Interview with our Founder
Date: February 12, 2015Category: Author: Danielle Azar
2015 may be well underway, but I thought it would be worthwhile to take a couple minutes to interview our owner and founder, Dr. David Hall, on his thoughts about the direction of Internet marketing. Dave is a former dentist who ran his own practice in Iowa for several years before he got into marketing. Unlike most dentists, he has always been quick to adopt the latest technologies to further his business and was toying with websites before Google was formed. Dave has kept abreast of the evolution of the Internet for such a long time that I assume his insight must be more valuable than most and was eager for his take on the state of the Internet past, present, and future. Here we go:
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How did you first get into Internet marketing and why did you stick with it?
The story of my getting into Internet marketing is an interesting story of the confluence of certain small things that made big things happen.
In 1995, the Internet was just starting to catch on, and I decided to get involved by joining CompuServe. At the time, CompuServe was running a promotion where they gave you a free website if you joined. I decided to use that website to promote my dental practice and started by publishing all the procedure handouts I had written for patients that explained various of the procedures I did.
What I wrote was unique, and there was little information available about dentistry on the Internet at the time, so it attracted a little bit of attention from around the world. I remember thinking how cool it was when a library in the nation of Jordan linked to my website. That was so cool, to be able to publish something that people from around the world could read, and that’s what fed my fascination with Internet marketing. And as I continued to build my website, I attracted patients from a three-state area, which also amazed me.
From there, the story of my getting into marketing for other dentists is a similar story of serendipity. Another dentist, who had practiced around the corner from me in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, had moved to Chicago. I was talking to her on the phone when she asked me if I would do a website for her to launch her new dental practice she was opening in the suburb of Naperville. It seemed like a crazy request, but she told me that I had done very well with my own website, so surely I could do one for her. When I thought about it I decided it would be fun to try that. I dabbled in websites for other dentists for a couple of years and then decided to launch the company, Infinity Dental Web, Inc.
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What about internet marketing could you have never predicted 10 years ago?
I never would have predicted mobile devices, and I doubt that many others would have predicted that direction in Internet marketing. It goes to prove that the future is extremely difficult to foresee and thus prepare for. You just have to be on your toes with each development as it comes out.
The development of social media–its importance and popularity–is something else that I would never have predicted.
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What industry development surprised you the most in 2014?
I need to qualify my answer here in that there are expected surprises and unexpected surprises. There are certain things that surprise me that I dismiss because I expected to be surprised. The REAL surprises are when we thought we knew what was going to happen, and it happened differently. The surprise surprise, therefore, is bigger than the expected surprise, if you’re following me. (No I do not follow. Maybe someone smarter than me can explain this in the comments.)
With that background, I would say the thing that surprised me the most in 2014 was how fast the importance of reviews grew. We started surveying patients searching for new dentists back in the summer of 2014. In August, we found that 40% of prospective patients were checking online reviews for a practice before making an appointment as a new patient. In January, just five months later, that percentage increased to 55%. That is enormous growth to take place over that short a time span.
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What’s the one thing you wish your clients understood about your field?
I had a little bit of a hard time with this, because generally I feel that our own clients seem to be pretty savvy. Even on the things they don’t know, they seem to feel they can trust us and we just have to tell them something and they believe us and understand.
Having said that, there are a couple of things that people in general would be very well served to understand better. These things are closely related–understanding one would help a great deal to understanding the other.
The first is the general low level of integrity we see in search engine marketing. There are too many operators who prey on the ignorance of the public to promote themselves. They throw out jargon that people don’t understand to try to impress them. They tell them that their websites aren’t performing in certain ways, in a manner that is truly deceptive. They promote the use of techniques that could really get those clients into trouble over the long term. This SEO industry seems plagued with a lower level of integrity than business in general.
The related matter is how difficult Google has made it, with their algorithm changes over the past three years, to really optimize a website. Many people think there is a magic bullet you can use to zoom their website to the top of the rankings. That used to be the case, and we used to be able to do that. But that can’t be done any more. Search engine optimization is a slow, laborious, and resource-intensive process. This truth is obscured by some of the low-integrity operators I referred to, who make it sound, in their promotional materials, like they have that “magic bullet” that doesn’t really exist any more.
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Give me three industry predictions for 2015?
How can you predict this stuff? But I’ll try. The safest predictions are the trends that you think will continue or strengthen:
- I predict that online reviews will continue to grow in importance and that people will become more adept at finding and evaluating them.
- I predict that the trend to mobile devices will continue and that larger screens will become more popular and mobile access will grow.
- I predict that there will be a big development that no one could have predicted.
But look again at your question #2 and compare it with this question. You asked in question #2 what today couldn’t we have predicted 10 years ago. We struggle with trying to predict one year into the future, and then we can laugh after the year is over to show how many people were surprised at what actually happened. Anyone who attempts to predict ten years into the future needs a little more humility, in my opinion. The one thing that is so exciting is the unpredictability of developments on the Internet.
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Fast forward 10 years. How are people searching on the internet?
Ten years from now? You’re kidding me, right?
My first impulse was to say that people will be searching by voice using mobile devices. But that’s probably 2016, not ten years from now.
Here’s my prediction: In ten years, people will be searching the Internet in ways I can’t imagine. In fact, we may not even need to search because computers will tell us what we wanted to search for before we even decided to search. That’s what makes this field so exciting–no one knows what’s ahead. Just take a deep breath and hold on tight.
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