The Group Dentistry Now Show: The Voice Of The DSO Industry – Episode 109

Cory Roletto, Co-founder and Partner of WEO Media, joins the Group Dentistry Now podcast to discuss the art and science of dental group practice and DSO marketing.

This in-depth dental marketing discussion covers:

• Signs your group needs to hire a marketing company
• How to scale marketing as you add new locations
• What to outsource and what to keep in-house
• Individual websites per location vs. one website for entire group
• What questions to ask when interviewing a marketing company
• How to set a realistic marketing budget
• Much more…..

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Our podcast series brings you dental support and emerging dental group practice analysis, conversation, trends, news and events. Listen to leaders in the DSO and emerging dental group space talk about their challenges, successes, and the future of group dentistry. The Group Dentistry Now Show: The Voice of the DSO Industry has listeners across North & South America, Australia, Europe, and Asia. If you like our show, tell a friend or a colleague.

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Full Transcript:

Bill Neumann:

Hey, I’d like to welcome everyone to the Group Dentistry Now Show. I’m Bill Neumann and as always, we appreciate you listening in. Whether you’re listening in to us on Apple, Spotify, Google, or you happen to catch us on YouTube. We appreciate however you consume the content. Without you, we wouldn’t have great guests like the next guest we have up here, Cory Roletto. He is the co-founder and a partner at WEO Media. So we’re going to talk all things group practice and DSO marketing today. It’s definitely one of these mysterious things where depending on how many locations you have and where they are and what kind of patients you need and what kind of procedures you do, it really is an art as well as a science. So Cory, thanks first off for being on the Group Dentistry Now Show. Appreciate you being here today.

Cory Roletto:

No. Thank you very much for having me Bill.

Bill Neumann:

Cory has a really interesting background. I was kind of … Not making fun of him, but just talking a little bit before we started to record. He has a BS in chemical engineering and then has his MBA at the University of Washington. Also pretty cool, played D1 Baseball. But the chemical engineering degree threw me a little bit there. He co-founded WEO Media back in 2009, but prior to that he had 10 years at Intel as an engineer. So somehow he transitioned from being an engineer at Intel into a lead executive role in marketing for Intel. So I’d love to hear how somebody with a engineering degree and is an engineer at an organization somehow gets into marketing.

Cory Roletto:

Yeah. Great Bill. That’s a good story. It’s not normal. It’s not a normal path for people. But I think it started with, I always wanted to go the engineering path, at least I thought so in high school. And then when I got to college, picked my direction there. Was really interested in computer chips and that whole technology around designing processors. And I found out that Intel was looking for process engineers that had chemical engineering backgrounds along with a few other engineering degrees. So I pursued that. Ended up getting lucky enough to have an internship and co-op at Intel and then getting hired full-time. And that was a great experience for me. Worked in multiple different areas of Intel. Very data driven. Very objective. On whether you being successful or not based on the data. Learned a lot about statistics and how to read data and then make good decisions from data.

But I always had this entrepreneurial bent and I knew at some point in time I wanted to start my own business and I didn’t know that engineering was the right path for that. I didn’t know enough about business in general. So I went back, got an MBA. And as part of that transition into my business studies, I went over to a technical marketing team at Intel, which led to a competitive marketing position in the server division. And that’s where I drove a lot of strategy at Intel around some key performance indicators they had that was essential in the industry at that time. And then lightning struck and ended up talking to a person I’d went to school with, Ian McNickle, who’s one of my business partners, and we decided to go off on our own and that’s how it all got started. But I often lovingly refer to the engineering to marketing move as my slow transition to the dark side.

Bill Neumann:

There you go. And a lot of our audience I think is familiar with Ian McNickle, so it’s really cool that we actually have the other co-founder on the podcast today. So you partner up with Ian and you find yourself in the dental industry. Is that how the marketing company started out? Was it focused on dental from the get go?

Cory Roletto:

Not initially. Neither Ian I or a third partner, Mark, who’s a software developer, came from dental. And so I think we were just looking for an industry that we could build a business in. And we actually started off with 30 different options that we come up with, narrowed that down to six and we tried to market and make sales in those industries. And dentists were the ones that were the most interested in what we had to say and what we had to do. We had done consulting for a few years prior to starting this business so we knew how to put together marketing and sales programs for businesses in general. And so now we’re trying to apply it to a specific industry. And within a year we had partnerships in the dental industry, we were being taken on training events. Within a first few months of launching our software platform, that’s where we had 20, 30 clients and were out the gate in dental. Kind of chose us in a way.

Bill Neumann:

Yeah. Really interesting. So let’s get into the Q&A part here. Really interested because we get a lot of inquiries. And our audience Cory is made up of the emerging groups out there, docs that have scaled up, and then we’ve got some more mature platforms people that have private equity investment, 30, 40, a couple hundred locations. So pretty vast. Different. So if we’re starting out, give me some signs like hey, when all of a sudden do you feel these groups need to hire a dental company? What should they be looking for and say, “Okay, this is the point I need to hire somebody.”?

Cory Roletto:

Yeah. I think there’s two pieces of that question. Like you pointed out, there’s the doctors that are growing the number of practices they have and are creating their DSO. They probably are working with a marketing company along the way. They’re trying to transition out of the seat probably around three to four practices, which is a really tough transition for most fledgling DSOs. And then at some point they’re wanting to hire someone to give direction. They’re trying to coordinate marketing at various locations and inevitably they need to hire a marketing director to help with the marketing and sales side of the DSO. What they often will quickly find is that one person they’re hoping will solve all their problems doesn’t have the breadth of knowledge and the depth in all the areas you need to be successful in marketing online. And so I think that marketing director, that first hire that they often will have is essentially a marketing coordinator.

They’re not going to be the ones that are implementing a lot of the things that need to happen online. They have enough knowledge to give direction and get input and evaluate the data, but it’s a marketing company that has the team behind it that is really going to drive the real growth. Some companies we work with, some of the dental offices we work with started with us with one office and we’ve gone through the whole transition of helping them from getting that person on board to growing to many locations. Some of the offices came to us after generally hitting about six or seven locations and they realized that they have websites from multiple different companies because those are purchasing practices. They’re keeping the current marketing and PMS and everything else in place and they’re realizing at about that point, they need to consolidate and they need to standardize.

And so around that time they’re really what truly I think in my mind is getting into a DSO. They’re big enough in revenue and they’re starting to centralize services. And so that’s another point where we’re often involved is around that time where they’re looking to consolidate down to a vendor. Now that period lasts oftentimes from about six to seven offices up into the 20s, 30s and sometimes beyond. But oftentimes in that period they’re looking to find a vendor and then they find a vendor and then they’re generally sticking with that vendor as long as they continue to do a good job throughout their growth cycle. So I think there’s multiple points there. We talk to PE firms that are PE backed DSOs. We talk to individual doctors that are starting DSOs. The story is the same. I think oftentimes with the PE related firms, they initially try to hire everything in house and they quickly realize that it just doesn’t work as well. After a few years of trying that they often go back and look for a good marketing company.

Bill Neumann:

Okay. You touched on it a little bit earlier, but as these practices or these groups start to scale up, talk a little bit about scale marketing. Give me some strategies there. And so we’ve got some groups that grow through acquisitions, some that are de novo, some that are a bit of a hybrid. So are there some differences there?

Cory Roletto:

There definitely are differences when you’re talking de novo versus purchasing a practice and purchasing a patient list in a location. De novo, I think there’s the opportunity there to standardize processes from the beginning. So you already know what PMS you need, who your accountant’s going to be, ideally what marketing company you’re going to launch with. And you’re engaging with them probably six to nine months before that building is ready to accept patients to make sure you’re building up a patient base so that you have people walking in the door on the first day. A bit different than purchasing a practice where you’re going to be changing some systems over. You’re going to be standardizing. They already have a PMS and a staff and knows how to use it. It’s not the one that you’re using for your DSO. So what does the transition period and what does that look like as far as retraining staff or bringing people in that already know that system?

It’s similar with all the other pieces like marketing, accounting. Now you’re standardizing so it’s a different type of work. And a lot of times that purchase of a practice, it’s nice because you have that initial revenue stream that’s already coming in, it’s already established in the community. But oftentimes the work starts once the doors are open or in this case in the purchase where you’re really trying to work to standardize those processes. Now if we’re talking about scaling as in adding practices and growing patients per practice or revenue per practice, I believe that needs to really be a office by office conversation. Because the types of marketing and the budgets for marketing are going to be different if you’re in a big city versus whether you’re in a rural city. And it’s mainly based off of competition and the real value you can get out of your marketing.

There’s just more patients and more upside to really good marketing in a big city versus a rural city where you might have a handful of dentists that are already on page one in Google just because there’s only five of you. So there’s different strategies and different budgets that we would talk about when you’re adding locations. And part of that comes with what is the strategy of the overall DSO? Oftentimes they’re not just buying practices to buy a practice they have to fit within the mold as a certain type of specialty practice. Are they all GPs? Are you trying to build a DSO that can feed your specialists with a good base of GPs? So a lot of that strategy comes into play when you’re talking about marketing strategies for these DSOs. I heard a good quote that I really like. It’s, “If you’ve seen one DSO, you’ve seen one DSO.” Just because they’re all different. They all have their unique strategy and approach to things. And I think marketing for DSOs has to take that strategy in mind.

Bill Neumann:

So it’s a little bit of a discovery. You’re trying to understand what the goals are of the DSO as they start to scale and open up these practices or add the additional practices. What are some of the first things that you look to do if we’ve got a new practice that they’ve acquired? Because you’re coming in as the marketing company, so some of it is where you’re trying to get them on the front page of Google, but I’m sure there’s a big strategy involved. It’s not just simple as like, hey, I’m going to get you to number one on Google. That’d be great, but there’s a lot of other things that need to be done.

Cory Roletto:

Yeah. Search engine optimization or SEO’s definitely part of that strategy. Potentially a website redesign with SEO built in mind to give a consistent look maybe across the DSO or just give the look of that website a more modern look. But I think SEO is the basis of that. And that comes back to where you’re located and what you need to do in order to get ranked well. But it’s more just, hey, I want to be on the first page of Google for this one term. It’s identifying what services the practice offers and which ones they want more of. So if they offer extractions but they’d rather take those cases and refer them out to an endodontist, well you’re probably not going to want to do a lot of marketing around extractions. So having that conversation and seeing what the offices wants more of, which may be dental implants, maybe all on four, maybe the doctor’s really skilled and does facial makeovers. So identifying the goals of the services and then building a marketing plan around not only general patients but those specialty procedures as well.

Bill Neumann:

Are you seeing any … Because I know the SEO is again a real science and a bit of an art. It constantly seems to be changing. So how do you as a marketing organization really keep up with everything? I feel like every time you turn around the algorithms change and you have to … So how do you stay on top of those things?

Cory Roletto:

Yes. Constantly changing is an understatement in our industry. I think this is where having a big team behind you comes into play. I have behind me a large staff of SEO professionals and we have people on the team that have been doing SEO for nearly 20 years before even it was called SEO. They’ve seen it all. And what’s cool about the team is that they really nerd out on this stuff. They follow all the different forums. They listen to the podcasts. Just as all the dentists listening to this podcast or listen to other dental podcasts, imagine my team just listening to SEO and PPC podcasts all day long.

Bill Neumann:

Right. There you go.

Cory Roletto:

Or in their free time or whatever makes sense as part of their research. But they’re keeping up with all the trends and they’re paying really close attention to what Google is saying. It’s one thing to pay attention to the trends and react to those. It’s another thing to know what Google’s long term plan is and always be marching toward that. Sometimes I see marketing companies going for the latest fad, which may work well in the short term, but eventually them and their clients get burned. So tempering where Google states it’s going in the long term versus what tricks people are finding to get temporary better ranking and trying to figure out how to balance those things and move forward with a plan that is always geared toward the long term. Because once we get you well ranked on page one, we want to stay there.

Bill Neumann:

So it sounds like it’d be really difficult for someone like a marketing coordinator, even a marketing manager in-house at a DSO, to be able to follow these trends and do all the other marketing functions that they have to do for DSO.

Cory Roletto:

And not only follow the trends but do testing. This is what we think is happening, let’s go test that and see if it’s really true and what the impact is and how long it takes to have an impact. That’s where if you have a marketing director or your COO that’s trying to figure out these things, they just don’t have enough time in their day to really dig into the details that it takes to stay on top of something like SEO.

Bill Neumann:

Yeah. Some great points there. So let’s talk a little bit about what to keep in house versus outsource. So if you’ve got a coordinator. Talk a little bit about that because you’re working with groups of all different shapes and sizes. So what do you see that works well and what are those inflection points?

Cory Roletto:

Yeah. I think if it’s complicated then you should probably be outsourcing it. SEO is one of those things where I think people read online and they know enough to get them in trouble. It’s like I studied TaeKwonDo for over a decade and one of my sabumnim or my teacher had came up to me and as he’s handing me my green belt, he says, “You know just enough to get yourself in trouble.” And I was like, “Oh wow. Yeah. I’m obviously not at a black belt now, but I think I’m knowing a lot. I totally, totally understand the meaning of what he’s saying.” And I find that a lot of times people that have a good breath of knowledge in marketing have their green belt in a bunch of places. And to really know the nuance and to stay on top of things related to SEO, you really need your black belt if you want to perform well.

So anything that’s complicated, I would say you should outsource. SEO is a perfect example of that. PPCs another one where it takes time month over month to continue to improve those types of programs. Both on conversion rates and cost per click. Those are two main ones. If you’re going to do something like video shoots, which are really important on websites to help with conversion, if you want to do those professionally, you’re probably not going to pull out your iPhone and a selfie stick. So I think anything that requires that level of expertise, whether it be in editing and or keeping up with the technologies and knowing the day in and day out and actually implementing that, you’re going to want to outsource.

Bill Neumann:

Great points. Okay. The importance of a designated point person at the DSO. And if you’re going to have a designated point person, does it need to be at each practice or could it just be at the DSO, like that topco level?

Cory Roletto:

Yeah. I think when we’re talking about dedicated point person, this is probably that marketing director or that marketing coordinator that’s coordinating items on the DSO side. And then on our side we’d have a dedicated person that is working things on our side. When you start to get beyond a handful of practices, it becomes difficult to keep everything straight. So having people that have worked together and have learned to speak each other’s language and organize themselves so that each side can be really effective, really is the way to go. Oftentimes it can be lost. And when you get up to 20,30 practices, there’s a good sized team on the marketing side that is supporting you. And if you had to talk to every single person that’s working on your website for any particular reason, you’d quickly get lost in not knowing who to talk to. So having that one person that can keep everything organized is essential. And then helping that person, whether it be on the marketing side or on the DSO side, then coordinating the work that needs to be done. It is really the way to go. If we’re working with someone from each practice, we can do that. We will still have that one point of contact on our side though because we need to coordinate within the team for the best efficiency and effectiveness.

Bill Neumann:

Makes sense. So you handle SEO, PPC. You talked about video editing, video shoots. Also you do website work as well right?

Cory Roletto:

Oh yeah. We build websites, fully custom websites, so starting from scratch and trying to build to the dentist’s dream or vision. And then we also do more semi custom templates. We don’t have anything where you just plug it in, plug in someone’s name and there’s their website. We will modify for color and call outs. Especially around marketing and what services we want to call out as opposed to others. So there’s still a lot of conversation that’s involved. But I look at websites as the hub of your marketing efforts. Most website companies and SEO companies that are effective are using proprietary platforms for a couple reasons. One is that it’s consistent for the work that has to be done day by day. So the team can be a lot more efficient in getting the work done. And then the second point is that platforms like WordPress, which is the biggest in the world, they’re a target. And you look at the number of times websites are hacked, percentage, over 90% of all hack attempts are made on WordPress websites because of vulnerabilities and people not upgrading their systems, having a bunch of plugins that eventually have vulnerabilities. So we take the security side really seriously. And then we also gain the efficiency in having our own platform for building websites where we can build in and automate a lot of the processes that you can’t do with something that’s off the shelf.

Bill Neumann:

That’s great to know that security side of things. There’s more and more conversations in the DSO space wrapped around security. We hear it all the time. In fact, we’re doing a webinar coming up on cybersecurity. So it’s interesting that you’re really focused on the security of the website itself. So sticking on that topic wrapped around websites … And this comes up quite a bit. You see DSOs again … You mentioned it. When you’ve seen one DSO, you’ve seen one DSO. So we’ve got some that are branded across all locations, some that have individual names, they’re locally branded. And then you see some when it comes to the website design, that’ll have one website and then on that one website you’ll have all the locations listed right?

Cory Roletto:

Mm-hmm.

Bill Neumann:

Then you have others that have a website dedicated to each individual location regardless of branding. Tell me about that. Is there is a best practice around having one or multiple websites?

Cory Roletto:

I think there’s a couple ways to look at it. One is, does the DSO want an umbrella brand? What I mean by umbrella brand is that they want to be known as a particular name no matter where the location is. So if they want a consistent brand across all practices, then that will open up the possibility of having a single website with a bunch of what we call location pages where you’re listing out all the locations that people have options for. You can do consistent branding and have individual websites as well. It’s just more expensive to build out those individual websites. But the advantage of individual websites is that the focus is on one location and therefore it is easier to rank a particular location on Google. When you have a single website with say 10 locations on it, you have to build out pages that call out each location and every page can only call out one location.

If you have an office in Boise and another one in New York, well, if Google sees both of those locations listed out in your key phrases on a website, it’ll ask which one is it? What do I rank you for? I’m confused. When you’re doing individual websites for each location, well you know what location every page is focused on. And so therefore it’s easier to be laser focused with that SEO and it’s easier to rank. On the flip side, it’s more expensive both in the building out of those websites and budgets required for each location. So what a lot of DSOs will do is have a single website with multiple location pages, but then you have to be conscious as an SEO company to make sure you’re building out individual pages for each location and it gets into this little cat and mouse game on Google of we want it to be seen, but we don’t want to confuse people going to the site.

So we want it to account for SEO, but we still want the user experience to be not well. Now in both cases you can rank well. One instance of multiple locations where I would actually advise a single website is if all those locations are in one city. If you have 10 locations that are all in Las Vegas, well the location you’re after is Las Vegas. Build out one website with 10 location pages. You don’t need 10 individual websites. You’d actually be competing with yourself for ranking. Build one website. If you have a bunch of locations and one of them is in a big city and the rest are in the suburbs around that city, then you can effectively use one website because you can rank for that one city. Google associates the suburbs with the vicinity of that, and you’re going to have a better chance of ranking with one website than you normally would. But if you’re scattered across the United States in multiple states, different locales, some are rural, some are big cities, especially if there’s multiple big cities across state lines, that’s when you’re really going to have to think hard about the individual website.

Bill Neumann:

Some great tips there. This is great information. Talk to me about if you’re looking for a marketing company, what questions should a DSO or group practice be asking? They should interview all their marketing companies so what are the interview questions?

Cory Roletto:

That’s a good one. And when DSOs are interviewing marketing companies, usually they’re interviewing multiple at once. But I think some really good questions for DSOs to ask are really around the relationship side. How are we going to be interacting? Am I going to have a dedicated account manager or am going to be interacting with multiple people on your team? We talked about the importance of having a single point of contact earlier. Their approach to marketing. A lot of companies out there are a one size fits all cookie cutter. Oh, if someone says, how much is a website, great. That makes sense. Well, how much is SEO going to be for each of my locations? And they go, “Oh yeah, we do SEO and it’s $500 a month.” That’s a big red flag. The $500 a month isn’t going to have a chance to get you ranked in a big city. There’s just too much work to do. Too many other competitors to catch up with. So if their approach is one size fits all for their marketing efforts, then that’s a big red flag.

Some other things that I … And maybe this is questions for later on. But some things that I see trending is are you working with lead attribution? How do you know where the leads are coming from? How do you attribute that back to a new patient? Can you help with training in the office? Can you put together a sales CRM that allows me to follow up on leads in a standardized manner? How much of that can you automate? The DSOs are becoming more sophisticated around these and wanting these types of systems, but they’re not the easiest to put together.

So that’s something that we’ve really worked hard on. And I think a lot of other companies are woken up to that fact where they need to plug in resources. Because at the end of the day, whether it be an individual dentist who’s building a DSO or the marketing director or the head of the DSO and she wants to build out their marketing efforts, it all comes down to understanding the ROI of those efforts. And oftentimes when we engage … I was really surprised with a DSO we’re working with right now. Seven locations. And they said, “Hey, we want to calculate ROI and understand patient acquisition cost and do you have those that information? We want to possibly make some adjustments on what we’re doing based off of results.” And I got back eventually after about three, four weeks, got back a spreadsheet with new patient counts that had big blanks. Six months missing here and there. And I’m like, okay. We got some more work to do here.

We know you’re doing better because we can see your practice is growing. We know the revenue side, but if we’re going to take this to the next level, we need better tracking on both sides of the equation here so that we can work together to produce the best services. So I think those are two major questions I’d ask and maybe a string of things that gets into where DSOs are going when it comes to marketing. Some things that I think are a little bit less important … Everybody wants a company that can do it all. The less vendors I’m working with the better. So at WEO we have a really big breadth of services. The one you mentioned earlier. But my guess is if you want it, we can do it. And I think a lot of marketing companies are moving that direction. So that’s a thing for just limiting number of vendors.

The other thing that is a red flag for me is when a company comes and says, “We will get you leads for this price.” So we will get you a lead for 300 bucks or 400 bucks, or we’ll get a new patient for 300 bucks, 400 bucks, 200 bucks, whatever it is. And they just state it as plain fact. What that tells me they’re doing for their marketing is 100% Google PPC. Because it’s consistent and you know how much you’re going to pay a click. If you’ve done it for many practices, especially in the areas you know what your conversion rate should be. So it’s not a bad thing that you can get a new patient for $300. A new general patient. A lot of DSOs are willing to pay that because they know the lifetime value of a patient. But it’s also one of those things where you’re not doing the other pieces of marketing that can drive your cost to acquisition down to $100.

And that’s where eventually you want to be between probably $100, $150 cost of acquisition. And so when they say, this is what we’ll do, this is how much it will cost, and it’s just stated as a fact and they come in with the big budgets, I know what they’re doing. They’re not putting any effort into SEO. They’re doing what’s easy from the beginning and that’s Google PPC. And the problem with that is you don’t have the opportunity to lower that cost of acquisition over the long term. And if you ever decided to part ways with them, your patient flow shuts off because you’re no longer doing PPC. So I’d try to ask some questions to figure out if the marketing company’s a one trick pony.

Bill Neumann:

Yeah. Good. Great tips there. Setting a realistic budget. So let’s talk about budgets. And I know it’s probably different for a startup de novo than it is for an acquisition, but maybe talk through some budget scenarios.

Cory Roletto:

Yeah. There’s lots of variations with this too. We like to approach budget from a location by location basis. Understanding where the starting point is with an office. If they’re ranking already on page one versus on page 10, that’s a big difference. If they’re in a rural setting as opposed to an urban or in a big city those are big differences on budget. In general if you talk to anyone like Bank of America or other banks that are lending to dental practices, they’re going to recommend between a three to 5% of revenue spent on marketing to ensure long term growth. They’re doing that because they want to protect their investment, their loan. They want you to market. They want you out there. They want you growing. Oftentimes I don’t see companies doing that, but I will say the ones that can ferret out, seven to 10% are the ones that are killing it and what everyone wants to emulate.

So there’s a big difference in what people spend. Sometimes we get in a conversation and a thousand dollars a month sounds like a lot of money because they haven’t done that much marketing before. They’ve had a website, they’ve been spending maybe $100 a month for support and the website hosting and a few other things. They know they need to do different. So jump to, oh, I want a website. I want a review system. I want SEO. I want some of those cool videos you have on the website and you get into pricing all this out and it seems like a lot. And oftentimes we all know in the business that it’s not.

But you can, if you’re in a smaller community, have a lot smaller budget. Competition’s less. If you’re in a big city, be prepared to spend more if you really want your marketing to be effective. And that’s one thing I look at when it’s budget. What is realistic? I’d say it depends. It depends on that practice’s unique situation, what has to be evaluated and then figuring out based off of just the experience of working with a thousand dental practices.

Bill Neumann:

Fair enough. So if you’re in a big city, you’re definitely going to pay more because you have to keep up with the competition or exceed the competition.

Cory Roletto:

And as dentists have figured this out, they’re spending more on marketing, which begets spending more in marketing. And it seems like at times I can understand from a dentist’s point of view where you feel like you’re on a treadmill or the hamster wheel. Where you got to keep putting more and more of your budget to get the results you want. But at the same time, I think once you get there, oftentimes we’ll recommend a reduction in certain budget levels because we know that if we can get you really highly ranked in SEO on the top page of Google, we know that there’s a lot more clicks to be had from ranking in the top five than you’re ever going to get spending a large budget in PPC. So your long-term goal is to rank well on Google. Why? So you don’t have to spend so much on PPC. Because you can always be at the top of the page if you want to, but that isn’t necessarily the long-term goal. So this is something as we’re looking at results, we’re looking where ranking is, we’ll make recommendations along the way to adjust budgets and that can go up or down.

Bill Neumann:

So as we start to wind things down here, love for you to get out your crystal ball a little bit and tell me what you think. Do you see any interesting trends coming down the lane for dental marketing? Maybe just what you see, maybe some people out there groups that are doing some interesting or creative things that are working for them and maybe you’re helping them with them.

Cory Roletto:

Yeah. I think there’s always the outliers. I see a lot of outliers when it comes to social media. So we do everything from basic posts to working with the office to do premium posts and PPC around paid ads with Facebook, Instagram, et cetera. And you’re always going to see some outliers with people that are being really successful in that space. The people that I find most successful really like doing those sorts of things. It’s tough to really build a successful social media that’s really going to bring in a lot of business to the practice unless the practice is involved and they have to like what they’re doing and really be involved otherwise it becomes something else to do and it gets kind of shoved aside and so it makes it really tough for us to move things forward.

But I do see some people being successful on social media. Especially around some ads and using those to get them into a sales CRM for a standardized follow up to potential patients. The same thing can be used for Google. I think some of the most interesting pieces that have evolved over really the last few years is the use of dental practices using call centers and DSOs using call centers and being able to integrate in sales CRMs where a call center can actively communicate with the dental office on next steps. And the combination of the practice reaching out and a call center, taking a call or reaching back up for follow-up is one of the bigger trends that I’m seeing right now and a program that we have in place and we’re excited to offer to our clients. But it’s not something that’s inexpensive. It’s complicated. You have to connect a lot of the dots and you have to have a lot of personnel to support a structure like that.

Bill Neumann:

I love that. So the call center, social media for sure. Very, very interesting stuff. So we got a lot of great tips today and I think what a lot of people realize is you probably can’t do all of this on your own as an organization. So there are people like WEO Media out there that can help out. Cory, if some of our audience group practices want to find out more, what’s the best way to get in touch with you?

Cory Roletto:

Yeah. I think there’s a couple options there. Of course, there’s our website, which is weomedia.com. WEO Media. It’s a good starting place. Our phone number and contact information’s there. I’m always interested in talking directly to doctors too. And so if you call one of our numbers and just ask for Cory Roletto, I’m always available. The one I remember off the top of my head is 503-922-2120. That’s actually our operation line, but I used to run the operations team for about a decade, so that’s the one I have memorized. You can always reach out via email too. My email address is Cory, which is a C-O-R-Y at weomedia.com. So lots of different options there. Of course, we have all the normal sales channels as well.

Bill Neumann:

That’s great, Cory. And all those, the email address and phone number, we’ll make sure that’s all included in the show notes. So if you’re writing it down, that’s great, but you don’t have to. We’ll plug it into the show notes as well. Cory Roletto from WEO Media. So again, he mentioned the URL. weomedia.com. You could find him there as well. Co-founder and partner at the organization. Thanks for being on. I think we got a ton of information from you today and it is definitely … I always say it’s like a mix of art and science. And like the DSO space and the dental industry it’s dynamic, it’s constantly changing. So it’s great to have an ally like Cory and his team really to keep up with what’s going on and really be able to help you out. So again, that’s it for me. I’m Bill Neumann. Group Dentistry Now Show. Thanks Cory for being here and sharing your wisdom and knowledge with the audience today.

Cory Roletto:

Oh my pleasure, Bill. Thank you very much for having me.