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Med Spa Success Strategies
Marketing for Med Spas: Top Performing Strategies for 2025, Part 1: How to Get Clients to Choose You
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Foreign. Hey everyone, I'm Ricky Shockley, owner of Med Spa Magic Marketing. And this is our 2025 marketing and growth series for Med Spa. So we did this last year. This is not going to be a boilerplate top level, you know, skim through the bullet points type presentation. This is going to be a multi part series where we're going to show you every everything we do to achieve results for our clients, including our ads, offers and frameworks. So I'm really excited to jump into this. We're going to go over some things that we went over last year, but also add some bells and whistles, updated information and some of our top performing strategies as we recap 2024. All right, so if you're not confident in your marketing investment conversation that we have with our clients generally centers around these types of things. Right? You're not really sure how to prioritize and allocate budget. Like should I be doing Facebook ads, Google Ads, should I be putting an ad in my local print magazine? You're just not sure what to do with your marketing investment and where to put those dollars. First, you're not sure how to make the platforms produce a consistent and satisfactory roi. What is it that you're trying to accomplish in terms of the financial objective and how do you measure that to make sure that it's actually happening? Marketing should be an initiative that you throw a dollar in and it prints you for. And if it's not, it's not an investment, it's an expense. And that hesitation is going to be problematic. So you need to have confidence that your marketing is producing roi. So we're going to talk in detail about that. We're going to show you some things I don't think anybody else has ever discussed in the space on how to measure ROI effectively. You're also not sure what a good result even looks like. You might be running ads, paying an agency to run ads, and maybe you don't even have a framework for what success looks like. If I spend a hundred dollars to get a client through the door, I is that good? If I got two clients for $1,000, is that good? So understanding benchmarks for success and what a good result actually looks like and then also again, understanding how to measure ROI so you can invest with confidence. So throughout this series, we're going to cover in this video how to get clients to choose your Med Spa. That's a critical part of your marketing strategy. How do you get clients to choose you for that first visit? So somebody's in your town and they're Googling, you know, Botox near me or med spas in my area. How do you get them to choose you whether they're seeing an ad on Facebook, Google or somewhere else? Part two, we're going to talk about understanding roi and then we're going to get into the details of a marketing system that can allow you to attract boatloads of clients consistently, even in competitive markets. To do that, I'm going to share our best performing ads frameworks. I'm going to show you exactly how we build Facebook and Instagram ads, the detailed nuances, the strategies that we implement for our clients to get cost of customer acquisition at times lower than $30. So that means we have clients that for every $100 they put into their ad spend, they get three clients. That's crazy. I'm going to show you how we do that and the trade off that you're making when you use that type of a strategy. I'm going to show our best performing Google Ads frameworks. We've made a lot of improvement in this area and managing Google Ads for a decade, but I think this last year we really made some headwinds with how we get that cost of customer acquisition down and how we maximize our Google Ads performance. So we're going to show you exactly how we did that in 2024. We're going to address the bad lead, bad leads problem. So if you've run ads before, you might walk away with this feeling that it wasn't super successful. You maybe had some people fill out a form or fill out something on your website or call, but not really convert and turn into booked appointments. We're going to address that head on and give you the solution. We're going to talk about the basic but often overlooked things you can do to improve your Google rankings. There are quick, quick wins that I see so many med spas missing in terms of how to optimize your presence in Google organic search. So back to somebody performing a search on Google for Botox near me. How do you maximize the chances that you're showing up in that Maps result and also just the organic blue link results underneath that Maps listing and maybe even the ad space. And then for our clients that are big, established med spas, some of the things that they're looking for are how to achieve omnipresence. They're maxing out their spend on Facebook and Instagram and Google. They've got those things really humming along and they're trying to figure out what's next to diversify and expand their reach so that prospects see them everywhere. We're going to talk about how we accomplish that, and then perhaps perhaps the most important part of this entire series is going to be part eight, and that's retention strategies that are going to make or break your practice. So here's the reality when I talk about retention strategies. This is a business that relies on lifetime value and retention. Your marketing investment could put butts in the seats all day. And if you're not retaining those prospects, the entire thing is not going to be financially advantageous. So we're going to talk about that in some detail. So real quick, if you're not familiar with me, I've been helping med spas and medical practices for over 12 years. Our agency is rated a perfect 5 stars on Google. I think we do best in class work. We've been told that by industry insiders, consultants, people that work at some of the biggest device and manufacturing companies in the space. My tips and insights have been featured in sites like CIO.com, search Engine Watch, bank of America, Small Business Business Forum, and more. I'm also going to show you how you can achieve those types of mentions for your Med Spa in the SEO portion of the series. I've also coached other agencies and consulted other agencies since 2011. So if you if you haven't listened to the podcast, I'm also the host of the Med Spa Success Strategies Podcast. We are going to publish this series this year on the podcast. So if you're listening to this in audio, just know there's a video presentation that accompanies this that you can see on our YouTube channel. But for those of you that are listening in audio format, I'm going to try to make sure that I present this information in a way that is digestible even for you. So going back to the retention question, this is a David Ogilvy quote famous marketing executive and the quote is great Marketing only makes a bad product fail faster. And I think that is incredibly true in our space as a medical aesthetics business. Just like a restaurant, I could bring people to eat at your restaurant all day. New people that have never tried your food to come in if they have a lousy experience, long wait times, a sloppy waiter and the food is mediocre. Probably not going to come back, right? I can think of an example. We go to a Mexican restaurant every Friday and we've been rotating Mexican restaurants because we never find one that we're super happy with. But there's a bunch of them in our area. There's one that's really close to me that we tried once and it's not even in the consideration pool. We'll never go back. The same thing happens with your med spa if you don't provide an exceptional service end result. So the prerequisites for success before we get into how to get med spa clients to choose you, these are non negotiables. If you're not doing these things well, nothing I tell you in this series is going to solve the bigger problems in your practice marketing. Effective marketing can be fuel on the fire of a well run business. It is going to be like trying to pour water over the side of a sinking ship with a bucket if you don't fix some of these issues. So here are the prerequisites non negotiables for success. And I think people tend to skim over these because they're not the flashy exciting thing. Right? We're going to show you our Facebook ads frameworks and exactly how we build Facebook ads and the types of offers we use to get a client through the door for less than 100, less than 50, less than $30. That's the thing that gets most people excited. But these are the things that are going to make or break your business. So prerequisites for success Number one, your patient experience has to be A plus. And most people skim over this when we talk about this on the podcast or in other YouTube videos. They think, you know, my patient experience is great, our front office staff is friendly, my injectors do a really good job. And that might be true to a B plus level or a B level or an A minus level. But the reality is your patients are constantly tempted by offers from other practices and if they decide to dip their toe in the water somewhere else for a visit, whether it's a laser hair session, a Botox appointment, a facial and they have a A plus experience, that practice is going to retain the patient and you're going to lose them. So without a truly exceptional patient experience, you're going to struggle. Your marketing is not going to solve that problem. That also needs to be reflected in your Google reviews. You need to be optimizing for your Google review presence. You need to have as high of A rating as you possibly can. You're going to win. More often than not. If people Google your business and it's you have a 4.9 or 5 star rating and they can barely find anything bad said about you. If you're a practice that has maybe a 444-54-6 and you've got competitors that have better reviews, you're going to struggle, so you better think of a compelling reason to get those people to choose you. Instead, we're going to address that. Also, your social media presence should be engaging, personable and connect. Like, don't just post article links and outsource this to an agency. You have an opportunity to connect and develop relationships at scale. So get good at social media. I would say, especially Instagram. As we enter 2025, this is still the place where most of your customers are going to be browsing and getting a feel for your practice. We did an interview on our podcast Med Spa Success Strategies with Chris Balby. This is their practice, Misha Aesthetics. He does a phenomenal job with social media, so I'm going to try to remember to include that in the show notes. But if I don't remember to include that in the show notes, go back to the podcast feed of the YouTube channel and look for the interview with Chris Balby. It would be Published here January 2025 where we go a little bit deeper on social media marketing and how to get your organic social media presence up to par Another thing that I think we've learned is extremely important is as much as we wish this weren't true, your clients are largely not loyal to the shell that is your practice. They're loyal to the providers. So provider retention is absolutely critical. When we audit our rolling numbers so we can look at the rolling data from ads leads and see how much money people have spent with a practice over the course of 12, 24 months and beyond. When we have practices that have a lot of retention and stickiness, their injectors have been retained. We have one practice that I can think of specifically that we do a really good job of getting butts in the seats. But when we look at the revenue numbers over the course of a year, the retention is horrible. And in large part they've had an injector turnover five times in 12 months. So when people develop a relationship with the injector and the injector is gone, you lose the ability to retain that client. And the way the math works, when you're advertising in the space, you're not going to make a killing, especially on injectables, if anything at all, on the first visit. So the name of the game is retention. So figuring out a way to keep your providers happy and to retain them is critical. Episode one of the podcast we had with Mary Beth Hagan from Titan Aesthetic Recruiting. She talks about some compensation plans and some strategies Cultural strategies just to get your, your providers to stick. One other thing to keep in mind here is if that loyalty is going to be to the injector, you can also build loyalty by trying to develop a presence around the owner, right? The person that's going to be constantly there. Because if you can develop a little bit of know like and trust based on the owner and the injectors and the practitioners are working under that person's guidance, you can at least supplement some of that. So think about whoever the most permanent person is at your practice. Like if you have a, a nurse practitioner that's part owner or a medical director, think about trying to make those people the star of the show so that even if you're filling up the spots underneath them with different injectors and estheticians, that maybe the loyalty can be to that, that provider that is the star of the terms of reputation. So that's another thing to consider there. Okay, so let's get to the topic of this video, which is how to get clients to choose your med spa all episodes. This episode is brought to you by MedSpa Magic Marketing, my agency. We help med spas and aesthetics practices grow with more effective marketing strategies. And I know that's a vague phrase, right? It's a vague claim. So I have an offer for you. I offer this to anyone. New prospects. If you're interested in exploring any of another marketing option, a new agency, or just getting into Facebook, Instagram, Google Ads for the first time, I'd love to show you why we're different, what we're doing for clients. And we can do that via a one and a half hour planning session where I'll outline a specific marketing plan and I'll give you all of the blueprints that we would implement if we were to do business together. Now you can take that, use that on your own, hire someone else to help you execute it or work with us. We really don't hold anything back on that strategy call. And I think you'll have a lot of confidence in how you manage your marketing investment moving forward. Understanding some of the nuances that can help you implement more effective marketing strategies for your business. So if you want to do that, you can go to medspa magicmarketing.com so the first thing super obvious but I have to point it out. They have to be aware that you exist. You're not going to be in the consideration pool. If I'm considering getting Botox or I'm new to the area and I'm looking for a Med spa, you need to be in my consideration pool and I need to know you exist. So there are a lot of ways to do that. You could do that with Facebook and Instagram ads, with Google Ads, with SEO, with word of mouth, with print advertising, with billboards, with guerrilla marketing, with networking. But you just have to be aware that the first thing you have to do is they have to under, they have to know you exist. You need to be in their consideration pool. And then once you are, people are going to make a purchase decision based on a combination of three factors. Those buckets would be no like and trust, reputation, price and convenience. So it's our contention that everybody's doing a subconscious scorecard, subconscious scoring mechanism on these three buckets. Everyone has different sensitivities. So there's some people that they just want the most reputable practice and they'll sacrifice to pay a higher price. Some people want something that's really close to their house. So even if it's, you know, middle of the road in terms of reputation and price, it's very convenient. So everyone has different sensitivities. But this is the basic matrix that people are using when making a decision on whether to visit your practice or your competitor. So you'll note here we sort of reject the idea of a unique value proposition. I don't think many med spas go into this thinking I want to be the Walmart of med spas. There are some, we have clients that do this, they want to be cheap, they want to operate on volume. But I think most med spas, most of you listening to this, first of all, that's a really easy way to win if you are choosing that strategy. But most of us want people that like us. We want to provide an exceptional service at reasonable prices and retain our clients. So how do we do that in terms of getting people to choose us for the initial visit, knowing that this is the matrix that people are using to make that purchase decision. So you have to be generally incrementally more attractive than the alternative options. Think of it this way. If I were to put a potential client in a room with you and your top three competitors, what is the compelling reason you're going to give them to choose you? And what most people will say when I ask them this is they'll talk about credentials and experience and that's fine, but those things are generally going to be reflected in a third party data point which is your Google reviews. So if those things are true, you might have a five star rating on Google. And if your Competitor has a four, eight. You know, that's one, one reason, one little feather in your cap to convince a prospect to choose you. But if it's just stuff that you feel is important but isn't necessarily important to your prospects and isn't reflected in your online reputation, it doesn't matter. So I would say don't get caught up on those things. But you need to figure out how to make yourself incrementally more attractive. So targeting people that live closer to your practice is going to make sure that you rank higher on the convenience scale. Right? Optimizing for reputation as much as possible is important, but the easiest thing to manipulate on this scorecard to incentivize a prospect to choose you for the first visit is price. So I've got some examples here. I'm going to skip over that. Just know that the easiest thing to manipulate on this scorecard is price when you're talking about new client acquisition. So I know this is a big debate. I don't want to discount my service. It cheapens my brand, though. I'm attracting the wrong types of clients. I would, I would ask you to watch this video that we have on the debate on discounting. So if you just type in the debate on discounting for med spas, this video should come up pretty, pretty high up there. And this will kind of walk through the explanation a little bit more detail. But here's our general view of discounting. It's a really effective way to lower your customer acquisition cost to get people in the door for the first visit so they can have an experience at your practice. Then we want those people staying and paying your normal price points because they know, like, and trust you based on personal experience. So that plays into this, which is my favorite quote. In marketing, action changes attitude faster than attitude changes action. So traditionally in marketing, we're trying to change someone's mind via our marketing message so they choose to do business with us. But the thing that changes perception and attitude most is interaction. If I were to ask you where your favorite restaurant is, your favorite place to eat, you're going to name a place that you've actually been to and experienced firsthand, not a place you've just heard good thing about, good things about. So this, this principle is really important in terms of how we think about discounting strategies to attract new patients through the door for that first visit. And again, you're lowering your customer acquisition costs by doing that. So to illustrate an example, when we have clients that run an aggressive promotion for Botox for new Clients, let's say it's 21st, 20 units at 179, they might see on average $100 acquisition cost. So they'll get a new patient booked and paid in the seat for every $100 they spend. So you spend a thousand bucks, you got 10 new patients through the door. When you try to win strictly on reputation, let's say you're running an ad out there that just tries to win on personality and reputation to convince people to choose you, you might pay 3, 4, $500 in acquisition cost. So maybe you're only seeing two or three clients instead of 10 for every thousand dollars. Now, might the the typical spend and the quality of patient be higher on average? Sure, but it's not usually enough to offset the volume you saw with 10 at bats and 10 opportunities. So that's a reason that we love to lean into new patient specific discounts to attract people for that first visit and to tip the scales in our favor and lower customer acquisition costs because that is an inescapable trade off. Some examples of this in my own life. This is my dentist, Dr. Wiggs. We live in a suburb east of Nashville, about 30 minutes. I still drive 40 minutes twice a year to the west side of downtown through rush hour traffic, sometimes to go to Dr. Wiggs because I know, like and trust them based on personal experience. And nothing shapes perception like personal experience. I know the hygienist isn't going to rip my gums to shreds. My appointment is going to be right on time and Dr. Wiggs is not going to try to sell me something I don't need on the way out the door. So I could see good, good reviews and hear good things about dentists in my area all day. I still drive to Dr. Wiggs because nothing shapes perception. Nothing shapes perception like experience and interaction. So that's the principle. We're trying to use. Some other examples of this. I would have never thought to be like a regular attendee of the zoo. Like my wife had to convince me to go one time, I think we got a gift card from somebody. But once we actually went to the zoo, we realized this is actually pretty convenient. It's not very hectic. It's kind of like a leisurely activity that we can do with our two boys. We ended up becoming zoo members. But I would have never purchased a zoo membership from an ad without first having an interaction with the zoo. So me actually having an interaction and an engagement by visiting the zoo changed perception to the point where I became a member of the zoo. Right. You can see that same principle potentially playing out in your med spa. People ask me for a good recommendation of a Thai restaurant or a restaurant downtown in Nashville. This place, Degtai, is phenomenal. I would have never had that recommendation if I had not eaten there myself. Sports, great example. There are way more fun sports teams to root for that win a lot more than my college, University of South Florida has in the last 10 years. But I still root for them and watch every single game because I went to school there. Right. You feel a tie and you feel a bond. My experience shapes perception and creates loyalty. Again though, the trade off that we're making here is when we discount to attract new clients, we're getting our customer acquisition costs down. If we try to win with a less attractive offer, our acquisition cost goes way up. I'll illustrate another point here. Another example, we've got a bunch of these. We had a client in Vegas. They were running a price point of $399 for a new patient Botox promo. And when they ran that promo, their customer acquisition cost was $85. So for every $85 they spent in ads, they got a new patient booked and paid. They tried to up the offer from 399 to 499 and the acquisition cost went over $400. So you look at the trade off there, you're seeing, you know, 12 people for every thousand dollars. In example one, you try to up the price point by a hundred dollars, you're now seeing two or three people for every thousand dollars. Those people weren't even spending more money really on the initial visit revenue. So that strategy makes no sense. Yes, you got $100 more out of the offer, but you paid 300 more in acquisition cost. So that's a trade off. You have to understand when you're managing your marketing investment. But acquisition cost and butts in the seats is certainly not the full picture. So this is a problem I see with agencies that do like a patient guarantee. Right? It seems like you're taking the risk off your plate because you know you're going to get 30 bucks in the seats. Here's the truth. That's the easy part. If you're implementing strategies that don't lead to retention offers, promotions, promoting certain services, then you're not going to be 6 months, 12 months from now than you are now. You'll just be spinning your wheels getting patients that come in for a promo and never seeing them again. So how do we avoid an empty treatment room like this? We have to understand ROI and retention, and that's what we're going to dive into in video two. It's going to be so important. I think it's going to completely change the way that you think about your marketing investment, the way that you measure results, and the way that you think about success. So I'm excited to jump into that in the next video here. Part two.