[00:00:06] My name's Luke, like Dr. Garg said. We've been working together for about a year. Just to give you a little bit about my origin story. So I was a designer and I was working in New York City doing motion graphics and things like that. So title sequences or show packages for like Fox, movies, like the titles.
[00:00:31] And I went to school for this in Savannah, Georgia and I hated, literally hated what I did once I went to work. So I decided to move back home to Pensacola, Florida. This was like late 2013. And I started to put together a plan on how to help businesses with their long term goals. What's your outcome for the next year? What's your outcome for the next 24 months?
[00:00:58] And I partnered with, who's still my business partner, Justin Huell. He's more on the tech and operations side. I was running into tech issues and my wife's like, Hey, you should talk to my cousin Justin. So we partnered together and we formally started HIP in I think August of 2014. And at the time, you know, we would work with anyone and everyone.
[00:01:21] I think we even had like a fishing charter that we worked with and, you know, go out and catch snapper in the Gulf of Mexico or now Gulf of America. But, you know, we would do anything. And then an orthopedist found out about us. And at the time, there's a very famous sports medicine orthopedist, Dr. James Andrews. He does, you know, RG3, Tony Bradshaw, all the big guys.
[00:01:47] And his fellows that he trained didn't want to go to work for the hospital. So they started contacting us kind of one by one. And we did an incredible job with them. And they started to refer us to their friends. So general surgery practices, bariatrics, plastic surgeons. And late 2015, an orthodontist, the name Ben Fishbein, found out about us. He was local. So Gulf Coast area.
[00:02:15] And we started working with him in 2016. By 2018, he became the fastest growing orthodontist in the country. And so he started to put on his own event. Everybody wanted to know, hey, how are you growing this fast? What are you doing? And so that launched us into specialty dental orthodontics. By 2020, we only worked in the dental space. And then, you know, we worked with a lot of orthodontists, obviously, like Dr. Garg said.
[00:02:45] But then more and more dentists started finding out about us. Or people were in partnerships and pediatric dentists and ortho. And so we just started working more and more in specialty dental. Met Dr. Garg maybe a year and a half ago through a mutual friend. And then we started working together. So fast forward today. We have over 500 offices across the country that we're partnered with that are our clients.
[00:03:14] And we don't just focus in marketing. Yes, that's what we're known for. But we realized early on, and Dr. Garg brought this up, you have to have tracking. So we have our own software. It's called Practice Beacon. Tracks all leads from first touch point to starting treatment.
[00:03:31] And then we realized, well, even if someone has the right marketing, even if someone can track it, if their team's not trained to focus on the right things or have the best scripts or Harrison's going to talk about sales tomorrow. He's in the back of the room, the attractive bald guy, newlywed. I actually officiated his wedding. So that was cool. But he's going to talk about sales tomorrow. If you don't have all those pieces, then you have leakage in your funnel.
[00:04:00] And so then we started to focus on education. So I have a book series today. I'm not sure how I'm going to give it away. I thought about closing my eyes and tossing it. But somebody could get injured. But I'll give it away. You can also get these on Amazon. And I have a number of other books as well. So really our focus is marketing, software, and education. Does that make sense? And we find that those three things kind of tied together can continue to help practices grow.
[00:04:30] So today I want to talk about something that most practice owners, and in fact, most small business owners, they don't quite get right. And so I'll explain this. I've called it the congruence effect. And I want to share a short parable. So I like to garden. Anybody else grow stuff in here? Maybe? Cool. North Florida is not so good for gardening, but I try. This is actually my daughter Aislinn.
[00:05:01] That was like two years ago or so. She's more grown up now. She's eight. So anyway, let's just consider two different types of gardeners. Okay? One is focused on symptoms. So pulling weeds and killing bugs. And, you know, I do everything organic. So it can be a nightmare if you're not using pesticides because bugs will just destroy your stuff.
[00:05:26] But how you grow, and if you guys have grown stuff, you know everything comes down to the soil. If you have the right soil and the right nutrients, I mean, it can even go two or three weeks without raining or watering because the soil is holding that. There's a healthy balance. And so I find that a lot, I mean, I've talked to thousands of doctors. I find that a lot of them are really focused on symptoms.
[00:05:53] They're not really focused on the root cause all of the time. And they're missing some of the foundational elements. But notice when you focus on the soil here, this middle bed has been like this for a month. And I think I've pulled one weed out of it. This is one that I have to go and de-weed and then bring in the right soil. But then that is when you can actually grow the right harvest.
[00:06:22] So I've gardened for six years now. I have all the stuff. You know, I have this beautiful area of 15 beds. But if I don't continue to invest, this isn't a one-time thing. If I don't continue to invest in the compost, in wood chips, in the soil, then my harvest is not going to be very good. And it's the same thing with what I'm going to talk about today. So I'm going to parallel this. You're like, why is this guy talking about gardening and soil? I'm going to make it make sense.
[00:06:52] So let me start with the question. How many of you guys, and this can be conversational too. So if you guys have questions as I'm talking, definitely weigh in. How many of you have Googled yourself recently? You've gone to the internet. You've typed in searches. Okay, good. So I don't just mean, you know, to check your rankings or to click on a website that you already know.
[00:07:18] I mean to really look at your brand through the patient's eyes, right? How does a stranger go to the internet and search and then interact with your brand? And a lot of times they're typing in long tail keywords. What I mean with that, and even like voice now, it's a sentence, right? So it's not just best dentist near me. They're actually searching for a problem that they have.
[00:07:46] And so if you're doing that, if you're looking at short tail, long tail, seeing where you come up, seeing where competitors come up. What's your number of reviews? What's the call to action button like? What are your responses like to your reviews? So we find, we audit hundreds of practices. We find that a lot of them, they don't even really respond to their reviews. And I'll tell you why this is important.
[00:08:13] I want you guys to dig in, not right now, but we'll set aside some time at the end to do a little bit of a workshop. Dig in like someone who's really researching to become a patient. Maybe somebody just moved to your area and they need a dentist. Maybe someone got a referral and they want to verify how long does it take to actually find you if they're not searching your name directly.
[00:08:38] And when they find the site, you know, I don't want you, again, don't dismiss it because you already know it. Read the copy. What does your headline say? What's the call to action say? Is it easy to navigate across the site? Do you have an offer? We just talked about offers and I get it if some people may not want to have dollar off offers, but sometimes they can work very well. So as you scroll, what differentiates you from the competitor?
[00:09:06] Does the design of the website, does the user experience, does it feel like a specialized provider? Dr. Gard brought up Clear Choice and I sent him this graphic and it was $5,000 off. So to kind of explain this in psychology, everybody remembers the store JCPenney, right? I think it's pretty much done.
[00:09:33] They're still won by us, but I think they've pretty much closed most of their stores. But there's this famous case study about psychology with pricing. I think it's from the 80s. And they used to have a CEO and part of his marketing strategy was to do a dollar off. So it'd be X off whatever products in the store. Well, a new CEO came in and said, we're not going to do that. We're just going to offer the best price, the lowest price. And it makes sense, right?
[00:10:03] Let's just show our best. What happened is sales plummeted. And if you think about how you buy, I know myself, you know, I buy high quality things, but if there is an offer that can incentivize me, right? And we find that a lot of times with patients, the right offer crafted in the right way, it really can drive volume. Now, if you want to stay boutique and you don't really want to grow that fast,
[00:10:31] it doesn't have to be something that you incorporate in. But Dr. Garg and I are going to try something like this, right? And make it even better, but we're going to craft it in the right way. And so this can really bring a lot of growth to your practice, but you have to differentiate as well. And so, you know, just trying to race to the bottom. Yeah, I'm not an advocate for that. But if we can market quality, if we can market a good offer,
[00:10:59] then that can really add a lot of growth to the practice. What's keeping you up at night? So after 12 years of, you know, talking and working with doctors, I think I have a good sense of what keeps doctors up at night. And I can tell you it's not branding. I'm going to use this word brand today, and it's not just your logo. To me, your brand is everything. Like everything that represents you,
[00:11:27] everything that makes a patient think a certain thought about you, that's your brand. So nobody here is, you know, laying awake thinking about their color palette. The number one thing I hear is, and I saw this with some of the messages in the group, is patient flow. So I used to host masterminds in Pensacola, and every single doctor we'd go around the room, I just need more new patients. I just need more new patients, right? It makes sense.
[00:11:55] How do I keep the schedule full? How do I keep growing? Number two is case acceptance. How do I get patients to say yes? And here's the thing, if they showed up to your practice, in my mind, and you guys can correct me, they're already halfway there. Like I don't take off of work to go see the dentist, right? Like that's a commitment already that they're calling, they're inquiring, they're coming in.
[00:12:22] And so how do we make it easier for them to say yes? That's the goal. Number three, and I know some of you are dealing with this right now, and this whole talk is not to poo poo on DSOs or corporate or anything like that. But I hear this all the time. Number three is corporate competition. DSOs that open up a mile down the street or in the same shopping center can sometimes make you feel squeezed, right?
[00:12:50] And I heard this actually this week. Somebody text in our team and said, hey, we're going to have to get more aggressive because the DSO just bought my main competitor and they're going to pump a ton of money into their marketing. So we need to figure that out. So to me, these are the real pain points. It's not logos. It's not color schemes and rightfully so.
[00:13:14] But what I want to show you and talk to you about your brand, I think it's actually the key to unlock all three of these things. So when we're talking about competitive threats, right? And competition is kind of a dirty word with doctors, right? Because doctors like to collaborate, but you all do have competition, I think, right? DSOs are not beating you on clinical quality.
[00:13:39] Again, when I go to Clear Choice and they have good marketing, I don't know that if I went there, they would serve me better than you guys would, right? I think, you know, private care is the best care that you can get. You know, we say don't judge a book by its cover, but we do. Whether it's someone who, you know, you're meeting for the first time or you're meeting a new team member or in this case a patient doing research, they're instantly thinking, can I trust this person? Is this where I want to go?
[00:14:09] Is this who I want drilling on my teeth? So a 20-24 survey found that 89.7%, almost 90% of patients begin their search for a new dentist somewhere online. So it could be ChatGPT, it could be Google, it could be perplexity, it could be a number of different, Yelp, you know, the different apps, but almost 90%.
[00:14:34] And when they search, corporate groups, DSOs, you know, they have clean websites, professional photos, hundreds of recent reviews, consistent messaging. That's something else about corporate is they have, you know, a CMO and they have marketing managers and they have a brand kit. So there's consistent messaging across every platform.
[00:14:57] We just did a citation analysis of a practice and he had rebranded three times. And so there was health grade accounts with old names and old phone numbers. Bigger groups have strategies for this and processes for this so they can really maintain the message. So a patient, when they maybe make an option, they're not choosing better care, they chose better perception. How's it make me feel?
[00:15:26] And that's what we're really up against. That's what you're up against. But the good news is, and this is kind of why I'm excited to share this, is it's really kind of easy to change. Yes, it takes time, it takes financial investment, but it's doable because you already have the competitive advantage. You can already offer better care, a better experience, better treatment because you're not constricted by DSOs or budgets or, you know, spreadsheets.
[00:15:56] A lot of these people become so budget conscious. Again, I don't want to, you know, poo poo on any, some of you may be affiliated with DSOs. We certainly work with a lot of practices who are, but typically when they come in, our clients tell us, hey, we had to cut this thing or we have to use this different type of material or product. And so that's why I really advocate for private practice because you can continue to offer the best care. And that's what patients want.
[00:16:25] You know, we hear this thing, shop local. Patients want someone who cares. They want a relationship. They want to feel like they matter. So the real opportunity is making sure that your brand messaging matches your quality. You're not starting from zero. You have the foundation. In many cases, you guys just need to communicate it better. And maybe some of you are, but I think there's always room to improve. And we, I find this in my own business.
[00:16:54] I'm kind of a serial entrepreneur at this point. So I have multiple businesses and I have to always evaluate them and say, hey, are we doing the best job with our brand and with our messaging? So here's some numbers. And some of these are enlightening. I think 44% of patients who find a dentist through a mobile search actually move forward and book an appointment with them.
[00:17:19] So if someone is searching on the phone, half of those people searching on the phone actually move through and book an appointment. The average patient spends about two weeks doing research. Yes, there are people who impulse buy or impulse book, but a lot of people are going to the Internet. I know I am and I'm using chat GPT or I'm using perplexity or I'm using Google and I'm doing research and I'm taking my time.
[00:17:49] I was telling a story earlier with Harrison and somebody here that I had a bilateral hernia repair. And I spent weeks doing research on somebody who's very, very specialized. I read the reviews. I watched the videos. I looked at competition. I spent a lot of time doing this before I made a choice. 76% of patients judge a provider's credibility based on website quality. So it's not your credentials.
[00:18:18] It's not your years of experience. It's about how professional and polished your website looks. Your online presence is credibility. And they're not just checking one place. On average, someone interacts, you know, five to seven times. There's five to seven touch points that happen before they make a decision. Google, your website, social media, reviews. Maybe they call. Maybe they fill out a form and you call them.
[00:18:47] So a phone call or text message or voicemail takes place. And so you have to be consistent across all these channels. And there has to be training for each person working through these channels. So the takeaway for me here is your digital presence, it's not optional. It's how patients evaluate before they ever walk through the door. So let's talk about reviews. And most of you here all know that reviews are very important and powerful.
[00:19:16] But I want to give you guys some data. 87% of patients read online reviews before choosing a healthcare provider. And, you know, it's not just enough to have reviews. And I also think that this is where we can talk a little bit about Google Business Profile. So Google built the profile and the algorithm around human behavior, around a holistic process.
[00:19:44] So if someone leaves a review, they want to see a response. And Google actually rewards you for this. So we have a process for our partners within reputation management where we're automating getting them reviews through our software. But then we're also leaving reviews that are HIPAA compliant. So we're checking off the boxes of Google Business Profile and then you get rewarded. So another stat, and this was pretty crazy.
[00:20:14] When I was doing research for this, I was reminded of this stat. Businesses with 100 or more images on their Google Business Profile get over 500% more phone calls. That's wild. And how many of you guys have 100 images on your Google Business Profile? I go to Google Business Profiles and most offices have maybe 20, maybe 25, maybe 50, but 100 is a lot. But guess what?
[00:20:43] You guys have smartphones now. So you can go around and snap images. You can take images with patients if they give consent. You can take images with team members. You can go to community outings and you can upload all of those to your Google Business Profile. And look, you know, the data is crazy. You guys can fact check this. You can get many, many more phone calls again because you're layering in that human element. To paint the picture, a patient is spending two weeks looking.
[00:21:12] They're checking your website, cross-referencing Instagram, maybe getting a text or a voicemail. So the critical question is, what story are they getting? So even on that new patient phone call, is someone edifying Dr. Garg? Is someone, his front desk telling the patient why he's different, his years of experience? And is all of that also portrayed in his ads like I talked about on his website? All of that matters.
[00:21:40] So here's what incongruence looks like. You have the best reviews, but then a phone call happens and it's not good. It's a poor experience. Maybe the front desk didn't have empathy. Maybe they had a bad day. And so that's just one example, but everything has to be congruent. Not just the digital stuff, the whole experience. So let's discuss the core concept here, the congruence effect.
[00:22:07] This is kind of the big idea is it's alignment between two things. There's harmony. So your clinical reality and your brand perception. Your clinical reality is what you actually deliver. The care, the experience, the relationship, the outcomes. And for most of you in this room, I would bet that's already very exceptional. You guys do a great job.
[00:22:31] And then the brand perception is what potential patients think before they ever arrive. Yeah. So it's not just your website. It's what they hear on the phone call. It's what maybe a patient tells them. It's what they read in the reviews. It's built entirely on what they discover researching you online and maybe even offline. When those two things come together, when there's congruence, patients come in already convinced.
[00:22:59] I think Dr. Garg earlier talked about being pre-sold, right? Patients are already ready to get started. You're not selling anymore. It's just a conversation. Case acceptance becomes natural. You know, again, we hear all the time objections, objections in the console. And so that's what we don't want. We don't want objections and we don't want it to be a frustrating experience.
[00:23:24] So closing the distance between how good you actually are and how good people think you are, that's what we're talking about here. And that is the congruence effect. So when these things aren't aligned, there's three consequences that I just want to hit real quick. First, there's hesitation at the discovery. So someone finds you online, maybe through a referral or maybe through a search, but the messaging isn't compelling. Or they keep shopping.
[00:23:51] So, and I'll talk about this maybe several times. It's estimated that people click on the first two to three links, right? And so if you're ranking number one, two or three in the map pack, maybe you're getting a click also in search below the map pack. But again, you have to be differentiated from the competition. The second thing is there's doubt in the consultation.
[00:24:15] So patients do show up, but you really haven't had a chance to build trust beforehand with them. Again, because there's not this congruence in your marketing. So they're walking in maybe skeptical and you're having to start from zero instead of being ahead of the game. And then third, the third thing we see when there's not congruence is lost case acceptance. So you're burning chair time, having to answer trust building questions, having to handle objections.
[00:24:44] And that's time that you could have been spending on clinical work. So this directly affects whether a patient says yes. So the bottom line is excellent clinical reality without aligned brand perception means you're working twice as hard to convert the cases. And I've got to tell you, you know, again, I've talked to a lot of doctors and they're frustrated in many cases.
[00:25:09] They're spending on marketing and advertising, but they've never really nailed these foundational elements that I'm talking about. So it reminds me of a good friend of mine. He happens to be an orthodontist and he hired a contractor to build his house. And he got about a year in and they had to tear the whole thing back down. And it's because the foundation was not done right. He didn't pull permits. He cut corners. So it ended up costing him millions of dollars.
[00:25:37] I think the contractor is in prison, actually, because he ended up doing this with several people. I'm kind of telling that story because it's so important to have the right foundation in place. And if you skip it, and I got to tell you, many people do. This is really an epidemic in small business. Everything that you build on top of it is at risk. So here's another story, another analogy. And you guys can probably relate with this. Picture two restaurants.
[00:26:07] And on the left, you've got this incredible place. It's the most amazing food. But there's dusty windows. There's a handwritten sign. The website was built in 2009. But the food is unbelievable. It's the kind of meal that you drive an hour for. And it's, you know, we all have that hole in the wall in our community, right? But you have to live there to know it. Or you have to hear through someone. But across the street, there's a modern spot.
[00:26:36] But it's half the culinary skill. But the branding's clean. The signage is beautiful. And it looks like it belongs in the magazine. And it probably is. The owner or management probably said, hey, let's put this in the local magazine. So it's in the exact same neighborhood and the exact same price point. And most people walk past the five-star chef to go to the prettier place. So it's not, again, it's not because it's better food. But it's better perception.
[00:27:06] And perception becomes our reality. So patients are making the exact same call every single day. And so that's not the whole truth, right? I'm kind of polarizing it. Because there are restaurants that have the image nailed with the best food, right? And maybe that's you. I don't know. And if so, that's great. Because that is the goal. The goal is to have the image and then to have everything to back it up as well.
[00:27:34] So your brand should really be seen as a clinical asset. Again, talk to a lot of doctors, a lot of small business owners. And your brand is not a call center. Everything I bring up a lot of times on calls, it's, well, how much is this going to cost? It's the same thing your patients are asking you guys. How much is this going to cost? But you can't look at it as just an expense, right? It's an investment. It's an asset. It's just like the stock marketer. It's just like a rental property.
[00:28:03] It's going to give you a return. And so you're investing in something that can continue to keep growing literally for decades. So your brand is not a marketing expense. It's a clinical asset. It is the infrastructure that allows your clinical excellence to actually reach patients who need it. Number one, it pre-sales trust. Number two, it drives case acceptance, just like what we talked about. And number three, it enables growth.
[00:28:29] So let's, now we've kind of, I've laid the foundation for the brand, but you can have the best brand. You can have the best videos. You can have the best reviews, the best testimonials. If you can't be found on the internet, none of that really matters, okay? So there's brand is number one, really important. That's positioning. And then number two is findability.
[00:28:54] So 72% of patients begin their search specifically on Google. So we talked about almost 90 searching on the internet, but Google is still really at the top. Even with chat GPT, you know, Google has Google AI. Somebody was talking earlier about something and I Googled it and I can hit show more and then I can just chat with Google on AI. Is anybody else using Google and using AI in search? Yeah.
[00:29:22] So Google is still really kind of owning this. Over 70% of clicks go to the top three results in the map pack. So if you have to click see more to find your practice, this is what I want you guys to do at the end. If you have to do that with certain searches, you're virtually invisible. And then 78% of local mobile searches result in an offline visit within 24 hours.
[00:29:51] So this is a little bit of a tangent. But I have something in my books that I call the 72 hour rule. And Dr. Garg and I just talked about this because I noticed that there was some appointments we were booking for him that were like two, three, three, four weeks out. So the 72 hour rule is all digital leads who want an appointment, booking them within 72 hours. Okay. So if they call on Monday, we need to get them in at least by Thursday.
[00:30:21] And the reason for this is if let's just put myself in a patient's shoes and I call Dr. Harrison and Dr. Harrison can book me in four weeks. And I know that the map pack gets most clicks, right? I'm just going to go to two and three. And what if three on the list Dr. Garg can get me in in three days? Am I going to probably go to Dr. Garg if it looks comparable, if the phone call is good?
[00:30:50] Am I going to call the first practice Dr. Harrison back and say, hey, just so you know, I got an appointment in two days. I'm not coming in to see you in four weeks. Most people don't do that, especially my age or younger. And so the 72 hour rule is based around getting that digital lead in quickly for an appointment. So your no shows don't go up. Has anybody experienced high no shows with marketing? Yeah, a couple of people. And this is one of the reasons why.
[00:31:20] So if you're wanting to amplify your marketing and your digital ad spend, you've got to make sure that you can get people in quickly and get them seen. Last stat, practices in the local three pack see 93% more phone calls and over 100% more website traffic than those that don't appear.
[00:31:40] So being in the three pack is extremely important in the key searches with the services that you really want to see or offer in your practice. So branding and findability, these two things work together. Google's algorithm rewards what patients want, the right content and the right experience. So start with your Google business profile. Make sure it's complete. Make sure that you can upload as many images as you can.
[00:32:09] Make sure that you have a review strategy. And this is something that is pretty interesting and you can fact check this as well. Businesses with a 4.9 star rating over a five star actually get more engagement because it looks real and it looks authentic. If everybody has a five star rating, it doesn't quite look human or normal. Your website needs to be fast and really we call this mobile first.
[00:32:37] So your website needs to be built really for the mobile phone at this point. We talked about this consistency across all platforms. Your SEO, people talk about SEO and it means so many different things. And truthfully there is so many things that go into SEO because there's on page SEO which is your website. And then there's off page SEO which is citations, again Google business profile, health grades.
[00:33:04] There's all these things, back links, press releases that kind of go into SEO. And it's not separate from your brand. I really look at it SEO being an extension of your brand. It's what gets you in front of people. So when you build a strong brand presence, part of that is content that patients actually want to engage with. So something that we do at HIPP is a lot of times we'll have a blog on our client's website.
[00:33:31] But we'll also keep publishing the right cluster type of pages. So if you guys are saying, hey, we want to see more full arch cases. Do you have all the content on full arch? Do you have new content? Are you putting out videos? Are you putting up a video on YouTube and then getting the embed code and bringing that onto your website? And so it's not about just getting content up. It's about continuing to publish new content.
[00:34:00] Because if you don't, your competitors will and then they're going to outrank you. And this is one of those things where it's ongoing. So some of you guys may be saying, well, Luke, I used to rank number one or I used to rank three. Why did I fall to eight or why did I fall to page two? And this is the reason why. Right? If your competition is continuing to put out content that patients are finding helpful, then they're going to get rewarded over you guys.
[00:34:29] So let's talk about the most expensive mistake in dental marketing. And this is where I see practices, Harrison can tell you this too, waste so much money. I see it all the time. And many of you have probably lived this. Almost everyone in our space, so our competitors, our peers, they're just trying to sell ads. You know, you need meta ads, you need Google ads, you need a CRM, and that's great.
[00:34:55] But what if you don't have the foundational pieces that I'm talking about? What message is that then getting in front of people with ads? So you're just like everybody else who can hand meta money and they'll gladly take your money. You guys probably know this. And maybe it can work to some degree. And truthfully, we have seen this work, even when the cart's before the horse.
[00:35:19] Sometimes it can work, but the practices who first invest in their website, their brand, even the community, in community engagement, being involved, maybe it's bridal expos with orthodontists, or sponsoring team events, or working with a nonprofit locally. When the community knows the brand, trusts the brand, has seen the brand, and then you go run paid ads on top of that, it's a completely different result.
[00:35:48] And truthfully, it can be exponential growth. But what most people do is they spend $3,000 or $8,000 a month on Google ads and meta ads and traffic comes in. But the website's outdated, photos are old or lacking, message is generic, the site isn't optimized well. And that's not a paid ad strategy problem. Again, it's an order and sequence thing. So Jack, you were talking about this and you were asking, you know, my marketing didn't work.
[00:36:17] This can certainly be true where you just went for amplification before branding, or you went for amplification before findability. And so you're kind of trying to jump to the last step because it truthfully can bring the most growth, but it's out of sequence. Okay? 30% to 40% of ad budget is wasted on poor conversions. And I should also throw this stat in there.
[00:36:43] 77% of paid ads, they don't even have dedicated landing pages. It's just sending traffic to your homepage of your website. That's the way a lot of people set it up. So if I'm running a very specific dental implant campaign for Dr. Gard, I'm going to have a landing page that matches that, right? I'm going to have his messaging in the video be the headline of the landing page. I'm not just going to send people to the homepage of the website. Make sense?
[00:37:10] I would say too, just to go back to the order and sequence thing, it's the same thing with you guys. You guys didn't just jump to a specialty within dentistry, right? Like you went to grade school, you went to high school, you went to college, you went to dental school, maybe you went to a specialized residency. Maybe you've come and gotten training with Dr. Garg, right? It's the same thing with marketing. There's this holistic path to take, but unfortunately what's sexy and exciting is this amplification of paid ads.
[00:37:38] Let's look at organic versus paid and let's look at some of the numbers here. Organic meaning someone finds you without having to pay for it, right? They're coming from a Google search or they interact with your brand in a holistic way. They call you, they request an appointment. And let's just say that runs about $30 per lead. And then let's look over at paid ads. Let's say it's $180 for the same lead. That's a 6x difference.
[00:38:07] Organic search works so well because it's patients coming to you who are already informed. You know, put yourself in the shoes of someone going to Google and doing searches versus being interrupted with a paid ad. They're way further down the funnel, right? Does that make sense? So they're doing their research, they're getting informed and they're coming to you.
[00:38:27] And so if you invest in the brand, if you invest in findability at scale, it can be a much bigger machine and you own the space. You're not renting the space. And then when you add on something like meta ads, you can be seen to so, you can be shown to so many people. And that's the right sequence that we're talking about. So sequence really matters. Again, I'm not talking badly about paid ads.
[00:38:56] We run paid ads for hundreds of practices. It's great. But it has to come after you've established organic credibility and strong foundation. And I want to leave you guys with the question. If one of your best patients was sent to you through a friend, family member, and they go to Google and they start searching, evaluating providers in your market the same way they'd evaluate anyone else, would they find you?
[00:39:25] And if they found you, what they saw would actually do justice to the care that you deliver? And if the answer is yes on both, obviously protect that and build that. That's the real advantage. If there's room to grow, this is potentially the biggest opportunity that you're going to work on this year in my opinion. So, you know, you guys have spent years becoming exceptional at what you do.
[00:39:53] The patients who need you, they deserve to find you. They deserve to trust you and choose you. So, in the end, it is what I'm talking about here is brand findability and amplification in this order. And so there's a couple things just to cover real quick. There's a QR code here that you can scan. And this is the most in-depth analysis that I've ever seen someone put together for a brand.
[00:40:23] And we will put this together for you free of charge. It looks at 12 different components within your online brand. So, it's an AI grader. It's built specifically for dental practices. Okay? And then the second thing which we can spend some time on if we have time per Dr. Garg and team is this worksheet.
[00:40:46] So, with this worksheet, again, we could break into groups and you guys could start to go through your digital assets like I'm talking about and start to grade it. And, again, I know you've seen these things all the time, but I want you to approach it like a stranger would and type in longer searches and your location and see if you actually come up. And then when you do come up, you're going to make note of that where you come up. But then you're also going to make note of the messaging and congruence.
[00:41:15] So, if we have time for that, we could do that as well. So, thank you so much. Thank you for your attention.