Dentists, front office professionals, and office managers are regularly called upon to make good decisions about dental digital marketing but don’t know anything about them. At Pro Impressions, we think it should be easy to get the basic information you need as well as the advice and expertise of a professional. So today,

Jonathan and Holly at Pro Impressions Marketing Group talk about what it’s like being new to digital marketing, and we go over the online dental marketing fundamentals that you need to know. Concepts We Cover: Where do websites come from? Why you can’t assume that everyone knows (or doesn’t know) the same thing What is the difference between a domain name and a website? What is a server and how does a website relate to a server?

How does Google work? There are ads on Google?! Do people click on ads or scroll past them on Google? What is SEO and what does SEO stand for? What is PPC and how does it work? What kind of information is tracked on websites? 

No Easy Answers is the actual title of the video referenced from Google at 12:29

Schedule a consultation with Jonathan by calling (970) 672-1212. 

Transcript

Jonathan Fashbaugh:

Hey there. Welcome to Marketing Chairside. I’m Jonathan Fashbaugh. Today, we’ve been doing a series of interviews with dental professionals. Today, I’m joined with the fabulous Holly Kail, who is the Administrative … I’m trying to find the button to push to bring her in … the Administrative Coordinator at Pro Impressions. Holly, thanks for being here.

Holly Kail:

Hi, Jonathan. Thanks for having me.

Jonathan Fashbaugh:

The COVID thing and just working remotely means that we get to pretend that we’re like newscasters and get to beam each other in from across the United States. Holly is in Colorado and I am in Missouri and this is magical. Holly, I wanted you to be on the show today because I think there’s a lot of dentists and front desk people and office managers that are tasked with making good decisions on digital marketing, but they don’t know a thing about it. You’ve been there because we hired you more than five years ago now, I believe. We did it because you’re an awesome person and you’re an awesome communicator, not because you were an awesome marketer. By the way, you’re not our ad specialist or a designer still. That’s not because you don’t know what they are now. Can you tell us a little bit about that journey from just not knowing anything and specifically, what are some things that you did not know and you probably think, my mom doesn’t know about marketing?

Holly Kail:

Just a little background. I came from 15 years of work in emergency services as a 911 dispatcher, trainer, and supervisor, and also a little bit of EMT stuff in there. Marketing was 100% the polar opposite of the world I had been in for the last 15 years. But I made a conscious decision that I wanted to do something different and needed to find a place to do that. I came on initially with Pro Impressions as an Administrative Assistant and was really willing to do anything, just to kind of get my foot in the door and to learn a new industry. When I started, I naively thought that websites just happened. That sounds so stupid in hindsight, but I honestly didn’t know that there was somebody who designed them. I didn’t know that there was such a thing as programming. I thought they came from the cloud. Nobody ever told me what even the cloud was.

Jonathan Fashbaugh:

It’s a website stork.

Holly Kail:

I was really, really naive when I started at Pro Impressions. My knowledge obviously has evolved in the last five to six years and now I understand a lot more, but it is such a complex thing that I think as a consumer we take for granted. That is my interaction with websites prior to working here was as a consumer and so every ounce of perspective that I came in with was really as a user and not anything on the backend. I think I am very similar to a lot of our clients in the sense that I just think you push the button and it works.

Jonathan Fashbaugh:

And hopefully it does. We have a lot of different concepts in terms of websites and domain names and things like that. I remember we’ve gone over kind of the relationship between those. I think that was one of those things that you didn’t get how those came together, right?

Holly Kail:

There were several aha moments, I think, even in the first week that I started to work with you and the rest of the team, just in kind of understanding the very, very basics of how things worked. I didn’t even know what a domain name was prior to coming to you. I just thought you had a web address in that. I don’t even know how I thought you got that.

Jonathan Fashbaugh:

Just for the benefit of people watching, because I do believe that we will have people watching this that say, “Well, yeah, a domain name is a website, right?” Well, I get what you’re saying, but not really, not technically. The .com in the top of your browser or in the Google results that you might see is called your domain name, and then that represents what people would type in to get to your website. But you can change your domain name. You can have like giantteeth or cool.com and say, “Well, that was silly. Let’s go with DrSchmidt.com instead.” As long as DrSchmidt.com isn’t taken, you can reserve that with what’s called a registrar. Those are the companies that house the domain. But they don’t necessarily house your website.

Jonathan Fashbaugh:

You have a computer that usually it’s your web company controls that computer and that’s called a server where your website is files are served from. Then, when people get on the phone, on their browser, that’s another word that you probably have heard of but don’t really understand what’s happening, when you’re on your phone or on your computer, on a browser, what’s happening is people are using Google or typing it in on their phone and in their browser and then that’s calling to the server via the domain name.

Jonathan Fashbaugh:

I mean, there are just an insane number of moving parts that I think the problem I see, if you don’t understand the complexity is it’s easy to just assume that first of all, the people that you hire can easily do this because it’s easy. It just works. The reality is it can be broken and it can be done poorly. But then the flip side is to do it well, it takes expertise and expertise takes time and money. So you don’t necessarily, I mean, we’re not the most expensive company out there, but we’re not the cheapest and it’s because we don’t cut corners. Tell me about your experience with Google. You said you’d been using websites primarily as a consumer. How did you think Google worked?

Holly Kail:

I think that was just a foreign concept to me as well. One of the things you just mentioned too, with even the bigteeth.com, I didn’t know, prior to working here, that we could type in bigteeth.com and get routed to DrSchmidt.com or whatever you just said. That too was a different or a learning curve for me, just to realize that we have clients who have multiple domain names that point-

Jonathan Fashbaugh:

Neither of which are bigteeth.com or DrSchmidt.com, by the way. I don’t know who owns them. If you get random traffic from these, you’re welcome.

Holly Kail:

Sorry about that. In Google, I honestly just do that you typed in what it was you were looking for and hit Enter, and it was a crapshoot what it came up with, was what I thought. I didn’t realize even in my search results that some of those searches were paid for, or those results were paid for, sorry. I didn’t know that there was such a thing as a paid ad. I thought the ads were something that ran on the side of a webpage once you were on it. I didn’t realize that you could pay to be the first thing that I might click on. I didn’t understand that there were things like organic results and that people worked really hard to make sure they show up on those pages. One of the things that I heard when I first started was they’re in the three pack. I thought that might be a website gang that somebody joined. I don’t know what that meant.

Holly Kail:

I now know what that is and so when I, as a consumer now that I search, and now that I have more education about this, I definitely don’t click on those paid ads. I tend to search for who got there organically. Sometimes, I’ll click on the paid stuff if it’s something that I’m looking for and it doesn’t matter who I go to, but oftentimes I take the time to look. But my family had no clue when I would come home and say, “Hey, did you know that there’s this little baby word ad next to thing?” They didn’t have a clue either.

Jonathan Fashbaugh:

I like to pick on my mom sometimes for that, too. I mean, and I think, you guys and my mom are perfect examples. We can’t assume that one person knows or understands how the internet works or uses things in the same way that we do because you’re right, my mom doesn’t know that there’s ads, or probably doesn’t know that those people are paying in order to be there and that might mean something. Now, I’ve heard you say you scroll past those ads, but a lot of people don’t, and like you said, you sometimes click on them. More and more I find myself clicking on them too because I’m like, they’re right there, they’re getting me directly to what I want, and they want me to click on it; otherwise, I wouldn’t be paying for that so sure I will click on it. Even though it feels like I’m skipping over people that have maybe earned their right to be there, but those listings are changing too. SEO, what does SEO stand for? Hotseat.

Holly Kail:

In my 911 world, that equated to a call type, which is typically a crime that’s been committed, and so when you used to throw out acronyms, those all meant something completely different to me than they did to you all. Now, SEO means search engine optimization. But again, my naive mind, when I initially started just heard call types. It was very foreign. Again, even search engine optimization was a concept that I didn’t realize was so important in creating websites. I didn’t realize that these search terms that I think of in my brain, like best dentist for veneers in Colorado, was something that you all have to put time and effort into to show up for. This is all a very foreign thing to me.

Jonathan Fashbaugh:

Well, and the tough thing is, lay people like dentists who are trying to understand concepts like SEO, because you’re not in it all the time, there’s no easy way for you to stay up to date on the changes with it too. That’s really what we put on ourselves at Pro Impressions for our member dentists is that we’re going to be the ones who stay on top of the trends and let you know about the important things that come across the wire. But Google is now, I mean, it used to be like there was a big change and then a whole year could go by before there was another algorithm update. Now, literally the algorithm is changing every day, and it could be construed to mean every hour because of the machine learning that they’re doing, where they’re figuring out, “Well, how did people interact with this result? What feedback did we get?” Then, okay, let’s reiterate that and make changes.

Jonathan Fashbaugh:

There was a movie that Google put out called Millions of Questions and Who Has the Answers. Or they should have picked a better title because it’s so hard to remember. But anyway, they were talking about how they have this restrictive process for big changes to be manually pushed out, but that their robot changes all the time. How do you keep up with that as a dentist? The answer is you don’t. You have to trust someone to help keep you on top of things. Those ads are called PPC and, again, no one outside of our industry knows what PPC means. It sounds like a drug.

Holly Kail:

It really does.

Jonathan Fashbaugh:

They kind of are. Hook me up with some of those users you pay per click. Then, the website metrics, like visitors and users and clicks, hits, and sessions, when we’re tracking traffic and stuff like that, do you remember the process of what it was like to learn how that worked?

Holly Kail:

Well, I remember even just reviewing some of our clients’ Google analytics, I was just blown away at the amount of information that is tracked. I was also fascinated when we started bringing in some of the heat map testing that we did on sites that you can literally see where I stop on a page as a user and what kind of interaction I’m providing the page based on where I’m scrolling. I didn’t know that any of that could be monitored. I didn’t know that you could see that.

Holly Kail:

Really the whole thing is fascinating, but it is so complex. One of the things that I’m grateful for working for Pro Impressions is that we have experts in those fields. As an employee and as a team member, that’s not my area of expertise and it doesn’t have to be because we have people who have the knowledge and who have just the whereabouts to even understand the data that we get, that are looking for data, and looking to provide better service based on that data. We have people who specialize in that, and I’m very grateful that that is not an area that we skimp on so I don’t have to be an expert at that. I can be good at what I do, and they’re great at what they do.

Jonathan Fashbaugh:

We do have now tools that help bridge the gap too with ProView Analytics. What we’re doing is helping our offices understand and just get bite-size information about all that wealth of data that’s there. Then, of course, with our packages, we’re able to come alongside you, the dentist, and give you the degree of control and investment that you want to have in that. You have access to all the data to hold us accountable, and that’s important to us. But then we come alongside you and make sure that you understand what, what you’re investing in, you know where you’re winning, where you’re losing, and what’s happening with the results of those campaigns. If you haven’t looked into ProView Analytics, go to our website. If you have any questions, call us at (970) 672-1212 Hopefully you and I can connect. Holly, thanks for being here.

Holly Kail:

You’re welcome. It’s been a pleasure to work with the company.

Jonathan Fashbaugh:

It’s been a pleasure to work with you. Thank you for all of you watching. Please hit that Subscribe button for us. If you liked what you saw, or if you know someone who could benefit from this, please subscribe and share that content with them. We’d love to help them as well. All right, guys, that’s it for us today. You take care.

Holly Kail:

Bye.