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Med Spa Success Strategies
11 Med Spa Marketing Questions Every Established Owner Needs Answered
00:37:20
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- [00:00]
A
Foreign. Hey everyone. Ricky and Lauren with Med Spa Magic Marketing. Welcome back to Med Spa Success Strategies. Today we thought it would be fun. We have a client FAQ document which is basically just a bunch of questions that have ever come up with clients. And there's a lot of them on this list. Some of them are specific to our service offering that wouldn't be fun. But we picked 11 off of this list that we thought would be valuable to bring to you. Questions, concerns, things that have popped up that we think could give you clarity with how you manage your marketing investment and some other aspects of your business today. So we're going to roll through these 11 and we haven't prepped a ton, so we're going to go kind of off the cuff, which I think is when Lauren and I usually do best anyways. All right, so first, the first one we had here is my EMR doesn't allow me to do custom reminders. What can I do? And so let me add some context to this first one because this is a recommendation that we have. If you haven't heard this before, we haven't probably talked about this in a while. Actually, Most of your EMRs, to my knowledge, do this one thing that I think is just stupid. It's they ask the person to make the purchase decision all over again. Now, for existing clients that have been with you for three years, asking somebody to type in to hit Y to confirm an X to cancel an appointment is perfectly acceptable for a new lead. It's letting them, inviting them to second guess their purchase decision and presenting it as a 50, 50 proposition, which I think is crazy. So we talk about, at least for new clients, some modification to this, but I know some of your EMRs have very limited availability. Lauren, we use go high level. But if you're just talking for go high level specifically or any sort of flexible opportunity, what do you typically recommend when this pops up?
- [01:41]
B
For clients, I typically recommend going as in depth as you can. So at least five to seven drips reminding people about their appointments. Of course their appointment is a day from now. We don't need that many. But we typically would start the drip anywhere between 40 days out if it's for a reminder appoint or a follow up appointment or 10 days out if it's for one coming up. We want those drips to be aggressive and to be a lot of them. Ones that like Ricky said, don't ask you to reconfirm the appointment but get you excited about the appointment. So with high level, we do have the option to customize those drips. So let's say you're going to see Ricky as your provider and you're going to get Botox. We can customize that drip to get you excited about your appointment with Ricky, what it's going to look like, what the consult process is going to look like, any incentives to come, things like that. Because we really want people to feel excited about that appointment and as least as possible have them cancel or no show that appointment. So we want those drips to be built out quite a bit. Maybe something like five days out, three days out, two days before, the day before, and then the same day of letting people know you're excited to see them, reminding them if you have a cancellation or no show fee, just to have that in place and then not asking them to reconfirm that appointment. For sure.
- [02:54]
A
Yeah. And for those of you who aren't familiar with High Level, it's just an additional software, a CRM that has some extra options in terms of text messaging, emailing, clients, integrating with some of your other tools. So you see, companies like Aesthetic Record has built High Level into their tool. Now they have lead AR as an add on. I know Zenoti has not High Level, but a different custom tool. I guess we found out recently that they've built on. That kind of gives you some extra flexibility. The EMRs are a little bit more restrictive. So there's also every EMR has a different op option for basically an add on or integration. For us it's typically been high level. Anything else to add to that, Lauren? What what you're seeing on that side, because I know that's evolved quite a bit last six months.
- [03:36]
B
Yeah, it is wild. You would not believe how many no shows are reduced just by having a better drip in place. When we first onboard clients and they want to try their drip first or they want to try whatever it is that's already in place just because they don't want to change it. We will see the no show rate be upwards of 40, 50% sometimes. And as soon as we get that drip in place, it'll drop down to all the way to like 10 to 20%, which is crazy. I mean, it's great getting that many additional patients in simply by adding more reminders into the mix. It also kind of gives people an obligation to respond to let them know or let you know that they're not going to make the appointment. Makes them feel worse about actually no showing it. If you text them an hour before, like, hey, I can't wait to see you, like I got your room prepped, everything's ready to go. Something like that. I mean, it doesn't have to be cheesy, but something that gets them excited and lets them know you're excited too.
- [04:28]
A
Yep. So whatever opportunity you have, whether it's in your EMR or using additional tools, be pretty intentional about your show up sequence automations. Especially for new clients. Especially for new clients. Don't leave it up to chance to hope these people show up for an appointment. Ramp up their excitement level and give them every opportunity to opt out and let you know they're not coming. Instead of no showing at the very last minute when you're expecting a button seat.
- [04:52]
B
Yeah. And also definitely utilize more text than email too. I see a lot of EMRs that have just the emails automatically built in, but make sure you have as many text messages as you can too.
- [05:02]
A
Yep, for sure. And I say the last thing there is maybe make it sound not like a robot, even if you're automating it. What we like to do with automation is we want to use the person in your business that would most likely handle the conversation if they had to intercept it. So even with with the aut automated replies, try to make them feel personal because at the end of the day most of you are intercepting those messages manually. So if they're coming from Sarah, Sarah is the person for making sure people show up and coordinating the appointments. Send your text messages from Sarah's name, not just a generic robot because people don't have that obligation to respond to a robot that they do with a person. Cool. Number two, and these are going to be all over the place. So we'll try to add context here because we're jumping all over the place here. Number two is why are my existing patients seeing my ads? So if you're running meta ads, your existing patients might be seeing your ads. And b, do I have to honor the promo for them? Something that comes up for us a lot. We've gotten good. We talk about this in Onboarding now,
- [05:59]
B
but I think this question probably gets answered five times a week in the agency world. But the first answer to why are my existing patients seeing ads? Is check if you have an exclusion list in place. So Meta has a feature built in the back end where you can add an exclusion list. Basically what you can do is just upload your whole client list into there and they do it based on phone number and email. So if their profile matches phone number or email as your exclusion list, they'll be excluded from seeing your ads. So we automatically do that every time a new client signs on as we pull their list, and then we update it monthly in the exclusion lips list in Meta to make sure they're not seeing the ads. But inevitably, people will always sneak through. Everybody created their Facebook when they were, what, like 13 years old? Maybe for me, not you, Ricky, but way back in the day. So you probably had a way different email address than you do now or a different phone number. So that is why a lot of existing patients will still see your ads as they might be a patient in your database, but they might not, you know, use the same information across both platforms. So it's always something to kind of consider and keep in mind the bigger question. You have something, Ricky?
- [07:06]
A
Yeah, I was just going to say for all of you people. Oh, is that a HIPAA violation? We don't know. I would say I've gotten very contradictory opinions on this. It's a gray area, in my opinion. From the information that I've gathered, we've decided that's a risk we're comfortable with. And for most of you, if you're operating a med spot that doesn't operate under insurance, if you're in the gray area, you're technically not a covered entity in hipaa. Anyways, that's what we've been told by the people that we pay for hipaa.
- [07:33]
B
Yeah.
- [07:34]
A
For what it's worth, take it with a grain of salt.
- [07:36]
B
Yep. And then the second part of the question would be, do I have to honor the promotion for my existing patients? We always advise no. There's a very easy conversation that you can have that's, hey, we're a small business, or we're a local business, or even we're a big business. And we need to acquire new patients. This is a new patient special offer specific to people coming in to try us for the first time. You can have access to our monthly specials or guide them to another special or type of promotion that you have. Could even be a referral bonus, anything. Anything like that. I do like to tell my clients have something that you can still offer them, not just a straight no. So, hey, we'll, you know, we'll give you $10 off today for being loyal, something like that. Or even just a referral bonus is always a good little addition. But you certainly do not have to honor the promotion. You can also explain it like, hey, if we honored this for everybody, we wouldn't be in business, so you wouldn't be coming here. So just have that honest conversation and, you know, stand your ground. With it too.
- [08:32]
A
Yeah. So equip your team with a templated reply for how to deal with that objection in office over the phone. Because when we're running the types of specials we've typically coached on, it's new client acquisition promos. Those are one and done specials to get people to try your med spa. They're not your standard price point and your existing clients need to understand that. So be prepared to explain that. We definitely don't recommend. I think that'd be a recipe for disaster if you're just constantly giving people a super big discount on units that are existing clients. So I'd say be prepared and be confident to hold your ground in a respectful way with that conversation. And like Lauren said, figure out a way to like steer the conversation in a different direction with maybe a secondary incentive or allay or whatever it is. Yep, cool. Okay, next question. Well, if I'm running a promo on Facebook, Instagram ads, why is that any different than Groupon?
- [09:22]
B
Yeah, I feel like this question was so much bigger a couple of years ago and Groupon is like faded out just. Yeah, maybe that's possibly like. I feel like we don't really talk about it. Yeah, we used to get this all the time, but we don't talk about it as much now. We really say that we see Facebook just as much as demand capture as somebody searching for something on Google at this point now, meta is people seeing it in their feed. It's coming along, but they're also something that they've already wanted. Groupon, at least in our opinion, is people directly going and seeking out that promotion. So it's still googling like Botox deals near me or Botox cheapest cost near me, things like that, or where you might see the most Groupani patients. But through meta, it's people that already want Botox kind of know that they want Botox and then they see the promo and it comes up and they take advantage of it that way rather than going and seeking the promo. That's typically the best way we explain it. Now I know it's kind of changed a lot of years.
- [10:19]
A
I would say on Google. Yes, on Google people are actively searching for the service from the get go. On the opposite extreme is Groupon. They were actively searching for the discount meta, sort of the middle ground. And so these people didn't wake up today actively looking for a Botox appointment necessarily, but they also didn't wake up today actively searching for a crazy deal and the lowest price. So the goal is that you're winning those people over because they're already considering the service like Lauren mentioned and the offer is just the cherry on the top to nudge them in the right direction to try your med Spa Today's episode is sponsored by Gloss Genius. Gaps in your schedule and patients who don't rebook. Tight margins, high fees and a clunky esque holding it all together. Sound familiar? You'd love to be growing your practice, but you don't always have the time to figure out your right next move, let alone to sit down and eat lunch. 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That's code strategies@glossgenius.com MedSpa success strategies hey practice owners and marketing directors. Interrupting this episode to invite you to schedule a one on one strategy. Call with me to discuss how we might be able to improve and level up your digital marketing efforts. So we're rated 5 stars on Google or HIPAA Verified by compliancy Group and we have a track record of taking clients from 30,000amonth to $120,000 a month and adding multi millions of dollars in additional revenue for some of our bigger multi location med spas from more effective marketing strategies. So on the free strategy call it's really educational. I basically spend an hour going through detailed reviews of all of our best performing plays that we run for our clients. You have it to take and run with it if that's what you want to do and if you think it might be a fit to work together then we're excited about the possibility to partner with you. But if you're interested in better, more effective digital marketing solutions for your med spa, Visit Med Spa Magic Marketing.com that's Medspamagicmarketing.com to schedule your one on one strategy call with me. Okay, next one. We get all the time. Oh, this one's all the time. I think we have conversations this week with clients that are going to pop up in this bucket. And this is a challenge. So for those of you that work with agencies, you're going to resonate with this. And one of the challenges is if you have new people in your business always coming into the conversation, this keeps popping back up. So you really have to understand the expectation going into it. But the question that we get all the time is, or the, I would say the assertion that we get, that we have to combat here is all the leads are bad, all the leads have been discount shoppers. I guess I'll start on this, Lauren, because the first thing is, is we have years and at this point, millions of dollars worth of data to say that is not the reality. All is an app, a statement of absolutes that is just not factually true. And so if. Yes, I would agree. If you're running these strategies and all of the patients are just discount shoppers and all of the leads are bad, that means A, none of the leads convert. That's not true. It's not none of them. It's a relatively small percentage. And B, all of the leads have been discount shoppers means you have no retention. And if those two things are true, yes, this would be a terrible strategy. But what we see here is new patient offers are an incentive to try your med spa. We're able to shape perception through experience, through the trial, and the people that have a good experience stick around and some of them are going to be there for years and years to come. So to give you some ballpark stats on this, what we typically see on average, a client, let's just say if you're doing this at a moderate level of success and you run something like the 20 unit 179 introductory Botox offer as your introductory lead magnet, you might see a 13% conversion rate on your leads. So when you say all the leads are bad, that's an absolute statement. That's not true. 87% of your leads are bad. I'm willing to give you that. If you're running meta ads and you feel like this is the bucket that you're in, understand that is the name of the game with Metta. The thing is the leads are so cheap that Even if only 13% of them convert and you end up paying $150 to acquire a client, that is an Unmatched marketing channel. So we're getting very caught up on the 87% of leads that don't convert. Instead of the fact that for every $160 we put into Meta ads, we got a booked and paid new client for Botox. So know that going in.
- [15:13]
B
Yes.
- [15:14]
A
The vast majority of those leads are not serious. They're fishing for information. They're thinking about it. They're not going to convert. Benchmark rule of thumb is somewhere around 10%. Realistically, if you're a top performer with the strategies that we use, you'll start approaching 20%. And it's. If you're probably in the single digits, like 6, 7% or lower, you probably have some struggles with your leads management or your reputation and your positioning.
- [15:37]
B
Yeah. I think the biggest thing too, as a reminder is if you're not the person directly managing the leads, make sure you or your agency or we are having a conversation with the person managing the leads just so that they have that expectation upfront too. Because a lot of times if it's somebody that's not bought in on the idea, has no idea what we even mean by customer acquisition costs or conversion rates, then it's, excuse me, going to feel like while they're managing these leads that they're just annoyed all day long if they don't understand that that is what's going to happen going into it. There's a big difference when we can have that conversation upfront and get those people to buy in as well. So make sure that that's a conversation that you do actually have whenever you have somebody new in your systems.
- [16:17]
A
Yeah. And look at real data. Don't look at anecdotes. I was watching a call recording from one of our clients and she said, we're lucky if 1 in 20 of these people actually come back. That wasn't true in the data. Her perception was that 19 of 20 of the patients were not being retained. They had something like 35% retention, which is, again, I would say we want to shoot for a better number than that. But if we're able to get customer acquisition cost that low and one third of those people become regular clients, you're going to be off to the races for the most part. So make sure you know your numbers and you're not speaking on anecdotes and perception. That's a real danger with how you assess your marketing investment. And to give you a benchmark with all the leads have been discount shoppers. That retention number we're looking for is somewhere around 40% or more. I want 40% of these people to come back for recurring service and be clients that come back for a secondary visit at a standard price point.
- [17:05]
B
Yep.
- [17:06]
A
Again, that doesn't mean it's not workable if you're at 30%. I like to use a number called effective customer acquisition cost. I don't know if that's a real thing or if I made it up. No clue. But if you take like if you got 10 clients for $1,000, so you had $100 cost of acquisition but only three of them stuck around, you can do the thousand dollars divided by three on your retained clients and figure it out. Figure out how much does it cost you to get a client that actually comes back for second service. Have some sort of a benchmark there. But those absolutes usually are not true in our experience. Lauren, you want to tackle the next one here?
- [17:37]
B
Yeah. Next question is, if my ads are working great, can I just spend more money until it ends and keep getting good results? The answer to that one, simply put, that you put in, yes, the more you're going to get out, but to a certain point. So at some point we're going to see diminishing returns in those campaigns. Main reason, specifically in Meta, is because you only have a limited audience that you can hit being a local business. So if you're a local person in a local area, there's a certain population that you're going to hit until you kind of start maxing that out. So if you're, you know, in a small town and you want to spend $50,000 on ads on the same campaign, you're going to start seeing diminishing returns. Now, all levels of diminishing returns aren't necessarily bad. So if we customer acquisition costs increase by 30, 40, 50 bucks, that's not necessarily a bad thing. Ricky always teaches me the anecdote of if you're going to put in $1 and get five out, great. But if you're going to put in one and get three out, is it still something that you want to do? Yes. So definitely, you know, you're going to see diminishing returns, but to a certain extent, you know, until it becomes something that isn't still profitable or doesn't make sense still in the long run.
- [18:44]
A
Yeah. For those of you who listen to anything, Alex Hormozi, he's one of probably the modern marketing thought leaders, he talks about this fear of diminishing returns. He's like, if you're still profitable, it's still working. Keep pouring it in you do want to optimize to some extent for volume and growth, not just max profitability. And so if you get too scared that your customer acquisition cost goes up by 60 bucks so you stop advertising, you're leaving all of those extra patients on the table. Is it really worth doing? Probably not up to a. Up to a point for sure.
- [19:12]
B
Yep.
- [19:14]
A
Okay, next one on the list. The patients that are coming in from my ads are not able to afford services or and are not spending a lot of money. What can I do?
- [19:24]
B
I think a big thing here is to first of all evaluate your consult process. I think it's always easy to point the finger at the ads or where the patients are coming from rather than looking internally first. I would say there's always two sides. So look at your consultation process first, your cross selling or upselling. Look at your providers and their reports per provider, per patient too. A lot of times we'll see that one provider has a really great console and upsell percentage and another provider might not. So definitely evaluate that, you know, in isolation too and look internally at your processes. Make sure those are all dialed in to have the time to train. I just talked to a practice the other day who gives new patient appointments 15 minutes. There's no way you're going to sell other things and other treatments in those 15 minutes unless you have a full sit down, long consultation process. So be willing to kind of play with some of those things too. So that's the first thing I would look at. The next thing I would look at is your targeting or what you're doing with your meta ads. So a lot of times you might be targeting places that are too far away and there people are just driving in simply for the discount. They're not driving because of your reputation or your location, but they're making an hour and a half trip just to get your price point. So that's something to evaluate. Another thing you can evaluate too is income area targeting. So are you targeting the highest of incomes or are you hitting certain neighborhoods? We have a lot of med spots who. Five miles to the right is gorgeous. Five miles to the left is not so nice of an area. So make sure you get really, really specific with your meta targeting. Placing those bubbles where they should be in exclusions where they should be too. I would say those are like the biggest things to kind of incorporate there.
- [21:03]
A
Yep, for sure. And you could always calibrate your offer up to like there can be times. We've talked about it. You want your offer to be the cherry on Top if you turn into, if you turn into running an ad where offers the Sunday and that's the primary reason or the exclusive reason clients are choosing you, you're going to fall into this trap of just a bunch of people coming in for the deal. So there is a necessity to calibrate that at times. Hey there. Wanted to briefly interrupt the episode to make a quick ask. If you're a podcast listener, it would mean the world to us if you'd leave a review for the podcast, whether that's on itunes or Spotify. It's something I hadn't really remembered or thought of asking for, but it does help us show up more frequently so that we can reach more people with the information that we're providing. So it mean the world to us if you'd leave a review on itunes or Spotify. If you're listening on audio, if you're watching on YouTube, make sure to hit the subscribe button so you're in the loop for future videos and you don't miss any of the content that we're putting out. Okay, next one. Which kind of ties in well to the last one actually. And we're going to move beyond meta ads on some of these too. But it was just, you know, meta ads is probably the number one play for med spas across the board. So I see so many agencies doing this. This is the number one place to spend ad dollars because it's the most effective use of your marketing investment. All right, next one is there's a really high income area, but it's 45 minutes away. Fill in the placeholder. Right, 38 minutes away. 45 minutes away for more a.m. should we show their ad so that we can get good quality, affluent patients to those people?
- [22:29]
B
I love this question. I think it's so much fun to dive into and dissect because I do think it is really practice dependent, right? Like I have a practice in Oklahoma who has no competition anywhere near them. And so yes, it makes sense to show to an hour away even because people are going to make that trip for you and for your practice. There are other areas where maybe the 45 minute drive is worth it because you're a five star med spa, 45 minutes away from them and everybody else around them is crappy. Not good reputations, not good places to go. So those are two big things to evaluate. Typically the simplest answer to the question is probably no, depending on what your promotion is. Main reason for that is we say people make purchase decisions based on reputation, location and price. So if they're not picking you for your location. If they're not picking you for your reputation, it's likely that they're picking you for that price if they're willing to drive, drive an hour just for that deal. There was Ricky talked about this last podcast actually is we had somebody come in for a sales call that said, well, I'm working with an agency that guarantees 50 patients a month. They're doing the 50 patients a month, but I never see any of those back. We're not growing at all. And when we went in and looked at it, it's because those patients were coming in and being advertised to an hour and a half away. So they were clearly just driving in for the discount. Even in affluent areas, people like deals. So that's the biggest thing that clients, I think my clients never think about or get is like people who are rich want deals still. Like it does happen. So that can be the case that they're driving in just for the deal and not for you specifically.
- [24:03]
A
Yeah, that can be a real challenge because. Yeah. When you start to this is where we talked about in the last episode, the burden of marketing friction versus operational friction. And as you reduce marketing friction, you add operational friction increases. This could be a case where that happens and you have to be realistic with the end goal of advertising is acquired clients, not one single appointments. So you can over optimize for like, well, I need to figure out how to get these people from this town 45 minutes away to come in. But if you do that, like Lauren said, you're probably, you're probably doing that in a way that increases the chances those people were just coming as a one off. And so that can be a real challenge. But yeah, good answer, Lauren. Context matters. You have to really know your business. The dynamics of your reputation versus local competition. Drive times, know where you're located too.
- [24:46]
B
I mean like I have a client in Washington D.C. who they're located in the heart of the city and they target areas an hour and a half away because of how many people drive in and do their appointments in the city too.
- [24:57]
A
Yeah.
- [24:57]
B
So again, like Ricky said, context 100% matters in this. In this scenario.
- [25:02]
A
Yep. Cool. Okay. Review management recommendations.
- [25:07]
B
You want to go through this one, Ricky?
- [25:08]
A
Yeah, and again, we might, we probably have different touch points on this, Lauren, so you might have more context than I do. There's a tool that I've always liked. I think it's a good robust tool called Gather up and it's HIPAA compliant as well. You can upload. We have no affiliation with them whatsoever other than we use it as a part of our agency tool set. But you can upload your list, you can send out text messages and emails. It sends reminders. If people click the review link but don't leave a review, it'll remind them. It gives you a nice little dashboard to send really carefully crafted AI assisted replies. It gives you some cool extra reports. But that's probably like the Ferrari version of a reputation management. I know there are easier ways to do it too. Lauren, do you have a recommended like preference or is it just straight? If the easiest way is send them the Google link directly?
- [25:53]
B
Yeah. I mean I think there are a million ways that you can do it. I think the best way to do it is to get them to do it and to leave their review before they even leave your office. So we've talked about this before. While they're waiting in your chair for you to write up their paperwork or their chart or whatever it is, see if you can grab it. Then while they're leaving the office, can we offer some kind of incentive or something to get a review before they even walk out? Those are probably going to be your most successful. But blasts are also great too. So somebody had a great experience or even if not, you know, send them the message up front. One thing that we do like is the review gating, which means like in the beginning you'll give them, hey, how was your experience today? Rate us 1 through 10. If they leave a 9 or lower then you know they get sent to an internal feedback software. But if they put a 9 or a 10 then you can send them the Google link. So tools do prompt those gather up has that option and then I love go high level for it too. Honestly, they make it super simple. They don't have as fancy of features with like the dashboards of you know where your great reviews are coming from and vice versa. But they do have really nice feature of having that initial NPS score, having forms built in and then giving the Google review link too.
- [27:03]
A
Yeah, an NPS score Net Promoter score. For those of you not familiar, it's kind of just like getting an initial feedback rating before you ask for the review so you know where to direct them. And again, if you want to maximize, this is another one of those things of understanding the trade offs. If you want to maximize reviews and you have high confidence that your list is going to be pretty much all five stars, then eliminate friction, send them directly to the Google review link where it just pops up right there and then go leave the review, if you're more worried about it, you have a mixed bag, then maybe one of the more complex setups is. Is worthwhile.
- [27:32]
B
Yeah.
- [27:32]
A
If you have any recommendations on these things, feel free to share them in the comments as well. We'd love to hear them.
- [27:36]
B
Yep.
- [27:37]
A
Okay. Three more on Google Ads. Should we try a Performance Max campaign instead of a search campaign on Google? I think we've waffled with this a little bit. Where do we stand as of filming this episode, Lauren?
- [27:51]
B
No, I think that there might be one or two use cases where it makes sense. Some examples might be weight loss specific campaigns or in locations where you can't advertise. Like we have a couple Canada clients that can't specifically advertise the worst, Botox, et cetera. So some of those might make sense to do a Performance Max campaign. Um, I guess let's break it down. What is a Performance Max campaign? A search campaign would be I go type in Botox near me and I just show up and the search results are at the top of the sponsored listings. A performance Max campaign allows different assets that you feed to Google to kind of populate themselves and show up in all of Google's placement. So it could be Gmail, YouTube in the search still anywhere. So the nice thing about those is they say that they're supposed to populate well. They get really good lead volume. Tons of people interested. The issue with them is we're not able to get the type of people that are going to convert. We just get too many eyeballs almost to a point where you get tons and tons and tons of leads, but they don't convert at any rate to even make it worth it. Typically if you're getting that mass volume of leads, even a low conversion percentage, you're probably still going to see success with the campaign. The ones that we have tested, trialed, even with the new additions of their search negative terms and things like that, we literally have seen like a 0% conversion rate from tons of leads. So it's just really hitting the wrong type of people. I think Google's goal with it is to get the most leads, the most eyes. They're going to show you those great metrics. But if you're really doing a good job with tracking who the leads are and what the conversions are doing, you're probably going to see that that's completely useless.
- [29:32]
A
Can you do like a Mac, like, like an offline conversion goal with Performance Max, Lauren, where you try to optimize for converted leads?
- [29:39]
B
You can, yeah, but I mean, yeah,
- [29:41]
A
so if you're gonna do it, maybe try it there. But we, at least for us, anecdotally, we haven't had much success with it in our trials. Even when it's been recommended to us by other consultants who have worked with mutual clients, we've done it and we've done it the way that they wanted it. And for us, at least in those test cases, hasn't worked well. Same at time, same TikTok ads. Another one that fits that category for us too, up to this point. Okay, last couple here. What do we recommend for membership models? This has been something we've talked about on episodes with guests and internally for years. And we've talked about loyalty and membership and different types of membership models. And our clients are all over the place with how they try to run memberships as it stands today. Lauren, what is your recommended membership model? And again, the cool thing for us is we're not basing this on our opinions. We're trying to figure out from our client roster where are our clients that are most successful, what are they doing? So that's where Lauren's recommendation comes from here.
- [30:29]
B
Yeah. I think from what I've seen be the best membership model and actually getting people's buy in is a monthly model where they can basically bank whatever dollars that they're putting in and then utilize it towards services while also getting special discounts or certain, you know, gifts or promos or things like that on the back end too. So typically, would you like a bank your Botox type model where Maybe they put 100 bucks in a month and then they come in and they can use that bank towards their treatment. That is usually the best way that I've seen it work. I've seen a bunch of clients try the method of hey, buy this prom or this membership and get a free facial this month and get 20% off these things and your talks at this rate. I haven't seen those be all that successful at all, really. I know, Ricky, I think you had said you just had a call with somebody that had a really successful model that was like that. But I just client wise, I have not had any anecdotes where that works well.
- [31:25]
A
Yeah, yeah. So again, that's another one. If you have any advice for us, share with the audience, we'd love to hear it. Throw it in the comments below. If you have a membership model that absolutely kicks butt, we'd love to hear about it.
- [31:35]
B
Yep, absolutely.
- [31:37]
A
Okay, I think this is the last question for today and again, I think we could do this At a, there's probably an infinite number of questions. So I think this is fun though. Hopefully you're all finding some value from this, this quick list that we're going through today, which is another one we get. If you're running ads with a marketing agency or if you're paying for any labor, you've got a marketing director, an internal marketing person on agency. How do you measure return on ad spend and effectiveness of ads? And should you calculate ads management into your ROI calculation? So I'm going to cheat a little bit here because I think this is a complex answer and for me, I would want the data both ways. Lauren, before I'm going to cheat here because I plugged this into Gemini to give me a little synopsis.
- [32:17]
B
So.
- [32:17]
A
Because I think this might explain it better than I could. But did you have anything you wanted to share on this first?
- [32:22]
B
Yeah, no, you explain.
- [32:25]
A
Okay, cool. All right. So it says at the end of the day, yes, you want to understand you these the the return on ad spend number, which is just from the ad spend directly, what is the margin look like versus what is true roi? But where and how you count it depends on whether you're calculating what I just said, return on ad spend or roi. So mixing these two ups is. Mixing these two up is one of the most common traps in digital marketing. So roas return on ad spend, this is a number we typically report on heavily. It looks strictly at the efficiency of your direct cash flow outflow of the ad platform. So in this calculation we don't use labor cost. If you're looking at true roi, you will include labor costs. So in the short term though, where I think this can be a challenge is if you're looking at a short term window and we have a ROAS ratio that's going to set us up to put us on a trajectory to create roi. People will get scared away if they don't see that the ROI is happening right now. And in the med spa space, your real true ability to generate outsized compounding return on investment at the end of the day is reliant on retention recurring revenue. And so when we do something like our ROI calculator and you fast forward 6, 12, 24 months, the reason ROAS is so important is because it'll explain our ratio and our growth forecast with retention for the inputs versus the outputs on the ad spend number. And as long as that number is creating a massive gap, your labor cost is going to be a rounding error in the overall analysis. But what we've seen a Lot of business owners want to do is early on they want to look in like a three to four month window, six month window and say like, like this either isn't profitable all in or it's barely profitable. And the reality is that's not the metric for success early on when you're trying to figure out if your ads initiatives are worth continuing or not. The ROAS number to me is the important number in the short term because that's the number that's the proof of concept for viability of future profitability. And so that would be my word of caution. Yes. Long term I want to understand my full cost associated with marketing my business and I want true ROI. But the ROAs number is a better indication because the more we spend and the longer time goes on, the lower the impact of the overhead and labor cost of managing the marketing efforts. So that would be my kind of distinction there. Anything to add to that, Lauren?
- [34:48]
B
Yeah, I think the other thing just to add is the biggest thing that I see be an issue is when you're not spending enough to make the cost of hiring an agency make sense too. That's a huge, huge one. So essentially if you're putting less into the ad platform or about this, the same as what you're paying your retainer, you're not going to see any return on investment until a really long time down the road. In that short term, really the fastest way to make money back on your investment is by putting more money into the system if you have a well oiled machine that's working well. So when I have clients that have like $100 customer acquisition costs, I'm like throw money at this thing like let's get this rolling. That's when you're going to see the return. If you're barely spending any money, you're barely seeing any return, it's going to look worse and it's going to look like you're agencies failing.
- [35:35]
A
Yep, that ratio matters a lot. You don't want your overhead in your management for ads management to be like significantly more or even really the same as your ad spend. So the more you're. This is why we encourage clients. My general rule of thumb is minimum 2 to 1. But the more of the ad spend ratio, the easier it's going to cover the overhead to create true roi. So you're actually delaying your path to profitability if you're not spending enough on ads. I had a conversation, I don't remember if it was like early this year or late last year with a client and luckily, they had their numbers and we were able to break it down. They were paying an agency, like, a $2,000, $3,000 a month retainer, and they were only spending $600 a month on ads. And they had a customer acquisition cost of like, $100. So for every $100 they spent, they were getting six new clients. Well, we plugged that in. The problem was the ratio was so out of whack that they were pretty much never going to see profitability. Even within 36 months. They weren't profitable on the marketing investment. If they would have simply put an extra zero on the end of the ad spend, they would have been profitable in the Marketing Investment Month 1. So don't be discouraged about spending more money when you know your numbers are working and you have the tracking capabilities to have confidence in your data, because the return on ad spend ratio will dictate how fast you get to true ROI to cover the overhead of a retainer or management, even if it's internal. Cool. All right, well, thank you all. That was 11 quick, frequently asked questions that have come up with us. There's on a sheet that we have internally figured those would be fun shares for the audience today and we'll do another episode like this in the future. I think that was a good one. Hopefully you all agree. Well, thanks, and we'll see you on the next episode.