Six ways to be different, not just louder

The Savannah Bananas sell out every game and I couldn’t tell you their record. Neither can most of the people in the stands, and that has never once slowed down ticket sales.

What they sell is everything happening around the baseball. Dancing coaches, players on stilts, a senior citizen dance team that gets louder applause than anyone actually playing. The game happens somewhere in the middle of all of it.

Meanwhile, every orthodontist, dentist, and chiropractor I know is out there advertising the game.

I spent part of last week in a client’s office. Twenty years in practice, one of the good ones, and his referrals have been sliding for months. Some of his referring dentists are down fifty percent. A couple have stopped sending patients altogether, including one whose own daughter is in his chair right now. He’d been told the same thing 99.9% of marketing companies tell everyone: run more ads, buy more search terms, do more TikTok dances with the team, and bribe the referring offices with more deliveries, food, gifts, and local donations.

Did you hear anything original in that list? Probably not. But it’s the go-to playbook for every marketing company out there.

So we decided to get creative. We put our heads together and landed on six ideas that don’t sound like anyone else’s marketing plan. Not one of them is about what we do. They’re all about how people experience us in a new way.

1. Stop feeding the hygienists and start asking them things

Most specialists take the referring dentist to lunch. But the dentist only picks an orthodontist once, maybe twice, in their whole career. The hygienist gets about twelve minutes with every kid in that chair, and she’s the one saying “this crowding is getting worse” a dozen times a week.

Here’s the part that actually matters: hygienists went through real schooling, they’re clinicians in their own right, and most of them feel completely unseen. Nobody asks what they think. So invite six of them from your top offices to an after-hours case review. Real cases, real imaging, and you actually ask for their read on it. Feed them, pay them a small stipend, and treat them like the specialists they are.

They walk out having stopped thinking of you as the office they send to. That’s a completely different relationship, and it costs less than a month of ads.

2. Your old patients have kids now

If you’ve been in practice twenty years, you treated a generation. The kid you debonded in 2008 is thirty-two with a nine-year-old and braces on her mind, and she has never once heard from you.

Pull the charts from 2005 through 2012 and reach out, but give it a reason. Do a yearbook. Dig up the old debond photo from 2008, put it next to whatever picture they’ll send you of their kid now, and post the pair. Call it “we treat generations, not just patients.” It’s not really a throwback post, it’s proof you’ve been trusted in this town long enough to treat someone’s kid twice.

It’s warm, it’s cheap, and I have yet to meet a practice that has done it.

3. Make debond day a spectacle

My client was doing thirteen debonds the morning I was there. Thirteen kids getting the best news of their month, and the whole thing takes about ninety seconds before they move to the next chair.

Build a moment into it. A wall, a ridiculous oversized trophy, a bell they ring on the way out, whatever fits your practice. Then hand mom her phone and let her film it.

She posts it. Her friends see her kid’s face, not your logo. Thirteen of those in one morning isn’t thirteen posts either, it’s one montage with the same song and thirteen grins, and it’ll beat anything you pay for.

Here’s the bonus nobody thinks about: book your new patient consults on debond days on purpose. Most offices just scatter them wherever there’s an opening. Put a few in the waiting room while the bell is ringing and the trophy’s coming out, and that new parent just watched what the end of the journey actually looks like instead of hearing you describe it.

Best Buy figured this out decades ago. They used to send you around back to the loading dock to pick up a big TV. Then someone realized it’s a lot more useful to have you walk out the front doors carrying a 72 inch box while someone else is still deciding between that and the 50 inch. Seeing the purchase beats hearing about the possibility of one, every time. Let your new patients see the debond, not just the brochure.

4. Throw an appreciation party with nothing to sell

Food trucks in the parking lot. A back-to-school thing, a Halloween thing, doesn’t matter. Free, open to the neighborhood, and absolutely no selling. No consult table, no clipboards, nobody in scrubs handing out cards.

It doesn’t have to be a production either. My local dump, of all places, ran a customer appreciation thing last week. Free hot dogs and sodas from 10 to noon, no announcement beyond a sign out front. That’s it. The randomness is the whole appeal, “hey, we’ve got a food truck out here today, come grab lunch” works just as well as a planned event.

Bonus if you bring in a local vendor instead of a national chain, especially one who’s already a patient of yours. A small donut cart or ice cream cart run by someone in your neighborhood does two things at once: it’s a nice thing to do for a local business, and it tells everyone in that parking lot that you actually support local instead of just saying it.

Parents don’t tell their friends about a good orthodontist. They absolutely tell their friends about a great party, and school pickup is where that conversation happens.

5. Go be a person in your own neighborhood

Gary Vaynerchuk has been saying this for years and almost nobody in healthcare does it. Walk into the coffee shop down the block in your scrubs, film ninety seconds about why you love the place, tag them, post it.

You’re not selling anything. You’re the doctor who is clearly out in the world supporting the businesses your patients already go to, and those businesses will reshare it to exactly the neighborhood parents you want.

The scrubs are doing quiet work there. You’re recognizable, you’re obviously mid-workday, you just walked over. Nothing about it looks produced, which is the only reason it lands.

6. Go find the group nobody else is marketing to

Every practice management company will tell you August, September, and October are slow. That’s not wrong, it’s just not the whole story. A dental office in Vegas noticed the same slump every summer, so they started marketing straight to the senior living communities in town: “September and October are Senior Citizen Month, book your cleanings now.” Those became their busiest months of the year, because seniors don’t run on a school calendar.

Do the same thing with homeschool families. They’re not competing with anyone else for your 3pm slot because their whole day is already flexible. Tell the homeschool groups in your area that August through October is when you book them specifically, and put them in the midday hours everyone else leaves empty. You fill the slow slots, they get treated like they matter, and you’re not fighting anyone for the after-school rush.

None of this requires a bigger budget, and every bit of it requires you to be a little more interesting than the practice down the street.

The Bananas figured out that people will drive a long way for something worth talking about. Your patients will drive past three other orthodontists for the same reason, and right now most of us are giving them nothing to talk about.

Pick the one that made you a little uncomfortable when you read it, and try it before the end of the month.

 

Proactive, Productive, and Profitable,
Dino