https://youtu.be/BYqBZ89Jtd4?si=QlFSJspjQ2wmxA0v

How Authenticity Can Help Your Marketing Efforts

The following podcast has been lightly edited for flow. To enjoy the audio conversation, you can watch on YouTube or listen to our podcast on iTunes, Google Play, or Spotify.

Carrie Webber:

Welcome back to the Jameson Files. I'm your host, Carrie Weber, and so excited to be coming back. While we're recording this, we are entering into the fourth quarter of 2023. And why I wanted to bring that up is because today's topic is going to be all about the trends in marketing, what we see happening, because what I hope that all of you are doing is preparing yourself now for the year you want to have in 2024. I'm thrilled to be joined with my guest friend and teammate, Nate Porter, who is the chief marketing officer of the Jameson Group. Nate, thank you so much for joining me today.

Nate Porter:

Yeah, thank you for having me. Excited to talk about this topic.

Carrie Webber:

Yeah, and my hope is that in this episode we can share with you what the Jameson marketing team has been seeing, as of late, in terms of what's getting results in marketing or what's happening that dental practices or dental business owners need to be aware of. And also, like I said, how to plan for this upcoming year–what you need to review and what you need to strategize for so that we can help you grow your practices or your businesses, whatever the case may be. So, Nate, I want to pass it over to you for a little bit. Tell me what you're seeing and what your recommendations would be at this point in the year.

Authenticity Breaks through the Noise in Marketing

Nate Porter:

It's interesting to watch trends and see what's happening with marketing in general. One of the things that we see a lot of is a really widening gap in terms of what people are doing for marketing. Things have evolved and some people are still looking back at their 2015, 2016 strategy, and they think that it’s going to continue to work, and it may in some markets. But what we are seeing is that there's a lot more people who are really advancing in their marketing, and they're really putting a lot of effort, a lot of resources behind their marketing. And so what that looks like is, as we've been talking about over the last number of years, is a trend towards more authenticity.

And so they’re moving away from this templated, very static, very generic feel to online marketing, to social media, all of that sort of thing, to a much more genuine approach. And, I think, as you look at the marketing industry as a whole, and you listen to leaders in the industry, what you hear is the importance of understanding the signal-to-noise ratio. So as you have more demands on attention, more demands on people's time, more competition, frankly, in the marketing space, including dentistry, you have a harder time breaking through that noise. And so what can break through is not shouting louder about your list of services that you offer, or being more pushy about your message, but being more authentic.

And so what we see as tools for that are creating a conversation with your potential patients or even with your patients online. That conversation needs to start online.You can't wait for it to start in your practice. And so that can be things like video, like what we're doing here today, where we're having a conversation about topics that are relevant. It can be authentic photography of your team, and your practice, of you interacting with patients. Dentistry can be something that creates anxiety. This feels warm, it feels welcoming, it feels like something that you want to engage with. The contrast has gotten so much clearer between what was common in the early 20-teens to today. It’s night and day from people who have kept up and kept moving their marketing forward.

Carrie Webber:

I love this point. I think the hangup, especially in dentistry,