Small, Medium, or Large: Dental Social Media Marketing in 2024 and Beyond

Welcome to a special episode of Marketing Chairside. You might be able to hear in the background. I got Brenda Lee on here. Rockin around the Christmas Tree. It is not yet even Thanksgiving. And normally I would abstain from all things Christmas until then. But I—what can I say? The spirit took me. And that's not what this episode's about. This episode is about small, medium and large looking forward to 2024 and beyond. What social media marketing for dental offices is going to look like in this episode? I mean, it's not sponsored by Google in any way, but it was inspired by Google because I asked Google to create a social media post for dental offices, and it sort of succeeded and it sort of failed. And I wanted to share that with you and share my thoughts on how artificial intelligence is going to shape social media marketing in the now and in the near future. In the distant future. But the reason why I added the kind of title small, medium and large is that's really how I see dental offices rocking social media right now. There is a segment of dental offices that are just killing it on social media, and there are some that are still just like naysayers and they don't really want to have anything to do with it. And I guess that's going beyond small to the non-existent. But most dental offices are leveraging social media to a certain extent, and it's sporadic post. I see that all the time where they're posting, you know, once a month maybe. And so at Pro Impressions, my company, we recognized this a while back a couple of years ago that, you know, we used to only offer the large size social media marketing plan. And we quickly realized that's not for everyone for a variety of reasons. And then the small plan is not for everyone, for a variety of reasons. And the medium plan is just because we wanted a step in between those two. But your dental office just needs to find a rhythm and stick to it. That's my number one recommendation. But artificial intelligence stands to kind of level the playing field and make things a little easier for your office to be successful in. It's not quite there yet, but, you know, Google just released its own version of—there was DALL-E by Open AI and a generative image basically that the robot can draw what you say. And Google has that capability now as well. And there's all sorts of others out there and there's just a situation where the ability to create is really being taken away as an issue. You can create kind of whatever you can think up as long as you take the time to use these tools to do it. But that's really what makes the dental practice kind of fall into these categories of small, medium, large is kind of how much time do you want to invest in social media marketing? Again, in 2023. I've seen the gamut and some of the offices that are taking the time to create these really impressive little videos. I mean, they're not they're not large scale film production, you know, quality efforts. They're, you know, pretty down to earth, recorded on a phone using the platform's built in little graphics and audio. And I mean, it's impressive because it takes a while to figure that out. I can tell you that I'm relatively, relatively young, dude. And, you know, I've got a new phone and a marketing background. And I can tell you, you know, every time they change something, it still takes a little while to kind of figure out what's new. And what's kind of in vogue is always changing. So it takes an investment and kudos to you if you're a doctor for making that investment, because I do believe it's an investment in the future. I spoke with the dental office this week that is one that I would say is checking all the boxes on social media. They're, you know, taking pictures and and well, I'll get into what Google says is a successful social media campaign here in a minute. But they're recording these videos. They're doing it on a regular basis. And really building a following. And this dental office shared with me that they they did enlist help in achieving that for a while. And they saw their numbers for viewers and engagement go way up into the into the hundreds where they had never been before, I think even the thousands. And ultimately it didn't lead to what they were hoping, which is, you know, new patients. And they even again, to their credit, they didn't just do this for a few weeks and then say, well, this isn't working. Sorry, I'm sipping on my mocha coffee here. I figured if I'm recording a holidays episode, I needed to have a warm drink in my hands. And by the way, if you're looking for this on YouTube, as we normally do, record video as well. I just decided to hit record on audio. And so this is going to be an audio only episode. But yeah, this office, after doing their very best to kind of have top shelf social media presence on Instagram and Facebook after I mean, really over a year I've been following them of really well done social media. They had built their visibility, but it hadn't really translated to a change in new patient leads. And I think there's a couple of reasons for that. I believe it probably has bolstered their numbers, but how could you tell? You know, how could you know if they hadn't done that, what their new patient numbers would have been? So that's that's problem number one. The other thing is just that visibility is valuable, even if it doesn't directly translate to new patient leads. I believe it's it has contributed and will continue to contribute to it because people will check them out and they'll have these assets that they've created that they can leverage and repurpose. So I don't think that they've wasted their time. That's not my point. It's just that when you're looking at this small, medium, large approach, you also have to have those small, medium and large expectations. And knowing that of a large campaign, it really does have to be a long haul campaign where you are investing on an ongoing basis. So in 2023, if you did that and you didn't see that, wow, the doors have just been blown off my practice with new patients. I don't believe that means that social media is a waste of time for you. It just may mean that you need to adjust your expectations. You may need to adjust your content, your your approach. And you know what? We'll get into that a bit. But the different size of your practice, the size of your market is going to the largely influence what you want to make in terms of your investment in social media. But you know, these new platforms coming on board and, you know, even ones that are starting to, you know, mature like tick tock and there's going to be ones just popping up and falling away all the time. You just have to keep track of where your your target patients are, but also know that you're investing in the future. These practices that are investing heavily in Instagram, knowing that they're their target patients are really starting to adopt Instagram, have for a while and you know knowing that younger people on Instagram are going to start seeing their earning potential are going up and up and up to where the investment they've made and building a following on these platforms is going to start to pay dividends as time goes on because they'll have this branding. So in 2024, I really can't in good conscience say that you should go out and try to find the latest and greatest platform. I think you can let other people kind of cut their well, not cut their teeth, but be the trailblazers in them. And I just have to keep an eye on your bottom line. And so for me, that's still Instagram and Facebook. If you invest in kind of a large size social media plan where you are generating a lot of video assets, then I think TikTok is fine to jump into, you know, because that's the thing with TikTok, obviously, is you're creating these short form video assets. And if you're creating reels for Instagram, you might as well repurpose that video content on another video platform. It's really interesting to see how more of these platforms are creating opportunities for you to make your content more interactive. And I would highly recommend trying to take advantage of that. But you've got to just kind of figure out what's your approach. And one thing I would say demographically and from a user behavior standpoint, glitzy smiles are in with our niche of dentists, but I don't think it's enough to just do that. I feel like if you're just showing teeth again and again, then you're going to lose engagement. And so I want to see you in 2020 for making an effort to be human in in social media and not try to be perfect. It's so interesting to see so many videos where they've got the green screen effect and you've got content in the background and the talent. The creator is just talking over what is going on in the background, and that's something that I think dental offices could do very well to and combine these ideas where you got beautiful teeth in the background or a video of you adjusting an orthotic or something and talking through what you're doing and why you're doing it. This takes time, but probably not as much time as you think. If you start getting in through the rhythm of it and you've done it enough to really understand what what's involved in sitting down and hitting record. But I feel like the demographics of Facebook are going to continue to age and by market. This is going to vary. But in more rural areas, Facebook will stay relevant longer, but in more metro areas, Instagram and TikTok are going to continue to grow and Facebook will continue to shrink. I was on Google Trends the other day and just typed in Facebook and it was really telling to see the number of people who are Googling Facebook, which seems weird, but if you just think about kind of lazy website or, you know, web navigators who maybe live out of the Google app and just don't even think about it, and they Google Facebook to click into Facebook and go to Facebook even though it's going to open the Facebook app. I've seen my kids do this. So it's not just an old people behavior and but if you look at Google Trends and you search Facebook, you'll see the steady downward trend of people doing that. You could argue that, well, people are just using the apps more. And so that's why it's not happening. But still, there's just no reason to believe that Meta is going to keep Facebook alive infinitely when they're growing these other capabilities. And in Instagram and Oculus, I mean, that's going to be a whole nother thing in virtual reality. At some point. It's going to have an innovation or an event in the world that will make VR and augmented reality more of a commonplace thing that will change the face of of marketing and social. But, you know, if you're a small practice and you're considering well, I don't even know if I should try on social media, there's just a few anecdotal pieces that I'll share with you. One is, if you are in sleep, you want to encourage more gentle sleep patients in your office. I would definitely recommend investing in social media because people who can't sleep are often on their devices. Everyone has to sleep, and you probably know that there are a lot of people out there that are exhausted all day long, but they don't wake up and are gasping or they maybe don't even snore, but you can help them sleep better. There are just so many reasons why there's more appeal to sleep messaging in social media than a lot of other dental verticals where people will be open to what you have to say. I'm going to use my coffee's warmness as a indicator of how long this episode should be. It's kind of lukewarm, so. So if you're a small practice and you do sleep, I would highly recommend it. If you're a small practice. No, that does not put you out of the running for a large size social media campaign. All you need is a phone and a willingness to get in front of it, willingness to be on camera and push, play and show people what you're doing. It does not have to be brain damage. You know, we we create content calendars for our clients and we've got these all these fancy social media post types. And we get into the weeds of doing it at a very high level and making sure that it's happening on a regular basis looks great and that's fine. But we can't get your face in front of people yet. I mean, I tell you, we're going to get to that in a second, but the practices that I see killing it, especially in rural areas on social media, just have the doctor being willing to get involved, you know, and when I see that, I see their engagements higher than offices of comparable size in metro areas or even larger sizes, because you've got kind of a a captive audience in a rural area. But truly, I don't think it has anything to do with the the region. I think it has everything to do with the doctor is interested in being more aggressive in their marketing and they want to do it on a budget. And so social media is cheap and easy. And so if you're just not doing it, I think you're missing the boat, especially in a smaller market or in a smaller practice. You just need to do it. You need to have fun with it and you need to be on camera still. Video are still photos video. You know, carousels, images of events or or procedures. I mean, there are all sorts of things that you can post. And as long as it's made by you or made by your team about you, you're going to get good engagement and engagement and your team really, as long as you're a good leader, your team should be willing to be involved as well. And their network in social is a great resource for you to take advantage of because if you tag one of your team members who's really outgoing and loves to be on camera and loves to do this, and they've got a good social media following in your community that's going to have a ripple effect. So why not take advantage of that? They're there at your office, record them, use them, and then, you know, if you're a large office, everything I just said still applies is just should be easier for you to execute on because you've got more built in camera people in a way. You've got more people looking out for opportunities. And so it's just up to you as a leader to say, okay, folks, we're going to really go after this and we're going to be active in a way that maybe our competitors aren't, whether they are or not, they don't have our patients. Our patients are our patients. And we can make it really attractive to be here. We can just tell the story of what it's like being a patient here and what we bring to the table. And if you do that and your office really is the legit premiere experience for, you know, the services that you offer and you make it clear what your focus is and why, why people should come to you for these specific problems. After a while, you're going to see that that's that part of your marketing campaign is worthwhile because people will start to say, Yeah, I saw this. I saw you did this video about this thing and your your Google traffic, your paid search, your organic search, your listing traffic. It's all going to cross-pollinate and it'll be worth while. So artificial intelligence is kind of the component that I want you to look into or at least keep an eye out for. But I ask Google to generate I put create a social media post for dentists about cosmetic dentistry. It did not do what I was wondering if it would do because I just asked it to draw a worm in the sky and it did it to terrifying effect. I'll share that in a post here that I make about this episode. It'll be in the description and I'll also share this. What I'm looking at here, which is generative AI from Google telling us what it thinks it should do. And so it says here are some ideas for creating a social media post about cosmetic dentistry before and after photos. Okay, I'll give that name. Sure, why not? Cosmetic dentistry is very visual and so yeah, that's a good idea. Not revelatory, not really different educational content. It says as it's not correct. Next recommendation says blog posts or videos about different cosmetic dentistry procedures. By providing educational content, you can help potential patients learn about their options. I'm not against that whatsoever, and especially if it's a video made by you. It'll be intriguing. Maybe thumb stopping if you do it right. You know, people are scrolling through, scrolling through, and they're like, Oh, wait, don't I know these people? What are they doing? You know? And if you make it interesting then or personal, you know, you've got a baby in the office even then just saying, you know, during that talking educationally about, you know, the formation of the mid face in development and things like that, you know, talking about airway with a baby on the screen when or you'll get so much engagement testimonials talking about happy patients. I mean, again, those videos are great. The more candid you can make them, the better. I love videos where the dentist is interviewing the patient on screen, but it's just, you know, a chill conversation. You've got to have the right patient for that. But those videos are money offers and promotions. I'm going to give Google a C minus on that recommendation because social media is bad at generating value oriented leads for dental office as it is. And if you start throwing around discounts and promotions, you're really asking for more of that. I would still I don't want your brand to be so hoity toity and high end that, you know, people don't even know if you accept patients, if they can even contact you. But I don't want you to be so, you know, such a follower of this commercial commoditization of dentistry that you look the same and patients are going to be floored when they discover that you're not in network for their insurances. You're going to get that if you offer a promotion that especially has any sort of dollar sign to it, you can have a fun promotion that's like seasonal or something or but I don't know if it's a giveaway. It's got to just be to generate visibility. But I just I don't love it. I feel like anytime you're giving something away or promoting a discount, you're going to regret it. You're going to get so many luck you lose and people that want free dentistry. So I would steer clear of that behind the scenes, give a give potential patients a glimpse of what it's like to come to your dental office. I love that. I mean, even if it's in case you haven't been to our office in a while, here's what we're doing, you know, here's what we look like. Here's a new team member, you know, or that you know what it's like when when you get a crown and we send it to a lab. Here's what we get back. And you show them the stone model or the any sort of 3D printed process of your lab work. That's really cool stuff that patients don't know about and they would love to see social media contests. Yeah, I, I, if it's clever and creative, I could maybe be behind get behind it. But they're just complex. And we learned recently in the episode with the ortho attorney tray, I'm blanking on his last name, but it was just a couple episodes ago that giveaways and contests in certain states can be complex or complicated, especially if you're giving away something really cool that has a high dollar value. Those are the ones that I'm interested in. But the Google says you could you could contest for a free consultation. Interesting. A grammar error in Google's generative A.I. You could contest for a free consultation, but that doesn't make sense. A whitening treatment or even a gift certificate to your favorite restaurant. So again, seasonally, maybe. But that also to me is a C-minus idea, because you're likely to spend a lot of time trying to put it together, get relatively few entries and, you know, giving away something without really actually having turned in your heads and possibly damaging your brand. So I probably wouldn't do that. Patient stories. To me, a testimonial should be a patient story talking about how their lives changed. And so to me, that's a duplicate, humorous content. I was one of the reasons why I hit play today is I think this is a good recommendation for Google and we work with a lot of high end dental practices, you know, where they're restorative practices that want to be seen as, you know, Ritz-Carlton experience. And I love that. I feel like that differentiates you from the commercialization or the commoditization of dentistry, the Starbucks dental office. But the issue is that engagement with just kind of, again, status quo, you're you're so focused on creating pillars in your Instagram profiles and you've just got three types of posts and it's just like, okay, that check that box that I did Instagram, right? I'm sorry, you're not going to get the engagement that you really want and need in order to become top of mind for a large number of people. So it's not really going to help your brand as an individual dentist to just be a follower and do the same thing that all the other towns are doing. You need to do something that's going to get people to stop once and then want to stop again when they see your content. Just keep coming back and that's going to be relatable content. And often the humorous side of things is overlooked by dental offices because it seems like kind of a low brow thing, but if you're fun, you're more likely to be engaging. And so I really want you to consider doing something silly. I met a dental office in Chicago that had been doing for Halloween. They did all sorts of photos of them in the cheesiest most costumes you can imagine, like literally white sheets with big black eyes put on them. But they they took a lot of them. And so they it wasn't just one dumb little photo. It was them like taking a photo of them doing everything they always do. But with these sheets over their heads and I mean, I'm maybe not doing it justice, but they're complete health dentistry in Park Ridge to scroll through their their Facebook and you know the there it's not a lot of like the posts the photos are just kind of yeah and somehow about the way they posted them put everything in a little box but their team is so tight knit and I know their patients know them and love them. And when they saw those photos, they engaged with them. They got a lot more likes and loves and and has and and so, you know, it was not highbrow like, you know, influencer level content. But I tell you, that content got them a lot of engagement. There were people who see their future posts are going to be more likely to say, well, what's doctor up to current events? I don't know about this one. This is a different one. So the last recommendation from Google's generative AI on what dentists should post about social media or about cosmetic dentistry on social media, I think food events especially the ones on the news, are so charged politically and there's so many updates in the news about them. I'm not sure that you need to touch them with a ten foot pole. So I'll give Google a D, and the only reason I wouldn't give it an F is, hey, if if you have a thought and will hit record about a current event on your phone and get in front of that gets you on social media then. Okay, you've been active, so cool. Let's do that. But I don't know. This is interesting because and this is why I is not there yet, but when you see the trajectory of things where I can give you something very specific and give you the talking points, and now they're able to help you with visuals and way to think about what Instagram is doing. They're even working. I mean, have generative AI graphics in their platform to it's really not going to be long before you say, okay, Instagram, help me do a social media post about mercury safe amalgam removal and it'll hit record and and have a prompter that will tell you what to say or I don't know. I mean, the future is obviously constantly in motion, but A.I. is going to just continue to make things easier. But what won't change is whether or not you are willing to take the time. And so small, medium, large. What's your willingness to invest in it and know that what you get out of it is really going to amount to how much time you spend getting in front of the camera. If you need help with that, you'll still need to get in front of the camera. But in terms of posting my company, other companies, your team members can help you take those assets and run with them, but you still are going to need to get in front of the camera when you're doing virtual reality posts in the you're 20, 30 or sooner, you're still going to need to get in front of your virtual reality camera and you'll be be you in three dimensions. So that's not going to change. But when it comes to I would keep an eye on that and platforms for 2024, I would still stick with Instagram, Facebook and TikTok. The other thing that we always forget to mention is Google. I would still recommend that whenever you can share your social media content on Google business profile as well, because that helps Google Access and keep your profile there active in a way that's difficult for them to do. But let's see here, what's what's playing next here on my apparently nothing my Christmas music. Music is gone. So we'll just have to stick with this normal outro on marketing share side, please let me know what topic you would like to see covered next. Predicting 2020 for getting best practices in 2024. I want to give you the content that you need to be successful and it can be broad topic or super specific. I don't mind doing a micro episode if you've just got this one issue where you know we've lost the log in for our profile on this social media platform. What do we do? Any questions like that hit me up on any of the social profiles or on my website pro impressions group dot com. Until next time I'm going to figure out, by golly, how to get this Christmas Christmas music going. And now is the time where normally you would see social media icon. So I don't know why I'm trying to be funny. Thanks for listening.