EDDM vs. Bulk Mail is a question many dentists ask. In this episode of Dental Marketing Mastery, Mark and Howie break down the differences, when you should use EDDM, which demographic is better, and more.

Podcast Highlights:

• What is EDDM?
• When should you use it?
• The right budget for EDDM
• Why EDDM is best for price-incentive-based marketing
• Which demographics work best for EDDM?
• When Should You NOT use EDDM?
• Income targeting
• Carrier rates
• How some households will skew EDDM targeting
• When to use Direct Bulk Mail
• Ad types for Direct Bulk Mail
• Advantages of Direct Bulk Mailk
• Budgeting

In this episode of Dental Marketing Mastery, Mark and Howie discuss phone coverage, how to do it right, and how to maximize it.

Podcast highlights:

• The best times to have your phones covered
• How to get the most out of voicemail
• How to screen between new patients and returning
• When new patients are most likely to call
• How to accommodate existing patients
• How patients view who answers the phone
• How to improve phone call conversions
• Connecting your website to your phones and practice management software
• The importance of reviewing your calls

In this episode of Dental Marketing Mastery, Mark and Howie discuss how to get out of a PPO contract.

Podcast Highlights:

• What IS insurance participation, really?
• What do you get out of it?
• Comparing insurance participation rates to an effective marketing budget
• How long does it take to get to the point where you can transition out of insurance participation?
• What NOT to do when transitioning
• Why going cold turkey is a bad idea
• How to motivate your team during this process
• How to keep some of your insurance patients
• Promoting to the right half of the market

In this episode of Dental Marketing Mastery, we discuss call tracking ROI. Why is it important? How do you get the actual numbers?

Podcast highlights:

• Do patients lie to you?
• "We don't need call tracking"
• Gaining actual insight into patient sources
• What is the EXACT source of a new patient?
• Call tracking budget
• Listening to calls
• Dealing with staff pushback on call tracking
• Increase ROI for less than a penny
• Evolving systems and communication
• ROI ancestry trees

Mark and Howie discuss the value gap in dentistry. What is it? Which moms respond to advertising that doesn't rely on a price incentive? If they don't respond to price, what WILL they respond to?

Podcast Highlights:

• What is your target demographic interested in?
• How is your target market learning about dentistry?
• Cable TV's value gap and how it relates to dentistry
• What do dentists believe is the value gap? Why is this wrong?
• Will moms ask if you are a good dentist? Not exactly. So how do you let them know?
• The value gap and why dentists are not changing the narrative
• What is the consumer supposed to think about other than price?
• Patients only ask about price and insurance because it is the only question they KNOW to ask. How do you change this?
• What if 80% of your patient's questions had nothing to do with price?
• Website creation guide
• Fighting the commoditization of dentistry
• Why dentistry is NOT a refrigerator!

In this episode of Dental Marketing Mastery, Mark and Howie talk about the one thing that can make or break your advertising: design.

Podcast highlights:

• Proper margins, fonts, graphics, picture density, size
• What will customers say? Does it matter?
• What are the professional standards that should be met?
• The design philosophy that has worked for us for the past 26 years
• How to incorporate benefit-driven design into your advertising
• Incorporating emotional concepts
• Making the most of your marketable attributes
• How to properly rotate ads
• Design 101 vs. Dentistry design
• The importance of teasers
• Logos -- how important are they really?

In this episode of Dental Marketing Mastery, we discuss the importance of design, our philosophies on design, and what has worked for our clients over the years.

Podcast Highlights:

• The importance of fonts, size, graphics, picture density, word density, and size
• What do professional standards mean?
• Why everyone has an idea of what is a good ad
• Utilizing benefit-driven design
• The importance of emotional concepts
• Design as it relates to marketing medium
• Ad rotation
• Logos: are they as important as you think they are?

What makes a good website? What should you do when it comes to things such as hosting? What shouldn't you do? In this episode of Dental Marketing Mastery, Mark and Howie explain.

Podcast Highlights

• Ownership of your site's domain
• The page most moms will visit
• The importance of your "meet the dentist" page
• How to properly do a "meet the dentist" page
• What to highlight, how to be approachable
• How to do a personal video
• Services: Which ones are important?
• How to appropriately mention pricing
• How to display technology and conveniences
• Social media and SEO
• The importance of attracting vs. educating
• Why your site shouldn't be a dental journal
• Show off your operatory? No way!
• How much should you invest into your website?

In this episode of Dental Marketing Mastery, we go over the best practices for Pre-appointing Hygiene, what costly mistakes are made, how to categorize your best customers, and more.

Podcast Highlights:

• The black plague of dentistry: pre-appointing everyone in hygiene!
• The fantasy of pre-appointing versus the reality of who will show up
• How if you can't get them in within 8 days, your chances of them coming in drop drastically
• How to make your hygienist's life easier
• The types of customers who will show up for hygiene and the types who won't
• How do you pre-appoint?
• How to reward your great patients
• Categorizing patients who don't show up, and how to get them in down the road
• The best appointment slots for patients in category A vs. those in categories B and C

In this episode of Dental Marketing Mastery, Mark and Howie continue their discussion of common mistakes they see Dentists make when marketing their practice. This episode focuses on custom vs. cookie-cutter advertising.

Podcast Highlights:

• Understanding how your promotions look and sound
• Is originality preferable to something that isn't?
• Left brained and right brained dentists
• Why going with something new is not an ad campaign... it's a test
• Why cookie cutter does not mean bad, and original does not mean good
• The right amount of customization in an ad
• How most practices don't have the time or money to do testing
• The battle is NOT cookie cutter vs. customized
• The power of templates
• Evidence-based dental marketing
• how the population perceives your practice based on its marketing

In this episode of Dental Marketing Mastery, Mark and Howie continue their discussion of mistakes that Dentists often make when marketing their practice. 

Podcast Highlights:

• Why using what you "like" can be an expensive pitfall.
• Taking input from non-professional sources on your marketing.
• Realizing that what you "like" and what works can be completely different things.
• What really matters is RESPONSE!
• Using individual, subjective judgements when making media decisions.
• Focusing too much on price incentives.
• The learning curve of marketing your practice.
• What dentists like to advertise is different than what consumers like.
• How marketable is your practice? You can find out by downloading our marketable attributes scorecard at www.dentalwebcontent.com
• Marketing services makes sense. Except it doesn't.
• Consumers care more about conveniences than services.
• How to properly advertise technology. 
• Collecting data about what works.

Are you making some of these mistakes when it comes to marketing your practice? 

Podcast Highlights:

Mistake 1: Not calculating or adhering to a marketing budget.

• Definition of a budget.
• Percentage of revenues that should be dedicated to marketing.
• An example practice and its marketing spend

Mistake 2: Starting and stopping

• The value of staying consistent.
• Under and overspending.
• What to do when your practice is doing well.
• How peaks and valleys can be stressful.
• Slow and steady wins the race.

Mistake 3: Budget Allocation

• Not letting yourself be the dentist who has to work on a full set of veneers you didn't do.
• Which mediums to spend your budget on.

Mistake 4: Impatience

• Understanding that your practice's success depends on a ratio of dentists to population.
• How year 2 looks compared to year 1.

What are your passive and aggressive media types? Why do you need both? Mark and Howie explain in this episode of Dental Marketing Mastery.

In this episode of Dental Marketing Mastery, Mark and Howie explain how and why all dentists should be using direct mail. Direct mail is not only extremely targetable, but did you know that it is the lowest-risk option for dentists seeking new patients? All this and more in Dental Marketing Mastery.

In this episode of Dental Marketing Mastery, Mark and Howie go over the hottest thing on all dentist's mind: social media. What are its main purposes? How do you use it to not only create new patients, but keep them engaged? Mark and Howie explain.

In episode 9 of Dental Marketing Mastery, Mark and Howie explain the launch of Dental Web Content, an online portal for dentists that has a library of advertising content.

In our second interview with Julie Mitchell, we discuss how dentalwebcontent.com can be a benefit to dental specialists.

In this episode of Dental Marketing Mastery, we interview Julie Mitchell, FAADOM member with over 20 years of experience managing dental practices. In this interview, she discusses Dental Web Content and how it can help office managers in their day to day lives.

In Dental Marketing Mastery Episode 6, we delve further into the various media types, such as internal marketing, mail marketing, the internet, telephones, print media, and mass media.

Which media types will give you the most ROI? What percentage of your budget should  you put towards each media type?

We answer these questions and more in this episode.

In this episode of Dental Marketing Mastery, we reveal Dental Web Content, an online portal that contains over 26 years of tested marketing material for dentists.

We also discuss why we created Dental Web Content, why we believe that dentists should promote dentistry on its benefits, and why we do not believe in promoting based on price.

In this episode of Dental Marketing Mastery, we discuss one of the most important things about marketing your practice -- your budget! How much should you allocate towards marketing? Which mediums should you spend the most in? How do you avoid a start and stop mentality? All of these questions and more are answered in this podcast!

Dental Marketing Mastery is brought to you by Dentalwebcontent.com.

In episode 3 of Dental Marketing Mastery, Mark and Howie expand on the two halves of the dental market, and more importantly, discuss what moms need to hear from you! 

In episode 2 of Dental Marketing Mastery, Mark and Howie recap episode 1's two main markets and then go in depth about what to expect from these markets, how to target them, what ad copy works best and what materials to use.

Welcome to dental marketing mastery, brought to you by dentalwebcontent.com! In this episode, we lay the foundations of all dental marketing -- the two halves of the dental market.