In this article, dental practice management consulting adviser Ed O’ Keefe will share to you about a critical element called “Association vs. Disassociation”. The dental practice management consulting adviser will share to you how important this critical element is in your dental practice as you use it in offering your dental patients the treatments that they need to have. And this is something that the dental practice management consulting adviser focuses specifically at their dental practice management website!

Here’s what the dental practice management consulting adviser will share to you about this critical element in your dental practice…

In your dental practice, when you get the patients in your practice and offer them the dental treatment that you have for them, as a dental practice management consulting adviser I would tell you that there’s something called “association vs. disassociation”. So when people have problems and they’re really emotionally affected by them, they’re very associated to the picture as well as they’re very associated to the event. When I got trained in a lot of the mental stuff that I teach my clients, I learned how to cure phobias in just around 15 minutes! And people tell me “Well, there’s just no way you can do that!”. And I tell them, “Trust me, I mean, if you got a real phobia I can help you get over it really quickly!”. So for people who are always having nightmares or those who keep going through the same problems over and over again in their past, the first step in all of it is that I tell them: “I know what the problem is… you’re re-running the same movie over and over again.. but this is the difference: you’re in the movie, and you’re seeing it through your own eyes!” When I work with athletes, the first thing I tell them is that when they visualize, they can’t see themselves on the screen; they got to be in the movie, imagining that they’re playing that thing over and over again.

And it’s the same thing in your dental practice. Just like when you are practicing a case presentation, you don’t watch yourself on the screen doing it… you go inside your head, and pretend like you’re looking through your own eyes talking to a dental patient. That’s good when you’re trying to learn something new or feeling good about something or visualizing your future; getting in the movie, and feeling the feelings. It’s bad when you are experiencing negative feelings that are holding you back, right? So as a dental practice management consulting adviser, I always tell my clients that the first thing we do is we have to disassociate people from whatever is holding them back. So the way you do that is you pop them out of the picture. So say there’s somebody who’s got some mental thing going on, I will say: “Just pop yourself out of the movie!” Also, you have to ask your dental patients questions that associate them to their pains. If you ask questions like: “Why are you not happy about your current situation?”, and with this, you’re creating pains. I want you to associate them until they make the decision for their pains. I want to disassociate themselves from their objections, because I don’t want them worried about the price, when we’re looking out for their overall treatment! So we tell them: “ Set that aside for a moment…”, “ We’ll go beyond that for a moment…”, or “Push that off for now. Let’s talk about this…”. And you can give them this question: “After we’ve gone through this, just tell me what it would be like; and if we went through this whole thing and we got you the goals, what would change in your life?”. With this, it disassociates them from other objections and puts them in the future, and associates them to what we want them to associate with!

As a dental marketer, you should find helpful ways in promoting your business. In your practice, you should get more dental patients. For this, you need to have a recommendation from a dental practice management consulting adviser. In this article, dental practice management consulting adviser Ed O’ Keefe would like to give you the ways to achieve success in your dental marketing business. What the dental practice management consulting adviser recommends is for you to follow these ways all the time in your business.

1st Recommendation: Sub-Niche Your Practice

The first recommendation that the dental practice management consulting adviser would give you is to sub-niche your practice. You can start by promoting other services. In the adviser’s case, they are promoting an “Invisalign” for patients who needs whiter, stronger teeth. He asks his patients what their ultimate goals are, and he has Invisalign as a solution to help them get straighter teeth. But if they want to get straighter, whiter teeth right away, then they can present the whole treatment plan to the patient immediately. So start by sub-niching your practice. Go after your patients with dental problems and have dentistry as the solution for them.

2nd Recommendation: Go For “Lead-Generation”

The second recommendation that the dental practice management consulting adviser would give you is to “lead-generate” through advertising your services. With this you can actually help people identify you as a good dentist by overwhelming them with “before and afters” proof, wherein you can educate them through DVD’s, powerpoints, and online. You can educate your dental patients through seminars, local workshops, or online.

3rd Recommendation: Open The “Floodgates” To Your Dental Patients

The third recommendation that the dental practice management consulting adviser would give you is to open the floodgates to your dental patients. A lot of doctors,with their associates, open the floodgates to their new patients; and the patients just keep coming in to their dental practice. Then 1 out of 10, or 2 out of 10 patients that came in are going to want cosmetic dentistry or more of high-end restorative dentistry. Remember, your objective here is to get that dental patient in your business.

These are the ways that the dental practice management consulting adviser would give you as you go with your business. First, start by sub-niching your practice, then “lead- generate” by advertising, and then opening the floodgates to your new dental patients. Go with these recommendations, and you’ll gain more patients in your practice, and become successful in your business!

In this article, dental town adviser Ed O’ Keefe will give you an update on what’s happening in the dental profession today that’s new, that’s hot, that is making practices more successful than ever. The dental town adviser will share to you the reason why now is the best time to be in a dental practice. And the dental town adviser will also share to you how to systemize your practice so that you can gain more patients. And this is something they focus specifically at their dental practice website!

Here’s what’s Ed is going to share with you:

Now with the talk of the economy and everything that’s going on, the reality is that there has never been a better time to be a dentist, or to be a marketer of the dental practice right now! And that’s what I have realized as a dental town adviser. With the “baby boomer” explosion that’s occuring right now and seniors living longer than ever before, there’s never been a better time to reposition and start sub-niching dental practices. Repositioning is about making the practice something for a particular demographic group where they have a great deal of discussion to spend whether they have good coverages, and they have problems like, for example, how to market dental implants. I always think like dental implants is the easiest thing to make big money quickly in dentistry, because you have frustrated patients, people out there with dentures and partials/missing teeth who have serious health problems if they don’t have natural teeth or strong teeth, even if they’re fake. Those are real concerns out there, and since people are living longer they want to have the stronger, healthier, more durable teeth. So to market to that kind of population is really simple because they have those kind of dental problems. For example, here’s a person who have bad dentures and partials for years, and there would be a $36,000-dental care required for her to go to the dentist and have the problem taken cared of… plus there would be an additional cosmetic work of course, because once you start to fix the function, you would want to fix the appearance! So marketing your services to this person would be a very good idea, because it would solve the dental problem that she has!

Now, the biggest problems that a lot of doctors have in general is that they get more education, more clinical training, and they think that that’s going to fix their income. But the reality is that the answer lies in the marketing of their services. It’s like your “backdooring” it instead of trying to tell everybody that you’re the best dentist there is (while anyone can say that and everybody’s saying that!). So as a dental town adviser, what we do differently than just about anybody else is we just teach them how to sub-niche and that’s really going to be where the future of the next level of marketing of dentistry is! It’s really like having 2, or 3, or 4 mini practices in one practice! One of the things that we did is in the area of Invisalign. Invisalign is very well known and so I know that a lot of my doctors were promoting Invisalign, and they were struggling with it. They went out and got trained, spent all weekend, and so some of them have tested and tried the Open House. Well, we know how to run seminars so we just shifted the gears, we told them how to run Open House and seminars. And if you do an Open House correctly using marketing, you can’t just throw it out to the open house because you have nobody showing up, but if you do multi-seminar marketing, do it the right way like we teach! We had guys do $100,000 in one day in their dental practices and just recently, one of our implant clients did a workshop for niche-marketing, targeted-marketing, and they went to a little area that’s outside where it’s like a retirement community of people. And within 45 minutes, 20 implant cases came from it and referrals were coming from it. And it went over $200,000 of revenue in the first month and a half. So it’s just kind of like shifting having to do with the thinking of how you’re going with your business, we could do 1 or 2 of these every quarter and sell more dentistry than doing mailers all day long. You see, it’s all about the fact that the dentist has to be willing to change this whole thinking about price, about markets, and about marketing!

As a dental town adviser, what I’m doing is making them very efficient, so really, one of the doctors that I’m best suited for is the guy who’s like actually marketing a verse, who finds it painful, who finds it troublesome, who only likes to do it under a desperate circumstances. It’s because I can actually systemize it in a way that he doesn’t have to pay attention to it everyday, he doesn’t have to be involved in it all the time! You can have periodic events that feed the whole practice. And that’s very cool! In addition to this, one thing we’ve realized especially with dental practices is that the previous scale are continuing to grow and getting off the “dental treadmill” or the “rollercoaster income” kind of analogies. Now, we’re training the staff to run all the marketing for the doctors! So even if it’s a different language to them, we got systems that would teach the staff member or team member, and we do these trainings all the time. So if you hire somebody new, we’ll train them and turn them into a little mini-marketing expert in your office, and that’s the way they should run it, and it creates that ideal lifestyle that we teach our doctors as well. The keyword there is “system”. You should know that all of the wealthy people in America is traced to such systems, and that’s the “make-a-break” difference in businesses, and every dentist should find out about them and investigate them!

In this article, dental practice management consulting adviser Lloyd Irvin will share to you the importance of “traffic” and “conversion” in online dental marketing. The dental practice management consulting adviser will share to you the definition of traffic and how getting it to your dental website is a must in online dental marketing. And the dental practice management consulting adviser will also share to you the definition of conversion and how to find your conversion rates in online dental marketing. And this is something that we focus specifically at our dental practice management website!

Here’s what the dental practice management consulting adviser will share to you about traffic and conversion:

On Traffic:

What is “traffic”? Traffic refers to the number of people coming in to your website daily through the Internet. Before, people use the yellow pages to look up and search for things they want to buy. Today, although some people still use the yellow pages, there’s an entire sector of people that if they want to go and buy things that they want, they go to the Internet, use search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, wherein they type in whatever they’re looking for and they spend time just trying to find out what they’re looking for, and they do their research online! As a dental practice management consulting adviser, I would tell you to understand this fact: traffic=real people! Hundreds and millions of people are searching for things online every single day. Online, they look in for Cosmetic Dentistry, Implant Dentistry, dental terms, etc. People are searching on the Internet because they have problems, desires, and want them fixed/achieved right now! In online dental marketing, your job is to make sure that you get these people into your dental marketing website, and into your dental practice as well!

On Conversion:

What is “conversion”? Conversion means that the people visiting your website becomes your new patient (and this should be your goal for your dental marketing business!). As a dental practice management consulting adviser, I would tell you to structure your website in a way that you get people to enter their name, contact number, and personal information, and then they would call your office and they officially become your patient in your dental practice! Now, conversion rates can be found in four areas:

Website Opt-In Rate: If you have a website and you are collecting names, e-mails, and full contact informations, you can track down and see what your conversion rate is with this. If you are using postcards or any other kinds of media, you can track your conversion rate for your online traffic.

Website Call-In Rate: You can also have conversion using call-in rates; wherein potential patients call into your office through your website, and in the process, they become your dental patients!

Office Appointment Rate: For this, as potential patients are calling into your dental office, you can get your staff to have useful “scripts” that they can follow so that there’s a big chance of getting that potential patient into your dental practice. And having these scripts will definitely make a big difference in your practice!

Auto-Responder Conversion Rate: Now, a lot of people have heard about the auto- responders, but are the e-mail that are in the auto-responders converting? If you have a 10-step auto responder that is automatically done, what is the percentage of people that call your office after they get e-mail#1? Or e-mail#2? Or e-mail#3? Or e-mail#4? You should also be converting these. Imagine this, if you track your results, you found out that 40% of those people got email#4 and called; and only 5% called from e-mail#1; 15% called from email#2; and 20% called from e-mail#3. With this, you can move e-mail#4 to position#2. In here, we’re trying to get them in as fast as possible! And while there in your auto-responder if your email#4 came in one day into position#8, but on that same day people are on Google looking for a dentist, and if they also opted into your competitor’s website, and your competitor’s first e-mail got them, then you’ve lost them! And if losing them is worth, say, $20,000.00, you should be concerned and worried, and you should be interested in how you can improve that!

Now, given these facts, as a dental practice management consulting adviser, I’d tell you to get as much traffic as you can into your website, be mindful of your conversion and track it down always, and increase both your traffic and conversion in order for you to make more money in your dental marketing business. Always remember and keep in mind my “magic formula”: Traffic + Conversion = Cash!