Anne: Hi everyone. It's Anne Duffy and welcome to Dental Entrepreneur, the Future of Dentistry's podcast. I'm so glad you're here with me today and I've got a new guest. I have just met him this morning, so it's gonna be new for me and new for you as he shares his information with us that I think you're gonna love.
But let me tell you a little bit about him before we get started. Justin Strong is the founder and CEO of room 118 Inc. A premier dental research and marketing agency specializing in high growth dental practices. With 25 years of experience in marketing and sales, Justin has spearheaded initiatives for top brands such as Verizon Enterprises Solutions and McCann.
He developed the industry first dental marketing index and is launching the 2025 edition alongside the Super Practice Blueprint Providing data-driven high ROI marketing strategies, his expertise transforms dental practice's profitability. Please help me welcome my new friend, Justin Strong.
Hey Justin, how are you?
Justin: And thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.
Anne: Well, I'm glad you're here. And so, before we got started with the podcast and recording, we found out that we have mutual friends. And shout out to Danny as Swell because apparently everybody loves you. Danny, I hope you're listening to this today.
Justin: refuse to go to a cocktail party with Danny 'cause I'll just sit in the corner and watch that guy work the room like nobody's business. So. Yeah.
Anne: And he's so authentic and he's just a swell guy we just love him. Absolutely. But you know. That's the thing about dentistry and I think you realize that, early on when you came back into dentistry a couple years ago, Justin is, it's a relationship business and in need of help from people that really care and are authentic and trustworthy.
So tell me a little bit about how you got going into dentistry and then actually where you were drawn back into dentistry.
Justin: I'll try not to divert too far and bore the heck outta you and your audience. But most of my career has been spent in tech companies. So, Here in, Utah where I live there's a pretty vibrant tech scene.
A lot of the big players are here, but a lot of startups have grown into big players here, and I spent most of my formative years. Climbing the ranks in those types of organizations. And about 10 years ago, 2015, I went to a big agency called McCann and ran strategy for Verizon Enterprise Solutions.
And then from there, kind of hopped back into the tech scene. And I. More recently, a few years ago, found myself at Swell, which I think some of your audiences are gonna be familiar with. Some have tried them when it comes to automated review solicitation and some of the other things that they do.
I spent some time there as the CMO and that's where I really got acquainted with dental. That's where I really stopped and I looked at this market. I'm like, this is one of those things that. First of all, it's a surprisingly large market. We all need dentists. They're everywhere. They do a valuable job.
It's critical to our daily lives. We tend to take it for granted. We don't think about it. And when I was there, what I felt were some real opportunities to level up the bar when it comes to marketing. I had this sort of big tech marketing background and I thought there's certain. Processes and technologies that could probably be maybe a little bit modified, but put to bear to help dental practices kind of do what they need to do better.
And so that was kind of the genesis and the pivot to say, you know what? I wanna spend some time really focusing on dental.
Anne: Well, I think that's smart. I mean, I've been in dental so long. you know, probably don't know this, but I was a practicing hygienist for about 46 years and I loved it, but I just still remember the day that you were not allowed to put any marketing out as a dental practice.
You could put your, I think just your name and phone number in the yellow Pages, and you were not allowed to do any marketing whatsoever. So they're kind of still new at. That. and usually they just need help. And if somebody's breathing and they say they can help them with their marketing, they're gonna hire them and then go back into their clinical realm and just assume that it's all working well and It's not like you just, put your shingle out anymore. You really need to market the greatness within your practice and with the vision of where you see it going. So kudos to you to, come back in. We need good people in this industry, and that's what really it's all about.
Justin: I appreciate you saying that.
I do think it is an interesting time because you talk about years back it was just hanging your shingle. It was, I'm a dentist in the neighborhood, people need my services. I'm gonna focus on being a really good clinician. I'm not gonna try to market myself.
That's frankly, a waste of time. My focus should be on giving the best clinical care possible, and I think we would all agree that's what we want. Even to this day, and the good news and the bad news is, you know, you fast forward from that time to where we are today. Patients and prospective patients, they're just much more demanding when it comes to making the decision to go to this practice versus this practice.
Your smartphone has changed how people go about that basic process, and so there's a certain amount of, Benefit. And I, think, again, this turns into a double-edged sword, but there's a certain amount of benefit to having some focus on the marketing side of your, practice, but also not obviously to the exclusion of your clinical focus.
And that's a tough balancing act. And I think historically that's where. As things have changed over the last 25, 30 years, agencies have stepped in to try to fill those roles better. You know, Hey I'm, focused on my practice. I'll hire a professional to help with my marketing. And I think agencies and even just.
Individual contractors and folks that maybe you hire within your, practice to do that work? I think they've done good work, but there's been an absence of reliable benchmarks that say in the same way that your clinical care is, if I observe these circumstances, I'm gonna pursue this course of treatment because there's scientific evidence to support that.
We don't have anything like that on the marketing side, or at least we have very little amounts of it. We, everybody talks about being data-driven, but in practice the data's messy. It's hard to take advantage of. So that's where I've been seeing, I think, some opportunity to step in and add some value.
Anne: That makes perfect sense. First of all, I think when you go to dental school you may wanna start your business, but you don't get the education in dental school for business. Right. And marketing's a big piece of that. So again, if you sign up for marketing, you just assume everything's going okay, and you don't even really look at the data or the return on investment, but you have this data.
Analytics and how do you see the data analytics shaping the future of dental marketing,
Justin: I think basically by providing that benchmark, so I feel like today, if you're, going to Novo and you're starting a brand new practice, even if you have an established mature practice, if you ask the question, I want to grow my practice by some amount.
what do you do? Okay, so I wanna add 10 more patients per month, or 50 more patients per month. What do you actually do? And most folks are gonna say well, I'll, talk to somebody and I'll maybe talk to three or four people and they're gonna pitch me on well, I need a new website, or maybe I should do social.
And I'll talk to some of my peers and they'll say well, I've done this and I've had some success. That's all helpful to a point. Our approach is to say, no. Let's look at thousands of dental practices at scale in a statistically representative way across the entire country, and then ask the question when somebody appears to have.
Say 10 new, patient starts a month and somebody else has 50 new patient starts a month. What is fundamentally different about those practices from a marketing standpoint? What can we empirically measure? Are their websites the same or are they different? Is their social the same or is it different?
And so this index that we're now in the third year of that we're launching June. It is the. Call it raw. It's formatted and filtered, but it's the raw data to say, here's what we found. This is the statistical range of the size of websites. This is how much your Google My Business profile tends to matter.
This is how much search traffic you can or should be seen. And that allows us to then step back into another layer deep beyond this, report and really the focus of our business. We can build models that allow the practice owner to ask the question well, if I do wanna go from 10 new starts to 50.
What do I have to do in my market reliably and not just say well, I'm gonna take this person's word for granted. They're really smart, they've done marketing for a long time. What does the data say you should do? And that's an important component that I think is missing, is taking these subjectivity out of this conversation.
Everybody talks data all the time, but there's a surprising lack of it when you start to make decisions. 'cause it's been hard to have.
Anne: Yeah, that makes perfect sense. It makes me think about how dentists really don't wanna know their p and ls. They don't wanna go into that, and they also don't wanna know if their marketing's not working because they're paying that.
But I feel like this index would be great for marketers Are you marketing it to marketing people as well as the dentist? Because that seems like that would be great information for everybody.
Justin: Yeah, you're spot on. So we have three focuses from a, client outreach standpoint. So we're not an agency that tries to build websites.
You we're the architect that helps you define what you should do. But we work directly with practices. We have a big focus on dental marketing agencies. And. Bluntly our focus is to help them win more business, but to do it responsibly by adding value, by showing no, no, no, you should do these things.
And not even, because we as an agency are doing it, you know, as an agency we have financial incentives to pitch this versus that. No step back. The data says you should do this. So we definitely work with agencies as well as DSOs. We do a fair amount of, outreach to them as well.
Anne: That just makes sense to be not waste your dollars on marketing and to actually know what is working for you and your demographics you know, and what you want and what your vision is for your practice.
Which digital trends do you see having the biggest impact on dental practices?
Justin: One of the things that we're noticing this year so historically when we, looked at the market and we look at what we call the top of the funnel this, might get a little, technical and your audience may not, necessarily like this part of the conversation, but we try to look through marketing from a top of funnel, mid funnel, bottom funnel kind of approach.
And the top of funnel are things like this podcast, right? This is one of those things that's getting ears and eyeballs on a particular topic. It's building impression, share and awareness. Maybe it results in activity. Another example of top of funnel and to your point about trends is search, right?
Again, we pull out our phone if we want something and mm-hmm. if it's proximity, right? Like I wanna know the best barbecue shop near me. Maybe I'm in a new city, best barbecue near me, Google's gonna show us a map. One of the interesting changes there is, historically for gps, about 30 to 35% of your new patient starts come from that channel.
And then when you look inside that channel, almost all of it is coming from somebody that does a search. They see the traditional search results. You know, You scroll through and maybe you have the patients to scroll to the bottom of the first page, if that, And you pick somebody well. That doesn't happen so much anymore.
You're starting to see the map, right? We're starting to see local PAC search results with the map, and then it's combining Google business reviews all in one. So now I have this big motivator that's, a convenience factor. I can now see where you are close to me, and I can now see I can make inferred trust based on GMB reviews.
That's an interesting shift because what's happening is people are no longer doing the traditional engagement via SEO. So what that means is if you've had a practice that historically has been very successful in this realm, you've got a really strong set of content. You've got lots of backlink authority, you know your website's highly trusted by Google.
That's now getting eroded by the fact that you have to have a really strong Google business profile. And in the same way you build out your website to answer certain questions. You need to start making investments in your GMB profile to then continue to rank on that proximity based search.
It's sort of changing the game. People are still doing that activity, but the way they end up actually finding you is changing, if that makes sense. I.
Anne: Yeah, it does make sense. And you know, early adopters are usually the winners. So, you know, If you're listening to this You may wanna look at this.
I remember a guy that was, fixing our air conditioner and he did something on Google reviews or something, what you're talking about. 'cause I don't know the lingo. Right. Can't repeat it back to you. But that's where he was getting all his clients. I mean, It was like incredible. And he was just.
one guy and he just happened to be an early adopter to that. And I don't know if you're early now or midway through, but get on it everybody. Right? absolutely. And do it right way.
kudos to you to be able to put this index. What's the index look like? I mean, What would you expect to get when you see the index?
Justin: the first version of this report was 98 pages long, and it extremely technical. The, feedback we got was well, that's a nice book that I didn't wanna read.
Anne: Would they read the first page and then they left the rest of it to go,
Justin: next day. Exactly. Exactly. So our focus has been to leave out a lot of the more technical data analysis and try to keep it to the, so what's we structure it in a few different ways.
The first thing we introduce is this concept of a super practice blueprint. probably the most important thing I think your audience to consider. But I'm gonna set that aside for a moment. We talk about that and then we talk about the inputs that result in that super practice blueprint.
Again, top of funnel, we call it market. Visibility. So this is all of the stuff that you can do as a practice, and maybe you only do a little bit and it works for you and that's great, but there's all of these things you could be doing to actually generate awareness and engagement with a broader audience.
That's the first tier below that is. Prospect conversion, which is mostly about your website, a little bit about sort of your inbound telephone and, basically your, lead conversion associated with activity at the top of funnel and then at the bottom, probably the least developed when it comes to practices.
'cause to your point. This was not something that you marketed traditionally, but case acceptance and loyalty, which is just an industry specific way of saying sales. Yeah. So if you do a good job of building brand awareness for your practice, you do a good job of, getting engagement and conversions from that activity.
And then you actually sell a lot of those. We structure the report along those three lines. We dive into sort of all of the constituent elements inside those things, and we try to give you, basic common sense. Your website, should look like this. if looks like this, maybe it's not an optimal website.
Doesn't mean you can't do it, but you might be spending money that's not helping you. Your social media should look like this. How often should you post? What types of content and themes are gonna produce engagement? What should you expect from it? We try to give you a sense of all of those things. And then the last portion of the report focuses on key trends.
So just like I said, the shift in SEO. AI is another big one. AI is radically and very quickly changing things, and so we try to give everybody that bite-sized look. But what I'd also like to do is jump back to this super practice idea because I think it might be the most, interesting part. Three years ago when we first did this, we looked at a thousand practices.
Okay? Now we've got a database of several thousand practices. It continues to grow every year. We saw a consistent trend on a variety of metrics, so I'll as an example, unbranded search. All unbranded search means is it's the kind of search traffic most people want. For getting new patients. It's not like I typed in Anne Duffy's name and found Anne Duffy.
Mm-hmm. That's a branded search. I already knew Anne, I was just using search to conveniently locate a website, unbranded searches like toothache fix near me. You know, Like kind of the obsequious ways that some people do searches. That's unbranded and it's the most valuable kind of search for patient conversions for patient acquisition, I should say.
Well, We looked at that. By website, we used a bunch of tools to observe across all these thousand websites, and we ranked them on performance. So we built a chart, and on the very left part of the chart at the very first spot was the first percentile, and then there was the second percentile, third percentile, and it continued all the way to the end, to the hundredth percentile.
And we plotted. A curve showing the amount of search traffic, the unbranded search traffic. And what we saw was this trend of, for the first 60 to 70%, this line was pretty flat. And so when people say, you know, most marketing doesn't work, it's, seems like it's all the same. That makes sense because for 60 to 70% of the market.
There's not a big change, but once we got to the 70 to 80 percentile rink, we saw a curve shift, and then when we got to 80% and above, it started to climb and 90% and above it was almost vertical. And what we saw was on average, one in 10 practices is producing 60% of the marketing metrics for all 10 practices.
We saw that behavior across almost everything, social engagement, GMB profiles, the amount of reviews they were getting, and we started to call that super practice level performance. So this year what we've done is we observed this on discreet things, like some practices will be really good at search.
Others will be really good at say paid advertising. Rarely do you see them good on everything, right? Like almost nobody's gonna have that level of performance on everything, but we ask the question, what if you could, and that created this blueprint. So we have this statistical blueprint that basically says.
This represents the theoretical maximum performance that a practice could achieve within a local market. The reason that matters is not because think everybody should try to become a super practice. I. The reason that matters is because we think people might wanna say, maybe I wanna be in the 70th percentile, where you have really high ROI.
That same model is built on a bunch of other models that say like what your social should look like and everything else. And it allows you to objectively say, if I want this amount of performance. Here's a list, literally a laundry list of things I need to do, and it takes out the uncertainty, know, John Wanamaker, half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. I just don't know which half it allows you. In the same way that a weather model says these inputs will result in rain. the blueprint allows you to say these inputs will result reliably in this kind of patient acquisition.
And that's probably the most interesting thing for the audience is to start saying well, maybe I'm not happy with some portion of my business. I want to go look at the super practice blueprint. Just really quickly at a glance to say, how am I doing on this? Like just quickly benchmark, do I feel like I'm okay and maybe you're doing fantastic, leave it alone.
Or maybe it's, no, I could be doing a lot better. Maybe I should have a conversation with my agency or whoever's running this part of my business. That's probably the most interesting part of our research.
Anne: dentists loves science, right? And so I think the data is show me the data. Show me the data, right?
really important. And no one likes to waste money or time and effort on things that aren't working. So I feel like this really backs up. What is working and what could be improved with not more than a one or two degree shift in what they're already putting out there.
Justin: think you're spot on.
It's, almost saying, could you get better performance by spending less, even in many cases. We're not even advocating that people should spend more or shouldn't spend more. We're just trying to say, if we could give you information that allows you to make a decision that's what matters, so that you can objectively say, this is what I want to do with my practice, and then I.
Based on that, here's what's necessary. Do I still want to do it? If I know what it's gonna take, maybe I'm gonna dial and tune in my objectives based on that information that's sorely missing. And that's also, to your point earlier you're, really, really prescient to kind of go there.
Agencies find value in that because they can start to objectively say well, this is how I can best serve my clients. And I think longer term. This kind of information even helps agencies think about how they restructure their service stack anyway. Like, Hey, we should really be focused on building the best agency possible based on what's proven to work.
In an ideal world, it's a dial, kind of set it and forget a thing. This is how much marketing I want, and I don't worry about it because I know information that goes into it is sound. That's where we're trying to take this.
Anne: Yeah. It makes so much sense. So, I I think we covered everything.
Like how can Praxis use forecasting to better predict patient acquisition? I mean, That is basically what you just talked about. knowing Yeah. What's working, what's not working. Yeah. And what they want, I guess, initially, and that, that's usually the first conversation a marketing agency has. And then that just, kind of goes on you know, rinse and repeat just hope it's working.
And sometimes it's a couple years in and you're like, what's working now? We don't even know. Right.
Justin: I think maybe that's the most frustrating thing is people aren't going, it isn't working. They're saying, I don't know if it's working. You know? Yeah. Like, And the agency, it's not that the agency is or isn't doing good work.
wanna be careful. Some agencies are phenomenal and some agencies maybe have room for improvement, but it's still difficult to say objectively. Is it working? we did a lot of traditional agency work with practices in the past to test a lot of this data.
And there are going to be situations where you can't cleanly attribute this performance led to this outcome. But when the benefit of looking at data, the way that we are at the scale that we are, is you don't necessarily have to see the exact breadcrumbs between one activity and one outcome.
You can see the entire population and make the correlations work. So anyway. Yeah. That's so cool. I'll bo you to death if I keep going on.
Anne: I love it. But just one other thing is it's not a cookie cutter thing though. It's different from the demographics and every, yes, Practice has to be absolutely analyzed for what that authentic practice brings to the table. Correct.
Justin: A hundred percent. In fact, when we do an audit with a client, the first thing we look at is the local market. Because you can't just say well, this has a population of 10,000 and this has a population of 10,000.
What's the poverty rate? What's the educational attainment? Mm-hmm. What's the fertility rate? What's the age distribution that is all gonna impact things like, is this a cross though heavy environment? Is this a lot of restorative care? Am I looking at a lot of fee for service and membership based stuff, or is this gonna be really more.
Sort of public insurance and lower cost stuff. we start there. That's where this conversation starts before we move on to the rest.
Anne: I love it. I'm super happy that I got to meet you and figure out what you do and the, value of that. So, Justin, how do we get in touch with you if you're a marketing agency or your practice?
I mean, I could see if a dentist is listening to this or an office manager's like, okay. Our marketing agency needs to get in touch with Justin Strong, right? Yeah, we need to help and we wanna know that, data, so how do they get in touch with you?
Justin: Just visit the website. There's lots of options there to kind of reach out and set some time with us. So, Website is just www.room 1 1 8. Com And if we had more time, I'd explain our name, but I think we're out of time, so
Anne: Oh my gosh. Well, We'll take that on the next one. Is that on your website? what your name is there,
Justin: there's a little bit more information on that.
It's, an homage to my grandfather and a whole bunch of other stuff but that's. That's
Anne: important. That's important. That's called starting the relationship early on in your life. I love that. Well, It's a pleasure to meet you and to have you on our podcast today, and all of you that are listening remember we've got a do life dental entrepreneur woman retreat coming up in November.
We want. every woman. Sorry Justin. It's just for gals.
Justin: No worries, No worries. Not offended. No, just for
Anne: gals. But to join us in uh, November in Charlotte, North Carolina. It's November 13 through 15, and if you're listening today, remember the most important thing you can do is to keep doing you.
Thanks everybody. Thanks Justin. I'll see you on the road.
Justin: Pleasure. Thank you.
Anne: Thank you.
