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People aren't searching for what you think they're searching for. Learn how to think like a patient when building your online presence.
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Howard Farran: Hey we’re at the Townie meeting 2015 in Las Vegas, Nevada in the Bellagio and I am going to have fun today. I get an hour with Colin Receveur and how are you doing Colin?
Colin Receveur: I’m doing great.
Howard Farran: It’s interesting because you’re 30 and I got out of school at 24 and everything you do now didn’t even exist when I got out of school. When I got out of school, the new age controversial thing which I did was a full page ad in the yellow pages.
Colin Receveur: Oh my gosh.
Howard Farran: And by God, that actually got me a free lunch with the executive director of the Arizona State dental association because he did not like. He came and bought me lunch and he was probably 50 you know and I was a young kid and he was saying say would you go to, would you get a bypass done with the guy out of the yellow pages? If you had cancer would you go to a guy out of the yellow pages? I've felt bad because I was paying $1000 a month and getting like forty or fifty new patients a month from this ad, because I was the young idiot doing it all, and all the older mature guys in medical dental professional buildings would just not do something like that.
Colin Receveur: You know my dad graduated, opened up practice in ’81.
Howard Farran: What kind of practice?
Colin Receveur: Dental. Yeah that’s how I got into dentistry.
Howard Farran: Okay so your dad’s a dentist.
Colin Receveur: He is, yup.
Howard Farran: And what’s even funnier is your mom’s dad was a pharmacist.
Colin Receveur: I’ve got a whole family of pharmacists.
Howard Farran: And you’re not ever going to believe this story, but his last name was Butt.
Colin Receveur: Butt drugs. Butt drugs.com.
Howard Farran: That is hilarious.
Colin Receveur: Still run today. Old fashioned soda, milkshake stand on the side of the drug store just like it was when it opened in ’52.
Howard Farran: And I assume he had a bunch of daughters named Berta Butt, Bigger Butt, Brown Butt, Bubble Butt.
Colin Receveur: That was my mom now, easy now!
Howard Farran: Oh that was your mom! So where does Butt come from? Is that German or Scandinavian or what name?
Colin Receveur: German. Grandma and Grandpa were both, Grandma was Harnishfeger, Grandpa was Butt. They met in New York at a, what was the old military where they had the dances and stuff, it’s an acronym but they met up there in New York, before World War Two and Grandpa went to Iwo Jima, came back and he was a pharmacist and what do you do, you open up Butt Drugs in Corydon, Indiana.
Howard Farran: Wow that's a long story. My mom's brother, Vaughn, he was in Iwo Jima too and oh my God, I messed up. I had no idea how bad that blood was. He’s passed on now. My mom’s 76 and he died a couple of years ago I think at 78 and I got out of dental school and I bought my first, a bought a Subaru and I went over to my uncle's house and he walked out there and saw that Japanese car…oh my God. He just lost it. I had to drive it a block down and walk back. He didn’t want him or any of his neighbors to see that car. That was a tough war. Yeah so he was on supply trip and every day they’d run supplies to the shore and every day about one in ten of those flyboats get blown out of the water. So when you do that for a year. You’re fried. So your dad’s a dentist.
Colin Receveur: Still practicing.
Howard Farran: Still practicing in Floyds Knobs?
Colin Receveur: New Albany, Indiana. Right down the road. These are all little cities.
Howard Farran: New Albany, that’s where Woody Oakes, The Profitable Dentist.
Colin Receveur: I could throw a rock and hit Woody.
Howard Farran: And so you’re right next to Louisville which is Kentucky. So that area’s almost Kentucky.
Colin Receveur: We’ve got five bridges that connect right across the Ohio River. We’re all metro Louisville is what it's considered.
Howard Farran: So what I want to ask you and I want to have you on is now that I’m the old guy, now I’m the 52 year old and you’re the young fresh 30 year old. What is, you know like when I got out of school the newest hottest most controversial craziest thing you could do is a full page ad in the yellow pages. Do those white fillings, those tooth colored fillings when all the good doctors did amalgam gold, tooth whitening. All you heard from the 50 year old guys was there’s not a shred of research on that. How can you have a five year study on something that just came out of a box? The only research done on that, you know, and we had an ad in the yellow pages, we were bleaching teeth, we were doing cosmetic fillings. The older people thought we were just, we all needed to be spanked and had our licenses taken away and thrown out of the country.
Colin Receveur: You know my dad's got a little framed picture on the wall. He was in Advertiser straight out of school. He was the only guy in the market.
Howard Farran: And how old is your dad?
Colin Receveur: He’s was born in ’55, he graduated in ’80, opened up shop in ’81. So he’ll be 60 this year. So a couple of years older than you. He’s got a framed picture on the wall from the big four dentists in town that said, I don’t remember the exact words, but it was we see you've opened up shop, we see your advertising, you’re not welcome at the events here locally. He thought it was a nice letter so he framed it and he hung it on his wall and it’s still there today.
Howard Farran: I can still remember when I did my first direct mail piece. Two of the dentists in my zip code walked in my office and asked for me, and handed it to me and said don’t ever mail this to my house again. I was like oh my God and that was so crazy. It was so small thinking because the other dentists, it was like when I opened up my practice like half the dentists want to be your friend and call you. The other half were just going to be your competitors and you know, crazy and the other half, they would always say oh when you did your two page newsletter on sealants. Oh my God we’ve been doing sealants all week. Because you're building demand for everyone. I mean you mail a flyer to everybody in town explaining bleaching, bonding, veneers, implants and snore guards, sleep apnea, anything…you raise the education of the whole community and it lifts all the dentists there. So that’s crazy, and that’s one of the reasons Dentaltown was so successful, it’s because dentists wouldn't talk to the other four dentists in the medical dental billing. Those were just sworn enemy competitors but if you got on Dentaltown and some dentist was 1000 miles away, now I can put my guard down and be your buddy. So what is the young hot stuff now? What’s new, I mean the biggest thing obviously is this thing which I never saw until I was 35 years old. I mean the whole market is moving from the yellow pages to this. This is an amazing device.
Colin Receveur: You know the interesting thing about mobile phones, you know I think you say what’s the newest thing? Not necessarily what's the newest gadget out there, but where are patients looking right now? I mean yellow pages was hot stuff and there are still few doctors here and there that have results from the yellow pages but by and large nobody looks at it. They pull these phones up when they want to search for something and you’ve got to look at how people make decisions. You know let's go back ten years, let’s go to 2005. 2005, we had mobile phones. We had cellphones, but you had to call 411 if you wanted to look up some information. There was no internet there was no 4G data access.
Howard Farran: So it was a cellphone, not a smartphone?
Colin Receveur: Exactly.
Howard Farran: Because smart means when the internet came into it.
Colin Receveur: Exactly. So even going back 10 years in marketing history, you had no video online, you had no smart phones, you had no phone call tracking, auto responders and it was basically a brochure online. You look at today, it's an interactive experience. People can pull their phone and access any information in the world with a few clicks. Or not even a few clicks you talk into it and Siri tells you back whatever you want. So what's the newest thing in dentistry in my opinion, you've got to deliver the wow experience before patients get into your office. I know you're big on calling patients by name and walking out and greeting them and introducing them and you know personal, human relationship skills. But patients in today's world, they don't have to come into your office to get a feel for that experience anymore. They can read your reviews online. Reviews didn't exist ten years ago, I mean a little bit but the adoption rates ten years ago were miniscule. Local directories didn’t exist a decade ago so all of this as has…
Howard Farran: Explain to the viewers what a local directory is. I think a lot of people don’t know what that is.
Colin Receveur: Sure. So local directories are just think yellow pages, but online. You know you’ve got Yelp, Yellow Pages, City Pages, things like Foursquare, Facebook. Even Facebook has business pages you know and an address for every business out there. Same as Google has a business directory that you can look up and they’ve got a page, just like in the yellow pages, they have a listing for every business that’s out there. So the patients can do anything they want online these days. They don't necessarily have to come into your office to get that wow experience. It's more, you know the studies that I see, it’s all about validation these days. They look you up online, they make their decision then they come into your office and validate who you are but they’ve already made the decision to come in whereas 10 years ago, they couldn’t really find out much about you.
Howard Farran: And you know another thing about that wow experience, one thing that I wanted to ask you about today, so my close friends back home in Phoenix, the ones that I intimately know well and you know that they think like they’re an implant dentist or you know this one thinks he’s a cosmetic dentists but you go to their website and you would never know that about that person and I’ve asked a lot of my friends, I say like you’re in a small town. Why don’t you have a staff meeting where you all get around a PC and you pull up everyone’s website in your town. If there’s only eight dentists you’ll find that two don’t even have one and it’s amazing because everybody says the same thing. They’ll say like well yeah, Frank is really good in placing implants or whatever, and you’d never know that from his website and then they start realizing wow, our website doesn’t really reflect the wow of who we are.
Colin Receveur: A lot of dentists I find get so focused on the procedures that they offer, that they never really build themselves up as the expert of anything. You know they talk about implants and dentures and crowns and bridges and veneers and sealants and all these things that they offer, but imagine you have a heart attack right. You’ve got to go to your cardiologist, you’ve got to get a quadruple bypass or you have to have a stint put in, you’re not going to ask the cardiologist what brand of stint or you’re not going to ask him what kind of catheter they’re going to use to check out your heart. Imagine a pipe in your practice or your home bust. Water’s pouring out of the ceiling. You call the plumber right? You call Joe up and you say Joe, you’ve got to come out here and fix my plumbing. There’s water pouring out everywhere. If Joe responded to you with do I need to bring out a PVC fitting or an NPT fitting or a pipe thread or a hex fitting, you’d probably hang up on him and call somebody else and dentists love dentistry, or they wouldn’t have become dentists and a lot of dental marketing is more attuned to attracting other dentists than it is patients. It's all about the procedures and the things that you do, it’s like the pipe fittings. It’s like you're getting into the cardiologist, you go look at cardiologists web forums, the equivalent of Dentaltown and they’re talking about all those things, the new shiny objects but patients just want to know that they’re going to live. People just want the water to stop ruining their house and that's the same thing dental patients want, is they want the pain to stop. They want confidence back, they want to be able to eat and chew the foods they love again. They don’t want to carry their teeth around in their pocket anymore or whatever, whatever their pain is. You’ve got to market to their perceived problem, not the procedures or what you perceive their problems to be. I mean you might have a patient walk in, their mouth is, they’ve got yellow teeth and they’re crooked and stained and they go, I think my smile is just fine and it doesn’t bother them. They don’t care. But you know they’ve got this pain back here and they want you to fix that. Well that's their perceived problem so you've got to talk to people in their language, talk to people in their language and address their needs. They’ll let you do the work but people don’t care about what you do. Fred Joyal has a great quote: patients don’t care about you until they know you care about them and if your message resonates with them, you know they know that you understand their problems and it's all the warm fuzzy stuff. I mean that’s kind of sarcastic to say but it is true. They want to know you care about them and genuinely care. Not just superficially to get them in the office.
Howard Farran: And you know people don’t want to reach out and shake their hand or whatever, but then when you take away human and they walk up to a dog, first thing you do is hey doggy, and they scratch him. We’re humans.
Colin Receveur: Have you seen Cialdini’s studies on, he went through university and he tested people that entered into a negotiation and at the end of the negotiation, one group would shake hands and the other group would not shake hands and they measured the success of the outcomes of those negotiations based only on the difference of them not consummating the negotiation by shaking hands. It’s all human touch, it’s personal skills. It’s It’s personal relationships and that's what dentistry is. I mean when was the last time you had a patient come in, Dr. Farran I think you’re just a prick but I’m going to come in here and let you be my dentist. It doesn’t happen. People do business with people they like. Know, like and trust and if you get people to know, like and trust you, that’s what it is. Dentistry is trust based. They want to know that you're the guy. You’ve got a carpenter, you’ve got a plumber, you’ve got a personal trainer. You call them, they’re your guy right? You’ve got a general contractor when you have a big problem but they’re looking for their guy. Their dentist and when they find that guy, they’re just going to go in and say fix me doc. Fix me, I don’t care what it is. I don’t want to know what you do, just make my problem go away.
Howard Farran: And it's interesting, like I wouldn’t want every time I go get my goatee trimmed to be tried to sold that I need hair implants or a wig. I wouldn’t want to…so a lot of times with what I see with getting a lot of dentistry done is, you’ve got to listen to what they want and you’ve got to just keep offering more and more and more services because when I look at the offices doing a million and a half dollars a year in dentistry, their presenting $3 for every one they’re doing so if you’re doing a million dollar practice, you're presenting three million dollars and they’re buying about a third of what you offer so it’s just laying it out there, being the guy but you’re right. It all comes with trust. So first of all, so my viewers out there and all over the world and I’m telling you that the internet speed in Ethiopia and Tanzania is not like is in Phoenix, you know so there’s all the different experiences out there. Why don’t you give us a state of the union of American dentist’s websites? What percent of the dentists would you think have a website? What percent of them are doing smartphone, mobile? Tell us the state of the union and how you recommend, so this girl out there knows where she stands and start giving them low hanging fruit of how they could raise their bar to be…I know everybody talks about search engine optimization, so if I’m in Floyd Knobs Indiana and I type in Siri, Siri find me a dentist in Floyd knobs, Indiana how am I going to go find you and your dad versus someone else?
Colin Receveur: There's a couple things that there's, let’s say two main points that I'll hit on with that question. The first is that what people search for is not necessarily the most logical or what you think. I see dentists every day that have a hundred first page rankings, they’ve got all these first page rankings, this great organic search presence and then you look at the patients coming from the internet. The patients calling on the phone tracking numbers and there’s zero or two. You know nothing coming from it's. It's like doing a TV spot for radio spot or a newspaper with a circulation of zero. Just because you're number one for a keyword doesn't mean anybody’s actually finding your website. It doesn’t mean anybody’s searching for the keyword that you’re number one for. You’ve got to figure out, and there’s plenty of tools out there that’s available. This isn’t like hocus pocus science. There’s Google Sandbox, there’s Word tracker, there’s Spy Food, there’s all these tools, a lot of them free where they have a free version you can play with. Figure out what people are actually searching for. It’s not optimization so much as figuring out what consumers want. One big faux pas I see all the time is dentists that optimize for what’s your zip code here in Phoenix?
Howard Farran: 85044.
Colin Receveur: Okay so I see dentists that optimize for dental implant 85044. I’ve never seen a patient search for a zip code. I mean I’ve looked at 1000’s of markets and you can, you know geo target based on a zip code, but the patients aren’t typing in a zip code in their search.
Howard Farran: Okay so how does a dentist know…so talk about the specifics. What’s the software that you do to know what your patients were searching when they landed on your dental office website? How does that work?
Colin Receveur: Well you look up what people are searching for in your area. Google provides that information if you look in the right place.
Howard Farran: How do we do that?
Colin Receveur: AdWords Sandbox. It’s a free tool from Google.
Howard Farran: AdWords Sandbox?
Colin Receveur: You can plug in there and look…
Howard Farran: Is that a service you buy?
Colin Receveur: It’s a free service.
Howard Farran: So AdWords Sandbox, you just go to Google, type in AdWords Sandbox then what would happen?
Colin Receveur: You’ll see Sandbox will pop up, number one. Click on it and go in there and you can drive down into specific market areas and what people are actually searching for in your region or in specific regions.
Howard Farran: Okay so I could find out what people in 85044 are searching for?
Colin Receveur: Exactly.
Howard Farran: Now can I ask them what the people are searching for that landed on my Today’s Dental.com?
Colin Receveur: Sure. Sure that kind of information would be available through your pay per click side or your Google webmaster tools. Interesting changes with keyword data is Google’s not providing a lot of that anymore, organically, for free. You know the privacy advocates had a lot to do with that. They don’t want people knowing what you’re searching for. It's you know this new privacy push that that has a lot of people on board with that so they started this change in 2011, 2012 and as of last year, if you go in your Google Analytics look, look at the keywords right in your keyword list, 80% to 99% are going to say not provided. Google's not giving you, they’re not telling you what people are searching for anymore unless you pay them for it. Unless you go into pay per click and start paying them for their AdWords. So they’re moving in this cut above omnipotent position I call it, where their algorithm is getting so sophisticated that they’re getting to the point that they’re saying we know who you are. We know what you do. This searcher over here, we know what they searched for previously. We know where they’re located. We know who they’re friends with. They have this whole demographic built on people searching and they know everything about you from spider, from crawling your website. We’ll figure it out from here guys. We don’t need you to optimize for these keywords. It’s not the keywords, it’s search intent. It's the buzz word is Web 3.0. It’s a semantic web. It’s more than just the words you search for. It’s the meaning behind it and Google’s got the kind of data that they can start to put that together from who you’re friends with and what you’ve been searching for, where you’re located, figuring all this out.
Howard Farran: Okay so I’m going to pin you down. So if mom is in, okay I’m in Phoenix Arizona. But what I’ve noticed in all the cities over a million is that no one says they live in Phoenix Arizona. Like in my area, everyone says they live in Ahwatukee. It’s Phoenix Arizona but the neighborhood is Ahwatukee and other sections of town call themselves names. Very seldom does someone, or they’ll even say like I live in South Phoenix and there’s no difference in that Phoenix and my Phoenix. We call ours Ahwatukee. So I’m a mom and I’m in Ahwatukee and so how do you think she’s going to search, and she wants to find a dentist. Do you think she’s going to search Siri voice, do you think she’s going to go to Google and type in Ahwatukee dentist? What do you think she’s going to do and then how can I have the better chance that she lands on my website than the other 40 dentists on the corner?
Colin Receveur: So there's, let’s take Louisville market for instance where I’m from. Louisville, Kentucky.
Howard Farran: You’re saying they have phones now in Louisville?
Colin Receveur: They do have phones, yes. We do have those in Kentucky. I’m not actually from Kentucky. I’m from Indiana.
Howard Farran: Now you know I spent, my dad had five Sonic drive ins in Wichita, Kansas and in my four summers in high school I was on the opening crew to open a Sonic in Kearney Nebraska, Abilene Kansas Childress Texas and Louisville Kentucky.
Colin Receveur: I didn't know that.
Howard Farran: So I spent summers, one of the most fun summers I ever had because you’re away from mom and dad and you go to another city, stay in a hotel with dad’s car and keys for three months. Oh my God that was a blast. The only time in my life I ever got shot at.
Colin Receveur: Shot at?
Howard Farran: Yeah. You know why? I was driving, my dad had this big old Lincoln town car and I was driving out there and I had, growing up in Kansas you only saw wheat and mostly just wheat, soy bean, occasional corn as you got closer to Nebraska. But there’s this huge tobacco field and I wanted to pull some plants and throw them in the trunk, take them home to show all my friends a tobacco plant. I mean you do not climb over a fence and start pulling tobacco. I was probably, I don’t know, 15 or 16 and all of a sudden heard a ping, and I’m like what the hell was that? And I hear another ping and I thought, and then I saw this shadow and then I go oh my God, there’s a guy in the middle of that field shooting at me. And I was still so dumb, I didn’t even put two and two together and I’m pulling the plants out. I jumped in the car and I got back home and everybody was like oh my God. You can’t do that. But in Kansas if you stopped and pulled some ears of corn off a corn plant, it was totally cool. But not tobacco.
Colin Receveur: Not tobacco, no.
Howard Farran: How do we, so how is mom is Ahwatukee, or so you gave the example of Louisville. What do you think the average mom in Louisville is going to do?
Colin Receveur: You look at Southern Indiana and southern Indiana is a metro of Louisville. New Albany, Floyd Knobs, Jeffersonville, Clarksville, Cord and those areas are just little cities right across from the river from Louisville, Kentucky and people primarily search by city names there. You see a little bit of county names being searched for, Floyd county, Clark county, Harrison county. You go across the river to Louisville which is a bigger city.
Howard Farran: That's a big city.
Colin Receveur: Yeah it’s a pretty good sized city.
Howard Farran: Is it a million?
Colin Receveur: Over a million I’d say. Metro. You know people start searching by area. The Highlands, Dixie Highway, Mount Washington, different area like that so people want to be very specific and look at the research. Google says that people revise their search four to six times before they decide on a search result.
Howard Farran: Okay explain that.
Colin Receveur: So you take a mom that’s looking for a dentist. They’re looking for doctor Farran in Phoenix or they don't know yet that they’re looking for you. They might search for Phoenix dentist and they look through the results and they go, man I really don’t want to drive all the way across Phoenix. I’m in the east and he’s in the west. So they go back and they revise and they search south Phoenix or north Phoenix Ahwatukee and then they go you know I don't just want an Ahwatukee dentist. I want an Ahwatukee dentist that sees kids and they look at the results and then they go you know it would be nice if I didn’t just have a dentist that saw kids but I want somebody that specializes. Ahwatukee dentist pediatric dentistry. And that's where you get, you've heard the term long tail keywords before? That's where you get that from. It’s human psychology, people revise their search and the Google data, the stuff Google tells us backs it up, four to six times. They’re going to go back and revise their search until they get the results they want and then they go down through the list and then click on a couple. That’s where the long tail keyword comes from. So that’s where your calls are going to come from. So you can optimize for Phoenix dentist, but realize that when you optimize for that you’re going to have a lot of people that aren’t interested in your site because just the geography, they might be 45 minutes across town and they’re never going to drive 45 minutes or an hour to come and see you.
Howard Farran: What does your company do for dentists? What do you actually do? Do you try to optimize? Is that your key: optimizing their websites for search or mobile?
Colin Receveur: Our focus is on keeping the dentists doing dentistry. We do everything from, we talk about the four pillars of marketing from your visibility SEO, pay per click, blogs, articles, press releases. We’ve got a writing team that writes unique fresh content for all of our clients ongoing.
Howard Farran: In Floyd Knobs?
Colin Receveur: In New Albany. Right down the road.
Howard Farran: Oh you’re in New Albany?
Colin Receveur: I am. I’m right down the road from Woody.
Howard Farran: So you build their website?
Colin Receveur: We build the websites.
Howard Farran: And host it?
Colin Receveur: We host it. We write the content, fresh and unique. We’ve got an in house video team that can travel to your office. We’ve also got a studio that we have a lot of dentists fly into. Shoot video testimonials, patients, doctors…
Howard Farran: Is this stuff for their website?
Colin Receveur: Use it for anything. I mean it’s all shot in high def. We’re web marketers so we use it on their social media, we use it on their websites. We’re doing a lot of video e mails right now where you have automatic communication systems that you can drip market to people. Keep your name in front of them. Well stick a video in it, like your video podcast that you’re doing here. You’re dripping video content onto people whether you pre record it and you do a prerecorded series or it’s kind of live like we do today.
Howard Farran: Now do you offer your services cafeteria price style, whatever it is at a one price, whole thing?
Colin Receveur: We do smaller card and then we also have our turnkey packages that, what I say takes the dentist from zero to hero.
Howard Farran: I like that. And what is that and how much does something like that cost?
Colin Receveur: Just depends on the market area. Some dentists are super aggressive marketers. They want us to come out and do a week long video shoot and produce 200 videos. Big mark areas. We work with new practices that are just starting up and of course they’re budgets and their focus is a lot more limited and specific than a big 10 million dollar practice.
Howard Farran: Okay so walk through those pillars again because, okay so first let’s talk website. There’s 120 000 general dentists in America and 30 000 specialists. So there’s 150 000. What percent of those do you think already have a website?
Colin Receveur: Not enough.
Howard Farran: But I mean what do you think it is?
Colin Receveur: Percentage? I would say if you looked at a sheer percentage that have a website, you would probably be up in the 75% range but how many of those websites actually meet any kind of current standards or have anything that is, let’s draw the line at five years old which I think is way too old already for a website. I think most dentists have something but maybe they got it in 1995 and then they just carried it forward.
Howard Farran: Hey I’m telling you, I’m always talking to a dentist on Dentaltown or whatever and I’ll go to their name and I’ll drop it in Google to find out like where does this guy live? And I’m amazed at how many of them, nothing comes up or whatever. So if they’ve got a website, how many of those now come up and work, show up good on the droid and the iPhone.
Colin Receveur: Very few.
Howard Farran: You said three out of four dentists probably have a website and so go back, what number of those websites would be optimized for an iPhone and Android?
Colin Receveur: So Google has a big push this year. Every year Google’s kind of had their different focus that they go to and they declared 2015 the year of mobile. Actually in just a few days, April 21st is Google’s deadline to have a mobile website and they’ve released a program. If you go to Google and search for mobile check my website, you can plug your URL in there, your website and see if your website is mobile friendly.
Howard Farran: Wow what is that called? Are you writing this down John? Write down the- and the other thing, the sandbox. What was the other thing?
Colin Receveur: AdWords Sandbox. Yup.
Howard Farran: Will you do that for me John?
Colin Receveur: So April 21st.
Howard Farran: So what was that again you were telling us?
Colin Receveur: Go to Google and just search for mobile website check Google. I don’t know what the exact URL is, but it’ll pop up right there.
Howard Farran: And it’ll tell you if it’s mobile friendly or not?
Colin Receveur: It’ll tell you if your website is mobile friendly. So how many dentists have a mobile friendly website? I’d say less than 10%. Very, very few because…
Howard Farran: Does that mean more likely to be less mobile friendly on Android, Samsung or Apple? Or would it not matter?
Colin Receveur: I don’t think it’s going to matter a whole lot if it’s….the way, without getting into techno jargon too much, the way the sites work in a mobile environment is not going to differ drastically. There might be some little usability differences but by and large if it’s mobile friendly, it’s mobile friendly across the board. If it’s not, it’s not.
Howard Farran: Do you think Dentaltown was made a bad decision, we only have so many programmers so we worked on Dentaltown app for iOS and Android but we didn’t do Blackberry. Do you think that was leaving a lot of dentists out there on Blackberry or do you think that was an okay business decision?
Colin Receveur: I think it was a good business decision. I think that, I mean you’ve got to put your resources, as with any business dentists or Dentaltown, you’ve got to put your resources where you can make the biggest impact and not having it on BlackBerry, well look at the numbers. Android you know, the platform from Android is huge. It’s surprised Apple how fast it’s taken off but Apple still is the dominant player in the mobile market.
Howard Farran: Is it really?
Colin Receveur: Last statistics I saw they were. Now it’s been, they’ve been sweating.
Howard Farran: So your prediction is not good for Blackberry?
Colin Receveur: They’ve been…I was an early Blackberry adopter. I had the 7000’s and the 8000’s series you know the old scroll wheels on the side. Loved them but they just didn’t stay with the times. I mean I sweated bullets when I got my first touch screen. I thought it would be horrible and the first ones probably were horrible but now they’re so good. I’d love to see then make a resurgence and really do something, but you know their focus right now is on corporate environments. They’ve gone through some mergers and acquisitions and it’s just turmoil. I don’t know where they’re going to come out the market.
Howard Farran: Okay so back to zero to hero with your one company. What’s the name of your company?
Colin Receveur: Smart Box.
Howard Farran: So it’s Smart Box.com?
Colin Receveur: Smart Box Web Marketing.com
Howard Farran: So let’s say you’re the three out of four dentists that has a website and he calls you up and he’s not one of the 5% that’s mobile friendly. What do you first got to do for this doc? What are you going to try to do?
Colin Receveur: First step is to help him understand what's going on, where is his website deficient because everybody's in different places, everybody's done different things, everybody has different iterations of a website or different generations so to speak. First step is just to figure out where he's at. You know hey, here’s your website. Here’s what you’ve got. Here’s what we can use and here’s what we can’t use. Here’s where you need to get to, over here. Once you know where you’re at and where you need to get to, you draw the line to connect them.
Howard Farran: Is one of the problems still old flash stuff that doesn’t show up on Apple?
Colin Receveur: Yeah flash is horrible. Apple doesn’t read it. Yeah Google doesn’t read it.
Howard Farran: So what percent of, I’ve heard and this is not my expertise, but I’ve heard that if you have a dental website and you don’t have a regularly uploading content, whether it be a video you take with your iPhone and upload it on YouTube or video or a blog that, if Google sees that you bought a website five years ago and nothing’s been done to it for five years, but this person searching for a dentist in Ahwatukee, and the dentist across the street, their website is alive because every week or month you’re adding a blog or a video or something, that Google’s always going to plan that way. Is that a true assessment?
Colin Receveur: If you look at what they've done with their recent updates, hummingbird penguin panda and I don’t know why they name them all after zoo animals, your guess is as good as mine, but they do. If you look at what they’ve done, they don’t want stale websites. They want fresh, unique content. Unique is key. You can’t have template cookie cutter content and if you don’t know if you have duplicate content or cookie cutter stuff, Copyscape.com, you can go there, plug in your URL and that program will tell you if somebody’s stolen your content, if you stole somebody else's content or maybe your web developer just sold the same content to 1000 websites out there. You can find out very easily.
Howard Farran: You know you’re going to have to summarize this whole in an article. Will you do that for me in the magazine?
Colin Receveur: Love to.
Howard Farran: Yeah and what would be awesome is, these are a lot of tracks and once again, be honest with yourself, if none of this interests you this is why you have an office manager. Somebody in your office has got to own this website because how they’re coming in on their smartphone now, you know new patient flow equals cash flow and if you just want to keep going to implant courses and learn bone grafting and you’re just in search of the ultimate CBCT and none of this is interesting to you, you’re not going to have the patients to do implants. You’ve got to learn all that stuff so when you were saying the pillars, you said there were four but I thought you names five. You said website…
Colin Receveur: Visibility is first.
Howard Farran: So you’re talking about the physical bricks and mortar location?
Colin Receveur: No your visibility online.
Howard Farran: Okay so you’re talking about…
Colin Receveur: SEO, pay per click, things that get you seen.
Howard Farran: So talk pay per click. Are you recommending these dentists buy Google Ads or Facebook ads?
Colin Receveur: Absolutely. There’s a few very cool things and there's a few things that aren’t known with Google AdWords. For instance a lot of dentists don’t realize that you have to optimize your website for pay per click just as you do for SEO and I’ll send you the exact formula on it. It’s what’s called quality score. Quality score is Google's way of keeping people from selling chainsaws to people searching for a dentist or anything that’s unrelated. So Google has a one to ten number quality score and depending on what keyword you’re bidding on and what Google assesses the page that you’re going to direct them to, they give you a one to ten number and that one to ten number is a factor, a direct factor in how much you pay for that click. So I can show you…
Howard Farran: So not all clicks cost the same amount of money?
Colin Receveur: Absolutely not. I can show you real world examples of a doctor in the number one position on pay per click that’s paying five fold less than the guy in a number four or number five position because the guy down the list has a one or two quality score. His website, the biggest thing that I tell docs about pay per click is if the guy doing your pay per click doesn’t have access or isn’t modifying your website, your quality score probably sucks because that’s how you fix quality score is you optimize the website to fit the pay per click campaign you’re running, or you change the pay per click to fit the landing page whichever way, you’ve got to change one of them to make it balance out.
Howard Farran: Okay so start now talking to this dentist who’s never, ever bought a Google AdWords or Facebook and first start with what would you recommend if he’s only going to do one? Would you recommend she does a Facebook ad or a Google click ad?
Colin Receveur: Facebook has some awesome advantages. Facebook has a lot more demographic information so let’s say you’ve got a list of patients that haven’t been in your office in 12 months. They’re dead, you need to reactivate them, you need to recall them. You can take that list of patients, their names, give it to Facebook and send ads specifically to those people through Facebook. So that's one really cool thing that you can re-target so to speak people through Facebook and you know you can segment it any way you want. You could take a list of over 12 months that haven’t come in for a cleaning, you could take people that came in but didn’t accept treatment, you presented to but didn’t accept, you can take a list of patients that maybe came in and had Invisalign or implant work and you want to deliver kind of a post-op referral sequence.
Howard Farran: And you do this all ATM style on the Facebook page? You’re not going to deal with a human I take it? Or are you going to deal with Facebook, I mean you’re not going to talk to anybody at Facebook, this is all automatic?
Colin Receveur: It’s all through their web interface. Yeah the buzz word on Facebook is what’s called custom audiences. You can build your audience on Facebook based on your list. So you take a spreadsheet, put all the names, export your list of patients right out of your EagleSoft or Dentrix that have not come into your office or whatever criteria you want, upload that spreadsheet into Facebook and then you can send ads specifically to those people. It’s very, very cool. You can’t do that on Google. Now you can retarget on Google, where if somebody comes to your website, you can continue to follow them around and show more ads but being able to target specific people, you know Joe and Jane Smith with a specific ad on Facebook is something we found to be very, very strong.
Howard Farran: And then would you on Facebook, is that a cost per click or is that something that you do a monthly budget? How does the money on that work?
Colin Receveur: Both. It is cost per click. Generally Facebook is a lot cheaper than Google, cost per click. A lot less competition. Both pay per click platforms are bid based. It’s a bidding war. The guy that bids the most gets to the top position on Google and Facebook.
Howard Farran: Okay now you’re talking about Facebook, if you’re going to do Facebook is it worth the dentist’s time to also do Google Plus, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram- is there any other social media that’s worth your time and effort? Specifically to dentist offices. Do you agree with the assessment that you’re basically targeting a mom?
Colin Receveur: Yes.
Howard Farran: So is it worth, if you’re doing all this stuff on Facebook, do you recommend also doing it on any other social media sites?
Colin Receveur: Well let’s set the paid stuff on Facebook aside. Let’s call that, let’s put that in some container. Doing organic posts, you know posting status updates and tweets, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest all that stuff, I’m not a big proponent of it because you might have some existing patients that you can recall, reactivate through that but you’re not going to find new patients. I mean people that aren’t yet your patients, they have a problem. They’re not going to go to Pinterest to find their dentist. They’re not going to go to Facebook or Twitter to find their dentist. They’re going to go to Google or Bing or the Yellow Pages, somewhere that they can look for a person that can solve their problem. Social networks are great to connect with people. You know keep relationships going. I think they’re in integral part in an internal marketing campaign, but we’re external marketing guys. So we focus on where we can find the new blood. The new patients that are searching.
Howard Farran: And your number one go to would be a Facebook pay per click ad?
Colin Receveur: Not number one. I would say that it’s a piece of the puzzle.
Howard Farran: What would be your number one?
Colin Receveur: I wouldn't say there's any number one. I would say the number one thing to do was make sure you've got visibility everywhere. Make sure you’ve got organic, you’ve got pay per click, you’ve got Facebook ads, you’ve got AdWords, you’ve got local search. You know you’re showing up in the maps, you’ve got good reviews online, dominate the listings don't try to put all your eggs in one basket. Don't try to do one thing online because as soon as you do that, people change. How they search change, what Google does change. I've seen too many dentists that put all their eggs into one basket. Google makes one little change and poof, plus everybody looks in different places. I talk to dentists all the time that say I don't know anybody that clicks on those paid ads. Nobody clicks on those Google ads. Well Google doesn’t have a hundred billion in cash sitting around because nobody clicks on those paid ads. I mean that’s their cash cow. Everybody clicks on the ads. So we find that 40-60% of new patients come organically, 20-40% come from paid ads and the rest are going to come from local listings, press releases, other properties out there that you can leverage and optimize or be seen on.
Howard Farran: So when someone says to a dentist your website which you bought 15 years ago at a convention, it’s not mobile friendly. Explain to doc what that means.
Colin Receveur: If you pull up your website on a mobile phone and you can’t read it, you can’t use it, you can’t click on the phone number to call. If you can’t click on the phone number to call, realize that person is going to have to grab a pencil, write down your phone number, back out of their phone, type the phone number back in and then call you. Now that seems simple but how many people have a pencil or are going to do that? You know they see a website that isn’t mobile friendly, the text is this small. I mean if the text was this small on your phone, could you read it?
Howard Farran: You know I’m 52 so I’m a cripple without my readers.
Colin Receveur: Yup.
Howard Farran: Ever since 45. I always have to have my readers, so I’m spoilt. When I’m on my iPhone I mean to hit a phone number and it just calls it’s so sweet, but what I like more is to hit the address and now I’m in audio, voice, map quest. In 300 feet, you’re going to turn right on 48th street. I love that. You just pull right up to the business and I’m thinking how many patient come into a dental office 10 minutes late for a cleaning and the hygienist hates that because they barely get it all done in one hour.
Colin Receveur: It’s all about, just giving people what they want. You know you have consumer hours in your practice right? You have, you do things the consumer wants in your practice. You cater to them and this isn’t rocket science. This isn’t like new shiny objects, this is just what consumers want. You’ve got to remove yourself and in the online marketing world, there's an unlimited number of puzzle pieces. You know everybody's trying to sell you the new shiny object, the new gadget and gizmo that’s going to yield you all these new patients, but you’ve got to think about just the consumer. What does the consumer want? Well they want mobile access. They love video. Look at what Amazon has said about how much they’re sales go through the roof when they put video on one of the product they’re selling. Look what the real estate industry, the car industry has done with videos on their websites? People want video. A cool statistic that came out a couple of years ago, Forrester Research did a study and found that websites with video are 53 times more likely to have a first page ranking on Google.
Howard Farran: I’m writing this down now and I’m doing the podcast. You know another thing I like about the video is I’ve seen it several times where I’ve just done for a doctor, we were thinking about trying to find a place to get all the kids for dinner or whatever and we went to this one website and it was a restaurant about 40 minutes away from where we all live but we’ve heard it’s kind of a fun place and I hit that video and the owner is like this, 50 year old lady and she’s like hey, welcome here and she’s walking me through the kitchen and waving the deal and showing me a menu and it was only like about a one minute video but it’s like I want to go there and so I immediately hit the forward scroll deal and then I prompt, I see a group text all my kids and I say hey this place sounds fun and two seconds later like oh yeah, let’s all go. That video just clinched it.
Colin Receveur: Video is humanizing. Everybody does business with people they like. It’s Cialdini, it’s the principle of likeability. You’re not going to do business with somebody you don’t like and the other Cialdini principle is social proof. People don’t want to hear you talk about how great you are but when other people point the finger at you, that carries a lot of weight. It’s social proof. We can all say great things about ourselves but when other people are going, man that Today’s Dental, those guys are awesome. It's the recommendation, it's the personal referral but you don't even have to know the person. Just any recommendation that looks sincere and is structured, what I call the reverse testimonial. Not just saying oh Dr. Farran, he’s so great. He’s so nice. He takes care of it, but structure your testimonials to start out with the problem. You know that patient that has their dentures, get them to say you know not Dr. Farran fixed my denture problems. Get them to say when I came to see Dr. Farran, my loose, sore dentures were driving me crazy. I had to take them out at night and put them in the glass. I had to carry them around in my pocket. I had to take them out when I eat food. Now he’s fixed it. Dr. Farran is so great, I like him so much. People resonate with the problem. It’s like you’re driving down the interstate and the police are on the side of the road, those red and blue lights, they grab your attention pretty fast. If the lights aren’t on, they don’t grab your attention. It’s the problem. We’re attracted to problems as humans and lead with the problem. Don’t talk about your procedure, talk about the problem they’re experiencing. It resonates with them, they connect with it. Now they know you’re speaking to them and when they know you’re speaking to them, now they’re listening.
Howard Farran: What would you say to a dentist if he just said look, I just need more new patients. I mean the bottom line is, new patients equals cash flow, there’s a lot of dentists out there that said you know, if I can just have 10 or 15 or 20 more new patients a month, I’d be a happy camper. I can solve all my problems. So what would you tell a dentist that said dude look, I just want new patients. Well first of all what’s realistic for him to ask for? Like if someone called you, is that still dependent on the market and the place?
Colin Receveur: We work with new practices. We work with million and three million and ten million dollar practices and the analogy I give is, okay take a ten million dollar practice and a one million dollar practice. Side by side, same market area theoretically. Most practice consultants are going to come in and say spend 4-5%, 3-4%, 5-7% whatever the number is, spend it on your marketing right? So the ten million dollar practice spends 5%, they spend half a million dollars a year. The million practice spends 5%, they spend 50 000 a year. They both grow by 30% next year. What’s the difference? Well the ten million dollar practice has the systems in place and they have the cash flow to do a boat load more marketing. So marketing drives patients and once you have the internal systems and the resources to handle that flow.
Howard Farran: So what do you think the average office? You said one million and ten million, those are extreme offices. What do you think the average practice collects in America?
Colin Receveur: Oh I would say under a million probably. A million?
Howard Farran: A half million. So if that dentist, is the average Joe, Dick and Harry called you up and said I do half a million a year and I want 10 or 20 new patients more a month that would be awesome. In two minutes, tell them what you would do. Close.
Colin Receveur: First thing I want to do is ask them what kind of patients? There’s a lot of different kinds of patients out there. There’s Medicaid patients, there’s patients that are just general bread and butters and then there’s niche, boutique practices. They want specific types of patients. Maybe they’re specialists, maybe they’re not. My dad only does implant work. He’s got his IV certificate and that’s all he does but he’s a general practitioner. First thing is find out what they want, not just in terms of new patients but what kind of patients. Then let's look at their market area. Look at demographics, look at how much competition they have to overcome, look at what their goals are. Some dentists call up and they’re like man I’m going to sell out, I’m going to transition in five years. All I need to do is maintain. Just grow a little bit would be nice. Other guys, you know I’ve got a doctor up in Oregon, Riley Peock, he calls me up. He just sold his practice for 3.2 million. He wants to open 10 more practices in the next 10 years. He’s going gang busters. He’s a go getter. He was a football player. He’s just a bold mentality and he is a marketing machine and he’s got the systems, he’s got the processes and he’s super aggressive. So he wants to grow like this, exponential growth. Some guys just want to take incremental and some guys just want to hold where they’re at because they’re on the way out. They’re ready to retire. They’ve worked for 30 or 40 years. So figuring out what that takes, where they’re at in their practice and their life. Some guys come to me and they say Colin, I don’t want more patients. I want more free time. How do I get more free time and produce the same? Putting together a package, a system, a marketing system that’s going to let them have what they want, that's just they key. Meet them with their needs.
Howard Farran: Well thank you so much for spending time with me. Did you say I have two minutes left? My clock says 52 minutes? No it’s been 52 minutes. Are you going for 60 minutes or do we need to speed up?
Colin Receveur: I think the camera might have run for a few minutes before we started.
Howard Farran: Okay so we’re good? Okay well hey on that note, sorry I messed up that close but Colin Receveur, thank you so much for spending an hour with me. Thank you for speaking at Townie meeting and thanks for educating all of us old guys all this new modern stuff.
Colin Receveur: Thanks.
Howard Farran: Alright buddy, bye-bye.
Hey I want you to come next year to the 14th annual Townie meeting in April and have a blast. There’s nothing more fun than a Townie meeting.