Welcome back to dentistry support the podcast. I'm Sarah Beth, your host. Today we have a special guest with us. My sister, Jenny, Melvin. She is our director of marketing and technology at dentistry support. We're talking all about marketing and business, about challenges, successes. Things that happen in marketing that we don't often talk about.
I'll give you a four warning. My sister doesn't actually want to do this, but I'm totally making her do it. Jenny, thank you for joining me on the podcast today. Thanks for having me. I'm not excited but I'll do it. Okay. I want to talk about how marketing has been, your role evolved, you started off in other departments and ultimately we got to marketing we've had to train you up.
Learn new things. Watch as industries have changed. And that has meant your role has changed. When I started dentistry support, I was the marketing team.
I had to do all of it, myself. My husband, Devin, obviously your brother-in-law, he handled ads that we would respond to and Lexi was working our social media. It was crazy. As industry support grew,
I knew that I couldn't physically wear every single hat in my business. I had to make a choice to have a team and having a team met, letting go of things that. I had to do that.
I wanted to have control over, but I had to let you do, you know, and then you had to learn my personality and what that meant to mark it the way that I wanted to mark it, you know what I mean? Yeah. Well, and I now have an issue giving away certain things that I handle because I'm afraid that if I'm not the one that handles it, it'll be done incorrectly. I feel like that's what you had to go through when you brought me into this position.
Totally. Totally. I had to relinquish the control that I wanted because I knew I needed to be in other areas of the business. And now that's almost exactly what you're going through.
I read a quote that says great leaders are not the best at everything. They find people who are the best at different things. And get them all on the same team. This mattered to me because of how we've had to build and transform our team here at dentistry support. Jenny, I want you to share with me your perspective on. The relationship between marketing and sales and how they compliment each other at dentistry support.
I will first say that. That took us a while to get to there. It was , marketing is just marketing and sales is just sales and we like. Had to get there. I feel like for sales, you're doing cold calling. You're doing like you're doing direct reach out. I feel about marketing. We're spreading the word about who we are.
We want people to get to know us through our content, I feel like sales is direct. When you think about it as a bigger picture, they're friends, they go hand in hand.
That's something that I had to wrap my head around and not feel like it's all on me, there's a team of us that can handle sales and marketing. We have a whole marketing team and a whole sales team, and my team has to create the graphics and what we're putting out and the idea behind what we want to offer we're not selling tangible goods, but we're selling a service to provide it's like we're paving the way
You can't go online and see what other people did. The challenge with marketing is number one, figuring out what's the plan. Number two. How to get someone who doesn't know, they need your service to want what you're selling
and then three. Giving it to a team that has to then go sell it. Our approach has been not bragging but how we solve problems. And that is such a challenge because , some people that sell a tangible good, they sell a hair product or. A car.
They can go look at what previous people have done that had been really successful. You're right. We're paving the way. There's nobody else that can sell this because it's so niche, it's so specific, you know? And we're trying to figure out in our minds, , How do we do this? Then not only how do we do this effectively? But because marketing and sales are two different departments.
We're merging into one. How do we make it creative for the consumer, but then make it effectively articulated to a sales team so they can deliver the same way we're imagining in our brain. Yes , we talk a lot in marketing about these different tasks that are so challenging.
I think if we were to grade out all of the tasks and marketing from , this is the hardest to, this is the easiest we gravitate towards. What's the easiest. And there is a quote. That I saw on Instagram. This person said, The magic you are looking for is in the work you are avoiding. It made me feel really guilty when I read it, because I know that there are things I consciously avoid .
There are certain aspects of marketing that are really easy. You can turn on that task, do it really quick, push it out and it's done. And that might mean. Creating content for social media. Like you're really good at it. You know, our brand, you know, my absolutely insane tendencies and how particular I am with what our brand looks like and color schemes and thoughts and placement of logos.
You get all that, right? So it's easy to take that task and just punch it out. You could even wait till the last minute, you could bust out like 30 days of content in a couple days, push it out to our team that schedules it and boom, it's done right. Then I work better under pressure.
So it's almost easier for me to wait until the last three days before the end of the month to create that content. Everybody listening is probably like, wait a minute. What she does, 30 days of content in three days.
So I push it to the end and then I crunch it in for three companies right. , it's one cool thing that I think we should give to our listeners is that. If you were to learn anything or listen to anything on this episode, it's that you can use content over.
You don't have to reinvent the wheel every month Jenny, think about that for a minute. What if you had to redo. Content. And we did. We would probably repeat, you know, once a week, it may have been, stating that, we had a new client come on board or something along those lines.
But we also read somewhere, I a couple months back people don't remember your content right. So when I go and look at our content and when I'm recreating or I'm setting up the following month, I go back a couple of months and I take from a couple of months ago and put it out there.
So we are cycling. Culling. Every 60 to 90 days, certain content. People don't remember your contents, you can recycle your stuff and save yourself some time. Yeah. You know, and maybe change out your caption or whatever it may be, but people don't remember.
Save yourself some time, schedule it out and then you're good to go. I also think it's so beneficial to reuse content for the simple fact that your branding. Yeah. Like if you think about McDonald's, everybody knows. If I were to say the golden arches, you knew exactly who I'm talking about. Right. Yeah.
Or target, you know, their logos or their color schemes. When we are building our brand. I think it's good to use some of that same content, because subconsciously if you're scrolling and your mind scrolls past something familiar, you might stop for a millisecond to look at it.
Right. I think part of that is that creative nature of us, of I want to like make new things over and over and over. We don't have to stress ourselves out. Right. You can reuse old content and it's perfectly fine. And that serves dual purposes. One. You're not freaking yourself out by having to do all this extra work.
And to subconsciously you're creating a repetitive process with your viewers who are going to learn what your brand looks like. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
You don't have to love marketing. To make sure that everything is perfect you can have a behind the scenes marketing team. It's just, you need to have someone who can execute it. And I think that's been a challenge. Making sure we fill your team with people who understand. Execution, right.
You may not love marketing. You may not want to have your face on the camera. You may not understand everything in all of these platforms. We use to create content or push emails out as long as you learn the art of execution, we can be successful together. Exactly. When I talk about that quote, that I was talking about a few minutes ago, where the magic you are looking for is in the work you are avoiding, Some of the things that we avoid, I think, as a team, Is this stuff that takes us a long time, because it takes so long to get approval on something.
I think we avoid certain things because it takes so much time. And I think that's a lesson to be learned, We can be better at communicating and articulating what our messages that we want to deliver so that we can attack those things quickly.
But sometimes that stuff we're avoiding yields us. The best results. Like sometimes we'll do an email and we'll get like 10 calls from it and we'll get three or four clients from it. And all of a sudden we're like, wait a minute. How did that result in that? This morning we were talking and you were like, yeah, we sent out that one email and we had a 96% open rate. If you could do anything on marketing, if you can get someone to open 10% of your emails, you're winning. It's crazy because you don't know what content is going to work. You don't know what email is going to work. And we had to figure that out and you get tasked with something to put out and it doesn't work or it does work, but then it doesn't yield any prospects. And that is the problem.
It's great to see these numbers, it means that they were interested in our content that it was kind of clickbait, right. But they didn't do anything with it. So then it's like, were you successful or no, you weren't. That's a very frustrating part in marketing it's so much work , you're dealing with the critiquing of your graphics or you're dealing with the critiquing of the idea or all of those things.
And then you finally get past that and you push it out, but then nothing comes from it. Yeah. It brings us to that second part that we want to talk about in this episode, talking about the challenges of working on projects that don't always result in something successful and keeping the team encouraged.
I feel like this is our most candid episode of the podcast and it's true. We've got to have these conversations about the things that you all are likely experiencing, and you're like, Wait a minute. Why are my new patient numbers down? Or why am I not getting clients? Or why am I not getting. Customers that walk through the door. I'm doing everything I read online, I'm doing all the tasks.
My boss says I'm creating the emails. I'm following the patterns. We're making ourselves crazy. Doing everything people are saying is going to make and give us results. But I'm not getting results. So, Jenny, what do we do? What are some things you do to keep our team motivated to stay working here?
I think two weeks ago, maybe three weeks ago during our marketing meeting, I had a heart to heart with the team and that included sales.
I said, you know what? It's okay to get upset. With the situation. You're okay. To be upset that you spent so much time on something and it didn't do anything. It's okay. We're okay. It's a new week. Next week. We'll start fresh. The response I got out of some of our team members just from, and it was probably an hour long conversation the response was like, we really needed that.
Like we really needed you to motivate us. It was really good for me at the same time to hear that they're feeling the same frustration. I was feeling about things going on in marketing and you're expected to perform in you're expected to do things.
I feel like having that heart to heart, which I've never done before with the team, I've never just been honest and real about how I was feeling and how. I didn't know that they were feeling stressed out about it. Somebody made a comment , I just really needed to hear that today because I'm just stressed it was so good.
At the end of that conversation, everybody was like, all right, let's go. There was just a lot motivation came from that conversation. I'm learning having those heart to heart conversations with them can remotivate them to be like, all right, I feel this way too. It's okay. And we're going to move forward. The motivation had shifted at that point. Cause I feel like we were all feeling our hard work wasn't doing anything.
If nothing comes from something, how do you stay motivated? Keeping a conversation, going, keeping people motivated in the way of just, you know, saying like you're doing a great job I think one thing that is really important in keeping your team motivated. Is. Starting your day off, right? You do something really great in the morning, talk about that for a minute. What you do, the, and this is like the way that you try to start your week off, right?
Yeah. So on Mondays, I usually come up with a list of tasks. We want to tackle that our goal is to get this many calls this week. A lot of us jump in there and say, good morning, Hey, happy Monday. Great.
Great, great. You know, but we're trying to do this thing where we're like, Hey, these are our tasks. Let's make sure we touch these things. That we're pushing for this, , There that I feel like is really helping start our Monday off really great.
Because they're like, okay, these are what we need to work on this week. Versus it just being quiet, you know, one thing I want to talk about, which this drives me crazy. And obviously anybody listening to this podcast, this can apply to you.
So here for the next little bit, I'm going to talk on dental for a minute. When I talk about this topic, I want you to think about your niche that you're in as well. I think that dental offices need to choose who their audience is. I've seen. When we are doing our posts and we're talking about different things, we try to make sure we encompass those that would be following us.
Right. We try to appeal to the office manager and inspire them. We want to let people know what problems we're solving in dentistry. We want to let people know the successes that we've had. We're trying to cater to those that would be watching. We've narrowed it down very well. As to who our audience is when we're posting online. I think in dentistry specifically, We don't see a clear understanding of who the dentist wants following them or who they're catering, what they're posting to. I'll follow dentists that. I'll see a bunch of, uh, blood guts and gore on their page, but then two posts later, it'll say we're accepting new patients.
And I cannot imagine for the life of me, a single person on this planet. That loves dentistry enough that they're going to go follow their dentists, want to see a tooth extraction and feel like, gosh, you know what. I want to go to that dentist. So I want to bring this up because it's either. Your page is going to attract more dentists because you want to be an inspiration to dentists or you want to cater to your patients.
So it's going to show the experience. That a patient would have in your office. And I feel like I want to talk about that for a minute because we're not making a choice. Like we're saying, we want to show how to extract a tooth, but Jenny, as a consumer, if you followed your dentist, do you want to see how they're extracting a tooth?
No, because I don't want to have my tooth extracted. So if I'm going to see that, that's how it's done. I'm not coming for my extraction. That would just deter me from going to the dentist. So like we got it aside. Right. One of my tips for you if you do the marketing for your dental practice, or if you're the dentist, that's like choosing what you post. Like have a conversation with your team. If we're going to spend time on marketing, who are we catering to? What are we doing? And why are we choosing this?
In less, you're willing to have that conversation. You're just throwing a bunch of darts at the wall and seeing which one sticks. Marketing is so specific. Don't you feel like that? I do. I do. And I think that brings up a really good. Point about how we've had to shift our marketing, initiatives and you know, how we've had to change and see if a different way of marketing to dental offices works better, which in turn we changed it to a negative situation versus it being positive.
And what do you mean? Talk about that for a second. Cause someone might hear that and be like, wait a minute, you shifted your marketing to be negative, to attract dental practices. Yeah. Yeah, we did. And actually it works because if you're like, are. Are you having trouble in your dental office because your front office staff just can't keep up or are you behind 30 days?
And your aging reports There are all these different things that are negative in a dental office, and maybe your staff aren't handling them the way that you need them to and you need somebody like us to come in and help. And so if we market to you negatively in the, in, and not in a negative way, it's just stating like, are these the problems you're having in your dental office? Let us see if we can help. So that is a negative hook in marketing versus just being like, look what we do, you know?
It works. It does work. It's proven itself. We've gotten interest off of our stuff off of negativity. When it comes to how you're marketing on your own social media negative, when it comes to dental, it doesn't really work for me. I don't think you should be posting the blood and the gore, because that would deter me.
I think part of it, Jenny, is that. You have to think of marketing, not from the perspective of what your going to get out of it, or how much you want to brag about yourself, but what you can bring to other people's lives or business or how you can support them.
So if I were to give advice on marketing and just what we've learned in testing different theories, Bringing out those negative hooks. It's not like we want to bring out the negative, but the way social media is trending right now, People gravitate towards how can you solve my problem? You found this coffee.
That's like so delicious. Right. And it's so good. It's this instant coffee. And it's like a major Tik TOK trend right now. And you gave me like two teaspoons of it to try. And I tried it this morning and it was so stinking. Good. And it's sold out everywhere and you can't get it for like three weeks right now. But someone somewhere. Advertised how quick it is to make it how delicious and how smooth it is. And it solves a problem of having to spend $5 on a coffee at Starbucks, but it's still a blonde roast. And I can make it for less money at my house.
It's a smooth coffee. I love it. It's instant. Let's fricking go right. You can't get it anywhere now, but everyone's buying it because it solves a problem. It solves a problem of a quick coffee that tastes good. It's not bitter. You can get it for less money. We're solving a problem. Right. And so for us, when we mark it, We're collecting your money. We're calling your patients.
We're filling your schedule. We're completing your eligibility super fast. We're trying to articulate what we do. But by solving a problem and that's the negative hook, right? Yep. Yeah. Your that's good moment for today is going to tie in everything. Jenny and I have been talking about. Marketing is an ever evolving and changing program. There's not a specific science things are going to constantly change. Learning to be okay with that, I think is half the battle when it comes to marketing.
We first talked about how my biggest company dentistry support has evolved from being me doing it all to a full on team that it consists of both marketing and sales. And how we have taken that team and learned to be the generation of leaders. We always promise ourselves to be by having those candid conversations.
Jenny, you talked about how. You went from meetings, just being these quick in and outs. These are our metrics we met. We didn't meet. This is what we're doing next to, Hey, it's okay. If you're stressed out, it's okay. If you're feeling overwhelmed, if you're stressed out that we're not hitting the numbers, we should be hitting, or if there's a downturn in the productivity that we're getting from X project.
It's okay. It's okay. If you've gotten there. But let's regroup. Let's get it right. Let's move forward. And then understanding that. There's going to be changes that require us to move and, shift in ways we didn't expect we would, but everybody can be on the same page. Jenny, do you have any more insights that you want to share for anybody that's new and marketing existing in marketing a dental office on. The key things that you could see them doing totally better, or one key thing maybe that they could do differently that would just transform the way that their patients can see them.
Even if it's from a consumer standpoint. I would say. Just keep doing what you're doing. You know, You may not see results right away. But just keep doing it because at some point somebody is going to see it. And they're going to jump and they're going to come and use your services, or they're going to come to your dental practice or, they're going to be interested in what you're offering.
Just keep doing it. Consistency is key. I had to learn that more than anybody. So just be consistent with what you're doing and sometimes we don't get results. That meet our goals for like 12 weeks at a time. And then all of a sudden we get an influx of new offices and group practices and all these people that want to be part of dentistry support.
And it's like crazy psycho onboarding and marketing and everybody in our team is totally maxed out and it's wild. And sometimes you have the locals. Right. But it's okay. Because the teams have to go through that. You have to go through. The really big highs and the lows and know that even if you see your competitor online, showing that they're growing and growing and growing. Marketing is your perception. Of what you see, that's what it is, you know?
It doesn't always mean that your competitor's doing an amazing job. It doesn't always mean that they're winning. But what it does mean is that they're consistent. So to play on what you just said, that consistency matters because the habitual nature the scheduled tasks, the repetitive nature that you're teaching your team to stay consistent, and it does yield results.
And sometimes you don't see them for two months, but then sometimes you see them nonstop for two months, right? Jenny, thank you for sharing your insights on what we can do as a marketing team.
What you've been through. I love it. You joined me on this episode. I know it. Wasn't your favorite thing to do, but we're just chatting it up. It's all good. I know that marketing is challenging. I know that it's a dynamic industry. I know that it's crazy. Sometimes it has crazy highs and crazy lows, but I think we're learning that the right strategies, the right mindset. When you couple those things all together, success is achievable to our listeners.
Thank you so much for tuning in before we sign off. I just want to remind you of a few things. If you find that we're talking too fast, feel free to slow down this podcast episode. There should be a little X next to the number one, two or three. If you need to speed us up on whatever modality you use to listen to your podcasts. If you're in the dental industry and you are looking for free training, you really want to get better at the skills you have. You can visit dentistry support.com forward slash free training. You can learn all about different things in your front office, your back office. Getting to connect with your customers, your patients a little bit easier all through
that page. If you're not part yet of our Facebook group, the dental collaborative, go check us out on Facebook. We also have a, another group on LinkedIn. So we'd love to invite you to connect with us there. . As we close this episode, I want to thank you for keeping us at the number one podcast in five different categories. I know I've said it on a couple of episodes, but we really are grateful for your listens, your downloads and sharing the podcast.
We will catch you on the next episode.
