is to capture them in the moment and if they don't, they probably moved on.

Interesting, interesting thought process. I think that you laid that out well, I think I agree with that. Okay, so continuing down on conversions and online conversions more specifically in general conversions, what are some benchmarks and thoughts around those areas?

Yeah, so when you look at a website, you want to start looking at how it's set up for conversion tracking or goal tracking, event tracking in Google. So you can track when somebody goes to the site, clicks to call from their phone. Typically, you know, people aren't usually calling from their computer, but click to call from their phone or click to schedule online. You can see those conversions. That's what's in Google would be called a conversion. So you can see then where they're coming from. So you can break it down. Say, I know that I got 100 conversions this month. 40 came from ads, 40 came from organic visits. You know, organic Google visits. 20 came directly by people typing in a URL. You know, the three categories typically are ads, organic and direct. You know, sometimes they're social, things like that. But you can tell where they're coming from. You can see what they do when they get to the site. So you want to be able to track those conversions to determine what's working, what's not working. And then you can take that baseline of what you get. So if you had a hundred phone calls from the site, then you can use that and say, okay, let's go back and look at the phone data and see how many people, how many phone calls we answered and you can get a baseline. So here's the general rule of thumb on that so if you have quality traffic, and quality traffic is going to be local traffic that people are engaged in the site, you're going to be around an 8 to 12% conversion rate for traffic. So again, 1,000 visits to the site could be 80 to 120 possible new patients. That's the rule of thumb. Now, when you're looking at these conversions, it's very important to know that a large chunk of people will click schedule online who actually don't schedule. Often what they're doing is just looking. They're browsing or they're looking for availability and then they're calling you. So you do need to take that into consideration. What we find is usually only about 20 to sometimes 30, 35% of the people who click to schedule online actually schedule. So we can see, say 100 people click to schedule online. How many people actually schedule using your online scheduling software during that time period. And you can start to get a percentage.

And you are able to set up goals within Google Analytics or whichever platform you're using to track the goal tracking on the website itself to only complete that event or give it credit for that conversion. If they actually schedule online with you.

Only if they click the schedule. Because once they get into your scheduling online software, that's out of Google's control. So they're now going into a gateway. So we don't know how many people actually will schedule online who actually click it. Because now you're going into like Local Med or Flex or Magenta or, you know, these different. And there it steps away from the website so Google can't track it anymore. Understood. That's why you want to validate that number by looking how many people actually click to schedule and how many actually did schedule.

And then you're able to segment the. Are you able to partition these, these organic leads or conversions as defined by the Google Analytics to determine that 20 to 35% number that you actually gave us there?

Yeah. So you can look just to see how many people clicked from each one of those sources. So, you know, maybe they're clicking over from a referral, like it'd be called referral on Google, but like they're coming from a referral site where you're linked on a site and it gets clicked over to your site. You know, they're coming from Yelp, they're coming from Facebook, Instagram or whatever. You can see all of those sources, you can see how many people directly type in the URL and then you can start to determine. Almost all conversions come from organic Google paid or directly to the URL. There's a very small percentage come from other when the people are getting to the website, there's a very small percentage from other sources.

Got it. Just to recap the metrics benchmarks that you gave us in sort of the online conversion territory and then we, I think you mentioned that 8% of all site visits will actually convert into scheduled appointments. So that's 8 to 12. Yeah, 8 to 12. And then of the people that actually click to schedule online, only 20 to 35% of them actually schedule online through the various online scheduling platforms that are out there. The rest of the click that and then ultimately call.

They call or they don't do anything. So that's why it's vitally important to make sure your online scheduling is set up properly. That's one of the biggest issues that we see. So we monitor all of the practice we work with online scheduling so we will see if it's not set up. So for example, if you're running an emergency ad and you go to click schedule online and say, sorry, there's no appointments available, we're going to contact the practice and say, hey, either you got to fix this or we're going to pause your ad because you're convert or we're going to switch your call to action on the ad to call. You know, so you want to make sure that that online scheduling is set up properly. The reason why you'll see a low percent actual conversion is because usually the online scheduling isn't set up properly.

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When you say it's not set up properly, that means that, you know, the user experience may show that there's not any availability in the timeframe that they want it and so they call and make sure that's actually real. Whereas if they had, you know, plenty of spots to book themselves, they likely would book themselves. And I think that that's a really interesting point. Something I talked a lot about, especially more recently, is technology around scheduling and these platforms have gotten much, much better, is to really look into the customizations that those softwares have so that you're building and then also tying it into your cancellations and no shows so that we're seeing that the user experience actually shows the correct amount of availability as opposed to, you know, just trying to work off of a block schedule and like only allocate like three, you know, spaces a day way out in the future, which used to be that kind of the only functionality that existed with those platforms. But they've gotten a lot better and they could be more real time with what's actually happening on your schedule. And I think that that will help to even Ryan's point here with your conversions.

Yeah, totally, yeah, get that set up properly and you're good to go. That's a major issue is just when that's not set up properly, your team's not looking at it. I would tell what I tell practices is every Monday and the first thing in the morning is have someone assigned to just review the online schedule for that week.

That's a good recommendation. And then so now that we have some good metrics here on both online and phone conversions, answer rates, et cetera, anything else in this sort of first preliminary stage that you think is important before we start to move on to the next stage of your process?

I mean, I think that covers a good overview of, you know, what it is the marketing operations are doing ahead of time or when you first engage practice about what's going on. And I think then the next step is to make that game plan.

Last thing I'm going to ask you before we move on to the next phase, any technology, and we're going to ask you this at each, for each phase, any technology out there that is helping either to automate or create more efficiencies in these areas that we just went over from answer rates, conversion rates, both phone and online, I would say.

I guess the first thing is on your website. Let's just start there. Just ensure your website is set up from a user experience to have the highest amount of conversions. And so that's very, a very manual thing at this point. There are some tools out there that will do some audits on your site, but I wouldn't trust them quite yet from a phone standpoint. You know, if there are any companies out there that offer any AI tools for that, that's helpful because you can optimize like you're talking about Mango, Patient, Prism, things like that can often then optimize what the calls are going through. But it's not, there's not a lot of technology for this, unfortunately. It's one of those things that's just a lot of manual work at this point to ensure that every piece that we talked about is actually it's just manual work and it' manual oversight to make sure that they're optimist.

Luckily though, there's a lot of technology in managing the communication for active patients. And if we insert those items, then we can have more time available to do more the manual new patient flow processes which, you know, I agree, unless AR starts getting really smart, we probably are a little whiles away from, from having some technology.

Well, real quick, I want to. Yeah. Touch base on that. So that's a good point. So if you're struggling with phone calls, this is one thing you can do is you can really push your current patients to schedule via text or online. That reduces the amount of calls coming in to the practice. So I'm a big fan of trying to get current patients to schedule alternative ways rather than through the phone. I'm also a fan if your area really allows for it to push online scheduling. Because, like, I was talking to a practice today that's in the Atlanta area. 50% of their new patients schedule online. That's a very high amount. So you got 50%. That's a lot of calls that aren't coming in that the practice doesn't have to worry about answering. And it allows them to free up time to take care of the person in front of them.

Yeah. And, you know, I'm gonna say a standard. The standard. I'm defined standard really quickly. Standard. Be like 1500 patients, five chair practice, single GP office. Right. 1500 patients every four months. Even if you're doing a great job with recare rates, you're probably gonna, you know, every month you're gonna spend about a full week on the phone getting just your active patients rescheduled.

Right.

With all the phone calls. So if we're able to eliminate, you know, 50%, 75% of those phone calls, that's a. That's a lot of time that we can reallocate to the new patient process. Okay, cool. All right, so let's, let's move through to the next segment of your. Of your system, Ryan. So we've kind of evaluated and looked at demand, and then we're now going to. What's our next. We're going to measure to see if what we're doing is working right to some degree.

Yeah, we're gonna make a plan. So we're gonna say, okay, now we have this information, let's go out. And I'm looking for website visits. So you know the movie Moneyball, where they're sitting there like, we're trying to get on base. That's what we're trying to do. On base percentage. So for this, I'm looking at website visits. So if I can get quality website visits, and this is important that I use the word quality here, because you put some blogs up on your traffic or your website, you're gonna get traffic from all over the United States or the world.

You know, someone from Australia is not going to convert if you're in Arizona. So you need to make sure it's quality traffic as much as possible. But if you can drive up that number, so we know that, say you're at 500 visits a month, total traffic, and you want to get to 80 new patients, well, you need to get up to closer to 800 visits a month. So that's where we're at. So that's the next step is how do we get more visits to the site in most cases. Now there's some practices that maybe that's not the case where they're in a more rural area where it's not as much site visit to get, or there's times where you're in like a very heavily like downtown area where you need to get out into the community and do make an action plan to get in front of people there, you know, through farmers markets, through businesses, things like that. But it's about establishing that strategy and then measuring it.

Got it. And then so once we, so let's talk about a little bit about the strategy and, and you know, which I know it is going to vary based on the person and their circumstance. We've kind of been using a standard practice, you know, standard 1 GP practice and I know market specific as well. We'll change some of these variables, but just kind of go through some of the things that you would, you know, tend to add to a plan that's trying to increase new patient flow and conversions, et cetera.

Yeah. So in general we're going to make sure the online foundation is strong. So that means again, we want the website to be built to increase the highest percent or highest conversion rate possible. So that's the very first thing. Is that site built to do that? Then the second part is, is that site being optimized organically to try to get rankings that are important and so not in all cases that do you want to be like dentist in Denver, Colorado? Like for example, there's so many people in Denver. If you get a search from west Denver and you live in the eastern part of Denver, you're not going to drive across Denver, especially if you've been there. But you know that traffic, you're not doing that. So you want to make sure your site's optimized for the area you're in California. This is incredibly important, phenomenally important. So where, what neighborhoods are you optimized in? Because there's points where we found like in Orange county that literally there's a dental practice and then across the street they'll get nobody to come to their practice. You can see it from the zip codes and the addresses that are people already active, patient based. You can see no one comes from that area. So you don't want to focus on some of the keywords and the rankings in those areas. You want to focus on where people are coming from. So you really want to analyze what keywords to go after and then that'll help you to create your online strategy and then your ad strategy as well in focusing on the right areas to ensure you're getting the highest conversion.

And I want to unpack the strong website that is set up to convert because there's a lot that, that's, that's kind of, it's, you know, it's a easy thing to say, a hard thing to, to execute on. And so let's just talk about some of the components of a strong website that is set up to convert. Sort of demystify this for, for people a bit.

Yeah. So typically a user to a dental website wants to learn about the doctor and the practice. Then they want to learn about the financial situation. So do insurance, are they cash, do they have a savings plan, do they have credit options? And then they want to look at the services you offer. So that's kind of the order. So you want your site to set up to tell that story and then you want that site to be able to convert at any of those points of that stage or those stages. You know, we found recently, especially on the coast, on east and west coast that there are more searches based on financial based dentistry. So it's up like 35 to 45% depending what you're looking at. And people searching for those financial, like do they take my insurance and savings plan, things like that. So on the site we've actually reversed some of our content to focus a little bit more on that financial piece. The doctor is very important, but we'll want to almost equally talk about our financial situation to help raise the conversions. So practices that we've done this where we change the content to focus on the financial aspect. On the coast we've seen a higher percent, we've seen convert at a higher rate than practices who didn't.

What modes and methods are you guys using to emphasize these pieces like video. And then if you're using video, like is there, are you using a plugin for a website? Like where are some of the tools and best practices there?

So the first thing is just you know what is very quickly to the point. So if it has to do with like meet the doctor, you want to just have a picture of the doctor, tell a quick story, have a personal site, that's your first layer that's going to get most people. If you have an opportunity to put a video with a doctor. And video can be used strategically on dental websites. If you have an opportunity to take a video and have the doctor talking about something that is of value, use it. Like we embed our videos through YouTube because that's what Google prefers. So we put them through YouTube. We like video content that has to do with services because the services are often what people are searching for. So you get two things out of it. You get a video that will help get you organic value. Then it'll also help you with a conversion rate once they get to the site. And so video that typically uses based around that. But then when it comes to like financial decisions, if you can go there and you can see your, you know, in church practice you can see the logos of the insurances that you accept. Is there like CareCredit, things like that on the site? Is there a video explaining what a savings plan is or a membership plan? If you offer that, that be helpful because we've seen a large percent increase in people searching some type of savings plan or you know, no insurance options at dentistry. So we use that as a tool. Services. You know, is there icons that just say use the general services that you offer.

Question. And maybe this might be a little bit outside your wheelhouse, you know, but when you were, you mentioned logos of dental insurance companies, I think that's really great idea. And if you're in network, obviously it's self explanatory put the logos on there. But when you're out of network, you know, one of the phone strategies that a lot of people will use is you know, they will indicate that they will continue to, that they bill that insurance company for any eligible benefits. They kind of steer away from in network versus out of network and speak more to the financial reimbursement that they're going to help them receive and, and you know, and, and, and do the legwork for, to bill for that. Just curious if you know of like if having logos on the site under that capacity is, is frowned upon or what, what's the, what's the industry think there?

Yeah. So if you're out of network, what we'll do is we will say kind of exactly this just said say, you know, we will bill your insurance for you and so we'll, we'll talk, we'll have that wording. We, we don't, we don't put, I don't like to do any type of bait and switch marketing. So I don't want to put a insurance logo on there. If you're really not in there with them, that's just going to make the patient upset. So there you steer away from the insurances and you talk about the experience, you talk about the fact that you will still help build their insurance, that you also like have a savings plan. Like savings plans are great. Talk about them and just you know, don't really directly like you said, say hey, we don't take X, Y and Z insurance. No, we're still here for you and we're still going to then build these insurances on your behalf.

Beautiful. And then there are like plugins, right, like your, your virtual smile that kind of like you. The user will select the service they're interested in, it'll have a pre recorded video and then at the end the financials will, it'll kind of give them an estimate of how much it'll be out of pocket versus how much would be covered by the insurance company. I'm just curious if you have experience with those and if you recommend them ever under any capacity.

Yeah, there's some where the personal smiles I think are a great opportunity for a practice. What we do when we do like all on X marketing is some of the practices we work with will have basically questions that will be triggered. It'll say, you know, they'll go through steps and then it'll come out and say basically okay, here's what we think, here's some of the costs. What we want to do sometimes is attempt to ask these questions especially on all legs. That does weed out some of the people. So when it comes to the implant, like on forward type marketing, I'm a bigger fan of trying to get someone to schedule a consultation that is the most likely to actually accept treatment. So if you can somehow weed out these leads in advance, that, that's something that I think is an advantage. But you can also then answer questions for them to capture that email or that phone number to then reach back out to them too. So yes, I think when it comes to these big ticket items there are some great tools that you can either set up on your site yourself, you can do some plugins to do as well. But typically they're all through form fields and if you're using like a, you know, HIPAA compliant, you know, something that captures that, then that's a. Just do it yourself.

That's a good point.

That's a good point.

Okay, great. Well then, so continuing down your, your, your program and your process here, let's speak about the, our next stage and, and what we've sort of or build upon what we've, what we've talked about here for our listeners.

Yeah, so then it would be, you know, we start to implement that plan, we're looking at how much to spend in ads based upon the area that you're in your competition. And we're looking at cap. We're looking at going after those keywords that you may not rank organically well in. So then we're taking that process where we said we're going to build out an ad campaign and we're going to get very focused in on that. We're going to see that you get like, you're trying to capture patients in certain. If you're, like, in a city that might have some, like a lot of bedroom communities, we're going to start trying to target those bedroom communities through ads to get in front of them to convert. So we're going to build out that campaign, determine what the cost of that ad spend is, and then, you know, start implementing that. The typical ad spend that we see across the country is $900 for Google Ads, but that can be up to like 2,500 to 3,000 in some communities like California, but it's around $900, that typical ad spend. We're going to allocate some to that. We're going to allocate some to social like Facebook and Instagram. That's going to be more brand awareness because you get a very small conversion percentage off of those. Like we see around a 1% conversion of traffic from Facebook and Instagram to actually try to call our schedule. But those are brand awareness to let people know you exist. So we're going to implement those campaigns. We're going to see if there's anything traditional that you need to do. Do you send out a mailer? Do you need to do some community marketing? Do you want to sponsor the little league, you know, baseball field? What are those things? So we want to try to get all of that started, then start measuring it. And that's where the important part is, is measuring how you can. How successful these marketing dollars you are spending are.

And when we're measuring, you know, measuring always sounds like a lot of. A lot of work and maintenance, which it is. But how do we. How do we make that measuring process easier to keep up with for. For our doctors?

Yeah. So you got to first look at what you can measure, what you can't measure. You're not going to be able to really, truly measure a billboard. You know, people want to try to measure everything, but you can't. You can. You know that you're going to get in front of so many cars and things like that through a billboard. So start and Establish what it is that's measurable and what's not. So what I look at as measurable is, here's where it's at. Google Ads, social ads, SEO, like organic traction. Because you are spending so much money a month, you can see how many people convert off organic traffic. You know, those are, those are the things that are very measurable. Things that aren't would be a billboard, a community event. There's times like I had a practice that went out to, they go out to wedding fairs and they do a tremendous job and they sign up people right there, schedule appointments for whitenings, clear lines, things like that on the spot. So that is measurable, but typically it's not. Then like postcards, mailers, usually those don't have a high like ability to measure. You can get some. And so I'm not a fan of tracking numbers because what happens with tracking numbers is if I send out a postcard and has a tracking number on it, that's going to give you some inaccurate data. Because most time people are going to look at that postcard and they're going to Google you. They might type in the phone number, but you're not going to get a true accurate representation of what that postcard is actually doing. And if they save that number, you know, unless you have a tracking setup that takes away duplicate numbers, duplicate calls, and the only person calls you might miss, you might not connect the dots and you're tracking something that you shouldn't be tracking. And so I think you track the conversions based upon what you know is accurate. And that's through the website, Google business, things like that.

Got it. And then so in that measuring process, it's, it's, it's iterative, right? We're, we're reviewing it. And then how often are you with your clients reviewing the metrics that you can track reliably? And what sort of course corrections do you make through that sort of iterative review process?

Yeah, every month. So I look at it every month. There's some bigger practices we work with that we're doing every two weeks and we're making corrections however we need to. And so like for example, if I get a practice who is having an issue like September was down, this last September was down compared to the last few years. So what we did was we were looking at September and saying, okay, we're down. Did it start to come back up at the end of the month? Are we seeing enough people going to site converting things like that? If we were seeing that not happening, what can we do. Can we get a boost by increasing the ad budget 2 or $300 to see a boost? Can we run a special something like that? I'm not a big fan of specials because usually you bring in a lower, you know, value patient. But yeah, you want to make those corrections as soon as possible and not wait. The worst thing that can happen is if you're not monitoring these numbers and you see that patient new patient numbers are down for three straight months or something and then you decide to take an action. There's something that happened three months ago that you needed to address and it's a lot harder to determine what happened three months ago than it did two weeks ago.

Completely agree. Obviously Google and everything is changing as well. So the longer you wait, the measurement that you took may not even be as applicable to the post Google changes question you mentioned. $900 is an average Google Ad spend budget for a general dentistry practice. And this is, we would put this category of practice owner in a sort of non or just general bread and butter make up not anybody or at least not as many people going out for all in four or larger production cases. And then it went all the way up to $2,500 was the range that you gave. So 900 to 2,500, maybe $3,000. And my question is a lot of people, you know, in just generally will equate spending more to better results at times. And so the range inherently to me sounds lower. But I'm curious as to what your, what the thought process is there because it seems very measured for you.

Yeah. So we're going to start with the lowest possible budget. We often start with like a budget of say 500, $700 to start with. And we'll see the amount of obviously there's impressions and clicks that you get off of that, but more importantly the number of conversions you get. And then you start going through those things we talked about really measuring those conversions to see if they actually did, you know, what was your actual new patient, numbers, things like that. So we start there and then we work up. I don't recommend changing your ad spend often because you know, if you're changing every two weeks, Google's not gonna like that. You're not, you're not gonna get, your conversions are gonna jump all around in terms of cost per conversion. And so exactly what you said, if you take a thousand dollar budget and you're getting say it's $50 per conversion and you think you're, you know, you think you're going to get that exact amount. If you just double, we're going to, you know, get 20 more conversions. Well, that's not necessarily true. You could double it and your cost per conversion goes from 50 to $70. And now what you've done is you've eaten up part of your budget to just spend more. So the goal is to try to keep the cost per conversion as consistent as possible and then make jumps. So, like, sometimes it's better to jump $4 and 1,000 to get the same amount of conversions. So you just need to really look at that very carefully and not think that just if you double your budget, you're going to get quite as many patients.

And I know this is why they pay you the money to do this part for them. This is not something that, you know, you would want to be looking and reviewing by yourself. But just curious, what are some context clues that you're leveraging to know that maybe a $400 jump may be better than a thousand dollars jump to maintain that same cost per conversion?

Yeah. So I take. And what happens is when I talk to a practice, we'll come up and say, okay, here's. We need to get eight more new patients. So let's. Let me go back to the ad team. My ad team. See, ad team, if we need to get eight more new patients, can we get all those through ads? And they'll say, okay, let's look at it and say, we recommend a $300 increase. They're looking at the competition. That's really a big thing they're looking at. What is that competition? Because, you know, is it high? Is it low? Is there keywords that we can add the budget to that are doing really well that we're targeting and then get it, is it more difficult at this point in a $300, you know, so I'm going to rely on my ad team just to do the research from the competition to the area and what keywords are converting to determine what that spend is. So funny enough, like, typically, my ad team will come back with a lower budget than what I would tell them. I'll say, hey, the practice is willing to spend $800 more. And they'll come back and say, okay, we believe $450 is going to get what you need. Let's start with there. I'm really big on spending, testing before just jumping into the waters with high budgets.

Got it. And is there. I mean, assuming that we can accommodate both operationally and geographically in terms of the amount of patients available in the area, and we have the right amount of staff. Some of the things that I'll look at, especially with single doctor, maybe upwards of two to three doctor practices is I'm looking at what their current, what their theoretical max capacity is in terms of number of total active patients that they can manage in any 12 month period of time. And then I'm looking at where their capacity is today, what their active patients are, how many of those active patients are unscheduled. And then I'm looking at how many columns of hygiene that they have to sort of reverse engineer. Are we a number one currently over or under our current capacity limits? Most of the time we're under, but not by a material amount, which could lead to some scheduling issues. Then I'm looking at theoretical capacity limit. So how far do we have to go from where we are today to where we theoretically could be in the future? Maybe on a four or five day workweek, right Hours per day. All these variables obviously play into this. Once we figure that out, my goal is to get those practices to be within, you know, three years or less to have to be able to meet or reach that theoretical 12 month capacity limit. And usually when we start off, you know, the recare rates are low, they're like 80%. The new patient recare rates are abysmal, like 25, 30%. And so our first goal is fix those. Once we fix those, you know, we go from like, you know, something crazy, like 35, 40 years to reach theoretical capacity max to like seven or eight. And then from seven or eight to bridge that gap to get it less than three. It typically is a new patient conversation. Right? We've fixed all the holes that we can fix to maximize net patient accumulation with what's flowing through the practice. The only way to lower that timeline further is to increase new patients. And a lot of times just fixing the holes will get them to three or four years. But point being, let's say that we have this methodology in mind and the goal in place and that translates to 150 new patients a month and they're currently at 30 or 40, which could be the case, especially in a seven or eight year practice. Is there a new patient goal to say this shortly, A new patient goal that would be unachievable or not from an ad spend or a cost per conversion perspective, not ideal to push the limits that far, Even though that's what we define that we want. We have the capacity in the office to do it, we have the staff to make it happen. It's just more or less you know, bringing that number of people in.

If you come to me and say I'm at 50 new patients and I want 200 in a matter of like six months, I'm like, that's probably almost not going to happen. It's impossible in most cases. So yeah, I'm going to look at what is realistic for a goal of what you can reach. Like our goal is typically have a practice reach capacity within 18 months. And so that doesn't always happen, but it happens much sooner than later. But it's just really setting a realistic goal of what it is that you're trying to achieve and within that timeframe. And so yeah, there's times where you can't, like there's, no matter what you do, you're not going to go from 50 to 150 in a short period of time. It's just not possible.

Even if you had all the money to spend on ads in the world.

Yeah, unless you're running like specials. You say I'm going to run a $79 new patient special. That's a different story. If you do some DSO type marketing, you're probably, you're going to be able to reach numbers a lot easier. We just typically don't do that.

Got it. And this is more of a theoretical question than anything else but you know, I think it parlays well with this analytical sort of framework that we've been going through today where we're using both operational data and you know, phone data and you know, marketing competition data to reverse engineer to tell us what we, the story that we ultimately need to, need to play. And sometimes that story may come back a little bit more aggressive than is obtainable. And I just did, you know, again, so just playing to some of these, these high level concepts and ideas to see if we, you know, what's possible around or just, just in general. And so there are some, there's some inherent limitations. It sounds like in your experience what's obtainable regardless of how much money you can throw at the ordeal in a lot of cases.

So like for, yeah, I mean this is a good example. I had a practice that we started working with back in March and they've increased their patients 38% but they've stalled now. And here's part of the reason why they've stalled and we've added a little bit more marketing budget is the area that they're in, their population base is you're starting at a point where you just don't have as much low hanging fruit. So you Know, you can jump very quickly sometimes new patient numbers and you can stall. There could be the area you're in, it could be you start. So think about this. If you have 150 new patient blocks a month to fill and you get to 100, you start to get to a point too where there's just not as many new patient blocks that might be included. 50 is a lot still, but let's just make it say 100, 120. There might be some less appealing new patient blocks out there that are harder to fill. So that way you need to go back and look at your schedule and rearrange those to give the new patient the most ideal spot and give your recare a spot that isn't as desirable. And because if I'm already out of practice and they tell me, Ryan, all I have left is a 7:30 or a 4:30. Well, four would be kind of crazy. But no, like 3:30 or something, then I might take that appointment or whatever it is. I don't know. Whatever you know that less desirable spot is. So make sure your new patient spots are also the most desirable ones.

That's a good point. That is a good point. As you kind of reach that goal, you start to. Yeah, less desirable spots. That's, that's huge. People love lunch. I'm sure people love their days off.

Yeah.

But yeah, early mornings, especially if you work well.

Cool, man.

And so this has been really, really informative. I, I want to give you the floor to wrap up any ideas or thoughts that you feel is great for our listeners within the context of what we talked about today. Anything else that you have that you feel like sharing.

I would say ensure that whenever you're doing marketing, do it with the type of person and practice you are. And then if you're a very data driven practice, work with a company that is who you are. You're data driven. If you are a practice that is very cosmetic driven and you don't need maybe as much traffic to the site, but you need to capture the high percentage. Work with a company that fits who you are. That's very important. So don't try to take a market company that's not who you are and make them work to your situation. You'll just fail and they'll just waste time. The other thing too is really make decisions based off of whatever's best for your practice. I think almost every practice should be making some type of data driven decision. But make those decisions off of what's best for your practice. Use your marketing to Adapt your marketing at times to your operations and look at marketing as a tool within the practice that isn't just something sitting outside the practice that is like, oh, this is my marketing. No, have your marketing really be part of your operations and I think you'll be successful. But really choose a partner or choose hire somebody to be internal that fits what you're trying to do for your.

Practice outside of, you know, giving them ideas of how they can define what, what's good for them and what, who they are. I feel like that's a lot. That's sometimes a difficult question for, for some people. But let's say assume that they do this, they have this idea of who they want to be and the direction they want to go. How can they interview for fit? You know, I find that that's, that could be a challenging thing for people that are clinicians and outside the marketing space.

Yeah, interview somebody when, when you're going through. And like I talk to a lot of practices and we do kind of reverse review. I interview the practices to make sure they fit with our system. And so one thing I would say is just go through and say, okay, are you a high contact marketing company where you're going to be in contact with us often? What is it that I'm expecting? Like if you are working with a company where you want to control all the aspects of the marketing, you want to have access to the website, your ads and things like that, make sure that company's set up that way because otherwise you're going to con, you're having this conflict and your marketing partner is not going to be a partner anymore. It's going to start to become almost like you are an enemy to each other because you don't fit. So just make sure the type of person you are. So my thing is working with practices that want to, that they know what they're great at, if they're a great clinical doctor, they're a great CEO, then work with those practices because typically those doctors are going to reach out to me and say, okay Ryan, you take this. My job is to then, you know, deliver on whatever they're asking. But if you're a practice that really wants to do all this on your own, then find a partner that's going to allow you to do that as well.

That's really well said and some very good interview tips for, for our practice owners trying to find the right marketing fit for them. Well, Ryan, thanks again, really honestly for, for coming on the show. I know I learned a bunch today. I know our listeners will as well if they want to reach you after listening to the show. Can you give them some good places to to find you?

Yeah, if you want to go to my CMO share so my CMO the word share.com so mysingoshare.com you can go in there, you can set up a call with me. I'll look through your numbers. Just give some advice, especially any, you know, listeners of your show. I'm going to go through and just give some some advice, give a recommendations and then, you know, take it from there. If it's something you can do to work with us, we'll talk about it. If not, hopefully you got some valuable information out there. So mycmoshare.com happy to talk to any of your listeners.

Thanks so much again, Ryan. I really appreciate your time today. Day.

Thank you, Drew. I enjoyed it a lot.