I interview Joseph Field, DDS, FAGD, FAAID, FICOI, DABOI/ID, who has three practices in Los Altos, CA. We discuss marketing high-end dentistry, a range of high-tech treatments, mastering teledentistry, building an unassailable practice culture, and more. This one’s dense with valuable stuff!
You can listen to the audio version here:
Hope you enjoy it, and if you do, subscribe to the podcast and you won’t miss an episode!
Bill Dorfman is perhaps the most recognized dentist in the world, with over 1 million Instagram followers, and long-running appearances on national TV shows. He is a celebrity dentist, co-founder of Discus Dental and creator of the LEAP Foundation. Hear how he’s leveraged PR and promotion to build a superstar practice, and how he created a unique path for himself in dentistry.
Listen to the audio of episodes here, or on your own podcast player. Just search Fred Joyal. And i you like these podcasts, subscribe!
https://the-remarkable-dentist-podcast-with-fred-joyal.simplecast.com/
You can watch the video version here on YouTube:
For many dental practices, their marketing strategy is HOPE.
Hope we can pump more money into the budget and get more patients.
Marketing and advertising have become significantly more complex in the past ten years, and is a faster moving target than ever. Hope is NOT an effective strategy.
If you’re like most dentists, you just need a consistent flow of new patients without all the headaches. To do that, you need to understand how the new game works, and how you can keep up with it.
As the co-founder of 1-800 DENTIST, I have spent over $500,000,000 in marketing. I know a thing or two about helping to create thriving dental practices and I’ve made it my mission to help a select few dentists get ahead of the curve.
My books, Everything is Marketing and Becoming Remarkable, are two of the most influential books in dentistry, and they have transformed many dental practices.
Things are changing too fast, and you need someone to guide you on how to spend your money, where to spend it and where else in your business you are LEAKING MONEY.
In January, I’m doing individual marketing consultations with a select group of dentists to help you FIND RESULTS IN YOUR BUSINESS to help you STOP BLEEDING MARKETING MONEY.
If you qualify, I’m putting together a select group of dental owners to participate in my Beyond Dentistry Mastermind (Virtual) for founders, owners and executives in the dental industry doing at least $1.5 million in business annually. The Mastermind has a few spots available
(You must be located in Southern California to participate in the Mastermind.)
If you are interested in the marketing consultation, email me and we’ll arrange a time. To learn more about the mastermind, you can watch this video or go to www.fredjoyal.com.
2020 was no picnic. So let’s get out of the business of hoping your marketing strategy works and let’s make 2021 your best year ever!
Email me directly if you have more questions. fredjoyal@gmail.com.
In the retail business, everyone pretty much agrees that Apple is king. And one of the first things you notice when you buy an Apple product is the beautiful, brilliantly designed packaging for every single product. In fact, I know some people who collect the boxes just because they are so impressive they can’t bring themselves to throw them out.
There are plenty of businesses owners and product manufacturers who would say, “That’s nice for Apple, but I can’t afford that.” And that makes perfect sense if you don’t want to be considered the best, and just want to be the cheapest or an average product.
What’s this got to do with dentistry? Everything. Your “packaging” is your entire office: your reception area, your scrubs, your operatories, your bathroom, your signage, your parking lot, your website and your social media pages. All of it tells patients how they should rank your value against other things they spend money on.
The fact is that Apple products, from a technical standpoint, are seldom the absolute best in the market. There are better phones, bluetooth headphones, tablets, laptops and computers out there. But there aren’t any that look better or come in a more appealing box. On top of that, Apple gets more money for their products, even though they are not the best. And they also never discount their products, when everyone else in the marketplace does, often on the first day of release. (And they’re also the second most valuable company in the world.)
Don’t go to the trouble to create a great clinical practice and then do an average job of packaging it.
Please don’t misconstrue this as telling you that you don’t have to be a good dentist clinically if you have a great-looking office. That’s hardly the point. What I’m saying is, don’t go to all the trouble to create a superior product, i.e., your clinical dentistry, and then do an average job of packaging it.
By all means, be a great practitioner, get loads of CE, and use all the latest technology that gives your patients the highest quality treatment possible. But don’t ignore the box it all comes in. Renovate your reception, get nice designer scrubs with your logo on them, and make the entire office pristine and well designed, from lighting to the wall colors. And make every aspect of your digital presence the highest quality.
And remember also that your team is your packaging: their smiles, their attitude, their helpfulness, caring and integrity, that’s all your packaging too. It all matters. It matters in case acceptance, loyalty, and getting your patients to refer you. And just like Apple, you won’t have to offer discounts to attract patients.
So pay attention to all of it, and maybe someday you’ll even have people lined up outside your office, just like an Apple store!
One of the things I try to emphasize in dental marketing is that a dental practice is too small a group of people to have even one person who’s not pulling in the same direction as the rest of the team.
The challenge starts with hiring, but it doesn’t end there. At the same time, if you hire wrong–either the person doesn’t fit the culture or doesn’t have a great attitude, then there isn’t any fixing that. Treatment plan: extraction.
But if there is a team member who isn’t participating fully and supporting the culture, then the need becomes how to grow the employee. This most often means teaching them the importance of the proper attitude, the need to effectively “sell” dentistry for the patient’s benefit, and the need to be positive and supportive of the team. And they also have to understand the importance of the practice culture and core values.
How does that happen? With good coaching it can definitely be achieved. I have also discovered that a significant number of the dentists who’ve read my books have started a study club with the team, where they all read the book a chapter at a time and then discuss it together, and apply the changes that they agree on, both to themselves and to the marketing of the practice.
This can be highly effective, but only if the team reads. Which a lot of people don’t anymore. They watch videos. So I decided to create the material so that practices can get everyone literally and figuratively on the same page. To that end, I just completed a video course entitled, “Creating the Remarkable Dental Practice.”
This course is an eight-week course, with four 20-minute videos in each weekly module, so that the team can watch them together and then talk about what they’ve learned and how they want to apply it to the practice. The course spans everything from the ideal practice mindset, to hiring and training, social media strategy and finally how to effectively advertise and promote your practice.
If you want to succeed in the years to come, you need a remarkable team creating a remarkable patient experience. My goal is to help you create that with as many tools as I can provide.
The course is $997, but to my faithful blog subscribers I’m offering a 20% discount. Just use the coupon code FREDBLOG when ordering. I think it will transform your practice, and if it doesn’t, it comes with a money-back guarantee. So jump on it, as the discount ends when the whim strikes me!
Here’s a sample video from the course. It’s on practice culture.
To purchase the course, click here!