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Foreign Today we're going to talk about how to select a marketing agency for your med spa or how to audit your current provider so that you have confidence you're working with the right partner to help you grow and elevate your med spa. I know coming from a person who's in the marketing space, there's inherently some bias built into this. But my goal with this really is to be as authentic and genuine as possible. So let's jump right in in terms of giving you some concrete things that you can do to gain confidence in your marketing provider and to ensure that you're on the right track. All right. So again, my promise is to be honest, transparent and helpful. One of our core values is even when we're working with clients, we're always going to do what's in our clients best interest, free of self serving financial impact. I'm going to bring that same approach to this presentation. So the first thing we're looking at, you've got a lot of different options when it comes to marketing providers in any niche. Med spas for sure. So I know the challenge here can be how do I know who to trust. Everybody's telling me something different. Everybody's got a different wrinkle. Everybody's showing me a case study. A lot of people with good Google reviews. So we have to do our best to whittle this down to the options that are the most viable and that we've got the most confidence in. This is not perfect because there's so many moving parts to marketing. It's like trying to measure the economy. Right. There's so many aspects of this, so many variables that it's really hard to say like this agency is the best agency and this one's not as good. Sometimes that agency might do a better job for one client than the other. There might be a certain fit or use case that's applicable to one business versus the other. So let's try to narrow this down and give you some confidence that you're at least working with a highly reputable provider that's generating real tangible results and it's going to have you on the right path so you're as dialed in as you possibly can be and that you have confidence your marketing is an investment and not an expense. So number one is we want to look for real results that are directly attributable to efforts. There's a caveat here. So I'm talking about case studies but let's talk about the caveats. I want to be sure that my marketing provider is not just piggybacking off of a successful business. So if you're working with a med spa, like if as a marketing provider, if you're working with a med spa that's already on a growth trajectory, right, they're seeing tons of word of mouth referrals, organic growth, growth, great reviews, and you're working with them, then you see some case studies that take credit for the growth and it might be correlation based, not causal. So that would be a precaution. Here is, I wouldn't want to say we started working with this med spa when they were small and now look, they're big. Maybe it's because of the marketing, maybe it isn't. So when I say directly attributable, I want to make sure I'm looking at the specific efforts the agency implemented and then I can see the direct connection between the strategy and the result. The specific result. So also I would want to understand the best case scenario and the worst case scenario. So when you get on a call with a marketing agency, your marketing provider might show you the best ever case study they ever made. I would ask them, hey, what's one of the worst case studies you have where something really didn't work out with a client? You had really bad stats and why? What are the base case examples and what do you see as a reasonable average? I would push for what type of numbers and what stats do we expect to see as a reasonable average and really push them. Get a gauge. You got to use your BS meter a little bit. But are they giving you a realistic perspective of what the reasonable average result looks like? Analyze their numbers, are they giving you a clear explanation of how their efforts, especially if they're doing direct response. So if they're doing direct response like Facebook ads for lead generation, patient bookings or Google Ads, those things should be extremely measurable. So I would want how much did you pay for leads? How many of those converted? What was your cost of customer acquisition for a booked and paid appointment? So if I pay $10 a lead for, or, sorry, if I have a, If I spent $1,000 and I had 100 leads at $10 a lead and 10% of those converted, then I have $100 CAC, right? 10 clients closed for $1,000. So of the ones that booked and paid, I paid $100. I want that number though and understand that in context, if you have a more aggressive, attractive offer, the agency is going to have lower CAC reference points than if they're doing reputation based advertising. But I would at least want to know what those numbers look like, how the strategies they're leveraging influence retention. So are they just generating new patients that are coming and going? Are these strategies that are designed to retain clients and generate substantial lifetime value and roi? So really get the numbers so that you can start to get an idea of what good numbers look like. Do they even have real numbers? Would be another question. Like if they don't have good data and they're just showing you lead data. My argument really in 2025 here, like that's not acceptable. Now if they're doing strategies that are more serendipitous, like they're doing like brand building and they're running ads where you're like doing patient education and you're really saturating the market in a creative way, it might be hard. But if they're doing direct response, like we're going to spend money to generate new bookings and that's the goal is bottom of funnel direct response, then they need to have real numbers. If they don't have good data on CAC retention lifetime value, it's just hard. It's going to be hard to trust whatever it is that they're showing you here. How much experience do they have serving the niche? I'm going to play devil's advocate a little bit here. Obviously more data and more experience is better, but it's not to say that someone can't have a really good knack for this and have a good few case studies under their belt. Now do you want to work with someone that has no experience and no case study in your niche? Of course not. Like they don't know your. They're not going to even know where to start. Like we know, for example, when working with a client, we've tried microneedling and all sorts of laser ads and combo services and single services and injectables and facials and we've got data around all that. So we generally know where best to steer our clients. Hint hint. Injectables is usually at the top of the list. But if somebody doesn't know that they're going to be experimenting with your ad dollar so I do, I would want someone that has experience serving the niche and more experience generally better, but not if they're not getting good results. They're not good at what they do. Sometimes people are just good salespeople. So I would be even a little bit cautious of that. But definitely make sure that you're incorporating that into your data set. Number two, read reviews. You can go to Google look, you can look up reviews of these companies just like your favorite restaurant. You can see what's good and you can also see what's bad. If people are leaving bad reviews because you know they felt like their account manager was not late for a call one day, like you could take that with a grain of salt. If they feel like they were completely ignored or scammed, like it's good to know that. And even if that's just an Anecdotal like one off, you @ least want that again in your data set, in your consideration pool. So look for Google reviews or anything else that you can find. But I would definitely go read reviews and experiences. The more explanatory those are, the more stock I would put into them. If it's just like it looks like someone that's not a real person, it just says we like this person and their team. Maybe not as valuable as, hey, we worked with them, they generated this many new patients for us like every single month. And we, and we ended up growing from this to this and it was directly attributed to their efforts. That's more impactful. So I would also look for reviews that are actually impact focused and not experience focused. So sometimes you'll see in reviews, even some of our reviews, it's just patients saying they like working with us and they enjoy us, enjoy working with us as partners. But you want people that are sharing a results focused review more so than just a hey, we like these people, they're nice to work with. Number three, understand the systems for delivery and management. Like how are they actually getting the work done? I would want to know that if you're working with an agency now, if you're interviewing agencies, get a feel for that. Make sure you have confidence in how the delivery system works. Are they white labeling? So meaning hiring another company to actually do the fulfillment. They're just selling you a service. Maybe they're giving you an account manager, but the people on the back end are actually performing services are overseas. It's a different agency that's not actually controlled fully by the agency. I'm not saying that's necessarily bad, but I would at least want to know that and I would want an explanation of why they have confidence in that strategy. Are they managing it in house? If so, who's doing it? What is their experience level? Do they have SOPs and processes in place to make sure that that stuff's done being consistently and accurately? Who's responsible for the day today? Like who actually has eyes on my account day to day? Who's got eyes on my account at least week to week or month to month. Who's responsible responsible for strategy and oversight and quality assurance. So how do we know that we're on the right path and we're steering the ship in the right direction? How do they perform account management duties would be another one. So like, what do we expect our account management service to look like? And then what is their communication style and cadence? Some of you, you don't want to be on a call. You just want to communicate via email. You don't need it to be super frequent. You want it to be out of sight, out of mind, and relatively hands off. Some of you want to be talking to somebody, everybody, every single day. Right? Agencies have a certain scope of work that dictates communication style and communication cadence. So you want to make sure that it aligns with what you're looking for. If you want someone that's got 24 hour attention on your account that you can call and is at your beck and call at any point, like probably a lot of agencies aren't going to be a fit there. So you might want to consider that in your search. 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 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. Number three, review pricing and work scope relative to expected results. Big caveat is the relative to expected results. But let's go into pricing and work scope. So it's a massive mistake I see people make when they look at pricing of agencies. They do an apples to apples comparison. They think agency A is managing my Facebook ads and they charge whatever. Agency B is managing my Facebook ads. They charge whatever. Well, I'm going to choose agency A. They charge less. I think this is one of the worst mistakes that you can make when you hire a marketing agency. It's not taking into account the scope, the deliverables. When you talk about SEO, this is a Major one, like when we're doing SEO for clients, we're getting them features in Forbes and gq. If you're comparing that to a service where somebody's building low quality directory links, like that's not an apples to apples comparison. Same thing is true with ads or anything else. So please, I would implore you, do not look at price alone. Couple examples. For some reason this is a disconnect when we shop marketing providers and when we're hiring a marketing provider. But when you do this for a car, you don't do this. I don't go to the car lot and just go, what's the cheapest car like? The cheapest car probably has a ton of miles, it's in bad shape, it doesn't look good. So usually price to some extent is going to correlate with quality. And in marketing, we're trying to figure out how to create maximum roi, which I'll get to in a second. But a home, same thing. When I look for a home, I'm not going to just purchase the home that has the lowest price. I want to know how many bedrooms, how many baths, what city it's in, what's condition it's in, how old is the roof, are the AC units working properly? Right. There's so much more information other than the price that influences the decision. In marketing, it's the same. You cannot make these decisions just based on the input price alone. Same thing like with an attorney, right? You want to hire a good attorney, you're not going to find the guy that's cheapest in town. Do the deliverables match what you're in need of? So If I've got 65 different services, I'm doing health, wellness, primary care, med spa, chiropractic massage, facials, and I want somebody who's going to advertise aggressively all of those services. And I'm not going to be happy unless I've got 45 different ads in the mix and I can change them every week. You need to make sure that that scope aligns in terms of the deliverables of the agency. So make sure that you're getting what you want and that you're happy with what they're providing as part of their work scope. And again, marketing should be analyzed on potential ROI impacts, not on the input price. So would you put $10,000 into a machine if it gave you $30,000 instead of putting $5,000 in a machine that gave you 10? Absolutely. Right. I'm tripling my money with option A. I'm doubling it with option B. So I'm of course going to want to be more aggressive when I know the numbers are working. So measure or analyze this based on perceived value and what you, what you think the potential impact on ROI is going to be money in versus money out, not just the price. I don't know why I used 5,000 instead of just keeping it a clean 10,000, but you get my point. Okay, number four, understand their guiding principles and their core philosophies, their core values, things like that. So do they have specific tenants that guide their strategy? One of the ways that we start off our strategy calls are our sales calls. Sales calls. It's really like when I do these, they're an hour and a half, basically consulting block that we do for free. Don't even go over our proposal options. But one of the things that I go over on that call and again, I'm just using this because anecdotally, this is my experience. I think there are a lot of agencies probably do this well, but one of the things that we do is we're going to go over why we do what we do. So we are really big proponents of discount based new patient acquisition strategies. Why? I talk about the math, consumer psychology, the purchase matrix. We talk about data. So we have an under, we have an overarching philosophy that guides our implementation. So we like to share that with our clients. Are also, are they helping you prioritize your ad dollars? Are they wearing a consultant hat first and foremost, or are they just trying to maximize how much you spend with them? My argument would be you want someone who's got a consultative approach, so they're coming in and saying, hey, at the stage you're at in your business, we need to be, we need to be focused. There's an opportunity cost with our ad dollars. So while yes, as an agency, we selfishly want you to do SEO and Google Ads and Facebook ads and every door, direct mail because we can charge you a big retainer. We know in your case the best place to put your ad dollars is even if it's not going to make us the most money is actually here. So you want somebody who's going to be a consultant first and foremost to help you prioritize your ad spend and you need to feel that you have that confidence in the provider. Any conflict of interest with how they sell or with or how they plan. Like so when, when my agency is recommending to me, we get into Google Ads, is my account manager being compensated for that recommendation, are they doing that? Because it's in our best interest. Are they charging a percentage of ad spend? Not that these things are bad necessarily, but I would want to know that so I can make my decision with all of the information. Number five, gauge strategic depth and expertise. I want the person steering the ship in my marketing who's basically going to be my CMO or working hand in hand on the digital side with my CMO to be an expert. I want to make sure that we're steering the ship in the right direction as efficiently and effectively as possible. So is the agency that you're working with deeply thoughtful about what they're doing? Is it backed by sound reasoning and good data? Are they truly experts in the field of marketing and aesthetics? I think you need that one, two punch. When you're working with a niche agency, you want to make sure they understand your business, they have experience, but they're also marketing pros. And there's what I call students of the game, right? I want the people that are at the highest level that are guiding the strategy of the agency, that are going to be in charge of my marketing efforts from a top, top level to really be students of the game and to be experts in their field. So are you confident that they're giving you the best chance to ship your, steer your ship in the right direction and to achieve the desired result? That's how I would think about hiring a marketing agency if I were in your shoes. If you're working with a provider, hopefully that was helpful. It can make you maybe help you revisit some conversations, figure out if you're a fit. You're like really locked in, getting some clarity on the person that you're already working with or if you go to explore other options. If you do this on a yearly or biannual basis, hopefully this gives you some direction on how to think about shopping marketing providers. So final reminders. Do your best to create an apples to apples comparison, but just know you can't do that on price alone. You need all of this data to be taken into consideration. Don't measure based on the best case studies. So don't just look at somebody's best case study or like a piggyback case study. I call it like where they were just with a business that was already growing. But I want to see their real results based on their actual direct response data. If they're doing direct response and I want to understand the extremes, what's the worst case scenario? What's the best case scenario? What's your average result look like? And if you're working with a company that doesn't have that data, I would say proceed with caution. It's hard to make decision without data, especially marketing. Marketing is a data driven initiative if you're doing it correctly. So remember, remember in your final analysis you're trying to figure out what's going to create the biggest gap between money in and money out. You don't want to make that purchase decision just based on the analysis of the money in. Marketing is we're implementing marketing strategies to generate roi. It's a money making initiative. It should not be an expense, it should be an investment. And the question with any investment is how do I make the investment pay as much of a return as possible? If you're in need of any help with digital marketing for your med spa, we do, I do offer for businesses that are doing over $50,000 a month one on one strategy session. I literally just go through a 90 minute consulting block with you where I share all of our strategies, all of our tactics, our tools, our philosophies, our ads and offers. Every single thing that we do. Nothing is off limits. I just pull back the curtain and show you everything that we do. And I think that it's transformative. It'll help you better manage your marketing investment for years to come, whether we work together or not. If you're under $50,000 a month, the I do have only limited time in my schedule. I do love doing these. They're one of the most fun things I do. But just to be responsible with the business, we have all of these resources for free on YouTube. I would encourage you to go back to previous podcast episodes and YouTube episodes, look at all the stuff we have, especially on the YouTube channel if you want a free education. And yeah, I hope that was valuable and helpful as you go to reevaluate your marketing as we head toward the end of 2025 and beyond. Sam.