2 Dental Marketing Experts Talk – Love Your Dental Website Again

1. 2 Dental Marketing Experts Talk – Love Your Dental Website Again

2. Podcast Highlights • Love Your Dental Clinic Website Again • What to Own, What to Delegate • Regular Maintenance and Upgrading • Delegate Minutiae • Knowing What You Get from Your Dental Clinic Website • Be the Dentist

3. Podcast Transcript Hello, and welcome once again to the Dental Marketing Mastery Series. This podcast is brought to you by New Patients Incorporated, and NPI click.com. I’m Howie Horrocks, the Founder of New Patients Incorporated, along with me once again is my friend and partner and the President of New Patients Incorporated, Mark Dilatush.

4. Hello, everybody. Welcome once again to our podcasts. We love having you guys and gals out there. You’ve got me, this is Howie Horrocks, in Vegas, and we’ve got my buddy and partner out there in New Jersey. Mark Dilatush. How you doing Mark? I’m doing fine Howie. We’re a little wet out here in the Northeast. Howie: Really? Mark: Yes. Yes. Noah, came by. The biblical Noah. And he said, Yeah, I’m done. I’m out. I can’t handle this. Right.

5. Howie: Too much even for Noah, eh? Mark: Right. So what are we doing today? This came from the mailbag. I actually, I think it was a combination of several hundred mailbag comments, emails, what have you Facebook posts, etc. That I know dentists struggle, or some of them struggle, with all the details of managing this aspect of their dental clinic marketing. So we figured we would make a podcast out of it. Howie: Yeah, yeah, we’re calling it, Love Your Website Again

6. Love Your Website Again Mark: Anyone who’s been married, you know, you get the inference there. When the website is all shiny and new everybody loves their website. And over time, it just begins to get aged, and dated. It’s like Formica, on your counters. Also, there’s innovation, there’s new tools to build websites these days. And those new tools are more efficient.

7. And these new tools allow you to do many more tasks, from a website and an internet marketing situation. Those tools weren’t even available a year ago. Then there’s the whole, “Google changed their mind for the 2017 time.” And they think this over here is important this week, right? So you know, those new tools and the innovation that happens in our industry allows us to take advantage of Google changing their mind this week.

8. So, the reason why we’re bringing this up is because dentists tend to stress, or at least they come to some point of stress over their dental practice website after it’s built. In other words, when it’s built, they’re all excited. “Yeah, I’ve got my new website! Look Mom, here’s the URL. And it’s nice and everybody’s happy and the staff loves it, everything’s nice and fresh and new.

9. But over time, the details of owning operating managing a website, especially through a 20 year career, you know, it can be kind of an overhead right? And in a lot of cases, if it’s a solo practitioner, they don’t delegate this to someone else, either a dental marketing firm or having a marketing person on staff, but whatever.

10. Normally, if they don’t delegate all these details to somebody else, they end up taking it on their own. A lot of them are lost, missed, some of them in some cases stolen, or ignored. It becomes just like another 10 tasks that you have to deal with, besides patient care, staff, management and everything else that dentist has to deal with. So what we wanted was to assemble all these things into a podcast. And show you how to love your website again.

11. What to Own, What to Delegate So the first steps are the obvious things. We know the dentists who hate their website the most are the dentists who’ve had their URLs stolen by a nefarious website company. Okay. No, the words in the URL they had were owned, actually, by the website company and the website company says, “Well, we’ll sell it back to you for whatever, $4,000. Actually, there was an example of this. I think it was on Dental Town recently.

12. Howie: Yeah, just recently. Mark: In April I think. Somewhere around there. So that’ll make a dentist hate there website instantly. Right? Okay, so the lesson there is, you the dentist, always own the URL. But if you want to delegate the management of it, you make whoever you choose the Admin, so they can’t take away your URL, but they can pay attention when things need attention.

13. And websites need attention. They need attention. About as often as you power wash your deck. Okay, you know, once a year, or once every other year, depending on how many years you secured your domain for. So that’s a detail.

14. Howie: Yeah, you know, and Mark, it’s a good point, because that’s a detail that is easy to forget for the dentist. Because when that domain renewal comes up, and you know, that’s kind of like “We’re knocking on your door, you need pay attention to this!” And you don’t because maybe you think its spam, or you don’t know what it’s for and then one day your website’s missing.

15. Mark: Yeah and normally you don’t even know it for like 30 days, okay? A patient walks in and goes, “Hey, Doc, your website is down.” And then there’s this mad scramble. Howie: Yeah. That’s just one little detail that can completely wreck your month.

16. Mark: Right. Exactly. So now let’s take that one classic example. And let’s expand upon it because for a lot of our clients, we buy defensive domains. Yeah, so what’s a defensive domain? A defensive domain would be (your town) Smiles dot com. Let’s say that’s your main URL, we would want to purchase all the variations of that on behalf of our client. Right? So there’s not just one domain renewal. There might be 8 or 12. Howie: Right.

17. Mark: Or even 16. It depends on how many you know, we got from a defensive position standpoint. So those come in email notifications and pretty soon that dentist gets kind of overwhelmed, right? So now that’s just a URL. Now let’s go to hosting. And most dentists don’t understand what hosting is. And that’s fine, you don’t have to understand what hosting is, the only thing you really have to understand is that you’re going to get a notice from your host that’s going to say “it’s time to renew your hosting.” It happens either on a monthly or annual basis.

18. Some of them will go two or three years. But that’s another detail. And then recently, Google, again, they hiccupped and they said, “Well, we need everybody to have SSL on their websites, or they’re going to mark them as unsecure so that the surfing public knows it could be insecure.” So you need to add SSL to all your pages of your dental office website.

19. And of course, there’s another detail. “So how do I get that done? Who do I talk to? How fast will they get it done?” So on and so forth, until pretty soon a dentist doesn’t like their website anymore because there’s so much of this. You know what it is? Its dental clinic website minutiae. Okay, it’s, you know, like getting a glimpse of pollen on your car right after you wash it, right? It keeps coming month after month, week after week, and you keep washing your damn car, and it keeps turning green.

20. Regular Maintenance and Upgrading So you have that and you have your domain renewals, and you have your SSL and you have all this crap that you have to deal with.

21. And then every about every time you change out your cell phone, I don’t know what the exact stats are on cell phones, I think cell phones, from somewhere around 30 to 34 months, people swap out their cell phones. And we will typically rebuild a client site about every 48 to 60 months, somewhere between four and five years, and we don’t do it just because we can and we don’t do it just because it means business… That’s kind of silly. Our job is to conserve marketing resources, not spend them so we don’t do it for those reasons.

22. We do it because it keeps everything fresh, updated. Most recent information, the right marketable attributes, the most popular marketable attributes, the conveniences, technologies, the highlights, online dental scheduling, everything in the website is all up to date. And all properly placed all properly messaged and documented. About every, let’s say, let’s just say four years, but every four to five years.

23. You should plan financially, to replace your dental practice website, at least renew it and refresh it. I mean, let’s face it, by the time you refresh and renew a website, you might have just built a new one. Right? So that those details and rebuilding the site with the newest latest greatest in Dentistry, gallery of pictures, staff, hours, services, amenities, everything. Your practice doesn’t stay stagnant. Your practice is always evolving. If it’s stagnant, you can’t afford a website anyway. Okay, because sooner or later, you’ll go out of business and you won’t need a website. Right? So then you really hate your website.

24. Howie: Yeah. By then you really hate you website. Mark, this might be a good time for us to take a little break. And then we come back and we’ve got to entertain our audience some more. All right, don’t go away. We’ll be right back.

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26. Delegate Minutiae Howie: Okay, we’re learning how to fall in love with your dental clinic website again.

27. Mark: It’s funny, you don’t really know these things are going to happen until after you own it. You know, sort of like the first time you owned a new car, Wow, great, you know, I have a payment, but I have a brand new smelling car. And then invariably, 40,000 miles hits and you do brakes, new tires. You need all these new things. And websites are not that much different.

28. I’m not gonna say constant maintenance, but it does need maintenance. And it should be renewed or updated, or, using the car analogy, a new lease should be found every four years. If you do that and you delegate all the mundane stuff… I don’t want to make this a commercial for what we do, but that’s what we did.

29. We are our own CMS, our Customer Satisfaction Managers. That’s what they do. They manage all those things, all the minutiae that goes into owning a website, keeping it up to date, adding the new information, new BIOS, new employees, new, whatever, right? As they happen, almost in real time.

30. And then, of course, your domain needs to be renewed? Fine, they do it. And if your host needs to be renewed? Yep, fine, they do it. Same thing with your SSL that needs to be renewed or installed, yep, they do it. It’s just something that you don’t really have to be stressed over. So because you should love your website all the time, not just the first three months, when it’s brand new.

31. You should be able to look at your website and be have the sense of pride in it, that it is the latest greatest and that it is updated. You don’t really have to worry about it, you can be assured that your patients aren’t going to be turned off by it, you know, we’re not going to put, you know, bloody implant surgical sites on the front page of your website.

32. Howie: Yeah, we’ve been asked to but, we don’t do that stuff. Even if you want us to we won’t. Mark: I can send you literally thousands of dental URLs that have them.

33. So that’s the first real big set of steps to loving your dental office website, always loving your website, is to have somebody else handle all the minutiae so that you don’t have to. And have somebody else there to update it as those updates come in. Because, you know, we can’t make stuff up. When you have an update, you know, email it over to us and we’ll just go in and update your website. Anyway. So that’s a great way to love your website. And then the remaining way to love your website is to know what you get from it, which is a really good way to love website forever.

34. Knowing What You Get from Your Website I see the numbers. In my analytics report, I can physically see that these people came to my website, which page they clicked. But you know, what, I can’t see what it generated. For me, I can only see in analytics, like traffic, I can’t really see if it creates anything. So… well, yeah, you can see a call, you can see traffic, like I know when somebody’s been to our website, for instance, right?

35. Same thing with a dental website. But once you install the call tracking in the dashboard and you start getting calls, and the call, says “existing customers or “existing patient” and then the call says “social media” or the call says “organic search” or the call says “Google business page” then you’re looking at your dashboard going “Ah, now I really love my website. Look what it’s doing for me.” Right?

36. Now, okay. So if you if you remove all this stress, dental websites shouldn’t be stressful, they really shouldn’t. Here’s how you think about your website. Your website is a storefront on Main Street.

37. Everyone passes by, or searches. And they when they search down the street, they see your window front, they go to your storefront, which is basically your homepage. And if it looks inviting enough, i.e., the main navigation at the top (probably) of your webpage. If it looks inviting, maybe it has some inviting window treatments in those front windows, maybe it’s a video, maybe it’s a picture of the dentist, and maybe it’s a picture of the dentist with their family posed properly. Whatever it is, as long as it looks inviting, and the main navs (navigations) are proper, then they’ll come in. And they normally come in through “meet the doctor.”

38. So once they meet the doctor, they’ll go from there through to things that they may or may not be interested in. And that changes from potential patient to potential patient. Anyway, the point is, is that your website is your storefront to the internet world, not only the internet world, but the offline world. If you’re doing any kind of offline, let’s say you’re doing mail, let’s say you’re doing a mail campaign. Well, we know statistically the 35% of the people that actually act off of that mail campaign, call the number on the mailer, the rest of them, go to your website and interact there and call from your website. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could see that in the dashboard?

39. Howie: Yeah Mark: That would really be cool. Right? Howie: Yeah, that would prevent you from perhaps being disappointed in your mailer results and thinking that every call you’re getting is coming from the website. I mean, we’ve seen that over and over again. Mark: Yeah. Literally thousands of people

40. Howie: They’re not realizing that what is actually happening is they’re getting the mailer and then going to your website. Mark: Right. Or, you know, being referred by an existing patient and typing in your practice name in Google into their phone and going to Google business page and making their appointment from there.

41. Be the Dentist Right? That’s how you begin to love your dental practice website. When we did our interviews of the dentist and they tell us all this minutia… “I hate that crap. Get that off my desk.” Okay, fine. “I want to keep it updated but I don’t want to think about it.

42. I don’t want to write it, and do it.” Okay, fine. Okay, we’ll take care of it, check, check, check, check. “But I want to know what it’s doing for me. There’s no way to judge it. Do I make another website or update this one? Do I go with a different company? I don’t have a clue if my prior investment in my website has even paid me back yet.” Okay. That’s the dashboard. Right? So those are…what most dentists want is they want to have their storefront well maintained for them.

43. They don’t want to be the guy or gal who cleans the glass, changes the window dressing, or changes the departments inside the front windows. They don’t want to do that stuff, and be the person who pays the lease on the rent of the storefront. Okay, they just want to be a dentist and take care of patients. So when we asked “What would make you happy with your website?” It was like verbal vomit. You know, “here’s all the reasons I hate my website.”

44. So we just kind of, you know, assemble them all. And some of them we had to interpret because some of the responses we got, you know, kind of singular in focus, not global and application. But when we got down to the end of it, we said well, what would really make a dentist happy with their website is if it worked, if they knew what it was generating for them. In other words, the ROI was there. And if they didn’t have to worry about any of the minutia and details involved with maintaining. That’s basically what most dentists want. Okay.

45. Howie: Pretty simple Mark: Pretty dang simple, right? So that’s how you love your dental clinic website. Again. Your website is just sitting there ready to be loved.

46. Howie: Yes, it is. Well, we certainly thank you all for tuning in again with us and we hope that we’ll have you back here next time. All right. Bye now. We hope you’ve enjoyed our podcast today. You can get all our podcasts on iTunes, Stitcher, and Libsyn.com. And on our websites, newpatientsinc.com.