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Get your funky Groupon

September 29, 2011 By Trish Walraven Leave a Comment

New patient marketing is all about finding clients that will bring repeat business, refer their friends and family, and basically spread good vibes about you to the surrounding community. But lately the social coupon craze has poured mud into the water, causing consumers and business owners alike to lose sight of these goals. The result is second-class service that most customers begrudgingly accept because, well, it’s a DEAL!

A few months ago I purchased one of these group coupons for 60 percent off of a full auto detail from a local car wash. Not only was I disappointed with the way I was treated once I redeemed my voucher, I realized that dentists often get stuck by the same traps that caught our car wash business owner when offering any sort of discount.

Rule 1: You should treat Groupon patients the same as your regular patients.

Two weeks ago I left my second voice mail message at the detailing center. The first phone call was never returned the week previous, but this time the owner called me back immediately. Maybe this was going to work out after all. Yes, he could reserve an appointment for me on the day I asked, but because a lot of people are trying to use their vouchers before they expire, he says the only time he can see me is for an early morning drop off. Not a problem.

So last Friday I drop the car off without incident. The owner assures me that the service will be superb, and I am like, hey, maybe these social coupon deals are worth my time. What a way to “kick the tires” and make sure that a business meets my needs, right?

Right? Ehh, not so much. Basically I got a $70 detailing for $70. If I’d paid the regular price of $179 and they’d called what they did to my car “detailing” I would have made them stay there another hour to go back over all the idiotic things that were missed, with me glaring over them for the inconvenience. And maybe I’d even ask for a HUGE discount.

But I was a pre-pay with my coupon. Instead, it was all I could do to get the heck out of there as quickly as I could. Don’t look back. And don’t go back.

Rule 2: Remember who you are trying to attract.

Out of the 150 auto detailing deals that were purchased during the offer period, only four were in the local area, according to the owner, and he seemed to think that those that traveled out of their way to visit his shop weren’t likely to come back. And then… as one of the four that lived locally, I got treated like one of the out-of-towners! Sheesh.

Not only do you want your marketing efforts to attract more repeat customers than one-timers, when you do have a “keeper” you need to make sure that they value not only your coupon offer but that they can see your Big Picture. In other words, why you signed on to be a Coupon Dentist in the first place. Many patients are hungry to understand your practice philosophy and your ethics. Make sure that you don’t compromise either when you decide to participate in a Daily Deal.

Rule 3: Create an offer with No Regrets.

The worst thing you can do is to go upside-down on a social coupon deal, where it actually costs you money to fulfill an offer. Forget prophys because of the perio thing – you don’t want to gnaw off more than you can occlusally manipulate. But then again, if you don’t make your deal enticing enough you won’t get anyone to purchase it.

You also have to be careful with the cuts you agree to share with the various coupon aggregators, and that you’re not ending up with the super-short end of the stick.

Above all, you don’t want your offer to be a Cheapie Freebie. Whitening kits are notorious for post-coupon exasperation in the dental practice. Take the whitening kit and run, say most of the Deal of the Day playbooks.

My suggestion for a Dental Deal that will attract new patients, enthuse your existing client base, and give your dental team a skip in their step, without tying up valuable chair time? Why not offer something that isn’t even dentistry? Try offering digital smile makeover photo shoots.

Maybe the offer reads like this:

“You want to look like a million bucks, but your teeth might be knocking a few zeroes off that last photo session. The smile designers at Dr. Chill’s Dental Practice can bring Photoshop magic to your mouth with this personalized production starring you and your potential.
What you’ll get (a $50 value):

 • A one-on-one review of your ideas for smile enhancement
• A 30 minute shoot at our own photo studio
• High-resolution professional headshots, including minor retouching and the smile design of your choice, emailed to you

And be prepared to change your LinkedIn photo soon.”

So you charge a small sum for this, say $15. Hopefully the coupon websites will let you do something for this low.  And even though you’ve heard this so much that it’s probably a cliche’ to you by now, keep in mind the most important rule of all:

Rule 4: Under-promise and over-deliver.

The bottom line is that you want to give buyers a reason to become patients.

You can make fun of yourself in your ad copy when you mention that you also want a person to come back as a dental patient. Because that’s like, duh. But you can’t say that “you’ll love us so much that you’ll want to get all that dental work done.” Whatever.

Or you can emphasize how at-home patients will feel in your practice if you have that sort of relaxed environment.  Send each purchaser a note about your practice before they redeem their coupons. But no baiting and switching with high-pressure sales pitches. Keep it real, keep it caring, and most importantly, build a relationship with each person that comes in with the coupon. Everyone knows that it costs money to get dental work done. You just want to be sure that patients have your number when they’re ready to commit.

Think of this deal that you’re building in the same way that you think of magazines. The only reason that publishers let a magazine subscription go out for $12 per year is to create value in the mind of the subscriber (who reads free trade magazines cover to cover? no offense, PennWell publishing!) The real dollars come from the ad revenue, of course.

In that sense, your Groupon (or LivingSocial deal, or whatever program you use) can provide a photo service that professionals are looking for to enhance their online profiles, while at the same time creating low-cost marketing for you that is all about WBID: Warm Bodies In the Door.

And those warm bodies won’t care how much you know how to fix their mouths until they know how much you care*. Sometimes it’s just that simple.


*thank you to Linda Zdanowicz for her dental blog tagline that I tried to paraphrase to fit this article.

Filed Under: Marketing, Money, Practice Management Tagged With: Groupon, linkedin, LivingSocial, social coupon deals

Quizno’s creatures need ortho treatment

August 4, 2011 By Trish Walraven Leave a Comment

by Trish Walraven

It’s a shame that these commercials, first broadcast during the 2004 Superbowl, were upstaged by Janet Jackson’s “stardom” during the halftime show that day. I thought that it was utterly brilliant marketing, even better than the commercials that went totally silent and you’d have to peek your head around the corner to see why your TV turned off. I mean, this campaign is the epitome of the proof that marketers will do whatever it takes to get your attention.

So if you agree with me that these were the silliest, funnest commercials of the time, especially because secretly you found yourself doing a subconscious ortho workup on the pre-adolescent mess of a dentition, then you now get your chance to revisit them here.


Our little freaky bowler hat hobgoblin is acting shy about showing his jacked-up smile at first. Open please, and bite your back teeth together.


Or just sing for us, okay?




Yes, you have a pepper bar, and you’re cute in a “I can’t unsee that” kind of way. But did you have to go all Sistine Chapel on us?
[Read more…]

Filed Under: Fun, Humor, Marketing Tagged With: linkedin, orthodontics, Spongmonkeys, YouTube

This is not Dental Justice

June 17, 2011 By Trish Walraven 4 Comments

by Trish Walraven


Photoshop is fun. You can use it to make a fake Yelp review to help illustrate a point that you’re trying to make about something else. Like a patient writing an online review of your dental practice:


 

 

 

Vindication, finally! Yelp lets me air the true story of this miserable experience, and no one can stop me.

First off, I had total confidence in the way I cared for my car – had the tires rotated every six months, oil changes every 3000 miles, if it was in the manual, I had it done.

About a year after I’d moved into town was when I began noticing a drift to the left (irrespective of the politics here *grin*) so I took my car into Dodgy’s Auto Clinic, which had the highest score on RateMechanics.com.

Get this! As I’m filling out some paperwork, one of the forms they’ve handed me is a “Privacy Agreement” that asked me to transfer ownership of any public commentary I might write in the future to Dodgy’s. Like this review – supposedly they now own it.

Did the red flag go up? Definitely. Did I heed the warning? Unfortunately not.

This mechanic BUTCHERED my car. Nothing feels the same. There are rattles where none previously existed, the steering wheel shimmies when I make a turn, and whenever I drive I just feel like taking a bus instead, it’s THAT BAD. They did fix the drift though, only now it goes in the opposite direction.

Just in case I was insane I took it to another shop to get an opinion about their repairs. The second place agreed that unneccessary “treatment” had happened and that it would be difficult and pricey to undo the damage.

In the end Dodgy’s did refund my money and asked that I not rip them apart online. I bet! The last thing they did as I walked out was to wave that “agreement” at me. Like it has any authority to do anything except make me mad. I have a destroyed car, and people should know the truth about this “Auto Clinic.”

So, Bring it, Dodgy’s. Bring your lawyers. I’ve got everything I need to defend my words. You want to own my words? Here. OWN EM. I now own YOU.



This is a frightening scenario for any service provider. We have a clearly upset individual that seems sincerely convinced her car was ruined by a repair shop. And just one of these unfavorable reviews can inflict massive online damage.

Now let’s take this to dentistry. You got some patients out there talking smack about the quality of your work. Not your chairside manner, not your front office person who was less than helpful about payment arrangements. We are in the heart of your business, a heart that could be ripped out by a singular disgruntled review.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Dental Debates, Marketing, Practice Management Tagged With: Dental Justice, dentist review, doctor review websites, healthgrades, linkedin, Medical Justice, online reputation management, RateMDs, scandals, Yelp dentist review

When you’ve said it once…

June 9, 2011 By Trish Walraven 5 Comments

by Trish Walraven

You’re a dental professional, you want to do your job well, accomplish a task and then move on to the next one. But there’s one critical thing that can make or break you, no matter how excellent your clinical skills are: you must also speak to the subject of your work.

Duh, talking about patients here! They’re your subject, and they expect to have somewhat of a conversation with you. You must use words to initiate your job, and a few to end it as you leave. Otherwise you’ll look like an assembly-line worker that’s too good to talk to the product. Hey, Doritos. You’re going into that bag nicely. Thanks for the job security.

So you create little lines here and there that you find yourself repeating to Mrs. Graham, Mr. Burgess, little Jacob. Hi, how’s it going? What concerns are you having? We’re going to lay you back now.

Eventually patients are able to pick up on the fact that you’ve turned a phrase hundreds of times, said it to hundreds of people. That’s when your assistant cringes because those stale words sound like the flight attendant talking about the mask that will drop down out of the ceiling if heaven breaks loose and descends into the airplane cabin. Sheesh. You’re just trying to fix a tooth here.

If you can’t get a personality transplant (which I did once and it was great at first, but then my old personality got bored and ate it), then your other alternative is to ditch the worn-out words and get new ones! Might I suggest trying on a few of these to make a change in your patient rapport:

 

•Dude, what’s your problem? Just kidding, it’s right here in the schedule.

•You’re going to feel a little mosquito-bite with this injection, and then its momma will be by to bite you GOOD!

•Alright, now turn to the left and cough.

•So what’s going on in your life that you’re too stressed to talk about? Don’t tell me about anything fun or interesting, that’s too easy.

•Hole La. May yammo ace Doctor Bacon. Day donday ace el dough lore? (Say this to everyone, even if they don’t speak Spanish. Or even if your last name isn’t Bacon.)

•Tell me, what hole do you want to have filled today?

•Uh oh, 15 minutes to Judge Wapner.

•(singing this song as you lower the chair): Baby going down down down down down.

•You say you’d rather be at the OBGYN than at the dentist office? Well make up your mind so that I can shine this light in the right place.

•See you in six months, or whenever you work up the courage to come back.

•Well that was easy. For me, at least.

 

 

Now it’s your turn. I’m sure you’ve heard colleagues use phrases that make you grit your teeth every time you hear them. With all anonymity please share yours in the comment section below. Words are powerful, even ones that are tossed around long after they’re worn out.

So what phrases are you tired of hearing? Which ones crack you up?

Filed Under: Fun, Humor Tagged With: dental communication, dental humor, linkedin

There’s an app for teeth bleaching

May 23, 2011 By Trish Walraven 6 Comments

By Trish Walraven

This picture was snapped at the local mall last week. If your Sephora shop is like ours, it has recently capitalized on its space across the mall from the Apple Store and is now targeting the same people who like to wear iPods around their necks. Glowy! White! Cords! Teeth? Hmmm.

I haven’t actually purchased the Glo™ system so the least I could do is to try to help sell a few of them with this exclusive “DentalBuzz How-To Guide for Avoiding the Dentist But Still Whiten Your Teeth a Tiny Bit.”

Step 1: Remind yourself that you really hate the dentist. And justify your reasons for not going to one by telling yourself that you brush every day with a toothpaste that you see advertised on TV. And mouthwash. You always use mouthwash, because it protects your teeth. So you don’t need a dentist.

Step 2: Save up $275. This is very important because you can’t get white teeth for free, no matter how much you see it offered by area dentists as a special for new patients. It’s NOT FREE. Also, make sure not to read up on any scientific studies about how light-activated or heat-activated whitening is no more effective than bleaching gel alone. Or that dentists use bleaching gel that is usually more than triple the strength of the strongest OTC whitener available. None of that matters because you are going to do this yourself with your own hard-earned money. Besides, insurance doesn’t cover whitening anyway so that’s one more way that a dentist won’t be ripping you off.

Step 3: Purchase the Glo Brilliant™ Personal Teeth Whitening Device at the place of your choice, either at Home Shopping Network, or Sephora, or directly from GloScience. And then justify the purchase one more time because the company has “science” in their name, after all.

Step 4: This is the most fun step! Take all of the stuff out of the kit and marvel over it. SPOILER ALERT! I’m going to tell you what you get:

•A lighted mouthpiece that comes with its own case!
•10 G-Vials! Futuristic-looking smearable 6% hydrogen peroxide gel tubes with built in brushes. G-Vials. Sounds kinky.
•The Glo™ Control. It’s so three generations of iPods ago….but….FOR TEETH!
•A Charging Dock! Docking is fun. And a Music Player! (just kidding, no music)
•A USB power plug. It plugs into your computer! And its for your teeth! (you should be squealing by now with joy).
•Glo™ Lip Balm. Because hydrogen peroxide is caustic.
•a BAG!!!! To carry it all in! Because you want to be able to whiten your teeth at your mom’s, while you’re driving to your job interview, or wherever you have an urge to wear the GloControl around your neck.

Step 5: Check to see that the GloControl is charged and hang it around your neck. You wouldn’t want to be putting the mouthpiece in your mouth all dark, now, would you? Also, apply a thin layer of the lip balm on your lips, and pout, because you’re too cute to get burned.

Step 6: Open one of the G-Vials and squeeze it until the gel appears on the brush (ooh. higher. Higher. There.). Brush the gel onto the fronts of teeth, taking care not to slobber on them.

Step 7: Plug in the mouthpiece, press the GLO button, unhinge your jaw and then cram the mouthpiece all the way in until it covers both your top and bottom teeth. Watch this video if you think I’m exaggerating.

Step 8: Spend the next eight minutes going about your day. This is verbatim from the GloScience website. Then you’ll want to immediately do Step 6 through Step 8 three more times, for 32 consecutive minutes per day. One G-Vial per day for ten days.

Step 9: Marvel at how much whiter your teeth are! You’ll probably notice a change, and hopefully the bleaching will last longer than a month, but if it doesn’t, just repeat Step 1 over and over until you feel better. And then buy some G-Vial refills. You know how you like your G-Vials.

Do you remember what came before this in the mall? The chairs, the lights, the kiosks, the leased-out spaces with people parading around in white lab coats? I think that this is a change for the good, and because the treatment course is similar to that recommended by dentists, it probably is much more effective. Well, except for the light. But then no one could charge so much just for the bleach and the tray?

Here’s to the power of bling.

Filed Under: Products Tagged With: GloScience. Glo Brilliant, linkedin, Teeth Bleaching, Teeth Whitening

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DentalBuzz explores rising trends in dentistry with its own slant. The speed at which new products and ideas enter the dental field can often outpace our ability to understand just exactly the direction in which we are heading. But somehow, by being a little less serious about dentistry and dental care, we might get closer to making sense of it all.

So yeah, a tongue-in-cheek pun would fit really nicely here, but that would be in bad taste. Never mind, it just happened anyways. Stop reading sidebars already and click on some content instead.

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