Ash welcomes Jennifer Christensen, co-founder and CMO of Beacon Media and Marketing, to discuss the role of artificial intelligence in modern marketing for dental professionals. Jennifer shares her journey as an early adopter of AI, highlighting how new technologies have reshaped client search behaviors and what this rapid shift means for dental practices that want to maintain and grow their online presence. She explains how practices can benefit from AI-powered insights, especially by personalizing content, building credibility, and targeting AI-driven search overviews.

Jennifer discusses practical strategies dental offices can use to become more visible in AI searches, such as focusing on author-driven, expert content and being transparent with information like pricing and service details. She also explores the changing landscape of consumer trust and how dental practices need to adapt to remain relevant, noting that small businesses now have a unique window of opportunity to compete with larger competitors. The episode wraps up with a conversation about AI's broader role in operational efficiency and the importance of businesses understanding and implementing these tools sooner rather than later.

To find out more and connect with Jennifer, visit: https://www.beaconmm.com/

Key Topics Discussed:

• Jennifer’s introduction and experience as an early adopter of AI

• The evolution from information age marketing to the age of intelligence

• How AI impacts SEO, search habits, and website visibility

• Importance of author-driven, expert, and personalized content

• Strategies to get dental practices featured in AI overviews

• The significance of transparency in pricing and service details

• Increasing consumer trust through detailed, credible information

• Using AI for operational efficiencies in practice management

• Adapting to changing consumer behavior and search trends

• The window of opportunity for small businesses in AI-driven marketing

Welcome to Beyond Bitewings, the Business side of Dentistry, brought to you by Edwards and Associates PC. Join us as we discuss how to build your dental practice, optimize your income, and plan for your future. This podcast is distributed with the understanding that Edwards and Associates PC is not rendering legal, accounting or professional advice. Listeners should consult with their business advisors before acting on any of the information that is shared at Edwards and Associates PC. Our business business is the business of dentistry. For help or more information, visit our [email protected].

Hello and welcome to another episode of Beyond Bitewings. In today's episode, we have a very special guest. Her name is Jennifer Christensen. She's the co founder and CMO of Beacon Media and Marketing. She's one of the early adopters of AI into the marketing space and we decided why not have her be on our episode today and talk a little bit about and how that could be helpful both monetarily as well as from an efficiency standpoint. So without further ado, Jennifer, how are you?

I'm doing so good. It's a pretty sunny day in Anchorage, Alaska, so I am enjoying that and just having a good day.

Wow, that's amazing. You know what, I was not actually aware that you are currently in Anchorage, Alaska.

That's where we founded our agency and we started here as a small company but then went national. I love living here. My husband owns a tour company here and it's a beautiful place to live. Great people too.

Oh, that's fantastic. You know, I've always wanted to go there. Didn't get a chance. I have a few clients from there that moved here to Texas from there, but they always talk about the nature and how beautiful it is over there. So tell our listeners a little bit more about yourself and how you got into marketing and what made you think of incorporating AI into your business model.

Yeah, so I think my road into marketing is like a lot of people in marketing, they don't necessarily start out in this. So I started out as an entrepreneur. I had a pretty large business in my 20s. Then I went into corporate sales more that direction. And I think the reason that I got into marketing is that I've always been a pretty early adapter of technology. I was like the first girl in my high school to be on a computer and that just followed me. I've always loved new things and building things. And so what led me to marketing was really the age of the digital marketing era and I saw that that was going to transform the way that people did business and so that drew my attention.

Attention. I was really excited about that, got into that. And then about three years ago, right before OpenAI came out, actually, I started researching AI, was like, okay, I think this is coming. I didn't think it was coming that quickly, but I, you know, had started paying attention to it, that this is where things were going. And I love being first so that I can help other people. That's just how I'm wired. If I can learn it and understand it and then help break it down to explain it to other small business owners, that helps them as well.

Okay, I see. Now, would you say because you were an early adopter, that it gives you certain unique advantages?

It has. It's given me speaking opportunities all over the US And I've been able to, you know, be in boardrooms that I'm not sure I would have ever had the opportunity to be invited to. But having that knowledge, and I'm just one of those nerdy girls, I guess, that will stay up till midnight sometimes reading the latest and greatest of what's happening. And I don't love technology necessarily for technology's sake. I love technology for what I believe the good that it can do. And there's certainly a lot of bad that technology does as well. But obviously my focus is to try to use it for good. And I do love having that advantage, having that ability to research, understand something, and then be able to share it and help make it a little bit easier for other people.

I see. So for those of us who don't know the nitty gritty of, let's say, SEO or other components of marketing that can help them, how would AI exactly help your clients when you're incorporating it?

That is such a broad question. So I'm going to start with. You brought up SEO, and I know a lot of Dennis, you know, really use SEO, and that's a great tool for sure. It's a great thing to focus on because it's very effective. But take SEO, for example. So the. The world has changed rapidly as far as, like, people's behavior and how they search now, just like it did in the digital marketing era. I believe the era we're in is called the age of intelligence.

We've moved away from the information age, and in this age of intelligence, like for SEO, for how people find you, more and more people are using AI overviews. So they're using AI overviews, or they're not even going to search at all. They're actually using AI to search for the exact information they're looking for or to even brainstorm with AI. And so that can actually hurt a business if they're not paying attention to that. So how AI could help you then figure that out is I'll just take an example of something that we would do for a local client. So we would research what is showing up on those AI overviews. How do we get our clients to show up in those different places? How can we actually use AI to help us do that? Now, instead of creating content that is just for SEO purposes, we're now using AI to actually analyze and determine what clients are researching and searching for in AI, what questions they want to have answered, and then how can we tailor the information we're doing to make sure we show up in those places? Yes, it's. It's still just like a different way of looking at it or a different marketing tactic, so to speak.

The big difference is that instead of just going to AI and trying to figure it out yourself or trying to analyze it yourself, you can actually brainstorm with AI. I just did this earlier this morning. I have this issue. I want my client to show up here. I want them to show up in the AI overview, not their competitors. Help me figure out the best ways for me to do that. Here's their target market, here's how we want to position them. What are people searching for? What are they looking for? How do I do that? Basically, I'll brainstorm back and forth with the AI program to figure out the best way to do that.

And it's very effective.

Wow. Okay. See, interesting. I never even thought about that. That's right, because I myself have done that where sometimes I do a research and I'm thinking, you know what, let me use some kind of an AI platform to do some research work. And sometimes I'll even ask it for some recommendation.

Absolutely. And that is going to get more and more common. The latest report from Gartner is predicting by 2026 that Google's traffic share will be down about 30%. And we're already seeing that. So even without their traffic share being down, we're basically right now what's called like a 60% zero click rate, which means even if you're showing up on Google, only 40% of people are even going to click through to a website. 60% are just looking at the AI overviews or getting the information they want and clicking off. So as a small business owner, like you have an incredible opportunity right now to like really, you know, get ahead of maybe even larger competitors. But it's also A scary place to be if you've been relying on kind of those old tactics.

I see, that's interesting.

So, yeah, it's quite a shift.

Yeah, yeah, no, it's just bothering my mind and I wasn't even aware, I mean you, you mentioned OpenAI and it's an open source platform, but I never really thought about it, that there would be a way to see what kind of input is being made into it and that can be analyzed to see what kind of questions are being asked or what is being researched on by the clients or the consumers that could give valuable insight to people that are trying to use that information to custom tailor their product.

Right? Absolutely.

Now would you say they work hand in hand? Because I have seen sometimes they do this little search thing like searching Internet for recognition recommendations. Would you say, let's say something like OpenAI or ChatGPT, it syncs in with other search engines to pull information.

Yes. So ChatGPT in particular, OpenAI, they use Bing for almost all of their data. Makes sense, right? Microsoft's a huge investor and their biggest competitor is Google and Claude and Gemini and you know, Google's own AI information. So they are using Bing for most of what they get. I mean, I can just share a couple little tips that would help your listeners as far as like for small business or stuff they can tell their marketing agency. Yeah, please do so. So basically it's getting a lot of the information from there. The things that are going to make you show up in those AI overviews are going to be what we call schema, which is the more personalized content.

So if you're just putting out content like every other dentist, you know, you're putting out like why you should consider an implant or you know, information that they could get anywhere else. Like even if your content is a little bit better, it won't have any ranking value anyi. The only thing that will give it ranking value is basically the person that wrote that. So it actually has to be content that that AI is deeming has relevance and is an expert authority. So what we're doing with our clients, pretty much all of our clients are healthcare. So we're actually interviewing the dentists and doctors and actually having them be the authors and the byline and then creating a whole branding campaign around their expertise and that's what's helping them then show up as an actual authoritative expert in answering those questions. So that's just like one thing you can do. But it makes a pretty significant difference, I would imagine.

So. Wow. Okay, that's Amazing. So now, because I'm assuming not a lot of people have caught onto this, right? It's similar to how SEO was working earlier. So this would be the time to utilize, let's say someone like you to help them with those AI searches.

It is an incredible time. We are right at the beginning. So it's like I said, it's. And we've actually only figured this out like probably three or four months ago. It's been changing so rapidly so took time for us to even really I kept analyzing it and looking at it and trying to see trends and like what was the traffic telling us? It really hadn't like settled into where I could find data that was comprehensive enough to actually start testing. So yeah, now is an incredible time. You know, it doesn't have to be us, obviously. You know, you can talk to your own marketing agency or somebody you're talking to, but if somebody doesn't understand the concept of geo, which is basically like that is being able to attract or be able to show up on AI search overviews or even AI searches themselves, you're going to be behind.

So they either need to understand that concept or they need to be at least starting to research it and starting to work towards that for you guys, for small businesses to catch up. I'm passionate about this for small businesses the same way I was the Internet, because there's an opportunity now to really take market share. So if you can take market share as a small business, put out some of the larger companies that are out there. I just, I always like that advantage because I think the big guys generally have the advantage all the time.

And I'm just thinking, I know with SEO keywords are a huge thing, especially when you're developing the website. I'm thinking, do we have something similar for AI? So for, let's say you are Invisalign specialist right in the Dallas area and you want your name to pop up or your practice's name. Is there something they would need to do on their website and or somewhere 100% okay.

Yeah, it's exactly the same technique. So whether they're doing it through blog or website, it has to be personalized content and this is what's a little hard. And like again, most of our clients are all health related and many doctors, dentists, people in this field don't necessarily like to have their name out there or to, you know, be promotional about it. And so it's really establishing the expertise. So like if you're going to write about Invisalign or you're going to write about something in particular. It has to come from a source that is vetted and credible so that will view it that way and pick it up as a credible source. So you have to do all the same techniques that you would do with SEO as far as making sure it's location specific, it's niche specific, but it cannot be general information anymore. And longer is no longer better.

So for that, for the websites, then the websites have to change. Like, we have clients still that don't even like to have, like their staff on their website. You know, things like that. They don't like to share that type of information. They will not be able to compete in this area that we're moving forward. Because there's two factors to this. One is that the AI needs that personalized content for basically credibility and expertise. But also throughout our entire culture, because things can be faked so quickly and content can be.

You don't know whether the content's real or not. You don't know whether the video is real or not. People are looking for trust factors. Not only does it matter in the AI world, but it actually matters even more for consumers that they don't trust what they're seeing. The more that it can be personalized, the more that there's social proof, the more that there's expertise behind it. The last three or four months that we've been testing this, it's just absolutely shot through the roof. Makes a huge difference.

Okay, and who's doing this vetting? Is it from the AI source or Bing?

Yeah, it's algorithms.

Okay.

So they want. Just like if you think about how Google has always established itself as the most reliable source for you to find information, right? And if. If websites are coming up, when you're doing searches on Google and a website comes up and it's not really what you were looking for, that sort of devalues Google. And that's always been the premise behind wanting to have the best content show up. Right. So with AI, it's the same concept in a. The algorithms are looking for all those indications of, is this the best content? Is this the best answer to what that person is asking for? And what we're seeing in behavior is the way people ask AI questions or the way people interact with AI is much more like a real conversation than Google. So it's much more like, hey, like, you know, who would.

What would I look for in somebody that I'm looking to do Invisalign? How much does it cost? Who's the most Reputable person in my area. How long does it take? You know, very specific. Not just like the general overview of, like, who's the best Invisalign expert in Dallas, like you might see in Google. But people are communicating with AI like, it's like it's a person. Like it's a somebody that they're getting that direct information from. So if your website is super pretty and fancy, but it just has all these general terms and doesn't give specific information and doesn't have credible articles from who's writing them, like you're. You're going to lose. You're not going to show up in those places.

So how long would you say it would take for them to implement this, if they want to take this route where they have enough credible articles out there and then redesign the whole website.

Yeah. To start switching things? Only a couple months.

It doesn't take long. Okay.

It's just if somebody's willing. Yeah. And so think about. And some people are actually just naturally doing it well already. Like, people who understand the concept of personal brand. People who, I mean, like, you having this podcast, right. This gives you tremendous credibility. Like, you're already.

You're already positioning yourselves for actually the AI market. This gives you a huge advantage than some of your competitors and what you do. So some people are already doing it. They understood the value of personal brand. They understood the value of, you know, having really detailed FAQs on, like, what their clients can expect. You know, I would say the top one, 2% have already kind of been going this direction, but the majority have not. Not. And now it's just become so much more critical.

So it's not that it will take that long to do it. It's just that you have to decide that you're willing to kind of go all in. A lot of businesses, service businesses, for whatever reason, they don't want to put all their information online. They want to kind of say, well, people need to call me to get the information. But that's not how people want to operate. It's definitely not how AI operates. If you don't have the information out there, it doesn't exist as far as AI is concerned, which one makes sense.

Because they're going off of those data sets. Right.

And we can see, like, when I look at the data, I can see, like, the specific questions, like people are asking that. They're asking about price a lot. So if you're asking your AI source, you know, give me a range of prices of who in my area, of what I can expect of what the length of time this will be, of who's the top rated. If you don't have all three of those things listed, then, like, if you don't even have your price out there, or at least your range, and you don't have, like, you know, what to walk through, what somebody can expect for length of time or recovery or any of that, like, you're not even going to show up in answering those questions.

Wow. Okay, that makes sense. And I. I can also tell you that a lot of it's crazy though, right? Yeah.

It's so different. Yeah.

It's like, no, we don't want to tell them our pricing. We want them to call us first, look at the patient, and then give them a treatment plan.

We've battled it as a marketing agency for years. We finally just put our range of price. I get it. I understand. Because as a business owner, you think, well, they need to understand the value first. Right. Maybe they won't like the price if they don't understand it's apples to oranges, what they'd be getting someplace else. I totally get it.

I've wrestled with it myself. But ultimately, our entire culture's behavior is changing to the point people don't trust, they don't want to be sold. They want to get the information themselves. AI is actually providing a better, faster, easier route for them to do that than even the search engines are now. And so you're kind of just completely cutting off a huge percentage of the market. Like, it's actually having the opposite effect. Right. If you don't do those things.

Yeah, it's. I think it's going to force people to be more transparent with everything.

Very much so. We are way past, like I said, I believe we're in the age of intelligence instead of the information age. So in the information age, you know, it was all about maybe, like, how you could get attention or, like, have the best way to express your information or, you know, like, kind of stay a little bit better than the other guy. And now it's. I really believe, like, we're at the beginning. This is all about clarity. People want to know they can trust you. They want to have the bottom line.

They want to make their own decisions. They want to educate themselves. And, you know, for a small business, that's a little bit scarier because it means they're less in control. But again, if you understand that that's what's happened in the market, you can position yourself to win in a huge way.

But it also makes me wonder like, is it going to force the people, let's say somebody who practices a holistic dentistry. Right. Would it force them to enter into some kind of a price different market just because they have to be transparent and now they have to compete with their other competitors? And because AI uses algorithm, it may not understand the qualitative part of dentistry, but it certainly can't understand the quantitative part. So would it force business owners to take that path instead of focusing on the care part more, even though if it costs a little extra premium?

I actually don't think so. I think it'll be exactly the opposite. I think you're going to see an explosion of niche service businesses. I mean, we've already seen this trend going this way and I'm a particular fan. Holistic dentistry, we have a couple of those clients and that's who I go see. Interestingly enough, one of our clients in that realm, when she first came to us and said she was actually just marketing herself as a general practitioner and we really, really punished like her going niche and that was scary because she thought she'd lose majority of her client and now she has a huge weight list and can't even, like she can't even take care of me. So. So I mean, you know, when you do niche down, the thing is, if you're willing to answer the detailed questions, if you're willing to put out online, why is holistic.

Why should I consider holistic dentistry versus regular dentistry? It's more expensive. They're going to find that out anyway. So if you, if you're willing to put that information out there ahead of time, you can actually probably convert. Some people you wouldn't convert before. I think it will have the opposite effect. I think the niche people that are the super transparent are the ones that will actually do the best.

I see. So having the information out there even before those questions are being asked, these platforms.

Okay, Absolutely.

Okay, so those crumbs can be put out there, right. It's like, oh, you're considering this. Have you considered, you know, taking the holistic route?

Absolutely. I mean, you could even structure entire sections of like your content and your website. You could write like articles about how much does dentistry cost and then you could be the expert in that particular area and then literally tie that into, okay, you want to know about cost, you want to know about pricing, here's all the general price ranges. Right. You can't give exacts probably, but here's the ranges and then here's why. Holistic costs a little bit more. And here's why that matters. So you actually would could do it completely that way and probably do super well.

In fact, I think I might use that idea for one of my clients.

That's okay.

I haven't even talked about AI from the standpoint, you know, I'm just talking marketing and there's so many areas I could talk about this in marketing, but we haven't even touched on like how does this help, you know, practices be more efficient internally? How does this help with like, you know, follow ups and client care and being able to be more personalized. I'm a huge believer in not replacing people. I know that job functions are going to change dramatically over the next four to five years. But instead of replacing people, you could use it to enhance your service. You can take something you're already doing really well and then use AI to make it even better. And that's kind of the suggestion like going in to talk with practices and different clients. That's what I try to look at is like, hey, what are you doing? That's actually working well, but it could be done better. You know, maybe you do great with your follow up and emails and your newsletters and all that.

But how could AI even enhance that and make it better and more efficient and more strategic?

Well, that's right. I am starting to see a little more of that this year compared to last year. And I think maybe there are associations that are also recommending their members to look into it. ADA as well as what's the other one? Even in our associations, adcpa, we're being told to look into it and see how AI could help with the internal functions. So it's just fascinating to see where it's going. You know what's crazy is that I sometimes get questions asked by clients. I did some research and I found out that, you know, the way we've been operating, where if a patient wants to see us, they have to call us first and set an appointment is no longer the way to go. It seems like, you know, they prefer being able to do all of that online themselves.

But you know, the software that I'm currently using, it's a hit or miss. Sometimes it does it right, Sometimes it'll overlap an existing appointment that's there and then they'll talk about is there a way to, you know, remedy that or can I help with that? Especially for emergency procedures over the weekend, I can't get a single employee to come in and work or you know, pick up, pick up that phone call. And sometimes I've even Told them, I'll pay you extra if you just, you know, I'll sync it to your phone and all you have to do is just pick up that call if you see one, commit. But apparently the response hasn't been, well, but that's where I can see how even from a cost standpoint and efficiency standpoint, implementing AI with that communication part can really help, as well as from reading X rays, really. There was a study that I saw that it speeds up the process of being able to identify what kind of treatment plan is needed by more than 50% if they're doing it themselves, along with, let's say, another AI that's going to take a quick look at that scan.

So, yeah, I mean, it's being used in medical in so many different areas. We're working with a startup right now that's got an app that is using it even in the mental health arena. I mean, there's, there's a lot of areas. I mean, I have some ethical cautions, for sure, and I do think it's important that every business or every person who's using it that they really think deep and hard about how they want to use it and for what purpose.

Right.

So that way we don't go completely off the rails here. Back to your example of like the scheduling thing. So my advice would be, in that situation, and I've seen this help a lot of people, is one, you have to have the paid version of either DBT or cloud. Like, don't go the free version. But when that question came to you, what I would have done if you weren't sure, like, how to solve that is I would have actually gone to AI to get solutions on how AI could help me. So instead of going to AI and saying, find me a company that can schedule online without problems or overlap, like, instead of approaching it that way, the way that I'm encouraging people to approach it, that we're getting really good response from. As you go to AI and you say, hey, I have this issue, I'm a dentist, I have these problems. Here's what I'm trying to solve.

Let's brainstorm. You and the AI, let's brainstorm different solutions. I want you to give me different ideas and then I'm going to give you ideas back. Please ask me clarifying questions so that we can come up with the best answer. And you literally toss it back and forth like you're talking to an assistant or you're talking like you and I, and then I'm seeing that create incredible solutions. Because then it's like you're using your brain power. You've got like part of the solution, but maybe you don't have all of it. And especially I found asking it to ask you questions because you don't always know what you don't know.

Right.

You don't always know the right question to ask, then it will help clarify and then you get to a much better solution than you would have just trying to have it solve what you think the problem is. Have it actually help you clarify the problem, figure out the problem and then solve it. Does that make sense?

No, it does. Yeah. I think that part of it is also because we're so used to putting in prompt commands in Google a certain way and we tried to use.

And that's what I was trying to get at is that it really is. That's why I'm kind of harping on this age of intelligence thing, because it really is a different mindset. Like, you have to, like, if you want it to be effective and you want to get the most value from it and then learn it, you know, learn back and forth, you have to change the way you're communicating. And we are starting to see that trend that people are doing that.

That's good. Yeah. And I feel like over time, once people get used to it, it'll get better. And what worries me is the more it gets better, the harder it will be to just like SEO. I remember early on there weren't a lot of people that could actually help you with that. And then people that utilized those resources had an edge early on. But later, I think as time went on, more and more people got involved. They have to constantly update their website to remain in that top five top ten search hits.

I worry if it's going to become like that with the AI as well.

I do think there will be a small percentage in the market of just like SEO. It's a great example, actually, because that was. That one was always scary for a lot of people. Like, they could kind of see social or kind of felt like they had options for their website. But that one always felt, even for me as a marketer in the beginning, it took me a while to really completely understand SEO and all the different components of it. I could definitely see that. I would say for every single person right now, though, like, SEO was kind of a choice that you could decide to work with or not. Right.

But we all need to understand AI. We all need, like for every single person that is working, wants to have a job, like this is going to revolutionize. I mean, that's what the reports are saying, like 40, 50% of our jobs within the next four or five years. And that's not a long time.

No, no. Especially not at the rate at which it's learning things.

Right.

So. Okay, that's fantastic. Well, that was a great conversation, Jennifer. Really, I learned a lot. And I'm sure our listeners learned a lot as well.

Yeah, I really enjoyed it. I love, like I said, love helping small businesses. And I will just end with. I've talked to other people about this and I think it's important to call out. So I was really excited about it for like the first, like 2021, 2022, even into 2023. And then I hit this point where it just was like, oh, my gosh, the world's gonna end. You know, And I didn't want to even talk about AI for about six months and then I came back out of it. And I've heard a lot of people, you know, speaking about that fear part of it of just like, what does this mean? This is so transformative.

You know, it's a huge amount of change. And so I'll just share my perspective of hope of being on this side, of kind of having that dark night of the soul, so to speak. And the hope that I have is that the more I feel compelled, at least, that the more people that are really learning it, embracing it, working with it as the small businesses that is going to help us shape and decide we get to have a voice then in how AI is used in our entire culture. So I am hopeful and optimistic and feel actually compelled to help people. So it's not just the large corporations that are using it.

Good, good. Yeah, no, thank you for sharing that. I also have a similar philosophy. In fact, I like to compare AI with fire. Yes, it could be a dangerous thing, but if you know how to use it right, it could be very, very helpful.

Absolutely.

And then you're also helping out the small business owners. So if a point comes for that fight, they don't feel helpless.

You are spot on.

Yeah. Okay, that's great. Well, thank you again so much, Jennifer, for being on our episode. It truly was a pleasure. And as I said, I learned a lot. In fact, I might be reaching out to you again later with questions, if that's okay.

Absolutely. And I do free 15 minute consults for anybody that reach out to me on LinkedIn. Again, I love helping. This is a little bit of my give back. I'm pretty good for my career at this point.

Oh, perfect.

Yeah. Yeah. If anybody wants to reach out. Yeah.

Please share your contact information because I'm sure there might be listeners out there.

Okay. It's just it says Jennifer Christensen, AK is my LinkedIn profile. Or you can reach out through Beacon Media and Marketing on our website. You can reach me either way. And happy to have a conversation.

Perfect. Well, thank you again, Jennifer. It was a pleasure.

Thank you.

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