Adrian is the CEO at My Social Practice, an agency providing social media marketing content, strategy and support to dental and dental-specialty practices worldwide. Adrian has been involved in digital marketing for many years in the dental industry and has helped thousands of practices grow and thrive through digital marketing.
Visit their website: https://mysocialpractice.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/my-social-practice/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mysocialpractice/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/socialpractice
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mysocialpractice/
Transcript of the Conversation
Jordan Smith: Hey everybody, I’m excited to bring this podcast, you guys today. I think everybody’s really going to love it today. We’ve got Adrian Leffler, um, with my social practice, uh, you guys, he’s going to give you all his contact information in this, but not only does he talk about some common struggles that he sees out there with a lot of their client base, which is dental offices. Um, but also some real tactical advice that you guys can follow them.
RJ Martino: Adrian has about, I mean, just tons of dental practices, uh, and knows that that market very well. He talks a lot about, uh, just permission based marketing and what it is he talks about engaging on social media, uh, what numbers they should be trying to hit and why it’s even important. Yeah, absolutely. So, uh, without further ado, let’s get social with Adrian. Adrian, I want to tell you a little bit about the framework in which we think about how we consult our clients and then I’ll plug you into the framework and that’s how I’ll, I’ll kick off. So let me go ahead and just start off. Uh, RJ Martino here with I prob I’ve got my cohost Jordan. Jordan, how you doing? Good. How are you guys? Okay, good. I’m good. We’ve got an awesome guest today. Uh, he and I have spent some time previous to this recording and he’s just got so much content to share if we don’t get enough of his brain.
RJ Martino: So if you get the opportunity, you really should dig in and get to know Adrian a little bit better. But before I introduce him, I always like to discuss the framework in which, how I think about solving or not solving, but how to grow a healthcare practice. And you know, it’s, it’s really seven easy steps and the first step is the doctor identify some symptom, some problem that they’re having with continuing to grow their organization. The second one, which I think is more important is actually admitting that there’s a problem. And for doctors it’s hard. Even any business owner, it’s hard to admit that there is a problem that you can control. Because on that step two, it’s important to know that you and only you need to take ownership of that problem. Even here have consultants, they’ll help, but you’ve got to admit that there is a problem and there’s something you can do to fix that problem.
RJ Martino: Sure. Yeah. Being accountable, that’s exactly what it is, is it’s saying I can fix this problem. The third one is what I call the initial health assessment or triaging where we really look at, do you need a business plan, a practice plan or a completion problem plan. The business plan is really who are you and where do you want to go? So what do you want to be when you grow up in 10 years, where are you? Because really you can’t even start on the practice plan until you figure out where you’re trying to go. Once you figured out where you’re trying to go, then you bring in consultants. It’s then that you say, Hey Adrian, how do I fix my social media plan? Cause he can’t even do that effectively if, if you can’t, if you can’t tell him verbally or written down, you’re trying to get to. And then the last thing that we call the completion plan, which is just how do you hold everybody accountable? How do you make sure, uh, the, you’re, you’re moving in the right direction. And then lastly, from there you engage your team and you really don’t start on engaging your team until you’ve got it all figured out in your head. Yeah. So today what we’re talking about from my perspective is really helping with the practice plan. What is, what are we going to do? And so I’m excited to bring Adrian, Adrian, welcome to the podcast.
Adrian Lefler: Hey, thanks for inviting me. I appreciate it.
RJ Martino: So I kind of teed it up saying that once a, a physician has figured out where the, who they are and where they want to go, then they bring you in and say, I need help with social media, but maybe not. Who, who is your product and your business? Who do you guys really help?
Adrian Lefler: Yeah, that’s a good question. Let me, that’s a good place to start. So, um, we have been working primarily with dentists. All is well in pretty much any English speaking country in the world. Most, most of our clients are in, uh, North America, uh, United States, primarily in Canada, but we do have clients in Australia and New Zealand. And, um, I think you got a few in Zimbabwe, in South Africa, a few in the UK. So, uh, and that’s primarily because we, we produce content that’s English. You know, we’re, we’re not, we don’t have a [inaudible], we don’t have the capabilities at this point to create content in other languages. But, uh, beyond that, we work with dentists and we’ve worked with over 5,000 practices over the last decade, and we have a small segment of, uh, ophthalmologists are uptight. Excuse me. Ophthalmologists, optometrists. Yeah. And they’re different. If you talk to an ophthalmologist and you call an optometrist, you’re going to get a mouthful. So, um, so we have, we have, we have some clients that are, uh, uh, optometrists as well. So as I kind of speak about this, you have to understand that and I talk about social media, you have to understand that there, there’s definitely some nuance between a dental practice in doing social media for a dental practice as you would foresee a dermatologist or a vet or a primary care physician or whatever it might be. But, um, my specialty is dental, so,
RJ Martino: well, very good. Tell us about some of the problems or you know, I always say most of the, most of the calls that we take start with the symptom or a problem and our solution helps some of those. Tell me about some of the symptoms that you hear and how do you guys first engage with [inaudible]?
Adrian Lefler: Well, well the, the primarily we are getting calls from clients that want more patients. I mean that’s the number one issue. We need more patients, we need more patients, right? Or patient flow. Um, how does social media help with that? That’s probably the number one thing. The second thing that we get from dentists is, Hey, we, we’ve got enough patients, we’re kind of like big enough, we don’t necessarily need to find new patients, but we want to control our brand better. We want to, we want to appear and make a, a better presentation online. Uh, uh, create a, maybe a wider digital footprint. But also we just want to look like we’re an awesome office. The culture of our office need is, is super important to us. We, we have a great team, we have great, uh, patients who have a great kind of family community and we need to portray that online and we don’t know how to do it. So those are primarily the two type of clients that we get more patients or I need a, I need to be able to display my culture in a way online that represents really who we are.
Jordan Smith: Yeah, that’s perfect. We talk about that all the time. And I’ve heard RJ talk specifically about, you know, one of the steps always being, you know, you get to define your culture. So whenever they come to you about the culture issue, are you guys helping them kind of helping define that culture or just you know, taking what they have and making sure it’s displayed properly on social? And it might be both.
Adrian Lefler: Yeah, it’s, it’s a little of both, but it’s Mmm. More about us giving them content creation ideas that will create the right type of content. Okay. Um, so, um, the, the tough part for a dental office and the staff is bandwidth, number one, do they even have the time to take on another project? And I would say that 75% of the practices that come to us initially say, dude, this is awesome. We’re super excited to get this kicked off. They get their team all oxide and we get their team all excited. We kick off the campaign and three months later we literally can’t get them to spend five minutes a month doing anything because they’re so swamped. So there’s a bandwidth issue. Okay. Um, so we have some solutions for that, uh, to, to help out with bandwidth. But, um, beyond bandwidth, it’s creativity. So you’re, you’re our client is a dentist. Like what? Like can you name a dentist? That’s interesting. I mean they’re just not really interesting people. Okay. Yeah. They are business owners. They are swamped with drama in the office. They’ve got their, they’re running things from a to Z. They, if they are interesting, they don’t have time to like, that’s it. That’s what we talk about is they, they went to school to be physicians, dentists, they
RJ Martino: want to be dentists. They turned down to business owners and now they, they’re dealing with all the other drama and so what marketing is to them. It’s just another box they have to check. Yeah.
Adrian Lefler: Generally what happens is because it’s a box that they have to check and they make that check Mark not knowing what they’re signing up for. There just begins to be a lot of really [inaudible] just crappy products being sold that just companies that play off of the ignorance of the business owner. It’s unfortunate. That’s probably like that in all of medical and probably all of business, who knows? But, but there’s, there’s a lot of product out there that really isn’t effective. And the reality of it is, is that when it comes to social media and digital marketing, it requires some effort. Like you’re paying for effort. If you’re the dentist or you’re the doctor, there’s no silver bullet. It’s not like there’s a sneaky trick somewhere that you can just buy you, you have to get involved. So one of the, one of the, uh, mantras that we, we’ve had since the beginning of our company is, and, and we came into the market into dental as a social media marketing company when there weren’t any, we were like, the thing, I don’t even think there was anything in all medical that was like a social media marketing solution in 2009 when we got started.
Adrian Lefler: So we were like super early on the whole social media marketing game and the medical industry and our mantra was social media isn’t something that you have, it’s something that you do have to actually be involved. And that becomes the problem. And the internal problem here at my social practice, which is how do you do something? How do you get an effective product if it requires the participation of the staff or the doctor and they don’t have any time. Right. And that is P people chatting me and I’m sorry
RJ Martino: it was going to happen. I told you, I told you before and this is authenticity. That’s a, that’s what we’re looking, yeah. Like in the office. Right. So anyway, um, so yeah, it’s, um, I don’t even remember what I was saying. Well, I agree. And you know, that’s what we talk about in our second step is that you’ve got to take control, control what you can’t control. But, uh, everybody, I don’t want to pick on physicians. Everybody wants something to change, but they want to do nothing about it. They want to complain about their corporate culture, but they don’t want to stand up and say, I, what can I control to fix a culture? Right? And so our step two is, before you do anything, you have to say, I’m going to commit to making this change. Uh, and, and so you, you’ve nailed it. Is that something you guys require or have you figured a workload? Yeah, so, so where
Adrian Lefler: do we go from here in terms of solving this problem is we’ve create, so there’s a, there’s, there’s basically, well, I don’t, I know the spectrum is fairly wide in terms of how much you do for the client. Okay. I mean, uh, on, on one end you can just give them ideas and they execute everything and on the other end you’d do it for them. Right? So for the first seven years of our business, what our product was, was a, uh, we are a CRI, well, we were leveraging our, our, our core competency, which is we’re super creative, we’ve got great designers. So what we were doing is we were developing content ideas and we were giving those to the practice and asking them to execute them. So we would, for example, like, um, in, in April, April, in the dental industry is oral cancer awareness month. Okay. So every April we would print, we would create a campaign around oral cancer awareness and we would create, um, materials like physical hard copy materials. We would design them all up. We would send them to a print shop, print this stuff hundreds at a time so we could get the cost down and we would ship these materials out to the office and they’d opened up the box and it would have signs and,
RJ Martino: well, and w w we all know how hard idea generation is. Yeah. That’s cool.
Adrian Lefler: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we’re, we’re giving them the idea. Right. And, um, so, and they, they would have, they would not just be just a sign that says it’s oral cancer awareness month. There would be some kind of an activity in it. It would be like the practice could, would donate a dollar or five bucks or whatever to some oral cancer, philanthropic, you know, charity thing. If the patient took a photo with a sign that says, you know,
RJ Martino: check your gut on what, I can’t remember where this, no, that’s cool though. I, I’ve looked at the website and I saw, it’s almost like ideas in a box, but also it’s the actual materials that are professionally designed. [inaudible] now the social post has them holding writery professional site that’s branded, uh, on the topic of oral cancer.
Adrian Lefler: Right? Right. So we would create this kind of stuff on a monthly basis and ship it out and give them, uh, like a schedule. And so we were giving him the ideas and there’s, there’s print ideas in the box, but there’s also a huge member site that we’ve created with tens of thousands of other posts and gifs and videos and blog articles and all sorts of stuff that are all that we’ve just built over the years that is just this huge resource library of content that they can kind of pull from. Some of it is kind of generic general content, you know, it’s educational content about dental stuff and other stuff is like this a sign that they could download and print, but they can then take a photo with that makes it more custom because now they’re in the photo with the sign that says, you know, we love our dentist or whatever.
Adrian Lefler: So we were basically creating this huge library of creative ideas so that we could get past the problem of creativity, which is that is it really, really tough thing to do in a dental office. You either are creative doctor, which there’s not very many of them. Uh, I would say one out of a hundred are super creative. I, in terms of like, I don’t mean to disparage Dennis, but when you look at like creative people that are like artists, these are not artists, right? These are on the other end of the spectrum. So they’d agree right. Dances and they usually don’t have somebody on their team that’s, that’s creative. Um, and if they do, there’s usually not enough bandwidth. So we’re, we’re solving the problem of creativity. Like, what are we going to post on Facebook this week? Well, here’s 15 different ideas that are all super cool.
Adrian Lefler: That’s basically what we were solving. So that’s what our product was for the first seven, eight years. And, um, our product is still that, but we’ve kind of like, Mmm. Separated into two, two different products because what we found is even after providing them with all this creativity, still didn’t have the time. So what we would do is, or what we did is we decided that we needed to have a slightly [inaudible], um, more hands-on product where we actually did the posting for them, responded to their comments on Facebook and Instagram, responded to all their Google reviews, um, uh, boosted all their posts. So because we, so we’ve just found that half of our clients still, even with the creative ideas, didn’t have the bandwidth to execute. They literally didn’t have five, 10 minutes a week, you know. So, so we, we actually have two products where we give the one that’s more just the creative ideas and we do training with uh, you know, somebody on the team to teach them how to use the content.
Adrian Lefler: And then we have this other product. We’re actually do it for them. But, but in that I will, I will say that in that product, that’s where we’re managing it for them. We still have to get content from them. So we still send our box out with all the ideas and we say all you got to do, shoot these 10 photos, shoot these two videos, it’ll take you 30 minutes a month, send it to us, we take care of the rest of it. And so it, that seems to have met the demand and the requirements necessary to, you know, to deal with the bandwidth issues in a, in a practice.
RJ Martino: Yeah. Cause you’re taking it off their plate completely. I mean, like RJ said, they went to school to be dentists. They know how to be dentists. They don’t know how to market. My idea, but you’re also just taking the activity off their plate too.
Adrian Lefler: Yeah, the, the, the thing, the thing that, that, that happens, at least in the dental industry is that doctors get excited about the idea of not having to do anything and they, they buy basically an inferior product where a company will, will sell social media and all they do is they just posts like general dental stuff to their Facebook and Instagram accounts or whatever it might be. And the problem with that is as they get content on their Facebook page, but what the doctor doesn’t realize is that no one else on the planet is seeing that content except for them, they don’t understand the permission based marketing model, which is if the content is not good enough to get somebody to comment or reshare or engage in some fashion, it’s literally being seen by no one but the dentist. Yeah. So I end up getting on the phone or I used to, when I was in the sales department and I would explain that to them and they’d be like, what? I’ve been spending a hundred, $200 a month on this bullshit social media product where no one is seeing the content but me and they get pissed off and they cancel the service and sign up with us. I mean that’s, it’s crazy that they don’t understand the model. They think they’re looking at a website when they look at their Facebook page, like people go on Facebook and search, you know, for a dentists like they would on Google. It’s not done that way.
RJ Martino: Right. Well I think this is an interesting topic because most of our audience are physicians are dentists and they, they’re probably more savvy, uh, than, than your typical. But talk about your thoughts on permission based marketing where someone who doesn’t know any event, talk about that. Okay.
Adrian Lefler: So, so the way that all social media accounts, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, tick tock, name one, okay. The all based on this model where anybody can create an account, okay, it doesn’t cost anything. And then, um, if you start posting cool stuff, other people may see that and then they would opt in to follow your content. So what happens is somebody who’s posting really good content builds a following. Like Instagram’s a really good example of this, right? Cause it’s like the fastest growing social media tool out there. Maybe, probably I’ll kick talks kind of coming up. But Instagram is definitely the best model to describe here. So you create an Instagram account, you start posting funny cat videos or whatever, whatever your thing is, right? And people start laughing at your cat videos and they think, Oh, I’m going to follow this guy. So you end up getting hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of followers.
Adrian Lefler: Now what ha, what you have to realize is that when you post something, if you’re the person posting funny cat videos, is that that content is being shared with the people who have, are following you, but no one else. Okay? So if you’re a dentist and you’re posting content on your Facebook page, um, and you’ve got no followers, no one’s seen it, okay? I mean that’s, that’s the general rule. And of our dentist, of your dentist, uh, how many followers do they have? Average dentists have three 50 to maybe 500 followers on kind of probably the mean good dentists that are doing really well have two, 3000 followers. Well and these, uh, these dentists who you’re solving for, they, they want new patients tip crime, right? So, so yeah, in order to, in order for the content that you post to get out, you either, there’s two ways to do it.
Adrian Lefler: You either have to have really good content that your current followers see and they like and they reshare or they comment on which feeds into the social media algorithm that would then reshare that content. It’s kind of like a ripple effect, right? You share, you posted on your Facebook page, your practice Facebook page, you got 30, 40, 50 people that see it, they comment or they, they click like, or they reshare and now their friends see it and more and more people can like see it, right? Or you have to pay, you’ve got to boost the content or run a Facebook advertising campaign. You basically pay Facebook money to push the content out. So you’re either doing one of those two things, but the, but the key is is that you should focus primarily on whether the content is good enough in the first place.
Adrian Lefler: If it’s not good enough, then don’t, it doesn’t make sense to post it. Yeah, no worries. What’s happening is content is being like general dental education content, which I know is super exciting to a dentist, but nobody in the communityK cares about dental information. It’s literally glossed over continually. Right? So if you’re posting general dental information on your page and you look down your page and you’re like, Oh, I’m posting every day or somebody is posting for me, that’s great, but you’re the only one seeing it unless you’re getting lots of engagement on the content. So the key to look for, to see if you’re being effective in your social media marketing is your engagement rate. Yup. Okay. That’s what is the, that’s the indicator to tell you is it being effective or not? Are people seeing the content? Okay. And exactly, whenever you’re talking to a practice or you’re looking at benchmarks, what should the listeners out there be looking for as far as a good engagement rate?
Adrian Lefler: What’s an average engagement rate? Talk through some of those a little bit. Mmm, and I know that’s how you use you usually if they’re getting any engagement, it’s great. Mostly what we find is that, um, they’re not getting any, so that’s typically what’s happened and they don’t understand what that means. So, um, one of the things that you, you look at in, if we’re talking about, say Facebook for example, one of the things that you’ll look at is you have what’s called insights, which is your statistical reporting. Instead of Facebook, if you’re an admin on the page, if it’s your page, you have access to all the insights. And what you want to look for is they have your engagement stats. I mean, you can read them month over month. The reporting is fantastic. Uh, but there’s also a number called your reach number, which is, are your unique impressions.
Adrian Lefler: So there’s reach and impressions and reach or unique impressions, meaning it hasn’t been seen by the same person more than once. So your reach number basically at the end of the month, says of all the content that you’ve published, this is how many people saw the content and the number is measured by the content moving through the Ville visible portion of somebody’s screen or their phone. So as you scroll through your Facebook feed and you’re seeing things go go up or down or however, which way you’re, you’re moving as that, as that visual image or video passes through, that creates an impression or a reach number. So you’re looking at that reach number and it better be going up otherwise, literally, no one is seeing your content and that goes up with engagement. So another way to kind of measure effectiveness is to look at that reach number cause that that’s tied directly to, um, you know, you’re in PR, you’re, uh, you’re the engagement of your content.
Adrian Lefler: The way to think about it is you buy a billboard, right? Billboards are sold on traffic or impressions, potential impressions, right? Same thing on Facebook. They’ve got it the same way you, you look at your Facebook page, a ton of content, you post it and then you look at this reach number to see how many people actually potentially saw it. That’s, that’s the number one thing. And then you look at the actual engagements, how many people saw it, but also interacted with the content, click light, commented, whatever. And uh, you know, it’s, it’s kind of all over the board in terms of what might be an effective number. But, but in our professionally managed service model, we manage it for them. You know, it, it’s not uncommon for people to start it one or 2000, uh, as their reached number and they’d go to 20 or 30,000 real quick. So, you know, a super, super steep hockey sticks spike when when we start producing the right kind of content and, you know, optimizing it and running contests and then their cool kind of stuff, stuff from the creative ideas that we said.
Jordan Smith: Well, speaking of that a little bit, uh, you know, it sounds, you guys come in and help them define a strategy. That’s one of the things we always talk about is, you know, let’s, let’s talk about what the end result is going to be before we start working to that or at least what the desired end result is. So you’re coming in and helping them not only with the strategy part, but also delivering on those tactical things that need to be done on a regular basis. Um, talk to some of those just to kind of give people some tangible examples of some things that they can do themselves or things that you guys would help them out with. Some specific things that you would like to kind of give folks.
Adrian Lefler: Yeah. So, um, for anybody that’s got a second, uh, to get some really clear examples, if you go to my social practice.com, there’s a tab that says free stuff
Jordan Smith: [inaudible]
Adrian Lefler: and there are tons of downloadable kind of creative ideas in there. So again, real quick and say literally tons. Yeah. If you’re not a dentist, Mmm. This stuff translates the, you just have to change the content of them. So instead of it saying, I love, I signed this as I love my dentist or whatever, you know, it’s just something else. But you’ll get get a flavor for what it is. But let me give you, let me give you some examples. So one of the things that we do every month is we run a contest. Um, contests can be something super simple, like a $20 gift card. Amazon gift card is the prize and the contest is, um, it’s, it’s may, it’s mother’s day, let’s say. All right? And you have a sign that says [inaudible] you get a sticker on your arm that says, I love my mom, looks like a fake tattoo or something like that.
Adrian Lefler: Or you have a sign. This is, I love my mom. So the dentist gets the sign from us, they take a photo, they post the photo on their Facebook page, and in the caption it says, Hey, we’re giving away a $20 gift certificate for anybody who posts a picture of their mother tags are practice and comments or something like that. Okay. And follows us, right? So you give them, you give them, give them some actions. You tell you, tell your audience, do these three steps and you’ll be entered to win this $20 gift card. I mean, that’s super simple. It doesn’t cost anything. And you’ll be amazed at how many people start sending in photography of them and their mother. Or it could be comment and tell us what you like about your mother or why you love your mother. That’s even a simpler action by the community, right?
Adrian Lefler: Rather than having to go get a photo, what happens is not only do you get a ton of, uh, action on your page, uh, you’re going to get more followers and it’s going to influence the algorithm, the Facebook algorithm. So Facebook currently, right now, if you, if you’re a business, you’re on a business page, not a personal page, but a business page and you publish something, less than 3% of your followers will see the content. So I said earlier that, um, you know, your content has to be good and known her for people to see it. That’s true. But, but also on top of that, when Facebook went public a few years ago, they had to figure out a way to make money. And so they basically collapsed the funnel, so to speak, or they started filtering the amount of content that you’re paid that is shared with your followers and the community and the requiring you to spend a little bit of money.
Adrian Lefler: So, um, anyway, I can’t remember why, why I got there, but basically you have to, you have to, I’d spend a little bit of money usually. Okay. And, um, so, uh, I just forgot what I was saying dude. Well, I think you were talking about, now you’ve got great content. Oh yeah, yeah. The algorithm that is actually shared and Facebook’s algorithm will then, right. Okay. So let me, let me keep back in here. So, so the algorithm and Facebook, basically, it can be influenced with the amount of interaction that you have on your page. So if you’re posting right now in less than, and you’ve got a thousand followers and, uh, you post something less than 30 of them are gonna probably see it. Unless it’s really, really super awesome content that gets a lot of sharing. But, um, if you, if you spend a few dollars, you can, you can, well, I shouldn’t say that you can spend some money, but if you get interaction on the content, right, you’re getting lots of comments, you’re responding to comments.
Adrian Lefler: The next time you post stuff it’ll, it’ll go out to more than 30 people. That’s essentially the idea. It’s not exactly like that, but, but the idea is that if you have more interaction on your page, then Facebook tends to open up that filter a little bit and more people see your content without having to pay for it. Does that make sense? So there’s a benefit and not only building your followers, interacting with your followers, building on the culture that you, that you have in the office, hopefully retaining your patients and so forth. But it also kind of affects that algorithm. Well, yeah, I mean, like you said, Facebook rewards folks that are doing, doing it the right way and doing interesting stuff like that. And you know out there too, I mean one of the things that you mentioned, which I think is important is um, just if, let’s say I’ve got 200 friends, right.
Adrian Lefler: And that’s a low number of friends and I like a dentists’ post. Yeah. Oh man. On it. Now all of my 200 friends are going to see that if we’re honest, then comments or likes, you know, it’s kind of multiply that message and well, yeah. And with that, sorry, let me give you another tactic. Okay. That’s right along what you’ve said. So, so you’ve got a dental office and let’s say you’ve got 10 employees, so you’re an average size dental office. Okay. And I think the, I think the numbers are closer to like, Oh, somewhere around 500 is the number of average friends that somebody has. Yeah. On Facebook. So I’m something like that. You can Google that and probably find the correct number, but it’s probably about around four or 500 something like that. I mean, maybe more so when you post something, who’s the first person or people that you should have reshare the content?
Adrian Lefler: Is your team, your own team, among your own team, you got 10 employees of 500 friends, that’s 5,000 people, right? So I did numbers, right? Yeah, 5,000 and it’s probably gonna reach half of those people because when, when, when, when you, when you, Facebook does not filter personal content. So if I’m an individual and I reshare content from a business page, it becomes personal content because I am sharing it to my personal account and my friends typically see it and I, I believe the numbers are 54% of the friends of your followers. Our local, I believe it’s right around fit. I think that last time I checked was like 54%. So I’m like that. So if you’re getting your own staff to reshare the content about the, the contest or you guys went out to lunch and you celebrated or you had a great patient experience that you shot a video or something about it and you get your staff to get involved, you’re already reaching a few thousand people. Sure. Size of your team, talking about low hanging fruit. Absolutely.
RJ Martino: Yeah. Well, okay. So, uh, going back to kind of the way I think about this, uh, our, you know, our dentist out there, audience members listening, they love this. I just know they do because it’s the juices are flowing. They think I want to use this. It’s great that he provides all the tools so that our team can actually create good content. Uh, I always think you’ve got to also track your progress and outcomes, right? That is like measure moving forward and that’s a responsibility that is on the physician. They’ve got to be measuring and stuff. But is that, is that a, is that a serve as you guys, are you doing that on a regular basis?
Adrian Lefler: Yeah, well we were, yeah. Reporting’s always. And when it comes to social media, it’s super tough to try and justify it. I mean, in the first few years of our business, we literally dodged this question cause it was almost impossible to provide any kind of reporting. So what the doctor wants to know is how many new patients did they get from this effort? That’s what they, that’s what they want to know. But what you have to with social media is that it’s, it’s, it’s not, you shouldn’t do it just for new patients. You should do it four. Mmm. Well you should do it for new patients, but it’s, it’s a longterm play. Okay. So what you can report on, and that is I think a valid report reporting statistic are your, uh, Facebook and Instagram. And we primarily work on those two platforms. We used to do Pinterest and LinkedIn, but patient you just don’t find patients from Pinterest or LinkedIn.
Adrian Lefler: You, you, you find new patients from Facebook and Instagram. Okay. So what we do is we report on the statistics that we can measure, which are the rape statistics, the impressions. We can, uh, we can report on the total number of engagements. Um, we can show, you know, over time statistics on that. So we’re, we’re, what we’re reporting on are the impressions basically how much of your content is being seen and how many people are interacting with it. And then we have to draw, we have to basically set the expectations. There is some correlation between that and new patients. Now, the problem with physicians is they notoriously won’t track anything. So, so when we do get, uh, doctors or teams that will track, we usually get really good data. Like I just got a, uh, a message from, um, uh, a client of ours has been with us for forever, that they’re getting about 40 patients a month, which is astronomical.
Adrian Lefler: And all they do is social media. That’s it. But I’ve got, I’ve got practices that have been working with us for just as long who don’t track anything and frankly are hard to work with cause they won’t do anything. And who knows if they’ve gotten one patient out of, I have no idea. So the, the, the problem of tracking is that the tracking has to happen. One, I think primarily one of two ways. One way is that you put tracking phone number on your Facebook page or on your Google account or whatever social media tool. But the problem is when you do that, you really screw up all the directory listings because they all share data. And so if you put a tracking phone number on your Facebook page, you’re going to see that phone number listed in a directory, white pages or yellow pages or something online cause they all scraped data from each other.
Adrian Lefler: So we don’t recommend that. Okay. But that has been done and that’s a way to track, um, you know, new new patient phone calls. Right. Um, the only other way to do it is you do it at an in an in an intake form, right? The patient, new patient comes in and you, you have to have listed on your intake form. How did you hear about us? Google search, Google my business. Facebook, a referral, a referral from a current, you know, I mean, whatever. I read your Google reviews. You know, I read your Facebook reviews. I mean like you literally have to ask them stuff. It can’t be just online or you have no idea if your spend and your digital marketing should be in PPC like ad-words or if it should be on Facebook and Facebook ads. If it should be on, you know, running a Google my business PPC account or, or getting more reviews or you know, whatever.
Adrian Lefler: So, or Instagram, you know, you, you literally have to like have them listed out, otherwise you won’t get the data. And what I’ve seen is that I haven’t seen an intake form yet that has really the specifics on it that’s needed in order to understand where your new patients are coming from. Yeah, the did thing is, is that a lot of these, a lot of patients like, like for example here, here, here’s the problem with tracking this kind of stuff. Patient, um, a person sees their friend, uh, sees a post on Facebook, their friends at a dental office and it has a sign that says, um, just got my, uh, you know, my wisdom teeth polled. Or actually, here’s a better example at an orthodontic office. They get their braces off, they do a sign that says, I just got my braces off and doctors giving a 10% discount to all my friends.
Adrian Lefler: Okay. They see that post, the person sees the post, they go over to the Instagram account of the office cause they’ve got their mobile phone on them, check it out, they see a bunch of content on this, really cool. Then they go to their website, um, look at that for a second, then jump over to Google my business and look at their reviews. And they got a ton of reviews and they’re all good. And they call from Google my business. Now the question is how did they find them? Is it a referral? Is it Facebook? Is it Google my business? Is it the website? It’s all right. It’s literally all of them that you can’t attribute it to one market, one digital marketing campaign. So, because that’s what happens, I mean, if you just think about your own buying behavior, like S you know, you, you usually check out more than, I mean you definitely check out Google reviews before you hit a restaurant. Maybe even Yelp or open table or something like that. Right? And you might look at their website and check out their menu. So there’s, is it a Google review lead? Yeah. Or is it a Google my business account or is it,
RJ Martino: yeah, we talk about tracking your progress and your outcomes. Uh, and we’re really talking about tracking new patients. You should be looking at that report because that report you’ll be able to see it, you know, what we’re talking about right now is attribution and is nearly impossible. And so we want as a, as a physician, if you want to justify doing social media, uh, you can justify if you want to talk yourself out of it, you can do it so hard. Uh, you know, our, my point is always tracking the progress, holding people accountable for the work that needs to be done. That’s something physicians have to be doing. And uh, I, I would guess, uh, your best clients because our best clients are always those that are just completely transparent with us. The guys who actually show us the patient count results, they’re the ones that are easier for us to work with and it helps hold us accountable.
RJ Martino: It helps hold the count client accountable. All of those things actually work better when you are just almost an open book with your providers. So, so then how do you, how do you handle the situation then? Cause this is what I, this is the question that I get is [inaudible] I agree with you. Attribution is almost impossible to find, right? And so it’s kind of like you just say you track all of your new patients that are coming in but you know, and it’s, some of them are going to be from online and some are from referrals and some of them for this or that or whatever. How do you guys justify I’m a digital marketing campaign over something else? Like where do you start drawing the lines too? It makes sense of that cause we, we’ve never been in that. That’s a hard question. Uh, and ultimately it comes down to again, kind of determining your, what your vision is for where you’re trying to go.
RJ Martino: Then building a plan and everybody agreeing on the plan. Uh, because sometimes it’s social media, sometimes it’s child pay processes and then we’re end result driven. Are we adding new patients with this? Because all this stuff internally, uh, all the plan can change from week to week. Uh, just based off of how a physician feels, if he’s allowed to do that. So, um, you know, I think, uh, I think what you guys are doing is really cool. Uh, the, the, the generation of the ideas and all the work that comes with the ideas cause all the time office managers call us with wonderful ideas, but then they look at the cost of producing this stuff and they think that’s impossible. A visitation calls and says, I’ve got a plan for a, uh, a giveaway and we say, that’s great. But now the actual hard work that has to come with designing and developing and printing that material, I think it’s a really cool concept.
RJ Martino: And I know our audience will love it. The thing they always want to hear is, uh, you, you have sold me on what you do. I want it. Uh, they always want to talk about costs. Can you talk about what it costs to do? Yeah, sure. Yeah. So our, so we’ve got a few different products. We have a, the social media product is kind of like, we just give them the content and they do it. We’ve got the professionally management or we send them the content. They just send us the imagery and whatnot. We do it for them. We also have an Instagram influencer program that’s super cool where we find an influencer in their area that comes in and has some treatment done and then post all their followers. We
Adrian Lefler: have a Google reviews product where, where it’s a texting service that uh, you know, your patient comes in, you say, Hey look, did you have a good experience? They say, yeah, I love you guys. And they say, you know, would you mind helping us out? We were trying to get a hundred new Google reviews this month and if we’d hit it, we’re going to have a party. Would you mind giving us a Google review? And that patient says yes. And they, they just open up an app that we’ve developed that they just to put the phone number in, it, sends them a text, sends the patient a text and they open up the text and it takes them right to their Google account where they can give a review. So we’ve got a lot of different services on the low end of our social media services. A couple of hundred bucks a month is all up to about $400 a month, uh, depending on the amount of budget that we need to use to boost content.
Adrian Lefler: So there’s some ad budget in there. Our review products, $100 a month, our influencer programs, 250 to $300 a month depending on the practice and the influencer. So it’s all around, you know, two, three, $400 a month. It’s typical of a client. Our average client spends about 300 bucks depending on, regardless of what they get. Yeah. So, uh, we have, uh, a website, great website product as well that we do that’s um, that we actually give our clients free. Uh, we, we build them for free. If they have one of our other services. So it’s, it’s probably a, I’d say it’s probably a three, $4,000 website. It’s pretty, pretty nice website and we’ve got lots of different designs and things like that, but we just give them that as a kind of a retention offer, you know, cause um, try and keep our clients as long as possible.
Adrian Lefler: So when you, when you talk about costs, like let’s take for example our social media, I’ll give you an idea of why this works for dental practices. So our social media product where we send them the ideas, let’s say it’s the $300 a month service, and we send them this box with, with props in it. If we were to create one box, right? Not even the time invested in designing it. So not even paying a designer to create it, it would cost us 175 to $200 just to print everything one time. Yeah. Right. So what happens is we print these thousands at a time, which enables us to get the costs so low that there’s no way in the world a dentist is ever going to design anything that’s remotely as good as what we can design at the same price. Because the printing costs alone are a fortune.
RJ Martino: Oh yeah. I’ll tell you, you know, uh, as a listener, if, if, if you were a client of mine and you came to me and said, Hey, I’ve got these ideas, I’ll tell you the idea, uh, and I have to design it and print it. I’m saying you can’t, you can’t design it. Pay me enough.
Adrian Lefler: So, so that’s what I, that’s what a custom agency will do. So we, we are, our typical client is a practice. It’s generating around $800,000 a year to maybe 1.2 to 1.5 maybe in the high end above that, the practice is making enough money. They can hire their own marketing manager and they can hire their own design team and stuff if they want. But, but if you were to go out and try and do this one off, you’d spend at least 1500 bucks a month, right as that time to get somebody that has the capability to design. Well, I mean, that’s really where the cost is. It’s in the creativity and the design capabilities and then the printing [inaudible] just, it’s not worth it, you know? So that’s what we try and explain to dentists when we’re talking to about this. Like they don’t get it.
Adrian Lefler: They have no idea that they’re going to have to spend a thousand to $2,000 to get, you know, a couple images designed, a few images designed the, uh, every month, you know, off the top of their head. Right. So it’s just so we, we kind of fit this sweet spot where we can, we can drop our costs by leveraging the content across lots of different practices. And the content isn’t, it’s the same sign that says, I love my dentist or whatever. But when they actually use it, they create custom content because it’s not just the sign that they’re posting, it’s sign with their patient. Yeah. Right. So we, we basically have a, almost custom, but it’s kind of like a semi-custom service that allows us to scale and leverage, uh, the creativity. Right. That makes sense. Oh, definitely. Well, man, I, I, you’ve got my creative creativity juices going.
Adrian Lefler: I know listeners are really going to appreciate this in wrapping up, talk about how they can learn more about you. Uh, talk about how they can learn more about your organization. Any other closing? Yeah, thank you. I just, first of all, I really appreciate the opportunity, so thanks guys for giving me a call. Um, uh, just go to my social practice.com. There’s that page I mentioned called free stuff. If you’re not a dentist and, um, you, you want ideas, look at the ideas that we’re creating for the dental industry and just tweak them. There’s probably, uh, I haven’t looked, you know, off the top of my head, I can’t think, but there’s probably some stuff in there that would actually work and you could just fill out the forms. Uh, you might get, you might get a call from us or an email from us if you want, uh, when you download some of the stuff, but, but you’re, you’re welcome for any of that stuff.
Adrian Lefler: The other thing that we’ve got is our reviews product, which is the product that allows you to send the text to your patient. Well then when they open it up is able to give you a Google or a Facebook review. That service is super awesome. I’m telling you, it’s like one of the first things that we recommend any business to do and it’s not dental specific. We’ve got clients in every industry that you can think of that use that to generate reviews. My brother-in-law is an orthopedic surgeon in park city, Utah and he’s had that setup, uh, for, I know I set it up for him maybe a year ago and he’s gotten tons and tons of Google reviews and he’s getting patients for knee surgery off of as Google reviews is, as you can imagine, the profitability on that. So, and that service is only a hundred bucks. Um, and just you just pay monthly. So if you’re, if you’re not a dentist and you’re wanting some kind of an actionable thing and a service that we could provide, I would, I would take a look at that reviews product. We’ve got information on our website about it, which is my social practice.com and if you’re not in dentistry, just look at the ideas and then put, put your spin on it.
Jordan Smith: That’s what I was and I would encourage all you guys and you know, even the, what you’re talking about as far as the reviews and rep management, we could almost have a whole other conversation about that. But if you have any questions, reach out to, to Adrian Leffler. Um, do you have an email address or anything?
Adrian Lefler: Yeah, you can send me emails too. Um, Adrian, a D R I a n@mysocialpractice.com.
Jordan Smith: Very cool. Well if you guys have any questions or just want to kick some ideas around, I know Adrian’s always super open either whether it’s him or a member of a member of his team to kind of talk you through in depth some of the more stuff that we talked about and I would encourage you to reach out to him.
Adrian Lefler: Well, thank you. I appreciate the opportunity guys. Thanks so much for your time. Uh, and uh, everybody, Adrian Leffler with my social practice.
Jordan Smith: That was great. What do you think RJ?
RJ Martino: Man, I could uh, uh, we spoke before this and I just know he’s got so much knowledge in his head because we could have spoke for another hour or two.
Jordan Smith: Well, again, if you guys are wanting to reach in out to Adrian directly, it’s adrian@mysocialpractice.com. Um, give them a look no matter what. I mean he was serious when he said, we’ve got a lot of free stuff that you can download. Um, you know, take it and use it yourself if you want to give it a shot.
RJ Martino: If you liked this podcast, please share it with somebody, send it over and just tell them that you thought they’d enjoy it. Uh, also, if you’ve got a, a potential guests, you know, we’d love to hear other people that we should be talking to.
Jordan Smith: Yup. We’re making this podcast for you guys, so we want to know what you’re interested in, so please feel free to reach out. And if you have any questions and you want to reach out to us too, feel free. Write a review for us if you love it. And if you don’t really reach out to us and tell us how we can change it and make it better for you guys. Yeah, we’re saying, uh, call us and gripe at us if you hate us. Thanks everybody.
