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Fred Joyal on dental marketing guy show talking about the Sirona deal with 1-800-DENTIST, how you can be remarkable in your dental practice, and how CEREC can help you be perceived as a dentist who cares.
Justin: Welcome to the Dental Marketing Guy Show. I’m Justin the dental marketing guy and today we have this huge guest. I’m hugely honored to introduce Fred Joyal. He is, as you probably know, the founder of 1-800-Dentist. He has been a huge key influencer in the dental marketing industry. Since very early in the days when dentist even started considering marketing. Fred’s basically a historian on everything that’s gone on in the changes in the industry, the technological changes. Everything from taking 1-800-Dentist into its future as 1800 numbers become less relevant and our digital age is taking over. He’s gonna tell us all about the history of marketing in dentistry, what he thinks the future is, what’s going on right now, who are the movers and shakers What you need to be doing in your practice in order to stand out from everyone else and man it’s just such a huge honor to be talking to you. How are you, Fred?
Fred: Really good, Justin. I’m happy to be on your show. It should be a lot of fun, there’s tons to talk about obviously, in the marketing world of dentistry and my company’s celebrating its 30th year. I can’t even believe it myself, that it was back at 86 that we started advertising.
Justin: That’s excellent, that’s excellent. Time does fly, doesn’t it? I mean, well.
Fred: Yeah, that’s it. It’s a big chunk and it’s, you know, half my life. I’ve been doing this and that with more to come.
Justin: Well, yeah ad I’d love to talk to you about, you know, what’s more to come. That’s gonna be really exciting to me. But for the viewers who haven’t really, aren’t too familiar with what you’ve done in the world of dentistry and marketing. Could you tell us a little bit about the history of how you got into 1800Dentist, why you got into 1800Dentist, and what’s changed as time went on, you know.
Fred: Well back in 86 dentist had really just started advertising a little bit more than Yellow Pages and so we came in and we started doing radio advertising, in the television advertising, creating a referral service for a dentist and there’s a ton of resistance to it. There were people going “You’re really denigrating the profession and, you know, you’re harming our image in the consumers mind. We’re professionals, we don’t do this sort of stuff.” And then eventually it’s come full circle because I had dentists who used to come up to me and say exactly that, at the trade show. And I had a dentist come up to me about a month ago and he said “I just want to tell you” because I talked about that in electron, he was in it and he said “I want to tell you, I was one of those guys” and he said “I’m here to apologize and tell you that I was wrong. You’ve done more for this profession in terms of promoting that any society’s ever done.” We spent the half a million dollars promoting dentistry with 1800Dentist at this point where nobody has spent that much and what happens is more people go to their own dentist because of me. Then call me, looking for a dentist. So I believe we’ve had a tremendous, positive impact and we certainly helped thousands of our member over the years to grow their practices. But the evolution of things is gone from what, we did, we were on television for 20 years is our mains day of advertising and now it’s probably a third of what we do, you know. We’re deep in social media, we’re deep in online search at this point. So, the landscape is completely changed and of course the dentist all feel the need to do advertising at this point to do some sort of promotional marketing. Whether it’s through advertising like print, television, radio, buying clicks. Things like that but they feel the need and they’re not wrong to promote themselves.
Justin: Yeah, yeah. And what do you think caused that change? Were you just seeing things before they happen or do you think 1800Dentist actually hanged the game?
Fred: I think we were not completely responsible for changing the game. But we were really powerful influence in the fact that the consumer was needed to be reminded to take care of their teeth and that there were options available. And so I think that a lot of dentists believed “Oh we will just do what they asks us to do or they’ll show up when they show up and we’ll try to remind them to come.” And it’s been an opportunity to really expand the industry and of course with the advent of implants and cosmetics and single visit dentistry. All of these things have really changed how people are perceiving dentistry and you know cosmetics is a big thing that’s certainly, appearance whitening has had a huge influence on dentistry that people are suddenly much more concerned about having white teeth…
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