Latest / Hey Docs! / The Balancing Act: AI Automation vs. Personalization in Digital Orthodontic Marketing
Transcript
- 0:02Welcome to the hay Docks Podcast with your host Jill Allen. Today I have
- 0:07Jeff Slater from Kaleidoscope joining me on the show. With AI becoming such a
- 0:11prevalent topic in everything these days, I thought it would be time to have
- 0:16the chat about what it is and how we should or should not be using
- 0:21it in our practices. From Google pay per click ads to AI pitfalls,
- 0:26we have a lot to cover, so let's dive in. Hey docs,
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- 1:11don't forget to mention Haydocks to unlock some extra goodies. Elevate your practice with
- 1:17smiles sweet, because every smile deserves a suite of excellence. Jeff, I
- 1:23am so excited to have you on Haydocks today. In the event that somebody
- 1:30hasn't had an opportunity to meet you yet or talk with you yet, would
- 1:33you mind just kind of talking to us a little bit about yourself and your
- 1:36role at Kaleidoscope. Yeah, for sure. I'm the VP of Operations at
- 1:41Kaleidoscope. And also, thank you, Jill. It's really exciting to be
- 1:44to be here with you today. And I actually started as Mary Kay's first
- 1:48full time employee. So a lot of people in our industry recognize Mary Kay.
- 1:52They know her name, the original orthopreneur, you know, orthodontic,
- 1:56SEO and web design. And back when her office was in her house she
- 2:00had a bedroom converted to an office. I would sit next to her three
- 2:02feet away and just look over her shoulder and listen to what she said and
- 2:07do her research and do her proposals and really just learned everything on the job.
- 2:12And that was probably twenty eleven. So here we are now at twenty
- 2:15twenty four, and essentially her right hand now on most things Kaleidoscope. Oh
- 2:20that's great. One of the reasons that I was like, Oh, I
- 2:23really want to have you guys on is I also feel like you always have
- 2:28a really great pulse on what is going on out there when it comes all
- 2:31things Internet. And I feel like there has been such a hot topic lately
- 2:38around AI. And you know, we can write us, you know,
- 2:42about anything we want. Now. It can design people to be in our
- 2:46ads. I mean, it can kind of do it all. But what
- 2:49I want to just kind of pick your brain a little bit about how you
- 2:53are seeing AI in our industry being used, and you know what we are
- 2:59seeing coming at us maybe for twenty twenty four and I think, you know
- 3:02beyond for sure. Yeah, I think it can go a lot of directions.
- 3:07Right. So with a marketing side of things, it's really content creation
- 3:12and AI making our lives a little bit easier coming up with ideas. Maybe
- 3:16I have an idea, but I haven't fleshed it out, so I just
- 3:19need more text. I need more content behind it. So we can use
- 3:23AI tools like a chat GPT to feed in our prompt. Here's what I'm
- 3:28looking for more text on here's my idea? Help me flesh it out and
- 3:31then take what gets spit back and now you're into the editing phase, right,
- 3:36you kind of get to fast track that first draft process. I've got
- 3:39my idea, give me my first draft, and then let me put some
- 3:44human touches on it and sort of fine tune it from there. Are you
- 3:46seeing a lot of doctors that are starting to use this when they're trying to
- 3:51develop out maybe their content on their websites, or are they using it more
- 3:55in their social ads? Like? How are you seeing an advice seeing docs
- 4:00use that? You know, for the most part, it really is in
- 4:02that initial content creation. And I talk with doctors a lot who are maybe
- 4:06delegating this to their teams. I don't talk to a lot of doctors who
- 4:11are boots on the ground doing this creation themselves. I think they understand that
- 4:15it can save time for their teams and they want to empower them to be
- 4:21as efficient as possible. But also, at the end of the day,
- 4:25you know that that end result has to translate and engage for the target audience.
- 4:30Right, So we don't want to get efficient and save time just for
- 4:32the sake of that if the end result is not going to resonate with the
- 4:36target audience, then you're not really accomplishing the desired goal. So I think
- 4:41a lot of doctors are wisely kind of taking their time with the exposure to
- 4:46this. And are we really going to jump in with both feets or are
- 4:48we going to sort of take a wait and see approach. Are we're going
- 4:50to gradually incorporate this into what we're doing with our marketing. I do think
- 4:56it makes a lot of sense to kind of take a slower approach to it
- 5:00and not just try to automate everything in your practice. Right, it doesn't
- 5:02always make sense for every piece of content that we're trying to create. I
- 5:06can totally see that, and I love what you said. We still have
- 5:11to make it personalized, right. We can't just have it right in our
- 5:15voice or our tone and think that it's going to sound exactly like us.
- 5:19We still need our personal touch on that. So can you talk a little
- 5:25bit about how AI is affecting Google and local search results? Because I think
- 5:30this is such a big deal. We get in, you know, we
- 5:33know all of the things from a startup aspect that we have to set up
- 5:38for our practices, and now we've got AI kind of messing with us a
- 5:42little bit, especially when it comes to our Google Business page. So I'm
- 5:46wondering if you can kind of talk to us about what you guys are seeing
- 5:50and what doctors are encountering a little bit out there. Yeah, I mean,
- 5:55I'm in the trenches with this every day. We're living this right now
- 5:58as far as Google, and it really comes down to them cracking down on
- 6:02spam. So what Google intends to do is eliminate fake businesses from showing up
- 6:09in Google Maps and on Google Search. So in that pursuit of eliminating spam,
- 6:14they're making it harder for real businesses to get verified. It used to
- 6:18be pretty straightforward if you're a startup in a new building. Once you can
- 6:24receive mail, you can get a postcard to your office with a pin number,
- 6:27and you just verify your profile. You're good to go. You could
- 6:30sometimes do this weeks, even a couple months before you were open. If
- 6:33the postal service was delivering mail, you could get verified, start grabbing a
- 6:38couple of reviews, maybe get a little traffic. Now it is harder than
- 6:42ever to get verified before you're actually open. So Google is getting really strict
- 6:47on are you actually seeing patients, Are you actually a real business that is
- 6:53operational, or are you still under construction. So what we're seeing a lot
- 6:57more of is video verification call so instead of that postcard. Now Google wants
- 7:02to get on a FaceTime with a doctor and they say, show me your
- 7:06main entrance, show me your exterior signage, show me your treatment era,
- 7:11your reception area. We had one doctor. Google said show me your supply
- 7:14closet with your brackets and your bands and everything you're going to use. So
- 7:17they're really kind of cracking down, and it's making life tough for startups because
- 7:24you know, you're juggling a lot of things when you're trying to open your
- 7:27doors. You're doing construction, you're doing staffing and life and everything that's going
- 7:30into it. The internet side, you know, just one more thing to
- 7:33worry about. And you know, doctors want to have that visibility, Like
- 7:38I'm about to open in a couple of weeks, I need to be showing
- 7:41up on Google Maps. You got to get me on there, and we
- 7:44have to tell them, you know, pump the brakes. Google knows you're
- 7:46not open yet, and if you try too hard to force this, you
- 7:50could actually create more problems, more lasting problems down the road. The one
- 7:55thing that I have also been hearing, which just to me kind of makes
- 8:00me cringe a little bit because it feels like, you know, we're told
- 8:03all the time, be careful with the information you give out, be careful
- 8:07with the information you give out. But I know we've had a couple incidences
- 8:11and I've had it at other points too, where Google is actually asking to
- 8:16see maybe even some of our business in corporation paperwork. And again to me,
- 8:22I'm like, oh, that's super cringe, where they like, I
- 8:24don't even know who's this is on the other end, and you know,
- 8:28it feels like somebody could be, you know, scamming us a little bit.
- 8:31Can you talk to that a little bit and what you guys are seeing
- 8:35there? Yeah, for sure. As far as business documentation, this is
- 8:39going to be more on the advertising side for Google Ads. So usually if
- 8:43we're talking your Google business profile, you want to show up on maps,
- 8:46you want to get your reviews going, that's not going to require the documentation.
- 8:52It's with advertiser verification where if you're running Google Ads, Google wants to
- 8:58see proof that the business this name, your advertising under is actually your business.
- 9:03So we run into problems if your corporate papers maybe have your own doctor
- 9:09name, your personal name, but you're advertising under a brand, and Google
- 9:13will say you know, your account has been selected for advertiser verification. Please
- 9:18upload you know, front and back of your driver's license. Please upload an
- 9:22official tax document or your articles of incorporation or your ei N paperwork from the
- 9:28IRS utility bill that shows your business name at that address. So if the
- 9:35names don't match, you can get rejected. And if you can't pass this
- 9:39verification, Google will stop your ads. And one of the biggest problems is
- 9:45back to the piece of AI. It's usually not a person at Google that's
- 9:50reviewing your documents and connecting the dots and saying, okay, doctor Smith is
- 9:52here, doctor Smith owns you know, smile orthodonics kind of thing. It's
- 9:56a it's a program, right, So you upload your doctor documents, it
- 10:00goes through the AI program, and if that program cannot authenticate your business,
- 10:05they'll just stop your ads right where they are. So we tell doctors a
- 10:09lot, try to get your corporate paperwork established under the name that you want
- 10:13to do business as. If you can't do that, or if you know,
- 10:16sometimes that ship has already sailed, You've already got your your corporation set
- 10:20up, and now you decide your business name. It doesn't always happen sequentially,
- 10:24right. Sometimes you'll get your paperwork thinking I have to get this out
- 10:28of the way. Then you talk to a marketing agency like Kaleidoscope, and
- 10:31we're helping you come up with a business name for your target market that's maybe
- 10:35search engine optimized, you know, to set you up for long term success.
- 10:39Now you're using a business name that doesn't match your documents. Here's the
- 10:43issue that we've created. So at the very least, you want to have
- 10:46a DBA, you know, a doing business as agreement. In some states
- 10:50it's a fictitious name agreement, so that you can upload the documentation to help
- 10:56the algorithm, help the AI connect the dot because again it's really hard to
- 10:58get a person on the phone and explain it, because while it makes sense
- 11:03to us, you have to convince the machine also to approve it. I
- 11:07would have never thought even three years ago that even the information that you just
- 11:13said that they're asking for, we would be uploading just to whoever happens to
- 11:18be on or whatever machine is out there that's you know, that's looking at
- 11:22it, and again, it just feels so wrong. And yet I know
- 11:28that a lot of doctors are really running into this problem where you know,
- 11:33they're probably like me, going, well, we've been told all along,
- 11:37don't give out your your driver's licens, don't give out your social Security number,
- 11:39don't give out your you know, and it feels like we're just giving
- 11:43away the keys to the castle. And who knows, you know, is
- 11:46this for real or not. It's kind of crazy. But I'm glad that
- 11:48you're talking about that, because I do believe this is kind of maybe the
- 11:52not you know, so pretty side of AI. I think AI helps us
- 11:56in a lot of ways, but it's not so great in some of these
- 12:00other areas. And will adapt and overcome, for sure, but I think
- 12:05that this initial phase is pretty tough, and I believe is going to make
- 12:07it really hard for doctors in this next year, year and a half or
- 12:11so until we really get this figured out. Would you agree? I would
- 12:15agree? Yeah, these are you know, if you want to call them
- 12:16table stakes, right, this is this is these are table stakes now like
- 12:20they have changed. This is what you need if you want to participate in
- 12:24Google's ecosystem, right, they make the rules, they do whatever they want,
- 12:28and we have to follow along behind. And if you don't want to
- 12:31play along, Google does not care. They're still going to make billions and
- 12:35billions of dollars off of all the other businesses who do follow their rules.
- 12:39So if a couple of small businesses decide not to upload their driver's license or
- 12:43their passport because they just don't want to share that information with Google, I
- 12:48got news for you. If Google wanted it, they get it even if
- 12:50you don't upload it. Like Google can find your driver's license number, you
- 12:54know, Like I kind of have my own. I've made my piece with
- 12:58this. When I'm giving my credit card and we might PayPal information. Am
- 13:01I on a safe device and my honest, secure network. I kind of
- 13:03go. I'm not worth that much for this to matter. And if a
- 13:07bad actor out there wanted my data bad enough, I'm not going to stop
- 13:11them from getting it. So I may as well just live my life and
- 13:13try and do whatever I can to help my business be successful. So that
- 13:18could be the tax documentation or the articles of incorporation, whatever else it may
- 13:22be. How are some other ways that you are seeing AI impact us maybe
- 13:26on that Google ad space side, and what's happening, you know, even
- 13:31with our pay per clicks and all of that. Yeah, good question.
- 13:33So the verification is the biggest piece, you know, just making sure that
- 13:37Google trusts your business, and that's kind of the barrier to entry. If
- 13:41you don't have that piece, then none of this, none of the rest
- 13:43of this stuff matters. The advertising algorithm itself is now teaming with AI.
- 13:50I mean, Google has injected so much AI into its advertising program to the
- 13:54point now that we used to as advertisers be able to run what we're called
- 13:58text ads or standard text ads, where we control every letter, what's the
- 14:03message, what's the call to action, what does the link say, where
- 14:07does the click go? We would have a lot of control. Now,
- 14:11pretty much all Google ads are what it's called dynamic, which basically means that
- 14:15when a user types in their search term on Google, the ad is created
- 14:18in those milliseconds by the algorithm based on a number of signals. So the
- 14:24actual search term is of course an important signal. The search history and behavior
- 14:28of that specific user is part of it. The advertising ecosystem in their area.
- 14:35What are the other advertising campaigns doing. Also what are other users in
- 14:39that area engaging with what seems to be successful? And another big piece is
- 14:43proximity or physical location. You'll hear a lot of buzzwords like geo targeting or
- 14:50hyper local, and what that means is Google knows where pretty much everyone is,
- 14:56and that includes the users and the businesses. So your physical locationation has
- 15:01a huge impact on the ads that are going to be served to you,
- 15:05more so than specifically what you're typing in. And you've probably seen this in
- 15:07your own experience. If you're sitting at home and if you're on vacation,
- 15:11you type in coffee shop near me, and then you leave the airbnb,
- 15:15you drive five minutes name direction, do the same search coffee shop near me.
- 15:18You get completely different results, right because Google knows you moved and therefore
- 15:24the relevant businesses for your search. That whole landscape has also changed. So
- 15:30everything is kind of evolving in real time, and it's AI that's driving a
- 15:33lot of this and making a lot of these decisions. So Google's even taking
- 15:37away some of our control, some of our ownership over what the ads say
- 15:43and when they show up, and letting their own programs make a lot of
- 15:46these decisions. Wow. I suppose in some ways it's great because it's just
- 15:50continuing to really drill it down and really get it to who our target audience
- 15:58may be. But on the other hand, wow, that they're kind of
- 16:02taking the creative component out of it or what we may you know, keyword
- 16:07we may use, or something that we think is you know, something that
- 16:10makes us stand out that may be kind of going by the wayside. It
- 16:12sounds like maybe a little bit definitely, and we have to be more creative
- 16:18in how we can still have an impact. And part of it there is
- 16:21still expertise that goes on kind of behind the scenes with the optimization, with
- 16:26the setup, with where you're moving your budgets around in different keyword sets.
- 16:30You know, there is still an art and a science to it. It's
- 16:32not as simple as well, just set it and forget it. You know,
- 16:34the playing field has not been leveled to that degree to where you know,
- 16:40the layperson can just plug in a budget and a couple keywords and be
- 16:42on the same level as an expert who's been doing it for ten, fifteen,
- 16:45twenty years. Maybe the golden age for orthodontic pay per click has passed
- 16:51us by when we could get all the traffic, and you know, most
- 16:53of your competitors weren't even running ads, So you're paying a couple bucks a
- 16:56click and you're one of the only ones who's even bothering to do it.
- 17:00So it has gotten more competitive and we do have more noise to kind of
- 17:04stift through. But that's also where you get into like what's your landing page
- 17:08look like, what's your offer? You know, are you giving a discount?
- 17:11Are you engaging those users? You know? After the click, you
- 17:15still have to create that experience of Okay, Google's controlling a lot of stuff
- 17:19from the time they type in the search to clicking on an ad, but
- 17:23where they end up after they click, that's still where marketers and advertisers have
- 17:27a lot of work to do to Okay, you got that click. Now
- 17:30you have to engage them, keep that attention, drive them to that desired
- 17:34action right, which is usually call your office or fill out that form.
- 17:37So there is still a lot of work to be done even after you know
- 17:41the ad shows up and somebody clicks on it. Ah, such good information,
- 17:45So how do you see AI you know, kind of working like you
- 17:49were? You were just kind of breaking that down. But any other areas
- 17:52within our marketing industry that you're really seeing that kind of pull in, it's
- 17:57really going to be with your content in your chatbots. If you've been in
- 18:02some of the conferences and some of the lectures where you've got AI experts who
- 18:06are peddling at the latest and greatest, you know, product that uses AI
- 18:10to you know, take a prospective patient from they hit your website. You
- 18:14know, AI can answer all their questions and get them scheduled and do you
- 18:18know ninety five percent of the heavy lifting. Sometimes I think they go a
- 18:21little too far where they say this is going to save you, you know,
- 18:23hundreds of hours a year, or this is going to eliminate hours of
- 18:29meaningless mundane tasks, And I'm sitting there going, that's somebody's job, Like,
- 18:33that's a real person who's who's doing this work. So they can paint
- 18:37a very rosy picture of how automation is going to make you so much more
- 18:41efficient and so much more profitable. But I think with anything you have to
- 18:45look at it through the lens of orthodonics, and in our industry, it's
- 18:51a very specialized profession and people aren't just looking for the cheapest, easiest,
- 18:56fastest, most automated. People want to know who am I going to be
- 19:00talking to, who's going to be treating me, or who's taking care of
- 19:03my kid. They want to talk to a real human. So if you
- 19:06talk to the AI people, they'll say, this is the greatest thing since
- 19:08slice bread. I can have a robot do all this stuff. A lot
- 19:11of people are not as excited about the rise of the machines, and so
- 19:18a lot of our prospective patients who are contacting our offices may not be so
- 19:22thrilled about being deflected to a chatbot or having AI, you know, answer
- 19:27their questions. They still want to talk to a real person. So,
- 19:30going back to what I said earlier, we kind of need to pump the
- 19:33brakes here and understand that having the human element and the human touch, especially
- 19:38in orthodontics, is still hugely important. Hey, docs, let's talk about
- 19:44consumer experience for a minute, Specifically, the kind of experience where you purchase
- 19:48an item or a service that you've been excited about only to be let down
- 19:52or disappointed by the actual product or experience. Not a good way to start
- 19:56a relationship. That's why relationships are so highly valued at GC Orthodonics because they
- 20:03are truly dedicated to the orthodonics specialty. GC Orthodonics is a leading provider of
- 20:10tomy orthodonic appliances, quality products that have serviced the orthodonic community for well over
- 20:17fifty years. They are focused on providing total solutions that include both digital and
- 20:22analog orthodonic treatment modalities like brackets, indirect bonding, and clear aligners. It's
- 20:27time to build a long term relationship with a company that is dedicated to delivering
- 20:33total solutions to your practice. Visit GC Orthodonics at www dot Gcamerica dot com,
- 20:41forward slash Jill Allen and see why countless leading clinics have made the switch.
- 20:52By now we all know. I talk to a lot of doctors and
- 20:55give advice to practices in every stage of their life cycle. And one question
- 21:00and my docs ask all the time, is who do you recommend for marketing
- 21:03to attract more new patients from the Internet. My answer easy, I have
- 21:07been recommending Mary K. Miller and her team at Kaleidoscope for the better part
- 21:12of a decade. Why they are thorough, professional and transparent. Kaleidoscope Digital
- 21:18marketing is who you want to talk to because they understand how to market in
- 21:22the orthodonic world, and they offer tools that are affordable and easy to use.
- 21:26I'm telling you, if you're looking to step up your digital presence,
- 21:30Kaleidoscope should be your first call. Go to contact KL dot com to request
- 21:37your free digital marketing consultation. That's contact KL dot com. I'm kind of
- 21:44curious any other challenges. I mean, you've been bringing up some great ones,
- 21:48but any other challenges that you think that besides the personal component that you
- 21:52think we need to be aware of when we're kind of finding that balance,
- 21:57finding our way as we're going down this path. Right, Yeah, because
- 22:00you can automate until you're blue in the face, but if the patient experience
- 22:03isn't good, you're going they're going to stop calling you and stop showing up,
- 22:07and you'll have a fully automated practice with no patients to come in and
- 22:11keep the doors open. So one of the other pieces I would mention is
- 22:15with AI, Google's always kind of had the mentality of move fast and break
- 22:19things. I think any big tech company, you know, Meta and Amazon,
- 22:23move fast break stuff. Right, So let's write the technology, let's
- 22:26write the Codelet's see what it can do, and then when we find the
- 22:29bugs, let's just fix them as they come up. Right, it's not
- 22:32going to be finely tuned when they roll it out, and the business owners
- 22:37and the consumers we kind of bear the brunts of this. They use us
- 22:40as their guinea pigs. What we're seeing now is really just more volatility.
- 22:45So what I would tell listeners of this podcast is to keep a close eye
- 22:49on your data, on your rankings, on your Google business profile. There's
- 22:55always been the potential on Google for things to change overnight. Right they'll they'll
- 23:00make an update and they won't tell everybody. Sometimes they'll announce their updates.
- 23:03A lot of times they don't, and your rankings can change, or your
- 23:07information can change, your profile can drop out of the maps, and you
- 23:11get sent scrambling what happened? What do I have to do to get this
- 23:14back? So I think being vigilant and paying close attention is more important than
- 23:19ever. So you know, ideally you have either the doctor or somebody on
- 23:23the team who's checking Google a few times a month. Where's my stuff?
- 23:26Am I still showing up? Let me check my rankings. We had one
- 23:30client where they've been in practice for years. They actually started fifty years ago,
- 23:36and the initial doctor sold it to one of our clients, and just
- 23:41at the drop of a hat, overnight, no warning, their profile disappeared
- 23:45from Google Maps, and they got an email that said, your Google Business
- 23:48profile has been disabled, and the reason was Google determined their business did not
- 23:55exist, which we know is completely untrue. It's been in the same location
- 24:00and for literally almost fifty years, and we've now been trying to troubleshoot this
- 24:04for them. And it goes back to making sure your information is accurate and
- 24:10consistent and that it matches across the board. Because Google's algorithm, in a
- 24:15lot of ways, is like a big spreadsheet, right, So your business
- 24:18profiles, your business listings are all like individual cells on that spreadsheet. If
- 24:23you have errors, inconsistencies, things don't match. That's like when you have
- 24:27a formula that's broken, right, and your Excel spreadsheet has a little exclamation
- 24:32point warning formula doesn't work. That kind of thing. Google's algorithm picks up
- 24:36on those, and if you have enough of them, or a severe enough
- 24:38one, like on your Google business profile, the algorithm will just just knock
- 24:42you out, just kick you out, and so now you have to go
- 24:45through help forums and emails. And again you can't pick up the phone and
- 24:51call Google and say hey Google, help me out, like oh yeah,
- 24:53okay, sorry about that, We'll go ahead and fix it. You have
- 24:56to go through these very limited, very automated channels, and it's there's no
- 25:00guarantee that's a happy ending. So again, with the challenges and the pitfalls,
- 25:07we're just seeing more volatility. And it's always been unpredictable. It just
- 25:10seems like it's accelerated the unpredictability that was already there. It's a tough thing
- 25:15because I feel like as business owners, we have so much to think about
- 25:19already running our businesses. I kind of feel like the last thing we're thinking
- 25:25about is our Google business page or up til you know this last you know,
- 25:29year and a half, two years, it really has kind of been
- 25:33a no brainer. You put it in play, and it's kind of this
- 25:36static thing that just does its thing and we don't have to think about it
- 25:40anymore, which is you know, really making me think, gosh, what
- 25:44are the protocols, whether we're newer practices or existing ones that we should have
- 25:49in place, Especially as we continue just like in our industry, you know,
- 25:55we see all this automization and all of these digital components coming into play
- 26:00within even just what we're doing within our offices, and now it makes me
- 26:04think, gosh, do we need to have you know, as part of
- 26:07like our end of the month you review, we're reviewing our financials. Do
- 26:11we need to kind of take an inventory of our just kind of our social
- 26:15you know components, you know, like you just said, are we still
- 26:18showing up on Google? I don't even think I would think as a business
- 26:23owner to even think about, well, why wouldn't I be on Google?
- 26:27Or why you know, my patients have been able to find me for the
- 26:30last five years. Why wouldn't they all said not be able to see my
- 26:33listing or whatnot. So I think a lot of times, knowing that this
- 26:37is all coming automated, I think it can be really easy. We change
- 26:41emails, you know what, we sign up with something the first time.
- 26:45If we aren't getting in there, we can't remember our password and we don't
- 26:48know where our emails are coming that. You know, I've got to believe
- 26:52that maybe this doctor might have had a couple emails that maybe came out saying,
- 26:56hey, we're trying to verify something, but we all know we've all
- 27:00got him. You know, those emails that we signed up with something ten
- 27:03years ago, and now we never even go in and check those anymore.
- 27:07So it sounds to me there's a little bit of a housekeeping component here that
- 27:11we really have to pay attention to. Absolutely, yeah, paying attention to
- 27:15your notifications, just staying on top of those alerts. I know, we
- 27:18kind of get desensitized to them because we get so many emails and a lot
- 27:22of times we can ignore them. So it's always the one that you skim
- 27:25past that ends up being the important one. For Google Ads especially. We
- 27:30did have a client who was running Google Ads actually himself was not a Colleidoscope
- 27:33agency account, but he was doing his own thing and just busy running a
- 27:38business as a family. He's just living life. He's got a couple of
- 27:41ads run in just to keep his exposure up there, and Google had notified
- 27:45him, hey, your account has been selected for advertiser verification. He either
- 27:52wasn't really sure the severity of it or what it even totally meant, or
- 27:55maybe it's just like I'll get to that later, you know. And what
- 27:57happens is once your account is selected, the clock is ticking. It's not
- 28:02this indefinite. Hey, whenever you get a chance to get to this,
- 28:04we'd love to have some more documentation for your business. It's more like,
- 28:07get us the documentation if you want to keep running ads. And by the
- 28:11time he circled back on it and so, oh, this is something I
- 28:15should do. He submitted his documentation and Google rejected it, and now he's
- 28:19in this place that none of us want to be, which is you know,
- 28:22Google's pretty much automated all the way through. It's not a human being
- 28:26trying to say, oh, that's no problem. I can go into the
- 28:30system and I can reverse this for you. It's you're either in or you're
- 28:33out. So if you miss one of those emails, or if you miss
- 28:37a notification that has an action item attached to it, and you don't give
- 28:41Google what they want by their deadline, which again, Google makes their own
- 28:45rules. It doesn't have to make sense to us. We just have to
- 28:48play along with their rules. Once that deadline passes, your ads could be
- 28:52offline permanently and to the Google Business profile one which you're kind of switching from
- 28:57ads to the Google business profile. That literally was an email out of the
- 29:03blue, your profile has been disabled. There was no hey this looks confusing.
- 29:07Can you clarify this for us? It was just one day they were
- 29:10there and the next day they were not. And so it really does just
- 29:15speak to keeping tabs on things. If not the doctor themselves, somebody on
- 29:18the team. If not somebody on the team, then maybe you have a
- 29:22company, you know, with a with a monthly program who's monitoring for this,
- 29:26monitoring this for you to give you that peace of mind, because you
- 29:30know, I say this a lot of clients, there are no absolutes with
- 29:34Google, with the Internet, you can do everything perfectly right and still have
- 29:40an issue. You can also have, you know, companies or businesses that
- 29:44appear to be spamming or they're fake and they're doing basically everything wrong, but
- 29:48they seem totally fine and there's no penalty, right, and there's not always
- 29:52Ryan or reis right. So I never say always, I never say never.
- 29:55You know you can't if you do this, you'll be fine all the
- 29:56time, or as long as you never do this, be okay. There's
- 30:00there's shades of gray to all of it. And if you're not paying attention
- 30:04not to be, you know, trying to freak people out or scare them.
- 30:07But you know, it's the AI, the automation. It doesn't understand
- 30:12kind of the human element of things and the gray areas of explaining, oh,
- 30:17this was here, but then that was there. It's like the machines
- 30:18either yes or no. Right, it's pretty much black and white. Wow.
- 30:22Wow. Well, I think we all need maybe a touch of fear,
- 30:26just in the sense that we need to stay on top of it.
- 30:30I think for so long this was not something we had to really worry about,
- 30:33where now it definitely is something, just like you know with everything else,
- 30:38we just need to really keep it at the forefront. So I love
- 30:42this AI thing again, it's a hot button. It's a big thing that
- 30:45we're all talking about and working through. And I'm sure a couple of years
- 30:49from now all of this will be sorted out and it'll be figured out.
- 30:55But I'm kind of curious, what do you see as far as maybe developments
- 30:59that are coming if you could look into the future. This is what I
- 31:03see maybe in regard to how we're doing our websites, or how we're doing
- 31:07advertising, or just anything in general that you think our industry needs to be
- 31:11aware of. You know, I do think that chatbots are going to continue
- 31:15to get better at mimicking human behavior and being conversational. You know, it
- 31:22used to be pretty easy to tell when you were talking to a chatbot.
- 31:26I think now it's a little harder to tell. Sometimes you're not sure if
- 31:29it's a person or if it's a robot on the other end. And I
- 31:33would say that as the technology gets better, we'll have to do less proofing.
- 31:38But right now, experianceans if you're use in chat GPT for an email
- 31:42or a blog or your social captions, or maybe it's writing subject lines for
- 31:48you, you're still going to need to go through it with a fine tooth
- 31:51comb and edit it and put it in your voice and make sure that it's
- 31:56not, you know, inaccurate or completely false. Or what we're even finding
- 32:00is when you're using chat GPT, you know, a lot of what that
- 32:06language model was trained on is now two years old to three four years old.
- 32:10So anything that's current or any technological innovations, any you know, society
- 32:15has evolved past things. Some of these technologies don't know what happened in the
- 32:22last six months or twelve months, So depending on the subject that you're trying
- 32:27to write on. If it's something more recent, I would say, be
- 32:30extra careful and make sure that you're again, don't just chat GPT is something
- 32:34copy paste scent, right, You really have to go through every sentence because
- 32:37you'd be surprised some of the things. And you may have seen in the
- 32:40news. You know, Google's getting in trouble for some stuff that one of
- 32:44their AI generators is spitting out. You know, is is it accurate,
- 32:47is it politically correct? Is it offensive? Which you know, for most
- 32:51of most of the people listening to this podcast, that's not a huge concern.
- 32:54But as the technology gets better and the line gets even more lurd between
- 33:00machine and human, I think we're going to have to just keep close tabs
- 33:04on this. And I made the joke with Jordan here a little bit ago
- 33:07that the more technology makes our life easier, the more it makes our life
- 33:12harder and more complicated. Right, So for every problem that technology solves,
- 33:15it usually introduces one or two problems that we didn't have before to go along
- 33:20with it. So taking everything kind of with a grain of salt and not
- 33:23being in such a rush to adopt AI into everything and to you know,
- 33:30keep that human element, especially in our industry, which is so so heavily
- 33:36predicated on and influenced by relationships. The people in your community. You know
- 33:40them, your kids go to school with their kids, they play on the
- 33:43same sports teams, they're in the same clubs. You see them out into
- 33:45town. So, you know, keeping that human element, the relationships,
- 33:50the connections. I don't think that's ever going away for orthodontics. No matter
- 33:53how good the AI technology becomes, yeah, ah, good insight, and
- 33:58you're right, matter how much easier it seems to be making it, you
- 34:02know, there's always the other side of it. There's something else we have
- 34:07to be aware of, something else we have to pay attention to. So
- 34:10as we start to finish up here, is there anything that we did not
- 34:15touch on that you're like, Oh, Jill, I think the listeners need
- 34:17to hear this. Anything else that comes to mind, You know, I
- 34:21would just circle back to the part about documentation and verification that even if you're
- 34:27not running ads right now, check with your accountant or check with your lawyer.
- 34:30Say do I have a DBA, what does my official paperwork say?
- 34:35And do I have documentation to match, or maybe I wanted to rebrand.
- 34:38Maybe I used to be operating under my own business name. Now I've got
- 34:42a cooler, newer, marketing branded name that's better for my swag and my
- 34:45logos and everything in the community. Having the documentation, I think to match
- 34:52what you're doing, because the world keeps getting more and more digital. Right,
- 34:54So what the sign on your door says and what the logo on your
- 34:58T shirt says, that's all great, but the internet needs to have that
- 35:01data, have that information to match and back it up. So it may
- 35:05not be a problem for you now, but I would say, get that
- 35:08sorted out, get those ducks in a row before you need to. It's
- 35:12seem like I tell clients, you know, don't wait till you need marketing
- 35:15to start marketing, right because you want to be building a well rounded approach
- 35:20and be working on it before you feel like you really actually maybe need it.
- 35:23Well, Jeff, if somebody wants to get a hold of you,
- 35:25how would they do that? What's the best way? Yeah, thank you
- 35:29for listeners of this podcast. I would send them to contact kl dot com.
- 35:35That's just a page we set up for Hey docs listeners. So if
- 35:37you go to contact kl dot com, there's just a real simple form on
- 35:42there that goes to me. It also goes to our team, so you
- 35:45know, we're happy to be a resource for your listeners in just the orthodonic
- 35:49industry in general. We do have a full website that's over at the kaleidoscope
- 35:53dot com, which is longer and harder to spell, So you can go
- 35:57to the kaleidoscope dot com for of all the content, all the pages,
- 36:00everything else. But yeah, I would say for your listeners, contact kl
- 36:05dot com is the best place for them to go. And one of the
- 36:07things that I have just always loved about you guys is that listeners, I'm
- 36:12just going to put this out there. Sometimes you may not know what you
- 36:15need or what you're looking for, but I know Jeff and Mary Kay and
- 36:20the team over there, they are always there to just answer questions and give
- 36:24you good information. And sometimes that's just the starting point, is just finding
- 36:30out what you may or may not need and what you should do. You
- 36:34know. I know I always lean on them a lot when I've got docs
- 36:36that are doing transitions, because there's so much that goes into switching from one
- 36:42practice to another, another doctor coming in and whatnot. So definitely I would
- 36:46say they're a good resource out there for you, and I think Jeff has
- 36:51done a great job just enlightening us on all of the things that I don't
- 36:54think any of us are thinking about because it's coming at us so quickly and
- 36:59knowing that yes, it isn't a phishing scheme from Google. It is for
- 37:02real, and if we don't do it right, we're not going to have
- 37:06a website up or maybe an advertising campaign going. So as we finish up
- 37:13here, one of the things that I like to do is finish us up
- 37:15with the Speed Round. I know you know that, so are you ready
- 37:19for the Speed Round challenge? I may have spent more time preparing for the
- 37:22Lightning Round than I spent preparing for the questions about AI, racking my brains
- 37:29hard to take this one thing. For some of these questions, it really
- 37:30is all right, Well, here we go coffee or tea ice coffee in
- 37:36the afternoon. It's ice coffee o'clock right now? Ah, I love that,
- 37:39all right? Favorite book? So I pretty much read children's books with
- 37:45my kids right now. So I don't have a lot of favorite books.
- 37:47But I'm big on encyclopedias and like coffee table books where you to slip to
- 37:52a page and something like, you know, like Around the World in one
- 37:54hundred Trees or Atlasts of Empires, just slip to a page and something interesting.
- 38:00Kind of my jam for books. I love that. I love that.
- 38:01How about a favorite outdoor activity. I would have to say golf,
- 38:07and I'm in Rochester, New York, so golf season. We were just
- 38:08getting our first taste of golf, but also taking my daughters to the beach
- 38:13or to the pool, you know, getting out with a packed cooler,
- 38:15some sun bluetooth speaker with some tunes. I have two daughters, second grade
- 38:20and third grade, Charlotte and Eilid. They're super fun humans, so I
- 38:22love getting to hang out with them. Oh that's awesome. I agree,
- 38:27nothing like sunshine and a pack cooler. That's great. If you could be
- 38:30remembered for one thing, what would that be. It's being a great dad.
- 38:35Ah, I love that. I love that. And then final,
- 38:37one best piece of advice you've ever received. Man I cycle through these every
- 38:42day, but I would probably go with whatever you're looking for, you'll find
- 38:45it. So if you're looking for the good and the happy and the positive,
- 38:49you'll find it. And if you're the slip, if you're looking for
- 38:52negativity, pessimism, the bad side of things, you'll definitely find that too.
- 38:55So it's all in how you want to frame it. Whatever you want
- 38:59to look for, that's what you're going to Fine. Yeah, ah,
- 39:00great advice for sure. Well again, Jeff, it has been wonderful having
- 39:05you on the show. I definitely appreciate Kaleidoscope and what it has done for
- 39:10my clients. Thank you so much, and I know we'll have you on
- 39:14again. Thank you. Likewise, thank you, Fia. Are you ready
- 39:16to start a practice of your own, need a new fresh set of eyes
- 39:21or some advice on your existing practice? If so, reach out to me
- 39:24Jill Allen at www dot practice results dot com. If you like what we're
- 39:30doing here on Haydocks and want to hear more of this awesome content, be
- 39:34sure and give us a five star rating on your preferred listening platform and subscribe
- 39:39to our show so you never miss an episode. Remember, new episodes drop
- 39:44every Thursday. See you next week,