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Guest: Minal Sampat
Business Name: Minal Sampat
Check out Minal's Media:
Website: https://minalsampat.com/
CE On The Beach 2024: https://ceonthebeach.com/ (Discount code for $150 off registration: TDM150)
Minal's Book: Why Your Marketing Is Killing Your Business
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/minalsampatllc/
Other Mentions and Links:
Aruba Marriott Resort & Stellaris Casino
Host: Michael Arias
Website: The Dental Marketer
Join my newsletter: https://thedentalmarketer.lpages.co/newsletter/
Join this podcast's Facebook Group: The Dental Marketer Society
My Key Takeaways:
- What are the steps to empower team members to take action and be excited about marketing?
- How to create incentives and fun goals for team members.
- How can I scale my incentives based on growing team size?
- YOU have to be excited and engaged if you want your team to feel the same.
- How to choose the right team member to spearhead a marketing team.
- Tips on a successful social media marketing campaign. How to get started AND stick with it.
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Episode Transcript (Auto-Generated - Please Excuse Errors)
Michael: All right. It's time to talk with our featured guests, Manal Sampat. What's up, Manal?
Minal: I'm doing great. How are you?
Michael: Not as good. You travel a ton. Where have you just, You came from SmileCon, right? Recently? Yeah.
Minal: Yep. I spoke at SmileCon in Florida before Florida, I was in Aruba before Aruba, I was in Pennsylvania before Pennsylvania.
I was in Virginia. I don't even know. It's, it's been, it's been, uh, it's been a lot of travel, which is amazing because I, I love to travel and I get, I love to speak. So it works out.
Michael: Yeah, that's good. So then I know in SmileCon, you, you did quite a bit of, uh, workshops. If you don't mind me asking, like, what's your favorite topic to discuss?
When it comes to marketing,
Minal: can you, I mean, it's like asking you to choose between your children.
I don't know what would be my favorite topic. I mean, I love everything. I love internal marketing. I love social media. I guess my best feeling is to provide the tools for people to implement. you know, for my thing, no matter what I'm teaching or how I'm doing the workshop, I want to implement, like, for example, like, I just spoke at SmileCon and some other meetings, and like, I have, you know, doctors messaging me saying, hey, I just implemented this, or I just did this, and oh my god, I can't wait, or I'm now obsessed with doing reels, I love it, right?
And that's what I want, like, end of the day. No matter what topic I'm hearing about or how deep dive you go into marketing, any kind of marketing, it's getting somebody super excited and having them take action because that's what makes it work is the action. So if they can do that, it's amazing.
Michael: Yeah. And I feel like a lot of the times the doctor, the practice owner may come excited or even the office manager, but the rest of the team really isn't all that excited or they're not ready for it.
Or maybe they excited one day or two days and then they died down. Right. So. Talk to us if you can give us like a step by step process or system on how can we get our team excited and continue to be excited about marketing?
Minal: Oh, it's, I think that a lot of it comes down to making sure that your team is one, they understand your goals.
And to the house, they get incentivized. There's something in return coming up because you have to realize the team members are busy. They're already busy doing their actual job. So if you want them to now work on your marketing so that you could grow your practice, there should be some sort of give and take, right?
Creating simple systems like, Hey, guys, our goal for this month is. So we are at 80 right now. If we get 100 new patients and everybody gets this, or you create incentive based on who's scheduling the patients, right? Or you can say, hey, our goal this month is to get 30 new reviews. So, let's go ahead and create a goal and create an incentivization.
Now, for some team members, it works well, if they're individually incentivized for others, it works where it works. Well, if they are creating a, a, Big team kind of, you know, if you reach together with 30 reviews, we're all going to go and get many and patty. So I like we're all going to go for a happy hour or something like that.
But you want to create a goal. I have a lot of practices and I get practices at my own events. Um, you know, from anywhere between 3 to 18 team members, they literally fly them to the destination events that I throw and they bring their team members and usually they make that happen as hey, let's let's reach this goal.
And if we reach this goal, then we can all go to Aruba. We can all go to Turks and Caicos. We can all go here. and so now the whole team is excited and moving towards this goal because they want to do that. The first thing is you need to create some sort of excitement, incentive around it, just because not everybody's organically going to share your practice.
And if any of the listeners here have my book, chapter five of my book, where I say teamwork. literally goes through the exact systems of creating and getting your team excited about marketing. So it's, it's, and it goes through the steps of how do you start with it. It goes through the steps of, you know, what you need to do as well.
So it's super, once you start implementing it, it becomes easier.
Michael: Gotcha. Okay. So then you mentioned incentives to provide of all the incentives you've seen your clients, practices, people you've spoken with what has been the best, like Oh, yes, this is really going to keep the fire lit under
Minal: the team.
It's very hard because I work with practices who are one providers to practices that are 60, 70 locations. So their incentive package and how they work their system is very different. If you are a smaller practice. Then, yeah, clearly you have you could do individually in civilization or a group one. If you are a multi location, then you have a lot more team members, right?
So it's not easy for you to fly 50 team members to some kind of a location. Maybe you fly your management team or your. Marketing team or your clinical team. So it depends on it. You know, your practice culture, you know, your team members, you know, is it going to work well as a group celebration for reaching your goals or individual incentives or perhaps both or maybe taking them out for, you know, some sort of a destination kind of event or whatever it is retreat or however you want to call it.
It really. comes down to your specific. I have practices who do as simple as 5 for every new patient that we scheduled or all the way to, hey, we are going to fly to whatever, and take everybody with us. So it just really, it just really depends.
Michael: Gotcha. Okay. And then what if they are trying, like, I've seen this before where they're like, yeah, they're excited.
They're, they're trying to reach the goals, but month one, they didn't month two, they didn't now they're getting demotivated month three month. And then they just kind of like, we just doctor, we can't reach it. We need. More money for ads, or I don't know, something,
Minal: do you not? Yeah, so it's, it's different, right?
So what I used to do was, Michael, I used to be the marketing ambassador for a dental practice. because of that, I did this every month. And the way that I kept the team super excited was every single month, I held a 90 minute meeting. Now, this wasn't like a meeting of like, here's a memo. This is what we are doing, right?
Like, no, this will be a fun meeting. So I used to come up, I came up with this game, like a Jeopardy, like a Jeopardy game, but what I would do is, um, we'll, you know, shut down in the lunchtime. Get everybody gets lunch. You know, the lunches at the practice and they know this is a team meeting and I would create the jeopardy game and then in the jeopardy game, I would have all the questions, right?
It will be clinical questions from desk questions, but also marketing questions and then all of the questions will have points. 5 point question. 10 point question. 20 point question bonus. And I would divide the team into different departments. So depending on how big your team is or how big your practices are, you could divide them into teams and you create a competition.
And what people have to do is, because they know these questions are coming, this is where you add everything, something new you implemented. Perhaps you are doing a whitening promotion this month, or perhaps you change your FA, right, your financial agreement this month, or perhaps you change your script, for something with clinical, or something with the front desk.
Whatever it is, you come up with all the questions, and you put your team members in smaller teams. And now you create a competition where you run this meeting as a fun team activity, and you would be shocked how much they all got excited every single month with everything we were doing, including marketing.
And we will have a winning team and the winning team will get like some kind of a prize or a gift card or whatever it is, whoever it's in the winning team, and they would literally study. So they would go on like if they know the team meeting is scheduled for next week, like the week before I would start getting questions, they would be on the website.
Checking out what promotions we are running, or they would be on like the social media checking it out, or they will, the clinical team will be asking the front desk team. Hey, what did you guys change this month? And you know, vice versa. And they all got super excited for this game because they knew it was happening.
There was a winning team. There was all this fun questions. And it was a great way to learn because instead of creating. a memo, again, nothing against memo, but that could be boring. But now you would have some sort of a question. Hey, we just changed our appointment time for new patients this month.
And then people were like, what is our new appointment time? And then, you know, the team, I would get buzzers from Amazon. They're like 20 bucks you get. So it's like buzzer. Everybody's trying to buzz and everybody's trying to, you know, get super excited about it. And it's amazing. It's super fun. And now everybody's talking about, oh, the new appointment time that we have for the new patient and the entire team is present there.
So everybody knows about it. Everybody's making a note. And I did this every single month. And then during that same meeting, I would share the goals. I would share whatever, You know, where we are trying to be, whether it's marketing, because again, I was a marketing ambassador. So I did the whole marketing part.
What do we, what results do we want? How are we working as a team? Where are we really lacking? What do we need to do to accomplish that? And it worked great. if you want to keep your team excited, you have to be excited. And you have to show that excitement to them, right? Like I would even go in and at the, at the lunch, at the lunch room, I would, I would have a graph or even in the dry erase board.
I will tell them where we are every single day with our new patient numbers. So every single day they came down and be like, okay, we are at X. Well, this is our goal. So I'm like, are those people calling? Are we converting them? What do we need to do? And tell me what I need to do at my end. Sometimes they will come to me and say, Hey, next week schedule is falling apart.
Can you go ahead and push out some social media ads? You got it. I'm going to push out some social media ads. Let's go ahead and do this. So there was this full on communication. Every day that I just kind of posted information, so they all knew where we were. But on a monthly basis to show them how excited we were, the doctors were, and I was, and the management, the team members were now excited too.
Because if it's not in front of you, you're going to forget about it. It has to be in front of you. You have to get excited about it.
Michael: Gotcha. So, one key thing that I feel like you're talking about too is, you kind of give the accountability to one person. In this scenario, it was you, right? So, who do you recommend, if it's a smaller practice?
You know what I mean? Who can we give this accountability to and then almost kind of like train them to do this?
Minal: It's easy. I mean finding the person who we want to be accountable one day how to be somebody that is organized So they could take on this task and they could stay organized with it. But the second is the personality They need to have like a fun energetic personality where they can actually help with marketing and with you know, capturing Content for social media or like working with the team and getting them excited because they are excited.
Right? So you do need the personality. So organization personality. And then the third part is you want somebody who is also okay with tech. You don't want somebody who absolutely hates technology or is not even themselves on social media. You know, that doesn't help you because they don't understand how it all works.
So those are the three things and you want to give them extra time. So you may be thinking of somebody already on your team that you have. and you can easily give them two hours extra a week is what you would need to get started with. And then you could add more and more and more, but you could get somebody on your team, or you could put out an ad and get a part time person who can come in.
Or maybe you have a niece, a nephew, a daughter, a son, a friend, somebody, you know, uh, who's totally into this kind of stuff. And they can come in and kind of help out to for for few hours a week. So you can easily do that. The reason I said that you want somebody in charge of it is because, as you and I both know, when it's everyone's job is nobody's job.
Yeah. So, somebody needs to take on the ownership of this and get excited and get the doctors and share with the doctors so the doctors are also excited. And this is true for the doctors. You need to be excited. You need to be excited because I sometimes get a lot of team members who are super excited and they will call me and be like, the doctor just won't take photos and videos.
Doctor, this is your business. This is your practice. If you don't take photos and videos, why should your team care about your marketing? Right. Why should they even put anything in? Because you don't put anything in. So that's just some real side talk And if you are uncomfortable with photos and videos, perhaps select a brand ambassador, like a practice ambassador for your practice who can interview you or show it.
But at the end of the day, it's your business and you're as a leader. How you act and what you do is what the team sees. You are the leader of the practice. You are the owner of the practice. So if they don't see you doing this or hustling or getting excited about it or sharing about it, then they are not going to do it either.
Michael: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So then capturing the content for social media, that's super important to have in house, you would say? Oh
Minal: yeah, 100 percent because everything happens inside your practice.
Michael: Okay, so then they... According to you, like, or your advice, what's the best right now, like today, to be like this is the best type of content you need to capture for social media?
Minal: Reels. less than 30 second videos. Videos of what? Oh, so much. This could be anything from a practice culture, to patient appointments, to testimonials, to a tour of your practice, to the team having fun, the morning huddle, you know, the doctor sharing a tip. It's just, it has to be a, Less than 30 second video and the 1st frame of the video, like you could even do a video and photo, photo, photo, photo.
You know, you could create 1 video with videos and photos, but the beginning has to be some kind of motion. So the beginning slide of that 30 second video has to be a video and all the listeners here, if you were to go onto my Instagram page, uh, you'll see that I have a couple of reels on there. You'll see that one of those reels is like me in a boat, and you'll see, if you click on it, you'll see that I start with a video of me sitting on the boat, like smiling kind of thing.
But then there's like a photo, photo, photo, photo, video, photo, photo, right? But so what it does is, You have, in general, your audience spends three seconds. before deciding if they want to watch your content. Our attention span is three seconds. And because it's three seconds, you have to capture them right away.
And if there's movement, they usually are like, what's happening here? Cause we are nosy people. So we're like, hold up, what's going on in this video, right? So you want to always start the first frame with a video, and then you could have fun with a reel where you could combine videos and photos together, things like that.
But the first thing is always a video. Okay.
Michael: So video first, And everything else later on, how often should we be doing this? Because some people are like, I'm going to do it three times a week or
Minal: I mean, you want to share at least four times a week, but you don't have to share a video four times a week.
That's, you know, you don't necessarily need to do that. You just need to share consistently four times a week, real photos and videos. And this is why it's so important that your content collection happens inside the practice because you and I both know that. If you see that photo of that stock family wearing their blue shirts and their blue dresses one more time on social media.
You know, everybody knows which one I'm talking about. That's not, it just doesn't work. Stock doesn't work. Um, the whole point, like the first word in social media is social. You have to be social. The first word in Facebook is face. You have to show your face, right? The first word in Instagram is Insta. It has to be something that captures their, their attention right away.
So these platforms are not even lying to you. They're telling you it's in their names, what they want. So it's not really that hard to figure out what kind of content the hard part is. A consistency staying consistent and actually sharing. and many times I would have practices reach out.
They're like, our social media is not working. And I'm like, let's take a look. And they probably shared something three weeks ago and they haven't shared anything since then. So what happens is the algorithm is like, well, you're not showing me any love, so I'm not going to show you any love, right? It's all about how much time you're spending there.
It's all about how much time people are engaging with your post, what's going on. So again, if you don't show the platform any love, why should the platform show you any love? So the things are just there. So the trick is to stay consistent. So you want real photos and videos and you want to post every other day.
So that comes out to be three to four times a week. And that's totally fine. Photos just start simple photos and videos. If you look at your patient, uh, your appointments, and let's say that you're open for five days a week, and let's say I'm going to be super like conservative, right? And let's say that you only see five patients a day, and you're open for five days a week.
That's 25 patients you're seeing a weekly basis. Can you capture four photos? From 25. Yeah, you can. You could capture a photo with a patient with a doctor, the doctor coming in the morning, the team doing the morning team huddle, You could share photos of you guys, you know, going out to lunch together.
You could share a testimonial from a patient. So you could share it. Photos and videos and always, just a side note, always get a written consent from your patients, for anything that requires marketing. Yeah.
Michael: I know when it comes to pediatrics, it's kind of easy to, you know what I mean? Like, share those photos and talk about it and it's like, it's a cute kid, right?
Like, here you go. When it comes to adults, do you ever feel, Manal, like sometimes you're looking at a practices page and you see like, them with the patient, them with the patient, them with the patient, and you kind of grow numb to it. You're just like, oh, another one. Can there be something, a better idea of them with the
Minal: patient?
Yeah, that's, to be completely honest with you, Michael, my favorite patients for social media are boomers. I have so many clients, practices who are killing it, killing it on social media by showcasing boomers. You know why? Because boomers love you. They are the ones who come on time to their appointments.
They bring you cookies. they bring your cards. They know everything that's happening in the practice. They are super supportive. They respect you. They listen to your treatment. So I love to showcase boomers, but you want to do different fun things. So you want, like I mentioned, you want to have a combination between your practice culture.
And your patients. So you want to show off your team huddles. You want to show photos of the doctor to the patient. You want to do a high five a great day, or you want to go ahead and create a testimonial, quick testimonial video with your patient as well. So there is so much content that you could do.
And again, if you go to Instagram. on Minaal's stamp at LLC. I share all of this. Like I share, give you like nine dental reel ideas. You have them. I actually tell you what to post. Uh, hook ideas. Hook is what goes on the reel. It's a subject line that captures somebody's attention. I share it with you.
I have an entire post on how to get your team excited about marketing. So all of those specific tips. You can easily grab, information is always there. It's the overload. And this is why I don't want to give out too much on the, on the podcast. Cause this is what happens when I usually do that.
They get overwhelmed and they're like, Oh my God, there's no way I can do this. You can do this. All I want you to do, if you're talking about social, is start with four posts a week. That's it. That's your job. Your job is to start with four posts a week. I don't even care if the same posts are all patient photos of the doctors.
It's fine. Just first get consistent with it. Just make sure you're implementing it. Then go crazy with all the trends and what's happening. But the first thing is to get started. It's like working out. You can't just run a marathon right away, right? You have to go slow. You have to practice every day. You have to get your speed up.
You have to get your stamina up. You have to work out every day. This is similar to that. So it's harder for you to jump directly into the big stuff. Uh, you know, if I'm here talking about like, go ahead and find this and go ahead and do this and, you know, push it this way where you're creating a different kind of reaction and you're changing how it looks, you're going to.
Say, Oh, that's too much. And that's the thing. Just start. Now, if you are somebody who has already started, good for you. Amazing for you. You're doing awesome. This is when you start leveling up and this is when you do start utilizing all those trends and topics and start, creating cross marketing and start collaborating with other people on Instagram and Facebook.
Collaboration means whatever you post also goes on their page. You start creating internal contests with your patients. So there's a lot more you could do, but just get started. Thanks.
Michael: So just get started four days, out of the week. Yeah. And then how can we just get started with getting the team motivated?
Cause they feel like you told us a lot of like amazing stuff, but
like, let's just say for example, the doctor's listening, he's like, okay, I have the perfect person in my team. She's going to be able to do this. I call her marketing manager, marketing
Minal: director, whatever, marketing manager and marketing ambassador, content, social media manager, the name is just a name.
Michael: Yeah. And then I give her what specific duties that she needs to do.
Minal: Capture four photos or videos a week and schedule them on social media and then go and engage with them. Okay, and then you only need two hours a week to do that, so you don't need to do more than that. Their job should just be, Hey, look at our schedule.
Look at the patients coming in. Let's highlight the patients that are more likely to take photos and videos with us because they love us. They're amazing. They're awesome. Let's capture a review from this patient. Let's go ahead and take a photo with this patient. Right? Let's go ahead. We have a team meeting coming up.
Let's make sure we take a photo of the team meeting. So on a Monday morning, they should just look at the whole schedule and be able to tell what photos they're capturing. And then what I do is you always want to take photos and videos and create into a library. So let's say you did a team meeting and you took 20 photos.
Don't share 20 photos only share 5. Save the 15 for future, right? So, because you will have those times where you have a lull or it's not, it's crazy busy and you don't have time. But if you have a library of photos, you can always take those photos out and just share them. So, you know, take a lot of photos, keep the library open, but their job should literally be take four photos and videos.
Start with our patient base and what our team's doing. And let's just share that. And once we do that. This is when we can start adding more and creating it But yes keep it if you are brand new starting at this and you're talking to a team member also don't overwhelm them Keep it very simple for
Michael: them as well Gotcha.
Okay. This has been fantastic. So besides that I know You got something coming up pretty big which is I mean, you got a lot of things pretty big coming up, but...
Minal: Uh, no, you're kind. Uh, yeah, I have CEO on the Beach in Aruba coming up. So, I'm super excited. So, CEO on the Beach is a destination conference, pretty much.
Um, you know, I've done it, uh, I called CEO on the Beach because I grew up in St. Thomas, and... Beach is my thing. Island life is my thing. So, done the event in St. Thomas, have done the event in Turks and Caicos in 2023. And in 2024, it's going to be in Aruba! And it's super fun. It's all different topics. There is marketing, there is practice management, scheduling systems, there is clinical topics.
I have amazing speakers coming. There's panel discussion. And like I said, everybody, you know, depending on who they are, your team members are welcome to join us. So, it's a fun event. How many days is it? So it's one full day is three days, but it's different audiences, right? So one full day is for coaches, consultants, speakers and companies in the industry.
And then there are two half days for dentists and teams. And I say half days because you're in Aruba. you know, so we start at 8 a. m. We end at 1 p. m. Because I know none of you are going to stay inside in a room in a conference room in Aruba. Yeah. So, uh, yeah. And then, um, I'm kind of the event see on the beach.
My, it's known for like epic beach parties, like in Turks and Caicos, we run the number one beach in the world for like a dinner and sunset and dancing and all the fun stuff in Aruba, the beach party is on a private island with flamingos.
Michael: That's pretty cool. Yeah.
Minal: You know, I kind of want to provide experience.
Like, if you're coming to Aruba, that's awesome. And you write it off as a workation because it's a work trip, so you're writing that off. You're also kind of, you know, doing that. But at the same time, I always want to do the beach parties are my way of doing something that you won't otherwise do, right? So this, going to this private island and Being there checking it out, seeing actual flamingos, uh, you know, on the islands, interacting with them and stuff.
So the beach parties are epic. They are pretty fun and people come with family and friends. Like, they really make it into a workation because the hotel gives a group room rate for over a week. So most The people come with family and friends and it becomes into a big, uh, big like networking event, but lots of fun and learning at the same time.
Michael: That's nice. What's the hotel that, or is it already kept
Minal: out or now? Yeah. Yeah. Everything is, I mean, we are, we are 50 percent full. This is not till July 2024. It's already 50 percent full. so it is in Aruba Marriott and Stellaris. So that's the, that's the hotel and the dates are July 25th to 27th.
Michael: Okay.
So there's going to be a link to that in the show notes below. And at the same time, if you type in TDM 150, you get a pretty awesome discount. So type that in there, TDM 150, and then that's also going to be in the show notes below as well. But any final pieces of advice, Manal, that you want to give to our audience?
Minal: Um, no, like I said, if you're just getting started, keep it simple. Your job should just be to stay consistent. Just, it's just like working out. If you want to get better, you know, if you want to get in a better shape, you just have to show up every day and you just have to work out, right? You can't work out once a week and then don't work out three weeks and then go back to it.
So keep it super simple. If you are somebody who has already started it and you are like, yes, I'm ready to. Level up. This is when you start using the trending sound. This is when you start getting more creative. You can use platforms like Canva and CapCut for like your videos and stuff as well.
So you could start getting a lot more stuff. And if you're already on it, you're probably much following some of those trends as well. And then, as I said. Be excited about it. Like share those numbers every day or on a monthly basis, create fun meetings for the team so that they're excited about it and they get to see you and they get to see how amazing this is going to be.
And they are into it as well. So remember, you are the leader. How you show up for this is how your team's going to show up for this. that's a big part of this. And the practice that I was a marketing ambassador was 25, 000 patients and like 40 team members. So I had a lot of writing on, you know, I have to create all 40 team members to get excited.
So it could be done. You can totally do this. Baby steps, just baby steps.
Michael: Baby steps. Awesome. So guys, thank you so much for tuning in. It's been a pleasure, but at the same time, and I'll thank you so much for being a part of the podcast. It's been a pleasure too. And at the same time, if you guys want to go in the show notes below.
Click on any of our links to reach out to her and then check out CE on the beach in Aruba and type in TDM 150 just to go check out that awesome discount. Okay, it's awesome. Thank you so much for tuning in and we'll talk to you in the next episode Thank you
