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Keys to a Successful Dental Practice in this Digital Age

Are you spending a lot on traditional advertising to promote your dental practice only to find you’re constantly having too much empty space in your calendar? Did you know there’s a much better way that would enable you to grow your dental practice faster? Believe it or not, you can grow a successful dental practice that can earn you twice or even three times your current income by adopting a more tech-savvy approach to market yourself.

How a Dental Practice Turned into a Multi-million Dollar Business

Dr. Williams is a pillar in the community and one of Atlanta’s most sought-after practitioner, management coach and marketing guru in the dental industry. In one of his interviews, he revealed some valuable insights into the dental practice – how he grew from running a well-paying dental practice to building a five million dollar business.

He started out just like any other dentist. As time went by, his practice grew and became one of the best in providing care and quality service to people in the community. At that time he was averaging one and a half million dollars per year. But it wasn’t until he decided to move and start over that he saw his income grow by more than double.

His secret? Making his presence felt and taking an online approach to marketing. His website took off at the height of internet adoption in the late 90s and he became known to people as the tech-savvy dental practitioner in the area. It enabled him to expand his reach and quickly grow his client base, basically from scratch.

One proven technique he used which gave him 150 new patients per month was to build a sales funnel. Ninety percent of people who came to his practice became regular clients. It was effective because it allowed people to get to know him even before they met him. We’ll get into the specifics of funnel-building later in this article using Small Business Dream sales and marketing automation software.

Sales and marketing automation coupled with email, social media, and content marketing helped grow his dental practice from zero to five million dollars per year, much quicker than using the old school methods of traditional advertising. You too can become greatly successful by adopting a modern approach to promoting yourself and your dental practice.

Here are the keys to building a successful dental practice in this digital age.

Become a Perpetual Learner

Dr. Williams describes what he called “alpha dentist” as someone who’s eager to learn more and has that inner drive to be the best. A well-rounded dentist equips himself with all the necessary skills to become a competent hygienist, general dentist, pediatric dentist, orthodontist, prosthodontist, periodontist, and endodontist.

Learning these skills takes time and a lot of patience. But by being more versatile, as opposed to just doing basic dentistry, you’ll be serving a much broader audience and hence,bigger income for your dental practice.

Being a perpetual learner also means acquiring managerial and marketing skills necessary for scaling up, e.g. setting up additional operatories, hiring more staff, acquiring new customers, and so on. This includes creating systems (working on the business), and becoming a tech-savvy dental practitioner. Having these skill sets helps build your reputation as an expert on the subject and bring your dental practice closer to the community.

Grow Your Audience Online

Having a blog or website for your dental practice will set you apart from all other dentists who don’t have an online presence. People nowadays spend most of their time on the internet and social media. When they need a root canal, tooth alignment, or high quality veneer, they search the web for answers.

It also increases your credibility. People can see your track record online such as special trainings, before and after photos, and be able to find useful information about oral and dental health.

You can use your spare time setting up a website or blog, especially during slow months. People who are new to web design can benefit from sales and marketing automation software that comes with its own web editor like Small Business Dream. Choose a template specific to your industry and customize it to your heart’s content. However, if you don’t have much time for it, you can reach them and have it set up for you.

Promote Your Practice through Automation

Sales funnels and autoresponders is a big thing in the business world right now. They can be used in so many ways and in many different situations. For instance, you can use sales funnels to lead your visitors into your practice after signing up on your mailing list. For best results, we recommend that you have a website and/or micro-site, and a landing page.

Small Business Dream allows you to build your own funnel and automate certain actions based on a given response from one stage to the other. In your Introduction page for example, you can have them choose between getting more information on maintaining oral and dental health, and availing of your dental services. One of those responses can either build traffic for your site or lead to an immediate sale.

Autoresponders helps keep in touch with your clients, particularly on procedures requiring follow up such as root canal or tooth alignment. For instance, you can set up an email autoresponder to remind them about their schedule a day before the appointment and ask for confirmation. You can book your clients who answered “yes” ahead of time. This makes them feel important and cared for. You can do the same for other clients who only want checkups once every six months. Set up an autoresponder to remind them that they should have one already.

Establish Good Relationship with the Community

You’ll grow your dental practice twice as fast if you become a pillar of the community. Reach out and network with other people in the community. Offer free dental checkups in schools or free dental services for athletic teams. Make your presence felt and get involved as much as possible. Take this as an opportunity to market your skills and your dental practice and set yourself as a valuable asset to the community.

Conclusion

The digital age opens up a world of opportunities for practitioners in the dental industry. The future of marketing is here. We offer a much better way so you won’t have to settle for expensive ads that doesn’t guarantee a return on your investments. Get more ideas on how you can use sales and marketing automation at Small Business Dream and start growing your dental practice like never before.

Creating a Digital Customer Experience for Your Small Business

Digital customer experience (DCX) is a buzzword among tech businesses and online marketers. Oftentimes, we associate the phrase with online shopping and e-commerce websites like Amazon. Nowadays, it’s becoming more popular among traditional businesses to have a web presence and connect with potential customers.

Let’s look at how customer experience has evolved over the years, and later we’ll get into how business owners can modernize customer experience to meet the demands of digitally enabled customers.

Customer Experience Then and Now

Customer experience typically starts with a customer walking by and getting a sense of what’s inside our business. Does it look nice and tidy? Do store people greet customers by the entrance? What about the customer service? Does it make them feel comfortable, important, and cared for? It’s the overall perception about the business during the customer’s journey. A great customer experience can be the turning point from being just a casual buyer to a lifetime source of revenue for the company.

The influx of mobile technology and subsequent growth in mobile users takes customer experience to a whole new level. Innovation gave rise to digital customer experience as businesses take their brand into the virtual space and create a seamless experience for both digital and physical customer engagement.

Bookings for hotel and accommodation are a classic example. A good digital customer experience meant customers could easily find their hotels by price range, ratings, and location, and be able to book their stay and make frictionless transactions all within the app or website. Moreover, they should be able to redeem their points and make cashless transactions through the app on-site and in-store.

Small Business Dream is built around the concept of providing users with the best digital customer experience through its digital marketplace (business directory) which also doubles as a mobile wallet.

Digitizing the Customer Experience

Here’s some way you can create a digital customer experience for your small business.

1. Engage with customers on multiple channels

Multi-channel marketing has a lot of advantages compared to just one type of customer communication. Traditional advertising is pretty much a thing of the past. Today, we need to grab people’s attention through social media, providing useful content (blogs, tutorials,etc.), and using top-of-mind strategies.

Your customers’ journey begins when they pause at your catchy post on Facebook, watch your videos on YouTube, subscribe to your mailing list, or click your page on Google’s search engine results. Webhosting sites, content management systems (CMS), and sales and marketing automation enables small businesses to build an online presence much quicker and easier at a very reasonable cost. Small Business Dream sales and marketing automation provide business owners with a little bit of everything from micro-sites, landing pages, autoresponders, follow up series, Facebook and Twitter integration, and so on.

2. Focus more on inbound marketing

Inbound marketing is more likely to succeed in this day and age compared to outbound marketing particularly among millennials. According to survey it may take around 3 to 18 months from initial engagement before they come up with a decision. It’s a continuous process of educating, following up, and sustaining their interest all throughout the journey.

Outbound marketing still has its place, although they’re still pretty much “hit-and-miss” even on the web. How many times did you have to skip a YouTube ad or got distracted by a Google ad because it failed to reach its intended audience? We call this “interruption” marketing. On the other hand, inbound marketing pulls people in (not push) by giving them exactly what they want, when they want it, and how.

One of the most commonly used methods include content marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM), as well as using customer relationship management (CRM), and sales and marketing automation tools. Say, you want your potential customers to receive updates specific to their own interests. Small Business Dream’s survey builder will enable you to segment your contacts, as well as sales funnels to quickly assess their levels of interest.

3. Get your business listed on a mobile marketplace

Your small business needs to be searchable. You can work on improving your Google search ranking through SEO. But if you want a faster way without having to wait for months or years to rank, business directories is the way to go. Unlike Google, you’ll have better chances being listed on business directories like Small Business Dream Business Finder app as it allows users to find your business through local searches instead of getting buried underneath in Google search results.

Mobile marketplace appeals to mobile users and digitally enabled customers who want fast and easy way to find businesses around the city. They also help in making buying decisions based on ratings and comments from customers, creating a much better digital customer experience for app users. It can also take advantage of Google or Apple’s push notification service which would allow you to have direct access to your mobile users’ phone screens.

With Small Business Dream, you can have your business listed in the Business Finder app or be able to send push notifications to app users as a Small Business Dream sales and marketing automation software subscriber.

Conclusion

Creating a digital customer experience is more than ever within reach for many small businesses. With better technologies in sales and marketing automation and more people getting access to mobile services, we can bring our businesses closer to people and level the playing field for everyone. You can take your first step by visiting Small Business Dream and learn how you can create a digital customer experience for your small business.

How Small Businesses Can Benefit from Push Notifications

Push notifications have re-surfaced as a cost-effective way to increase and maintain customer engagement since its first launch in 2009 by Apple, and Google in 2010. Some of the reasons points to the recent explosion in the mobile markets and greater internet access. With consistent growth in mobile users, it’s only a matter of time before mobile becomes the new standard in customer acquisition and customer engagement.

Customers Have Gone Mobile

We bet, most, if not all of your customers are mobile users. Small businesses have been increasingly aware of this fact. According to Global Digital 2019 reports, 5.112 billion or two-thirds of the world’s population are mobile users. This, coupled with the rapid growth of social media makes mobile marketing not only useful, but a necessity for every small business.

Tech-savvy business owners are no stranger to email and social media marketing, yet many small businesses still haven’t seen the potential or shy away from push notifications. They work extremely well when combined with sales and marketing automation and, when it comes to real-time customer engagement, no method comes close to having a well-designed and well-executed push notification mobile marketing strategy.

How Push Notifications Work

One of the defining characteristics of push notifications is its ability to be seen through the user’s “heads up display,” which gives it a distinct advantage over email, SMS, and social media. These very short messages, typically 1 or 2 lines of text or around 80 characters, have been contextualized for the individual user. They can also be time-sensitive and thus relevant for a specific time only.

One example would be, “Hey Sarah, we have added 50 credits in your wallet for today’s year-end Sale. Shop now.”

There are several approaches to using push notifications as a mobile strategy for business in addition to email and social media marketing. Small Business Dream has created an app that is perfect for networking events. It allows you to push a button which will send the recipient a vcard with all your information while letting you collect some important data about that person. You never know where this connection will go or if this person will become a client, a partner, or a supplier.

Users on the customer’s side need to download and use the app in order to get notified via Google Cloud Messaging (GCM) or Apple Push Notification Service (APNS). They may or may not have the option to get notified upon install. Conversely, users may uninstall the app if they don’t want to be notified again. Use caution so as not to annoy your recipients and cause a lot of uninstalls.

Simple Push Notification Strategies You can Use

Before going on with the specific examples, be sure to observe the following when designing your push messages. They should be:

segmented
relevant
catchy
compelling
concise

Here’s some uses for push notifications for your small business:

1. Seasonal goods and services. Your messages can be tailored based on what’s currently in season. For instance, you can send push notification during hot summer days like, “Love the sun today? Stay cool and fresh with our stunning hats and sunglasses at 10% off.” This applies to special days as well, like Father’s day or Thanksgiving.

2. Markdowns on selected items. Your old inventory could be taking valuable space and you want to get rid of them as fast as possible to maintain your cash flow. You can get help by sending push messages to a specific category about a price drop. Your message can go something like, “Hey Mark, as a Nike fan, you can get 20% on selected items when you drop by at ABC Store today.”

3. Reminders for inactive app users. The nice thing about using a push notification service is it enables you to check on who uses your app more often and those who don’t (the app interacts with the app server and GCM or APNS with each launch). You can then use the data to send an automated push notification message such as, “Jeff, you have 50 unused credits in your wallet. And we’re adding 50 more because it’s Season End Sale. So hurry. Shop now.”

4. User feedback. Customer survey is an excellent tool for improving customer engagement, allowing you to segment your contacts further and be more relevant to your users. Know their preferences and ask about their experience using the product or service. Something like, “Hi Dennis, your experience matters to us. Tell us how you feel so we can better improve our service.” Insert a link below that says, “Take Survey Now” to take them to your survey page.

5. Geofencing. A bit more advanced, but if your app can pull this off, geofencing can work miracles for brick and mortar stores. By default, Google tracks your customer’s location, and you can use this feature to trigger a push notification message, say when a customer enters your store 5 times. Depending on which category they fall into, you can send a push message like, “Bet you’d like our men’s apparel on sale at 10% off.”

Conclusion

Push notification can work wonders for your business if handled well. Regardless of marketing technology, be it sales and marketing automation, or marketing strategies like email and social media marketing, your creativity and sensitivity to customers’ needs will set you apart from other businesses. It’s all about planning and execution. For small businesses that are struggling or want to increase their sales, download mobile apps like Small Business Dream that combines the power of sales and marketing automation and push notifications, enabling businesses to engage with customers on multiple touchpoints.

Turning Slow Months into Opportunities to Grow Your Business

Businesses aren’t always bustling with customers buying. Some businesses are in a lull during summer and post-holiday winter. People’s spending habits change. They go on summer trips, spend more time outdoors or they had to pinch the dollar after spending everything for the holiday season. But there are things you can do to prepare your business for changing spending habits to help see you through the dry spell. In fact, this could be an opportunity to set your business for massive growth in time for the “days of plenty.”

1. Improving the customer experience

You should always be working on ways to improve your customer’s experience. Set a priority system, if you haven’t done already. If you’re a brick and mortar store, move merchandise a bit to improve traffic and freshen your look. Set the vibe with posters, slogans, or works of art. Note how your customers shop, what they pick up, what they look at and where they wander. Anything you could think of to improve your customers’ overall experience, slowdowns can give you that opportunity.

Say you’re running a restaurant that serves Italian cuisine. Having replicas of Italian renaissance art or paintings of popular destinations can lend a traditional Italian vibe to your restaurant. Customers will start coming in, not just for the pasta, but for the whole experience. It’s one of the keys to Starbucks’ worldwide success as an iconic brand. People come not just for the daily dose of coffee; it’s the whole coffee experience they’ve grown to know and love.

Same goes if you have an e-commerce site or online store. You can use downtimes to improve your website by making it easier for customers to navigate or make buying and paying more frictionless. This brings us to our next point.

2. Working on your online presence

There’s no excuse for not having a web presence, particularly during slow months. Popular webhosting platforms have made it easier than ever to create your own. If you want to test it out, try using a sales and marketing automation tool that comes with its own page builder/editor like Small Business Dream. Unlike most generic webhosting platforms, Small Business Dream is made specifically for small business owners like you.

You don’t have to start from scratch. If you’re a restaurant owner, simply choose Restaurant from a list of templates, and you’ll be greeted with a web page specific to your industry, complete with background and featured images, sample text, and call-to-action. Slap your brand and logo to make it truly yours. Jazz it up with pictures of your mouthwatering dishes, and promote your site through email and social media.

Once you’ve established an online presence, you become more searchable, enabling your business to gain more clients through online visits, thus maintaining your cash flow even during slow months.

3. Empowering your employees

Use their spare time to level up and acquire new skills. Teach them how to be a sales and marketing pro. With cutting edge technology in sales and marketing automation, we can condense the learning process significantly. What has taken many top earners and marketing legends to master can now be learned in less than a year at just a fraction of the cost (before we have Internet, they had to spend hours finding leads and qualify each one over the phone).

Think of how many hours you’ll save by getting your team up to speed. They can reach their goal, say 10 to 20 leads per day, in just one or two hours instead of eight. Multiply that with the number of hours per week and the number of sales people in your team and see how your company can save hundreds of hours for other productive endeavors. This could mean more sales and bigger opportunities to grow your business.

4. Finding business partners

Successful businesses are built through partnerships. In retail businesses, this could mean finding the best suppliers that would allow you to get the highest profit margins, or in the case of auto repair shops, provide you with both high quality aftermarket and genuine OEM parts at a lower price. Having less customers during these slow months means you’ll have more time looking for these people.

There are many ways to find partners. One way involves finding business partners through social media. Of course, not everyone on social media are genuinely interested teaming up with you (some aren’t even real people, i.e., bots and fake accounts). You’ll need a tool to curate your “likes” or “follows” to see if their businesses do exist or if they really want to build serious business relationship with you. Small Business Dream offers a way to curate your leads through the Social Connect function. This allows you to find potential partners and weed out bad ones in one sweep.

A second option involves meeting up with people in business conferences, expos, and networking events. This requires social skills, a compelling business idea, and the ability to handle objections. This type of event allows you to network with likeminded people who you can partner with – or at the very least become a customer. You’ll have to own this skill through experience and gaining a lot of exposure in social events.

Conclusion

Regardless of the industry you’re in, you’ll find many practical uses of sales and marketing automation for your business. Struggling to find high quality leads? Train your realtors and insurance agents to set up sales funnels and survey pages to qualify unlimited number of leads. Other businesses like home improvement, dining, beauty care, and repair service, can also find lots of creative ways of using sales and marketing automation. Need more sales ideas? Small Business Dream can lend a hand through their mentoring services and help oversee your sales people.

As you can see, slowdowns doesn’t necessarily mean you’re being less productive; you’re simply channeling your resources to further your business goals over the long haul.

How Small Businesses Will Pave the Way To Adopt Cryptocurrency For The Mainstream

There’s been a lot of talk about cryptocurrency in recent years, but not many people can actually use it to pay for everyday goods and services – yet. Most are into it just for the quick buck while some were just HODLing and waiting for mainstream adoption. However, more small businesses are accepting crypto.

If we know that cryptocurrency is here to stay, how do you prepare your business for the coming of this new era in cashless transactions? And when is the right time to start learning and actually using cryptocurrency in our day to day transactions?

Increased Adoption for Business Use

Cryptocurrency has been adopted by many small businesses across Western, European, and some Asian countries with more than 14,000 venues worldwide currently accepting cryptocurrency as of late. Adoption has doubled from 2015 to the present and big institutional investors are stepping in this 2019.

Data from Coinmap.org reveals an interesting growth in businesses accepting cryptocurrency payments from 2013 to the present:

2015 – 6,970 venues
2016 – 8,035 venues (up by 15.28%)
2017 – 11,189 venues (up by 39.25%)
2018 – 14,124 venues (up by 26.15%)

Small businesses are starting to impact mainstream adoption and we could see a dramatic change on how we do businesses in the next 3 to 5 years. Businesses will have to adapt quickly if they are to stay competitive and relevant with their new breed of customers (esp., millennials and tech-savvy users).

Here’s how small businesses are paving the way towards mainstream adoption:

Easy access to cashless transactions. Before cryptocurrency, banks and financial institutions have the sole authority over who may or may not have access to their financial services. Fast forward to our present day, people are now able to transact peer-to-peer with their mobile phones and have access to cryptocurrency in a multitude of ways from mining, to crypto-exchanges, online and over-the-counter (OTC) markets, airdrops, bounty hunting, and the list goes on. Small businesses help further the cause by making it much easier for people to spend their cryptocurrencies much like their debit and credit cards.

Change people’s attitude about crypto. It’s hard to imagine living on cryptocurrency until someone walks the talk and shows you how he did it. Olaf Carlson-Wee, former Head of Risk at Coinbase, proved it is possible to live on Bitcoin with help from businesses accepting Bitcoin payments like Overstock, CheapAir, Shopify, and Newegg. Small businesses are also doing their share by usinig cryptocurrency gateways and processors like Coinbase and BitPay, enabling them to get paid in cryptocurrency just like with any other currency. Users will stop thinking cryptocurrency only as a store of value and start using it the way it supposed to work.

Accelerate growth in cryptocurrency users. Cryptocurrency’s market cap is nowhere near to fiat – at least, for now. But what if people started using cryptocurrency to pay their bills, groceries, and stuff instead of being just a store of value? Imagine what this can do to a cryptocurrency’s value. Businesses will continue to move cryptocurrency forward by helping the unbanked to get as much access to cashless transactions as people with bank accounts. Check out useofbitcoin.info for a list of small businesses currently accepting Bitcoin payments over the internet or go to coinmap.org to find local shops and stores accepting cryptocurrency payments near you.

Dealing with Fees, Confirmation Times, and Volatility

Business owners who are new to cryptocurrency are reluctant to the idea of accepting cryptocurrency when they hear about fees, confirmation times, and volatility associated with it. But this will be a thing of the past with recent developments in second-layer solutions (e.g., Lightning Network) and payment processors (e.g., BitPay).

Here’s how small businesses can start accepting cryptocurrencies and their pros and cons:

1. Accepting cryptocurrency payments through mobile wallets –Pretty straightforward. Business owners setup their own wallets like Copay (Bitcoin only) or Jaxx (multi-currency) and have customers send their payments straight to the wallet address by scanning a QR code. It’s the old way of doing things, which can have some advantages and disadvantages for the business owner.

Pros:

private keys are stored securely within the device
customers pay for transaction fees
no service fees

Cons:

risks associated with unconfirmed transactions (3-6 confirmations are needed to be secure)
faster confirmation means higher transaction fees for the customer
no protection from volatility

2. Cryptocurrency merchant services – Merchant services like BitPay reduces the risk associated with cryptocurrency’s volatility while making it easier for both customers and business owners to send and receive cryptocurrencies. Small businesses can now have the option to take cryptocurrency payment as is, or convert them straightaway into its fiat value during the sale. There would be some tradeoffs for using the service but in return, business owner will also get some of the good stuff.

Pros:

users own the private keys in some payment processor app (e.g. BitPay)
risk associated with volatility can be reduced significantly
fast and secure

Cons

service fees
still requires confirmation (BitPay requires at least 6)
some issues with compatibility

3. Payment channels through lightning wallets – Although still considered nascent, second-layer solutions such as Lightning technology is already showing a lot of promise. One of the earliest implementations such as Éclair wallet allows merchants to open channels (which are basically just smart contracts) with regular customers and transact indefinitely with as many micro-transactions as they wish without worrying about fees or confirmation times, and only pays transaction fees when closing the channel (time lock expires or both parties decides to close the channel).

Pros:

“lightning-fast” transactions
near-zero transaction fees
users keep their private keys

Cons

still in the works and are mostly experimental
may require business owners to run their own lightning nodes (partial or full copy of an updated blockchain ledger)
same with using regular mobile or hardware wallet, users are pretty much exposed to volatility.

Conclusion

There’s never been a perfect time to learn about cryptocurrency than today. It’s only a matter of time before cryptocurrency is used for everyday transactions. It could be just around the corner or we might have to wait for another five to ten years. Either way, it sure won’t hurt if people will start learning about cryptocurrency as early as now and be a step ahead rather than trying to catch up with the competition.

If you’re a small business, Metropolee Team Building System (MetroTBS) can help you build your customer base by making it easier to reach out to new and existing customers. MetroTBS has a business finder app to help you connect with your customers and with over 100 features, the possibilities are limitless.