Howard: It is just a huge honor for me today to be podcasting interviewing Pras Murthy all the way from San Diego, California. He was born and raised just 90 miles down the street from me in Tucson, Arizona and attended Pomona College in California where he graduated in 2005 with a double degree in Math and Philosophy. I have- I don't think I've ever met anybody with a Math, Philosophy major. Shortly after, he began working at a Man- Mathnasium Franchise?
Pras: Mathnasium, yup.
Howard: Oh, Mathnasium. So, that's with your Math major?
Pras: Exactly. There's actually one and Ahwatukee
Howard: Oh, okay. I know exactly what you're talking about. And you lived in Scottsdale for what? 6 years?
Pras: Yup, just about 6 to 7.
Howard: Roughly a year later, you bought the franchise for $8,000 over the next 6 years, he built and ran the business selling it in 2012 for a 120 grand and moved to Las Vegas and joined his business partners in what would become Doctor Multimedia. Pras is co-founder and co-owner of the online marketing company for doctors. Pras helps of thousands of doctors across many specialties, manage their online marketing from websites to social media to search engine optimization. Doctor Multimedia is a one-stop shop to manage your online presence. In 2016, Pras moved to San Diego, California to open Doctor Multimedia's newest office in Del Mar. Pras currently lives there with his dog, Wally, and enjoys driving the beautiful southern California coast each day. So, thanks for joining me today.
Pras: Oh, my pleasure. Thank you for having me it's quite the honor to be here.
Howard: Oh, where's Wally? That's what I want to know first.
Pras: Well, Wally is behind these curtains sleeping away on this Sunday morning.
Howard: So, you know, dentists you know- we only went to school for 8 years because we wanna help somebody get out of pain, they broke their tooth, they need to get sleep you know, and so I'm always trying to say that's awesome but you got to focus on the business and the best way to get more toothaches, I mean a fireman wants a house on fire, a policeman wants to catch a bad guy. The only way you're gonna get a lot of people walking through your door is no longer the Yellow Pages, it's this online stuff and I think the millennials get it 10 times more than all the old dogs like me who are 54, but what- what do you think dentistry to know about online marketing in dentistry? First of all, you're- you guys are 25% dentistry but you started in vet, I'm just curious why did you guys start in vet first?
Pras: Yeah. So, you know, there's- the real answer in there is the business answer. The real answer is, my business partners and I we were messing around the internet like a lot of people fresh out of college. We were passionate about Arizona basketball, you know that is the name of the game down in Tucson. We were doing it as a hobby much like yourself, we had a forum, we were producing content and one of our good friends saw that. And he was a veterinarian and he asked us for help with his website and the first time he asked we said, "No way. That is the last thing we would ever wanted to do, help you with your boring, you know, veterinary hospital website". But he kept at it and then eventually, just as a favor to him, he treated all of our dogs, you know, we said, "Alright, let's give this a shot".
And what we ended up doing was, we brought the same principles that we were using on the basketball side, to his website. You know, at the time we didn't really know what would work and what wouldn't work but the basics of it were regular content, interactive websites, the ability for patients and clients to comment. And this was, you know, roughly 2007-2008. So, pretty early in that sense. You know, thankfully we were able to help his business grow. I'd love to take all the credit that he went from about 2.8 million to 3.5 to 4.2 over the course of 3 to 4 years. And the person who owned his practice in Las Vegas happened to own 16 others as well. So, when he caught wind of what we were doing, he gave us about half of his practices at that time and that unofficially was, what now is the beginning of Doctor Multimedia. At that time it was just a fun hobby on the side, a way for some friends to get together, you know, have a little bit of residual income but that wasn't really what it was about.
From there, since we were based in veterinary we went to a couple conferences, you know, dentists know all about conferences and the sales floor and we were able to show up our product, meet people, get a few accounts, and grew very modestly over the next couple of years, really crafting the product without a whole lot of attention to sales. We weren't really sales based because we didn't really come at this from a business perspective. It was just something that evolved. But, about 3 years ago we got serious about sales, hired some fantastic sales talent and that's when the business skyrocketed and it was right around the same time that we saw the opening in the dental world. We saw what was out there, we saw the options for dentists like you mentioned. A lot of dentists had no training in business. They just woke up one day and happened to own a business and my father is a physician and so, I watched him at an early age. He was either seeing patients,he was either at the office seeing patients or at the office doing paperwork. And that didn't leave a whole lot of time for business management and, you know, things like a website or online marketing. So, as that came up and we scoped out what was in the dental world, well we realized that we really had something to offer and so dental- the dentistry, whether be orthodontics, endodontics, periodontics, general dentist, cosmetic dentist, is our fast growing division at Doctor Multimedia. We actually started at DDS Multimedia because we had a veterinary specific name initially and we wanted to branch out but a couple years ago we rebranded everything together as Doctor.
Howard: So, what was your last brand on dentistry?
Pras: DDS Multimedia. So, if you look far enough back on Dentaltown you will see a couple of references to DDS Multimedia as we broke into the dental market.
Howard: And- And by the way, homies, none of these are commercials. He didn't- He's not paying me to come on the show. I called him, he didn't call me but you can go to Dentaltown and on... there's a quarter million of your colleagues there and I thought it was interesting Pras said to me earlier that- I thought Dentaltown was just for dentists. And that was a big debate back in 1998 because lot of dentists said, "There's people on here that sells stuff “ like, what are you? A volunteer? What do you do? Free dentistry in a homeless shelter?" I am only a great dentist because of about 500 companies that sell me a lot of great stuff. And if those companies disappeared, I'd be working with a bunch of stuff from Home Depot and I would not be a good dentist. I mean, could you imagine pulling teeth with pliers from Home Depot? And- and if you want to know what your townies think of these stuff. Like, if I put in- If I go to the website, the app, and I type in Doctor Multimedia, I mean there's just pages of threads of what everybody says about it. And then- I'm gonna go back to your last name which was DDS Multimedia?
Pras: Yup.
Howard: DDS Multimedia. And you have all these threads saying that you have 8 basketball socks. And go go ASU. And I also want to point out something very interesting- one other thing is that a lot of dentists are trying to decide what new procedures they should learn but you're- you're the perfect capitalist. You saw a demand so you supplied the demand. You didn't sit there with your Philosophy major and sit under a tree and wait for an apple to fall on your head and think of the next great thing. It was just in front of you. If you got a bunch of poor patients in front of you, that just want dentures then learn how to do mini implants and implants, follow the lead.
And then one last point before I let you talk is most of the big dental supply companies like Patterson, they also do vets because dentists, vets, and chiropractors aren't strangulated by National Health Insurance, Medicaid, Medicare and these stuff. And they're the ones that behave most like a business. And as poorly run as dental office and vets are, they are ran 10 times more efficiently than the MDs. I mean, I have to go to the hospital about every 10 years for a couple of days for kidney stones, that's my- that's my weak spot. And my God, every 8 hours somebody walks in there and asks me what my name is. I'm like, "Dude, I'm naked. I'm in a bed. I got 2 bands on. I got an IV. How the hell do you not know who I am, what I'm here for". I mean, everytime I go to the hospital I just say to myself, "My god, what do they do with like really sick people?" Like what would happen if you had a heart attack or cancer. I mean, they can't even, I mean, the way they treat a kidney stone patient is so incompetent. It's mind-boggling. I have 4 boys, every time I took them to the emergency room, which was regular when you have 4 boys. They'd ask me, "What is your name? What is your address? What is your phone number?" It's just like, oh my, you know, crazy. So, vets...so, now you're 25% dentistry, that's the [09; 28 unclear], and what percent are you vet?
Pras: Vet, I would say is about 60.
Howard: Oh, okay. So, 60, 70, 80. So what's the remaining 15?
Pras: So, it's a blend of like you said chiropractors, plastic surgeons. We've expanded out, I’ve got some psychologists now. Let's see. There's...we have some neurosurgery, urology kind… a lot of private practices are now catching wind or realizing that it's time to treat the internet like a part of their business. As opposed to this inconvenience that they had to deal with in the late '90s and early 2000’s because it just came about. You know, most of the doctors that we work with were successful long before the internet, they would quite frankly be successful without it based on their medicine. But in terms of growing and expanding their practice in the way that they want looking forward, this is something that they've had to tackle and so we now regularly get inquiries from niches that we're not even in at the moment because they realized, "Hey, you know, we could make use of this". Or a lot of times, "Hey, this is a problem. We don't want to deal with it. We don't feel equipped to tackle".
Howard: You know, and again plastic surgeons, they're operating in an area not covered by Medicaid or Medicare. That's why when you go to dental- countries around the world where the government like the NHS in England, sets all the fees at a loss. All the dentists are moving into Invisalign and dental implants because they can run that segment like a business so they're just using their base of loss leaders with cover by the NHS, to hopefully pull out one Invisalign case a week for 6,500 or one implant a week or whatever. But, so what do you think all the dentists listing to you right now need to think more about when it comes to their online marketing in dentistry?
Pras: Absolutely. So, I wanna approach that in 3 ways because I know you have a large viewership. I know you have a lot of students listening. I know there's a lot of people on their drive to work just kind of pondering, as they..trying to wake up in the morning. So, there's really 3 aspects of your approach here. Let me start- Let me appeal to the younger audience first and I am sure you know this-
Howard: What is your definition of younger?
Pras: I would say-
Howard: Anything under 55?
Pras: I would say probably within 5 years out either in school or within 5 years out. And the reason I bring them up is in our experience, more of that segment are starting to start their own practices and on their own practices than ever before. It doesn't seem like anyone wants to be an associate for 20 years and take over the practice anymore. I regularly am coming across, you know, kids of dentists that are either- you know, I'll give you a great example from California Dental Association. I met a young woman who just started practicing within the last year or two in her father's practice. But rather than join her father's practice, she has decided to start her own practice that operates one day a week out of the same facility. Another example, I have a husband and wife team in Indiana, both under 30, relatively fresh out of school. They bought the practice that they worked at, from the owner who was just toying with retirement and rather than kinda keep him on and learn, they just made a clean break, took it over and are running it with, you know, their own philosophies. So, we see this more and more- go ahead.
Howard: But- but- what- what percent? You get such a mixed data . What percent of... everybody tells the old people that millennials are all different. You know, they came from a different planet, maybe genetically modified food altered their DNA or something, what percent of the kids come out of school want to just- they hate business, I want be an employee and work under someone else's domain their whole life and what percent someday their goal is to own their own show?
Pras: Sure. This answer is gonna be more anecdotal than statistical but I would say based on the people that we talk to, 90% don't want to work for someone for a long period of time.
Howard: Exactly. And when I talk to all the CEOs of the biggest corporate dental chains in the- in the world. I mean, in Iran and other countries, in Singapore, in Australia, whatever. What's their number one problem?
Pras: They..
Howard: Associate turnover.
Pras: Right. Exactly.
Howard: They can't- They can't keep a [00:13:57.08 unclear]. And everybody's always saying that now, you know the next generation is always gonna be different. They're gonna be crazy and dumb and they're not gonna be as good as their dad or their grandpa or whatever the stuff. But the bottom line is, the last 2 million years, no human wants to live in someone else's cave. No human wants to be told what to do. Humans are the most fiercely independent, tribal, walking, talking monkeys without tails and they don't want to be told anything. I mean, they- so all of a sudden, the millennials want to be under someone's thumb the rest of their life? I mean, it would- it would have had to be a complete mass evolution genetic mutation because I don't see any evidence of that in the last 2 million years of homo sapien.
Pras: Well, I- I totally agree with you. And I actually, and my opinion speaks to a bigger shift in the industry. You know, maybe 20, 30 years ago medicine was viewed as a profession above many others in the sense that you didn't really advertise. You wouldn't really market. You know, it would be hard to imagine a doctor on a billboard. They were essentially separate. And lawyers used to be the same way, lawyers didn’t used to advertise and now you can’t go twenty feet without a legal advertisement.
Howard: And that came from Tucson, did you know that?
Pras: That’s right. The billboards?
Howard: No, our right to advertise.
Pras: Oh.
Howard: It was two attorneys in Tucson, I know them.
Pras: Really?
Howard: And before 1973 lawyers, physicians, and dentists it was against the law.
Pras: Right.
Howard: Just like it used to be against the law for pharmaceuticals to advertise. And two lawyers from Tucson were told by the Arizona board that take... quit advertising or you’re going to lose your license and of course the lawyers say, ‘sue me’. They went all the way to the Supreme Court saying ‘this is free speech’.
Pras: Wow.
Howard: ‘We only do one type of law’, I think they were personal injury attorneys, ‘and we want the freedom to tell people in Tucson this is our core competency, this is what we do’, and the Supreme Court said ‘it is free speech’.
So that started in Tucson but when I got out of school and ‘87, which was fourteen years later, it was extremely taboo. And when a young twenty-four year old me took a full page ad in the Yellow pages and went into a strip centre next to Safeway.
Pras: Right.
Howard: All the old guys thought it was like guys like me that was going to ruin the profession.
Pras: Right. Exactly. And so the crowd that has been through that transition has had to change their approach to business. Whereas I think that younger crowd, that millennial crowd that’s coming up, accepts that from the get go. That these are small businesses they’re running, that there is competition, that they do need to maybe not say that they’re better than other people. But they do need to illustrate the benefits of coming to them as opposed to just going to your neighbourhood veterinarian or your neighbourhood dentist or your neighbourhood chiropractor. Thanks to the internet, now people are searching, they’re researching and the definition of word of mouth has changed.
So, you asked me originally what do people need to know and I said I’d I answer it in three parts. I think that, that younger crowd kind of comes in, pre-prepared, understanding the value of the internet from their own experience, the value of online marketing, even if they can’t necessarily afford to do it, it’s in their plans down the road.
And then I think you have the middle segment, just for the sake of argument, we’ll call it thirty to forty-five. And I fall into that range. They are a blend of the two. We didn’t grow up as digital natives but right around middle school, high school, college we started to hop online. Didn’t… we remember the Yellow pages, we remember looking up services and phone numbers and so they see that mixture. They see the older clientele that they had that they believe operates the same way, but they also are now seeing those younger patients or the kids are their long time patients. They’re coming in with their heads buried in their phone.
I think for them they struggle with, ‘how do I approach this?’ ‘Is this something that I delegate to an office manager? Should I have my front desk girl doing social media, because she’s on Facebook all the time on her own? Is this something that I need to… that I need to learn? That I have to worry about? I don’t really want to.’ These are kind of the questions that we hear in that… in that… we’ll call it that mid-segment of the population.
A lot of them are also relatively new to practice ownership, because they did come from that time when you would have been an associate a little bit longer, within a couple years and adventure out on your own. So they may be within five to ten years of starting their business, and as I know from experience, over the first two or three years they’re not really worried about this stuff. They have a million other things that they’re trying to get right with their practice, than the way that they came up in the dental world. And that’s their concern and they kind of get to this later. Whereas the millennials seem to get to this first even before they’ve signed the paperwork on their practice. They’re already thinking about what’s going to go on the website.
Then lastly. If you are in that, we’ll call it that old school category, where you’ve been… you’ve been, like I said, successful long before the internet. Don’t need it to survive. Healthy thriving practice. At this point it becomes more of a luxury, a time versus money, a delegation versus outsourcing sort of scenario. And realistically I meet plenty of dentists that say ‘I’ve got plenty of patients, I’m booked out for three to four months, what do I need a new website or internet marketing for?’
And the answer really depends. But ultimately I respond with, ‘you still dress up nice when you go to work, you don’t show up in pyjamas just because you’re booked out for three years, you still update the sign out front if it looks outdated.’ And the same way you want to represent yourself online with that same luxury, with that same attention to detail. It really just… sell yourself, for lack of a better word, as a thriving practice. One that is booked out and one that, if you are that full, you’re going to get constant word of mouth referrals. And these days, word of mouth usually quickly turns to Google as the second step in finding information and looking you up.
Howard: Well that old guy... he’s going to have a hard time selling that practice if it doesn’t have a big online presence? I already hear young people saying, ‘well I’ve got three choices back in Salina, Kansas, but one of them doesn’t even have a Yelp review, or a Google review, or a website, so they just cross that one off.
Pras: Right.
Howard: And then they start talking about the metrics of how they see it. I want to start with the young people because they get it, they grew up with this. But I’m seeing one huge mistake a lot of them are doing, especially in Asia, and Africa and every once in a while in America where they say, ‘well you don’t need a website. I mean websites are dead, you just do it on Facebook’. What would you say to that kid? And there’s a lot of them…
Pras: Sure.
Howard: In Cambodia, Malaysia, Africa. Why would they need a www dot when they could just go to their Facebook page?
Pras: Great question. I think their hearts in the right place. I think they figured that’s where all the people are. But anyone without a website what I usually do… if I’m standing with them side by side is I Google them. And I show them from Facebook, to Yelp, to Healthgrades, to Google reviews, that whether they think they’re on these platforms or not, they have pages and people can say whatever they want on those pages.
The website is essentially the one place online, your one piece of real estate, where you’re in complete control and you have complete ownership. You know Facebook changes their rules on what feels like a weekly basis, when you’re on the other side of having to keep up with those. They can move stuff around, they can delete your reviews, they can allow bad reviews on there. Don’t get me wrong. I think that you can reach people that way, but ultimately you have to drive them somewhere you can control.
So putting your forums on your Facebook page, allowing appointment requests through your Facebook page that you can monitor, and that you have control of rather than having them going through Facebook. Being able to stash your services, highlight yourself, promote yourself with personalization, customization. And, especially for these younger doctors, they want to be able to push the envelope when it comes to what their practice does online. They don’t just want a Yellow Pages ad on their www, even though that’s all a lot of people need. So those things can’t be done, can’t be controlled.
You’re putting your online presence, which some could argue is your most valuable way to reach people, in the hands of someone else. And I don’t think Facebook is going to turn off tomorrow, but whatever they do choose to do, whether its ads, putting your competitor on your page, they can do. So I would always stake out your own set of real estate. If you haven’t bought that domain name that represents your business, you can bet your competitor sure is looking at it. It’s a very common practice just to buy the domain name just so someone else can’t...
Howard: I got two questions out of what you said. I am old enough to… I remember when Friendster was all that, then it was… MySpace was everything and it’s gone. And it looks like Facebook had a lot of their younger crowd leave and go to Instagram, so they had to get out their cheque book and buy it. Then they had the same problem with Snapchat and they tried to buy that. Do you think Facebook is still the four hundred pound grill and getting stronger every day, or do you think it's starting to plateau, or do you even think it may be contracting?
Pras: Well, it depends who you’re looking at. But yes. There’s no denying that social media's come and go. Facebook obviously came up at the perfect time and has a lot of financial backing. But you said it best, the kids aren’t on Facebook, a large part of the reason is that you and I are on Facebook. So they can’t post what they’re up to on the weekend if people like you and me, and their parents are going to be able to check it out. So they just jump ship, and they’re always going to jump ship to whatever is new, whatever is exclusive to them, wherever we’re not.
That said. There’s no denying the reach of Facebook, their goals to get the entire world online, and just the sheer volume. So as of right now today the foreseeable year or two, Facebook is going to be the largest audience on social media by far. But the lifecycle with any of these seems to be, you become the most popular, the result of that is a lot of people leave. You also have to continue make money, so you do have things like sponsored posts and advertisements. And people kind of go elsewhere. I’ll leave it to the people at Facebook to decide how they’re going to stay relevant. But there’s no denying that those trends change, and so your online marketing has to change with it, depending on who you’re trying to speak to. If you want to speak to a teenager, you would not go to Facebook.
Howard: I want to ask you another question regarding your name. I’m a hundred percent Irish and I always thought… and I see Irish name Murphy and you’re Murthy, I’ve never seen Murthy before. M-U-R-T-H-Y.
Pras: That’s it.
Howard: But the point being is when I first saw your name, my brain saw Murphy. I didn’t… I didn’t see the R there because you know how your brain does… have you ever seen them with… they’ll do a paragraph where the first and last letter of each word is the same, but they scramble the middle.
Pras: Yeah.
Howard: And you read it fluently, because that’s the way your eye sees. But a lot of these kids… you own doctormultimedia.com...doctormultimedia.com. You didn’t go with the website prasmurthy.com and I see a lot of kids, their dental office website is their name, because their name’s sacred, they got it from their mom and dad and ten generations. And some of these last names, I mean I can’t pronounce them, I can’t spell them. I’ve got a friend who is Indian descent, his last name is, I think, thirteen or fourteen letters long. What would you say to young kids about going with their name versus a DBA, doing business as? What do you guys recommend?
Pras: So, yeah, you’re absolutely right and I’m glad that you brought that up, it’s a question we rarely get asked. But you always want to plan long term, so don’t get me wrong, if you’re fresh out of school, if you’re playing around on the internet and you want to claim your name, and put some information about yourself on there, that’s fantastic, but just like you mentioned that millennials don’t want to work under someone else forever, they also don’t envision themselves being the only doctor in their practice forever. All of their plans are to have associates to build a successful practice, to reduce their workload over time, and be a business owner at some point and run the business.
So when you take that approach combined with what people are searching for... People don’t search for the name of the dentist, especially if they don’t know them, they search for dentist near me, they search for Del Mar dentist if they’re new to the area. If they’re driving by, they rarely register the name that’s on the board, if you put your personal name on there. They’re more likely to capture the name of the practice, or ideally, you’ve got your domain name on the marquee out front. Because it's actually more effective than putting your phone number in the marquee out in front.
But… so in all those ways you want it to be easy to spell, easy to remember, and short as possible. Now full disclosure Pras isn’t my full name, it’s Prashanth but most people call me Pras online. It’s shorter, it’s easier to type so it’s a little easier to remember, and it stands out. If you had to spell Prashanth it would be a little more difficult than after the first time you see Pras.
Howard: So how do you spell Prashanth?
Pras: P-R-A-S, the beginning is the same, then it goes H-A-N-T-H. So nine letters.
Howard: H-A-N-T-H.
Pras: Yeah.
Howard: Yeah. See I assumed it was P-R-A-S-H-A-U-N.
Pras: See? There you go.
Howard: Yeah.
Pras: And you want…
Howard: And my name is so simple, Farran, I mean it’s 6 letters. It is two, three, far, and ran.
Pras: Right.
Howard: And nobody, nobody can spell it, pronounce it. And they write ‘fe’ and if I say, ‘Howard Farran’, I mean it’s… so names are very, very serious.
Pras: Yeah. Well, and the unfortunate downside of the internet and the digital age is that no one can spell anything anymore, let alone names. So we’ve got abbreviations for everything and we’re starting to see that in domain names – you know, Dentist4U with number 4 and the letter U, things like that, UrSmile. They’re doing it all out there.
Howard: What I’m embarrassed about is if I lose my iPhone, I can’t even call my four boys. I don’t know any of their phone numbers.
Pras: That’s right. And imagine then the dentist who tells me, ‘oh well, they have my phone number, they’ll be able to call and look it up’. Like you said, outside of my home phone, where I grew up, and maybe a couple other numbers. I don’t commit any phone numbers to memory and even fewer addresses. You remember the time you had to know the address of where you were going to find the place. Now we all just blindly follow the blue line on our phone.
So that’s absolutely part of… when you talk about name recognition, branding, awareness, promoting yourself as a new business in the community. When you think about how much space in people's brains you’re competing for. Really the simplest thing you could ever do is get them to bookmark or save your website, or know how to get to the website on your mobile device. And that’s going to be their gateway to all the other information you want to deliver to them.
Howard: Okay, I own Dentaltown. I don’t know how to bookmark a site on my iPhone, what did that even mean?
Pras: Sure. So next time you go to your website, at the bottom you’re going to see a square with an arrow in it. Press that. You might have to thumb through but you’re going to see ‘add to home screen’ as an option. If you press that, a little square is going to pop up on your iPhone that looks just like all your other apps, and it’s going to say Dentaltown. And so the next time you want to get to Dentaltown, you just press that button and you no longer have to go to Google, type in Dentaltown, risk making a typo, going to the wrong page. You’re one touch away from the websites that you want to be at. And to the normal user it looks, and feels, like you have an app on your phone when really it’s just the website.
Howard: Okay. I learnt something new from you, thank you, Pras.
Pras: You’re welcome.
Howard: What do you think are the biggest mistakes? Let me go through what think first because whenever... if you emailed me , I'm just gonna hit reply or if you have your website link I'm gonna click because I'm just wondering who you are, where you at, are you in Tucson, or Katmandu. And I would say that less than 5% of the websites even look like a C. They all look like they bought it at a dental convention 5, 10, 20 years ago. They don't have any videos. So, like when I see you I can feel your chemistry, your energy. I already like you and I have only been talking to you for a minute. I like the websites with a YouTube video where a dentist is talking and say, "Oh, I- I trust that guy he looks really nice. I think he's listening to me.’ Because they’re always thinking the doctor’s gonna talk down to him, condescending, bitch him out because you know, they do everything wrong, they don't brush. Their picture looks like a mugshot, at your last DUI, you know, there's ...and you can tell they haven't done anything with it for 5 years. What do you- and if they... Imagine, if you wanted a- cosmetic procedure, veneers. But they don’t even have any before and after pictures. And then if they do have before and after pictures, like say, dental implants you know that half the people that looked at that picture they go, "Oh my god." I mean, it's like the titanium sticking out of bloody gum, a suture, I mean just gory gory stuff. What- what do you see as the common pitfalls on websites?
Pras: Well, that was pretty well put. If you ever wanna join us on the sales floor we could distribute that perspective. Now, you're absolutely right. When it comes to the mistakes out there and we'll skip past not having a website. We kinda went over, went over that. But, I would break it down into thinking of it as something that's static, or thinking of it as something that's dynamic. So, you know, in my opinion when- when a potential patient comes to your website, they're not really looking for your phone number and address. They are if they're in the moment of contacting you but if they're in that initial research phase, they are trying to build some element of trust, some level of comfort with you and your practice and the best way to do that is multimedia.
That's kind of where our name came from, it's the pictures of the practice, the outside, the inside. You know, when you drive by a beautiful practice, whether [32:18 unclear] or not, you assume that if they're that invested on the outside that they are equally invested on the inside of that practice. When you see smiling faces, happy patients, you know, as much as we've been in the dental world we- sometimes we forget that it's a scary experience for a lot of people and something that they're nervous about. I mean, a lot of them put off scheduling or you know, I can't imagine the number of times the spouse has asked me the other one if they scheduled their dental appointment yet, and they say, "Oh no, not yet. I'm looking at this, I'm looking at that". So, with- with the day and age that we have now, and you know I needed a barber yesterday to prep for this interview since I was gonna be on screen and I knew that- I don't have my- my regular guy available so, you know, I typed in barber near me and I'm thumbing through the options and I won't say I made my decision based on reviews or based on proximity but they all played a part. You know, someone popped up with 3 stars out of 5, that's not the guy I'm going to gamble on. You know, 24 hours before I need to be on screen. Same way, if someone was 25 miles down the road, it didn't really matter how great they were. I probably wasn't gonna make it in. So, when you think of your website and your online presence as dynamic, then you have to keep up with all of this things. You are keeping up with the video. Once YouTube became popular you wanted to be on there. Once websites got faster, then you want high quality photos on your website. You know, now that people, even the older folks out there like my mother, she's on her- her iPhone using it to contact businesses. Now, you need the mobile version to be smooth and huge buttons and easy to dial phone numbers. So, if you go into it knowing everything's changing all the time and my website needs to keep up. A lot of the things you mentioned becomes second nature because you're always again trying to establish trust and comfort with what people are seeing. And like you said, the reason we do this as a video podcast is that people won't watch it. We could've have just done the audio and people could have listened to it and if you're in your car, yeah. But if you're at a computer you might get more out of seeing us, watching us, our facial expressions as we interact. The backgrounds even, I don't know what you're gonna put on behind you I'm curious to see.
But, so all that said, if you view it as static then you really do treat it like that Yellow Page or a dthat brochure that you put out. You do it one time, you get it right, you set it and then you forget about it or at least you don't revisit it on a regular basis. And I don't blame people that do that. I totally understand. Designing a website is a scary endeavor. It takes a lot of time, it takes time away from all the regular business functions you and your staff have to do. When someone finishes that process the last thing they wanna do is go through it again. So, I get that a lot of people are of the mind that we did it, it's up, they did buy it- website 5 years ago to dental conference and it has not changed since and that was the opening that allowed us to come into this industry. But, if you take just the mental approach that this is changing on a day to day basis, I joked that it's a living and breathing thing. If you think of it like that, well then you're not going to ignore it. You're not gonna just to let it be out of date. You are gonna look at it. A lot of dentists- ask them the last time they looked at their own website. They can't even tell you the answer. Because nothing's changed on it. It should be the same as it was 2 years ago in their opinion.
Howard: And what's funny is just with my friends, just the ones I know. Like the ones who are like totally in the implants well you'd never know that in a second if you went into his website. Other ones are members of the AACD and really pride themselves in cosmetics, you'd never know that from their website. I mean, if someone went to some of the best implant doctors I know, no one, I mean a brain surgeon wouldn't have ever guess on their website. Pitfalls are- here's another complaint on Dentaltown. I had a website company and then I decided to change it and found out I didn't own the website the data and the content was- wasn't even mine. And they didn't know... what are some of the things to look out for?
Pras: Yeah.
Howard: With people building your website?
Pras: And again you- you can stand there at their booth with a- I didn't even put this in the notes but you're hitting- you're hitting all the major points. So, absolutely- again because websites and online marketing is a scary, daunting thing because most dentists don't have any training in this. Everyone's looking for that solution and I don't blame people when they're walking around on that exhibit floor, you see something that looks halfway decent, you see the low price tag and you go for it. Unfortunately, a lot of them don't know the questions to ask. So, for all the listeners out there, there's essentially 3 areas you’ve got to be a 100% sure of before you commit, you know, your online presence. If you remember, I said the reason not to go at Facebook is that someone else owns that real estate. Someone else is in control of that. So, first and foremost do you own your website? You know, I just mentioned you kinda learned that in the opposite direction. You figured it out when you did it. And a lot of dentists are in that same position. They have what are called template websites from large companies where shouldn't they choose to cancel or they wanna leave, they'll actually lose everything on the website because the rights to the content, the rights to the design, the layout, are not theirs. So, even if you had invested time over the years, keeping it up to date, customizing it, making it appealing, you are at risk of losing that. You know, at the sake of just missing one month's payment. And you know a lot of people say, "Well, I'm not gonna cancel my payment". Just to give you some ideas on the opposite side, I had a dentist call me about a month ago saying he got hammered on his taxes, he needed to free up the budget, anywhere and everywhere he could, could he have a couple months off from our marketing services. Now, he owns the website so he's in a position to ask that. Otherwise, the website's one of those core bills that you can't get rid off without losing your website and that's gonna affect your business. Just another- one of the floods out in Louisiana. I had a couple of clients that had to close their doors for 3-6 weeks while they remodeled. Again, if you don't own your website, your content, you're basically handcuffed to those companies. Outside of that there's just the quality aspect of it. You've no doubt seen many a dental website that are exact copies of each other. Because that's what these template companies do. So, you've gotta own the website. The way you do that is either by building it yourself or by going with the company the offers you full ownership. A lot of people ask me what that means. But, to me it means you're not in a contract. It means you're going month to month with your services, your agreement and if you stop, everything that's been done up until that point is yours.
So, any good salesman will be able to talk around the question of whether or not you'll own your website. They’ll say, of course you own your domain, this, that, the other thing. The number one question that I want your viewers to kinda deposit in their mind that if they're ever in this conversation is, what happens if I stop paying . If I stop paying you, do I get the website? Do I get the content? Is there anything that you take back? And what kind of contract that I'm in? So, that would be the biggest one by far. I think along those lines comes with the customization. So, are you going to be in a situation where you've got a template website. The product they delivered you is an exact duplicate of anyone down the street and then you've gotta go in and customize it out and make the changes in the edits because ultimately that gets delegated to your staff. Not really the people that you necessarily want doing that kind of thing. Or do you get to build from ground up with help, you know, in a company that's gonna customize it out because of exactly what you talked about.
People have different specialties, people have different interests, people,..different dentists are better at different things, and well, yes, once you get your general dentist then you often have that patient for life. When they need that advanced procedure when they’re in an emergency situation, when they’re contemplating cosmetic surgery, they are out there doing research and you may be able to capture someone else’s general patient because of your speciality, or your expertise, or your results in the community, and that’s when you want to showcase it.
You know, I had a Doctor up in Bellevue Washington, first time we did the website it was family dentistry, beautiful website, lovely lady. She gets back to me about 6 months after we launched and she said, you know what, I love cosmetic dentistry and I forgot all about that when we were going through this process, I want to be a family and cosmetic dentist. So, you know what happened in those next coming weeks, before/after galleries, patient testimonials, more pictures of herself and some of her cases.
More social media, the patients that weren’t just there for their cleaning and it really helps promote not just to her own patients but people that know her patients that, hey, you might not love the idea of doing cosmetic dentistry at your general dentist, so just, so, you know, there is this option down the street and you may want to check them out and you go to the website and you learn all about it. So, ownership, customization and who ends up doing all the work, I would say are the biggest 3 pitfalls that my clients ran into before they met us.
Howard: So I know everyone listening, that is probably 85%, are commuting to work and the average commute is an hour, that is why the show is an hour. I always re-tweet my guests last twitter, I am @howardfarran and I re-tweeted 2 of your tweets, @doc_multimedia. One is your reception desk properly receiving new clients, and then another one, top 10 social media marketing strategies for orthodontists.
We have dentaltown and orthotown, we have a lot of orthodontists listening right now, is social media different for an orthodontist than it is for a general dentist?
Pras: My goodness, it is almost a 180, and, you know, these are lessons that we did not know going in, like you mentioned, we didn’t sit and wait for the apple to drop. These are just lessons we picked up from rolling up our sleeves and being in there, so the first orthodontist we ever had, all we knew is to treat them like a general dentist and we very quickly realized you are in a different world. First of all, you are dealing with kids, so if you are trying to post the kids picture of their new braces on Facebook, you can be sure none of their friends are going to see it.
Right, they’re on Instagram, they’re on Snapchat, they’re out on those new social medias, but more than that, when you’re an orthodontist, you really are only looking for your new patients in the moment that they need you. You know, I am not out there Googling braces, my colleagues, my cousins, they aren’t doing it until their kids need braces. So, you’re in this unique time frame where they get told they need braces or Invisalign or whatever the case may be. Then they’re out there looking, now the whole world is available.
You know, I have a cousin in Ohio, she told me she took her 13-year-old son to 4 different orthodontists for consultations, some were high tech and the kid loved, some the mother loved because of the price tag, and they kind of negotiated in between. So, there was that research phase, then once you get them, you know, you have that patient anywhere from 2 to 4 to 5 years, and they’re coming back in regularly, these are high cost procedures.
Some people are paying cash, some are being covered by their insurance, the decision-making process is very different, so not only is that research and trust element so much more, I’ll say relevant, but the money the orthodontists are putting into competing for those same new patients is astronomical. If you look at it, cost per click in dental verse orthodontist, you’re playing 2 different ball games, so the orthodontists out there, they’ve actually been much, much quicker to adopt online marketing and the industry there is much more developed, and savvy and diverse, than a lot of the options in general dentistry because they aren’t quite there in terms of the competition.
You mentioned that word when you talked about CEO’s with turnover, that the patient turnover that an orthodontist is going to see if they do their job well, they’re always going to be replenishing. Whereas a general dentist can kind of be growing that base, and I will say one last thing to the orthodontists listening out there because the first time I heard it, it kind of blew my mind. It may be common place when you’re in the industry but I think it always helps to repeat.
I had an orthodontist tell me early on, he said, ‘Pras, my website is geared for kids but I can’t tell you the number of times the parents bringing their kid in for braces, they are sitting in the waiting room and then when they are done, they say, you know, Doc, I had no idea that you did adult work. If I’m sitting here for an hour anyways while my kid’s getting this work done, well, why don’t I get a thing or 2 done while I’m already here, I have always wanted to, I have never wanted braces but now I have got Invisalign.
The fact that they can open up this whole other segment, they have already earned the trust of the mother, the kid wouldn’t be there if they hadn’t. Now they just have to offer the options to the mom, and/or dad or older sibling and say, hey, come on in, you know, you don’t need full-fledged braces, maybe just a tray, you know, that you put in overnight, whatever the case may be. They have seen a large boost in their existing patient base, just simple moves like that, tailoring their marketing to appeal to adults as well as children.
Howard: I had the opposite experience with my son, Ryan, here when I turned 50, I had to get a Colonoscopy, and he went with me and I said, well, Ryan, since we’re both here, why don’t you just get one, too? Now he won’t go to the doctor with me anymore.
Pras: That’s sounds like a Father’s Day gift to me, Ryan.
Howard: On that cost per click, can you give any dollar examples, it is probably different for every city but like what’s it, were you talking about Google Adwords?
Pras: I was, I was.
Howard: Like, what is a typical click cost for a dentist versus an orthodontist?
Pras: I will just give you some rough numbers, you know, dental and we’re talking about dentists near me, teeth cleaning, those kinds of items. On a medium size town, medium competitiveness, you might expect about $4 dollars a click, okay, just to give you a baseline, and remember that is not $4 dollars a view, that is only when somebody actually clicks on your ad to come to your website. Orthodontists, now you’re talking about braces, orthodontists, Invisalign, you can see anywhere from $8 to $10 dollars on average.
So, you can see a considerable jump and then in competitive areas or densely populated areas, it can sky rocket to 12 to 15 to, I have even seen 20 dollars per click and that’s just to get a person to come look at you.
Howard: What is the highest cost per click of any industry in any city, I assume it it’s Manhattan, that you’ve ever seen?
Pras: Oh gosh, well, I’ve seen if you get far enough down, I’ve seen it in the hundreds but yes, some of the most competitive are legal, you know, the lawyers out there, they’re just competing with each other and the thing to keep in mind is that Google Adwords is an auction. It doesn’t seem that way but it truly is, so just like any auction, as demand goes up, as more people show up to the auction prices go up. So, a lot of the time, if your budget is limited, you want to go after the lower hanging fruit, the terms that not a lot of other people are going after rather than just throwing your minimal budget into play with, you know, with the big businesses, you want to advertise for braces, you know, that Invisalign ads are popping up, you know, no matter what town you’re in. If you’re going to be a general dentist, you know, those corporations are investing a lot of money to beat out the private practices. So, you can spend hundreds of dollars when you’re talking about lawyer, legal fees or some of those plastic surgeons, even if you’re looking at breast implants.
You can be spending an enormous amount per click but those are very specific calculations, and they have done the math backwards to realize that they only have to convert 1 out of 20, 1 out of 30 of those for it to be profitable. So those are…
Howard: So, what he really said is if you hate these medical malpractice law firms, you should just Google that and then just start clicking their ads all day long?
Pras: That’s right, yeah.
Howard: I heard the most, one time I heard, I think it was from an economist years ago that the highest click cost was a Personal Injury Attorney in Manhattan?
Pras: That’s right.
Howard: So just Google Personal Injury Attorney Manhattan, you start clicking the shit out of all those ads, just give them some feedback of what you think of the lawyers. No, I’m just kidding but, so let’s get down and dirty, this is Dentistry Uncensored, what do you cost? What do you do? Are there contracts? How does doctormultimedia.com work?
Pras: Yeah, absolutely, so again, you know, I’ve always been doing these answers in sets of 3, it’s no coincidence that the last info-graphic that we put out was 3 keys to Google ads, so the 3 things that separate us from everyone else, the first is no contracts, we go month to month with our service. We don’t believe in you having to pay us.
Howard: Are you married?
Pras: I’m not.
Howard: Well, keep that advice, no contracts.
Pras: There you go, that’s right.
Howard: You don’t need a contract with a consultant, a website, and a woman, that’s my 3.
Pras: There you go. Absolutely, so, no, make sure that you have that you are not in a long-term commitment.
Howard: That sounds even better.
Pras: That’s right.
Howard: Even better.
Pras: You can get out of it, so that is number 1, and you know, the same goes for the dental profession, if I show up and I sit in your chair and I have a terrible experience, I’m not locked into coming back 6 months later just because I came in. You don’t get to take the fillings back out of my teeth if I decide not to use you for the follow up. So, you know, you guys are at the mercy of that train of thinking all the time, and so somehow, in the web world, it became, ‘ah, of course I’ve got to sign a year or a 2 year,’.. I’ve even heard of a 5-year contract the other day. It just doesn’t make any sense in today’s landscape, too much can change.
The second it goes along with the contract, with full ownership. You’d be surprised how many people don’t own their website that we talked about, with Dr Multimedia, you own it from day one, it is yours, licensed and registered to you, you can do with it what you please, you can leave us on day 2 if that is how short sighted the game plan was, you know, there is nothing we can do to stop you.But our clients aren’t really there for the initial build, they’re there for the monthly service, so..
Howard: Does that mean you build it on, what do they call it, a WordPress document?
Pras: Exactly, right now we use WordPress exclusively, not because it’s the latest and greatest technology, not because it’s the fanciest, my developers are always coming to me with options that they think are better. But for exactly what I mentioned, if I build it in some proprietary platform and you leave me, well, you’re screwed because you’re not going to know how to go in there, you’re not going to be able to do anything, you are always going to need the company and that is intentional, you can see from the company’s perspective why that’s so much better.
Building in WordPress, it powers about a third of the internet, most commonly used platform, any web developer should know how to do it, it is kind of like the alphabet, if you’re learning English, you have got to be able to do WordPress. So, as a business owner, you’re well protected that, should you leave us, should you just not be able to afford us anymore, whatever might happen, whether you sell the practice, someone else can just pick up where we left off. So, build in WordPress, so you asked how much it costs, for that reason we do have an initial set up cost.
A lot of companies will dangle a low or no setup cost in front of you, but they will get you in a long-term contract or they will own the product. That setup cost can range anywhere from about $1500 dollars to about $4000 depending on, on what services we are providing. Then more importantly, we have a monthly fee because like I told you, we think it is a living, breathing thing, we would hate to see a website get put up and then forgot about.
You can imagine if someone build a website 2-years ago and hadn’t touched it, the number of things it wouldn’t be equipped to deal with, excuse me, whether from Facebook to Instagram, to YouTube videos to linking, to having Twitter on your actual website so you don’t have to re-tweet, the tweets are just there. That kind of thing, so we go month to month, you own the website, the monthly fees range anywhere from about $100 dollars a month all the way up to $1500, $2000 a month depending on what we’re doing for you. I probably shouldn’t say it but I’ve got a member out there on Dentaltown, I think she negotiated her way to about $70 dollars a month about 3 or 4 years ago, one of my first dentists and we never raised her price because, you know, you’re month to month and you’re grandfathered in.
Lastly, especially now when you are talking about time versus money is that we do all of the work for you, I mentioned we’re a one stop shop, we’re a full-service solution so we know doctors are busy people, not only was my dad a doctor but being of Indian descent, you know, about 70 to 75% of people I knew growing up were doctors. We understand that between your personal lives, your work, seeing patients, you really don’t have time for a lot of the auxiliary things.
You know, a business owner, you know, like a, if you own a solar company, you’ve got a lot of your day to sit around and play with your advertising, your online marketing, really get into the nitty gritty of the cost per click and the details. These are things that my doctors want me to handle and then to report back to them, you know, they’re too busy to even remember to ask me about these things, I have to go out of my way and text them or send them an email, they don’t even want to get on the phone a lot of the time because time is so precious.
So, we do all the work, whether it is website changes, whether it is social media posts, whether it is filming the video, managing your online reviews, putting out that custom content, those email newsletters, we’re going to do it for you. You can be as involved or not involved as you want, usually there is a super star staff member, excuse the children running around, everyone is having fun today on Father’s Day.
Howard: That’s awesome.
Pras: We will, you know, we can help, we can do it for you, we can work in conjunction with that office manager to take the reins on it, and a lot of the younger doctors, they know it’s important, they want to have some oversight but they don’t have the time to get in there and even to write the bio page. You know, I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve done a call like this, maybe not an hour but we’ll record a 5 to 10-minute conversation. We’ll go back home and type everything up because if I had to wait for the doctor to do it, 6-months later I’d still be waiting. So, just to reiterate, month to month, no contracts, full ownership, we do all the work for you, that’s what’s …
Howard: Sorry what do the fees start at? Because I know you’ve got Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond?
Pras: So Bronze ranges, you know, anywhere from about $1500 dollars initially, and about $150 dollars a month, I’d say, all the way up, Diamond is probably around 4000 initially and up to about 2000 a month depending on what we do for you, but I should also [55:57 unclear], everything we do is custom so we build custom packages at custom prices.
Those packages are merely outlines of our most popular offerings and price points, because as important as this is, as much as you know I’d love to tell everyone to invest thousands a month, we also understand the nature of the industry is not quite that of business ownership, you know. Most of these practices are 1, 2, 3 million dollar a year businesses, and if you looked at that, if I remove the word dentist and just show you, business A generating $1.5 million dollars this year and their online marketing budget was $2400 dollars, you’d scoff at that discrepancy.
That such a small percentage of their budget went to marketing, however, if I grab a dentist and I sit them down and they made 1.5 million and I’m asking for $2000 dollars a month, that is a very large expense and, you know, and they are a medical business so they have overheads, they have employees, they might have insurances to deal with, we get it. But the more you lean to business ownership, the more these costs look like no brainers, the more you gear yourself to the kind of medical professional, the more you are likely to look for the lowest number you can because you accept this, like your power bill, it is kind of like a sunk cost, I need to be on the internet but I really don’t want to pay.
So, we have a range of services for everybody but what we’ve found is the more they view it as a business and a marketing expense, the more they are able to justify those increased costs, and most people don’t start out at 2000, most people come in 2, 3, 500, whatever is comfortable. Just like when you’re trying to get a patient in the chair, you want them to be comfortable and you gain their trust, we do the same. And they often will work their way up once we can demonstrate some return and some value.
Howard: I want to go back to, do you need to go or are we cool, or are we good?
Pras: No, no, I just have to call my dad when we’re done.
Howard: Okay, I have already talked all my 4 boys today, that’s the most special day. I, when I look at the big brand, you know, I’ve always told dentists to steal all of your ideas from the Fortune 500, why reinvent the wheel, all their names are two syllables, Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and then their name is San Diego Cosmetic and Laser Dentistry and you’re like what? I mean, and then their name might even have an apostrophe in it and it’s like, I mean, should they try to find a 2-syllable name, is that what you would recommend or should they be The San Diego Institute of Facial and Cosmetic Dentistry?
Pras: Yes, so again, if we’re looking at it from the business perspective, I won’t say that it has to be 2-syllables, shorter is better but you want to be memorable, right, so the reason that those names exist that are 2-syllables, those are all made up words, right. They didn’t exist before the company, but you can go to almost any corner of the planet and the person knows what Google is. So, they, and Google actually just stole a word and repurposed it, Facebook, you know, invented based on what was going on at Harvard.
So, you want to have that ability to be easily remembered, again, given people’s attention spans, giving their inability to spell long words or even simple words, you know, orthodontist, you can’t imagine the variations of the correct spelling that end up in Google when people are searching. So, the idea is if you can make it catchy, if you can make it easy to remember, if you can shorten it, great, but you know, I had a ‘Kids Smile’, you know, paediatric dentistry…’Wow’, paediatric dentists are kind of like the first to hop on board there because they’re appealing to that younger crowd, and they want the mom’s and they want to have that fun and playful aspect to it. You know, Bellingham Smiles is a client of mine out in the Washington area, you can try to capture that location and easy to remember, if you can’t get the location and the name, it’s fine to try to get that in your domain name.
You know, you can have your business name or something, the same as a guy across the country, you cannot have the same domain name as the guy across the country, that is truly unique real estate. So, when it comes to picking your domain name, you may need to work location in there but outside of that, you want to play off of what would someone driving by remember and, you know, I don’t want to take up too much time but I had a fun story from the other day.
Me and one of my salesmen, we were at a conference, we were driving around and we went by a strip mall, which is, you know, a lot of dental offices are now and on the marque, I saw orthodontist, so the first thing I said was, hey, Mike, pull up the website, let’s see if they need our help. And I realized that the only other thing on the marque besides orthodontist was silverspringsmiles.com, no phone number, nothing, and it was, obviously we were driving.
So, this was all a couple of seconds after I saw the sign, I realized in that moment, you know what, if that was the phone number, if that was really anything else, that information was lost forever, I was in a foreign city to me, it wasn’t my home town, I wasn’t paying much attention to it. But because it was Silver Spring Smiles, I could remember that, I could tell that to Mike and now if I ever did want to find the phone number, find the address, get the name of the doctor, I’ve got an easy path to that - one I still remember 6 months later. In that sense, you’re gonna brand the name of the practice, You wanna be San Diego Cosmetic and Facial Implant Surgery. You know, try to grab San Diego dental implants dot com. Something- someone’s gonna be able to remember it and cache that away in their mind. You’ll notice, you know the websites of- of many, many, many businesses, even on just the ads for, like you said outside of your 4 sons you might not know a single phone number or anything.
Howard: Yeah I got it. My mom's the only phone number I still remember and my- my own dental office. That’s it. My mom and my dental office. And- and if you have a hundred dollars to spend, would you spend it on Google Adwords or Facebook Ads?
Pras: If those are the only two choices?
Howard: Yeah.
Pras: Okay.
Howard: Or just tell me what you’d do if I gave you a hundred dollars.
Pras: Oh.
Howard: Just prioritize where you would allot that money.
Pras: It's a- it's a very not rigid but right now it's a set pyramid. So, first and foremost in your website and your online marketing. Again, the real estate you control. If you only have a hundred dollars. Put that into the elements that are gonna pay off for you long term. That's one of the reasons that we go month to month. Over to the course of two years, even at the hundred dollars a month you gonna have spent twenty four hundred dollars. So if you're just getting the same product every month and you’re just paying to exist, you’re no better off two years down the road than you were and you still invested the same amount of money.
So invest that money in improving your website, adding to your website, growing your website even if you don't have a company behind you. You know one month take that hundred dollars and spend it on a graphic designer to improve your logo. One month take that hundred dollars spend it on a writer to write some content for you and edit it. Make sure you're improving your website. If the budget gets slightly bigger, go after that social media. Try to get some regular posts on there, some fun content, pictures from in the practice. People often forget that anything you have your staff do, you are paying for that time but they're spending on it. So if that - if the reception spends three hours on Facebook that week, that wasn't free. Those were three hours she could have been doing something else to help your practice that only she could do. From there, I would focus on, you know, photography, video, kind of the fun aspects making your website interactive. And then even though my answer to your question was Google Ads before Facebook Ads. Budget wise, Google Ads is gonna be the last thing you put in place because it requires the most substantial budget. Google would tell you, if you show up even with three hundred dollars you're essentially throwing that money away because it's not enough to see a meaningful return and you're gonna walk away thinking the Adwords didn't work. And they’re gonna tell you ‘well you just showed up with an auction with less than money than everybody else and you're complaining that there wasn't enough things for sale.’ So I would - if I only had a hundred dollars Facebook over Google because Facebook Ads are cheaper. However, a hundred dollars isn't gonna get you anything on Google. If you had two thousand dollars, I would go to Google first before I go to Facebook Ads because that can generate you some fast return on your investment. But, generally speaking there's certain building blocks you want in place and a lot of dentists make this mistake. A large part of it, is the salesman calling, you know, Yelp’s calling you on the phone, you're getting solicit emails, the SEO companies are contacting you, PPC companies. This why we try to be a one-stop shop. But everybody wants a couple of bucks to produce some element and you end up spread thin and I found that a lot of dentists are investing heavily on steps 3, 4 and 5 without ever securing steps 1 and 2. And so just make sure that you have a plan. You know the number of dentists that have an online marketing plan -very small. Have that plan and that process to where you're going to invest and when you're going to invest. And realize that some things you really have to work your way up to. You don't wanna diversify too early if your- if your core isn't strong, if your website, if your social media aren't good. Don't worry about paying to bring people to your website because you're really just investing for them to see a subpar product.
Howard: Why is it that on Dentaltown we have 50 categories that- that's the main difference in Dentaltown and Facebook. Facebook is just an endless feed. It doesn't really have a great way of categorizing the information. You know what I mean? I will say Facebook is a mile wide and inch deep. You could show me a final picture of a root canal but you're not gonna teach me how to do a root canal. And when I- when I go to dental websites- So we have 50 categories. One of them is marketing and dental websites falls under marketing. It's marketing, dentist websites, building a website, social media. But when you do a search on Dentaltown for like Google Adwords, there's a lot of constructive, talking or Facebook whatever. But dude, when you Google Yelp, every thread is negative, negative, negative. So every time I ever got an email from Yelp, I just delete it. It's like I feel like you're- you're joining the mafia or something. Why is that? Why does every- why is there so much anger about Yelp?
Pras: Sure. Great question. So..and this all comes back to my- my comment about web real estate. So if you- Yelp is one of those areas that we can't control and they make it very frustrating for us to try to control. By us I mean dentists out there. So, not only can anyone go say anything about you, a lot of times when do get someone to leave a good review, it filters out. But really the core of it, you know, everyone once to think of Yelp as a review company. In my opinion, they’re actually an SEO company and that’s search engine optimization. And what’s so frustrating about Yelp, is that you can't Google a business without bumping into their Yelp page. Yelp's kinda cracked that code as to how to show up when I google our brand and a Yelp listing comes up for you. They kind of captured some of that real estate. So you don't hear as many people complain about Health Grades or Web MD reviews because they don't really show up when people are looking.
So someone looks for your business. They see your Yelp page. If you have a low rating on there, you freak out. You know, dentists take these bad reviews personally even though that's the wrong approach. Then when they do go to get good reviews, they get filtered out and so their stuck, so they’ve got the hands in the air, then Yelp keeps going for $300 but Yelp will be the first one to tell you that $300 get's you nothing when it comes to your reviews. But I think the best way to sum up people's frustrations of Yelp, when you go to report a review to flag it. Basically saying, “Hey, Yelp. Take a look at this and take it down”. There's a variety of options as to why that review should be taking down. And the first one on there is it contains information that’s false. And if you pick that option you get an automated response that says, “Yelp does not takes sides in factual matters”. So they're essentially telling you, they're not interested in truth, they're not interested in navigating arguments or taking away someone’s review because it's-because it's false. They're staying out of that game. So when I see that I say, alright Yelp’s made it very clear that they don't care about what's true or not. So that, as you can imagine as medical professional will be incredibly frustrating in the days of malpractice, lawsuits and word of mouth and online reputations. If the company that controls all this is telling you that people can go on and lie and they don't have a problem with it, that in it’s core is extremely frustrating. So, just as as a side note to any listeners, if you are trying to get Yelp reviews removed, don't pick that option. You need to get them on some of their terms and conditions like vulgar language, not representing a personal experience. I don't wanna go on too much of a tangent but I do think this is valuable for you listeners. If you read the Yelp's terms and conditions, they have what they call a fly in the soup policy. So a Yelp review is supposed to describe an overall consumer experience. So, if I go to a restaurant and I get a fly in my soup, Yelp actually doesn't want me posting pictures of that or leaving a bad review about that because it is not the typical experience. It's the exception. So, you can imagine though how many bad reviews are written about the exception to what a general experience is. So, the number one point I've had with success in getting Yelp reviews removed, is appealing to Yelp and saying look this wasn't a typical personal consumer experience. This was the mother of the person that was in the chair. This is the brother on other account. This is someone complaining about the wait room when there was...the commute to the practice when there was traffic and construction outside. You try to get them on those areas. So, to answer your question, that's why the negativity about Yelp. If I said, “I’m gonna tell the world about your practice but I'm not gonna pay any attention to what's true and what's not. You’d be pretty frustrated with me when the bad stuff comes out”. And unfortunately for better or worse, that's what a lot of dentists fall victim to. And they think that paying Yelp will solve that problem but Yelp will be the first one to tell you that it won’t.
Howard: So, in saying all that, should people buy or pay Yelp or get their services or just..?
Pras: So, I would call that step 6 in that- pyramid we’re constructing. If your website is great, if your social media is really good, if you- if you’ve got Google Adwords coming along, if your- you know your staff is delegated and working on this thing as a team, yes. Then if you have another three hundred and up, Yelp is a great place to put it on there. Now do I necessarily think people are going to Yelp to find their dentist? No. But, is your Yelp page showing up when people are researching you, yes. So, I have seen a lot of success through Yelp advertising. What I have with the pitfall is, if you're doing that without those other elements in place, you, again- you're investing money in a tool that’s meant to drive traffic to you, but then that traffic is coming to a subpar product.
Howard: You promised me an hour. I've already gone ten minutes over. I still got couple of questions. I don't wanna be..I don't wanna be bothering you on a Sunday on Father's Day. I've already...I celebrated my four boys last night. They're all gone today except for Ryan and but can I ask a couple of more questions?
Pras: No problem. I'm having a great time. I'm here as long as you need me and my dad will be happy to know I was working this Sunday morning.
Howard: Still people just ask Angie's List. Yay, nay is that something you see it on TV all the time?
Pras: Yeah that's- that's a tougher one because that's opens up the door to a countless number of..
Howard: First of all, what is- I always wonder. How would..where do you get the money to buy all these television ads?
Pras: Right, right So-
Howard: If you're up there saying, “Oh this is the best plumber in town”. Well, who the hell is paying for that ad on TV?
Pras: Absolutely, absolutely. So, and I haven't checked recently so I could be a little outdated here but from my understanding, Angie List- Angie's list was tied in with Craigslist, or at least the rise of Craigslist and Craigslist was personal ads, people putting up whatever they wanted, whatever they wanted to sell. So Angie's List was essentially the business version of that. Let's help people find businesses in their area and rank them. Like Craigslist, full of a bunch of noise, bunch of junk it is... You know, you kind of pay to play or at least... where that money comes from is that these websites first have to get people on them then once they’re on them, they have to generate some money and that money almost always comes from businesses. You know, Yelp doesn't charge people to go on and read or write Yelp reviews. But once Yelp got big enough and their fund... they had to show some money and in return for their funding, well they had to go capture some money. Same for Facebook. Same for Google. All of them get their money from businesses. And those companies don't really care if this is a good investment for your business or not, they will take your money all the same. So I would have to be pretty far down, my online marketing list to consider Angie's List or I would have to have a specific reason why I want to be on there or maybe I have a personal relationship with my Angie's List rep and they're giving me a good deal and I wanted to try it out. And you know, I think that speaks to a larger question in marketing, and one that leads to a lot of frustration for dentists, is that nobody knows the one silver bullet in marketing that's gonna work. If we did we all just do that. You know, marketers like myself would be out of business and anyone that tells you, “Oh, this is- this is definitely gonna work and you gonna see extra return on your investment”. They're just lying. It's actually the best tell of a bad marketer is when they guarantee you X amount of results.
The truth is, none of us know exactly what works but we all know that when you do this things that I have mentioned in combination and you do them well and you put it out there, that the results follow and trying to untangle backwards exactly which one was giving you the best return on your dollar, that's what having someone helping you with your marketing is all about. But, so I never wanna tell someone not to try an opportunity because you should try it and see what happens. However, I do think there's a fairly smart order to what you try and unfortunately, every one of those companies that needs your money from your businesses, also has sales people contacting your business. And again, as a business owner that might not have any true business training, you're kind of at the mercy of a good sales pitch and what sounds like a good idea because you don't wanna short change your business for $50 a month, a $100 a month, $200 a month. Well, sometimes when I review dentists’ operating expenses, I'll find 10 to 15 of those $50-$100 a month bills and when I asked them what they're getting for, they’ll have no idea. But it's a low enough number to just fly under the radar as long as the practice is growing and new patients are coming in, why mess with the marketing budget.
So, I'm not saying cut that and go to zero. You know, Henry Ford had a famous quote. I’ll update it for today. “The person who stops advertising to save money is like the person who stops their clock to save time”. Right, so that's not where you cut money to save money. But I do think if you only had 400, 800, 1200. There are certain areas where you want to invest that first and be secure. Because Angie's List is only gonna give you return as long as you're on Angie's List. Your website, your social media are gonna give you a return as long as you have your website, as long as you have your social media. Even if you pull back the reins on that budget.
Howard: The number one genius that understood that Henry Ford quote was Michael Dell whose dad is an orthodontist.
Pras: Really?
Howard: Did you know his dad is an orthodontist?
Pras: I did not know that.
Howard: And his brother is an ophthalmologist. I had dinner with them at the Texas Dental Association like in the ‘90s and Michael, you know, his dad is an orthodontist. Mike comes home from school after- comes home after one week at college and moves back out and says, he's like, “What’s going on?” He’s like, “I met everyone of my teachers. Everyone of them is an idiot”. I'm done. And Henry's wife cried that night and he said, “Can I use your garage to start this idea I've got?” which was Dell computers. But, in the March 2000 crash when, I mean, the NASDAQ had gone from my 1200 to 5600 in March it just- it just collapsed. Dell was the only one who tripled his marketing budget with “Hey dude, got a Dell?” And he was the only one growing sales and earnings and he was saying in the Wall Street Journal, he goes- he goes, “All my competitors are cutting their advertising. I tripled mine”.
Pras: Right.
Howard: He said it's gonna be harder to get business , I tripled my marketing. Just a couple more questions they are asking. What is Zocdoc?
Pras: Great question So, Zocdoc is a platform. It was originally meant to connect patients to doctors. So, we all know the situation. You need a doctor last minute. Your doctor is booked out or doesn't have an appointment for two weeks. But you need to see someone today or tomorrow. So, Zocdoc, I believe started with the intention, I don't know the early beginnings but when they came to market, they had the ability to fill that need. Where if you're a doctor, you signed on for Zocdoc. You can put out some times that you're available today. If someone needs a doctor today, well you'll pop-up. They can book an appointment with you, they’ll come in. Had no idea.
I think it was July 4th 2001 or 2002. I had an issue with my eye. I was an internship in Washington D.C. I needed to be seen that night. No optometrist or ophthalmologist that I called, you know, regular practice had any openings on a Friday. I had to go online and- and Google you know, who's available right now and make some phone calls. So that's how they started. Kind of filling in people's schedules. Now they're a bit more robust of a platform. They are a online platform for doctors. You can get reviews on Zocdoc. They can promote your reviews. They have featured listings. So again, once they got enough people using their product, now they they're gonna take money from doctors to have you show higher than the other guy.
They also can do what we call microsites. So a lot of people that don't have a website, they at least have a Zocdoc site meaning, there's somewhere online you can go to get their basic information and book an appointment. But, of course it is a paid service. So, it works beautifully in conjunction with a website. If you can have your own custom personalized website and that ‘request appointment’ button goes to your Zocdoc page where they can then select an available time even if it's last minute and come on in, that's how you get more out of the products that you're paying for. Too many of the dentists I worked with, pay companies like Zocdoc, or Yelp, or Facebook and they don't have these elements on their website. And that actually speaks to what you mentioned about your Michael Dell quote. You know, I read that a large number of consumers view a lack of advertising as a sign of a struggling business.
So that’s kind of why you don't cut to save money and why Michael Dell went the opposite way. He wanted to show them, “Hey, Dell is not in any kind of trouble. We're doing great and we're growing”. And kind of that prophecy filled itself as he invested more in sales and marketing. So, whether you're a struggling practice or not, when someone goes to your website and they see a five-year old website or it's all broken, the links don't work. Whether it's fair or not, that can be a sign of someone who's not investing in their marketing and that can be a sign of someone whose business is struggling. 'Cause why wouldn't you put one or two hundred dollars towards this problem a month unless you’re really trying to tighten the latches you know. And that’s not always the truth. So let me just say that upfront. That's not always the case. My doctor back in Las Vegas, my dentist, he had the worst website. It didn't work on iPhones. It didn't do anything. I said, “Doc, you know, what's going on here?” And said, “You know, well I'm booked out 6 months in advance. You know, I don’t really know what it’s gonna- you can't more book me up. You know, having this website I’ll get around to it. It’s something that I've been afraid to do, blah blah blah”. I moved out of Vegas so, I couldn't help him out because he was pretty resistant to it. I checked it the other day still the same website. So he's a healthy practice. He's thriving. Someone with that impression would be wrong. But it’s still the impression that they can have and it is the impression that I had the very first time. I went to see him because I thought, “Damn. Maybe this practice is in bad shape. They can’t even get around updating this website.” And then it turned out be the opposite.
Howard: They say an upcoming trend is that on your website you'll be able to schedule your appointment and Open Dental is open and they- they have a feature where you can add to your website. Are you- Are you seeing that growing in demand?
Pras: Yeah. Certainly growing in demand. We all as patients want to be able to log on and schedule an appointment. You know my joke about millennials is if you let them make an appointment without ever talking to a person, they'll do it. The last thing they want to do is call, be on hold, leave a voice mail, have you call them back right. That's almost an invasion of privacy now calling their cellphones. So, they can Uber or Airbnb, if they can tap their way to what they want just showing up in front of them, they would take advantage. So the demand is there. On the dental side, the supply isn’t.. is catching up. Because you know, there's always the fear of schedule appointment versus request an appointment. So if I schedule appointment 10 minutes from now, your staff might not have the resources to actually act upon that and then I'm gonna show up in 10 minutes with the attitude that I made an appointment why isn’t everyone catering to me?
So, we have seen almost everybody on board with using their websites to request an appointment. And the large part of that is because there's all the hours that you're closed which are the main hours that you know, working people are doing these kinds of things and you want them to be able to let you know when they're gonna come in. When they're available without having to call and wait on hold. You know when they're at work they're not able to call and if you put them on hold, they're really not able to stick around. They're trying to do that on their lunch break. So the idea there is everybody wants to be able to request an appointment. All their websites allowed for that. Some people put you know 24, 48 hour disclaimers on there saying, “Don't use this if you need to be seen within that time frame. Our staff will reach out to you”. That said, all those practice management softwares are seeing the money in services like Zocdoc, in some of the platforms, your demand forces, you know the systems that integrate directly with your practice management software and do allow someone to truly schedule an appointment and be on the books, that’s definitely popular, definitely wanted. You need to have the infrastructure in your own practice to handle those kind of requests. But, everybody listening should have ‘request an appointment’ on your website and have someone checking that email. I can’t tell you the number of bizarre situations where that’s come in handy. Something is off the wall as- I got a message that said, “Please email me back. I’m deaf”. I’ve seen one that said, “Hey, I’m at work. Don’t call my cellphone. You know, I can’t pick up but I need an appointment tomorrow morning”. We’ve seen it all in terms of who will use those forms to contact your clinic on their terms.
Howard: You just said- you just kinda walked into another can of worms because- Well, first of all, as far as scheduling online, doctors are afraid these people are gonna show up or whatever, and then you say well, what are some of your biggest problems? ‘No shows and cancellations.’
Pras: Right.
Howard: For 30 years, I told my patients, I named my office Today’s Dental and if you have an emergency, you don’t call the hospital you just go down there. I said, “If you have an emergency, I mean, we’re open Monday-Friday. Just come down here. You don’t have to get a hold of Jan, or me, or Valerie or whatever. Just come on down”. And for 30 years, that walk-in emergency, that person coming down has balanced equally with the no-show or cancellation.
Pras: Right.
Howard: In the hospital, when you walk in the emergency, you don’t walk into the surgery. Every dental office needs to have an emergency room. And, you know, when you have 3 chairs and they’re scheduled all day long, then you don’t have an emergency room. And the doctors who don’t have their emergency room usually nett to the IRS about $50,000 a year lost. And every oral surgeon has 2 extra chairs, every endodontist has 2 extra chairs because the endodontist is gonna catch a fish. He might not necessarily do the root canal there but they’ll get you out paying giving antibiotics, Vicodin, Oxycodone, whatever Prince was on. You know, you catch the fish, you don’t have to cook, clean and eat it. And, but last question, I feel so bad. You’re on a Father’s Day but now the dentist show.. they live in fear. Now, they’re all afraid that they’re gonna get sued by the Americans with Disability Act because a deaf person went to their website and your website wasn’t in braille or didn’t have text for the video. Is that- is that real or myth?
Pras: I’m so glad you brought that up. In fact, it was- it was my poor planning to not put that on the agenda. But, I am getting questions from every corner of the country about this from my current clients. So, I don’t want to discredit the American Disabilities Act in the slightest so we absolutely wanna cater to them to take this, take that in as the forefront. However, that particular email going around is more or less legal communication from lawyers looking to make more money off of people being afraid. You know, it’s no different. My mom got a call on the other day on their landline that said that I was gonna be arrested. You know, in 30 minutes and the police were on their way to the house if she didn’t turn over some kind of information. And you know, she called me and asked about it and I said, “Okay, first of all, if they’re doing that they wouldn’t call you and tell you that they were on their way”. But, the point was it was a completely fear-based system and anytime you implement that it’s a numbers game. So, if I email out a million dentists with some kind of fear-based claim that they could solve for a 100 or 200 dollars, you can be rest assured I’m gonna make some money off of that because some people are just gonna pay the bill and move on with their day because you know it sounds fine. So, in the body of that email, there’s a long list of things you should do and they intentionally make it sound very difficult, very challenging, wanting you to question your website provider from top to bottom. And don’t get me wrong, these are nice questions to ask but the way that they frame it is like you need to this or you’re gonna be the victim of the lawsuit.
What we’ve done on a front line of defense is the number one thing on that list is that there should be a disclaimer at the bottom for people with disabilities as to how to access the information that they might need and the ways to get around it. If you take care of that now, again, remember the lawyers are looking to make a buck. So, they’re gonna make some money off the initial email, then once they run dry on that, their next step will be to send the follow up letter to make it look like they’re taking legal action or attempting to take legal action. When they do that, they’re gonna go after the low hanging fruit. So, if you’ve taken the first two or three steps on this list, you may have a much weaker case than if you just ignored it completely and they can kinda hammer you with fear. So, we’re putting that disclaimer on our websites, we’re starting there. There are some considerations, yes. If someone is blind, is your website gonna be easy to navigate for them? What are ways we can do it? Technology does have solutions. However, blind users also go into using their computer with some tools that help them pull out what’s on the internet.
Really, what I took away from that was, if you design and add a lot of extra bells and whistles on your website, if you have things people have to be able to do, to access your website, have people with disabilities in mind, if you only have your phone number on there as a means to contact you, have deaf people in mind and give them some way that they could reach out to you. If you are putting a spam filter on your website that requires you to enter in a certain code and it’s a picture, you know, have blind people in mind or have there be an audio option that the computer will read to them what they need to type in to pass those filters. That’s how I viewed the letter and I’m not a lawyer, I’m not an attorney but I’ve seen enough of those complaints and the places they’re coming from to know that, “Hey, look. Take the first step or two. The easiest ones the disclaimer on the site, the ADA gives you the disclaimer that you can put on the bottom of your site. That’s gonna be your first level of protection. But outside of that, you know, how many people are actually going to court and losing because there’s some real damages on their dental website. No, we need to see those numbers before we take it more seriously but, no.
Keep them in mind when you come up with the brand new idea, put a disclaimer on your website and keep in mind that doctors are some of the easiest business owners to frighten because of what you deal with in your profession and malpractice is a very serious thing, lawsuits, the insurance you pay. No one wants to come within 5 feet of that. So, if I call you and tell you your domains are about to expire and you’re gonna get blacklisted on Google unless you pay me $20, you can’t imagine the number of people that have paid the wrong company $20 to register their domain name when really their domain name is sitting in GoDaddy and they paid, you know, XYZ domains because they got a letter saying that they are out of compliance.
Howard: Damn, you are so smart. You’re like a, I mean- what an orator , you’re like Socrates. I can listen you- you just flow. You can tell there’s so much- there’s so much horsepower behind those that larynx of yours. I mean, really, you just- you just- It’s been an hour and a half. I was just gonna talk to you for an hour and Ryan said when we started don’t keep him an hour, it’s Father’s Day just- you know, just let them off and we went one hour and a half. I could go another hour and half with you.
Pras: And just real quick, I think of the things when it comes to digital marketing, you know, I went to school, not to drag this on too much longer but when I showed up at college, I had no intention of taking another Math class, right. I was well ahead in high school, I’d completed my requirements. They made me take one course to get my units that I earned and I had a wonderful teacher. He said, “Hey, you’re halfway done, why don’t you finish the thing out”. And I did. I left college planning on never doing piece of Math again. I stumbled my way into a tutoring job to pay some bills. I ended up buying the business. I tutored Math for the next 8, you know, 8 years. I left that, I started a basketball website with no intention of doing online marketing, certainly not for doctors. I kinda stumbled my way into it with a friend and now here I am, right.
So, all of that is to say that when it comes- when it comes to marketing, when it comes to the internet, most people are kinda stumbling their way through this. So, if you’re a dentist out there and it’s daunting, and it’s scary, that’s normal. No one says I’m gonna grow up to be a dentist so I can have the best dental website in the world and my online marketing is gonna be thriving. We’re here to help. Every one of the things we talked about on this call today a dentist could do themselves. With enough time, enough research, no one- I didn’t go to school for digital marketing. Nobody did. I don’t know if there’s some new degree that’s popping up now. It’s all learned on the job. So, you can do it, your staff can do it. But it always comes down to time versus money and if you’re trading hours that you could be seeing people in the chair or you’re trading hours that you could be administering the sides of the business that I can’t help you with, are you actually coming out ahead versus a monthly bill of anywhere from $1 to $1,500. That’s the decision you have to make but don’t be afraid of it. If you get in there with some help and with some pieces of advice and some honesty, that’s really what it all comes down to. You know, my product is not for everyone and I try to be sure to let people know when they’re not the right fit instead of just taking them on board. I think you’ll get through it and you’ll actually find it to be one of most fulfilling parts of your practice because it’s your way to speak to the world, right dental... I have to imagine if I ask you about Dentaltown just the number of stories you would have from people in every corner of the globe and the ways that it affected them, that you never could have seen coming and when you started the thing. And while not on a global scale, your website can often do the same thing. They see that before and after picture and they think, “Oh my God, there is hope for me and my condition that I’ve got -this guy had it.” And look at what happened, you know, 6 months later with some regular business. That’s how you wanna think of your website and your online marketing. Your ability to speak to the world.
Howard: So, they can contact you if they go to doctormultimedia.com. You give out your email, number, anything else? Or just go to Doctor Multimedia?
Pras: I mean, if you need to reach our company as a whole it’s just info@doctormultimedia.com. If you have questions for me in particular, I’m Pras Murthy and hopefully on the podcast we can have the correct spelling of that. PrasMurthy@doctormultimedia.com. But, again if I’m asking you to remember any of those things, I am already failing you of what I’ve told you on this show.
Just go to the website doctormultimedia.com the very first thing you’ll see is a quick contact form, less than 10 seconds you can submit your question. Even my current clients use that sometimes because it’s so much easier to just go to a website, type away than try to open up their email, type my email and deal with the balance. You go to doctormultimedia.com send us a question and we’ll get right back to you usually in under 12 hours usually but I promise 24.
Howard: So, on the most sacred holiday of the year, St. Patrick’s day, you changed your name from Murthy to Murphy?
Pras: Yes. On those days I don’t correct the spelling when I’m making reservations. I just say it M. U. R. T. H. Y. and everybody writes it down P. H. Y. So, I only have to say T. as in Tom when- when I’m worried about an email address getting sent to the wrong place.
Howard: Alright, man, this was just rock and roll. Thank you so much for just an hour and a half. This was just amazing. And Ryan we should- when this podcast goes out, post it under dental marketing and I wish you would go in on that ADA post and say what you just said about the ADA because it’s already causing total hysteria.
Pras: Absolutely. And thank you so much, Howard. I don’t exactly know how you found us but I’m very appreciative you reached out. Thank you, Ryan.
Howard: I found you on Dentaltown.
Pras: For all the work that you did in scheduling this. You know, I could talk all day about it -it wasn’t a passion of mine and initially but you know, experience say has made it such, and we’re here to help. So, absolute pleasure. Couldn’t have imagined a better way to spend an hour and a half this morning and to all the listeners out there, you’re part of an amazing website, keep it up. The conversations you all have on that website help thousands of people you never see or hear from because I get questions about your website all the time from people that are not on there. So, keep doing what you’re doing on the website, answering questions and pushing the envelope because the dental industry is catching up in the online world. There’s still a long way to go but they’ve made some serious strides over the last 5 years.
Howard: Now, go tell your doctor dad that Doctor Farran said that he should be very proud of his son.
Pras: I’ll do that. Thanks so much, doctor.