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🎧 Gary Bird, Founder & CEO of SMC National & Host of Dental Marketing Theory Podcast, joins Bill Neumann on the Group Dentistry Now Show.
Takeaways from Gary Bird’s conversation with GDN:
🚀SMC’s Culture
🚀 The state of digital marketing
🚀 Main metrics DSOs should be measuring in marketing
🚀 Results-based marketing vs. activity-based marketing
🚀 Automating dental marketing
Visit https://smcnational.com/ to find out how they can help your DSO with its marketing needs.
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Our podcast series brings you dental support and emerging dental group practice analysis, conversation, trends, news and events. Listen to leaders in the DSO and emerging dental group space talk about their challenges, successes, and the future of group dentistry. The Group Dentistry Now Show: The Voice of the DSO Industry has listeners across North & South America, Australia, Europe, and Asia. If you like our show, tell a friend or a colleague.
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Full Transcript:
Bill Neumann:
I’d like to welcome everyone to The Group Dentistry Now Show. I’m Bill Neumann. I’m a little nervous about this podcast recording, and I normally don’t start off the podcast by saying that. But Gary had me on his podcast earlier, and I want to make sure that everybody downloads that. So I’ll mention that in a second. But he was such a great host that I’m sure he’s going to be grading me through this entire podcast.
Bill Neumann:
So a little bit nervous here. Gary is a pro. So we have Gary Bird who is the CEO and the founder of SMC National. So welcome, Gary, to The Group Dentistry Now Show. I’m really happy to have you on our podcast. I thank you for having me on your podcast before.
Gary Bird:
Yeah, absolutely. It’s an honor to be here and I really appreciate it, and appreciate those kind words. You absolutely killed it on our podcast and it did really, really well and very, very informative. It’s a privilege to be here. I’m really excited to have a conversation with you today.
Bill Neumann:
Thanks, Gary. And so, Gary’s podcast is Dental Marketing Theory. You’ve got quite a few already under your belt. It’s like you came out of nowhere and consistently just cranking out a lot of really, really solid content. So if you’re a dental practice or a DSO or an emerging group, or anybody that wants to sell into that space and understand that, he has a lot of the players on there. So what number are you up to, episode?
Gary Bird:
I think we’re about 30-something. So we’re closing in on the last leg of the year there.
Bill Neumann:
Yeah, it’s good stuff. I know how much it takes to put these together. So that’s amazing. So a little bit of background on Gary. I’m going to ask him to fill in any blanks that I may not hit.
Bill Neumann:
So, again, I mentioned he’s the founder and CEO of SMC National. And so, what SMC National does, they are a … They’re like this. They offer predictable digital marketing services to emerging DSOs and group practices. So we’ll talk a little bit further on in the podcast about what’s predictable about digital marketing services and just what digital marketing services really are, because it’s a catchall. So we can talk about what’s important specifically in the dental and the DSO space.
Bill Neumann:
Talking a little bit more about SMC National, proven marketing systems that measure ROI, real lifetime value, and provide predictable … Again, there’s that predictable again … patient flow. He also offers fractional CMO services to dental practices across the country, served as a consultant for the American Dental Association, a contributing author to the Guidelines for Practice Success module on Managing Marketing, which is available in print.
Bill Neumann:
Like I mentioned, again, you should download this and subscribe, which is the Dental Marketing Theory podcast. I just saw today somebody shout out that you were one of the top podcasts along with a couple of others in the DSO space.
Gary Bird:
That’s awesome.
Bill Neumann:
That was just on LinkedIn today. So congratulations.
Gary Bird:
Wow. That’s awesome. Thank you so much. Yeah, when we started, I was just like hopefully somebody listens, one person might download this. So it’s really exciting when you build something. The relationships is one of the best things about podcasts that I’ve learned, is that I get to build relationships with people that I probably wouldn’t have talked to before.
Gary Bird:
So I absolutely love it. It really fills my appetite for curiosity. So I get to talk to these people and go, “Why’d you do that? Why’d you do it this way and why’d you do it that way?” So I absolutely enjoy it. It’s great.
Gary Bird:
Again, I’m really excited about this conversation and hope that we can help some people. I know marketing is one of those things that you don’t need it until you need it. Then when you need, it’s this complex, confusing thing that has many different levers. My goal is always just to give enough information to people to make an educated decision on how to scale their practices.
Bill Neumann:
Really timely as well. I just received an email mid-last week from marketing director of a DSO in the New England area, about 40 locations. She reached out and she’s like, “Hey, I need some education.” She said, “I don’t need the 101. I need to dig a little bit deeper, and I can’t find anything out there to help me.” So hopefully she can get a couple of tips from today’s show.
Gary Bird:
Awesome.
Bill Neumann:
So let’s talk a little bit about SMC National. Maybe we start off with looking at your background, see like, okay, what’s going on back there? We’ve got the astronaut, we’ve got the rocket ship. It looks like we have a Pac-Man maybe behind your head. So tell me a little … Is there a message to that? Is there a theme there?
Gary Bird:
Yeah, the message is I got to actually build something that I probably would’ve wanted when I was like 20, but I didn’t have the money when I was 20 to buy dinosaur heads and stuff like that. So I was like, “Man, I need to build a background that really people will just notice and that I can change the colors on,” so I could just swap out really easily and with my phone and just change the colors. We could change it to red or green or whatever.
Gary Bird:
Yeah, it took me about three shots to do it. I’m actually in my Zoom Room. So this is where I operate my business and this is where I shoot my podcast. I do a ton of content out of this room. So, yeah, it’s fun, but probably a little bit kiddish.
Bill Neumann:
It’s great. And so, if you’re listening to this on audio only, you’re going to want to go over to YouTube and check out his background. It’s well worth the trip to actually watch Gary and his background. Just really, really cool stuff.
Bill Neumann:
So talk to me a little bit about … And that leads me to the first question here, which is the culture. I have to tell you a couple of instances, and then I’ll let Gary talk about the culture, because I’ve experienced it already on a couple of calls initially with Gary and some of his team members. I’m surprised you’re not on one right now. It’s either on an elliptical or a treadmill. I was the only one that was in … I was standing still. The rest of the team was exercising. So it was really interesting. So obviously something that’s important to you and it seems like your team.
Gary Bird:
Yeah, absolutely. So culture, I’ll be honest with you, when I first started learning about culture and growing a business, I literally thought culture was just a buzzword that people used to sell books and stuff like that. And so, when I was a smaller company, I just didn’t get it. I didn’t understand it. As I grew, I realized how important it was.
Gary Bird:
And so, we really started to work on systemizing our culture and really making sure that we can measure our culture and that we are keeping our team healthy and happy. I have one KPI that I’m responsible for in our leadership meeting, or my top KPI I should say, and that’s our pulse score.
Gary Bird:
So what we do is every team member in the company has a weekly check-in. We have over 75 team members. Those team members do their weekly check-in and then they do a pulse score between a one and a five how they’re feeling. We aim to have an average of about 4.5 is where we’re usually in.
Gary Bird:
Then what I do is I personally go through every single one of the pulse scores, look at how people are doing. Anybody who’s a little bit lower than normal, I’m checking in with their managers. What’s going on? How can we help them?
Gary Bird:
I was brought up to think … And I think this is an old way of thinking more of like a factory mindset, of like you leave your work at home and then you come to work and you do your work. Then you leave your work at work and then you go home. That’s a great way to operate if you, again, have a factory, but we are a remote company. We’re 100% remote. We were remote before remote was cool, before COVID.
Gary Bird:
And so, I can impact people’s home life because they’re working in their bedroom. So it makes a huge impact. And so, I want to know when people aren’t doing well. I want to know when people are doing well. I want to know if they have a sick kid. I want to know if their dog … Somebody just recently had a really sick dog and they had to take them to the vet. I want to know those things because I want to be able to support them in that time and be able to help them.
Gary Bird:
That’s my mission. That’s my goal. When we do that, it comes full circle. The team really wants to help the company. They want to help each other. And so, we try to cultivate an appetite of supporting one another. That in turn then supports our clients. So that is really crucial.
Gary Bird:
The other thing that we do is we do a quarterly eNPS score. Our eNPS score used to be really, really high, used to be in the 80s, which is almost unheard of. But we were around 20 team members at that time. We’ve been able to maintain that. Not quite in the 80s. We’re in the mid-60s right now, which for a team of 75 people is a tough thing to do.
Gary Bird:
But that’s how we track our success of how our culture’s doing. Then from there, we just listen to our team. We communicate with them. We’re just constantly checking in and seeing how they’re doing. Again, because we’re remote, I really want to try to make their work experiences as peaceful and as …
Gary Bird:
There’s pressures, right? There’s still pressures and there’s still anxieties. There’s still things that come in, and that’s part of working and as part of the world that we live in. But I want to make it as smooth as possible for them. So that way when they go home, their home life is as smooth as possible. Then when they come back to work, it’s full circle.
Gary Bird:
So I like Josey. She was on my podcast, one of my first podcasts. She said there’s no such thing as work-life balance. It’s work-life harmony. I really believe in that. It’s about having harmony between everything that you’re doing. So far, it’s worked well for us.
Bill Neumann:
Yeah, that’s great. Speaking of your team, you added somebody new recently, Vic Hennegan, who a lot of people who listen to this or watched this podcast know was in the industry for a long time, well-respected, loved in the industry. Now he’s back in, thank goodness, thanks to Gary. So talk a little bit about that hire.
Gary Bird:
Absolutely. So I really got fortunate. I was very fortunate to land Vic. Vic’s definitely out of my league as far as a person and who he is in the industry. He was in dental forever. Most people know him. He left dental. And someone reached out and said he might want to come back to dentistry. So I didn’t have to fight everybody off and all those kind of things.
Gary Bird:
And so, really, what I did is I just presented our culture to him and said, “Hey, this is what we’re trying to do, and I think you would fit perfectly into this.” He’s just a really kind human being that everybody likes. I feel the same way about him. He’s amazing. I’m constantly learning from him. He just moves with so much grace. I love working with him.
Gary Bird:
Then the other person that we added at the same time, again way out of my league, but she decided to join at the same time, it was a package deal, was Alyssa Keefer, who’s been in dental marketing forever.
Bill Neumann:
Oh yeah. I didn’t know …. Alyssa. Congratulations. That’s great.
Gary Bird:
Huge, right?
Bill Neumann:
Yeah.
Gary Bird:
When I have dental marketing questions, I go to Alyssa. I always told my team like, “Hey, this is who I go and talk to when I have questions and I have things that I can’t figure out.” And so, she decided to join the team at the same time. They both joined our business development team.
Gary Bird:
So I’m really, really excited about that. They’re both really big on culture, they really fit our culture, but they’re also wanting to always make things better. That’s what I’m most excited about having them on the team.
Bill Neumann:
So we’ll be looking for Alyssa and Vic and yourself, of course, at some of the DSO dental meetings now that things are opening back up. I think we have quite a few that are going to happen in 2022, for sure.
Gary Bird:
Yeah. I’m really excited. Yup, I’m glad things are opening back up and we’re going to get back to action.
Bill Neumann:
Yup. Talk to me a little bit about how you started in dental marketing, Gary.
Gary Bird:
Okay. So doing my podcast, at the beginning of every podcast, I ask people, “How’d you end up in dental?” So here’s what I’ve learned about that. If you’re a dentist, it was very calculated and precise and dialed in. Every step was planned out. If you’re not a dentist, it was by accident. Every person that I’ve talked to said, “Well, I didn’t plan on being in dental,” and I’m no exception to that rule.
Gary Bird:
So when I got started in marketing, actually, in 2008, I quit my job. I had a good paying job, and I quit. I started an email marketing company. At the time, there was no way to reach your customers outside of sending postcards. There was no social media. Mass text messaging wasn’t a thing yet. The only way that you could actually do it cost-effectively was with email.
Gary Bird:
It just so happened that the economy crashed right at that time. So everybody was slashing their marketing budgets and trying to figure out a way to get back in front of people and to get business booming again. And so, email marketing was perfect. It was perfect timing. I helped a lot of people will grow their businesses through email marketing. I actually started to add services and things like that.
Gary Bird:
I met a dentist through another client that I was working with that was a non-dentist. We helped them go from $80,000 a month to about $400,000 a month over a couple years’ span. It was cool. I was like, okay, this is great, but I didn’t realize how big of a deal it was. They were also in a very competitive market in California. They actually had four dentists in their parking lot. Again, I didn’t think anything of it. I didn’t really understand the dynamics of dentistry at the time.
Gary Bird:
And so, he referred me to a friend. We were able to reproduce those results. They refer me to another friend. Then eventually I started bumping into some consultants and things like that were like, “Hey, can you do this for them?” or, “It would really help me if you can help them.”
Gary Bird:
From there, we really started to grow the dental side of what we were doing. At that point, we actually decided to focus only on dental, which was a very scary thing to niche down that far. But it was one of the best decisions that we’ve ever made.
Gary Bird:
We niched down. We were then able to figure out really quickly that, okay, there’s specific kinds of dentists that we want to work with. We niched down a couple of times from that.
Gary Bird:
And so, recently, right after COVID, it caused us to pivot a lot. And so, we said, okay, we’re working with dentists, we’re working with entrepreneurial dentists, but we’re really working with groups that want to grow and want predictable patient flow. That is super important to them.
Gary Bird:
That really becomes a problem at a certain level as you grow your organization. We were able to 4X our company at that point. That’s how we made the Inc. 5000 list. We went from about 20 team members to over 75 team members in a really, really quick time.
Gary Bird:
That’s where I really learned a lot of things really fast and the hard way. Sometimes it takes you years and years and years to learn things and you learn them slowly. This was like a bootcamp on business, and really helped us. It really helped me. I really grew. That’s how we got to where we’re at today.
Bill Neumann:
That’s great stuff. So it started off with email marketing. So talk to me a little bit about the state of digital marketing now. This is a whole lot more than just email marketing.
Gary Bird:
Oh yeah. Absolutely. Email marketing’s just really an internal thing now. So it’s something that you do as an internal plan. So digital marketing right now, we live in a really cool time because you can actually track everything.
Gary Bird:
Everything’s about mental models for me, especially when I’m explaining something that took me years to figure out. And so, the mental model that I use for this is I tell everybody you need to decide, before you do any marketing, what are you doing? Are you doing a branding campaign? Are you doing a lead generation campaign?
Gary Bird:
A lot of times the dentists that we work with, they want to do branding, but they want to measure it like it’s lead generation. What I mean by that is someone will come along and say, “Hey, I want to put up this billboard,” or, “I want to put up this commercial and I want to know what my ROI is going to be on it.”
Gary Bird:
Frankly, that’s not how it works. You cannot measure results from branding the way you can from lead generation. It’s kind of like this. You watch the halftime show of any Super Bowl. It’s always sponsored by Pepsi. Why does Pepsi do that even though everybody knows their name? It’s because they want top-of-mind awareness. But do you think Pepsi’s out there going, “All right. How many Pepsis did we sell today at the show?” Maybe they track some of that, they can track some of that, but that’s not the end of that branding campaign.
Gary Bird:
Another one would be Nike. Nike signs Jordan and sells lots of sneakers. But they also signed 40 other people who never sold any sneakers, or sold very few sneakers and actually cost them a lot of money.
Gary Bird:
So you can post after the branding’s done and the campaign’s done. You can look at it and go, “Oh, that did have an impact,” or it didn’t have an impact, but you’re not measuring it day-to-day, and it’s not predictable to actually grow your practice.
Gary Bird:
Where lead generation, on the other hand, is totally trackable. This is how you tell the difference is that you can actually track, okay, how much did I spend? What was my cost per opportunity? What was my cost per acquisition? Then what was my ROI on my first visit, 30-day, 90-day, and lifetime?
Gary Bird:
That is where you can really start to get traction and then you can create predictable models where you can say, “Hey, now I need to double my marketing budget here. That’s going to bring me X result of people through the door.” Then if it doesn’t, you can actually track back to where it broke. Oh, we’re not answering the phone, or we are answering the phone and we’re not converting them, or we had a higher no-show rate, or whatever it may be.
Gary Bird:
I think where dental is right now is that the vast majority, every person that I’ve ever talked to, is they commingle that data. So when they’re looking at their new patient numbers, they’re looking at all their new patient numbers. When they look at their phone conversion, they’re looking at all their phone conversion. When they’re looking at their no-show rate, they’re looking at all their patients.
Gary Bird:
That’s great for a higher up view, but it doesn’t help you at all with your marketing because marketing only accounts for a sliver of that. If you don’t figure out those same metrics on your marketing, then you’re really guessing. You’re guessing at where you’re going to be throwing dollars. And so, that’s really the backbone of SMC.
Bill Neumann:
So you’re able to focus that, and that’s where this predictable comes in that you’ve mentioned a couple of times. So talk to me a little bit more about that. If you were a, let’s say, an emerging group that really doesn’t have a strategic digital marketing plan in place. It’s been, “Hey, we just acquired three practices. It’s mostly been word-of-mouth. Now we realized we don’t have enough patients or patients aren’t sticking with us.” What are a couple of tips in a case like that?
Gary Bird:
So just getting to your key metrics, it’s just like everything else. When you’re a single practice and you’re a doctor, you can pretty much operate most things off your fillings, because you’re in the trenches. You can fill it. We’re going in the right direction. We’re not going any direction. We need more new patients. We don’t need more new patients. But as you grow, you can’t do that anymore.
Gary Bird:
So when you’re at three practices and you’re trying to fill out if you should give people time off if they’re performing well or not, you’re not going to do very well because you’re not there. Marketing’s no exception to that. You cannot fill your way through it. You also can’t look at traditional marketing numbers.
Gary Bird:
So here’s where most people get themselves in trouble. Most marketing companies, what they’re going to do is they’re going to bring you … And this is just the way the industry works. This isn’t knocking anybody. This is just how it works. Most marketing companies are going to bring you traffic. “So this is how much traffic we drove. Here’s how many clicks that we got.” They’ll even say, “Hey, our cost per lead is $20.” What they mean by that is that it’s $20 for someone to click on the phone button.
Gary Bird:
Well, if you actually look at that data, 90% of those aren’t real leads. So it’s not actual information that you can pull from to actually make educated decisions.
Gary Bird:
I liken it to this. If I was sick and I went to the doctor’s, and they pulled my blood to do blood work and then they gave me back the blood work and said, “Here’s what’s wrong with you,” and said, “Now you read it,” I would have no clue what’s wrong with me. Someone has to decipher that information for me, that understands blood work. I can’t be left to my own devices to figure that out.
Gary Bird:
In fact, I’m probably going to make a bigger mess of it if I go with Google and try to do it myself. I’m going to be on Google freaking out, going, “Okay, what’s wrong with me? This and this and this.” I’m going to see a hundred different options it could be.
Gary Bird:
So that’s what we have right now in the marketing industry is that you have people that are bringing information, and that information is incomplete. The other problem that we have is that, operationally, you have to be able to delineate the difference between marketing and all the other stuff that you have going on.
Gary Bird:
The reason for that is patient referrals are awesome. I love patient referrals. A patient referral is worth about double or two and a half times what a marketing patient is worth. So they’re amazing, but you can’t scale them. I can’t say, “Hey, let’s double my patient referrals next month.” You can grow them, you can boost them, you can do different things, but there’s a roof on it. Marketing, you can actually scale. You can double it. You can triple it and so on.
Gary Bird:
But if I mix those numbers together, then I have no idea what’s going on. It looks like my marketing’s working, but I’m not growing. What’s really happening is my patient referrals, they convert 100% on the phone. They accept all the treatment that I present to them. They come back to the recare appointment. They bring their friends in. That’s great. Then marketing can be a big fat zero across the board, and I end up somewhere in the middle on my stats.
Gary Bird:
So it’s really important that you delineate those two and you say, “Okay, patient referrals, great. They’re over here. What’s my marketing and how is marketing coupling with my operations?” Just like anything, there has to be a smooth transition or a smooth handoff between marketing and operations when that patient comes in.
Gary Bird:
And so, I’ll just give you some raw stats. Right now about 35% of dental calls are going unanswered through the marketing lines. The reason we know that, we work with hundreds and hundreds of locations. I’ve talked to Cory at CallForce. I’ve talked to Amol at Patient Prism. When you go and look at that, they’re seeing the same thing.
Gary Bird:
That means if you spend $10,000 a month right now on marketing and you don’t know you’re unanswered rate, I bet you’re losing around $3,500 before it even gets to you. Then from there, the average front desk person only converts around 50% of their new patients on the phone from marketing, not patient referrals.
Gary Bird:
So, again, if you have a track sheet there and you’re going, “No, I had this many,” it’s a blended number. It’s not valid. What is marketing? What is marketing’s conversion? It’s about 50% is they’ll end up converting if you’re not tracking it. So you just lost a ton of marketing dollars down the drain.
Gary Bird:
Then from there, we’re seeing the average office is putting patients five days out. Five days out. I want you to think about that. Five days out. If I needed a plumber right now, guess how long I’m waiting? If I needed someone to clean my carpet, guess how long I’m waiting? If I wanted a pizza, guess how long I’m waiting? I’m not waiting five days. No one in the dental industry is waiting five days as a new patient to come in if they’re in pain or if they’re getting something done on hygiene, but they’re punting these patients out.
Gary Bird:
And so, a lot of these offices are losing 70%, 80% of their marketing before the patient even gets to their front door. Then they go, “Oh, our marketing’s not working. Look how many patients we got.” But it’s just a leaky bucket across the board when you work through that funnel there.
Bill Neumann:
Really, really great points. Talk to me a little bit about metrics that you feel should be measured. So let’s take a look at marketing. You touched on a couple of them and I’d love to know the main metrics that the office managers, the practices at the DSO levels should be looking at.
Gary Bird:
Absolutely. So I’d just make it super simple. Actually, when we work with clients, we tell them, “I promise not to ever talk about any other metrics outside of these,” because, again, in the marketing world, there’s a bazillion metrics that you can look at. Sometimes they drive results and sometimes they don’t.
Gary Bird:
So cost per lead … And I’m going to put a little caveat on that. You have to define what a lead is. So marketing defines a lead as somebody clicking on a phone number, but that may or may not be a real person. In my book, I don’t count that as a lead. That’s not a lead.
Gary Bird:
So another way that we’ve rephrased that is a cost per opportunity. Did I actually get an opportunity of somebody that I can convert? So be really, really clear with whoever you’re working with in your marketing, because they’ll say, “Oh, our cost per lead’s $10.” It’s not $10. That’s a red flag right off the bat. So cost per lead or cost per opportunity, that’s number one.
Gary Bird:
Number two is what’s your cost per acquisition? Now let me tell you how not to do your cost per acquisition. The vast majority of people do it just like this. They take all their new patients, divide it by their marketing budget. This is our cost per acquisition.
Gary Bird:
That may work for somebody who’s maybe private equity. A smaller group will come in and look at that and say, “Okay. Well, that’s fine that you put your cost per acquisition that way,” but you’re not going to be able to scale at the speed that you want if you’re using that metric, because, again, it’s counting for location, patient referrals.
Gary Bird:
All those things are being counted in. If you don’t take that into account when you open up a new location, you can get burnt really, really quick. I’ve seen a lot de novos open up and they’re like, “Uh-oh. We don’t have the volume that we thought we were going to get,” and it’s because they didn’t bake in the numbers correctly. They didn’t have an accurate cost per acquisition.
Gary Bird:
So cost per acquisition’s huge. Then from there, you want to look at ROI and lifetime value. There’s a couple different ways you can look at these numbers. Again, if you’re just looking at averages, it’s really not going to get you anywhere. What I would like to do is, okay, I’ve got a hundred new patients from marketing. How much money are they actually spending with us on the first visit, 30-day, 90-day, and then the lifetime?
Gary Bird:
The reason that’s important is right now what I’m seeing is most people, their marketing is only getting them less than a one-to-one return on the first visit. You know what that indicates to me? They don’t have room to actually do the treatment.
Gary Bird:
So everybody always says, “Hey, I want to get more new patients.” But if you’re getting a 0.8 to one ROI on your marketing dollars on that first visit, what you’re doing is you’re saying, “Oh, I see that you have a problem. Let me move that down the road. We’ll schedule you a week out.” Some people will come back and do that, but a lot won’t. So then your lifetime value, you’re losing a lot of people out your backdoor without even realizing it.
Gary Bird:
So that’s a really good number to track. Then, of course, phone conversion for your marketing, unanswered rate for your marketing. Those are two really crucial metrics to see where things are breaking as a patient moves into your office.
Bill Neumann:
Good stuff. Okay, good. We’ll list those in the show notes so everybody has them, important. It’s not just what they are. It’s actually how you’re measuring those. That’s probably even more important than the metric itself.
Gary Bird:
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It’s if you’re taking a global number, then don’t try to apply it to marketing.
Bill Neumann:
Talk to me a little bit about automation in dental marketing. What can be automated? What should be automated?
Gary Bird:
That’s a really good question. Well, there’s a couple of different thoughts that I’ll give you. So the things that you have to do internally that you just can’t source out to a marketing company is culture-related things. So anything that’s internal, that’s culture related, like if you’re going, “Man, I really want people to see how amazing it is to work here,” someone can come in and video that one time, but they’re not going to be able to capture that on a weekly or daily basis. That’s going to come internally.
Gary Bird:
Google reviews, thing like that, really important to have somebody internally that’s working with the patients and making sure those keep going. Anything of that nature of recare, stuff like that, you can use different softwares. There’s people out there that do a great job with that. But that’s not really traditional digital marketing.
Gary Bird:
So when we talk about digital marketing, we’re talking about patients who have never heard of you before. And so, from an automation standpoint, number one, you can work with a marketing company that can produce those things. So in my book, that is an automation. But if you’re saying, “Hey, maybe I want to build my own internal team,” there are some things that you can do to speed that along. Obviously, you can get somebody who understands marketing.
Gary Bird:
So what I’ve seen in the dental industry that’s really slowed people down is that they bring in somebody who understands marketing, but doesn’t understand dental. I’ve watched this over the years and I’ve talked to a lot of people about this. It’s about a three-year learning gap to learn the dental side of it.
Gary Bird:
That’s why a lot of marketing companies, I’m sure your listeners have heard it before where someone comes in and they’re like, “Okay, I’m an orthodontist. I want to get more ortho patients,” and then they put cleanings on the website. It’s like, no, we don’t do that. So that takes time to learn. That doesn’t happen overnight.
Gary Bird:
The other side of it is bringing in people that understand dental, but don’t really understand the marketing side of it. That takes even longer to learn. So that’s a way to hack that is if you can get somebody that understands both of those, both of those worlds, it really speeds things along.
Gary Bird:
As far as fully automating it outside of outsourcing it, there’s too many components that you need working together. We have built an application that tracks all this for us on the backend. It does automate that process for us. But it’s taken us five years to build it. It’s not something that you just go in and build and slap up. So I don’t know of too many automations outside of outsourcing the duties of producing that digital result.
Bill Neumann:
So let’s continue this a little bit more. If you’re building an internal marketing team … You talked about your platform that took you five years to build out. So is that something that if I had a marketing team, I could work with SMC and access that platform, or is that something that I have to work through SMC?
Gary Bird:
Yeah. So right now you have to work through SMC because there’s still components of it that we have to manage with our team.
Bill Neumann:
You’re automating it on your side, but it’s your people doing it.
Gary Bird:
Parts of it. So there’s parts of it that are automated and there’s parts that are people still piecing that together. We’re hoping that we can roll something out soon where it’s like, okay, you don’t have to use us as a marketing company. You can just use us as a SaaS product, a software as a service, and it’s just like, “Here you go.” But there’s a lot of moving parts. There’s a reason that no one has that in the industry.
Gary Bird:
It’s because you’re actually what you’re dealing with … And this is actually a really good conversation to get into. When you get into dentistry, you’ll realize really quickly that there’s a lot of bad data. I actually just did a podcast yesterday and they said dental finance is like spaghetti finance, where you’re taking all these things and you have to straighten it out. It’s hard, right? It’s not easy.
Gary Bird:
And so, the reason for that, or a big reason for that, is that anytime bad data makes it into your system, that has to be accounted for on the back end when you’re trying to get answers. Well, where does every patient eventually start in your office? It starts in marketing. So if you don’t have the marketing foundational information, you can start to fill in the dots down the road, but you don’t know where that person really came from. You don’t know how they got there. Did they come through phone? Did they come through chat? Did they come through online scheduler? Did they come through another kind of form?
Gary Bird:
If you don’t know that information and you don’t know the breakdowns of that, and the percentages and the cost and all those kind of things, then the rest of your data behind that can be questionable. There’s other issues that … Again, I’m simplifying it, because it gets really complicated as you move into a dental office.
Gary Bird:
So I’m really, really passionate about getting the right information upfront. If you can get the right information upfront, it makes every single other step behind that much, much easier.
Bill Neumann:
So any other software, systems, platforms you would recommend, whether it’s just in marketing in general? You don’t even necessarily have to talk about digital marketing, but-
Gary Bird:
Oh yeah, absolutely. So actually a couple popped into my mind as we were talking there. So obviously there’s online scheduling. You have that. It’s really important that you understand how those work and that you have to actually reach out to people and follow up with them if you’re going to want to get people in through that.
Gary Bird:
So marketing those need human touch. You don’t just get to throw it up and say, “Oh, no one has to reach out to them.” For existing patients, it’s different. Existing patients, you don’t have to reach out because you’ve already built that relationship.
Gary Bird:
And so, another one that’s really good to create that human touch but it’s automated is chat. So we use Simplifeye on most of our websites, where they manage the chat for us and they create that warm human touch. It’s very reasonably priced. Dr. Ryan Hungate, he’s an orthodontist. He’s built a company that basically worked for him, built that out.
Gary Bird:
Also, membership plans for uninsured patients. I have personally seen that if you have a membership plan, more of your patients are going to stay with you long term that are uninsured. If you don’t have that, then you’re going to lose … They come in and then they go out if they’re uninsured. So having that membership plan. DentalHQ does a great job with that.
Gary Bird:
Patient Prism does an amazing job with the RELOs, they call them. So basically what happens is these marketing leads are coming in and they’re flowing in, and your team doesn’t have time to either deal with them or answer their questions, or they just don’t do it right. What Patient Prism can do that nobody else can do is they get those patients back to you really quickly.
Gary Bird:
So I’ve used them for that and that does a great job of getting that in. Then another thing, I’ve worked with Cory at CallForce, and they do a great job of answering the calls when you can’t.
Gary Bird:
So, again, all those have, we say, automating. Really what you’re doing is it’s more outsourcing than it is automating. You’re outsourcing those gaps because, if you don’t have enough people sitting at the front desk, then you’re just going to lose a bunch of people. So you might as well pay somebody else to fill that gap for you. Even though they’re still using a human, they’re going to do it at a cheaper rate or a reduced rate that you’re going to be able to fill that spot.
Bill Neumann:
So on the membership plan side, I know you mentioned DentalHQ. I know there’s Kleer. There’s a couple of others out there. I think there’s … You mentioned Patient Prism. There’s Callbox. You mentioned Cory at CallForce. Oh, I’m sorry, you also mentioned chat. You mentioned Simplifeye and Dr. Hungate’s team there. Online scheduling, does Simplifeye also handle that?
Gary Bird:
I think so, yeah. I think they do that as well.
Bill Neumann:
Okay. So just a couple of other ideas there besides using SMC’s platform. So that’s something you’d have to do working through SMC National.
Gary Bird:
So that’s a problem right there, what we just talked about right there. So let’s say that someone goes, “Okay, let me use all those softwares and SMC’s dashboard.” This is why dental sometimes is really difficult, because I just gave you six companies. I would use all of them if I was a dental office. That’s going to require somebody actually working in each of those companies, each of those dashboards, and none of them work together. There’s not like mine is in theirs and theirs is in mind. It doesn’t work that way.
Gary Bird:
I really think that’s the future is that someone’s going to figure this out and bring this all together. I’m working on a couple pieces of it and trying to work with a couple companies to-
Bill Neumann:
Integrate.
Gary Bird:
… integrate things all into one place, whether it’s with me or them. I don’t care. I just want to make people’s lives easier. At this point, that’s where we need to go because this frontend, if you can get that data correct on the front end of all those channels we just talked about, then you can start making educated decisions as patient move through the office.
Bill Neumann:
Interesting stuff. This is good stuff, good conversation. A lot of opportunities. Talk to me about the difference between results-based marketing and activity versus activity-based marketing. So results-based marketing versus activity-based marketing.
Gary Bird:
Yeah. So I’ll actually start a little bit higher than that, and then I’ll work through that. So basically most marketing companies don’t know what kind of marketing company they are. What I mean by that is usually they’re tailoring things based on what the client tells them that they want. But if I was going to break it into three buckets, there’s three different kinds of marketing companies out there.
Gary Bird:
Number one is there’s a branding company. That’s generally what you look and feel like. Number two is a marketing company. That’s more strategic. So they’re like, “Man, we’ve got to get more Facebook likes. We’re going to do this SEO thing and we’re going to do the … ” It’s all these … And there’s an endless supply of strategies out there. I mean they abound.
Gary Bird:
Then there’s a lead gen company. A lead gen company is somebody who produces the end result that you want, the opportunity, and they measure that.
Gary Bird:
And so, when you’re talking to a marketing company, they usually don’t tell you right out of the gate, “This is the kind of company that we are,” because, again, they’re going to listen to you and you’re going to say, “Well, I need this and this and this,” and they’re going to tailor that to you.
Gary Bird:
And so, what I have done and what I’ve told people to do is when you are looking for a marketing company and you tell them, “This is what I want,” be really, really clear in what you actually want. So what happens most of the time is a company goes, “Well, I want a new website.” Well, when you tell somebody that, they’re going to build you a website. But if you don’t tell them why you want a new website, then you might not get the end result that you want.
Gary Bird:
So one thing that we do, we always ask why, because we don’t work with everybody. So we’re just like, “Well, why do you want a new website?” “Well, because we want to upgrade our brand.” “Okay. Why do you want to upgrade your brand?” You dig into that. Usually it’s like, “Well, we want more new patients.” Not always, but usually that’s what people are looking for.
Gary Bird:
And so, be really specific on what your end goal is and then listen. Whatever their first solution they offer you, that’s going to tell you where their strength is. So if they’re like, “Oh, we’re going to do it this way,” that’s going to tell you this is what kind of company that I’m dealing with because they always are going to lead with their strength and what they’re familiar with.
Gary Bird:
From there, result-based is usually going to live … And it depends how you define results. If your result is getting a website that you really like, well, then you need to go work with a branding company. We’re not a branding company.
Gary Bird:
If your end goal is, “I want a beautiful website that I love, and that’s my end product of why I’m doing what I’m doing,” there’s tons of branding companies out there. If your end goal is, “I want to be the most liked. I want 10,000 followers on Instagram and I want a strategy for that,” or, “I want to SEO this,” or, “I want to build back links and things like that,” there’s another company that’s going to be able to do that for you.
Gary Bird:
That’s not what we do. We’re a lead generation company. That means we’re measuring results of the end results of the campaign, which are all those metrics that we just worked through. Now can we build a website? Yeah, absolutely. We have to in most cases. Can we measure everything? Yup. Can we go through and help them and support them through what they want to do? Yes. But at the end of the day, all that matters to us is are we driving those patients to them that they want and are we doing it at a price that they can actually afford and scale with?
Gary Bird:
And so, the activity-based marketing companies out there usually are going … And then there’s nothing wrong with this. There’s definitely a need for this. If you’re just like, “Look, I’m really happy with everything, but I think if I just get more followers on social media,” there’s companies out there that will go and do that activity for you.
Gary Bird:
It may or may not net you the end result that you want of more new patients, but if you’re already good with your new patients and you’re just like, “Well, I want more followers,” then that’s what you want to go do. You want to go get more followers or more Google reviews or whatever it may be. So that’s the difference between activity-based and result-based from my perspective.
Bill Neumann:
Okay, Gary. So we are almost at the end of the podcast here. It’s been a great conversation so far. So if I was looking for results, see if I can get this right, if we get away from the patient acquisition and patient retention side, that kind of lead gen, if we’re looking for a different type of lead gen where I might be looking as a DSO for dentists to come work for me, for my DS, or I’m looking for practices to potentially become part of my organization, any tips around that? Because that’s a different type of lead gen, but it’s still a lead gen.
Gary Bird:
It is still lead gen. So dentistry’s a B2C company, or a B2C business, business-to-customer. Your business and my business, we’re B2B. We’re business-to-business. So we understand the B2B side of things. Most dental offices never have had to deal with B2B. Recruiting of dental offices, recruiting of team members and acquiring practices, that’s B2B. It’s a totally, totally different beast.
Gary Bird:
So pre-COVID, the biggest problem in HR for recruiting was, uh-oh, I have too many resumes to sort through for this position. That was like the problem that people had is like, yeah, I put up a job post and I had a hundred people apply for it.
Gary Bird:
What happened in COVID is people decided to leave the dental industry. They decided to go to other things and work from home, or do this or do that and, or start a marketing company, or whatever it may be. So COVID pushed people in an uncomfortable way to do things that they may have not have done if COVID wasn’t interjected there.
Gary Bird:
So now we have a shortage of potential people working in the dental industry, which, by the way, is causing a shortage of dentists to serve patients. There’s actually more patients right now than there are dentists to serve them in the time that the patients want to get served. That’s why we have a longer wait time to get into an office. That creates the problems. It creates friction and it creates problems.
Gary Bird:
So you can’t solve this problem the way that you’ve solved your other problems. What I mean by that is when you do patient marketing, you have to figure out what your avatar is. Who are you trying to target? Then you have to go speak to them. So if you’re doing implants, you’re going to skew a little bit older. If you’re doing general dentistry, you’re going to skew probably towards the mom. If you’re doing ortho, you’re either going to be the businesswoman. You’re going to be the young lady or you’re going to be the young child that the mom’s bringing in. Those are three totally different avatars, three different websites, three different approaches, three different platforms that you’re going to attract those people in.
Gary Bird:
With business to B2B, you are actually going to have to rethink how you’re approaching them. Then you’re also going to have to think about where am I sending them? When they click to go apply for the job, just sending them back to a job post isn’t going to cut it anymore, because you’re competing against a lot of people who are a lot more sophisticated in how they’re approaching it.
Gary Bird:
When I say that, what I mean by that is they’re actually thinking who’s my avatar? Okay. I want a hygienist. Okay. How old is my hygienist that I want? How many kids does she have? How much money does she make? What are her options? What are her fears? What are her anxieties? What are her pain points? Thinking through that. Same thing with acquiring a practice. What practices do we want to buy? What kind of doctor owns them now? What are they experiencing? What are they going …
Gary Bird:
And so, they’re building out these avatars. Then from there, they build out whole websites around those avatars to speak to them. Then they drive these recruits back to their website. The reason that’s so crucial is now you can retarget them. So you can get back in front of them. You can retarget them. You can put videos in front of them.
Gary Bird:
And so, here’s just a simple funnel you can do. Once you identify your avatar, go shoot a video of that avatar, that doctor, that hygienist, that dental assistant, and say, “Okay, I want you to tell our audience here why you love where working for us.” They’ll say, “Oh, I love working here because of this and because of this and because of this and because of this.”
Gary Bird:
Then you take that video and you can run it to every hygienist within a hundred miles of your office on LinkedIn. You can just hit them, hit them, hit them. Anybody who watches it, you can then drive them back to the website. Then you can retarget them with a culture video for the next six months. They may not be looking for a job today, but you know and I know dental offices get stressful. Maybe their boss yells at them today or tomorrow or the next day, and you’ve been in front of them. Now they’re like, “Maybe I should go apply for a job there.”
Gary Bird:
The reason that’s so crucial is you’re not fighting everybody else for that recruit. If they get into the job market, they’re going to get every kind of person reaching out to them. We’re all fighting over these same pool of people. So you have to actually jump out … Stay in that pool, keep doing that, but go outside of the pool and start attracting people who aren’t applying yet.
Bill Neumann:
Great final thoughts, Gary Bird. So, Gary, if people want to find out more about SMC National, how do they get in touch with you or one of your team members?
Gary Bird:
Yeah. So just go to SMCnational.com. You can reach out to us directly. We have a form on there. You can call us. I’m really active on social media. So TheGaryBird are all my social media handles. So anytime you reach out to me there, I’m there and happy to help any way that we can.
Bill Neumann:
That’s great. We’ll make sure that in the show notes, you have SMCnational.com. We’ll have Gary’s contact information on all the social media platforms that he’s on, and he’s on a lot of them. Then the last thing that I’ll just mention one last time, because, selfishly, I was on one of his podcasts and it was a lot of fun, it’s Dental Marketing Theory podcast.
Bill Neumann:
So thanks a lot, Gary, for participating in The Group Dentistry Now Show. It was a lot of fun. Everybody, thanks for listening or watching. I’ll say this episode in particular you want to watch because you want to check out Gary’s cool background. You want to get one for yourself. So that’s it for The Group Dentistry Now Show. I’m Bill Neumann. Until next time. Thanks.
