17 October 2022

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Dr. Chris Phelps: Marketing agencies have failed us Part 2

Dentistry expert talks about his new book, marketing, lost opportunities

Mary Guiden

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Dr. Chris Phelps recently sat down with Dentistry33 and discussed his new book, how he’s been successful and why he feels that advertising and marketing agencies have, to this point, failed dentists. His new book, “The Complete Book on Dental Marketing,” is now available through Edra Publishing. In part two of this three-part interview, Phelps provides marketing advice and shares his observations about COVID-19 and a shift he saw in patients at his own offices.

In the first part of the interview, Phelps shared his advice for aspiring entrepreneurs. He also discussed the three target audiences for his new book. Read the first part of the interview on Dentistry33's site. 

Q: What are a few things dentists can do to improve their marketing?

A: The first thing is to get your mind set in the right place. So many times, doctors will grab me after a talk and they’re like: Dr. Phelps, what’s that one thing I can do to get 100 new patients next week? As if there’s one magic bullet that will solve all their issues and marketing problems. 

The truth is that’s the wrong mindset. There is no ‘one thing.’ Marketing is trial and error. It’s fishing –what I call in the book — fishing with multiple fishing poles.

Marketing is making a lot of small investments, spread out, with multiple fishing poles over several different areas. It needs to be tracked well and we see where the fish are biting. If the fish are biting in direct mail, then great, we keep on fishing in that pond. Or we add a little more money and make a bigger ‘worm.’

If we’re fishing over in grass roots marketing, successfully visiting retirement communities onsite and doing educational seminars, then we keep fishing. But if it’s a billboard or radio ad, and the fish aren’t biting, then we need to be able to know that early on, so we can pull up our pole and go fishing elsewhere. 

There’s not one thing you can do to get yourself 100 new patients every month. But I will say that there are easily four or five things you can do every month that will get you 20 or 25 quality patients to get you to 100, if that’s your number. 

Don’t be so dead set on the mindset of: I need this one thing. Track your goals but stay focused on being successful with multiple smaller things. 

Q: How has marketing in dentistry changed in recent years, given the pandemic and statistics that show fewer people were booking appointments during the deadliest time of the pandemic?

A: It was an interesting time for me as a behavioral scientist and somebody who likes to study why people do the things they do, to see what the reaction of people was during a time of uncertainty. 

That’s what COVID was. Not only did it bring local uncertainty in your area, but it was also a rare global uncertainty where everybody was afraid of and affected by the same thing.

It was interesting going back and looking at the mindset of our patients and who was responding to our marketing before that versus the patients that were responding during a time of apprehension. 

What do we do in this time of uncertainty? 

It flipped the paradigm of who was coming to the dental office. Prior to COVID, we had proactive patients coming in, people who would come in to do their six-month cleanings, get fillings and crowns to avoid big things causing them pain and discomfort (root canals, implants). 

We were not seeing reactive patients, who typically wait until something blows up before they do anything about it. 

After we were shut down initially for two months, we reopened our doors, and we were inundated with patients. But it wasn’t our ‘normal’ pre-COVID patient. It was the reactive patient. The pandemic, a time of uncertainty, created a new subset of mindsets. Proactive people are also risk averse. Reactive patients are risk tolerant. 

Dentists got into trouble if they didn’t prepare for that change in patients. They didn’t change their marketing messages to speak to the patients who had always been coming in, so when they ran out of the risk-averse patients or didn’t change marketing tactics, they had a huge gap in treatment, with lots of empty chairs. 

I hope people dig into that section of the book. It doesn’t have to be an uncertainty caused by a virus or a pandemic; it can be an economic or a cultural uncertainty. But the mindsets and how people are going to react will be the same. That’s the key. 

Q: What procedures or processes were you using in your practice prior to the pandemic that helped you and your team succeed during a challenging time?

A: I was fortunate because I’d been playing around with marketing for a number of years. Through time and having been tested by the school of hard knocks, I figured out all the different mediums and mastered them to the point where they’re like light switches now. 

So, when the time came and we had reached our mass capacity, I was dialing down our marketing. We didn’t have chairs for 100 new people every month. But I had tested and proven these tactics, so I knew if I brought on a new doctor, then I could increase the patient count. 

Luckily, I had this repertoire of proven marketing tactics. When I needed them, I could turn them back on and it was a good thing. 

Prior to COVID, my favorite type of marketing was grass roots, going to retirement communities or assisted living facilities and communities of people ages 55 and older, and hosting educational events. I used that as a new patient event to draw them to my practice. 

Guess what the no. 1 thing is that I could not do during COVID? Visit those facilities. It cut off a whole medium for me. But fortunately, I was able to go back to time-tested things like internal marketing, network marketing, parasite marketing and ramp up my external marketing as a result. That protected us from the gap that so many other dentists got stuck in during the pandemic.