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Med Spa Success Strategies
New Med Spa Wins: 64% Higher Conversion w/ Better Botox Ads, 5X Returns on Laser Hair Ads, SEO Tips
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- [00:00]
Ricky
Hey everyone, and welcome to MedSpa Success Strategies, where med spa and aesthetics practice owners come to discover strategies and tactics that help them better market and manage their practices so they can grow, improve profitability and have greater impact for their teams and their patients. Today I wanted to start by talking about choosing a marketing provider and the mistake I see practices make when choosing on price alone. Now I understand the instinct. We're business owners. We watch costs, we want to be smart. But the truth is, cheaper doesn't always mean better. And in marketing, cheaper usually means slower growth, weaker results, and more missed opportunities. Let's say marketing company A charges a bit more, but they help you grow by a million dollars over the next 24 months. Meanwhile, company B charges less, but their strategies only get you halfway there. Which one actually cost you more? See the mistake? Choosing based on price without looking at outcomes is like picking a house just because it's the cheapest one on the block. Without asking about the location, the space, or if the roof leaks, that good deal ends up costing you in repairs, stress and lost value. It's the same with marketing. If you're only focused on what you're paying, you're ignoring the most important question. What are you getting in return? Smart marketing isn't an expense, it's an investment. And the right partner should help you grow faster, more predictably, and with less chaos. So the next time you're comparing options, whether it's marketing or anything else, don't just ask, what's the price? Ask who's going to get me further. That's the real roi. So I went to the news feed from amspa. Really good. Obviously source AIM Spa for kind of curating this stuff and several of the articles were actually about scrutiny and regulation in the med spa space. So if I kind of go back to the AMSPA feed here, kind of just browsing their site, you'll notice that some of the things that have come up recently Houston Med Spa patient says she was left disfigured after alleged fake doctor gave her Botox South Carolina bill would create Advanced Esthetician License Several Northeast Ohio Med Spas blasted by Ohio Attorney General Oregon bill restricts MSOs so the name of the game today or the the headline in the news is definitely regulation. Both active and potential. Kind of tailing off of where we covered last week with some of these stories. I'm just going to specifically cover this story from the Northeast Ohio market because it's related to the Ozempic WeGovy GLP on drugs. So the title of this article from Cleveland 19 News is several Northeast Ohio Med Spas Get Blasted by Ohio Attorney General Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost announced Wednesday he sent letters to 14 med spots, many in Northeast Ohio, warning them to stop making false or misleading claims about their versions of popular weight loss drugs. With the popularity of FDA approved drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy, Zepbound and Manjaro, several health spas are offered offering compounds of the active ingredient in those drugs to consumers. According to Yost, compound drugs like semaglutide and or Tirzepatide have not been tested and approved by the fda, and some spas are advertising advertising them as safe and effective. People deserve clear and accurate information about the medications they're putting into their bodies. We're reminding businesses that being truthful isn't just a good business practice, it's the law. So implicit threat of legal action for some of the the verbiage being used in these advertisements, it appears letters from Yost were sent to the following med spas, six of them locations in Northeast Ohio. I'll skip over the names of the med spas, but Yoast is providing details on what consumers need to know about the compound drugs. Bullet point Number one, the drugs are not FDA approved, which means the agency hasn't tested them for safety or effectiveness. Again, this is about compounded drugs. Number two, these are not the same as Ozempic, Wegovy, Zepbound or Manjaro, which are FDA approved. Compounded versions may not meet the standards that brand names have met. The third and final bullet point that these drugs are not the same as generic drugs. Generic drugs are FDA approved and such as are held to the same standard as branding versions. Compounded drugs made by pharmacies or individual for individual patients are not subject to the same oversight. 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. This episode is brought to you by Med Spa 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? That's a vague claim. So I have an offer for you. I offer this to any new prospects if you're interested in exploring any of them. 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 key takeaways here. One is let's just be extra careful if you're if you're promoting these drugs currently you've seen a lot of news about these drugs, the changing landscape of the market, legal ramp simplifications of using compounded drugs from compounding pharmacies and things of that nature. And as this continues to evolve, tip number one might be good if you're offering these products to just get a second look from attorney, not legal advice. So I'm going to say one other thing. Use chat, GPT or some of these other AI tools to run run some ideas through feedback share articles like this. If you're advertising these types of compounded products, let them know, let the lawyer or even if you're using an AI to just kind of coach you, again, that's not legal advice. You can't do that leg. But they can at least give you, you can at least get some good feedback that way. As to better strategies, they're going to give you a better chance of covering your legal basis to how you're presenting information on these drugs. We covered an article last week of people explicitly comparing the drugs to the to the name brand products without actually using the name brand. They just called them name brand products which got people into trouble. And now in this case we see A bunch of med spas just in the state of Ohio alone, getting a giant slap on the wrist and a talking to here from the state attorney general about what they believed was some misleading language about the safety and efficacy of these drugs related to the use of weight loss from compounded versions of the drug. So I would really just double and triple check me personally. I'm the kind of person that I want to, I want to go to sleep at night not stressing about these things and knowing I have my basis covered and that I've done my homework from a legal standpoint, as I go about navigating some of the changing pieces of the market here, I think would be really important to me. And then takeaway number two for me would be just the importance of diversification as a med spa. I think this is true for a variety of services, not just weight loss. We have so many product lines, especially the ones that don't have a long track record. So things like toxins, right, A Botox type product, those have been around for a really long time at this point in the med spa space. A really long time, I should say. And there's a long track record of patients consistently using those drugs to get a satisfactory result with a lot of the other stuff. So really, once you get beyond injectables, the med spa category gets a lot more dicey in terms of long term trend data. Right. You see things like this that come, they peak, they explode, they grow and then they kind of go by the wayside or become less popular. So I think diversification of your service offering, if you're relying on anything like laser devices or weight loss, is really important to start thinking about because not only do you have legal implications and things that can impact your ability to provide the services, but just from a strategy standpoint, these things do come in and out of vogue. And with weight loss, one of my concerns is as these things become more and more mainstreamed and, and I think whether it's the name brand drugs or alternative versions your primary care doctors are offering them, there's, there's people shipping them to direct to home and ultimately if people just want to get their hands on the drug, it's going to be hard to differentiate without doing a lot more with your weight loss program, if your weight loss program, if you try to add extra bells and whistles to make it feel like you're doing other things, but really the main squeeze is that you're offering these types of drugs, then it's going to be a race to the bottom. In terms of price points on these things. And I'm not sure it's the most sustainable long term strategy for growth if your main focus is weight loss, unless you've got a much more comprehensive program. But yeah, I think just a reminder to diversify and to try to find services that do have a long track record. You can see this with some of the body sculpting devices and laser devices where they had like some good news and they're trendy and people spent hundreds of thousands of dollars buying these devices and then they sort of fall out of vogue. Prices are erased to the bottom, they're commoditized. There's not a differential in terms of perceived value whether you're getting this from one provider or the other. And so I think that's a good reminder today. And one of the reasons I think we love some of the tried and true products like a Botox or toxin based products, toxin type products, is that they do have a long track record of success and patient satisfaction and there is a perceived differential of outcome of some of those services. So it's just like a hair salon. There could be a salon full of 20 people that all went to the same school. But if you find the person that you really trust to provide the service and the outcome that you desire, you feel a little uneasy going to the person in the next chair over for your next hair appointment. Same is true with Injectables. So the more that you can lean into products that have that sort of comfort level associated with a perceived differential of outcome of providers, I think that's a good place to lean into as well. Okay, well, we will jump into our Magic Moves segment now presented by Medspa Magic Marketing, our agency. This is where we share new ideas and what's working now in terms of marketing, advertising, operations, anything that we can kind of think of that, that we feel like we've cracked a code or can give you a little tidbit of advice to make what you're doing better. So the first thing we wanted to talk about was laser hair removal and a potential Google Ad strategy for laser hair removal that we've had some recent success with. So backstory for those of you who haven't heard us talk about this, laser hair removal can be one of the most challenging things to advertise. I think this is because it's very commoditized. There's a race to the bottom in terms of price point, there's lots of competition. You're not really differentiated in terms of like provider preference. And things like that. And especially in a social media ads environment, it can be the case where you're looking for a needle in the haystack. You need the person that wants laser hair removal but has never before done it and wants to do it right now. And that's a much smaller percentage of people seeing your ads on social media than the people that are interested in Botox. So I think the first thing here is we've really recommended, other than the cool example we had last week, go back and watch last week's episode for some cool ideas to really up the ante on creating what we would call like a Seth Godin purple cow offer on laser hair on social media or Facebook and Instagram ads, but shifting more of that budget generally toward Google Ads. And so, Lauren, if you want to share, kind of the recent case study, some success of a specific offer we've been running for laser hair.
- [11:30]
Lauren
Yeah, absolutely. So we have a client who's down in Florida actually, and we're testing a newer laser hair removal offer. Typically we say when we're talking about packages and laser hair and things like that to stay away from area specific things just because it gets too specific to what the majority of people want. But we've seen this offer working really, really well. So it's a buy a Brazilian package, get the underarms free. I think one, it's just a really attractive offer. Two, those are both areas that a lot of people want laser hair removal done on, especially those who haven't done it yet. That's usually, from what we've heard, the first service that people are interested in doing. So we're doing a Google Ad for that client for buy Brazilian package, get the underarms free. So far, we're seeing about a 5x return on their ad spend in terms of what they're spending into that package price at the end of the treatment. So seeing really, really good results on that one so far, it's giving us kind of a little excitement over here because like Ricky said, we typ typically don't do a whole lot of laser hair. So it's definitely tapping into a whole nother market that is super exciting for a lot of our clients. Yeah.
- [12:38]
Ricky
And I know many of you listening, you've got laser hair programs that you want to sell more of. And it can be a challenge. And when I say it can be a challenge, I mean in terms of the numbers you need, your customer acquisition costs, how much you pay to get a customer through the door to be four or five times less. Than the package price. And that's where the challenge comes in. It's not that you don't have a response rate at all when you run these ads. It's that is it satisfactory to create a return on investment? Because unlike when you advertise injectables with laser hair, you really want an immediate ROI on the package sale. There's. Let's not assume lifetime value really, after the initial package sale. So I think that's a cool one. And like Lauren said, making sure that if you're doing anything with laser hair, it's got to have broad appeal to the people that are interested in laser hair. So if you have, I think we've had clients that have tried to pair together, like buy this area, get that area free, but that's not the most common use case for laser hair removal. And those types of ads are going to struggle. The gist of it, Lauren.
- [13:34]
Lauren
Yeah, definitely. Cool. All right, you want to talk about our next magic move, which is the offer impact and changing what we're offering in terms of promo pricing.
- [13:45]
Ricky
Yeah. So this was kind of cool. We're really friendly with consultant on the Allergan digital marketing team who helps some of the larger med spas on the west coast that we work with. And he. We have the theory, you guys have heard it if you've watched any of our stuff on YouTube, that there's a direct inverse correlation between attractiveness of your offer and your customer acquisition costs. So as you dial up the attractiveness of your offer or your promotion, you're going to see lower customer acquisition costs and more butts in the seats. Now that's not the end all, be all data point. Right. We want to understand from the clients that we're getting also, what do they spend on the initial visit, what do they spend on recurring services. But he did a pretty cool case study from a client of his that was running three different types of Botox offers at three different price points. They were doing a $50 off, $75 off, and $100 off. And they were doing this with a spin the wheel type prize wheel. So the data is going to be pretty accurate because it's a true split test. All other attributes of the campaign were the same other than the offer. And what he was able to pull and share was kind of cool. Again, not going to get into specifics of like, all. All this, but just the data points. The difference between offering $50 off on this Google Ad versus $100 off, the click to lead ratio was 64% better. So from the people that got to the landing page, 64% increase in lead conversions when the offer was upped to $100. The difference in terms of lead to treatment. So how many of the leads actually showed up for services was minimal? If. If none. And then the customer acquisition cost. So how much we actually paid to get the customer, even factoring in the difference in the discount, actually saved them 16%. So if you take the cost of customer acquisition and you take also add on to that whatever the discount was. So let's say our cost of customer acquisition was 150 and then we had a 50 off promo, that means we're pulling the customer acquisition cost to $200. If our cost of customer acquisition was 150 plus a hundred dollar promo, it's 250. So even factoring that in, they actually saved 16% on effective customer acquisition costs. And then the really interesting stat. Okay, so yes, we got a better response when the offer was better, but did it lead to decrease in patient quality? That'd be the real next question. Right. And I think there are certain ways it's all dependent on context. So if you were doing this in other platforms, I think this might look a little different. But specifically on Google, at least, the average lifetime value of the client was actually 7% higher on the more extreme promo. So every single step, essentially from lead response rate, customer acquisition cost, initial visit revenue, and lifetime value of the clients all looked better in terms of the financial implications for the practice with the more aggressive offer. So I know that's counterintuitive for most of you. We talk about it all the time. That is an inescapable reality. As you make your offers more attractive and harder to resist, you're going to see better stats. And most of the time, those better stats on the customer acquisition side outweigh any benefit in terms of patient quality. Now, there are extremes that this could go to where that's not true, but as a general rule, we definitely find that to be true. So Lauren, Lauren always pushes us on this. So we, you see these offers all the time, kind of tying this in. We had another client that's running Botox campaigns, they're in Idaho, and they were doing 20 units of Botox for 179. And they were really on the bottom end of the performance spectrum for us. And we wanted to figure out, hey, what could we do? Is it the branding, is it offer framework, is it the reputation? Like, is there, what can we do here to improve the performance of this campaign? And I know Lauren, you Pushed specifically for can we just squeeze a little bit more out of this offer? And I've always been resistant because I think my natural inclination is like, no, this can't make that much of a difference. And I feel like time and time again we noticed that at least on this initial stat, which is customer acquisition costs, response rate, butts in the seats, it does. So, Lauren, you just talk about, like the trade off there between something like going from 20 units on 1 for 189 on your promo and 169, some of the stats we see and why we think that that, that happens to that extent.
- [17:53]
Lauren
Yeah, absolutely. I think the number one reason it happens to that extent is competition. So we know that the 20 units for X promo is nothing special, unfortunately, anymore. The way we frame it can definitely be special. And the steeper we go can also be special and kind of decrease numbers too for us. So what we were looking at for this client specifically is on the 20th for 179 promo, they spent a total of $3,000. They had conversion rate on those leads, which gave them a customer acquisition cost of $364. So really, really on the high end of our customer acquisition cost spectrum, like.
- [18:29]
Ricky
Highest maybe, Actually, yeah, highest probably of all we ever see. Numbers that bad? That's pretty bad. Yeah.
- [18:34]
Lauren
Yeah, definitely. So way outside of what range we want it to be in. Simply by tweaking the number from 20 units 179 to 20 units 1 69, we saw cost per lead decrease from $25 down to $11. If everything holds exactly the same, if we spend 3,000 and we see 7% conversion rate of leads to book deployments, we're going to drop customer acquisition cost by $200 down to $165. So huge difference in terms of just changing your offer by $10. So we always talk about you're either going to pay the difference in customer acquisition cost or in product cost. So simply by dropping your product cost by $10, we decrease customer acquisition costs by 200. Now, not to say that that is 100% going to happen every single time. Every time you drop $10, you're going to drop 200. But in this case, that is what happened. Now, Ricky and I were actually going back and forth a little before the podcast on is that going to decrease patient quality? What's retention going to look like when they start going steeper? And of course, those are things that have to be monitored and have to be watched in terms of the quality of the person coming in. But at an initial glance with the stats, that is a fantastic decline and really helps with the butts and seats principle that we talk about.
- [19:48]
Ricky
Yeah. And really what we see most of the time is even if the patient quality is 15 or 20% different as a result of that promo, that still does not even come close to offsetting the improvement in acquisition cost.
- [20:00]
Lauren
Absolutely.
- [20:01]
Ricky
So I do think there's a line we talked about this like do as you up the ante of your offer for a service like this, do do you start to risk running into Groupon territory where you are just getting a dramatically outsized response from the Groupon type customers. So that's why really do need to monitor the stats and make sure the trade off is worth it. We'll tell you most of the time that we monitor those results, the trade off is more than worth it. And again it's, it's. We reworked our purchase matrix a little bit this week and the we kind of modeled it of what, what most of you would consider your ideal client. What is the purchase making, purchase decision process of your ideal client? And we sort of estimated that the first thing, 60% of the piece or so is going to be reputation and affection. So how good do they feel specifically about doing business with you? Location is going to be like right in there and then the third thing is going to be price. So your ideal customer is not going to be primarily price sensitive but in reality they probably have multiple options that check the first two boxes. I was telling Lauren, in our town we've got two. A relatively small town, 40,000 like a midsize town. We have two med spas right across the street from each other on the main street of town that have a really nice buildings, standalone Med spas, beautiful logo on the outside. Like one of them is like a brand new white house. Like they're just really cool looking buildings, really good reputation reviews, great looking social media profiles. And that's the reality for most towns in the United States at this point is you have a few Med spas that probably check those boxes. So in lieu of any other data point, you can tip the scales in your favor and win the business just by giving people a more attractive offer. Because the people that are on the fence now have a little bit easier decision that can help them tip the scales. So that's why we think that works so well. Next thing we wanted to cover in the magic moves segment to wrap this segment is something that's come up quite a bit recently which is hey, when is the right time to spend money on SEO search engine optimization. So, Lauren, I know we've got a nuanced approach to this. I probably go a little too extreme on it, but do you want to talk about kind of why we, why we think the way that we think about SEO? And again, we've got a ton of experience in the SEO realm. We do really cool things. We've had our clients featured in Forbes and gq and I think we do things on the technical side that other people overlook. With that said, I think we're exceptional in that area still, for us, it's not the first place we spend ad dollars. So can you talk a little bit about that?
- [22:21]
Lauren
Yeah, absolutely. I think the biggest point that everybody can take away from this is where you're going to invest your money in and where are you going to get the most out of the quickest and the easiest way to do that is going to be through meta ads and then Google Ad. So if you have a limited amount of resources to invest in marketing or invest into getting new patients, the number one place to do that, where you're going to see the most effective customer acquisition cost and the quickest response rate and people coming in from, is going to be meta ads and then Google Ads secondarily. So it's not going to be making changes to SEO. We always say SEO is like going to the gym. You're not going to go for a couple days and see really fast results. Sometimes you will. If your site's a disaster and you clean some things up pretty quickly, you can see some awesome jumps pretty fast. But overall it's not going to be the quickest way that you're going to see the most new business in the door. And it's also really a long term grind. There are some pages. If there are a lot of competition in your area, if there are a lot of other people who have really high domain authorities and great structured websites, it's going to take some grinding and some time to get your pages to where they need to be or even ranking. We've even seen some cool, interesting studies recently of percentages and I don't remember the exact numbers, Ricky, of what goes to the blue link result as opposed to the Maps pack or the Google Ads.
- [23:38]
Ricky
Yeah, so one of the things that was shared with us was something like 90% of it is, is going to the Maps results.
- [23:43]
Lauren
Yeah, absolutely. So at the end of the day it's just is the juice worth the squeeze of what you have to put in right now? And for most people, if you're newer or if you're slower or smaller starting out, that's not going to be the number one place to invest your resources. Now where Ricky and I disagree a little is I still think that there is value in getting that done as soon as possible and starting to get those things cleaned up. So we've been talking about adding some little SEO starter packs and things like that where you can make sure your site is structured properly and your headlines and page titles are clean and you have great content. Those are the easiest things to check a couple boxes and make sure your site is well structured to see some quick improvements. In that sense.
- [24:26]
Ricky
Yeah, we have a. I agree Lauren. So like I think the hesitation for us, one of our, one of our core values is that we provide advice free of self serving financial impact and it becomes an order of priority issue. It's we, we want to do something that's going to be predictable and is going to generate a fast result. And like Lauren said, those are the ads platforms first and foremost and then there is a time and a place. So like I like the gym analogy, but I'll tie it into a health analogy here too. It's like if I'm trying to get in peak shape, you know, the first thing you probably got to do is just restrict your calories and start exercising more. But once you get down to like that, that last 10 or 15%, now you have to start worrying about like the specific types of foods that you're eating and what time you're eating them and the percentage breakdown of your micronutrients and your recovery. And it's that last part of really dialing into the next level where I think kind of SEO plays a role. But I think you have to be doing these other things well to have a proactive, ongoing SEO investment. There's things that you can do from an SEO standpoint early on in your business that are beneficial. We've got a on our YouTube channel if you're paying for SEO, if you're a really established business with a bunch of locations or just starting off, I think that's a really helpful thing to revisit because it'll help you audit and gain a top level understanding of what an SEO company should really be doing for you in terms of deliverables. And Lauren's right, check the easy boxes out of the gate. It's the stuff that happens after you check that initial, those initial boxes. That's a really slow grind, really, really incremental result. And that's the reason I recommend not a super proactive high end SEO budget. Really our general guideline that I have blueprinted is basically $2 million a year in revenue or more is when I would start spending money on SEO. Before that there's an argument maybe in the 1 to 2 million range, but up until you're at least a million dollars, make sure you've got high performing ads campaigns in the mix and that you're generating as much of a direct response initiative as you can from those platforms before you start to pump a bunch of money into an SEO investment. Cool. All right, so that transitions us from the Magic Move segment. We're going to wrap here with some Q and A. So reminder, if you've got a podcast question, you can email us. Just put podcast question in the subject line at support medspa magicmarketing.com or find us on Instagram and shoot us a message over there. Today we actually pulled some questions from the med spa owners Facebook group. There was so much good content in there. I was like, I'm going to pull some questions there and we're just going to jump in and kind of riff on some of these. So we've got a few things we pulled from that group here. First question and we didn't go over these much, so we're going to just really go over these in live time together. So I have an independent license as an NP and also work full time in the hospital. I opened a med spa in September of this year. City is small, about 24,000. It's about 10 to 15 miles across the bridge from a bigger city of 90,000. There are a couple larger med spas in that area that are absolutely beautiful. I have IV therapy, laser hair removal, tattoo removal, ipl, Ibrium. Not sure if I'm just not familiar with that one or it's a typo. Botox fillers, skin pen with PRP. I have two estheticians and three RNs. I'm out $58,000 in supplies, furniture, equipment, and I've only brought in $22,000 after paying the RNs. So this person was basically like posting here hopefully to get some recommendations and someone to tell me not to give up. So there's a lot there. Lauren, any initial thoughts?
- [27:45]
Lauren
I mean my first initial thought that stands out after what we just talked about is the comment of there are a lot of larger med spas that are absolutely beautiful nearby. That goes right back to that purchase matrix that we were just talking about. So if you're newer, if you don't have the same built up reputation that A lot of those larger, more established providers and practices do. Maybe that is time when you tap into the discount and see how low you can go, maybe lower than whatever they are by a significant amount. And give people a choice that they cannot say no to to choose you for business. Couple that in with your reputation, your backgrounds, your credentials and your spa too. But also give that discount as that incentive that makes the question a no brainer for sure. To choose you.
- [28:33]
Ricky
Yeah, easy. Up the ante on your offer. If you're the new person in town and you're struggling to break in, up the ante on your offer. Get aggressive, especially for services that are not that are reliant on retention and repeat visits. You don't have to do it always, but you can do it as aggressively as possible to get your first interaction and your first at bat. I think that's really good advice. The other things that I saw in here were one, it feels like as a med spa, starting off, this is really starting to stretch yourself thin. You've got two providers that you've hired and like nine or ten different services. I really think there's a lot to be said about starting lean and ensuring you have profitability before you worry a ton about anything else, really, like start small, small, start lean, grow as demand dictates and make sure that you're profitable. You didn't start a business to put a bunch of time, energy and money into it just to lose money. Like that's not, that's not why you did it. So I think revisiting kind of your blueprint here and trying to come up with a more lean version of your operation is probably another good place to look. Dr. Carol Clinton mentions in the book Med Spa Confidential the idea of right sizing and maybe go grab that book too and look at her notes or our podcast episode actually on right sizing and how she did that during the 2008 recession and credits it for like rebuilding her business from scratch. Lauren, you want to read that second question on the list?
- [29:47]
Lauren
Yeah, absolutely. I'm adding services to my already open practice. I want to add laser hair removal and a CO2 type device steering away from radio frequency. I don't want a huge loan and the payment needs to make sense to me. I live in a rural area. No one around me is doing this. I would estimate maybe five to 10 patients a month would be interested in these services. You want to dive into that one, Ricky?
- [30:13]
Ricky
Yeah, I mean, I think, I think we did. We scanned through these. I know we said we didn't go through them in detail, we kind of just scanned through just to make sure we were roughly familiar. And I know that was a short one. So, Lauren, your initial reaction was don't do it. Yeah. And that, that might be the extent of the, the advice. But do you have anything else that you kind of want to just elaborate on that question?
- [30:31]
Lauren
I mean, for me, I think, yeah, like what we just said. And the short answer is don't do it unless you're in a really comfortable financial situation where you're not going to be scared or worried. When you aren't getting 5 to 10 patients that month to pay that bill, if it's not something that's going to stress you out to be paying that bill, it's okay. The other thing that we talk about on a podcast back with Gina Graziano was doing on your intake forms asking questions about what people are interested in or what types of concerns people have. If you see a lot of your already existing patient base has concerns that can be treated by microneedling or are interested in laser hair removal type devices, then absolutely, maybe consider bringing one of those in. If you're financially comfortable and if you know you already have demand for that type of service, if you have no clue in terms of what demand might bring and you're kind of worried about the finances, definitely press pause until we get a little further down the line. I would suggest.
- [31:33]
Ricky
Yeah, if you. I think that's really good. If you like, send a text or a newsletter out to your existing clients, start talking to people. If your existing clients aren't excited about these services, I wouldn't bank on new people that you don't have a relationship with filling the books. I think that's really good advice. And then really I would say if you can avoid it, try not to make these purchases on debt because the debt payment is going to be there whether you have the patients or not. And I think for most practices, if it's not a financial stress to have that payment with no patients, it's going to be a pain point nonetheless. Like you're going to be frustrated and you know, it's a lot easier not having the payment on the device. And worst case scenario, it doesn't affect your cash flow. If you've got that payment on the device, your cash flow is going to be negatively effective, negatively affected in perpetuity if it's not offset by bookings. And I would be really wary of doing that, especially with some of the things you mentioned about being in a smaller, more rural area. Yeah, Just I think that that makes a lot of sense. You know, jumping back to the last question, I know she mentioned in there being in a smaller area too, 24,000 population. I do think that if your population size can't sustain your business, it's an even better reason to stay as lean as possible and ensure profitability and grow really slowly to make sure the demand is there and also to lean into what Lauren said, which is if I got to pull people from the next town over, I'm not going to be the most convenient option for them. And if I'm not, if I'm not the obviously most reputable, I need to figure out what the incentive is for those people to drive across the bridge or to my rural area. So really upping the ante on your offer. Attractiveness. It's kind of the theme of the episode today. I feel like probably a common theme for us is a good place to look. Last question today. Does anyone have suggestions on how much is reasonable for a small agency to charge for marketing on social media? Also, what is a reasonable amount of money to spend on ads? I'm a small med spa just hoping to acquire 10 to 20 more patients per month. Or do you want to give that one a crack?
- [33:28]
Lauren
I feel like that one's in your wheelhouse, Ricky.
- [33:31]
Ricky
That was my morning rant. I guess that was my rant to start the episode. But okay, so. So I'll cover the ad spend portion first. So Lord mentioned some numbers. We've talked about numbers on this podcast. Each service is going to have a different customer acquisition cost. If you're talking about injectables, so things like Botox, I think you want to shoot for customer acquisition cost of $150 or less. Again, that's dependent on good strategies. So again, we've got a lot of stuff available on our YouTube channel that walks through the exact strategies we use to generate results. That is going to give you a blueprint that allow you to see those types of numbers. And even better, but just conservatively, let's say we're shooting for at least $150 and you want 15 patients a month. That means reversing into that. It's a really good way to do it. Actually, most people don't ask this question properly. This was a good way to ask this question because you're engineering back to the goal. So that would require about 2,000 to $2,500 a month in ad spend directly to hire an experienced agency to run these for you. It's probably going to be like people said in the comment section here, a couple thousand dollars a month. So the only thing to keep in mind there is you're basically doubling your customer acquisition cost if you're thinking of your agency as a part of the expense. Now, my recommendation is if you know you want to be marketing on social media for your business and that's a core function of your business, just like operations or bookkeeping, you can't factor that into the ROI calculation, but you can if you want to, to play with the numbers. But I would assume the agency expense is a fixed rate. And the important thing that I talked about in the monologue here is don't make that decision based on the agency price. You need to make that decision based on how good of a result you think that agency is going to achieve. Because if that agency, for the same $2,500 in ad spend is only bringing you seven patients a month, that's $360 in customer acquisition cost. That is going to set you up for a much more challenging cash flow situation than an agency that can achieve a hundred dollar customer acquisition cost, but maybe has a more expensive retainer. So I think you want to be careful with the way that you make the decision. You really want to find somebody you can trust that's going to do a killer job at a reasonable rate. And then you really want to be able to maximize your ad spend because your ad spend is going to determine the level of results. So if you want to be closer to that 20 side and you want to leave a little wiggle room for customer acquisition costs like that might be three, three or $4,000 a month. If you're talking about 10 to 20 patients for M sculpt, that's a completely different calculation. Right now you're talking $500 potentially in customer acquisition cost. So if you want 15 more of those people, that's seven or $8,000 a month in ad spend. So that's, I think the important thing to remember when you're making those decisions. We have a recent YouTube video that talks about this in detail. We actually give benchmarks for customer acquisition costs for all of the different types of strategies and offers that we typically recommend. I'm going to pull the name of that just so those of you who are listening, we'll try to remember to include that in the show notes as well. But that was a really good episode. Lauren broke down all of our benchmarks for customer acquisition costs based on certain offers. So I want to be able to reference that because that's going to give you a lot more insight if you just want to audit what your agency is doing. If you're paying an outside provider, hey, what is a good result? Really? The lower the better. We have some clients that are at 50, 60, 70 customer acquisition costs for Injectables. But just to give you a very rough guideline, I think you want that at least at $150 or less for something like Injectables. And the name of that video is. Let's see here. Yes, it's going back probably a month or two. Lauren. Yeah, Trying to find the exact name of it on YouTube, Med Spa, Facebook and Instagram. Ad strategies that work 2025 series on our YouTube channel published date was February 2025 for those of you that want to go check that out. Lauren, anything to add to the Q and A or magic moves that we might have missed for today?
- [37:20]
Lauren
Nope. I think that's perfect.
- [37:22]
Ricky
So this is something that I try to keep in mind and I wanted to share this lately and it's a reminder to have fun with your business. I know the pressure is real. I know the weight of payroll, the client reviews, comparisons on Instagram. But if we're not enjoying the process, if we're not finding meaning in the building, the growing, the grinding, what's the point? Remember, you chose this. You started your business to create freedom to may have an impact and to change lives, including your own. And yeah, there are going to be hard days, challenges and setbacks. Doubt. But every challenge is part of the privilege of being a business owner and an entrepreneur. Every decision you get to make, every team member you lead, every client you serve, that's not a burden. That's a game. And you get to play it. So don't forget to enjoy this. Laugh with your team. Celebrate the wins. Geek out over things that light you up. Because the truth is, if you can learn to love the climb, not just the milestones, you'll always be winning. So take a breath, take a step back and remind yourself you're building something that matters. Now go have some fun. Fun with it. You got this. Thanks everyone for tuning in. This podcast is a production of medspa Magic Marketing. If your med, spa or aesthetic practice is in need of digital marketing services, help with advertising on Facebook, Instagram, Google lead generation and booking more appointments, please visit Medspamagicmarketing.com.