Imagine if your schedule was filled with only your best, your top patients, day after day, week after week?
What if you were able to root out all of those patients that take up all your time, are never satisfied with your service no matter how long you treat them, and just plain drive you nuts?
And instead…spend your time with only those that truly value the exceptional care you provide and are not only happy to pay you what you are worth but will even tell their friends about you!
To some that may seem like a far-fetched pipe dream.
But this could be your reality, and it all starts with identifying your target market. And that’s what we are going to talk about on today’s show.
Full Transcript
What do you get when you combine simplified practice marketing, proven ROI strategy, and Vans skate shoes? You get Mark Thackeray, of course.
So lace up, grab your green smoothie, and get ready because this is dental marketing secrets. And this is Mark.
Hello and welcome my friends to the second episode of the Dental Marketing Secrets podcast. My name is Mark Thackeray and I am so pumped to be with you here today. I’m actually recording this in my hotel. I’m meeting with a client for a few days. So the audio may be different, it may be better, who knows? Maybe it’s, maybe it’s better, but that’s why.
But I’m really, really excited for today’s topic because it’s something that transformed my business. Once I understood this principle and applied it, I made huge gains and I don’t see enough businesses doing it right now. So I’m so excited to be talking about it.
So to preface this, I want you to take a minute and imagine for a second: If you’re schedule was filled with only your very best, your top patients day after day, week after week, okay, what would that look like?
What if you were able to, at the same time remove or root out all those patients that take up all your time or never satisfied with your service, no matter how long you treat them and just play drive you nuts? You know those people, you know what I’m talking about. And instead of dealing with them and dealing with the headaches and stress that come with them, spend your time with only those that truly value the exceptional care that you provide and are not only happy to pay you what you’re worth, but they will even tell your friends about you.
And to some that may seem like a pipe dream, that is some farfetched a dream that can never be realized. But I want you to know that this could be your reality. And it all starts with identifying your target market. And that’s what we’re going to talk about on today’s episode.
So the late great copywriter Gary Halbert, and this guy was a marketing mastermind, but he used to ask this question a lot. He said, “if you were going to open up a new hamburger stand in town and you could have access to any asset or any advantage, what is the one thing you would want most?”
And most people would say, well, well, I want the best burger. You know, or you know, secret sauce. Maybe you’re a great cook or a striking logo, or a very prominent or famous name, or even a huge bankroll for a major advertising campaign. Any of those answers, right?
But you want to know what Gary said? His answer: a starving crowd.
Think about that for just a second. Have you ever been driving and are so desperately hungry? And then all of a sudden here comes a restaurant in your view and you are, it’s like a revelation from heaven, right? I had, this happened to me not that long ago. I was driving out in the sticks and I was, I was actually out in Maryland and I remember I was driving along. And there’s these stretches right where I was and there’s just nothing, there’s the town and mostly this really wooded area. And so you don’t see anything from the road and, and so you never know. And you know, me being from a mountain state, I’m always lost. But I just remember I was just so painfully hungry at this point. And lo and behold, here comes a barbecue joint that I see a sign for and I peel off the road and it was just manna from heaven.
And you know what I noticed too? That food tastes better when you’re starving, like a lot better. Have you ever noticed that? But that’s what we’re doing here. We’re trying to identify who that “starving crowd” is for our industry.
Now let’s define that for just a minute. A starving crowd in this case would be a group of people, a group of patients that have demonstrated that they’re hungry, that they’re actively seeking for the same type of services that you offer. But what I see most i there just aren’t enough people that take the time to look at it that way. Okay. They’re not trying. Most dentists, most orthodontists simply aren’t taking the time to identify who their starving crowd is. And really what most of them do is they’re trying to cast the widest net possible so as to catch anyone and everyone in hopes that, you know, maybe a fraction will respond to their message.
But I’ve noticed that that is very, very scary. First off, you’re just kind of throwing things out there and you’re being very generic about it. It’s more like blind luck and I think of it this way: that’s like sending a message to your aunt in Pittsburgh by dropping, I don’t know, 100,000 copies of your letter out in your plane as you fly over Pennsylvania. You know, if you have an unlimited amount of supply, you’re gonna hit the target eventually, an unlimited amount of arrows, you’re going to hit that target even if you’re blindfolded. But arrows are one thing and letters are one thing, but dollars are quite another. That’s a different story, a completely different story.
Every service, every business either appeals or has the ability to appeal much more strongly to a definable group of people than it appeals to all people.
So another way to look at that is that your business, your practice, in essence, the services that you provide, the treatment that you provide appeals much more strongly to a subset of people than it does to the whole, to the general population. And the million dollar question that I want you to ask is, have you determined precisely who your message should be for and how to put it in front of them?
What’s cool is this is more of an advanced marketing Jedi trick, but you can do that with, you can message those types of people and attract that type of demographic and at the same time exclude other people. You can actually repel those ones that you don’t want. Now that’s it’s a little bit more advanced, but that’s what you want to go for is you want to eliminate those people that are causing 80% of the stress and the headaches and replace those people with more of your ideal patients.
But again, the thing that I see more often than not is that people are just putting out these generic messages. You know, all they’re doing is looking at other dentists and looking at other orthodontists, Oh, what does this guy doing? Oh, he’s doing a mailer. Let me just copy this message. I’m going to try and improve the offer a little bit. Maybe I’ll offer a steeper discount. But you’re missing the boat, you guys, and just hoping that it’s gonna work.
And this may be okay in certain certain situations, certain economies like now, we have a very strong economy. But like Warren Buffett used to say this, I love this quote. He says, you can’t see who’s naked until the tide goes out. Right? And yeah, we’re in the high tide of a strong economy right now. But when that starts to recede, we’re going to find out who’s truly naked, who does not have the proper marketing system in place. Okay? And the sad part is that we never know when that tide will go back out. That’s why it’s absolutely imperative to identify your starving crowd to look for and really define your ideal patients and continually market to them.
So let’s get down to the nuts and bolts a little bit. How do you select a target market? So I want you to think about your patients. Who is that one patient that you would like to clone again and again? What type of patient are you the best fit for? For whom can you knock it out of the park and deliver an exceptional experience and outcome every single time? Who is that patient? What is their situation look like?
Now it’s important that you do not kid yourself into thinking that you are perfect for everyone. You’re not, not only is that naive, but that kind of thinking can lead to disastrous results in your business if you’re not careful. And the next step is to identify exactly what it is about this patient that makes them so great to work with. Is it their age perhaps? Is it their income level or their how affluent they are? Is it their personality? Is it their disposition? Is that the services they need? Is it their race or religion or interests or hobbies or family status? I mean the list could go on and on.
And I want to share a few examples with you cause I think this will help, uh, get my point across and help you better understand how to do this. So let’s, I’m going to take some from a few different industries at first.
So I’m going to start with a real estate. Okay. So imagine for just a moment that there’s these two realtors. Okay. One who lists, say you’re talking to them and you’re asking, Oh, I’m a real estate agent. Oh, no way. Cool. So do you do, let’s say, can you help me find a condo, a starter home, do you help with relocation? And he keeps saying yes to all these things, right? Cause he just, he’s trying to cast the widest net as possible. What about investment properties or second home perhaps or a ranch or a cabin or maybe a luxury home that’s, you know, $2 million or more. And he’s saying yes to all this because he wants the business, right? He wants to appeal to as many people as possible and everyone wants to have that, right? I mean you want to appeal to as many people as possible.
Contrast that with someone who has defined their target market. Okay. So let’s say your, let’s say you contrast that with another realtor for example, who only specializes in high end second homes for the Santa Barbara area in the two and a half to $5 million range. Okay.
Now, let’s just say in this example that you happen to be in the market for a $4 million vacation home in Santa Barbara. Who are you more likely to call? Joe-does-it-all realtor or the specialist, the one who has spent time and investment and effort and has tons of experience working with second homes in this particular area of Santa Barbara, who knows that market, who knows all the opportunities, who understands the challenges, you know, even the things that you don’t understand or that you don’t know of that you’re not aware of.
I think the answer is pretty clear. More often than not, they’re going to choose the specialist and that’s an important thing to remember, is that specialists get paid more than generalists. That’s probably something you should be writing down. Specialists get paid more than generalists, and what I mean by that is this, you need to drill down and crystallize exactly who you’re wanting to serve. Be ultra specific in that, and then cater all of your services to cater what you do, your messaging, your entire experience to that specific group of people. In other words, you’re trying to become the go to expert, the specialist for that particular demographic. Okay.
Another example in the photography world, like I mentioned, I was a photographer in a former life and this happened all the time. You guys-it’s both sad and sobering and scary at the same time. But you talk to any photographer, you hop on their website and the list of services is a mile long, right? I mean it says, I shoot newborns, I photograph children, and weddings, and families, and events, and Oh yeah, I do headshots, and real estate, and food photography, and travel photography, and lifestyle photography, and documentary, and macro, or stock images. And the list keeps going and going and you’re just, man, it’s crazy. But again, they’re trying to appeal to as many people as possible.
And you can’t fault him. You might say to yourself, well, I can’t blame him. We all want to reach more people. And I totally get that. And I was like that too initially. But when you try to appeal to such a large diverse group, then you have to out of necessity change your marketing message so that it’s very generic. It’s very broad because you’re trying to not leave anyone out. And when it’s that broad and generic, it goes completely unnoticed. It gets ignored and you have just wasted time, money and effort. And that’s unfortunately what I see all happen all the time.
So let’s contrast that with a photographer who has done a fantastic job of specializing, of finding his target market. So there’s a photography studio in the United Kingdom and they chose their niche and they chose a very specific niche. They do commercial work and they chose bottles. That’s their market that they focused on and specialize in. And that’s it. Bottles. In fact, their website is, we shoot bottles.com and if you click on their website or you type in, we shoot bottles.com it shows an image of a bottle and in big letters underneath it says “we shoot bottles. This way.” I mean, you can’t get a clearer example than that- bottles in a very specific manner and it shows you exactly what that is.
Now again, the question becomes if you have a product that is bottled and sold and you need high quality pictures of it, who are you more likely to choose? Answer: the specialist almost every single time.
And at this point though, you may be tempted to think, well Mark, I don’t want to settle for doing one procedure. I don’t want to only do implants. And it’s important to note here that the goal is to identify a target market and to truly go deep with that market, learn to cultivate it and eventually dominate it. But then the plan is to select another target market. So you’re not just going to stay stationary, you’re not just going to settle for that one market, but you do go one at a time because it takes time to really carve that out. Okay.
So think about your patients. Who is that one patient that you would like to clone again and again? What type of patient are you the best fit for? And I love this question, for whom can you knock it out of the park and deliver an exceptional experience and outcome every single time? Think about that. I have a download for you and I’ll put it in the show notes. Basically some type of homework, some help, a resource that will get you started on identifying who your ideal patient is and it breaks it down. It gives you different things to look at, such as their age, their personality. And I mentioned some of these before, but race, religion, interests, activities, hobbies, family status, services that you need. It could be their job title. And you can go deeper and deeper with all of these different attributes.
But the point is that you are looking for patterns and these patterns will help you to identify your target market so you can attract more of them. Okay? That’s, that’s what you’re looking for. And once you understand who you’re targeting, then your messaging can be so much more specific and resonate to a much greater degree than ever before.
So let me give you an example. In the dental world, let’s say your ideal target market, you’re doing your research and you find that moms are just amazing – moms with kids, that that is our bread and butter. I’d do that all day, every day a hundred percent okay. So let’s say in your research you said you have moms that have two to four kids and and the kids are either in elementary or junior high school, so you kind of know the age range. How will, knowing that, just that piece of information, that alone, and I’m asking you to go a lot deeper than that, but just that piece of information, how would that, knowing that change your messaging, how would having that clarity about who it is you’re going after and identified, okay, it’s moms with two to four kids? How’s that gonna change your communication?
These moms are probably very busy. You know, that stage of life can be extremely filled, you know, occupied with so many different things. So convenience is probably going to be a major motivator. Okay. You’re going to want to cater to all her needs. And I actually have a client whose ideal market is this demographic is moms with kids, you know, in that age range. And so what they’ve done is we’ve, helped them engineer a message that speaks directly to their situation. Like I mentioned, convenience is a big component of that messaging because they’re looking at how do I save time, I know going to the dentist is important, but here I have me, my husband and my two kids or three kids or four kids, that’s going to be three or four visits or that’s going to be a six hour day. Okay.
So we’ve changed that with one of our clients and it’s been so cool. So we’ve had multiple providers, meaning multiple hygienists, multiple doctors, and with proper scheduling they can all be seen and have their own appointments at the exact same time. So no longer is it a multi-day visit where you’re going back, you’re going to the dentist coming back and then a couple of days later you go back, take the other one back. But now you could do all of you being seen at the same time and in an hour and a half or an hour. Talk about wow factor. Isn’t that amazing?
And combined with additional offers and incentives and more convenience items such as the ability to text questions or payments or you know, scheduling, all that stuff plays to that convenience portion, right? And it’s like I said, it’s been so successful, but it all starts with understanding that demographic, who you’re really going after, what their needs are, what their day to day looks like, what their, what their frustrations are.
So another example, let’s say you find that you know, you want to be doing more implants and dentures for seniors for example. So you’re going to want to change your messaging to fit that market. Now seniors, the ability to text might not be seen as a huge benefit. And this was just the case for another client of mine. And so what we did, we decided to focus more on the educational aspect of providing some type of resource for them that would help them make the best decision possible and wouldn’t feel very, you know, no pressure or anything like that.
So we, you know, initially thought of a different, a couple of different things that could look like a free seminar or maybe it was a report and that’s what we decided on. We created this report on implants that walks through the different situations that helps them identify what they need to know in order to make the best decision possible. And that has been working swimmingly, I might say. It’s been so cool to see that.
But again, it starts you guys, all of this starts with your understanding of your ideal target market. You need to invest the time to identify their needs and understand what their life looks like, what their dreams are, what their desired outcomes are, and all that goes into your messaging. Okay. And so I hope you can start to see some of the power that comes with, with that type of clarity of having that knowledge of who you’re targeting. It is so critical to longterm success
. So in closing, you guys, I can’t emphasize this enough, but take the time to do your homework. Listen to this podcast again, download the handout, get to work. It will pay massive dividends for your practice.
Again, this is one of the major mistakes I see with dentists and orthodontists, and businesses in general, you guys, is that they, they do not take the time to do this. And as a result, their messaging is so bland and so generic that it gets thrown by the wayside. So do your homework. Put in the time now it will pay dividends year after year.
So that’s it. My friends, thank you for joining us today on Dental Marketing Secrets. I hope that you found value in this episode and hopefully have some a-ha moments to go along with that and that you will honestly take action on clarifying your target market.
Now, if you have any comments, questions, or feedback, I would love to hear from you. Simply email me markthackgmail.com, and if you enjoyed this episode, please, please leave a review for this podcast. That would be a huge help. And share it with your friends, share it with your peers here, with your team. Because when you get working on all these types of things together, it can really snowball. And what I’ve seen is it can create massive breakthroughs for everyone involved.
So get going on that. But until next time, my friends make it a great week and I will talk to you soon.
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