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Foreigners. Welcome to another episode of Med Spot Success Strategies. And I had a few things on my mind that I wanted to talk about today that are things maybe we've touched on lately before, but figured I'd elaborate. And they're just things that have come up recently in conversations with our clients, people that we work with, and associates. So let's go through these things in order. And as always, my goal of this podcast is to deliver a ton of value, give you some food for thought, to helpfully make your business better so that you're more profitable, leading better, treating your team better, generating bigger and better profits, and serving your patients better. So let's go through a few of these things that I think might be indirectly tied to that, but I think are important. So number one on my agenda today is firing your marketing agency too fast. And so this is a delicate balance because I know for many of you and I know that the marketing agency space is the wild west. As an agency provider, like, I know that and we all know that there are agencies out there that are doing a good job that you all are still firing because you've essentially got some version of ants in your pants. And so let me explain a recent example, a conversation that I had with a prospective client. So this client that I talked to, they were doing like 65k a month, but he was pretty stressed out because their break even point was essentially like 85K. So they were still under break even every month. And he was working with an agency and that agency was actually consistently delivering him 30, 25 new paid clients every single month. And the slow months hit December, January, February. And that 30 clients a month went down to 15 clients a month for those months. And in the client's eyes, that was, that was a reason to freak out. Our results had dropped in half. We were only getting 15 leads. We used to be getting or 15 closed appointments. We used to be getting 30. What are these people doing? They don't care about us anymore. Not paying attention. And so he went off looking for greener pastures and he hired another agency. And I walked through this on the call with him because he reached back out, he was struggling, he was stressed. And this other agency felt like things were even worse. And we looked at it and I looked at kind of the pitch and at the end of the conversation I said, yeah, you know, unfortunately, I think the first agency was doing a good job for you. There are just, there are headwinds at times, there's seasonality. Sometimes an offer that was working really well goes stale. And stops working as effectively as it used to work. There's increased competition. There are all sorts of factors that impact your ability to generate new clients. It's not in a vacuum. It's not as easy as just always printing money with no change or no moderation or no modification to strategy. That's just not the way that business works. And so to expect perfection and consistency from your marketing investment is just not realistic. And so he had made a mistake by hiring this other agency and the second agency that he hired. In my opinion, they were basically scumbags. To be honest, I was tempted to kind of to call this agency out after some of the things that he told me. I think they'd sold him a complete bill of goods. I personally seen this agency run ads completely crapping on the discount based client acquisition strategy that we run a lot of times for our clients that his other agency had run for him. And again, back to things I've talked about recently. This always sounds good. Stop running discounts, you're cheapening your brand. You're attracting discount shoppers and tire kickers, don't you? And so this agency had actually run an ad completely poo pooing on the idea of running a promotion to attract new clients. Come to find out, I get the behind the scenes peek of what this agency is doing for him. They are quite literally running a new patient discount strategy and it was actually a little bit of a bait and switch on a more expensive package to try to attract new clients. And it wasn't working well at all. And so be careful who you pay attention to. This person, I think they're confident when they speak. I see this person's ads all the time and I have very little respect for people who operate their business that way. Right. They're, they're just saying whatever they have to say to get the business and they know how to pull on the emotional levers that are going to get you interested. And so that can be dangerous. And so he made a bad mistake. I said, listen, we'd probably run a pretty similar play. Do I think maybe we could produce 15 or 20% additional efficiency and do I think we're a better long? Yeah, of course. I wouldn't be in business if I didn't think that. But his other agency was doing a good job. And I actually reached out to the other agency owner. They have a little different business model than us. I'm going to share their name because I want to give a little bit of a shout out when it's due. Patient engine was the agency that he was working with previously and Patient Engine, they are a Facebook ads. They run a pretty. They run one or two plays that work pretty well and they'll manage and book your leads. It's a few grand a month. We can run a very similar service for this for a similar price. But typically our clients we do a lot more customization and strategy for so our prices start to go up. I think we're a really long term growth, good long term growth partner. But I also think Patient Engine is good at what they do and I think they've got a pretty lean efficient system there. And so he was getting good results with Patient Engine and it sort of leveled off and he freaked out, went and hired a new agency. We have similar experiences with our clients from time to time. I have a client that we've generated something like a 5x return on ad spend 4 even just in. In terms of net profitability usually. I'm so curious now to actually pull this up. I'm not sharing my screen, am I? So I'll make sure I pull this up because I actually want to give because this is, this is not something that's unique to this prospect that I talk to. We deal with this with our internal clients and we have clients all the time that are getting a good result and just for whatever reason they want to try something different or they want to see if they can run their own ads and they think they're going to save money. We're actually bringing on a client now that stopped working with us seven or eight months ago kind of for that same reason and is now back on board. But this happens and again, the grass is always greener. And so as long as you know your agency has your best interest at heart and they're getting you results, give them a little don't. It's not that you can't explore other options, but give them the benefit of the doubt and give them a little bit of leeway to adjust. Just because something stops working at the exact level of efficiency it worked at before doesn't mean it's a bad strategy. I mentioned on our last call or our last podcast the increase in competition. You could be doing the same things and results could drop by 40 or 50% because that is just more competitive. That play became less efficient and it either is what it is or you've got to go back to the drawing board with strategy. You know, certain agencies are better equipped to do that than others. But we have a client, for example, she's. She spent $60,000 on ads. Since starting with us in July of 2024, she has generated $385,000 in new patient revenue from that $60,000 ad spend with 388 patients booked and paid for service with about 1000 spend per patient. So a 6.3x return on ad spend today with 102 of those patients returned and retained for repeat visits. And she was having this existential like moment of like I don't know if I want to do this anymore. She had some clients that I think especially with the promotion based strategy that were frustrating for her team or maybe one of them had left a bad review. And I think there are other reasons for that that I won't get into but this happens right? And so we had to kind of have like a real like grab them by the shoulders, look them in the eyes moment with this client. Your agency's job is to iterate and to modify and to run a play for you that's going to get results but it's not going to work perfectly always and there's times where you have to iterate. So that was kind of the first thing I wanted to talk about is have some patience with your marketing strategy. And especially if your agency has a track record of getting you really good results and you're tracking it and you know your number, know your numbers. Just because things deviate, try not to have a freak out. You're, you're hurting yourself by doing this and tearing something down that's working. I think it's Chesterton's fence is the idea if you run into a fence in the middle of a field and you don't know why it's there, assume there's a reason for it. Don't just tear something down without fully understanding the consequences. This can happen with your marketing agency. 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 five stars on on Google were 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 Medspamagicmarketing.com that's Medspamagicmarketing.Com to schedule your one on one strategy. Call with me. So that was the first thing I wanted to talk about today. Have some patience, especially if you have a track record of results. Number two thing I wanted to talk about is serendipity and tracking with our marketing results. So we had a conversation internally of moving some of our Google Ads efforts onto the client's client's website instead of using what we normally do, which is standalone isolated landing pages. Now there are pros and cons to both of these strategies with getting in the weeds here for a second. Getting in getting in the weeds here for a second for a reason. Using a landing page. I'll get back to the bigger point. Using a landing page allows us as an agency to isolate our data a little bit better because we're trying to force people into a specific conversion action that we can track. But if we're really doing marketing well and we understand their serendipity to this and people are going to do their research before they make a purchase decision, opening up the doors for people to browse and to look around, I think there are major advantages to that too. And sometimes when you get to a website, it makes it a little harder to track and to automate follow up. So like when we run lead ads, we're generating a lead, we're automating follow up. We have everything in a nice clean pipeline. Well, if we send that traffic to your main website, it might be a better user experience and it might even get you better results, but you might lose the ability to track it so specifically. And so when it comes to attribution, one of the things I wanted to talk about is allowing things to breathe a little bit and understanding that if the fundamentals are correct and you're confident that you're doing something that makes sense from a marketing perspective, allowing it to live without perfect measurability sometimes can be a good move. So with Google Ads, for example, if somebody comes into your website from a Google Ad, but they bounce and they go look at your Google reviews and instead of coming back to your website to convert, they just go to your Google business listing and call your business phone number. High likelihood there's no trackability around that inquiry. And so if you're looking at your Google Ads performance and you don't, and you don't, you're not able to track that, you might be tempted to tear down that system too, or to modify that system, or to want to go back something where you have more control instead of knowing that, hey, we might have to take our, take a little bit of our hand off the pulse of the measurement part of the marketing effort in order to understand that it might actually be getting us a better result. I wanted to put that reminder out there because that's very true. And when we run ads, we're so obsessed as marketing agencies with generating direct response results that we can track, especially as an agency to prove our value and prove our worth. When the reality is that if people, as people become more comfortable with, you know, using the Internet to explore options and to make purchases, especially you as med spas, your clients are millennials and older for the most part, that they might not do exactly what you might want them to do. They might not funnel, follow the funnel perfectly. And so if I'm running even a Facebook and Instagram ad and I've got a new patient special offer and somebody doesn't convert from the ad itself, but they go back again and read Google Reviews or they bounce to my website, I might lose trackability around that. And that has to be okay to some extent. So I wanted to do a PSA on this too, which is just a reminder of if you know you're doing the right things and you're getting a marketing message that you're confident in in front of the right people at scale, you have to have some confidence that it's doing what it's supposed to do, even if you can't measure it perfectly. And the truth is that so many of these things work together that thinking about our market investment as, you know, isolated parts of a funnel that operate independently, it's just really not how things work in reality. We talked about our validation checklist and the validation phase when people are finding you, whether it's from driving by the office or from an ad online, people are doing their research. And all of the supplementary information helps lead to the purchase decision. Whether that's your website, your social media presence, your Google reviews, interactions they've had with you or your team and your in the community, all, all of those things play together. And so trying to think of these things as operating in a silo independently, it's just not the reality. So have some confidence that if you're making the right decisions in your marketing. If you're spending money to get in front of people with a compelling marketing message and you at least anecdotally have the business coming in, accept some lack of measurability in your marketing if you really want to take things to the next level. Because if you think about things in isolation, in silos, it's going to lead you to making decisions that are more shortsighted. So have some willingness to allow serendipity to play here when it comes to your marketing efforts. And the third and final thing I wanted to talk about today, unrelated is another thing related to just management and operations, which is your people story that prompted this part of our conversation today. I go to Dunkin Donuts like religiously almost every morning. It's Dunkin Donuts or Starbucks for me. And there are a couple people that work at my local Dunkin that my wife and I jokingly call them the A team. If you go and these people are working, you know they've got a great energy, the order's going to be right. They remember my orders when they hear my voice in the drive thru. The service is good, the interactions are friendly and just everything about the experience makes going to the cop to the Duncan drive thru or popping in with our boys on a Saturday morning much more enjoyable. And so I think like a big corporation like Dunkin Donuts, they they're the type of businesses that in my opinion really lose sight of this. Chick Fil a does this really well. They understand that their people have a major impact that's not measurable on the performance of their business. I would argue Chick Fil A is a an infinitely less successful business if you take Burger King's hiring process and staffing process and plug it into a Chick Fil A. If you've got people who are generally not screened well, not trained well, don't have excellent interpersonal skills to don't have a consistent process for how they communicate, how they treat and how they hold themselves accountable, then you don't get the results that you get with Chick Fil A. But back to serendipity, that's probably impossible to measure. And this is why you see these big corporations not pay a ton of attention to it because they feel like they're getting away with it for the most part and they can't directly track a good person being at the checkout line with a person that's just average or below average being at the checkout line and the impact it actually makes on sales, not directly at least. And so the thing to remember is your people matter a ton in any business. All the talk about AI and automation, it's important. It's on our radar too. But at the end of the day, in a service based business, the interactions that you have with people are what make the difference. So treat your team well, pay them well, do your best to give them a path for growth and prosperity. Make sure that their workplace is as enjoyable and as much of as much of a positive deposit in the piggy bank of life as possible. Your clients will enjoy the experience more, they'll come back more frequently, you'll retain them at a higher rate, you'll increase referrals, and it's nothing you're going to be able to measure specifically. But you have to trust and have faith that doing the right things will lead to a better result. So those are a few things today that were on my mind. Hope that was valuable. If you have anything to add, go ahead and leave that in the comments below and we'll see you on the next episode. Sam.