Episode 207 – Authentic Marketing: Connect with Patients & Build Trust

“The why is important because marketing is about connection and trust.” -Sara Hansen

If the patient doesn’t feel like you’re a safe place, they won’t schedule with you. If they don’t trust you, they won’t accept your treatment plan. This is why authentic marketing in dentistry is so important: patients need to know who you are and why you can help them.

Your patients are looking for a champion to help them solve their problems. Sadly, many dentists forget to focus on the why. Of course, the surface level maybe you’re a dentist and can help them but within that, there’s much more.

We’ve worked with so many doctors with amazing stories: they had a bad experience in childhood and want to help others, they had an amazing experience and want to give that to others. The story itself isn’t what makes their marketing so powerful. What attracts patients to them is their passion. That passion drives a connection, builds the all-important trust, that brings patients into your office.

We talk a lot about how marketing is about the patient, not you. So why does it matter that you have a story to tell? It goes back to the patient. Everyone – every single one of your patients – has a problem and they are looking for a champion to help them solve their problem and that’s where authentic marketing comes in…you have a story to tell, you are that champion they’re looking for. Using Authentic Marketing throughout your entire business and all your marketing campaigns builds that trust potential patients need.

We are so excited to have Sara Hansen – An authentic Marketing expert – join us today to help shed light onto this topic. Let us make your lives a little easier with this glimpse into Authentic Marketing and actions you can put into play right away, including:

• How to figure out what you’re a champion for
• Understanding the difference between marketing tactics and strategy
• Using ROI to know if campaigns are successful

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Regan
Welcome to the Everyday Practices Podcast. I’m Regan Robertson, and my co-host, Dr. Chad Johnson and I are on a mission to share the stories of everyday dentists who generate extraordinary results using practical proven methods you can take right into your own dental practice. If you’re ready to elevate patient care and produce results that are anything but ordinary, buckle up and listen in.

Welcome to Everyday Practices. I am your host, Regan Robertson here faithfully with you as always, my co-host, Dr. Chad Johnson, wouldn’t be here with us but as you’re going to hear it with some behind-the-scenes footage, he is pulling wisdom teeth right now, Thanks to the marketing efforts of our guest and speaker today, Sarah Hansen, who is a marketing consultant with PDA. Welcome to the show, Sarah.

Sara Hansen
Thank you, Regan. You know, I love being here.

Regan
I love it when you are here. This is your second time being on Everyday Practices, right?

Sara Hansen
My third time

Regan
Your third time? Oh my gosh. Well, okay, so that’s an indicator of how much I enjoy talking with you and talking with you.

Sara Hansen
I know maybe I should be like the substitute co-host or something when someone’s out of town.  How about that?

Regan
ooh the seed has been planted Sarah, I will remember this. Okay, it’s been such a joy to have you on because one, we’re both marketing geeks. So it’s really fun to geek out and anybody who’s listening, you know, dentist or not, you can apply the marketing expertise that Sara brings into PDA and brings out to all of our doctors, we recently just wrapped up with a Productivity Workshop down in Texas and authentic marketing is the topic of one of the days, Sara and I are both presenters during that day and that’s exactly why I invited her to be on the podcast this week with us is to share and give you a kind of a preview of what we end up talking about things that you can put into action right away, you can look in your own marketing collateral and kind of ask yourself, am I showing up authentically and why does that matter? And so that’s what we’re going to talk about today and I think you’re going to get a twofer in this we’re going to break this into two episodes because there’s so much goodness to share. Right, Sarah?

Sara Hansen
There is so much goodness. So you’re in for a treat.

Regan
So, so one of the things that you and I talk about a lot is there’s a difference between marketing tactics. So what pieces do you engage in to get your message out and then there’s a huge difference between marketing tactics and marketing strategy and Sarah, you and I have talked about listeners really focusing on the how, on how to deliver that message and we forget to focus on the why. Sarah, why is they important when it comes to marketing yourself?

Sara Hansen
Yeah, the why is important because marketing is about connection and if there’s no connection, if a patient can’t trust you or doesn’t feel like you’re a safe place to go, they’re not going to schedule an appointment, they’re not going to move forward with treatment. So really it comes down to you know, they need to know who you are and why you can help them

Regan
Let’s don’t dive into the “Who you are” element. I really like that piece because on the surface this level is I’m a dentist.

Sara Hansen
Yes, yes,

Regan
I’m a dentist and a business owner. So where do we go from there? What else matters in that who?

Sara Hansen
Well, within the who there’s usually a reason why they have chosen to be in dentistry. Regan, we’ve worked with many doctors that have amazing stories of their own childhood trauma or, you know, things that have come from wanting to then give back to their patients and those stories are critical to really telling the story about how they can help patients. So, you know, we’re all in dentistry to help people really, you know, that’s why we’re here we like it, we’ve served those we help give them better smiles and better lives but there really is a deeper component and this is where it gets a little bit fun for you and I to discover what that is. So why did you decide to do this and how do you want patients to feel you know when they come to see you and why is that important to you?

Regan
Oh, my goodness, that’s great, that is a great exercise. You’ve talked about being a champion.

Sara Hansen
Yeah.

Regan
A champion for something within and how to dig. How do you tell, how do you help people kind of figure out what they’re a champion for and, and I think that that really helps in that maybe that secondary question of who I am, I’m a dentist, but what else am I, naybe I didn’t have a childhood trauma? So what am I a champion for? How do you help people discover that?

Sara Hansen
Yeah, so really, the first step is to figure out, what are you passionate about? When do you show up to work? and you look at your schedule every day? What is it that brings you joy? What do you love to do? What are you telling your team? “Hey, today, we have this on the schedule, and I’m really excited about it.” You know, every doctor is different, and everything that they do is different. So really, it’s figuring out what you’re passionate about and what’s interesting is we’ve interviewed so many people, not you but here at Productive Dentist Academy, there’s been so many great interviews, and even you know, Dr. Levey, she talked about her passion was baby for nectar knees and that came from her story and, you know, really, there are so many things that you can be passionate about within the realm, it just doesn’t have to be in plants or you know, endo or whatever that is, there really is so much more to that and that’s where it gets fun.

Regan
There is a spark in the eyes and the lights of the, of people when you hear you know that they’re doing a service that they really love doing. So for listeners who didn’t catch Chad as he’s doing wisdom teeth right now, his eyes were like, sparkling, and he’s like, “I get to go do wisdom teeth.” He likes doing it and so it really does, does need to be expressed that there are obviously different services that we like doing more than others, and champion that is championing that is important. A lot of times, though, we say it’s not about you, it’s about the patient, and it’s about the patient experience. So Sarah, why does it matter? Why does it matter that I have a story to tell like like Bridget Lubich, for example, okay, she likes frenectomy, how does that matter to me as a patient? How is that used to kind of attract me into the practice?

Sara Hansen
Well, I’m glad that you brought her up, because she is a great example of her a mother, not even a dentist, as a mother, she had a need, and there was really no one at that time that she heard about to help her with this need until, you know, she finally found it. So really, each of us has something that we need support with, we need help with, you know, and that’s where you’re looking for that expert, or you’re looking for that champion to help you with that and I think, you know, for the example of Chad, you know, he saw, it was twofold with him with the wisdom teeth. So I’ll give you a little background about how this all came to be with his campaign. It’s really fun. So one is he loves to do wisdom teeth because he thinks it’s fun, it’s, you know, breaks up his day and, but then he also found that there was a need. So how it gets fun, as he said, to me one day is like, “Hey, Sarah, I’ve been hearing, you know, throughout my community, and through the grapevine that there’s a lot of people that are waiting weeks to get into dentists, to get their teeth extracted, and you know, how painful that can be, and stuff like that. So what can we do to really spread the word that, hey, if you call us we can get you in within 24 hours, you know, even if it’s not the same day, the next day will help get you out of pain and stuff like that?” So we created an entire campaign for him. It was so fun, and now he’s doing wisdom teeth today. So it’s great because again, there’s a market or, you know, a group of patients that need they’re in pain, they need their teeth extracted, and they can’t wait two weeks to get in and so what’s great is we aligned with where the need in his community was, and something that he was passionate about doing and so then it just really brings the whole campaign together and then of course on our end we do create the tactics right, we create the campaign and how it’s going to look, but the why and how it started really came from Chad. He saw the need, and then we were able to align with that.

Regan
Oh my gosh, you know, you spoke earlier about building trust and how important it is to build trust and I know from a new patient’s perspective, obviously, that’s critical. I don’t want to entrust my health to someone that I don’t trust. So pairing that up with wisdom teeth, what was your angle and positioning on how, kow did you advertise or, you know, really let the community know that he was open and ready for business with wisdom teeth?

Sara Hansen
Yeah, so his was fun, we actually created kind of a cartoon-type campaign that we were able to blast on social media for him and his digital advertising but first, we started with the educational part. Why do we have wisdom teeth? You know, a lot of patients call and ask that, “Do I really need to get them taken out? Why are they important?” So we start with the educational component, once they have an understanding of why something’s important to do, then they’re like, “Oh, well, then I should get that taken out.” Right and so then we were able to pair that in with Dr. Chad, why come to him? Well, because he’s here to get you in and out of pain as soon as possible. You know, he’s also here, because he understands what it’s like, you know, to go through these types of experiences. So it’s fun to build campaigns around that trust because really, that’s what it is, you know, we’re all looking to be supported somehow with a need within oral health and that’s where we try to identify what that need is for those patients and we work a campaign around that need.

Regan
I wonder if Chad’s had his wisdom teeth out?

Sara Hansen
I think he has

Regan
We have to ask him that because he was sharing some details with that. I think I know that a big portion of that building trust is connecting with people and, and getting on that empathetic level and I think that’s what I saw just in the conversation quickly with Chad for two seconds. Gonna go to wisdom teeth, really excited about it. Sorry, we can’t do an interview today because marketing working Yeah. Tony, how are you tracking that type of information? So I mean, he said definitively, like, thanks to PDAs marketing, I know I’m getting with some teeth, patients. So how long did it take to set that up, execute it? and are you tracking those results so that you know for sure it’s from your efforts?

Sara Hansen
Yes, yes, absolutely. We track everything. So with all the different campaigns out there, it becomes very overwhelming for doctors. There are so many choices and so usually, people do one of two things. One is they throw a bunch of money at a campaign and hope it works, or two, they throw up their hands and say marketing just doesn’t work. I’m done with it. Right. So this is where I come in. What we like to do at Productive Dentist Academy is, for example, when Chad came to us and said, “Hey, I really would like to have more wisdom teeth come into my practice, I see that there’s a need in the community, how can we best market that?” Then what we do is we then kind of take a look at who’s the demographics that we’re looking at how do we best, you know, align with this but what we always do is I never, I will never, ever just throw money at a campaign and hope it works. That’s not good marketing, we need to know that there’s an opportunity within the market first and if there is, which there was for Chad, then we align with that but what’s really great is that I meet with Chad a lot, I work with his admin team and we actually track the production that comes into the practice through referral sources, we track the phone calls that are coming in, I want to know the difference between this new patient and new patients. A lot of times I get all the data that comes from those phone calls because I want to hear the keywords that they’re saying. The keywords are important to those phone calls because that’s the messaging that those patients are hearing and if that’s aligning with what Dr. Chad wants to attract, then hey, I know we are golden, right? If for some reason are calling in, they’re asking a bunch of questions about the campaign, well, so when he’s talking about this, what does that mean? I know we’re misaligned somewhere. So we do that with all of our campaigns because again, we want to make sure that that branding is matching with the patients that he wants to attract we’re attracting the right patients for him. It’s not about volume all the time, it’s about how do we attract the right patients for you and then Chad and I meet, and we go over the analytics, that’s my job and we go over the campaign results. We go over the production that’s coming and so it’s great because he knows a solid ROI is coming from each of these campaigns and we have the data to prove it. So no longer are we hoping and crossing our fingers that a campaign works. Now we know, “Hey, our marketing is successful.”

Regan
I am blown away by that. I didn’t know that you, well I learned something new in that. I don’t realize that you’re listening for keywords on the phone and then if something isn’t hitting quite right if I heard you correctly, you go in and revise the campaign. So yes. So it’s important to set it up how you think it’s going to go test it and refine it as necessary.

Sara Hansen
Yes, exactly. Exactly and that’s why, you know, we go back to what we were first talking about in the beginning, what is what are you wanting what’s important to you for your practice? You know, how can we spread your passion? What is it that you’re really looking to attract? You know, because then that allows me to really get in line with the team. It allows me to get unaligned with everything and then we create campaigns so that when a patient hears you or sees your brand when they actually call the practice, they hear that same messaging, and then when they come to the practice, they hear the same messaging, we want it to be congruent all the way through.

Regan
Wow, you have really illustrated I think, well, why the why is important. So knowing who you are. Knowing what brought you to dentistry is really important so that you can be a champion.

Regan
Thank you for listening to another episode of Everyday Practices podcast. Chad and I are here every week. Thanks to our community of listeners just like you and we’d love your help. It would mean the world if you can help spread the word by sharing this episode with a fellow dentist and leave us a review on iTunes or Spotify. Do you have an extraordinary story you’d like to share or feedback on how we can make this podcast even more awesome? Drop us an email at podcast at productivedentist.com and don’t forget to check out our other podcasts from Productive Dentist Academy at productivedentist.com/podcasts See you next week.