Lauren (11:30)

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.

Ricky (12:37)

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.

Lauren (13:33)

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.

Ricky (13:44)

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.

Lauren (17:53)

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.

Ricky (18:29)

Highest maybe, Actually, yeah, highest probably of all we ever see. Numbers that bad? That's pretty bad. Yeah.

Lauren (18:34)

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.

Ricky (19:48)

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.

Lauren (20:00)

Absolutely.

Ricky (20:01)

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?

Lauren (22:21)

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.

Ricky (23:37)

Yeah, so one of the things that was shared with us was something like 90% of it is, is going to the Maps results.

Lauren (23:43)

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.

Ricky (24:25)

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?

Lauren (27:45)

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.

Ricky (28:32)

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?

Lauren (29:47)

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?

Ricky (30:12)

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?

Lauren (30:31)

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.

Ricky (31:32)

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?

Lauren (33:27)

I feel like that one's in your wheelhouse, Ricky.

Ricky (33:30)

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?

Lauren (37:19)

Nope. I think that's perfect.

Ricky (37:21)

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.