Alex Nottingham JD MBA discusses Marketing Mistake #5: Paying and Praying – for the best marketing efforts you must measure, track, and review.
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About Alex Nottingham JD MBA
Alex is the CEO and Founder of All-Star Dental Academy®. He is a former Tony Robbins top coach and consultant, having worked with companies upwards of $100 million. His passion is to help others create personal wealth and make a positive impact on the people around them. Alex received his Juris Doctor (JD) and Master of Business Administration (MBA) from Florida International University.
Episode Transcript
Transcript performed by A.I. Please excuse the typos.
00:02
This is Dental All-Stars, where we bring you the best in dentistry on marketing, management, and training. Hi, everyone. I’m Alex Nottingham, founder and CEO of All-Star Dental Academy, and welcome to our series The 6 Marketing Mistakes, and we’re on number 5. That marketing mistake is not tracking results. Now, let’s do a quick review. The first marketing mistake is doing what everyone else is doing. If you do what everyone else is doing…
00:31
you’re gonna get what everyone else is getting and that’s poor results. What does everybody else do? They’re not marketing, they’re not marketing well, they’re not tracking, which is this one, they’re not providing great customer service, they’re not training at all, they don’t do any work on phone skills, they are not modeling the best and you wanna model the best. You wanna model the best in dentistry, you wanna model the best outside of dentistry. What’s their customer service like?
00:58
What’s their marketing like? The second mistake is trying to market to everyone. If you try to market to everyone, you get no one. We talked about the fish story where the legendary fisherman fought like a fish, not like a fisherman. So you wanna think about what do your patients think like and not what you think like. What’s ideal for them and craft your ads accordingly. The third marketing mistake is discounting.
01:28
Goods and services are not the same. You’re not a retail establishment. You’re a high level customer service dental office and you wanna make sure you’re not commoditized to your patients and that you don’t put out that you are a commodity. You want them to treat you like a service, like someone that can help them and make a difference in their world. And be careful with discounting, whether it’s insurance or whether you’re lowering your fees.
01:52
because that can impact your bottom line and you’re working really hard and you might be working where you’re actually losing money or barely breaking even when you are discounting. Keep that in mind. The fourth is selling yourself. That’s the fourth mistake. And instead of selling yourself, position yourself as the expert in your field. And when you do that, you will attract patients and drive them up the pyramid that we talked about beyond just the 3% that are buying now. So let’s get into the fifth.
02:22
marketing mistake, not tracking results. And what I like to think about this is this concept of pay and pray. I’m gonna pay my marketing and just pray that I get a return. And that’s how typically we market, we pay, we pray. Because we’re not testing, we’re not tracking, we’re not measuring. And you need to make sure that you’re measuring and you’re testing and you’re tracking everything you do. So you have qualitative and quantitative measures.
02:51
Quantitative measures are actual statistics, like phone call conversion, email inquiries, email blast results, downloads, clicks, return on investment, ROI, revenue, referrals. Those are some quantitative measures, qualitative measures, which are things you can’t directly measure, but you can see the impact. Team morale, enthusiasm, teamwork, happiness, lower stress. These are all areas that we want to measure to see.
03:18
Are we having a difference in everything we do, including our marketing? Consider, are you tracking and measuring your marketing? Is your marketing company tracking? Do they have tracking numbers for every marketing medium? For example, your website should have a tracking number. Your paid ads, billboard, mailers, all should have different tracking numbers so you can differentiate what came from what. Write down and think about, what are your quantitative measures?
03:48
What are your qualitative measures? Are you tracking KPIs, which are your key performance indicators, in your practice in general? What about coaching? Are you working with a coach to go over your numbers, to see areas to improve? We have to track and test everything. And speaking of coaching, our whole philosophy of coaching is what we call self-funding coaching. So our coaching is designed.
04:15
to see an impact and pay for itself within 90 days because we see the numbers. We see these are areas that we can track, we can test, and we can make money on. So coaching becomes an annuity. The same thing you wanna do with your marketing. Give it some time, give it three to six months, and see if we can self-fund, if the marketing pays for itself. And then you can do more marketing. You wanna be aware of Google Analytics minimum?
04:43
that’s free from Google so you can see what are the impacts, what are the conversions that are happening on your website in addition to other measures that you or your marketing company may have access to? Are you using email follow-up or text messaging? That could be in your practice management software that provides that, but also, what about custom emails and phone calls? Because often we get so enamored by the technology and we say, this is what’s gonna protect me, this is what’s gonna keep me on.
05:11
safe and all the information. We’ve got to make sure that information is accurate. And we also don’t want to hide behind technology. We’re still human beings. I know AI is here, but we’ll be human beings for a while, I hope. And with being human, we respond well to something customized, whether it’s a custom email or a custom phone call that you care. So don’t hide behind technology. Use and train on the soft skills and make sure you track everything.
05:39
I also want to point you in the direction of our webinar, alls backslash webinar. Whether you’ve seen it before, see it again. If you haven’t, check it out. It helps you with phone call, conversion, scheduling, practice management. And one of the things we talk about right in the webinar is the cost of not converting a phone call. And when you understand that, you see why training is so important. You see why the Ritz-Carlton.
06:06
focuses so much on training in all the great companies, which we’ll talk about later in the series. So check out the webinar, make sure you follow, like, subscribe, and until next time, go out there and be an All Star.
06:20
We hope you enjoyed this episode of Dental All-Stars. Visit us online at allstardentalacademy.com
