AI in Dentistry: How AI Is Redefining Dental Marketing with Adrian Lefler of My Social Practice

Welcome back to another episode of the Dental Boardroom podcast into the next installment of our AI in dentistry series. I'm your host, Drew Phillips and today we're spotlighting a marketing partner that's been turning social media clicks into new patient smiles since way before dental TikTok was a thing. My social practice, the Utah based firm helping practices be found and chosen since 2009. My guest is a co founder and CEO, Adrian Leffler, a 14 year veteran at the intersection of dentistry, storytelling and digital strategy whose content wins with both algorithms and actual human beings. If you've heard the buzz about Annie, the AI powered web agent that schedules patients while your front desk sleeps, or caught their recent webinar on how large language models are rewriting dental SEO playbooks, that's Adrian's team pushing the envelope forward. In today's conversation, we'll unpack how generative AI is reshaping marketing from hyper personalized video scripts to real time chat that feels genuinely helpful and what that means for growth, team efficiency and patient trust. Let's step into the boardroom with Adrian Leffler of my social practice. Welcome, Adrian.

Dude, that is like the best intro freaking ever, man. Can I just rent you for a little while? Intro me everywhere else. That was amazing.

Heck yeah.

We ate all of it. But it's not a great.

Um, well.

Cool, man, thank you. I appreciate it.

Of course, of course. And welcome man. We're, we're glad to have you. So, you know, there's a lot of different ways in which we can kind of approach this topic and the theme of today's podcast. You know, I felt, you know, talking with Adrian offline, that it'd be good to kind of start with that high level overview of just where the marketing, the business of marketing is today and those traditional channels, and then start to kind of pick apart each of those different channels that AI is and automation is impacting and influencing both today and increasingly so in the future. And you know, at the top of the list, you know, we have, we have a website, we have videography and pictures and that sort of story based telling that's going to go on and the aesthetics of that website and that website design, you're going to have SEO, right, which is organic search, you're going to have paid ads, you're going to have the local business pack that you're going to be trying to rank on as well within a general search. You, you have online scheduling, patient engagement, all of these different verticals that we're pooling together in order to Create that comprehensive outcome, which is patient growth and patient satisfaction for our dental practice partners that we work with. And so, Adrian, kind of the first question, using those sort of important channels that we have today, kind of help our listeners get an idea of how AI and automation is going to be impacting those different areas both today and moving forward in the future.

That's a big question, man. Big question, big topic. Information, the cost of information is essentially going to zero with AI. Meaning what that means is that where you used to have to pay for copywriting, or really any kind of information, it can all be accessible at virtually zero cost through large language models. Large language models being things like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Anthropic has a product called Claude. These are all called large language models. It's the AI guts. It's the guts of the AI algorithms and so forth. Because those agents have the ability to create so much content, they have accessible. They access pretty much all content and they understand language. They can create content. So, so where, you know, a marketing company who's hired to write blog articles to help you rank for, you know, certain keywords in Google Search, you know, you might have to pay them a couple hundred dollars an article, right? Because it takes two or three hours to write the article, link it, publish it, get it, you know, dialed in, all that kind of stuff. Now it can take 20 minutes, right? So the cost of content creation, and that's not just copywriting, that's imagery, that's video. That's everything is going to zero. And that is fundamentally changing the way that marketing is being done and will be done in the future. So one of the biggest impacts in all of those strategies that you mentioned, social reputation management, SEO, website development, that kind of stuff, one of the inflection points that's going to make the biggest impact on how dentists attract new patients is going to be, I'll say two. We'll talk about two things unless you ask me another question. We hang on, we spin off into the universe somewhere, but it's going to be an SEO and an AI automation. AI automation in relationship to patient communication. Okay, so if we can tackle those two topics, and if you want me to jump on anything else, you let me know, but we can talk about those if that's appropriate.

Yeah, yeah, those are great. Those are two good ones.

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So if anybody's been on Google recently, in the last maybe couple months, you'll notice that when you do a search, at the top of the search engine are what are called AI overviews or they the acronym is aio.

Those results that are at the top of the page are generated from Google's Gemini, which is our this Google's large language model. It's their it's their their version of ChatGPT. And what is happening if you've read any of the articles you've looked at some of the statistics is that people are getting their answers more direct and more clear from the AI overview than clicking on a link and going to a website to read about what you know to read about what it is. So if I search who's the best dentist in Florida or Miami, Florida, typical in the past, SEO, Search engine optimization, a strategy to help a dental practice rank higher in Google search to be found. What you would do is you hire a marketing company, or you'd have a marketing manager at your office, and you would create content that would be tagged. We call this metadata. It's a tagging system you, like, you make a video or an article or a website or whatever it might be, and you tag it with a phrase or a keyword that's relatable to a highly searched keyword. So if I search. If a typical, a great keyword, if you're a dentist in Miami, Florida, would be best dentist in Miami, Florida, best. So if I search that, that's probably a highly searched term by patients who are looking for a new dentist.

Right.

So you would want a website that is tagged with that phrase. So it's a, it's a merging of a query by a patient with tagged content. Okay. So that's how SEO has been done. So if you didn't, if you weren't creating any content, you had a very difficult time ranking in the, in the search engine because Google doesn't recognize any new content. And you don't, you don't go up in the, up in the rankings. So when you'd hire a marketing company, their job was to make sure that your website is tagged appropriately. They're probably writing blog articles, they're creating videos or images or whatever it might be, and they're tagging this content with different keywords so that your, your content ranks high in the search engine. Okay? That's how SEO has been done for the last 25 years. Okay. Now what's happening is Google Gemini is being placed at the top of the search engine, and it's giving results and it's, it's answering the query directly. So the difference here is this is usually you'd search best dentist in Miami, Florida, and you'd look at the ads or at the top, then you'd see the Google Maps section, and you see a bunch of organic links, links to websites, and it would require the consumer, the patient, to click on something, click on the ad, look at the Google Maps section, maybe click to the website from there, or possibly call from there. That happens a lot. Or go down and look through the titles of all the organic rankings and click on one of them and go to the website to get the answer right. That's not happening anymore. Google Gemini basically looks at the query and it accesses all of the information online. And it's not just delivering links, it's delivering the answer. Because the AI algorithm in Gemini has the ability to understand your query so well that it can just give you the answer. So you don't have to go to a website anymore to get an answer. Okay, and what's the statistics are getting? I mean this has only been out for a couple months, maybe two or three months actually. Probably been testing it for longer than that, but it's only been around for a few months. And the statistics are showing that the, that the, that the user, the patient is getting their answer more likely in the Gemini response than clicking on a link. So this, what this means, these are called zero click responses, meaning the consumer doesn't have to click on anything, they just get the answer right. So if I ask a question about a dental implant or whatever it might be, I don't have to go to a website from a dental website to learn about what a dental implant is. Gemini gives it to me. Okay, so what this means is that there's going to be less clicks on the organic results and the paid ads. There's gonna be a significant difference in the clicks on those links as there has been in the past. Okay. Now to give you an idea of the magnitude of this, this may not sound like a big deal, but this the, the ad section. So usually when you do a search in Google before the AI overviews, you'd see ads, you know, have it say promoted or ads or what or add or something sponsored, say sponsor. Right, that section, that, that section, that sponsored section which you pay for, it's a Google Ads product. You have to pay for those, those are, it's called pay per click or paying per Click or Google AdWords or whatever that the, the amount of revenue generated from that section in search is close to 2. It's a $2 trillion business. I mean it's massive. That's how Google's become a multi billion dollar company is because they charge for those ads at the top of the search engine.

So now what's happening is they're putting this AI overview above their ads, which makes you think why the hell would Google do that?

Why would Google risk billions of dollars in potential ad revenue to put the AI overviews above their ads? Which is what's happening right now. Now this, the user interface may change, the search result may change. They're going to probably play with it a lot. But right now the ad, the AI overview is at the top. Ads are below, then the Google map and then organic links. Okay, so my question, not to put you on the spot.

Oh, please do.

But I'm going to put you on the spot, Drew, why the hell would Google do that and risk the ad revenue?

Because it's a bigger risk not to ignore their competitors in that large language model space. ChatGPT, you already mentioned a few others, Gronk, etc. Right. And so they're trying to get that market share so that they can be creative later with how they re monetize that system.

Dead on. Okay. And by the way, I didn't prompt you. Everybody listening? I didn't tell him the answer before this. I really actually put him on the spot. So the issue is this, is that to more contextually, like describe what you've just said. Consumers want speed. They want answers immediately. Right. Even the time it takes to click to a link and then read something, they don't want to do that. So if they can get their answer immediately, they're going to use that as their new search model. And what's happening right now is, is search is shifting from traditional search to AI search. So people are using ChatGPT and perplexity and Grok and Google Gemini and all these other things as their search engine. It's going to be the new way that we get information and it's, it's not going to change. This is the direction, this is where it's going. I, I've even noticed it in my own, you know, searches and queries. I probably get 90% of all of my searches. I probably get the answer in the Google Gemini, the AI overview, and I don't have to click on anything. It's a better response. Right.

For general questions, I would have to agree with that. Absolutely. I'm curious to hear what your thoughts are, though, in terms of like, service providers, because I still feel like there's this element where ChatGPT could give me a list or Gemini's summary, it could give me a list of providers that meet that specific, that specific requirement that I'm looking for. But then I'm still going to potentially want to look at who they are and get familiar with them, which may still lead to clicks.

Yeah, no, that's true. So, so I think you're, you're, you're leading the conversation here. This is where I was going to go next. So good, good call. So if you look at the AI Overview. What it is is it's a curated response from Google Gemini. So it's accessing all the information on the Internet and it's query, it's creating its own response. And but if you look through the actual responses, there's little links. Reference or references is probably how you would call it. It's showing you where it's referencing information from. And on the right hand side there's, right now there's three reference links where you can then click through to a website. Okay. So there is some sense of the old kind of model, the old SEO model or search model, where you put a query in and you're going to get a link. The difference is, is that you're getting probably 90, 95% of the time you're getting what you asked for in the AI overview. And then the question becomes, is the person going to then reference. Look at the reference link in the response and then click on that response on the right hand side. Right. That's basically the way that the UI is set up, the user interface. So there's still links there. It's just the answer is there with a reference to get more information rather than having to click on a link to get the answer. So they call this 00 clicks or 0 clicks or I think that's what they call it in marketing. So the question then becomes this, how do you get you your dental practice to be one of the references in the AI overview? That's the new SEO and they're calling it GEO Generative Engine Optimization. Okay. So SEO as we've known it, Search Engine optimization, is shifting to GEO Generative Engine Optimization.

It's the first time I've heard that term, but I love it. Great, thank you.

Yeah. At least that's what they're calling it right now. It's probably going to stick.

Okay.

It's a good one. Yeah.

So you got AIO A AI overviews, which is the response at the top of the page. That's what it's called. And then you've got geo, which is the strategy by which you can try and get your website to rank as a reference in the aio. That's the key. And the reason why you want to do that is this. The statistics are extremely strong. You lose if you have to scroll. If you require a consumer to scroll down the page, you lose half of them at the bottom of the page, meaning everybody wants the response. This action.

Is too difficult for people, you know what I mean? Or click right. They just want the answer immediately. So the further you're down on the page, the less likely a consumer's gonna find your information. So you've gotta figure out a way to get your practice your website or blog articles or whatever it might be in the AI overview for the search phrases that people are searching for. So let me talk about one other thing that kind of is in tandem with this, there's also a significant shift from the types of search phrases that people have that they're, that they're using because we've got AI integrated into almost every software system and they're going to continue to be integrated and these systems understand language. People are not typing in their queries anymore. They're not searching best dentist in Miami, Florida. They're searching hey chatgpt, who's the best dentist in Miami, Florida that accepts Medicaid and is near the mall? That's the query because they're saying it, they're not typing it. So the queries are getting longer and more specific do you ever feel lost.

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So that shift to voice search is significant and in the younger populations it's even greater than in the older populations. But people are going to get to a point where we're probably not even going to have keyboards. I would imagine that's probably happen the next 10 to 15 years. We want to use keyboards. I mean if we do, it'll be just rarely. We're just going to speak to our computers, right? We'll speak to our watch, we'll speak to our cell phone. That's the way it's going to work.

Right.

So what you have to figure out, going back to my other point of like how to get into the AI overviews is you have to take into consideration voice search and the types of search phrases that are being used now. Okay, so here's how you do. Here's, here's, here's a couple strategies on how to do this. Definitely. I got a ton of blog articles about this on our, on our website, on my social practice. So if you go to the blog and you'll see, I don't know, I got 15 articles on, on just this. I've also got an E. I actually just, just published an ebook last week on geo.

Oh, nice.

And I'll send it to you if you want to put it in the show notes. Yeah, that's an ebook that talks all about this. It digs in deep and walks through it. So if anybody's like super bored on a Saturday night and you want to like, you got nothing else to do, you can read this ebook and learn all about geo.

Anyway, as a practice owner, I don't think it's a, it's a, it's a wish list item. It's a must do. You got to stay ahead of this one.

I think personally, yeah, it's, you need to at least know enough about it that when you decide to do something. So me back up. A dentist needs to understand at least kind of what's happening. I don't think that to, to, to learn this stuff and implement the strategies is like starting another company. It's, it's, there's a ton of work to it and, and it's changing so fast that it's really hard to stay on top. So if a dentist is looking to generate new patients and SEO is a primary strategy to, you should know about this transition, that we're right in the middle of it. Like this is going to be transitioning for the next year or two as consumers start using voice search more and more and more and the AI overviews are being implemented in more ways and so forth. You have to understand this so that when you talk to a marketing company or if you've hired somebody that's doing SEO for you, maybe on your team, you need to be able to understand what's going on or you're going to be doing old tactics that don't aren't probably going to be very efficient. Okay. So anyway, with that, here's a couple things. One is your website has to be wicked fast. Okay? Now this isn't necessarily a geo thing that kind of talked about, but Google's algorithm prioritizes being able to provide content as quick as possible. So if somebody clicks on your website link and your website takes a fraction of a second longer than other websites, you're kind of marked down in terms of the.

Your SEO or your geo optimization. Okay, so you need to use Google Page Speed Insights. If you just search Google Page Speed Insights, there's a free tool online. You can drop your URL in there and it'll tell you how fast your website loads on mobile and as a desktop. And you want to be above 90%. Okay. If it's below 90%, you need to talk to your website company and say fix it. And if they don't know what they're doing, call me. Okay? So that's one thing, and that's just kind of outside of this whole conversation we're talking about, but it's fundamentally, it's a priority. Okay. So speed and the map, the way that your content loads and how quick it loads, it's important.

So speed's been important, right, Even from SEO before geo was. Right. But I'm curious, do you feel it's more important now? And it sounds like you do. And then how does videography, which is a slower load time on a homepage, how does that impact? Because for so long, that story that a video gives you outweighed the speed elements that you lost in the organic search rankings of old. But I'm curious to see where you think that optimal place is now.

Well, I think video is the best kind of content to use on a website. So I would say in order to improve the quality and the user experience of your website and to kind of promote your brand and who you are and to deliver an emotion, I think it's very important to have video content on your website. But if you, there are ways to shrink the, the file. And I am not like, I got teams that do this, but I don't do it myself. But you can basically minimize the size of the file so that it loads quicker. There's a lot of little techniques that you can do. So I don't think that there, if it's done well, if you got a great video and you want to use in your website, it's not going to damage the speed. As long as the video file is being optimized and in a way in which it loads quicker. And there's a whole bunch of little things that you can do, tweaks you can do. So I don't think that's really necessarily a problem.

You should not, not use video for speed concerns.

Okay, so video compression. And like the strategy.

Compression's the word. Yeah, compression is the word. So compress. If you've compressed your video content well enough, you're still going to get great speeds.

Beautiful. That's very helpful.

Okay, so. So here's a couple strategies.

Okay?

One is the speed. Okay. Two, you have to have a blog. You gotta have a blog. Blogging. Nobody reads your blog. I'll be honest with you. Nobody reads dental blogs unless they're super bored and they got nothing else to do. But nobody reads a blog, but Google reads it and they use it as a resource in the AI overviews. So you have to have a blog and you need to be publishing content to the blog. It cannot be copied content. It has to be authoritative and it has to be custom. Okay? And in the blog, you always want to add an FAQ section to the bottom of your blog. So let's say you read an article about minimally invasive techniques in dentistry or something like that, right? At the bottom of the article, you want to have five, three to five questions. And the questions that you create there now need to be voice search questions. You need to ask yourself, what would a patient ask? Not typing, but what would the voice query be if they were looking for an answer that this blog post answers? Okay. So if it. And, and you can use AI to help you do this. Right? To help you write the questions even. Right. But basically what you're doing is you're trying to optimize. You're number one, you're writing a blog post, okay. You're publishing it to your website, which is just awesome for SEO, right? But if you add the FAQs, it's easy for you to put a long tail question in a question that somebody might be searching using a voice search. And then you can answer that question. Simple technique, but it's an, it's an optimization technique that the, that Google Gemini will use as a reference in their AI overview. So your blog posts may get sucked into the AI overview and be a reference link. That makes sense.

Yeah, that makes complete sense. And I don't want to get completely on a side tangent here, but it's because it's part of a larger question that I did want to ask you. But you know, Google has always been Somewhat protective over the different combination of elements that they want to see in order to rank someone higher in the older traditional search process. Right. And I'm just, I'm curious, with these large language models starting to take over that market share of search, what type of data points are being shared more freely or maybe less in a more, more restrictive way so that people like yourself and others out there can continue to refine their strategy around ranking in these different, you know, platform, on these different platforms, at least in a comparative way to the traditional search process. When we had Google Play, playing, holding all the cards, right.

I went on a river trip last week, which is why I've got this super golden tan right here.

Heck yeah.

But I picked up a cold and I'm just getting over it, so excuse me. So Google protects their algorithm extremely well and they're changing it all the time. In, in typical SEO, the industry, this is the game marketing company, tries to figure out the algorithm so they can game the system. They figure it out through all sorts of testing and whatnot. And once they figure it out, Google realizes they've been figured out and they change process.

Never happening.

Yeah. And it never ends. So if you, if you try.

The, the safe play. Okay. And this is not going to be the answer you want because I don't think, I mean, there are some little strategies that you could do that are kind of tricky and you might be able to, you know, game the system a little bit, but inevitably the long term value or your long term benefit of your SEO, if you stick to a few rules, you're, you're going to win. Okay. It doesn't happen immediately, but it happens over time. Okay. So a couple of the things that, that can answer your question are you. One, you have to have a blog. Okay. You have to be. Oh, look at that. I got a thumbs up.

Did you do the balloons too? Sometimes when I do this, it'll do balloons.

That's funny, that's the first time I've ever seen that, so I don't even know. It just, it's, it has its own background AI. It just loved what you just said right there.

Yeah. All right, so cool. We got a thumbs up. I probably won't do it again. So you have to have a blog. Okay, so. Well, let me back up speed. I just gave you that. One, that's a, that's a, that's inevitable. You have to focus on that. Two, you need to have a blog and you need to be writing as much content as you possibly can. I would say A minimum of two to four articles a month. Nobody has time to do that, so you might have to hire somebody. Okay? But two to four articles a month seems to me, I've been doing this for 15 years. Seems to me to be a good cadence for most practices. Okay? Those have to be customized. They have to be linked properly. I have articles on my website all about how to link, okay? And linking is a strategy in and of itself. So there's links inside the article and then you should have the FAQs. Okay? If you publish two to four blog articles a month and you do that for a year or two, you're going to be outranking almost everybody around you. Okay? That. And that's a. This is not something that games the system. This is something that Google wants. They ask for it, they look for it. It's never changed. As long as you're publishing more content, you're going to. You're going to be doing well. Okay? So speed and blogging. The other thing I'll mention is that you need to figure out a way to get links, inbound links into your website. So one of the. One of the primary ways that Google will value a particular website over another website isn't just by the content on the site. It's. It's looking at how many other companies are referencing that company. And those companies need to not be like spam sites. So here's an example. Let's say that you're an endodontist, okay? And you have 20 or 30 dental practices that refer patients to you. If you had an article on all of different articles, not the same article, but different articles on all of those GP sites, talking about.

The relationship that you have with that company and a link that comes back to your site. So you write a blog article, you send it to your referring dentist to publish on their website, and there's a link in there to your website that's golden. That's like one of the best links you can get, okay? It's industry specific, it's local, it's real. Google recognizes it's coming from a site that's valuable. So. And this is a tough thing to do. Inbound linking. Creating inbound links, meaning a link coming into you, into your site, is one of the toughest things to do in SEO.

And it's going to always be valuable in geo as well. Okay? So you got to figure out a way to do that. And there are lots of strategies on how to do it, but the best way to do it is to find local businesses and Companies that you have a relationship with, obviously other dental practices or referring practices are great. Your state association is a great link to get from the ada. Anything dental specific to get a link from is super, super valuable. This is a. One of the reasons why most dental practices get links from directories like health grades, WebMD, those kind of things is because those are valuable sites and they're. They're not spammy. Right. They're not a junk site, just, you know, created by somebody somewhere to try and generate a link. These are, these are valuable websites and they're specific to the industry. Healthcare. Right. At least, or dentistry, potentially.

So links from those types of sources are extremely valuable. If you have more inbound links from reliable sources, you're going to outperform almost everybody. So there's three things. Speed blogging and inbound links. Those will never go away. At least they're not looking into the future, even with this AI change to search.

They're.

These are strategies that Google's always going to be referencing and it'll be a big part of their algorithm. So no sneaky silver bullet there, but like three strategies that you should definitely be doing if you want to outrank people.

Backlinking. Right. As you were referencing the inbound links kind of getting on other people's sites that to your point, I think, you know, it takes a lot of time, it's a lot of manual effort to get connected with those companies, prepare the articles in a way that is conducive to their user base in line with their branding. I'll kind of get a link back to you, but, you know, I've seen the authoritative score of websites quadruple very quickly by having a heightened focus on that backlink campaign.

Yeah. You're talking about a domain authority, right?

Domain authority. Yep.

Yeah, yeah. It's the authority that Google. It's a scoring system that Google gives your website and they give you some authority score. If your authority score is higher or lower, it plays a huge part in whether they would end up using you in the AI overview. Reference links.

Totally. And then are there any strategies with. You know, because we're talking about creating a lot of content and maybe even with the backlink process itself. But are there ways that we can use AI to, you know, create, you know, massive amounts of articles kind of on the front end and then load them into sort of a drip system like Captivate or whatever, so that we can kind of do a lot of this work in chunks, but also not be viewed by the search engine sort of bots. Or crawlers as a AI generated content so that we still get, you know, a fairly good score or outcome from that exercise.

Yeah. And so, you know, this is the. This is kind of the new frontier of how to create copywriting, how to create good SEO or GEO copywriting, which is how much AI can you use to still get some kind of, like, value on the back end in terms of your domain authority and so forth. Now, Google does look at AI content and it has a system that can spot it, okay? And I would imagine that they can spot it better than you think. Nobody really knows. But they do take that into consideration. Now, they've come out with some articles.

Like quite a few articles actually, the last couple years, talking about this, Right? Because what's happening is people are just spinning off hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of articles that are created by AI and publishing them. But the content isn't super valuable, Right? So it's just AI fodder, you know, it's just like dental fodder. And the question has to be, if you create more content, can you still create quality in that content? Can you still keep some quality to it? So some ideas on this one is you should definitely be using some type of an.

AI copywriting tool. So Anthropic's got a product called Claude C L A U D E. And it's kind of being.

Kind of tagged as a great.

Conversational AI. It writes really well. It's. It's got kind of a. An influence. They've tweaked their algorithm, so it writes really, really well.

So you should use something like that. But what you don't want to do is you don't want to just say, hey, Claude, write me an article about dental implants and the benefits. It'll spit out an article for you and it'll sound great. And then just take that and copy and paste it to your website. You don't want to do that. What you want to do is you want to. You want to give it as much information as you can in the beginning in order to formulate the article. And some of the ideas would be to do things like this. You could do an interview with your dentist, okay, you could interview the dentist and record the conversation in Google Gemini in, like, Google Meet. If you use Google Meet or Zoom or anywhere. And get the transcript, okay, you take that transcript and maybe you ask the doctor five or six questions about. And maybe this is about dental implants, let's say, okay, you ask the question. You know, why do you. Why did you decide to Start offering dental implants. Are there any dental implants you don't. You like to refer out? Do you just restore implants or blah, blah, blah, Whatever. My questions might be, tell me a story about a patient without revealing the patient's name. That was a success story, whatever, okay? So you get some, you get some actual words, right? From a human being. You take the transcript of that, then you dump that in to say Claude, and you say, I just did an interview with Dr. So. And so from this practice, I want you to use this and I want you to write me an article about dental implants. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And what, what Claude will do is then suck in quotes from the interview that you did with your doctor. And this makes it really.

Authoritative, transparent, and valuable because it's not something in AI. You've done a step, right? You did the step of the interview. You got some real words, some actual conversation. You get some real information, not just fodder. And then you can get Claude to write you an article. That's sick. It would be great, right? Then after that, you have to link it properly, you got to add your FAQs, and then you publish it. So you can use AI to help speed up one of the steps, okay? And if you're talking about a dental practice who's writing content themselves, they haven't hired a dental marketing company, right? They're just, they've got a dental assistant that likes to write or whatever, or they got somebody on their team that likes to write and is willing to do this. The hardest part of writing a blog article is just like getting, getting started. Like, what's the name of the article? Where do I like? Getting that stuff onto the page initially requires creativity. It requires focused time. And focused time is not like something that anybody's got in a dental practice because there's like million things going on off at once. So if you just did a, if you just put the model, like, hey, I'm going to interview my doctor once a week for five minutes. I'm going to ask him these 10 questions about this idea and this, these 10 questions, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then I'm going to drop that into Claude and then I'm going to link it and then I'm going to publish it. You got a great system, right?

I'm going to, for a moment. So practice cfo. You know, we meet with our clients virtually and we have phone calls. And so everything's already captured digitally. And so we've tried to find that system and solution that takes that high value content that we're delivering to our partners and then package it in a way in the same, in a similar manner that you're referencing here, which is to create that sort of section content to be able to release to the site. And I think from the dental practice, you know, practice owner's perspective, you know, what areas of their day that they're already doing normally, are they capturing similar digital content that could be used in that manner without having to sit down on a separate occasion and create that content, you know, outside of their normal workflow? And I don't know what the HIPAA rules are in terms of, because now you have all these AI tools that are required, recording the interaction with the patient. Right. And there's valuable content talking about the treatment, the implants, what they have to look forward to in terms of pain management, whatever, that could then be funneled into content creation. I don't necessarily know if there's HIPAA rules against that, but that to me would be an interesting play for them to turn an AI tool that they're likely going to use either today or in the future as it evolves, and then move that into future content generation as one less step in that puzzle.

Yeah, no, I think your, your questions are valid. It's putting something in. Putting a process in place is always. And keeping it in place and staying consistent is one of the toughest things for dental practice. Any kind of marketing tactic is people get excited about it. It's something they want to do and they'll get it done for a month and then something changes. Somebody leaves the office, you know, the person you trained is, takes another job somewhere or whatever it might be, and all of a sudden the process is messed up.

So 100%. Couldn't agree with that comment more.

Yeah, it's tough. So, I mean, not to promote myself and my company too much, but this is why you hire a dental marketing company. This is not what they're built for. You're, you're probably going to be able to get better content at a cheaper cost. Even though you might only be paying your dental assistant 20 bucks an hour, the amount of time that that dental assistant spends to write an article is probably going to cost you more in labor costs than it would be to just hire somebody to do it for you.

Oh, 100%. But to your point earlier, the biggest challenge for my clients at least has always been getting professionals like yourself the content they need to be able to write great articles or whatever. Now I know that you can write articles without influence from the practice owners, but kind of extrapolating that into a system where the amount of content that they're pushing out and the quality of that content allows them to be on these geo rankings, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And then for video, you know, historically, correct me if I'm wrong because I'm definitely not a marketing person, but you know, when I would publish a video to my own website for that, for that, for that matter, you know, we always would have to include the summary or the transcription to that video in order for the Google crawlers to be able to read and use that information to help us rank. But I'm curious, with the AI tools, is that still necessary and, or, and maybe why a lot of people are saying video is, you know, a big part of that next evolution? Because you don't have to transcribe, you don't have to summarize it. The AI can already hear, digest or ingest and then know everything content wise that that video was trying to accomplish and rank you accordingly.

So, so if you were to do this, say this video that we're doing right now, this, this webinar, if you published this one of two ways. You just take the recording and you publish the recording, you drop it as a blog post and you don't have a transcript or anything there. Okay? That versus you drop the video in and the transcript below. Okay, that's, that's what you're describing. Is it okay to just put the video up without a transcript? Does Google still prioritize copy over video or not? I don't know the answer to that question yet. I think that, I think that Google. Well, I, I don't, I am not confident at this point that Google is ignoring copy and prioritizing the words in a video. Okay, so, and it also depends on how you publish the video. So for example, if you, if you take this video and you publish it to your YouTube channel and then you share the link or the embed code from the YouTube channel in your blog post, it's now referencing your YouTube channel. And it depends on what your YouTube, how your YouTube channel is, then the value of your YouTube YouTube channel and the other content that you might have on your YouTube channel that would help influence the algorithm, right? So the way that we're doing it is we always, if we do a video, we always include the copy. Right? Now we don't, we're not pulling copy off and just publishing videos just to make sure that we're covering our bases. So, but that's a really good question.

And I guess we'll see. As, as we transition over these next few years. It may be that you don't need to, but you're. That's a good point. Though it's defensive at a minimum to do so.

Still, I did mention we've gone for about 45 minutes here, I think, or maybe a little longer. But I did want to mention the other, the other subject and we don't need to take much time on it, but at the beginning I was talking about SEO and then AI, automation in patient communication. Can I just touch on that for a second?

Yeah, please do. Yeah, absolutely.

Because this is like super, super cutting edge and trending. So I'll give you a little story about how we got into AI back in 2019ish, we were trying to figure. So we're hired to do SEO and website development, social media and ads and all this kind of stuff, right? So we're driving all this traffic, eyeballs, basically to a website. People go to the website and they bounce off, okay? They don't make a call, they don't schedule. So how we're thinking, how can we improve the conversion of all this traffic that's going to this website into more scheduled appointments? I mean, that's what we're hired for, right? We can't just tell the doctor, hey, you got a lot of traffic. The, the doctor doesn't care. He wants to see butts and chairs in revenue, right? So we gotta get these into scheduled appointments. And there's two main issues. One is patients that land on the website and don't interact in any way. They don't make a phone call, they don't schedule, they don't fill out the contact form, nothing. So why are they landing? Why are they bouncing off? And the other issue is phone calls. They go to the website, they get the phone number, they call it 5:02pm and it goes to voicemail because they've all left the office, okay? And those calls come in all the time. They'll even call during work hours and they're slammed and they can't pick up the call and it rolls over to voicemail and voicemail. Right now, like 80% of people do not leave voicemail messages, okay? And statistically it's about a third somewhere around there of all calls that come in dental practice are missed. Now that is unacceptable. It's the industry standard, but it's absolutely unacceptable for a practice that is concerned about growing. You can't miss a third of your phone calls. If it's a new patient, they sure as hell aren't going to call back now. If it is, it is an active patient, they may call back several times because they have a relationship with you. But if you're trying to get new patients, you. You got to pick up the phone, right? So, so this is what happened. We thought, okay, let's solve one of the problems. Let's put web chat on the website. We knew that about two thirds of people preferred web chat over making phone calls. And so we thought, oh, let's add web chat. So we built a web chat product. It was a simple little box that would pop up, you could chat a question, it would ping the office, and somebody at the office would respond, okay, sweet. We thought we could increase conversions by like maybe 1 to 2%, which would be awesome. You drive a 500, 500 people to the site and you get 1% conversion. That's five more scheduled appointments, right? Awesome.

We did it.

We put it on a whole bunch of websites. Every single practice called us back and said, take this damn thing off our website. We can't handle all the chats. So we're like, oh, we didn't. We didn't see that problem coming. Maybe it's because we're stupid, but dental practices do not have the time to answer chat. It's too intrusive. If they're talking to a patient, a chat comes through, they're not going to stop talking to the patient and answer the chat. But chat requires immediate on demand responses. Like it. Like, if you offer it, you have to deliver that. So the only other option after that was, well, do we. Do we kill the project or do we create our own live chat management thing where we hire a bunch of people that are sitting in their basement answering chats all day long on behalf of practices? And we thought that was a stupid idea, so we didn't do it. So we dumped the project. So In November of 2022, when ChatGPT came out, I was like, oh, my gosh. Holy cow. If we could train ChatGPT to be a front office person and give it all the information about the practice so that it speaks in the voice of the practice, it could handle the entire conversation. It would not require anybody from the team to respond ever. It just handles the conversation. So we built it and it performed flawlessly. And so then what we did is we connected to the patient management system, so now it can schedule. Okay. So we launched this web chat product called Annie, and it was awesome. So we solved that problem. And we get much higher conversions with, with dental Practices that have a. An AI chat. And this is not the ch. The AI that people, you know, sometimes people say, hey, I've got an AI chat. And you look at it and it says, how can I help you today? Choose A, B, C or D. That's.

Not what I'm talking about.

Yeah, it's not a database chat. It's not a tree, a chat, like a triage. Right. It's not. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about talking, dynamic conversation, like a natural conversation. Okay, so, so we launched, it was awesome. And then we thought, okay, if we could just put a voice on this, we could tie it to the phone system and run all calls that get missed, whether it's during work hours or after hours, to an agent who picks up and has a conversation, schedules appointments and da, da, da, da, da. So that's what we launched. And the results are freaking unbelievable. Like, I, like, I, I predict voicemail will be gone in two years. Like nobody's going to use it anymore. There's no reason to send anybody to voicemail when you can have an AI agent pick up and handle the conversation. So, And I believe you don't want it.

You want action to be. I said, more importantly, the practices shouldn't want voicemail. They should want something that's creating action and change right there on the spot.

Absolutely. So that's what this, any AI product is. It's, it's basically an AI agent. We built it on chat, GPT and it does web chat and phone. Okay. But the actionable items that it can do are expanding as we're developing the product. So it can, it can forward calls. So if it's on a call with somebody and they're like, I need to talk to the doctor, and the doctor's willing to let the AI agent have its phone, it'll transfer the call to the doctor's phone. Right. If the agent, if you want the agent to reschedule appointments or cancel appointments, it can do that. It can schedule appointments, it can drop links in chat, it can drop PDFs, it can drop patient forms, we can put links into billing. You know, so if somebody's chatting and they want to pay their bill, we can drop a link in so they can pay their bill. So it's like the opportunity of these AI agents to then start taking on routine tasks that just a human being doesn't have to do. Like an AI agent can do it and it can do it efficiently. It can do it with flawlessly and not make mistakes. It's always polite, doesn't ask for a raise. It's never going to quit. Right. You know, it's like a huge support system of the front office. Now. The front office can run more seamlessly, handing off tasks that are routine, automated tasks. Right. So it's just, I just, it's just, it's an unbelievable, like, we're super, super excited for it. Like, when anybody calls us and they're like, I want to get your social media product, or I want you to build me a website or do ads for me, I'm just like, okay, great, we'll do it, but we need to add Annie because you're going to call me or I'm going to call you in a month, and you want to know how many patients you got in your marketing campaign. You know, from whatever we're doing. And if Annie's on there, we're going to have more than we. If we didn't, period. So it just incredibly improves the conversion rate of all marketing campaigns. So my recommendation is for anybody that's listening, if you haven't looked at any of the AI phone assistants, or they call them AI receptionists or whatever, you need to look at them. There's a, it's a, it's a, it's a rapidly developing industry. There's a lot of players in there. Obviously, I like Annie because it's dental specific and, you know, I have a vested interest, but it's something that you're. You're going to find will work really, really well in your practice and you'll just still grow. Just flat out grow.

I've got a couple of questions for you, if you don't mind, on Annie.

Yeah, go ahead.

So, you know, last probably three or four, maybe five years online scheduling has gotten better and better. You know, the old, the more. The old format, right, where the human being has to click through, take action, pick the date, the time, hit submit, and then the forms and the automated messaging about, save the dates and whatever, that all happens automatically behind the scenes. You could set up an automated text with missed phone calls, and the person can get a link to schedule. So those things have kind of been around, but you're taking it to a point where now you humans can actually interact and hopefully get to that resolution, maybe faster. But I guess what I'm curious of is when I've looked at an online scheduling tool, it's only ever as successful as the amount of seats that that office is willing to create, whether they have to be creative to do it or they have to shuffle things around within their schedule to make it to accommodate the people that want to take action. So I'm curious with Annie, know what type of programming and what type of logic is that tool using to say, hey, this patient that's calling today that wants to come in 9am Tomorrow is an ideal spot that the office is willing and able to facilitate?

Yeah. So what happens is you. You have this Annie software, communicate seamlessly with the practice management system. And we've got. This is just. What's. What I called an API. It's called an API integration. Just a. Just a software tool that lets two software speak to each other. So you've got your patient manager system, let's say you got Dentrix, Right. And then you've got Annie. And Annie needs to be able to see the open slots in the patient management system and then be able to provide those to the patient based on the type of patient and the type of appointment. So what happens is when you set Annie up, we have the doctor or office manager who we're working with, pull up their schedule. We identify all the operatories, all the slots where certain types of appointments should be scheduled. So emergency appointments should be scheduled in this operatory on these dates at this time. And we block those, we indicate those sections. Okay. We're kind of like following the way that they set their schedule up.

Okay.

You want an adult profi. A child profi. How long should those appointments be, what operatories are, what time's available, so on and so forth. So what happens is when the AI agent has the conversation, and it'll just know if it's an emergency appointment, the patient's like, I have swelling in my mouth or I just broke my tooth, or I have an emergency, It'll know it's an emergency appointment, and it'll offer the emergency slots to the patient. Okay. And we'll set parameters on how much time, et cetera. Okay. So we've set ours up where it's kind of unlimited. You can set up as many different types of appointments as you want. You can work with as many doctors as you want, as many operatories. There's no limit on that. We just build it custom to the way that the practice typically schedules. And the agent will, after the conversation's going, or in the middle of the conversation, the patient says, I want to schedule an appointment. It just grabs the next three openings and says, well, I have an appointment on Thursday at 2:1, at Friday at 9am and then we have open hours on Saturday, we have an appointment available at 10. Will any of those work? If they say no, it just picks the next three.

Right?

So. Or the patient can say, no, you know what? I need to get something on next the following Tuesday. And it'll just look at Tuesday. It just uses the conversation to find it. But if. But if it hasn't been prompted by the patient saying, I need to come in on this day at this time, or I need to come in tomorrow, this is an emergency, it just provides the next three open slots based on the type of appointment that the patient wants to make.

Got it. So that's kind of like following a block scheduling setup when the office uses that. And then I'm assuming that you could also just say, hey, Operatory 3 all day long is wide open. And they'll just look if there's 60 consecutive minutes or not to allow that.

Okay, Exactly.

Cool. The other.

The other one last thing that we just launched is the agent can now do outbound dialing. So rather than just taking inbound calls, we have the agent. And this is specifically for scheduling hygiene. So this is. This is just an idea of, like, where this stuff is going. Okay. So nobody in a dental practice wants to be the person that's asked to call all the unscheduled hygiene reports patients and try and schedule them. It's like. It's a pain in the ass. Nobody wants to do it. Okay, so what you can do is, because we got this connection between Annie and the patient management system, we can create a protocol that says, look at all the active patients in the database. Tell me. Or create a list of patients who do not have a future hygiene appointment and haven't been in. In, say, six months. Or you can set whatever parameter you want. Okay? It'll create a bucket of those patients, and then you can create a protocol. Say, I want you to call these patients once a week, one time only, three times, whatever you want it to be, or send a text or whatever, you can create a parameter, and it just calls and schedules hygiene appointments. And as I've talked to dental consultants in the industry to try and get some statistics on conversion rate on outbound dialing for hygiene, it's. It's usually between 5 to 10%, meaning if you call a hundred patients, you're getting about five to 10 appointments scheduled. And our concern was that the AI agent wouldn't be able to do as well. And it's right in the same. It's between 5 and 10%. So you can offload all of your outbound dialing just for. For hygiene to an AI agent, you can just take it right off your team's plate and your front desk will be like, thank you for doing that because I don't want to make those phone calls. So. And more stuff's being developed. I mean we're, we're working on right now, it's not yet here yet, but we're working on calling unscheduled or calling patients have an accepted treatment. So the AI agent can look at the treatment plan, can get the information, make a follow up call and say hey, we saw you for a crown last year. We weren't able to get you scheduled, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah blah blah. So these are tools. It's like, it's like a phone, you know, it's like a, it's like the new phone. You're going to have to use this stuff because it's going to make you so proficient that if you're resistant to leveraging AI, you're going to be at a disadvantage in the industry. Your costs are going to be higher, you're not going to be able to keep up.

More tools in the arsenal, the better.

Yep.

Well, Adrian, is, are there any other things that, or any last comments or thoughts that you wanted to share with the listeners and if not, that's okay, but I'd love for you to drop you know where people can find you, learn more about you guys and just some of your best places of contact.

Well, you can just go to, if you want to just go to our website, mysocialpractice.com we've got tons of information on there. I would recommend that you go to our blog and look at all the AI articles. I'll send you a set of links to some resources, the ebook I mentioned, some, some videos of like AI in action, some stuff like that, some information on geo. So if you want to put those in the links as resources for people who are interested in learning more, I'll, I'll send those over to you. But other than that you can reach out, you can shoot me an email if you want. My email is Adrian a D R I A n@mysocialpractice.com I'm happy to jump on a call with anybody who has more questions. Questions.

So thanks again Adrian. Great to have you on the show.

Yeah, it was a pleasure.

Till next time.