#262 How to Dominate a Market Where Every Block Has a Dental Office

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Three dental offices in the same strip mall. Two across the street. Sound familiar? A dentist in North Dallas asked this, and if you're in any major metro, this is your reality. Here's exactly what I told them.

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Dental Marketing Goat, the go-to podcast for dentists who want to grow faster, market smarter and build practices that thrive in today’s competitive landscape.
Hosted by Gary Bird, the Dental Marketing Goat himself and founder of SMC National - recently named Best Dental Marketing Agency by over 60,000 dental professionals. Each episode unpacks the real strategies, marketing frameworks and operational shifts that high-performing practices use to attract more patients and increase production. Whether you're a solo practitioner or scaling a DSO, you’ll learn how to align your marketing, team and systems to drive predictable growth.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Had an interesting question. I think a lot of dentists deal with this and a lot of dentists feel this way. And this came up on a Facebook group. Actually, I believe this was in my Facebook group, the dental growth group. If you're not in that group, we have 12,000 members and a lot of really smart people when it comes to growing a dental office and a lot of dental dentists that have already grown their offices that uh participate in there. So you should definitely hop in there. The link's right down below. But here's what they ask so marketing and search engines that direct people to your business. I'm in North Dallas and there are dental offices on top of dental offices. And this is true. So uh some have three in the same strip mall and two across the street. It's amazing that they all survive. What would your advice be to bring in new patients and loyalty to your brand? And would you use branding? Now, here's the really important thing to understand branding's great. I get on Facebook every single day. If you're a dentist and you're watching this, you've seen me everywhere, right? And so I've purposely branded myself to dentist for the purpose of you someday reaching out to me to help you grow. That's that's branding, right? So you associate my name with growing a dental office, and that's what I want. And dentists are the same way. You can have a brand. However, branding takes a long time. It took me about four years before I started seeing results from the branding effort that I'm building. And so I have other podcasts on branding. If you're interested in that, I can help you with that and give you some advice. That's not what my company does. What we do is we help you generate new patients next month. And so if you want to generate new patients like right away, that's something that we can definitely help with. So, what do we do when there's a dentist on every single corner? How do we actually compete with that? And keep in mind, a lot of these dentists are DSOs. These are people who are spending$20,000,$30,000 a month on digital marketing. How do we compete with that? So I gave this dentist a rundown of the six things that you need to do if you're in a hyper competitive market. At the end, I'm going to give you a competitive analysis that you can actually use for your office. And then also, I'm going to give you three case studies of dentists. This dentist happened to be in Texas. So I had three case studies in Texas of offices that have absolutely exploded in a really short amount of time. When I say exploded, going from like 20 new patients to 160, going from 20 to 70, going from zero startup to 120 in 90 days, that kind of stuff. Okay. And I'm going to give you these case studies where the dentists actually tell you in their own words how they built up this many new patients that quick. Okay. So the first one is number one, you have to run Google Ads, but it has to be the high-intent searchers. So there's two different kinds of marketing, and most dentists don't realize this. There's there's low intent and there's high intent. So a lot of times when dentists are like, I want to see how many clicks I got, or I want to see how many uh leads I got. And those are vague terms inside of marketing. And the reason they're vague is like I could generate a boatload of clicks and leads for really, really cheap if I'm going to low intent. So low intent is like video games. Have you ever been playing, you know, the video game on your phone and the little ad pops up? Those are really cheap. Those are pennies. And the reason they're pennies is no one wants to see them, and the only people who click on them are accidents. So you can get four, five, six, seven clicks for a couple cents. And that's it's like, oh, we got a bazillion people to visit the website. Well, yeah, but what was your bounce, right? How many of those were quality traffic? It kind of stunk, right? It wasn't, it wasn't a great result. You didn't really get anything from it. A lot of times, leads also in the marketing world, leads can be anybody who clicks the phone button. And you know, and I know new patients is actually a very small percentage of your total call volume into your office. New patients is like very small percentages, right? Like a very small percentage. Most of the calls that come into your office are existing patients, vendors, and people trying to sell you stuff and your mom calling to see if you want to go to lunch. This is this is most of the traffic. And so marketing companies will take all that and say, Yeah, we had a bazillion people click on your phone call button. Yay! Who cares? Right? No one cares. Doesn't mean anything. So what's really important is that you're running to high-intent keywords are more expensive, a lot more expensive. So you're talking about pennies or on social media, if you're running ads on social media of people who haven't asked to see you yet, those are gonna be dollars. Versus Google's gonna be 10, 20, 30, 40 dollars. And people choke on that and they're like, oh, what am I gonna do with that? Well, these are people who are searching things like I need to get my teeth cleaned, or very specific dental words, and they're looking for a dentist in the next 90 seconds to go in in the next couple days. So we're talking about short buying cycles. Really, really important that you understand this. And you can drive these to a landing page and you can drive these to a home page. It really depends on the keyword structure. Dentistry is interesting because most people just search the word dentist and we don't actually know what they're searching for. So you drive them back to the home page and then try to disperse them out from there. But if they if we do know the keyword that they're searching for, we drive them back to a landing page. So that's step number one. You gotta be running high-intent Google ads and you got to be spending a good amount of money. Now, you need to work with somebody who understands when and how to run your ads because, as an example, at the beginning of the month, it's gonna be more competitive. At the beginning of the day, it's gonna be more competitive, which means it's more expensive. At the later in the day and in the evenings and on off days like Fridays or Saturdays, and at the end of the month, it's gonna be cheaper. Why? Because you still have the same amount of volume coming in as of people searching. However, you don't have the same number of people competing because a lot of dentists run their own keywords and things like that. So they run out of budget and they turn it off because it doesn't work, and then it restarts the next month. So that is really, really, really important. So that's number one. You're gonna have to do that. Get rid of this idea in a hyper competitive market, like I'll just do SEO. Yeah, one person will get lucky and get that, and they may hold it for a little bit, but you're that's not a gross strategy. It just isn't. Okay. Um, you're you're not gonna be able to get volumes of leads and volumes of new patients with SEO in a hyper competitive market. Guess why? You're competing against some really big players with really big budgets, and they're all competing for the same exact spot that you are with your$2,000 marketing budget. It doesn't work, okay? So that's number one. Number two, own the Google reviews in your zip code. Own the Google reviews in your zip code. And if not at your zip code, then your three mile radius. And if not your three mile radius, then your two mile radius. If not your two mile radius, then your one mile radius. And if not your one mile radius, just try to be the best dentist, like in your parking lot with the most Google reviews. Now, this never stops. I don't want you to ever stop getting Google reviews. Your goal should be to dominate, start with a small circle and expand out and get the most Google reviews. You have to be vicious about this if you want to really compete and get a lot of new patients. You have to be vicious because if not, other people are stealing your new patients. And how that works is it's very simple. If I go, hey, you should go to this Italian restaurant in your town, it's really good, great Italian food, and you do do a Google search for them, and they have 200 Google reviews, all five star, and then right below them, there's a 3,000 five-star Italian restaurant right down the street. Which one are you going to? You're gonna go to the 3,000. And more than likely, right? Most people are. And so what happened is the 3,000 Google Review just stole marketing from the 300 Google Review. And we all understand this. And so it's winner takes all with this. If another dentist sends out a postcard and they only have 100 Google reviews and you have a thousand Google reviews, and they're right down the street from you, there's a high probability that that postcard generates a new patient for you if you have a marketing growth partner who is aggressively running Google ads in those areas. Okay, really, really high probability. So that's number two. Here's the secret with that incentivize your team. Pay your team. You're not allowed to pay the patients, but if you pay the team, you're allowed to do that. And you're and your team will be super motivated to get a bunch of Google reviews, and you can get hundreds of Google reviews sometimes a week, and just really, really crank and get a lot of Google reviews. If you want to dominate your market, that's the second thing that you have to do. All right, number three, answer the phone. This is a big one. Answer the phone. Average office is missing 35% of their new patient calls during normal business hours. That is the industry average. I talk about this all the time. Great news is AI can just solve this for you. It's$299 and it will it can schedule new patients better than humans. Now, some people say, well, it's not a great experience. It's a way better experience than going to voicemail and then ending up at another dental office. Way better experience than that. And I would argue it's better than most people. The experience is better than working with most people at the average front desk in the dental world. It's$299. The link's down below. There's no contract. It's just kind of crazy if you don't have this right now. You're gonna instantly get more new patients. All right, that's number three. Number four, listen to your team's calls. Listen to your team's calls with your team. I don't know if you played sports, but I did growing up, and we would watch tape. And we would go in and we would sit in a room and we'd watch tape and we would be hyper-critical, and we would we would praise the good stuff, and then we'd be critical of the mistakes that we made. And we would sit down and we'd say, See, on defense there, you did really good in the cover two, but when it was time to switch to a cover three, you missed your assignment and they were able to get a big playoff of that. And because we were getting feedback on visually over and over and over again on tape, and we're getting that positive, negative feedback, and we knew next week we're gonna review this tape again. It really helped us with results, like big time. It helped us with the results big time. And so we were always getting better as a dental office owner. You need to review the calls with your team. Now we go through the calls and we flag them for our clients and we make it really, really easy. But if you're not constantly letting your team know, like, hey, I'm listening to these, even if it's just one call a week where you're like, hey, I'm gonna take one good call and one call that we need to work on, and you're doing it in a group setting, this will make everybody get better. Now we're not yelling at them, we're not, we're not degrading them, we're telling them how they can get better. This is a learning, this is great. I'm glad that this actually happened on the phone because it's a learning opportunity. So that's number four. Number five. Well, let me back up real quick too, before I jump into number five. The reason this is so important, the average dental office only converts 50% of their new patients on the phones. So that's why you need to do that. You need to get that up into the 75, 85 percent. Okay, number next. Number five, if you want to compete in a competitive market, same day, next day availability. Same day, next day availability. If you are if you have a waiting time of a month, which is industry average right now, 28 days, almost 30 days, almost a full month, people are waiting to get into the dental office to get their teeth cleaned, you are losing. It is a competitive advantage if you can get a patient in right away. If you push them out a month, you will have 40, 50% no-show rates. It's just the way that it goes in a competitive market because there's people who want to get those patients in right away in a competitive market, and you're not. Now, if you're a week, if your average wait times a week and everybody else in your market is three weeks, then you're winning. Then you're winning. But in a really hyper-competitive market, you got to figure out how to create ghost columns. If you don't know what those are, where you're actually scheduling people based on production so it creates more space, and you're pushing, uh allowing the new patients to push in same day, next day. This is huge, huge advantage. Patients love it, your team loves it, everything's moving really, really fast. It's an absolutely win for everybody, okay? And then number next, do a competitive analysis. Now, I told you that we would give you an option to do a competitive analysis at the end. That's what this is. And I I'm gonna pop up a little map here, and on that map, you can see we have income levels, competition, drive times, we have population levels, income levels, and historic new patient flow. Why this is so big, you can actually start to see where your competition is, where your new patients are coming from. Are people driving by a hundred other offices to get to your office? That probably means it's gonna be more competitive and more expensive to market to those areas. So you could start to figure out where the pocket of opportunities are and where you're not getting new patients from, where you probably should be. And you can start to market on those. Also, down below, I have the link to the AI. Check that out. Gotta have that. In 2026, you gotta have that. It's almost free. It's as close to free as we can possibly make it. And then number two, I listed three case studies down below of people who absolutely exploded their new patients. We're talking 3X, 4X. Some went to 120 new patients in the first 90 days of being open. His third month, he had 120 new patients. So he explains exactly how to do this. All of them do. Three different dental offices, three different scenarios, and they're gonna explain to you exactly how they grew their new patients. I highly recommend that you check those out. Also, the links down below if you want the free competitive analysis. It takes about 15 minutes meeting. We'll meet, we'll talk, and we'll go through that. Comment down below if you want those or if you have any questions. Thanks so much for tuning in. Have a good one.