In this groundbreaking episode of the Marketing32 show, host Brett Allen welcomes Dr. Kathryn Alderman, a dentist-turned-AI innovator who transformed her fear of dental visits into a thriving group practice empire before discovering how artificial intelligence could revolutionize everything. As founder of the Intelligent Care Alliance and author of "The AI Advantage in Dentistry," Dr. Alderman brings over 20 years of experience in dentistry and business leadership to reveal how AI has fundamentally changed both how practices market themselves and how patients search for dental care. Her remarkable journey from emergency patient to practice owner to AI thought leader demonstrates the evolution of dental marketing, culminating in her discovery that AI reduced her marketing team by 60% while dramatically improving results. This episode exposes the seismic shift happening in patient behavior and provides actionable strategies for practices to thrive in the AI-powered future of dental marketing.

In this episode...

Dr. Kathryn Alderman delivers a masterclass in the fundamental shift occurring in dental marketing, drawing from her unique journey from dental-phobic patient to successful group practice owner to AI innovation leader. Her transformation began with an emergency dental visit that inspired her to create a practice specifically designed for people who fear dentists, leading to years of hands-on experience managing the complex challenges of group practice growth. When AI emerged, she immediately recognized its potential to address the time, money, and energy constraints that plague practice owners, ultimately reducing her marketing team by 60% while improving results across all business areas.

The episode's core revelation centers on patient search behavior transformation. Traditional assumptions about dental marketing - that patients use Google to find dentists - are now outdated. Instead, patients rely on Google Maps for local searches, voice assistants like Alexa and Siri for immediate needs, and AI platforms like ChatGPT, Claude, and Meta AI for research. Younger generations particularly trust social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram over traditional search engines, fundamentally altering how practices must approach their marketing strategies. This shift requires dentists to abandon the old model of comprehensive website content covering every possible service in favor of deep specialization in specific areas.

The technical aspects Dr. Alderman discusses reveal the critical importance of schema markup - the JSON coding language that AI bots prefer over human-readable content. Unlike traditional SEO that focused on keyword optimization for human readers, AI marketing requires structured data that speaks directly to automated systems. These bots visit websites almost instantly after content publication and completely ignore visual elements like videos and images, focusing solely on text and structured data. Dr. Alderman's endorsement of Marketing32's schema generator tool demonstrates how practices can implement these technical requirements, with results appearing in AI search results within weeks rather than the months typically required for traditional Google rankings.