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This podcast episode features Samantha Watkins, Marketing Director at Pearl Street Dental Partners. The podcast focuses on bridging the gap between dental group operations and marketing efforts.
Kleer is a proud sponsor of today’s episode and has helped over 7,000 dentists and 300 DSOs build and scale successful membership plans. To learn more about Kleer and the impact a membership plan can have on your group or enterprise, check-out the DSO Leaders Guide at —> https://www.kleer.dental/gdn.
Samantha discusses her background, different ways Pearl Street is making access to their services more convenient for consumers, and the importance of connectivity between dental operations and marketing initiatives especially as dentists and group practices navigate a diverse and multi-faceted healthcare landscape.
Podcast objectives:
- Discuss the importance of including your marketing team in the analysis of operational performance.
- Identify how day-to-day procedures can impact the marketing decisions at each practice.
- Explore why diversifying and marketing insurance alternatives is key to optimizing visits, treatment acceptance, and revenue.
- Learn how to outline activities that a marketing team — or a team of any size — can implement to reach strategic practice goals.
If you would like to find out more about Pearl Street Dental Partners visit https://www.pearlstreetdentalpartners.com. You can also email Samantha Watkins at samantha@pearlstreetdentalpartners.com
If you like our podcast, please give us a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review on iTunes https://apple.co/2Nejsfa and a Thumbs Up on YouTube.
Our podcast series brings you dental support organization 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:
Welcome everyone, to the Group Dentistry Now Show. I’m Bill Neumann. And as always, we appreciate everybody listening in. Whether you are listening on Spotify, on Apple, Google, or maybe you’re watching us on YouTube, we appreciate your support, because without your support, we wouldn’t get great guests like the next guest we have here today, we have Samantha Watkins. She is the head of marketing for DSO, Pearl Street Dental Partners. So we’re going to find out about Samantha, her role in marketing, and then learn a little bit about Pearl Street and what they’re doing. But first I want to make sure that I thank Kleer for introducing Group Dentistry Now to Samantha. They’re the reason that she is on today. So little message from Kleer. They are a proud sponsor today and I know that they’re partnered with Pearl Street and work closely with Samantha.
They work with over 300 DSOs and they’ve helped over 7,000 dentists build and scale successful membership plans. We’ll get into membership plans a little later on in the conversation, but if you’d like to learn more about Kleer, you can visit Kleer, which is spelled K-L-E-E-R and you can go to kleer.Dental/gdn, like Group Dentistry Now, GDN, so kleer.Dental/gdn and I’ll mention that one last time at the end of the show, and then we’ll also drop that link in the show notes. So where the housekeeping is finished, and now Samantha, I would love for you to just give the audience a little short bio, your background and maybe how you got involved in dentistry.
Samantha Morrow Watkins:
For sure. I’m very thankful to be here talking with you today. So a little bit about me. I have been in the industry for a while, but I’ve only been in healthcare. So when I graduated college, I graduated from the University of North Texas with a bachelor’s in journalism, of all things. I came out with a really big passion of storytelling, connecting people through, at the time it was digital and print. And when I came to Pearl Street, I was actually the first marketing employee that they had ever hired. I came in on our founding year, so I started in 2019. A mere seven months after Pearl Street had formed officially and it was me, 10 offices and just trying to figure out what to do. A lot of the offices didn’t even have Facebook pages, they didn’t have fully formed websites. So a lot of what I had to do was come in and build strategy and figure out what makes sense for what office.
Because one thing that’s really unique about Pearl Street is all of our offices are individually branded. That’s a very big part of our culture. A lot of what we look for in an office is to have them maintain some form of autonomy. So we do not go in and rebrand, which makes my job very fun. Right now we’re up to 36 offices with 34 brands. I manage a team directly at our business office as well as we have people in the field that help us. So we’re growing very rapidly. We have a total of, I think 81 doctors is what I’ve had yesterday. And our support office is 36 people. So with all of those brands, it comes with a lot of managing expectations, managing timelines, managing what fits which one of those offices. I also just finished my MBA, so now I’m further able to connect the business side of it to the creative side to be able to further help a lot of our offices.
Bill Neumann:
Oh, that’s great. So the group started in 2019, you joined-
Samantha Morrow Watkins:
Yes.
Bill Neumann:
… seven months into the founding of the group. So 10 locations at that time. Where are the practices located?
Samantha Morrow Watkins:
So majority of them are in the north Texas area. We have several in South Texas. We’re building up a really big central Texas region. East Texas, we have a good majority and that’s where our founder, Dr. Jennings, he’s in Tyler, so has a lot of offices in East Texas. And then we have a couple in Oklahoma. That was an addition. That was about two years ago. We branched into Oklahoma. So being in two different states also makes marketing very interesting because each association has different rules that we have to follow, different things that their patients are looking for. So it makes things very interesting in the strategic realm. But that’s where a lot of our offices are, north Texas, Texas in general, and then Oklahoma.
Bill Neumann:
Okay. And you mentioned now you’re 36 offices, 34 brands, which maybe we should, we’ll talk about that too. I’ll make a note here to talk about the challenge marketing different brands, especially with 34, probably be a lot easier to have one brand, but I guess there’s benefit and there’s negatives to that as well. So before we get into a conversation about the marketing efforts that you have at Pearl, maybe we talk a little bit about how marketing a dental practice and it might be marketing for a DSO or a brand, is unique compared to other healthcare verticals. Sometimes I think people kind of group, it’s healthcare, but dentistry is different.
Samantha Morrow Watkins:
Dentistry is very different. Where I started my career, I was in dermatology and we did a lot of efforts that were more B2B, so we were marketing to general doctors who we wanted to refer their patients. We weren’t doing a lot of direct patient marketing, so that’s very different. I have colleagues that work in emergency dental care, they’re just trying to get as many bodies in the building. Dentistry is probably the most patient or just people focused type of healthcare that there is, because you’re not marketing to a business, you’re not marketing to just everybody. You’re looking for people that are in your community, that are looking for a new dentist, that are looking to better their oral healthcare. And with that comes a lot of personalization.
And that’s something that going from especially dermatology to dentistry, dermatology, we could be luxurious, very generic in a lot of cases, it didn’t really matter, showing the derm faces. Where in dentistry, everybody wants to see the doctor. It used to be all of the dentists practices were named after the doctor, so there was a personal element to that. And now you’re seeing a lot of centers and family dentistrys’ where it’s not focused around one person. And sometimes that’s really scary for a patient and there’s a very large phobia out there for going to the dentist. That’s a big campaign that we run on a regular basis is why dentistry is not scary.
But it is something that typically everybody has healthcare coverage for or they have access to some form of coverage. And it’s a very passive coverage that most organizations have that people don’t always utilize to the fullest extent. So we’re trying to communicate to average people, why going to the dentist is important, why going twice a year is really important. So that makes it really unique because it’s something very basic that people need. They don’t always realize why they need it and we have to be very personalized in our approach, because what works in Huntsville, Texas for example, doesn’t work in Dallas and it doesn’t work in Tulsa. So it’s trying to figure out how to get into that community and get that particular audience.
Bill Neumann:
So you mentioned that a lot of the dental practices typically would have the doctor’s name, right? It was Dr. Clark and Associates potentially, right?
Samantha Morrow Watkins:
Yes.
Bill Neumann:
When Pearl Street comes in, is everything acquisition? Is that what you’re doing, you’re buying existing practices?
Samantha Morrow Watkins:
Yes. So our process is we’ve been very fortunate to not necessarily be on the office. We’ve had a lot of people who have heard about our model, about the great things that we’re doing with our existing locations and our partner doctors and they’ve wanted to be a part of it. So we’ve been really blessed with having acquisitions come to us and that’s saying, does this fit, does this work? Now we’re expanding a lot because we are on a pretty rapid growth trajectory to where we’re really looking to partner with doctors. That’s something that is really unique, is we actually prefer the owner doctor to stay. We realize that that person has built something that’s really great and we want to capitalize on that and maybe just take away some of the things like accounting, payroll, HR, that typically most dentists don’t like doing and we’ll take that on for them, but we want them to stay and be a part of their patient base.
But when I joined the practice we had just acquired five, so they went from 5 to 10 pretty quickly in 2019. And that was a big, we’re buying from retiring dentists and they’re phasing out. So my first year was just getting patients acquainted to a new dentist. Whereas now, we’ve seen a lot of value in partnering with dentists who want to stay, who want to build something great. And maybe in a couple years they want to phase out. But most of our dentists that we’ve partnered with over the past going on four years, I think we may have had one that has phased out and he was ready just to be done. So we’ve been really blessed and fortunate to build something that a lot of our dentists when they partner with us, want to stay.
Bill Neumann:
When you’re acquiring these practices, you say you don’t change the brand necessarily, but if it is Dr. Clark’s office, are you branding it locally? Do you create a brand locally or how do you navigate that?
Samantha Morrow Watkins:
It’s a really interesting process because one of my biggest advocates, especially coming from a journalism background, is getting as much information as you possibly can. So I don’t typically make any recommendations of changing a brand until I’ve at least met the entire office, studied them, really gotten to know their patients, gotten to know their interactions with their patients. And then about three months in, we’ll make that decision. And I would say we’ve only rebranded one office the entire time. And if it’s the doctor’s name, then we’ll keep the name and if they’re ready to phase out, we’ll make that decision then.
But we’re partnering with these practices because they’re doing something right and we want to make sure that we fully understand what that is. Whether it is a particular person, whether it’s the doctor, a hygienist, et cetera, or maybe they’re in the right location, maybe they are specialized, but we don’t want to change anything about them that was working. We just want to enhance it and see what we can do to partner with them going forward to maybe bring in more new patients or bring in more revenue.
Bill Neumann:
That makes sense. You’re bringing in, you have these new practices that come aboard. My suspicion is that some are better at marketing than others. So I’d love to get feedback on when you bring on a practice, have you seen when you add your marketing expertise and have people dedicated to marketing, where it’s not necessarily the dentist or an office manager there that’s doing several other things. Talk about how that changes the health of the business of that particular practice.
Samantha Morrow Watkins:
Yeah, for sure. Well, like I said, we don’t like to make too many changes right up front, mainly because we’re changing so much about them, from their payroll system to how we onboard people, accounting, et cetera. So when we partner with a new office, I’ll go in typically about a month after and we’ll see what they have. A lot of times it is, they just have a website and they’re totally fine with that and we’ll just take over managing that vendor and that’s all we do. There’s some offices that have a lot of things going on. They’re already really good at social media, they have a really good reputation health, their website vendor is great, they have no problems with them. And I will just kind of ride with them along the way for about a year and seeing, what is this, is this working, is there anything else that you need help with? Can I provide any input? I’ll at least have a couple of those meetings throughout the year.
I would say a vast majority of the time, we have an office that wants to make a transition from general dentistry to cosmetics. They are struggling with new patients, they’re struggling with reviews and we will build an introductory campaign of, how do we address those things? I don’t want to throw out too many things at you at once, but what services does myself and my team provide, that we can take that list off over time? What campaigns can we run to address those needs immediately? What can wait? I think one of the best examples is one of the offices that we just brought on in San Antonio, and they had a very outdated website and we knew that we were going to need to change it but they were doing no marketing at all.
So it’s been about a four-month process to just learn about the office, get some media taken of them, write a plan, write a branding proposal and actually get their website up and running. So it really depends on the office, but I would say we have kind of three extremes. We have somebody who isn’t doing anything, doesn’t want to do anything or has no interest, some that are good at what they’re doing and we just want to slowly start taking that burden up to the support center, or we have some that are doing great at what they’re have, they’re doing a lot and maybe we just provide feedback every once in a while. So that’s why I say those are probably the three buckets of what we work with.
Bill Neumann:
Well, so that’s pretty interesting. You’ve got a lot of different things going on and I guess different stages or sophistication of marketing and I’m sure some practices don’t maybe need as many new patients as others?
Samantha Morrow Watkins:
Right. Yes, and I think that’s a big part about working with the operations team is I just tell them all the time, I don’t need to know every single nook and cranny that goes on in the office. But if you’re booked out in hygiene for six months, you probably don’t need a recare campaign or you probably don’t need any additional things to fill your feed. Maybe your new patients are good, you don’t have a new spot for a month. Maybe we’ll start something like two weeks before the month starts, make sure that those spots are continuously full and go on from there. But it’s really important that we at least know the health of the office because we can make changes fairly quickly. But if I’m told, my schedule fell apart tomorrow, we’re more limited in what we can do. But if this is a continual problem where patients are canceling all the time, they’re not showing up for their appointments, that’s something we can address over time. But we can’t do anything with day of, to affect their schedule tomorrow and that’s where the operations’ partnership has to come into play.
Bill Neumann:
Yeah, that is a great point you bring up about the relationship between marketing and operations and I guess it depends on the practice itself and the needs, but maybe talk a little bit more about how you interact with operations and how that, because two really different things going on.
Samantha Morrow Watkins:
They are and I think that the most successful offices that we have in our family are ones where we have a great relationship with the operations team and they take our feedback, they run with it. Maybe we’re not calling all of the shots, but we’re at least working together to achieve a common goal. And I meet with our operations team regularly between our regional directors and our regional managers. I am fully in the know of what is happening in those offices. I tell new hires, I tell my team, you should know every single thing that goes on in that office, from their treatment expected, to their schedule, to their net growth, to their recare percentage. You should know that and be fully formed and then maybe you go visit the office and get the full story. Why is your recare percentage low? Why is your treatment percentage not where it needs to be?
That way we can kind of bridge the gap. Is it something we can actually make effective change on or is it you have a hygienist down and that’s why you don’t have recare. A lot of the campaigns that we’ll run, especially, we miss you campaigns if people haven’t been in the office for 18 months. Is there a reason behind that, that we can pinpoint with the office, because I can only look at data so much. I can memorize trends, I know what’s going on, but there’s another element behind it. And if I don’t have a regional manager or an operations person who can fully integrate the picture for me, then I’m going to be throwing darts at a dart board and not actually knowing what I’m looking at. So I think that that’s really important.
So I meet with them regularly, sometimes every day we’re messaging back and forth, but my team goes in for strategic visits once a quarter to really make sure that we’re still on the same page. If they see something, they’ll let me know, I’ll say it in our support team meetings. So it’s a pretty constant communication. But that started back in 2019 when it was just me and I didn’t know anything about dentistry. I had come from dermatology, it was a completely different world. And being a journalist, I am just so used to doing research, that I made it a very big point to do my research for every office.
So that first starts with me, but then it’s having the operations people on the other side who are receptive to that, so they don’t think I’m trying to invade everything that they’re doing or question why is this happening? But it is helpful for us to know because if you have a front desk that’s down, they’re out on maternity leave, they’re on vacation, I may not run a digital campaign that’s having the phones ring, because no one’s going to answer them. So it’s helpful to know that. So I would say constant communication is probably the biggest key there.
Bill Neumann:
Well, this brings up a great point that I was going to touch on but you pretty much already did, which is, how does operations leverage marketing to help set goals? And it sounds like you’re meeting as much as operations would like, quarterly basis maybe more and providing data and then suggestions and solutions that marketing can come in and help with.
Samantha Morrow Watkins:
Right. And I think if there is a stigma that marketing can make magic happen and we can, not to say that we are not capable of making sure that you have the fullest schedule, your production’s growing, but there’s some of these things take time. I would say any change that you make to a marketing strategy, you won’t see effective change for three months, because sometimes schedules are full, hygiene’s booked and so you really won’t see that trend start to pick up at least over a three-month period. And that’s what I typically tell our dentists if they’re like, “Okay well why aren’t we seeing the change?” “Well because I coached you yesterday. Give it a little bit of time and you’ll start to see those changes happen.”
But they’ll bring us data, I’ll review it and I’ll ask questions to make sure that we’re all on the same page. But if they tell us the day before, we may just be able to address it later, but we’re constantly pacing and making sure that we have the information at hand and then yeah, operations will let us know, “Yes that’s a good idea. No, that’s not,” because they have the full picture on the ground level.
Bill Neumann:
A lot of our audience has maybe smaller groups that, two practices, three practices, not centralized yet. Do you have any suggestions if it’s somebody that doesn’t necessarily have the marketing acumen or again they’re the office manager that is tasked with doing just about everything. What would you recommend somebody like that in a position that maybe has limited amount of time and resources do to help market a practice, whether it’s patient acquisition or recall?
Samantha Morrow Watkins:
I would say there’s several categories that I constantly go back to and focus on. That’s your reviews, that’s your in-house patient referrals, and that’s having a good digital vendor. A lot of offices that we acquire, they have a website and it’s either being managed by a company or it was built a long time ago and it just exists. Everything starts with your website. And I’m not saying you need to have the best SEO campaign, you need to be constantly back linking and updating. That’s really if you have a full team behind you. But if you’re a one man operation, you just need to pick a vendor that you trust and you say, “I need help, I need a good SEO strategy.” But with your SEO strategy, reviews can help that. I don’t think a lot of people realize just how impactful reviews are to search engine optimization with Google. If you’re getting a consistent number of reviews, it will help your office continue to rise in those ranks.
I typically say 10% of your patients should be leaving you a positive review, hopefully, and that continuously gets a good churn in. Because I think more than anything, in the past several years, the biggest change that we’ve seen is people are really paying attention to reviews. We’re seeing a lot of people leave a little bit more reviews, leaving the long ones, especially. So those are two things for sure. And then your patient referrals, you don’t have to have a big campaign, but at least in the state of Texas, you’re allowed to provide some incentive for your current patient if they refer somebody. And it could be something simple, a card, a thank you, maybe a gift card every once in a while, that’s $5. Those are some things that you can just continuously build a culture with your existing patient base of, if you had a really good experience, maybe tell your friends, or can I give you some literature that you put up at your office?
Those are some really big categories that I would say. And then the biggest thing for me, and this, it costs no money, is social media. It’s a big SEO driver. You can link building your social media, you can show your office’s personality. You know can take a patient that is a little scared if they need to come in, and you can have a goofy picture of your dentist and you’re like, “That man is not scary,” or, “That woman’s not scary.” So those are the big things I would say, have a good website vendor, consistently get new patient reviews or just reviews in general, have a good referral system and maybe get on social media.
Bill Neumann:
That’s great. Wow. Great tips there. What about first marketing campaign? What are some best practices, strategies again, what would you say to somebody that maybe hasn’t done this before and is now looking to grow their patient base?
Samantha Morrow Watkins:
I would start small. I have done big campaigns over the years. It’s big giveaways to existing patients and you don’t necessarily need to do that, A, because you don’t know if your audience is going to respond to it well. I would say potentially doing a small referral incentive. Everybody that refers a patient this month will be entered to win X or doing a Starbucks gift card giveaway on social media, just trying to get your people to follow your page. Start small. You do not have to do a big campaign, especially in dentistry. We have seen guesses the amount of kisses in a candy jar in February for Valentine’s Day, be it one of our most successful campaigns. And it blows my mind every year, how many people we get to engage in this on social media, people who love it in the office and we sometimes don’t have big prizes, we just give them the jar of candy and patients are obsessed with it.
So I think that when you’re thinking of campaigns, a lot of people go really big like, “We’re going to give away Texas Rangers tickets,” or “We’re going to give away Dallas Cowboy tickets.” You don’t need to do that. You do not need to spend a lot of money, just do something small that you know your patients will like. I think the local restaurant giveaway is also a good one in the National Food Month or if there’s somewhere you staff constantly goes, get a gift card from them, your patients already go there. It’s a nice little incentive to get them to refer patients. So start small, you do not have to do something really big.
Bill Neumann:
Oh that’s great. Yeah, great advice for an office manager that will be doing quite a few other things. Let’s talk about the membership plan idea here. The concept which isn’t new but it seems like it’s gaining quite a bit of traction and become much more sophisticated and I think with membership plan companies like Kleer and make it a lot easier. So recommendations on marketing plans like that, how do you do that, because this could be new for some of our audience, they haven’t done it in the past?
Samantha Morrow Watkins:
Right. And we get practices all the time that partner with us that don’t utilize Kleer, they’ve never used a membership plan and we get some that have tried to do it themselves and build an in-house one without an external vendor like Kleer and every time, they’re like, “I don’t know how to manage this,” because it’s a lot. Kleer has definitely been a very fabulous partner to work with because not only do they provide the online portal for patients to register themselves to keep up with their own payments, they also provide marketing materials, they provide email templates, they provide social media templates, they provide language for you to use. So they’re just a great partner overall. But as far as membership plans and marketing, I think that it’s one of my go-to’s, because it’s something that if a patient doesn’t have dental insurance or their dental insurance through their employer is expensive, Kleer is a really affordable and transparent way to get patients in your door.
It very clearly on the website and in brochures, lists exactly what you’re going to pay, exactly if there’s a discount for a service, what you’re going to be paying at the end of the day or what discounts that you’re going to get. So for us, especially in our more rural communities, that it’s very easy for patients to go, “This is what I’m paying.” And knowing your demographics is important. If we have a full fee for service office that already isn’t in network, Kleer’s been a great option for patients to still come see the providers that they’ve loved for a long time and have the ability to get more affordable service, even though we wouldn’t market it as affordable services, an in-house membership plan.
But they have the options, you can set your prices as an office to market to patients. So it’s not like you have to do X, Y, and Z. Kleer gives you the ability to set those prices yourself. So it’s been a a nice partner to have with campaigns and I think now we have across 30 offices, I want to say we’re approaching like 20,000 patients using Kleer, so it’s been very nice to have that many patients who are constantly coming in and we don’t have to do much with it, we just have to tell them what we want our prices to be and they handle the rest.
Bill Neumann:
Wow, 20,000, that’s great. Across 34 brands, right?
Samantha Morrow Watkins:
Yeah.
Bill Neumann:
Give me an idea, so this is something that a lot of these practices didn’t have or you said they had their own in-house plan that maybe wasn’t working as well as or it took much more time to handle. What’s the impact been that you’ve seen? Have you been able to measure that?
Samantha Morrow Watkins:
I think we’ve acquired a couple of offices that did have this and they were early partners with us and they really showed us the impact that they’ve had, and they were both full fee service offices and we’ve seen their number of patients that they’ve had go from maybe a couple hundred to a thousand. And when we brought Kleer on as a family partner, one office in particular that I can think of, they’re in a more rural setting, they went from zero to, I think, I haven’t looked at their numbers in a while, it’s like 700 patients on Kleer. So it’s had a very big impact and we have seen that Kleer patients are more adept to coming in because they feel the impact of them paying for it. Sometimes when you have patients that are on insurance, they don’t necessarily care if they come in twice a year, because it’s a passive cost that just goes along with their employer insurance.
Whereas Kleer, you see those charges come out either on a monthly basis, on an annual basis, so you feel the pressure as a patient, to come in and utilize that. So we’ve seen our Kleer patients come back and accept treatment and still want to move forward as a patient, long term. So I think I can confidently say, had a really nice impact with our offices that started from the ground and they go up.
Now it doesn’t work for every office, because we have some offices that are in demographics where they have a lot of employers that provide dental insurance, so it’s just an added benefit, something that we can say that we have. Where some offices, they depend on something like Kleer to always go back and get their patients, to be like, “Okay, well if you’re a cash patient, we can convert you into this and you’ll be able to see us and get all of that treatment that gets done.” Our big thing as a family, we don’t like to say, sell, and we are not selling them a membership plan. We are providing our patients with an opportunity to get the care that they need and it’s affordable and very transparent. So that’s what another thing I would say is we’re not selling membership plans, we are educating our patients of what we’re able to do and it’s had a really big impact overall.
Bill Neumann:
That’s a great point and there’s that education because each office is providing this solution. So to have that, understand how to present it to the patient and offer it, makes a lot of sense. Overall with marketing, how do you measure campaign success? What do you look at? What type of metrics are you, Samantha, head of marketing, looking at, that you can share with your team?
Samantha Morrow Watkins:
First and foremost, we always look at new patients. I think at the end of the day, we want to make sure that people are constantly coming in. I’m also looking at net growth. So we’re looking at the amount of patients that are coming in versus how many are leaving or haven’t been in after a certain amount of time. Because if we’re constantly filling the bucket and it’s just dripping right out, then we’re also not being effective. But I’m looking at if we’re running a new patient offer or we’re running a referral campaign, how many of those referrals are coming in? Are we seeing an uptick with new patients? Are we seeing an uptick in net growth? That’s kind of our baseline numbers that we pace off of, that we measure off of. But then it depends on what the overall goal is. If we want to increase reviews, I better be seeing an increase in reviews.
If we want to see increase in positive reviews, I want to see increase in positive reviews. We use a lot of email marketing and we look at things like open rates, we look at click-through rates, if we’re doing a digital Google campaign or just a digital PBC campaign overall, I’m looking at call volume. I’m looking at how many of those calls are answered. I’m looking at how many conversions come off of that. So it really depends on the goal, but there’s a lot of metrics that we do look at on a daily, weekly, monthly basis to ensure. But I always encourage my team, especially, if they’re not seeing a big jump, I’m just looking at a positive trajectory. I want to see if our campaigns are working or not. And if they’re not, it’s just a learning opportunity. We can pivot, we can try something else. But as long as we are seeing growth overall, especially in that net growth and new patient category, I would call that a success.
Bill Neumann:
What percentage typically should marketing be as it relates to production in a practice? Do you have some guidelines around that?
Samantha Morrow Watkins:
We do. Selfishly, as a marketer, I would love all the percentages because there’s so many things I’d like to do, that doesn’t always work out that way. I would say we kind of orient anywhere from 2 to 3% of production and we track that on a quarterly basis, so it’s not something that’s set in stone, this is what we’re doing. Because things are constantly changing. There’s a lot of personnel things that we have to take into account. There’s a lot of seasonal things, so we have to take into account. But I think overall we’re running a fairly low percentage of production. I know that we have, not even in our family, but I have colleagues in the dental industry that are running anywhere from 5 to 6%m so we’re definitely on the lower side of our spend. But I consider myself somebody that’s very cost efficient. So I like to try everything that we can, like social media or just having a website or running emails that don’t cost very much money. Try those first before we start doing the bigger ticket items.
Bill Neumann:
Well let’s talk a little bit about social media because I think this is a really interesting topic. One thing that I seem to see quite a bit is, it’s really easy to get it started, but to be consistent is the real challenge.
Samantha Morrow Watkins:
Oh yeah.
Bill Neumann:
Any thoughts around that? Because we see a lot of people like social media and then you go to their Facebook and they haven’t posted anything in two or three months. How do you keep up with the consistency?
Samantha Morrow Watkins:
That is something that has been a big challenge because it depends on what your goals are with it. We want to utilize that as a tool for SEO, for transparency, showing offices’ personality and pushing our campaigns, our specials. But like I said, when I started, I had to start a lot of Facebook pages from scratch. And that was very interesting because we take offices that have had employees that have worked there for 10, 15 years and I say, “Okay, I need you to do something that’s really funny for me.” They just sometimes look at me like I’m crazy, like, “What do you mean?” And we have to really massage the conversation and go, “I’m not telling you that I want you to be the most trending viral office. That’s not the point. You could have a million Instagram followers, you could have a hundred thousand Instagram followers. Are all of those followers in the city that you’re trying to target? No? Then they’re not going to turn into patients.”
Our goal is to be very geo-targeted, to be very website call to action centric. But consistency is still always a problem because everybody’s busy. I get, all the time, I didn’t have time to do this. And I totally understand and I really do preface the priority of being in the office and experience that, especially from a team that’s remote from our physical locations. But I always tell them, you have several things that you can always go back to. Your doctor is always going to be your biggest hit. And it does not have to be the most professional photo. If he’s looking at you funny because you put a patient on the schedule at the end of the day, maybe just pull out your phone and take a picture and then make him laugh. And you’ll get an even better photo out of that.
If someone delivers you food. For example, if like a work referral delivers you food or a patient brings you a gift, take a photo of that. If you get a review and you want to highlight it, canvas free, in a lot of cases, build a free graphic poster review, get similar. Boomerangs are still very popular, they’re very easy, just taking photos of people that are working. You don’t have to be the most well lit photo.
Now if you’re an office that’s trying to do, especially cosmetics or something specialized, I would say it’s probably a little bit more important. So if you’re a general dentistry office, especially that has a small team, you can just take content that makes sense for you in the time that you do have. As far as how much you should be posting, we specifically post every work week during work hours, because I believe that patients are going to see something and they want to take action, you should be available to take the phone call or if we do it after hours, we’ll do it to the website so someone actually can follow up on that lead patient in the morning.
But if you’re just starting out, I would say anything from two to three times a week, is probably safe, across both platforms, whether you’re on Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, I would say get once a week, two, three would be better and you’re probably going to consistently follow up. The biggest thing is not actually being consistent in terms of your posting, it’s your engagement, because the way that the algorithms work these days, it’s all about whose interacting with your post. Because you can only post something once every few months. But if it gets a 10% engagement rate, 15% engagement rate, then I would say that’s a win. So you need to be posting things that your audience is actually going to engage with because then your consistency doesn’t matter necessarily. But consistency does go into the algorithm, so it’s kind of a chicken or an egg, but you need to be doing something at least once a week if you’re going to try and utilize social media to benefit the practice overall.
Bill Neumann:
So we start to wind down the podcast. I’ve got a couple more questions for you. One is, over the past couple years, we’ve seen increase in interest rates, inflation creeping up. How do you combat that with patients that now are paying a lot more for staples, things like food. And I’d love to hear your thoughts about that as it relates to dental marketing.
Samantha Morrow Watkins:
Right. I think when we get into a situation like this, I think coming out of 2020 was probably the biggest thing where people were very unsure. They didn’t know how much money they wanted to spend. And my big push spin was just educate patients on why they still should prioritize their dental care. You shouldn’t do a bunch of things like we’re going to do an all on X or we’re going to do Invisalign in some cases. We’re just going to promote, why you should come get a cleaning twice a year. Why you should, if you have a filling, don’t let it turn into a crown. Don’t let it turn into a root canal, because those are things that ongoing, it costs you more at the end of the day, so why not get them taken care of now, so you’re not having to spend more money later.
Those are some big campaigns that we focus around, or we’ll just go back to reviews and referrals to try and recapture the people that are still coming into the office. I’m not going to be running a big special or promoting big services. Those will come with better patient loyalty, as long as you still have people coming in the door. But I would say just continue to educate your patients. They will come, I promise.
Bill Neumann:
Great advice. This is a question that I tend to ask just about everybody. Give me some thoughts about the future of Pearl Street and where you see the organization headed in the next couple of years. And then also, the future of dental marketing, do you see any really interesting things that are going on that maybe you’re like, “Boy, I can’t wait till AI gets better.” Maybe you don’t want AI, I don’t know. But yeah, just the future of dental marketing and then the future of your organization.
Samantha Morrow Watkins:
Yeah. Well, dental marketing is definitely getting more and more interesting, because I think patients are really looking for better customized, personalized activities. They’re not really interested in stocks or a generic caption or a generic ad. They’re really looking for, why should I pick you over the many, many, many dental offices that are everywhere. Even from when I started four years ago till now, we’ve seen an increase in competition. We’ve seen an increase in dental offices opening and their dentists are younger, so they’re trying to compete with more established dentists, so we’re seeing more competition overall.
And I would say one of our goals, and I’m seeing this across the board, is personalization, is trying to keep up with trends, is trying to do something that your patients are consistently going towards. You say AI, I’ve learned about AI almost 10 years ago and I still have not seen AI come into a big part of marketing in general, let alone dentistry. Like I said, its dentistry at its roots with just one dentist, who was just trying to be friends with his community or trying to get involved with his community.
I would say that patients are still looking for that. So we’re not trying to be overly technical in terms of what we’re promoting or how we’re getting involved with the community, but I would say patients are looking to go back to more of that model than they want to see AI generated chatbots. I could be wrong, maybe we’ll see chatbots next year and I will have to figure out how to integrate them at all of our offices. I hope not.
But as far as Pearl Street goes, we have been really fortunate to go from 10 to 36 in a short time span. I don’t see us slowing down anytime soon, which is exciting for everybody else except the marketing team, because they’re like, “Oh, that’s great, more generations of offices and brands.” But it’s a really exciting challenge to face when we’re looking at all the work that we get to do, all the patients that we get to impact.
So we’re very excited for that. Our organization’s also growing quite rapidly as far as the key personnel that we’re bringing in, trying to systemize things while still providing this extraordinary experience for our team members, our family, as well as our patients. So I would say you’re going to see a lot of growth from Pearl Street in the next coming years, I don’t know how many, they don’t always tell me, so we’ll see how many we grow. But they used to joke when I started, they’re like, “Okay, we’re going to get 50,” and at 10 offices I just looked at them like they’re crazy. I was like, “Okay, well we’ll see when we get to 50.” Now 50 is approaching very rapidly and now they’re like, “Oh, 100.” I’m like, “Hey.”
So I think we’re going to see a lot of growth coming out of this, but at our core, Pearl Street is about people first. We want to make sure that our families taken care of, that our patients are taken care of. We want to provide an extraordinary and exceptional patient experience and hold onto that core, no matter how big we get. We want to do things in a very unique way, whether that’s from our marketing team doing 30 variations of something or trying to make it personalized. Just fun, unique ways to do things that everybody else is doing. And then just long-term buildings, how do we make this thing last? Because dentistry’s been around for a long time. It will continue to be around for a long time. More and more people are finding value in dentistry. We’re seeing more dentists serving day that want to enter the field. So how are we going to continue to do something that’s built to last? And I think so far we’ve been successful with it, but I understand growth is probably the biggest thing you’ll hear from Pearl Street in the coming years.
Bill Neumann:
That’s great, congratulations. Samantha, if people, anybody in the audience wants to find out more about Pearl Street Dental Partners, how do they do that?
Samantha Morrow Watkins:
So you can find us as Pearl Street Dental Partners as our website, it’s PearlStreetDentalPartners.com. We’re also on LinkedIn at Pearl Street Dental Partners. And those are the two best ways to get to us. If you’re interested of partnering with us, as an owner doctor or as a practice, you can send an email to marketing@PearlStreetDental Partners.com and it’ll go to the correct people. But that’s how you find us.
Bill Neumann:
Okay. And if anybody wants to reach out to you, Samantha, how can they do that?
Samantha Morrow Watkins:
They can reach out to me via LinkedIn at Samara Morrow Watkins, or they can reach out to my email is samantha@PearlStreetDentalPartners.com.
Bill Neumann:
That’s great. And we’ll drop those links in the show notes to Pearl Street Dental Partners website and we’ll have Samantha’s email in there. Thanks so much, Samantha. This has been great, great information. Yeah, it’s always exciting, coming from a sales and marketing background myself, I really appreciate the challenge that you have managing all these different brands and all having different needs and different markets with different patient base. There’s a lot of moving parts, so it’s not as easy as it may seem from an outsider’s perspective.
Samantha Morrow Watkins:
I really appreciate you saying that, because I think marketing is such a black box to so many people. And I try and kind of break down those barriers as much as I can with getting involved in operations or making sure that I am being financially responsible for our accounting team. I’m sure they appreciate that, but we’re never bored. And anytime we add a new team member and I tell them what the workload is and it gets a little bit more overwhelming each hire that we make. But it’s a really fun environment to be in and we really enjoy getting to serve so many brands in just a unique way.
Bill Neumann:
Well great. Well, thank you Samantha. I also want to thank Kleer, I mentioned them at the beginning of the podcast. I want to mention them here. If you want to find out more about Kleer, which we’ve discussed during the podcast, they actually have this DSO Leaders Guide that you can check out. And that’s at Kleer, which again is K-L-E-E-R, Kleer.Dental.gdn, GDN, Group Dentistry Now. So Kleer.Dental/gdn and that’s the DSO Leaders Guide. And I again, will throw that in the show notes as well. So thanks everybody for listening in, or you might be watching us on YouTube. We appreciate it. Thanks for your time, Samantha. Great getting to know you. Hope to meet you in person at some DSO meeting or some meeting real soon.
Samantha Morrow Watkins:
For sure, thanks y’all.
