Have you ever wondered why it takes some dental practices decades to generate just $1 million in revenue, while other practices are able to grow to $5 million in a fraction of the time? In this article, we’ll get into the biggest factors that separate good dental practices from exceptional ones.

At RevUp Dental, we’ve worked with dentists all across North America, and have seen first-hand how they operate. While some practices generate under a million in revenue, others may generate $5 million or more! Obviously, these practices have different approaches to the way they organize the practice, schedule payments, present treatments, etc. But, it might surprise you to learn what the real difference-maker is.

The experience of the dentist doesn’t seem to make a big difference. We found many cases where incredibly talented dentists with decades of experience were struggling to get by, while younger and less experienced dentists achieved much better results much faster.

The area in which the practice is located doesn’t seem to matter much as many would believe either. We’ve worked with practices in highly competitive areas that still do exceptionally well, while others, operating in areas with very little competition, were still struggling.

So then, what’s the big secret? Why do some dentists take decades only to achieve mediocre results, while other dentists can build a practice that’s two or three times the size in just a few years? The best way I can explain it is by telling a story that happened to me in which I had a lightbulb moment about what really separates good practices from bad ones.

A few years ago, we hired a new employee at RevUp Dental, and I had to go to the Apple store to pick up a new laptop for her. This was during Black Friday and every store in the mall had balloons and flyers featuring all kinds of promotional sales.

So I made my way to the Apple Store, and at the front of the store, there was a female customer talking to an Apple employee behind the desk. I was a few steps behind her so I could overhear their conversation. After the employee had greeted her, she asked him:

“Hey… what kind of promotions do you guys have going on today?” 

To which the employee responded, “Ugh…. we don’t have any promotions going on.”

“How can you not have any promotions on Black Friday?” the customer said, taken aback. “Literally every store in the mall is running promotions today and you’re telling me you guys don’t have any promotions?”

And I will never forget what the employee said next. He paused for a moment, then said, “Ma’am.. this is Apple… we don’t really have promotions… ever. Maybe once in a while on some small things like cables or bags, but never on the main products. We just don’t need to.”

I remember looking around the store after he said that and realizing that they didn’t have any balloons, posters with buy-one-get-one-free deals, or any of that sort of nonsense. And yet, the store was completely packed. There were more people in that Apple store than just about any other store in the mall. In fact, the customer complaining about the lack of deals started looking at products as well.

On my way out of the mall, I looked around at all the other stores and realized that most of them were empty. Every one of them had promotions, special deals, and all kinds of gimmicks to catch people’s attention, and still, all the salespeople twiddling their thumbs attempting to chat people up as they walked past were just being ignored.

This made me think:

• What is it that makes companies like Apple so popular?
• Why are there so many people that live paycheck to paycheck but have to have the latest iPhone?
• How many students do you see at coffee shops who have Macbooks?
• Why do these customers with no income, saddled with thousands of dollars in student debt, and living off of ramen noodles still feel that they HAVE to have the latest Macbook? 
• You can buy a faster laptop for half the price yet they all want a Macbook. Why?

And it’s not just Apple, you see the same level of devotion to brands like Lulu Lemon. How many girls spend $150 on a pair of yoga pants when they can go to Walmart and buy a pair for $20? How many people are happy to spend thousands of dollars on a Rolex. Why? It’s just a watch. 99.9% of people on the planet would not be able to tell the difference between a real Rolex and a fake one, so why do people buy it?

The simple answer is people don’t make logical decisions, they make emotional decisions. The same emotional elements play a big role in how successful you will be as a dentist.

Everyone wants “the best” or at least what they perceive as “the best”. If people perceive your product, service, or business as something unique, something that can help them stand out, something that is different and novel, they are going to spend a lot more money than if they perceive what you are offering as a commodity that they can get elsewhere.

This is why there are a lot of people out there who may spend hundreds of dollars on a nice pair of shoes, but when it comes to the socks they just go to Walmart and buy a 3-pack for $10.

If people think that you’re just a dentist like every other dentist in your area, then they are just going to go to the dentist who is the closest, or the cheapest, or whoever happens to accept their insurance.

The reason companies like Apple, Rolex, or Lulu Lemon are so successful is that they put an insane amount of thought into the little details of the customer experience. Apple puts a lot of thought into how the keys on the laptop are shaped, how they feel when you press them, how the laptop feels when you hold it, and when you open and close it. They obsess over things that most other tech companies regard as completely pointless. The same is true for dental practices.

Those small details that most people think are pointless are what separates dental practices that spend decades and only achieve mediocre results from dental practices that achieve 2 or 3 times as much revenue in just a few years. Successful practices understand that the little details matter, and they matter A LOT.

So, exactly how do the little details make or break a practice? We’ve been inside many practices over the years, and have witnessed first-hand how inattention to those little details can cost practices potential patients.

Presentation Rooms

On numerous occasions, I have gone into dental practices that don’t have a beautiful or professional presentation room. They are trying to pitch a patient on $20,000 of dental implant work, and they’re doing this presentation in the staff lunchroom, while another staff member is busy heating up a pizza pocket in the microwave. Obviously, the patient doesn’t accept treatment, and, in response, the staff or the dentists assume that the patient just wasn’t serious about seeking treatment.

Nobody is going to come in for a consultation on implants or Invisalign for fun. If they’re standing in your office, they want to buy dentistry. If they leave without committing to treatment, it means that, after looking around the office, they realized that the office was not the best choice for them and they decided to go somewhere else.

Branding

A lot of dentists opt for the “good enough” approach when it comes to things like branding, marketing, photos, or staff training. They think, well, we’re a small office, so this is good enough for now, but once we get bigger… we’ll invest more money into doing things better.

We often see practices present their patient with a treatment quote by simply printing out a quote from their patient management system onto a single piece of the cheapest paper they could buy at Staples.

Taking the time or effort to put together a detailed treatment plan, a professional folder with nicely designed and branded material to explain to the patient what that treatment will entail, why they’re the best at it, etc. will make all the difference for the patient experience.

Companies like Apple didn’t get to where they are by starting out building “good enough” products. If you want to build a very successful dental practice, you need to start acting like a successful practice before you become one. You need to start doing all of the little things at a much higher level of quality than other dentists are doing before you see the results.

The little things in your practice matter a lot. How your office looks, your logo, your website, the photos on your website, the quality of your sign, how your staff answers the phone, how you present treatment, and how you make your patients feel during their visit.

So, the next time you’re thinking about why a patient didn’t book their treatment with you, ask yourself: 

• How did your staff greet that patient on their first visit? 

• Did they offer them a cup of coffee? 

• Does your office look clean and professional or does it create the impression that you don’t really care?

While these details may not seem important to the daily operation of your practice, for the patient, they could make all the difference.

Your dental patients don’t really care about all of the fancy equipment in your practice. The reason why a lot of dental websites don’t perform very well is that they show pictures and talk about things that do nothing but stroke the dentist’s ego, not things patients actually want to see or are interested in reading about.

In this video, we’re going to break down what types of content and photos on your dental website will ACTUALLY help you attract new patients.

A common request we get from our dental clients is to feature all of the fancy equipment they’ve purchased at their office. They want to show off their CERC machine, or their CBCT scanner, or their dental laser. They want to make sure everyone knows that their office is not like everyone else, they’re “state of the art”

Now I get it. You’ve spent a lot of money to equip your practice with the best equipment. It’s natural to want to make sure this is front and center on your website so everyone knows it. However, here are two main reasons why this doesn’t actually work.

The first reason is that in 99% of cases you don’t actually have anything that’s really all that special. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve spoken with dentists who are showing off their fancy new laser or intraoral camera or whatever fancy gadget they bought, and they feel that this will help them really stand out, they feel like they are one of only a few dentists that have this type of equipment (because that’s what the sales rep told them), and they feel they need to REALLY promote this (because again, that’s what the sales rep told them to) and then I go on Google and find 20 or 30 dentists in their area that all have the exact same equipment.

This is something that happens ALL THE TIME, and you have to remember that dental supply companies have some of the most talented sales people on the planet. They are absolute experts at getting dentists to buy a bunch of fancy gadgets by making them feel that this will really help them stand out from other dentists… and unfortunately… in 99.9% of cases this is just not true.

Now it’s important to have up to date equipment, to do better dental work, to do it faster, to do it more efficiently, but if you think some piece of equipment is going to help you stand out or give you a big edge over other dentists in your area you are sadly mistaken.

The second reason why talking about your equipment on your website doesn’t work is… patients don’t really care. A patient has a very limited attention span when they visit your website and you don’t want to squander that time by talking about things they have little-to-no interest in.

Let me give you a good example here. Imagine you are trying to sell tickets to a cruise vacation. Instead of talking about how they’re going to discover the world, they’re going to dance the night away in beautiful cities, they’re going to enjoy the sun and the warmth… no,no,no… you instead run an advertisement talking about the diesel engines that power the cruise ship, how big they are, how much horsepower they produce. You talk about how your cruise ship is equipped with the LATEST and the BEST navigation system. We’re not like other cruise ships, we connect with much better GPS satellites for our navigation, we’re state of the art. Instead of our position being accurate on the map to 5 meters, our navigation system is accurate to 2 meters. Order your tickets today!

How successful do you think this would be? This is why so many dental websites produce little-to-no results. They are built to impress the dentist and stroke their ego rather than actually impress patients. You have to remember that when you’re trying to sell someone on Invisalign for example, that person is considering whether they should do Invisalign or if they should go with their friends on a cruise. And the cruise companies do a much better job of marketing their services than dentists do.

So what should you talk about on your website and what pictures should you show? Well when it comes to content you want to focus mostly on what a patient can expect from coming in. If someone is looking for Invisalign for example, you don’t want to spend a lot of time explaining what Invisalign is like most dental websites do, because nobody is going to land on your Invisalign page not knowing what Invisalign is and read your content and say “ohh.. that’s what that Invisalign is. I never knew. I don’t need Invisalign, but I was curious to find out what it was.”

You want to have a bit of that content explaining the service more for SEO reasons to help Google understand that you actually do provide this service. The vast majority of your content though should be around things like:

• How is this treatment carried out?
• How long does it take?
• Does it hurt?
• Do I need to take time off work?
• What can I expect to happen when I come in to YOUR office.
• How do YOU do this procedure?
• Why do YOU do it that way? Why is that better?

You want to talk about what makes you different from other practices. This is where you can sort of touch upon your equipment, but make sure it’s not the main focus, or you’ll lose people’s attention. For example, if you have a CEREC machine, you can say that “Our office is equipped to do same-day crowns.” You would focus the content on the benefit your equipment provides not what that equipment is, because again patients don’t care.

You can also focus a bit of content on the dentist who provides the treatment. For bigger cases like implants or ortho, people will want to know that the dentist who’s doing the work is an expert. While you can’t necessarily state that you’re an expert because this may go against the advertising guidelines of your governing body, you usually can say something like “Dr. so and so has been practicing dentistry for 30 years and has performed over 2,000 implant cases.” or “Dr. so and so has been doing implants for 15 years and regularly teaches at the local university.”

Again you want to review the advertising guidelines for your state or province and make sure you don’t break any rules, but you can have usually have a nice section on a page talking a little about the dentist from the angle of “this is how their experience is going to benefit you as a patient” much like you do when it comes to dental equipment. You don’t want this section to talk about how “Dr. So and so has 4 kids and he enjoys hiking and fishing on the weekends” because… nobody cares. It has to revolve around the patient and their needs.

Now when it comes to photos, you want to follow the same examples you see with vacation advertising. Pictures of happy patients, pictures of your staff in the practice, smiling, having fun, pictures of kids coming in for their first checkup, pictures of staff events, etc.

What you DONT want is pictures of an empty office. You don’t want pictures of an empty operatory showing your equipment, or pictures of your sterilization area or your CBCT scanner. Nobody is going to look at a picture of an empty dental chair with a bunch of sharp and pointy instruments on a table beside it and think “wow that looks fun!”

We see this all the time and I can tell you it is going to tank the conversion rate of your website.

Again, think of it like the cruise vacation. You want to show pictures of guests having a blast on the ship, having a wonderful vacation, you don’t want to show pictures of the engine or pictures of empty rooms on the ship or random equipment.

What your photos need to convey is that you have a nice and modern office, you have warm and friendly staff, and patients seem to be having fun and are happy to come to your office.

Things like photos and content usually seem trivial to most dentists but the reality is they can either make or break your business. The success of a cruise ship is not based on how state-of-the-art their ship systems are or how many certifications the captain holds. It’s largely based on the marketing that attracts passengers and the experience those passengers have once they are on the ship.

The same happens with dentistry. Your success as a dentist is much more dependent on your ability to attract patients and the experience those patients have when they come into your office,  than it is on your clinical skills. This isn’t to say that quality dental care isn’t important, it is, but dentists often neglect many other areas of their practice which leads to poor results over the long term.

The amount of Google Reviews your dental practice has and the ratings associated with those reviews can be the deciding factor when a new patient is choosing between your practice and your competitor down the street. 

If you’re trying to attract more patients, it’s crucial that your practice ranks among the top 3 BEST and MOST reviewed dental practice in your area, while always striving for the coveted #1 spot. 

In this article, we get into the top three reasons why Google reviews are an essential tool for increasing your patient flow. 

Gone are the days when people discover a new dental practice by strolling past a window advertisement or a sign on the street. Google reviews are the new storefront and people trust them more than almost any ad copy. 

Google reviews are the first thing people see when searching for dental practices in their area. This means that potential patients are deciding whether they like you, trust you, and want to buy from you before they even click on your website to explore what your dental practice even offers!

For better or worse, Google reviews reflect the honest experiences that patients have had with your practice. The higher the rating and number of reviews, the more potential patients are inclined to trust you.

Think of it this way: If you were to look up dental practices in Toronto and saw one practice with a 4.6 rating and 18 reviews, and then saw another practice with a 4.8 rating with 250 reviews, which practice would you call?

For this reason, it is absolutely critical that your Google reviews provide a great first impression of your practice.

The positions where your practice ranks in Google’s search results aren’t randomly assigned. Google’s algorithm ranks search results by trustworthiness to provide its users with the most relevant results. Naturally, the algorithm favors results with larger numbers of positive reviews.

If your practice doesn’t have many reviews or bad reviews, Google will push it further down the page. On the other hand, the more great reviews the dental practice has, the more Google will trust the business and the higher it will move up in the search results. 

So, if you want your practice to be seen online, you need to prove to Google that you are trustworthy. Google reviews are the most effective way to do that.

Sometimes a series of good Google reviews are all a person needs to decide that they trust your business enough to pick up the phone and call. 

If your practice has the most positive Google reviews in your area, patients will often decide to call your office from those reviews alone. 

If your practice doesn’t have a ton of great reviews or is sitting at a low rating, patients aren’t going to give you the benefit of the doubt, or simply assume that your practice is the best-kept secret in the area.

After years of marketing dental practices, we know from experience that effective marketing starts with collecting Google reviews. Encourage your staff to assist you! Tell friends and family to leave you a quick five-star review and ask them to spread the word. 

Google reviews are the new storefront of your business and have the best success rate at bringing new patient leads to dental practices. 

Need help coming up with a marketing strategy for your practice? Contact RevUp Dental today for help reaching new patients and increasing traffic to your practice’s website. Happy reviewing!

Do you ever feel like all dental websites look exactly the same, and don’t actually do much to drive new patients? That’s because the majority of them are lacking one critical component– the element of personalization. 

But how do you personalize your website so that new patients are more inclined to pick up the phone and call your practice, rather than dismissing you as “just another dentist”? Two words… TESTIMONIAL VIDEOS!

A testimonial video is a quick 1-2 minute video of a happy patient who has just had a great experience at your dental practice. The following video is a great example:

Awesome right? Is every patient going to be this much of a superstar on camera? No, but the goal is to fill your website up with real people who have had real experiences at your practice. 

So why is this so important?

When you have a page on your website that is filled with a ton of friendly faces who have awesome things to say about your dental practice– that is going to resonate emotionally with new patients who are wondering if they should pick up the phone and call you.

A page full of testimonial videos will make your website stand out. Imagine yourself looking for someone to do your ortho treatment and you stumble across the following video:

That is the type of content that is going to inspire potential patients to pick up the phone and call your office.
At the end of the day, people buy from people they trust. It’s critical to reinforce messages of trust from real consumers throughout your website.

The reality of living in the time of social media and digital marketing is that video converts better than text. People spend their day scrolling through social media and, rather than reading in-depth articles, they are quickly consuming bits of important information through video content.

According to a commonly cited report, people retain 95% of a message when they watch it in a video compared to 10% when reading it in text.

Video tends to resonate better with people than text because it allows them to create an emotional connection. It’s like storytelling– our brains are particularly attuned to stories, and that’s exactly what testimonials provide. A great testimonial video might tell the story of how a patient overcame dental anxiety while visiting your dental practice, like the following video:

In another article, we talk about the importance of collecting Google Reviews, because a series of positive reviews can make or break whether a patient decides to pick up the phone and call your practice. Testimonial videos can be even more impactful because you are seeing a real person and hearing about their journey while looking at the expression on their face.

Think about it– if a patient sees a wall of testimonial videos of happy and smiling patients, while they aren’t going to watch every video, that page is going to resonate with them. It says, “Wow, this practice has a ton of real patients who like and trust them enough to get on camera for them.”

If you want to learn more about how to quickly and easily shoot a testimonial video– or you want to teach your staff how to shoot testimonial videos –reach out to us at revupdental.com to learn more.

So, now that we know why it’s so important to shoot testimonial videos, let’s take a look at how quickly and easily it can be done.

Find a happy patient who has had a positive experience at your practice and ask them if they would be willing to shoot a quick testimonial video.

If that patient says they don’t want to do it, don’t force them. Many people will say no but some people will also say yes. This step is about asking as many happy patients as possible.

Have the patients act naturally on camera. Don’t worry about a script, just have a conversation with them.

You don’t want to script the patient. The goal of these testimonial videos is to come across as real and natural as possible. If they look too fancy, too scripted, or too edited, they will come off as staged and won’t resonate as well with potential patients. People relate best to real people sharing real stories.

For filming, all you need to do is find a space with good lighting. We like to go outdoors or near a nice window, and simply hit record on our cell phones. These days, all you need is an iPhone or Android to shoot a great video. Just make sure you clean your camera lens down with a tissue before shooting for the clearest image possible.

Once you’ve filmed your testimonial, simply send it over to RevUp Dental to be edited and put up on your website. If you’re not a client of ours, you can also find a good video editor with services like Fiverr or other similar freelance websites.

We edit out any awkward parts and brighten it up with your logo. The goal of these testimonial videos is to keep them down to earth while also making sure that they are branded and flow well. Once that’s achieved we will pop them up on your site and you can share them on social media.