On this episode of The Modern Practice Podcast, host Gary Tiratsuyan welcomes Jeff Gladnick, CEO of Great Dental Websites back to the show to continue the conversation around attracting and retaining patients, with your website. In case you missed episode 1, you can tune in here.
Jeff shares his expertise on:
- The foundation of a good marketing strategy
- How to leverage website data to make smart marketing decisions
- The tools you need to know and use to scale marketing for your practice
- New tactics every dental practice should at least try, to attract new patients
- The latest in AI
Connect with Jeff on LinkedIn >>
Learn more about Great Dental Websites >>
Transcript
Gary Tiratsuyan
Hello, everybody. And welcome back to the Modern Practice Podcast. I’m really excited for today’s episode as we welcome Jeff Gladnick, CEO of Great Dental Websites back to the show for part two of our miniseries, “Attracting and retaining patients with your website.” If you missed our first episode with Jeff, I encourage you all to check it out. During that conversation, he shared best practices for building and/or revamping your existing website, as well as a ton of great information on how to put that amazing site to work for you to generate new patients and retain your existing base. I’ll have a link to that episode in this description for you all to check out in case you missed it. All right, without further ado, Jeff, thanks for taking the time. Happy to have you back on the show.
Jeff Gladnick
Hey, Gary. Yeah, thanks for having me back. I had fun last time. So hopefully, we get to discuss something interesting and useful to your viewers. And thanks again.
Foundation of a Good Marketing Strategy
Gary Tiratsuyan
My pleasure. We had a great conversation and some good laughs last time we spoke, and we got some great feedback on that episode. Even before we published it, I knew we had to get you back on to dive deeper. So, as I mentioned a second ago, we ran through those best practices for building effective websites that attract and retain patients. And specific to that site build, we spoke about the visuals, technical aspects, hosting it on a platform that allows for longevity and agility and ease of maintenance and updating. And where I want to pick back up is on the topic of marketing and generating relevant traffic to your site and drawing your new patients. And before we get into those specific tactics, I think a good place to start is the strategy because I think what happens oftentimes is, in a practice or any business really, in my experience, we’ll start dumping dollars in to running ads and expect an immediate uptick in business or in this case, new patients. So, what in your mind is the foundation of a good marketing strategy?
Jeff Gladnick
Well, it depends on the marketing you’re doing. But usually, you have to have good processes, people and assets in place before you can really spend marketing money successfully. Otherwise, as you mentioned, you can just dump money in you might as well sell it on fire. So, I mean, one classic example of this is when the front desk is just not trained up properly or is… sometimes people have just acquired a front desk person through buying a practice, and they really don’t have any experience with them. And they’re actually not good at their job. They’re really bad at answering the phone. So, we can generate lots of phone calls for you. But if the front desk isn’t handling them well, you need to stop everything and fix that problem. It’s like having a great product, but your salesman sucks. You’ve got a customer in front of you that’s really excited, and they talk to the guy and they’re like, “Oh, geez,” and they leave disheartened and annoyed.
So, the second thing is, if you’re doing online marketing, the website really has to be up-to-date too. Because we’re generating calls to the front desk, but first you’re generating clicks to a website. So, that’s the second place or I guess the first place, I should say that the process can break down. If we’re, really getting traffic and interested people very cost effectively, but then they get to your website and they’re not impressed with the content on the website that they leave, then well, we haven’t even made it to the front desk.
And then the last stage is case acceptance and kind of getting the patient to accept the recommended course of action in the chair. And sometimes dentists need some advice and training on that. So, you want to make sure that you kind of have the business of the dental practice as a smooth-running machine. We at least have the media and content on the website, we need to convert patients to a call, and the front desk knows how to handle new patient inquiries. And you as the dentist, feel like you’re pretty good at converting patients to accept your treatment plans when they come in. If those things are all in place, or at least mostly in place, or even if you have a really solid plan to get them in place and you’re working with consultants or companies or mentors to help you, then it’s time to get started with marketing. But if all of those things are complete news to you, and you just thought, “Well, we can just, you know, just buy Facebook ads,” this is not going to work. You’re going to you’re just going to enrich Mark Zuckerberg.
Gary Tiratsuyan
Absolutely. And if I were to use your team as an example, if you’re approached by a dental practice that has done some marketing in the past, this is two-part… So Part A, do you look at historical data? And Part B is, what tool or tools are you using the capture information about the effectiveness of the tactics?
Jeff Gladnick
Oh, yeah. I mean, if they have it, we’ll get as much data as we can. So usually, at a minimum, most people have Google Analytics. And they may also have Google AdWords, but any historical marketing reports they’ve gotten if we can get access to Google Analytics accounts, their Google AdWords accounts, if they’re running paid search, if they’ve been doing SEO, do we have like rank tracking data that we can look back on and see when things have changed? Anything that we can get a hold of, we really want to start with that. And if you’re doing SEO, there’s usually a lot a laundry list of online accounts that they have usernames and passwords for. We want to check those out, too, because that saves a lot of time of having to go through the process of registering the practice for every single one of those accounts. There’s quite a few. That’s usually the first place we start.
Industry Updates
Gary Tiratsuyan
Speaking of Google Analytics, in July 2023, changes were made to that platform. What were they? And is it a pain to update the current instance? And what happens if a dental practice does not implement those updates?
Jeff Gladnick
So yeah, we’re speaking just a couple of days before the deadline here. Google announced that on July 1, they’re going to sunset the old version of Google Analytics, which still quite a few people have; we’re still getting last minute requests from clients to upgrade. Even today, I saw one come through. They’ve announced this for about a year, we started communicating this quite a long time ago, we started moving over our marketing services clients to the new one.
The new version of Google Analytics called GA4, it’s just much more complicated and the setup process is more difficult than the previous one, where you just cut and pasted like a JavaScript snippet. For this, you have to use something else called Google Tag Manager, and then get everything set up. And so, if you had any kind of like goal tracking, which you probably should have, like, did somebody click the contact form or click the button to call the office on mobile and you want to track that data, that’s probably all been lost. For the new version, it has to be all moved over manually, it takes an hour or two to set it up and go through the whole process and double check everything for some clients if they have more complex reports.
So yeah, there are guides; you can go on YouTube, and look up how to set up GA4; it’s not rocket science. But if you’re a dentist and you don’t have experience editing HTML or JavaScript snippets, or configuring Google Analytics in the first place and this is your first time in there, it’s probably not worth your time to spend an hour or two figuring it out. Just call your website people; they can probably get it done for you for half the cost of what it would take you. But otherwise, you may wake up on July 1 and find out that all of your analytics tracking has stopped. And if you don’t look at it until you get the report mailed to you, at the end of July, you’ll be shocked to see that it’s all gone to zero. It hasn’t. But it’s just that the tracking has been scheduled for termination.
Identifying the Right Channels for Marketing
Gary Tiratsuyan
As a marketer, data is my key to decision-making every day and it’s an important piece needed for growth to make sure your dollars are effective and not wasteful. There’s got to be ROI in there. And not having those metrics available to me is just not an option. I can drop a link to your site for anyone who’s interested in learning more about that transition from Analytics to GA4 and also to learn more about you, your team and your services.
If we’re shifting gears here a little bit, let’s talk tactics. I’m a dental practice, I’m aligned with the strategy set in place that either an agency or myself put in place, and I’m looking to break through this massive clutter and saturation in the space to generate more patients. What is the approach in identifying the right channels to launch marketing efforts on?
Jeff Gladnick
Well, it’s a little trial and error. And it’s a conversation with the practice and what the capabilities of the practice are. Some dentists are just really strained and they don’t have any access time. And we often ask our clients to help us produce content, like video content, or before and after cases. And usually, we can get some dentists to go a little bit above and beyond; they’ll start making videos of themselves explaining procedures, which really helps. So, if we have video of the dentist, that opens up some new opportunities; now we can advertise on YouTube or do Facebook video ads and stuff like that. If we don’t well, that narrows our options. And then the trial and error… it really just depends. We have to try a couple different things and figure out where the low hanging fruit is.
So, even within like one specific type of ad group, if we’re doing AdWords for somebody, we may find that for some reason, like all the Invisalign keywords are like really overbought. Google AdWords is a dynamic market, kind of like the stock market. So sometimes there’s good value in bidding for certain keywords, sometimes it’s a terrible value. I remember during the pandemic, the price like right after everybody went into lockdown—especially when everybody was in lockdown the first two weeks at the end of March and April— the price of Invisalign ads was just nothing. Like, we could get new Invisalign patients for like $12, which is absurdly cheap. Usually, it’s hundreds. But of course, no one was open. So, patients were like, “Can you see me for Invisalign?” “Well, not yet. But maybe sometime in the future, we don’t really know when.” And so that’s why it was so cheap, everybody had halted their ad spend.
But other times, we just find that, you know, for whatever reason, there’s a couple of dentists just over bidding in those areas. And it’s not a good value for our clients. So, we redirect them to Google AdWords or maybe advertising for dentures or implants, or some other veneers or some other service. Or if those are all overbought, then off of Google AdWords entirely. And we look at Facebook ads or SEO or other options.
So, there’s, there’s lots of different ways to do it. But it the general rule of thumb is, what are the practices capabilities and how can they help us? That narrows down the choices. Then we start a process of trial and error to figure out what’s going to cost the least amount of money to get our clients the type of patients that they want.
Latest Marketing Developments
Gary Tiratsuyan
It’s great insight there. Are there any new tactics, or latest marketing developments on one or more of these channels that can be tapped into to generate new patient inquiries?
Jeff Gladnick
Yeah, actually, at the beginning of the year, Google finally released local service ads for the dental industry. And we’ve been waiting for this for a few years because they had previously released this product for attorneys and home services. And I know agency owners and other people who own those types of businesses who use LSAs. And they all told me that the first six months were just a bonanza. And they were able to acquire new customers very cheaply, because there just wasn’t a lot of interest yet. People said the same thing about Google AdWords when that first came out, and the same thing about Facebook Ads when it came out.
So, if you can get in early to a new type of advertising medium, and it becomes popular, you end up doing really well at first, and then at least well later. So, we’ve brought over a bunch of clients who are doing that. I think the cheapest source of new patients in that group of clients is like $89 per new patient. The worst was like $140. So that’s like, that’s the acquisition costs for new patients, per new patient. Local services ads, they’re a little bit different than paid search ads; you’re really paying per patient instead of per click. So, it’s kind of moved the cost that the event that charges you way down in the funnel to the point where the patient calls you. Now, there’s still some like issues with reporting bad calls, which we can talk about if you’re curious. But local service ads are new, they’re not heavily utilized, there’s very little competition, they’re still very cheap. I would really encourage dentists to talk to their marketing people about local service ads or looking into them yourself.
Gary Tiratsuyan
Just before it gets to the next question, how in depth or interested are your clients in looking into things like CPA cost per acquisition? Are they listening to the figures that you’re giving, as far as ROI on these marketing dollars?
Jeff Gladnick
Depends on the client. Some clients are just like, well, the phone rang a lot last month. So, I’m happy, I’m assuming everything’s fine. Some clients just look at the bottom line of like, “Well, what was the total cost of the advertising? And how many patients do we get?” Sometimes we’ll go one step further and try to measure the revenue from those patients, which is probably the best thing you can do. Because you might get one case that was a giant case, and it made everything worth it, or maybe just two or three, but they’re all big cases. And well, that’s worth it. And then some clients, they do really want to go over the cost per click, and the conversion rate and the bounce rates of certain ad groups, and they’re very involved in the process. We typically just work with the practice, however they want to use us.
Gary Tiratsuyan
And for these LSAs… you mentioned bottom-of-the-funnel conversion. If that call or that inquiry comes through and is not a real lead, quote/unquote, or not a real patient in this case, you’re not on the hook to pay for that are you?
Jeff Gladnick
Maybe. So, unlike other industries, we have some issues with recording phone calls because Google really doesn’t want you to do that because of HIPAA. And then there’s another issue with if you have a tracking phone call and it’s not the same phone call that’s used within their app, that makes contesting the call more difficult, but we have had some success contesting the call. So, you have to download the app. There’s like a Google Local Services app that will show you all the calls that have happened. And we’re still updating the best practices for this, because it seems like every month we learn something new figure something out, or Google rep tells us something that they maybe they shouldn’t have. Or maybe there are a lot of times, we’re not really sure, we don’t ask. That helps us dispute more of these calls, and our clients have had success with it. And we want them to dispute every call that’s not real, because it helps drive the cost down. But if you have that app installed, and you give it to the front desk, they can tell when it’s a Google Local Service ad that comes in. And if they’re just fastidious about contesting it right away, there’s a couple reasons that you can do it. Not all the reasons are applicable to dentistry, but it’s obviously if it’s a wrong number or a sales call and it’s over within like 30 seconds, we’ve had a lot of success disputing those. If it’s spam, just a fake call, like “The IRS wants to talk to you” and you can only pay them with Walmart gift cards for some reason, you can get rid of those. Any duplicate leads, like if you say “No, this is the same customer; they just called back again,” you don’t have to pay twice.” And if they call the wrong business, then you can get rid of that too.
We’ve tried to counsel our clients to really try to keep the calls under 30 seconds if they’re if it’s clear right away if they’re not real. Because I think those might need to be like automatically rejected by Google, or they just accept your rejection of them without even reviewing them. The other ones trigger a manual review.
The other one that’s interesting is a job not served, or in the case of a dental practice, a service or procedure. And so, you can also use this to screen out Medicaid patients. I know most of our clients are trying to do this when they’re advertising because they’re paying for patients here. So, they’re looking for higher revenue patients, although we have other clients that have made great businesses out of specifically serving Medicaid. So, it can go either way. So, you may want to avoid this advice if you’re in the latter group. But we’ve had clients tell us that Medicaid patients are calling or asking for these types of services. And so if you just tell Google Local Service ads that we no longer want to advertise for those services, then you won’t exactly screen on Medicaid patients, but you’ll seriously reduce the likelihood that they call. And it’s a problem if you don’t accept Medicaid, because you can’t really screen that out in the first part. So, the issues with insurance and Medicaid are kind of sticky. So, the best strategy there is just to try to avoid the services that they’re calling about frequently; that’s helped.
The targeting for LSAs is not as granular and good and accurate as pay-per-click. So, there’s still room for both. But it does provide a really unique opportunity of finding patients who are clearly looking for transactional dental service that are in your area, and you just pay if they come. So, you have you really have nothing to lose. Pay-per-click’s like that too, but you still have to pay each time they click, and then we just have an at bat instead of getting a hit.
Gary Tiratsuyan
So at this point, do you feel like it’s a no brainer to least try LSAs?
Jeff Gladnick
Oh yeah, every practice should be trying this. Like I said, the worst case was $140 per patient. And I think that’s decreased. I think that practice is now on like the $120s. And the best case is $89. So, if you are hearing this, and you’re like I would pay between $89 and $140, to acquire a new patient, just think about the lifetime value of the patient or the initial value of the patient. Usually, if a new patient comes in, they might have something else wrong or something else they need help with, then you might even get a whole family if you get one. So, this is certainly worth the risk, I would absolutely consider every practice should really at least try it and consider it for a few months.
I also think it’s time sensitive, like I’m not sure that these days will last forever, prices may go up. And it’s still maybe you know, valuable at $150 $160, maybe even $200. It still may be worth it. But it’s better to get it for less.
The Rise of AI
Gary Tiratsuyan
You absolutely took the words right out of my mouth. I remember when things like Facebook lead form ads were just launched and super effective, super cost-effective. They worked and now it almost seems like Facebook… well, not seems like, it definitely is more of a challenge as far as targeting goes and getting a strong ROI. But shifting gears here a little bit for the last segment of this episode, I want to talk about AI. This is something that’s gotten mixed reactions and from a 30K-foot perspective, can you talk to me a little about what it is and what it means for marketing?
Jeff Gladnick
Yeah, it can mean a lot of things and people have been throwing the word AI or the letters AI I guess, around for a long time and it’s meant whatever it needed to mean for somebody to make a sale. The large language models that like ChatGPT and Bard from Google and the other competitors that you’re starting to see, like kind of really cool stuff like creating a kid story or the visual image generation is pretty neat, too. Those things are ones that have gotten a lot of attention lately.
We started to play with it a little bit, and dentists I know have probably done something similar. So, we’ve done some experiments with copywriting to try to generate like FAQs for the dental industry. But even using our own data set as the foundation for the AI engine, it still produces a lot of duplicate content. And sometimes these learning language models will create content with complete confidence that is absolutely wrong. We tested FAQs, and one of them was like, “Can you put a crown like over a rotting tooth? And it’s like, yeah.” Like, no! I mean, I guess you could but it would be a terrible idea. And so, if you’re using ChatGPT to just like write FAQs for you or write your services, you’ve got to check it.
In the best or most successful experiment we did, we had one of our senior copywriters kind of treat ChatGPT like a junior copywriting intern. Like, “Here’s the heading for this paragraph, write it.” But then she had, and she reviewed everything, made edits, corrected things that were incorrect. And but that was only to be able to reduce her time… I think it ended up being about 40% of the time she normally would have to spend writing the content herself from scratch. So, it did save time, but there’s definitely a risk factor.
We’re not using it on any clients sites, we’re still not too nervous to do that. Google’s made statements that said they would penalize AI-generated content. So, that’s another problem. You know, you may put up an AI generated page, and it may get ranked. But then, Google has a history of this where, you know, there’s an SEO tactic that works. And then Google makes an update, six months or a year later, and the people who did it get slammed, because they issued guidance forever, that they weren’t accepting of this. But you know, it was a trick and it worked for a while until they fixed it. And now you pay the penalty. It’s like the IRS saying, this is illegal, don’t do it. But everybody’s getting away with it. And then eventually, it becomes an issue, and they have people investigate, and then they go back years, and find you for it. So, pay your taxes and don’t use AI generated content yet.
But I think it can assist you in giving you ideas. Like, if you asked it, “What are the benefits of Invisalign?” It’ll give you the top 10 benefits of Invisalign. Great. Now, open that on another window and rewrite that in your own words. Like, it’s really good for getting around writer’s block. And I know our copywriters use that sometimes. I’ve seen good case studies for prototyping logos. So, DALL-E and Midjourney are two excellent photo generation AI tools. And if you’re stuck on like logo ideas, you can feed in your own logo and ask it to evolve it and make it a little more, 2.0-ish. “Show me a different graphic design styles. Show it to me in green. It can do a lot of these things really quickly. So you can kind of replace like a graphic designer for the prototype phase. But then eventually, you probably need a graphic designer to make the final adjustments and tweak things. But it’s not bad for prototyping and kind of thinking about things.
And I know our SEO teams used it for generating meta tags, and they’ll then adjust. But they’ll ask it for ideas based on this content, “What would the ideal meta tag be to rank for this keyword? And it gives you some good ideas. So, everybody’s afraid that AI will take your job, probably not. But it may reduce your needs for consulting, or it may augment your workforce and make them a little bit more efficient and give them better advice. Or at least more advice. Some of the advice is bad, really bad. But some of the advice is smart. So those are the things that we’ve been playing with. It’s kind of exciting. But it’s not quite ready for primetime. It’s definitely ready to test and to play with.
Gary Tiratsuyan
You mentioned Midjourney and I actually saw just offline friends of mine using it. He’s in the jewelry industry and he came up with this brilliant unique one-of-a-kind engagement ring design that just you know blew people’s minds. They took it across the office and just it absolutely blew everyone’s minds away that, why haven’t top designers thought of this specific style? So, there are definitely benefits to it.
Jeff Gladnick
What did it look like because I’m now I’m kind of curious. Because most engagements have like a big diamond in the middle of a single ring.
Gary Tiratsuyan
Absolutely. So, the standard huge stone that you see right in the middle with a standard—it’s called shank, the band is a shank. But it had twisted and woven the band that goes around the finger in such a way that it didn’t create a rope effect, it created… if you’ve ever seen like an anchor chain, that’s it. And it was absolutely stunning. I don’t I don’t think the design has sold yet. But it was absolutely just, why isn’t this out there already? It was really interesting to see it.
Jeff Gladnick
And I’m curious to see it. I wonder how difficult that is metallurgically to produce like, because you’re basically it sounds like you’re making chain links. I wonder how comfortable that would be on your finger.
Gary Tiratsuyan
We’re going to have to ask him if he ended up making it.
Jeff Gladnick
We’re just getting way off topic!
Gary Tiratsuyan
No worries, I wanted to actually ask you, from the consumer perspective, not the business perspective… As I mentioned before, there are like mixed reactions, and you touched on this. It my take my job, I’m not going to be needed anymore. Outside of that key concern, why else do you think there are mixed reactions to AI?
Jeff Gladnick
Well, I mean, the whole taking-over-the-world bit? Is that we’re getting to?
Gary Tiratsuyan
Yeah, Terminator.
Jeff Gladnick
Yeah, I guess if we hook them up to weapons systems. I mean, we all saw War Games and Terminator, and all that. I feel like we’re not quite there. Yeah, I mean, they’ll probably be some interesting developments as these things get hooked up to like drones, but they have limited range. It’s not like it’s going to turn around and go to the city and start looking for you. But if you’re just walking around anywhere near the war zone, be careful. Yeah, that’ll be real weird. I’d be concerned if the police had armed drones that were on AI. I’d be concerned about that. I mean, that’s most of the fears.
Mostly, right now, I hear the fear of economic loss. And the down-the-road thing is how these are going to impact society. I listened to a podcast the other day, and it made complete sense. We all have our own little, personalized Siri that really knows us, because it’s consumed all of our data. Just imagine all the data on your phone, and like in your email, and like everything you’ve ever said, written and sent. It can write an email that sounds just like you because it has access to the last 50,000 emails you’ve ever sent on every conceivable topic. And it does a really great job. Well, it also knows, what social, political and cultural issues are important to you. So that the theory that the guy was espousing was like, what if the AI like, wants to accomplish some sort of like, societal change? Like, they want to make, you know, root beer tax deductible or something? And it’s well, what’s the best argument for Jeff to make root beer tax deductible, and then we can give Gary a completely different one. But worse than this, it can just create all this fake data. Like, if Gary was really interested in what baseball players thought for some reason, it’s like, “Well, here, here’s what Babe Ruth said about root beer. And here’s what the last year’s MVP thought about root beer,” and that might really sway you. Now, it might not work for me; I don’t care about baseball. But I really care about what my dentist thinks or what the American Medical Association thinks. So here’s a bunch of fake quotes from the American Medical Association, that actually, root beer is way better for you than soda. And if you’re in a hurry, and we get to the point where we’re just relying on these AI engines that have been customized to us, because they tell the truth, you know, 99% of time, but 1% of the time, they’re lying, to try to steer us towards some goal that’s not really known that the AI has, how would you know? And how could you tell? It starts to create some really interesting science fiction show?
That technology is pretty much going to be here within a few years. And so, right now, you’d have to have a person who was saying, I want to create this goal, and just attack Gary and Jeff and whatever way you can to get them to vote for the root beer tax. But, if there’s a general AI it could come up with those goals on its own. So it’s wild times.
Gary Tiratsuyan
Absolutely. And I think you hit the nail on the head; Play around with it. Don’t completely trust that and rely on it just yet. Jeff, how can how can our listeners connect with you and learn more about what you and your company are up to next and where can they do that?
Jeff Gladnick
Just go to greatdentalwebsites.com and the easiest thing is to sign up for our email list. There are a bunch of ways do it or contact us that way. We’re on Facebook, on Twitter, LinkedIn, just look for Great Dental Websites on there. On Instagram, you’ll find us.
Gary Tiratsuyan
Awesome. I’ll drop all those links in the episode description. And I definitely want to dive more into AI. And I’d love to have you back again to dig deeper.
Jeff Gladnick
It keeps changing, so I’m sure there’d be something new.
Gary Tiratsuyan
Sure; we’ll connect and figure out a time and thanks for joining me today. It was a pleasure.
Jeff Gladnick
My pleasure, Gary, thanks again for having me.
Gary Tiratsuyan
Thanks again, Jeff. For our listeners. Just a reminder, we want your feedback. Let us know how we’re doing, what you’d like to hear discussed on upcoming episodes. And if you enjoyed this episode, hit that like and subscribe button, as well as we’ve got lots more great content coming up soon. Thanks for tuning in. Til next time, everybody.
Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
