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Ever wondered why some dental practices thrive while others barely scrape by? The answer often lies in savvy marketing strategies, and that's exactly what Dr. Jamil Torofdar, a dentist turned marketing guru, is here to dissect. With Jamil's guidance, we explore the unique challenges and opportunities in dental marketing—revealing how targeted, in-house efforts can slash patient acquisition costs and why genuine content trumps generic ads every time. This episode promises a deep dive into the world of dentistry ads that are often overlooked but ripe with potential for those willing to think outside the box.
While authenticity might seem like a buzzword, in the realm of social media marketing, it's the golden ticket to engagement. We share an intimate tale of a post about a car accident and its unexpected impact, setting the stage for a broader conversation on marketing strategies that are leading the charge in 2024. From leaflet drops to dynamic Google ads, we cover the gamut of tools designed to capture attention in a crowded digital landscape. Jamil's personal experiences, including overcoming dyslexia, shape our approach to crafting accessible ads, underscoring the importance of consumer-centric content that resonates on a personal level.
As we wrap up, we turn the spotlight on dental practices and their varying approaches to social media marketing. Stepping away from the cookie-cutter content often churned out by AI, we discuss the unbeatable value of personalized engagement and the significant role of Google reviews in cementing a practice's reputation. From practical tips on how to encourage patients to leave stellar feedback to a candid assessment of video testimonials, we deliver actionable insights that can transform a dental practice's online presence. And as a bonus, we're excited to share an invaluable resource—an ebook on finance and investments—for those eager to continue learning long after the podcast ends. Join us for an episode that's as informative as it is enlightening, perfect for dental professionals aiming to bite into the meat of marketing mastery.
Transcription
Dr James, 0s:
All right, take two. Take number two. We're back and live on the Denyshne Invest Facebook group. The reason that we had to restart that previous stream was, for whatever reason, the video was not displaying correctly. But now you've got us back Crystal Clear HD broadcasting across the airways, onto the Facebook network, onto the Denyshne Invest Facebook community myself and Dr Jamil Turoftar. We were just getting to the point where Jamil was explaining his credentials on the marketing front and why Jamil has such a high level of expertise when it comes to all things dental practice marketing.
Jamil, 38s:
So, first things first, I am not an expert. My name is Jamil.
Dr James, 41s:
That's not what you said on the last stream. You said that's hilarious. You changed that. Anyway, I'm kidding.
Jamil, 48s:
My name is Jamil. I'm a dentist from South Wales. I'm a Dundee grad and James said my incorrect age on the last one. I'm actually 29 years old now A bit old. So I own a few sites within South Wales and expanding into England in the next few months. See how that goes really.
Dr James, 1m 9s:
All right, Listen, Jamil. Thank you so much for that intro and I can't wait to learn loads about marketing tonight, because marketing is like the ninja shit that dental practice needs, but they don't always flip and realize that they need it. It's massive right. Three parts of any business marketing, sales and the product. Dental practice is focused on the product a lot, which can be your marketing word of mouth and things like that. But what you want to do is you obviously want to maximize how many people you can serve, how many people you can help, and that's where marketing fits in. Marketing is just awareness. But anyway, Jamil is a resident expert on that. We're going to talk all about that Just before we do. Guys, can you give us a really good idea? If you see me looking down at this, it's just because I'm looking at my phone and keeping an eye on everybody on the group who's interacting with the live stream. Guys, anybody who is watching this live in the house tonight, go ahead and throw a live in the comment section. Got a really good idea of how many people are here. If you're watching this on catch up, that's cool as well. Be interested to know. Feel free to throw the word replay in the comment section Got a really good idea of how many people are in the house tonight. And also, as well as that, as ever, we'd like to reward everybody who hangs around for the full 20, 30 minutes webinar with a little gift at the end. So more on that later. It's going to be worth the wait. As I say, always a pleasure to have Jameel on the platform. Jameel, you're here today to talk about marketing. The stage is yours, my friend. Let's maybe start off with how you define marketing, maybe some of the misconceptions that Dennis have whenever it comes to marketing, because they're abundant, right.
Jamil, 2m 39s:
Yeah. So what I do differently is I try and think outside the box. The great thing is because I don't use a marketing agency and we do it all in house. We move with changes very quickly, so we'll know if something's working and if something's not working, and I think that is really, really important in any industry, but especially dentistry.
Dr James, 3m 5s:
My man, awesome. And where did you acquire your expertise on marketing? Was it a?
Jamil, 3m 10s:
career. I'm not an expert, so basically it's trial and error. So because obviously our own practices when you're putting money into Google, facebook, you're almost putting your own money in. So I feel like I've got skin in the game. Where I really need to improve my cost per acquisition or whatever, I try and get it down as low as possible so that as a business, if financially works. So yeah, that's why I try and do it myself and try and really understand it. I'll give you an example. I released a Google ads I think about two weeks ago and I thought I made the best ad mankind has ever seen and I just didn't get any calls and I was like, but because I've seen that, straight away I paused it and I was like this campaign's obviously not working for me, but other dentists probably will have a marketing agency. They'll meet up once every two months and by that point you would have lost a lot of money on Google ads. Spend whatever spend you do.
Dr James, 4m 9s:
Awesome man, okay cool. So ads are something that is hugely under leveraged by dental practices, in my opinion. What do you think on that? Would you agree?
Jamil, 4m 19s:
Yes, yeah, so I see a lot of people doing Google ads very badly, so I'll give you an example. So I'm based in an area called Blackwood. Sometimes, when you're typing in dentist, around me, I get dental practices from London, birmingham appearing. So I think they haven't obviously done location tagging properly and location exclusion properly. That's why it's happening. But, yeah, so that's what I believe. I've got skin in the game and that's why I try and do it as efficiently as possible.
Dr James, 4m 50s:
Okay, cool. What do you think or what do you find are the biggest gimmies for dental practices whenever it comes to marketing, like, what could they all do better? And what do you think is really effective whenever it comes to all things marketing in terms of helping dental practices get the word out there about what they do?
Jamil, 5m 8s:
So the issue I've got is that a lot of dentists go and pick a marketing agency that might work for about 5, 10 dentists and what they do? They churn the same content that everyone else is churning out. In fact, you want to make relatable content that is engaging and put in an ad of Facebook ad up saying brush twice a day. Everyone knows to brush twice a day. It's just not unique enough. It doesn't get the share, it doesn't get the engagements If you look at Facebook and tell you all the stats about each one of your posts. So I think like, for example, last Halloween somebody came in and they were dressed in like their Halloween outfit. It was a young boy and young girl. I think they were about 7 age and I was like it was really cool, Do you mind me putting that on Facebook? And I was like yeah, yeah, go ahead. Blah, blah, blah. So I put it up and obviously they were over the moon because their kids on Facebook on our dental practice. But it's like that drives a lot of engagement because what happens? They're auntie, they're nieces, they're nephews, all are going like in the post. So my best performing Facebook post was of an accident that happened outside my practice. So basically, somebody crashed into my electricity pole. It hurt me financially that day, but I had a lot of shares, so I just put a post up saying look, somebody's crashed into the pole. Sorry, we're having to close today and I think I must have got about 80, 90 shares. That's 80, 90 people sharing it to 200, 300 of their friends for free. So that really worked really well. We got loads of likes and stuff like that. So it's like cases that would be really engaging and I think there are. I think everyone's doing loads of before and afters and you'll see, I stalk a lot of dental practices and they barely have any engagement. They'll have one or two likes. We're really transparent as a dental practice. So I proposed to about three weeks ago, on the first of Jan. We're telling everyone that our prices are increasing and, yeah, we just don't like hiding anything, but yeah. So I think I'm going a bit off topic because I'm just talking about marketing in general. I think we discussed this, James. We want to talk about how is my marketing strategy going to change in 2024?
Dr James, 7m 35s:
Yeah, well, certainly that's definitely something we should talk about. And how can we adapt what we're doing in 2024 to stair-breasts of current trends? But just before we do that, right, just to touch on what you were saying a second ago, I think the biggest mistake that a lot of people make whenever it comes to social media and marketing is that it's way too artificial, as in. It's just so staged and people are like, yeah, you get like one or two likes from like your brother or like your auntie or whatever the heck sister-in-law and all of this stuff. You know what I mean? Her own Facebook and they see it. But I just think if you just keep it real, like you know, when you shared the car crash post, you were just keeping it real right there, like there was no, there was no like we. You know there was nothing that you could have ever staged about that and that like got the most PR of all time. So there's something in there, there's something in there, and when I say keeping it real, what I mean is the human factor, cause that's why people use social media. Social media is just an extension of our human psychology. People just use it as a means to share the fact that they love and enjoy things that they would normally, they would normally enjoy. You know, see, like love in real life, like they're just, they're just expressing that in social media. So as long as you remember that and remember that it's a human being on the other end of it, you're already better than like 80, 90% of people, in my opinion, cause it's just so staged, but anyway. So what you were saying, but the question was that on a Facebook page, or is that on a Facebook group or Facebook profile?
Jamil, 9m 2s:
So it was on our dental practice page.
Dr James, 9m 6s:
And you got. You got 90 shares, bro. That's wild yeah.
Jamil, 9m 10s:
Yeah, that's unbelievable, isn't it? Because people, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So people want to be their own hero, don't they? And then they share it and they're like, oh, I'll let everyone know. But yeah, that performed really well. So, yeah, the marketing strategy in 2024, I think there's still a place for leaflet distribution. I genuinely think there is. So I recently did a leaflet drop of about 40,000. It costs about 4,000 pounds, so it doesn't cost massively amounts. You're paying a pence for whatever it is per house. Within three patients, we made our money back. I think there's massive scope for it. But because one thing, that search engine optimization of Facebook and stuff like that do we really target people that are looking for a dentist? But not all patients are looking for a dentist. Some people, some people might have no decay but they just want to get a checkup or a scale and polish. These people sometimes aren't actively checking, looking for dental practicing. So we've set aside. We've set aside. Each practice will do one leaflet drop once a year and this year to see how that goes. Short form video content, I think is going to be massive in 2024. Yeah, reels and having videos on your website of you I think that makes a massive, massive difference. So we're trialling it out at the moment. But the reason why we can move so quick with the time I was telling you, james, before this call, we have our own video gear. It's so crazy like you can have an idea and you could just go in front of a camera, click, record and you're getting professional video footage straight away. I don't have to think of an idea, then have to contact a video guy that comes, sets up, eats away half of my day. So I think by doing that has made a massive, massive difference. Google ads is always developing and it was changing day by day, but there's something called dynamic ads at the moment that I think is working really well for me. So, dynamic ad for those that don't know, I think it's dynamic ad. Yeah, dynamic ad is basically it pulls what the person is searching for and puts it in the title of your ad so you can get more likely to get clicked through rate a lot higher. But yeah, so that's what I'm trying to do in 2024. Obviously, we will always set aside a budget for things like such as Facebook, facebook, general marketing, whatever we do, but yeah, Awesome.
Dr James, 11m 53s:
Where did you learn all this stuff? By the way, is it trial and error or any courses or anything like that, or books?
Jamil, 12m 0s:
So I can't read on. Severely dyslexic. I've never been able to read a book. I wish I could, it would be amazing. But so I believe I'm quite dyslexic, so I'm hyper critical of everything I do and one of my abilities is that I will design an ad and I will always think of the consumer. I won't think of the dentist, and I think a lot of marketing agencies don't do that very well. They're so bombarded on telling the patient oh look, we do this, we do this. But sometimes all patients want is a solution to their problem and if you think of it, so I designed my ads, my posters, whatever for me to read. I believe anyone can read them. I think that makes a massive difference.
Dr James, 12m 45s:
So you know what? Listen, awesome stuff, and I want to pull that apart in just a second, but you know what's going through my head Just then? There's kind of three relationships that dentists or dental practices have with social media and marketing. The first one is they don't do it right, in which case they should, and certainly some of the things that you mentioned just then are good places to start. The second dentist or dental practices is doing it, but they're outsourcing it, right, yeah. And third one is doing it doing more can, actively doing more can but they're doing it in house, right. To me, those are like the three categories that dental practice or a dentist will fall into you with me. Yeah, do you think there's ever a place for outsourcing it, or do you think you should just jump straight in and bring it in house?
Jamil, 13m 32s:
So, for example, the problem is is that so you know when you see something like in your house there is something that is always there, but you've always glance past it? You, just, you, just there's always one object. If you look around, you'd be like, oh, I didn't know that was there. The problem is all of these outsource agencies are using chat GPT to do the content writing, and the same thing is happening with chat GPT content. I can look at a Facebook post and I could say that's from chat GPT Because it fills it with emojis and it's just. It's sometimes they're just a bit too long winded and it wouldn't. So somebody has to put effort into making the post look pretty. I think I can be hella short. They're not putting that much effort doing the content right at the top of it. So I think being like you said it's actually true, it's just being natural, just being yourself is the most important thing. But I'm saying don't make a caption of an Facebook post. Three letters or three words, make it a bit deaf, but you write it because people relate to you, not to chat GPT.
Dr James, 14m 41s:
So it time of this. On the topic of bringing it in house, what's the most effective thing in terms of marketing, the most effective strategy you've ever implemented that has brought you the most leads? What's the biggest thing that you find worked for you?
Jamil, 14m 56s:
Reviews. Nothing more, nothing less. Oh, reviews. If you want to grow as a practice, you need to be, you need to have a lot of reviews. I think that's the most important thing. Everything else, you might have the best marketing agency, you might have a team of 50 people in house, but if your reviews are poor, it just speaks for itself. Your conversion rate is going to drop down massively, do you?
Dr James, 15m 23s:
mean specifically Google reviews or.
Jamil, 15m 28s:
Yeah overall, but like this, people use working feedback whatever. I just want to. I gamble on the company that's going to be around the longest, and I think Google is going to be around the longest. So I'd rather put my reviews on Google and encourage people to leave on review, let's say, if working. I know working feedback does pull it from like yell Google, but if working feedback goes down, then you kind of got reviews everywhere. But yeah, so that's my own opinion.
Dr James, 15m 57s:
So you think of all the methods in your opinion, of all the methods, Google reviews, they're like the God tier, they're right up here, they're the most important and everything else is secondary to that, I've heard rumors that you can get trust pilot reviews.
Jamil, 16m 10s:
But you have to remember trust pilot generates his income from paying businesses. Okay, and if a business calls them up and says that's not my patient, will you remove it? In my opinion, they'll be more inclined to remove that review because they want to retain their customer. Their customer's the business, not the consumer.
Dr James, 16m 31s:
Oh, interesting factoid, Good marketing knowledge right there, because people just don't know that stuff. So top stuff. So let's focus on Google reviews because in your opinion, they're like the go to place, that's like the first place that we should look. How can we get more Google reviews, either as a dental practice or potentially an associate as well, and associate for the practice that we work in?
Jamil, 16m 51s:
You can open up your own Google places page. But yeah, Google, you can create a Google link and you just send it to your patient, email it, whatever.
Dr James, 17m 3s:
You're a big believer in asking them for reviews at the end of the year.
Jamil, 17m 6s:
Yeah, massively. Because if you go to a restaurant and somebody says, can you leave me a review, you'll be more inclined to leave a review than somebody that doesn't. And people are more. People have a more tendency to leave a bad review than a good one, so that's what you want to weed out. And so my first ever review was a one-star review. Oh man, yeah, it was a one-star review, my first ever review, and I was like so I knew the power of reviews and I was like I'm never having one person hold my business ransom and that's why. So we got, I think in one site we got like 1,805 star reviews. That's pretty good yeah. So yeah, we do, we do well on reviews.
Dr James, 17m 47s:
Awesome, but this is the thing so valuable because of all the tools that are available to us when it comes to marketing, how do we prioritize? So that's the go-to one, and let's just go really granular on that just for one more second. Just one more thing I'd like to ask how specifically do you ask the patient, because a lot of people have a hang-off on this, right?
Jamil, 18m 9s:
So I get a tooth out. I'm like, mate, if you don't mind, I'm going to send you a review link. Please leave me one. And I'd be like, yeah, yeah, no problem, okay, done, that's it Simple as that. Yeah, yeah, I was like that's it. I said, if you need to, I'll send you the link, you just click the button and you just leave a review. And so I've got some patients that are massive fan of me and they will create they'll get their grant credits to create a Google Mail account so they can leave me a review. But the problem is, google is really good at setting these out and you'll see, if you collect a lot of Google reviews, your reviews will dip. Okay, because Google goes for a crawl, I think, every three months, and so any newly formed accounts, I think they remove the reviews. Personally, Right. Okay, because then it thinks that well, you can make a thousand Google Mail accounts if you've got time and you could just leave thousands if you want. So I think Google does that. Google reviews bad reviews are not easy to remove Very, very difficult. So that's why they're so authentic, in my opinion.
Dr James, 19m 11s:
So avoid the bad reviews at all costs and get as many goodies in there. But listen, you're right. Like human beings, if they have a bad experience, they're pretty likely to leave a bad review. If they have a good experience, they just take it for granted. That's like one of the unfair biases, I suppose, of human behavior, effectively, that we have to contest against as business owners. So, really, for me personally, I had no qualms about asking for those, because they are happening. They're just not being represented on Google and we want those to be recorded right. And here's the thing, the thing that you just said. So many people have a hang up on that. There's no magic formula. You just straight up say to them can you do this for me? And that's what's got you to. However many reviews.
Jamil, 19m 52s:
It was Well. That's one side. We've got 1,805 star reviews Moly moly. Wow. So to answer, I just think he'd put a comment on about leaf drops. All right, so I'll correct him there while he's there. And he told me to do a leaf drop for implant. That did not work. That's a waste of money. Don't do that. But I did a leaf drop leaflet drop for general dentistry and that worked really well. Leaflet drop didn't work so well for implants Set in the record straight.
Dr James, 20m 21s:
Yeah, set the record, I'll have it. I'll have it, I'll have some work with him after.
Jamil, 20m 27s:
Well, yeah, I think 2024 is going to be a great year for marketing and marketing agencies I was thinking about the other day. I said I really want to start my own marketing agency. I just think it's so cool.
Dr James, 20m 40s:
Bro, but listen, you got the knowledge. You got the knowledge right. You could do it. It's just probably. It's probably, like most people, hours in the day or hours in the week, not the time. Yeah, all right guys. So, listen, we're going to wrap up pretty soon because you like to keep these live Q&A days powerful, impactful, impactful and punchy at about the 20, 30 minute mark. So there's going to be an opportunity for somebody in the audience to ask a question about anything. Marketing or even not necessarily per se, it has to be restricted to marketing just anything they'd like to know from Jamil, given his knowledge whenever it comes to being a principal free practice at the age of 29, and then forth on the way, which is really quite cool, to be completely honest, that's really quite the claim to fame right there. So if anybody's going to be questions out front, feel free to pop them in the chat. We can probably squeeze in one question before we wrap up. I have a question just while we're waiting for potentially a question to come through how important do you feel paid ads are whenever it comes to marketing Jamil Massively?
Jamil, 21m 45s:
Massively. It's one of the most important things because there's a direct search to your website. They're the strongest clients you'll ever have because they're committed to buying. So if somebody types in emergency dentist, let's say in brackets area, they are very likely to commit and become an emergency patient of yours because they look at the actively seeking for that service.
Dr James, 22m 11s:
Don't you find that with ads they're like a big black hole in people's knowledge, because there's just so many buttons to push and things to toggle and settings to configure whenever people try to undertake them or attempt to do them?
Jamil, 22m 25s:
Yeah. So I don't think, unless you're going to spend a month understanding Google Ads, I don't think anyone should really straight away commit to Google Ads. If you want to do it a basic level, you probably can, but to do it in really in depth and really understand it takes a lot of time. Yeah, do you reckon hiring someone is the way to go at the very start on that, they're all great YouTube, so I learned Google Ads from YouTube, so there's loads of YouTube videos on Google Ads here. I'll just recommend watch. I watched, I used to listen to one on the way and on the way back from work and you just understand. It just makes sense.
Dr James, 22m 57s:
Fair enough, all right. Well, like I said, we're coming up to the 30 minute mark. We've had a question in the chat from. Question the chat from well, where's it going? It was there a second ago. Where's it going? Okay, I can't. Oh, here it is, find it again. Question from Sharon. Sharon Wackrish and Sharon. I haven't got my glasses on tonight, so I'm hoping that I'm pronouncing it incorrectly. Apologies if I'm not Shout out to Sharon. Thank you for your question. That's coming in the comments. Sharon would like to know how important are video testimonials and are those something that you do from your patients, jamil?
Jamil, 23m 33s:
So I think it works great, but I just think it's a waste of time. And the reason why I think it's a waste of time is because you're obviously not going to get a bad patient and say, yeah, stick a camera in front of them. Like you can almost get an actor to do a testimonial for you if really need be. I don't think they give you much value. People look for volume, so I don't know When's the last time you bought something off of a video testimonial.
Dr James, 24m 1s:
You see, this is the thing, because I'm kind of cynical about video testimonials myself, but I didn't know if it was a personal thing or other people shared that belief.
Jamil, 24m 10s:
No, I shared that belief. I just think so. It is a time and place to do them Like, for example, if somebody has had an all on for you could record their journey how was it? Or if you're going to do a video testimonial, to make it authentic, you have to get them, you have to tell them, you have to ask the people what was the bad parts of it. There is no way a whole procedure was good all the way through. If you want to really build and trust, you need to do that.
Dr James, 24m 36s:
Go, jamil. Thank you as ever for your words of wisdom. That was the webinar in Q&A this evening Marketing 2024 with Jamil. If anybody out there got value from that tonight, well, we are most pleased to sit on this side of the camera tonight and share that information with you, because there's no real place that you can go in terms of how can we say a manual on this stuff. You just have to go to people who've done it, and done it successfully, in order to be able to learn it and implement it into your own practice. That's exactly what we have created tonight on this webinar. Guys who have hung around to the end, feel free to go ahead and put game plan in the comment section. If you need a little bit of help Whenever it comes to your marketing, jamil or myself can reach out at some stage. Also, I did promise that anybody who was watching the webinar at the very, very, very beginning, I promised that there'd be a special gift for you when you completed the webinar, when you joined us to the very, very, very end this evening. On that very note, I've got an ebook. It's on all things finance, all things money, all things that we talk about on Dennis to invest. If you like that ebook, feel free to put ebook in the comment section and we can both reach out to you. Guys, it's been really, really, really fun to sit on this side of the camera tonight and present this information to you. Jamil, just before we go, any parting words of wisdom on the topic of marketing.
Jamil, 25m 57s:
No, but if anyone knows anything, tell me.
Dr James, 26m 1s:
I'm always a student. You've got to respect that. That's humility right there. Thank you so much for your time, my friend. We will see each other very soon. Thank you very much, great.
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