← Med Spa Success Strategies
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- [00:03]
Ricky Shockley
Welcome to MedSpa Success Strategies. I'm your host, Ricky Shockley, owner of MedSpa Magic Marketing. And this is where MedSpa owners come to discover strategies and tactics that help them better market and manage their practices so they can grow and create more impact for themselves, their teams and their patients. Let's talk about branding, but not the surface level stuff. Not your fonts, not your logo, not your aesthetics on Instagram. Those things are important, but they're not your brand. Your brand is the perception people have about your business and whether or not they want to be associated with it. It's emotional, psychological, and it's powerful. If you get this part right, you don't have to scream the loudest or offer the deeper discounts. Your brand starts doing the heavy lifting for you. People will seek you out, refer their friends and even pay a premium. So, as a med spa, how do you build that kind of a brand? Here are the three components I want you to lock in on. Number one is developing an emotional connection through shared values or identity. This is where brand loyalty really begins. People support brands that reflect something about them. Their values, identity, lifestyle. It's the reason people choose Apple over PC or Lululemon over a cheaper pair of leggings. They're not just buying the product, they're buying alignment. They're saying, this brand is for me to some extent. So for your med spa, what I want you to ask yourself is, what do we stand for? Who are we here to serve? And how can we show more of that through our story and personality? I think one of the easiest ways to do this is to actually just develop personal connections via the owners and providers and have those people be very prominent in telling their story. What matters to them? What's going on in their lives? What's. What are their challenges? What are their pain points? That's the type of stuff that will help you connect at a deeper level that can set you apart from other providers. Right. So most med spas say stay surface level with their marketing. They'll post before and afters and treatment solutions, but they don't share the why about what they do, the mission behind the brand. So if you want to stand out, start telling your story, show your team's personality and make people feel a connection. When people feel connected to you, they'll choose you, even if your price is higher or your location is less convenient. Number two, develop the cool factor. Earn social proof on among the tastemakers. Let's be honest. People are influenced by people they admire. And successful brands know this. That's why Nike partners with athletes, why high end restaurants seat celebrities up front, and why new businesses work hard to get those first few influential clients. In your world, that might be a local fitness coach with a strong Instagram following, a boutique owner, a stylist, or even another respected provider. Find the tastemakers in your niche, your town and build relationships with them. That can mean offering them a VIP experience, collaborating on content, or just consistently showing up and adding value. The goal isn't to fake influence, it's to earn influence. When people see someone they trust choosing your brand, it accelerates the trust in their minds too. Number three, back it up with a great product or service. I don't care how great your story is or how much influence you have. None of it matters if you you can't deliver. If your treatments are inconsistent, your team is disengaged or your results are just meh, you break the brand promise. Branding isn't a trick. It's not smoke and mirrors. It's a way to align perception with reality. So you have to earn it. You have to deliver an experience that people genuinely want to talk about. The best branding strategy in the world cannot save a bad product. Really, Even an average product or an above average product in this competitive space, you have to be excellent in all aspects of what you do. When you pair emotional connection and social proof with great results, that's when the magic happens. That's how you become the med spa people brag about. So if you're tired of blending in, competing strictly on price, it's time to start shaping perception on purpose. Tell your story, earn influence, and most importantly, deliver the kind of experience that truly exceeds expectations. That's real branding and that's how you build a business that lasts. All right, two news stories we're going to cover today. The first is from health.com and it's a news article from two days ago. So as of filming this, this is just one of the last end here of March. So there might be some updates on this. We film these episodes a week prior. So if there are updates on this. Got one person that I really want you to stay connected with that is Courtney Walker. You can find her on Instagram at court C O U R T approved aesthetics. She's an attorney and she's really, really in the loop on all things happening with GLP1's compounding and next steps. But for today we're just going to touch on this article from health.com March 28 I'm going to focus on the portion of the article that talks about the future of compounding. This section of the article says Will compound versions of OIC and WOVI actually be banned? The FDA announced it would delay enforcement of its ban on compounded semaglutide for the time being. Pharmacies and physicians have until April 22nd to cease production and outsourcing facilities, which are larger compounders, can remain in business through May 22. This was to avoid unnecessary disruption in patient treatment. After the OFA filed its lawsuit, the FDA announced it would hold off on the ban until a district court made a decision or or until the previously announced deadlines, whichever comes first. In the lawsuit, OFA is arguing that Ozempic and WeGovy shortage isn't over and that compounding should still be allowed so patients can have access to reasonably priced medications. OFA has several legal theories for this argument, but they all center around the allegation that the FDA relied on data from the branded drug companies rather than examining other data from consumers or the compounding industry. So the FDA appears to be following a similar pattern with compounded semaglutide by delaying enforcement of the compound until the court decision, said Carter Johnson. If a court decision is rendered against the ofa, the band's timeline is likely to be very similar for Tirzepatide. So long story short, we covered this last week. These things as of filming this are very up in the air again. I think the best resource for this is really Courtney Walker. I would go check her out on Instagram. We had her on the podcast. She's just, she's an attorney, she works in the Med spa space, and she's very, very in the loop on all things happening with this GLP1 shortage issue. So as of watching this, that's my best advice. Go follow Courtney Walker at Court Approved Aesthetics on Instagram as that news about GLP1 compounding, you know, just continues to evolve. We just want to make sure we're keeping you in the loop and giving you the best advice and next action items related to being able to continue providing services to your clients if you do so in your med spot. Hey there. Wanted to briefly interrupt the episode to make a quick ask. If you're a podcast listener, it would mean the world to us if you leave a review for the podcast, whether that's on itunes or Spotify. It's something I hadn't really remembered or thought of asking for, but it does help us show up more frequently so that we can reach more people with the information that we're providing. So it mean the world to us. If you'd leave a review on itunes or Spotify if you're listening on audio. If you're watching on YouTube, make sure to hit the subscribe button so you're in the loop for future videos and you don't miss any of the content that we're putting out. 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? It's a vague claim. So I have an offer for you. I offer this to any new prospects if you're interested in exploring, exploring 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 magic marketing.com Next Article Article from Bloomberg. This actually goes back several weeks. AMSPA covered this and was the source of some of the information. This article from Bloomberg is called How Med Spas Conquered America. So it's a longer article, tons of takeaways. So I actually have a chat GPT summary to kind of help us cover the article and then go into some commentary. So from the article the med spa industry is in the middle of a major boom. Since 2010, it's grown from about 1600 locations to over 10,000, generating $15 billion in revenue last year. The average med spa now brings in $1.4 million annually and the industry is still growing at around 15% per year. Part of the draw, low barriers to entry for licensed providers, high margins and the fact that it's a cash pay business. No insurance needed. So what's fueling this demand? A mix of cultural shifts over the last several years, Social media influence and a growing acceptance of aesthetic treatments. Think Botox fillers. Coolsculpting, right? But also newer offerings like the GLP1 products we just talked about, IV therapy and hormone treatments. Private equity in this industry is circling. But most med spas are still independently owned. Over 80% are single location operators. The challenge for investors is loyalty is often tied to individual providers, not the brand. I think that's very true. And the industry's biggest risks, the risk is its own success. As more under trained injectors enter the market, the potential for botched results and regulatory scrutiny. You also see, you see some of this happening already grows. And with the rise of the overdone look, there's now a growing demand for more natural treatment options like bio stimulators, collagen boosting treatments. So the bottom line is opportunity is big. Sustainability will depend on quality, trust and adapting to what clients actually want. This ties in actually again to our new story from last week. A YouTube video from consultant Michael Gurdley on the med spa boom. And one of the things that really caught my attention in this article is a chart provided by AMSPA in the article that shows revenue growth in the industry over time. This chart starts in about 2015 and it shows the industry at about $3.2 billion climbing up to $9 billion in 2019, $10 billion in our Covid year 2020, a huge boom in 2021 at 15 billion, a leveling off in 2022 to 12.5 billion and a resumption back above 15 billion closer to 16 for 2023. I don't know that we have 2024 data, at least not in this article we don't. But here's one of the things that really stood out to me in this article related to our new story about the med spa boom last week. Although the industry is growing, right? We talk about growing 15 year over year. It's a 15 billion dollar industry. One of the other things in this article was that the industry has grown from 1600. I want to check the date on that 1600 number in the article. And okay, from 2010 the number of med spas expanded from 1600 to more than 10,000. So one of the challenges we are going to continue to experience in this industry is that competition is outpacing revenue growth. I think by all available evidence this is a reality. So although we see more money being spent in the space, there are more providers and with a low barrier, barrier to entry, right? Like single, single providers starting in small locations, which as an aside I think is the way to start. There's a lot of competition always entering the market. And the challenge with competition is commoditization. There are so many options, they start to kind of wash together. There's not a differentiated option. It's a race to the bottom in, in a perfect competitive market. We talked about this, I think a little bit last week. Race to the bottom in terms of price points tends to happen. So I think my monologue today on branding is really important. I think this news article illustrates the importance on really setting yourself apart, optimizing all aspects of your business, developing emotional connections and building a brand that is more, that is more than just the standard med spa. Because we're in a growing industry and there's money to be made. If you're going to be one of the survivors and not everyone will be. There are so many people entering this market, so many competitors. You all see this in your local markets. There are more people today than there ever have been offering the services that you offer. So the take, takeaway there is, I think you just have to have everything so buttoned up in terms of process, patient quality, patient delivery of services, patient experience, quality of results relative to price point, branding, emotional connection, all. Everything we talk about on this podcast just matters more and more and more as the months go on. So that's an important thing to see, though, because although the industry is growing with more competition, that means on average there's going to be less revenue per practice available. So we need to be cognizant of that aggressive marketing aggressively and doing all of those other things well. So I thought that was kind of an interesting takeaway to kind of look at the difference between the revenue growth in the industry relative to the number of businesses popping up each and every year. So that's it for the news today. We're going to pop into our next segment. All right, we've got a lot of continuity in today's episode because we are going to, in our magic moves segment here, we're going to kind of tie this into the theme of the episode, which is branding and differentiating. How do we set ourselves apart? So, so this has been something that's really been on the forefront of our minds lately because if, if you watch any of our stuff, if you're an existing client, you know that our philosophy is we, we, we know we want people to love our, like our clients, right, our med spas. We want to figure out how do we make more people fans of your med spa? And our easy solution to that is we want to create engagements that lead to perception through experience. So how can we reduce barriers to entry to get somebody through the door at your med spa so that they have a brand connection with you based on personal experience. And I do think that's the easiest way to accomplish brand favorability in the eyes of a specific prospect. But what we've been thinking about more and more is how do we actually, in our advertising and in the stuff that we communicate to our prospects prior to that appointment, start to develop brand differentiation based on emotional connection. So that's kind of where today's monologue came from. So we're going to focus our magic move segment today on things that we're doing for our clients right now to help them set themselves apart in their ad messaging. How can we let our marketing messages and communications carry some of the weight of creating brand perception? So, Lauren, you want to go into just some of the things we're doing with automations and even some of the things that are on our radar here for ads, changes related to branding and helping our clients to set themselves apart a little bit. So if you're listening to this, I really recommend incorporating some of this into your marketing and advertising.
- [14:50]
Lauren
Yeah, absolutely. I think one of the biggest things that we're working on right now is a welcome video is essentially what we've been talking about and what we've been implementing for a lot of our clients. Essentially within the welcome video, it just gets people able to know your brand, to know you, to put a face with the brand and with the practice too. It gives the opportunity for the providers to share a little snippet on themselves, what their favorite treatment is and why. Some really cool testimonial videos of people actually showing their results and talking about why they love your med spa and why they love the results that they've received so far. So that video is a couple of them we've gotten done so far are about three minutes long. It's not super long, but it really just introduces why you're the place to visit and it gets them comfortable with your brand too. The ways that we're going to start incorporating that are one, through our automation drips. So as soon as somebody fills out your Facebook lead form with the promo attached, that's the first text that they get is thanks for filling out the form. Please watch this short welcome video to get used to our spa, get to know our providers a little bit more. Along with that, we're actually going to start incorporating it into the ad itself too. So we're going to do a carousel template of an ad to where you can swipe through the images or the videos as they pop up. So page one is going to be our offer or the thing that we always talk about that stands out, that really grabs the user's attention and pops in the newsfeed. And then page two, when you swipe, is going to be the welcome video and start walking you through who the spot is, who is involved, and some really awesome patient testimonials. So incorporating those I think is going to have a big impact in terms of right off the bat, not only are people seeing the promo and getting you excited about that, but also seeing the spa and getting used to that too.
- [16:31]
Ricky Shockley
Yeah, I love this, I love this addition to the formula. And for those of you, if you're running Facebook and Instagram ads or even Google Ads, right, we have a purchase matrix that we kind of operate from. And this is there are three buckets of factors that people look at when determining where to schedule that first visit with a med spa. They're looking at reputation factors, price factors, and factors of convenience. There are a lot of things that fall into that reputation bucket. Right. Your Google review is what people see on Instagram. And I would argue that the brand element, the emotional connection element is part of that. So we're optimizing in our strategy. We really, we still love new patient specific promos and offers because what it does is it lowers your acquisition cost. All other things equal, if you've got a really enticing offer, you're going to pay less to acquire the customer. And in every financial calculation that we've run, when you look at the analysis of the trade offs, it's one of the catalysts to maximizing the ROI from your ad expenditure is lowering your cost of customer acquisition. So we love new patient one time use offers because we want to create an engagement that leads to perception from personal experience. But Lauren's talking about how can we leverage more of that brand building element, that connection building element in the ads before someone becomes a patient. And I think adding it into the ads mix is a second slide. So if you're running offer based ads on Facebook and Instagram, we love this idea that we're going to start experimenting with which is put it as the second slide. So your offer frame is there of whatever the deal is and the next slide is like, and here's why you should fall in love with our practice over all the other options you have available. Really excited about that. I would say another application for this. If you're going to do a welcome video or like this, this piece of content, whether it's text and images, whatever this is, you need to tell your story and show personality to develop an emotional connection. So on your landing pages, if you're using Google Ads, wherever you're sending that traffic from Google Ads, make sure that it's on your website there. And I would argue even your website in general. This is something that we need to start doing more and more of in our space. Really most service based local businesses probably need to be leaning a lot more into this. So showing personality and authenticity in your marketing messages from your website, your social media accounts, to the destinations that people are seeing when they're clicking your ads, whether it's Facebook and Instagram or Google Ads. So the other place Lauren mentioned we're putting this is the, is the automation drips. When she says automation drips, we're big proponents of when you're running ads should have the first part of your process, your follow up process automated. So when a lead comes in from any source, whether it's Facebook and Instagram or Google Ads, you're automating some follow up based on whatever they inquired about. So if they inquired about Botox and they looked into your new patient promo, one of the first things we want to send them automatically is this welcome video. Some of the other things we include in that template are if you've got really good Google reviews, mention your Google reviews. If you do have influential people in town that are your customers that give you permission to kind of tout and float their names, maybe incorporate some of that into there. Right. We have, we have a couple clients. One of our clients is the official med spa of one of the NFL team's cheerleaders. Really cool thing that adds additional credibility and helps build brand upfront. So I think those are some great actionable tips. I think that makes up our magic move segment for today in terms of action items you can incorporate into your marketing program to boost results. Lauren, any other thoughts on that? Any other like second third level strategies that we have on the radar?
- [19:53]
Lauren
Yeah, actually two more Real quick. I think one that's really awesome too is you already have an established list. I'm sure all of you do. A handful of those people are probably people that have never been into your practice before. So really leveraging your text and email marketing to, to that list to start building your brand even through them. It's easy with our newsletters kind of to get in a habit of just sending a standard newsletter standing, sending our specials and things like that. Something we're starting to do is have each of your providers pick their Favorite treatment and a quote that goes with why that's their favorite treatment and then offer that as the monthly special. So for one of our practices, for example, they're doing their estheticians, doing $75 off VI peels. Um, one of their providers is doing $75 off lip filler. So it's really cute. In the newsletter, it has a photo of the provider, what their favorite quote is on that service, and then the offer associated with it. So even through your list and your newsletters to just continuing to build your brand, building your providers and building up your team that way, too, is a really cool way to kind of still engage that list of people that you have that might already be established with you. Maybe it's somebody that comes and gets Botox all the time, but they see your provider and they love the offer for a facial and they want to try something different too. So definitely kind of pushing that down the line, too. Don't just think that because someone's been to you. They know you and know your brand well, but keep pushing those things. Even with the list that you have.
- [21:19]
Ricky Shockley
Yeah, you need to continue telling your story. You don't build connection and a relationship based on one interaction. So you probably have patients right now that have been in for their first Botox treatment. Continue to develop that relationship through emotional connection by showing personality. I really think showing personality and telling your story and being authentic is the best way to build an element of brand into what you're doing. So I really like that idea, too. I think that's going to be really effective too, because it's, I think, unique and. And tends to probably connect at a deeper level than just a standard promotional link. So really cool idea, Lauren. Love that.
- [21:53]
Lauren
Yeah. And then I think one of the other things, too, that's a really good application of this is with a lot of our services, especially ones that are a little different. Maybe it's not just a standard Botox or facial with some of the things that maybe it's a concern that people have, but they don't really know exactly how to go about or what the appointment's going to look like. Some of our practices incorporate videos on each page of their website that talk about what the treatment is and what the process looks like on your first appointment. So maybe they walk you through, hey, you're going to come in, check in at the front desk, sit down in our consultation room. We're going to talk through X, Y and Z. Then you can choose if you want to proceed with treatment. Here's what Treatment looks like and walks you down that way. So that also builds a perception of your brand too. That's you're. You're for the people. Like, you want people to be comfortable when they come in. You want them to be happy and excited about treatment, not scared, like, oh, you're poking me with needles in my face. Right. But you're providing a comfortable and relaxing atmosphere that gets them excited about those goals too. So not just that you're somebody who's going to get somebody in and out the door, but we're providing a nice experience when they're there and that you really care about them as a person too, and their results. So I think even just short little iPhone clip videos of one of your providers talking about their favorite treatment and what that looks like for them or that process looks like, pop it on your webpage as a YouTube link and get people comfortable with it that way too, as they start to learn more.
- [23:16]
Ricky Shockley
Yeah, this I'm reading Good to Great by Jim Collins right now. And one of the things he talks about is most of the great companies, they work based on the flywheel effect, incremental improvements. And I think as business owners, sometimes we're always looking for the thing that's just going to take us from wherever we are now to like triple the amount of success overnight. And that's really not how most success is created. It is, it is this incremental approach to improvement. And we really adopted that. And I like this idea because most people that hear this go, okay, whatever, that's not gonna, that's not gonna make or break me. And they'll brush it off. But I guarantee you that's going to make a difference and it's going to be a notch in your belt that's at least going to make an incremental improvement to everything that you do. Because when people, my wife and I were just doing this over the weekend searching for some local businesses and you.
- [23:59]
Lauren
Just gonna ask you to bring this up, Ricky.
- [24:00]
Ricky Shockley
I think you type in a Google search and you get to a website and you're trying to kind of figure out who to trust and like, what do they actually say about the service? And. And so much of the content that's on the website is just boilerplate, like Q and A information about the service. If people performed a search and got to your website, they're already kind of interested in the service. You need to make them feel comfortable specifically moving forward with treatment from your business with your providers. So these videos, it can be something as simple as Lauren Said like a cell phone video of one of your providers going, oh, here's what it looks like when you do Botox. Here's how we think about Botox and injectables. Here's our philosophy, here's why we do what we do, here's the process. That's the kind of thing that can help you differentiate and push somebody over the finish line in a competitive landscape. So yeah, I think every page of your website should probably have a video, even if it's just an iPhone video of the owner or the provider talking about the service, how your philosophy, your why, backstory, what the patient experience looks like and pretty much everything in between. So good, good tip. Cool. All right. With that, we are going to move to our next segment which is Follower Q A. So this is our second week doing this. If you have questions, please go to Instagram medspa Magic Marketing on Instagram. You can message us there or email us. Support magicmarketing.com that's supported spa magicmarketing.com and just put podcast question in the subject line. So these are all actually from Instagram, Angelica, she's kind of the head of our internal sales and marketing branch of our business. She gathered some of these via an Instagram post. So we're covering these in an Instagram post, but we're going to do those these in the video because I think these were great questions that are hopefully going to add a little tidbit of knowledge to help you level up your marketing and management here. So, Lauren, first question is, what CRM do you all recommend? Loaded question.
- [25:52]
Lauren
Honestly, for me, it's a super easy answer, at least from the ones that we've used with our clients. Zenotia would definitely be the number one choice for us. Most of those reasons, like I said, because of a lot of our clients use it. But it's also just the easiest one that we've found to be able to use. Gives you access to a lot of different target segments and ways to segment your reporting, your client lists, things like that, who's coming in for what treatments and who hasn't tried others. It's just simple. It has everything really in one place. It works really well. It has what's called Open API, so it can communicate between different platforms too. So we use that a lot with go High level to communicate data in terms of our leads who have booked and paid for appointments. I'm sure there are plenty other good ones out there. But like I said, that's just the one that a lot of our clients use. That's really friendly, user friendly and easy to set up as well as they have a good support team that typically helps out too.
- [26:44]
Ricky Shockley
Yeah, and I think the caveat for us is just know our recommendation is coming from the marketing side. So we love that because we want reporting data, we want to be able to make better marketing decisions and we can get that data in our experience easiest from Zenoti. Lauren, real quick, if you had to kind of say our clients, the ones that they use, where do you feel like people are generally pretty satisfied just in terms of the practice side use, like dealing with patients, booking appointments, flexibility. If you had to kind of bucket those, which ones, which ones would you say are like on the thumbs up side just as a general rule or like I don't know where we don't feel super comfortable with these?
- [27:21]
Lauren
Yeah, thumbs up side. I definitely say people love Zenoti. Mango Mint is one too. It's a little bit smaller, but our practices who use it love it. Boulevard is also a really good one that people like with ease of use. Some of the no gos are more tough ones for us or Aesthetic Pro. That one is pretty outdated, I think, and it's just challenging to kind of use the features and the reporting and things like that. And then Aesthetic Record kind of depends on which side you're on of it. If you're just using Aesthetic Record as it is, it's a little more challenging as well. Reports are really, really limited. If you use their Lead AR software, which is basically Go High Level too. That one is really helpful if you're going that route.
- [28:01]
Ricky Shockley
Lauren, with the Lead ar, this has come up more and more. So for those of you who aren't familiar Aesthetic Record, they have their own version of GoHighLevel. Go High Level is basically a marketing side CRM. It's the one that we use to do a lot of our lead nurture and tracking of leads into booked appointments. So up optimizing for that process, automating that process and measuring those stats. We use Go High Level for a lot of that. Aesthetic Record adopted their own version of GoHighLevel and they call it Lead AR. We just had a client though that actually went through a pretty extensive project to go away from Lead ar. I don't know off the top of my head what the reason was. Lauren, do you have any insight on that? Maybe not. But you know what the reason was for wanting to get off of Lead ar?
- [28:42]
Lauren
Honestly, I don't know.
- [28:43]
Ricky Shockley
Okay, we'll probably ask on that. Maybe we can Report back to you all because in our experience, I think it does a decent job. Like it's basically high level, layered inside of aesthetic record, does most of the things we wanted to do. But I'll get some more insights as to why they switched away because they did switch to Zenoti. Okay, so that's our recommendation for CRM marketing side. It's go high level for us. Practice management side. If we had to pick a winner, it'd be Zenoti. But really, I think the one thing, if you're spending money on marketing, you want a public API so you can make sure you can connect data. If your EMR does not have the ability to connect data, you're going to be at a disadvantage in terms of your ability to analyze your marketing investment. So there are other things, right? You can use mailchimp for some automation tools. Just personally, we don't have a lot of hands on experience with that at this point. All right, Lauren, you want to roll with question two?
- [29:32]
Lauren
Yeah. Question two is how do you use blog posts to boost SEO without getting into keyword cannibalization?
- [29:42]
Ricky Shockley
So this person that asked this question has obviously listened to a lot of our content because those are very technical terms, keyword cannibalization. But I'll explain the concept real quick. So I have a video on our YouTube channel that basically argues against blogging as an SEO strategy for most local service based businesses. I won't go into every detail of that right now, but this question, what it's asking is, is how do we avoid keyword cannibalization if we're going to blog post do blogs? I'll give you the quick scan here. If your blog posts are optimized for local search queries, you're probably creating this issue we call keyword cannibalization. So if you have a page on your website, that's I'll give you a great example. We had a client in Austin, they had a service page which is Coolsculpting in Austin. But then they had like five different blog posts that were also optimized for Coolsculpting Austin. Like Benefits of Coolsculpting in Austin FAQs for Coolsculpting in Austin. If you're adding location based keywords to your blog posts, you're probably going to create an issue with keyword cannibalization. What that means is you now have two pages on your website that are optimized for the same search. Right. If I'm looking for this service in this town, Google now doesn't really know which page they should be showing to the search user. That doesn't really make sense as just a user experience initiative. Right. We want to make sure that we have one page that answers every question you could possibly have about the service. So I would recommend not segmenting that into a blog post that should be on your service pages. So that's my quick. My quick tip is just make sure there's not location information in your blog posts. If you want the full analysis of why we don't recommend blogging for SEO, just Google blogging for med spa SEO. And I think our video comes up pretty, pretty much toward the top there. So, Lauren, any other thoughts on that?
- [31:24]
Lauren
No, I think that sounds great. You ready for the next one?
- [31:26]
Ricky Shockley
Yep. I'll jump back up. Actually, we're going to one other. Actually, I'll do that because that's a weird one, I think because we have this one, which is. Would you talk a bit about local service ads on Google?
- [31:37]
Lauren
Oh, I didn't even realize I skipped one.
- [31:39]
Ricky Shockley
Sorry. Real quick on this one. This will be a short answer. Local service ads. If you Google something like Plumbers near me, you'll see at the very top you've got this little thing that says Google guaranteed next to the search results. See, we don't do a lot of this. So I'm just going to make sure. I'm not saying anything that's inaccurate here, but you'll generally see, of course, plumbers is not showing for me. I don't know. Let me see if I can find AC companies near me. Lawyers. I know is a big one where this. These will show up. Okay, perfect. AC services. It'll say AC services and it'll have a book button and like a get phone number and it kind of looks like the Maps results. So that is what the. The Google local service ads generally looked like. Or Google guaranteed. Those are basically pay per call. It's a pay per call model for the most part that's only available in certain industries. In the healthcare space, it's like hair salons and nail salons. So it's not available for med spas as of now. Something to keep on the radar as they expand that offering. I think local service ads will be an element to add into your marketing mix. But for now, just know with Google, you're really relying on organic search or traditional Google search ads. There are no local service ads available. So I'll jump to the next one for you, Lauren, which is something that comes up for us all the time. How do we balance trying to attract high ticket patients and not just deal seekers through our advertising. Complicated question, I know.
- [33:08]
Lauren
Yeah, we could talk about this one for hours, but I think it kind of really ties into what we were talking about earlier here in the podcast with branding and positioning ourselves well too. A lot of the way that we do this to one is by upfront explaining the other purchase decisions that we talk about. So we make our reputation big on the ad. So whatever your star rating is on Google, if it's something to be excited about, we use provider images. So we're already starting to build factors of know, like and trust in that initial decision point of the ad, not just showing the promo price. Same thing we talked about through the automation drip. So starting to build on those factors too. And then from there action changes attitude faster than attitude changes action. So getting somebody to come in and have an authentic experience, experience with the practice, fall in love with your providers, your space, the way that you do things, that's really how you're going to have high ticket clients and people that return with you for months and years to come. Getting them in the door is honestly the easier part in terms of using those discounts to attract new patients at a cost effective strategy or cost effective way. And then once they're in is how we turn them into high ticket clients. It's the experience that they have, it's falling in love with their results and wanting to return with you for months and years to come. But definitely upfront taking care of knowing where people are, doing the correct things with your location and demographic targeting with your ads. So for example, if you're targeting an hour and a half away and you're pushing a steep discount, people are probably coming to you just for that discount, not because of your reputation or your location. So we get really specific with our location targeting as well as in the ad graphics showcasing our results and our providers and our team as well.
- [34:56]
Ricky Shockley
Yeah. So I think the great tidbit is if you're running offer based ads, discount based ads for new patients, incorporate the other things. Try to figure out how to make sure that you're reaching people where you're a convenient option. They're also choosing you because they're, they're building some emotional connection. Seeing your brand, seeing your provider on thing, understanding your Google reviews, I think that's really important. That'll help optimize for patient quality. I'll take one step back and add one layer to this which is you have a trade off of decisions that you're making. Right. Every action or Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. So as you turn one knob up, something else gets turned down. These things are all kind of intertwined. So when we talk about running new patient exclusive discounts, like back to the previous point, what we're doing is we're lowering our acquisition costs when we do that. Though, when you run discount based ads, we do understand that some of the people coming to see us are going to be discount shoppers. I'll add this little tidbit. Sarah Schickman on our podcast, I mentioned this a lot. She mentioned when she audited her practice before she sold it, of her top 20% spenders, 80% of them originally came from Groupon. Even your high quality clients like to feel like they're getting a good deal. So I think that's an important thing to keep in mind. But I always use this, this term catch rate, or effective cost of customer acquisition, which basically means when you're running a discount based ad to get us somebody in the door for the first time and you're lowering your acquisition cost, you're accepting that maybe 50% of those people aren't going to be sticky clients that are your high spenders, that are, that are going to be around for years. But by casting that wider NET of the 10 people that you got for that thousand bucks, five of them are good. That's an effective cost of customer acquisition of $200. If you take that discount off the table, it makes it more challenging to win that person over for the initial visit. So your acquisition costs are way higher. You might pay three or four hundred dollars to get a single patient through the door. So for that same thousand bucks, yes, you didn't see the five discount shoppers, but instead of having five good clients left over from the group of ten, you maybe only saw three total to begin with. So the catch rate, after all things are sorted out, is generally better when you incorporate those discounting strategies because you make it easier for people to choose you if it's a tie. Right? So if they're like, this practice has a good reputation and they're local and this practice has a good reputation, they're local, but they've got a really attractive offer to get me in the door for the first time, just tipping the scales in your favor to increase the chances more people choose you over the alternative. So that's why we like that strategy. You do have options. There are trade offs. We talked about some of this internally this morning. But just know if you're, if you're seeking only your Ideal clients, you're going to pay a premium to reach those people directly without any sort of discount or promotion involved. And if you break down the math, we've got videos on this, the math can look really shaky in terms of the ROI calculation. So I would just be wary of consultants and people telling you because I know it's what practice owners want to hear. I don't want the discount shoppers. I just want good quality, high paying clients. Well, there's a trade off you're making when you try to win only on reputation and only seeing the high ticket clients. And that trade off is really high acquisition costs that can really throw a wrench in your ROI calculations from your advertising. So next question here is this, is this your rolling to you, Lauren. This last one?
- [38:07]
Lauren
Yes. Yep. Last one is how can I rank higher in the Google Maps pack?
- [38:14]
Ricky Shockley
Yeah, I think this is easier than most people think. Go. I always use this in my sales calls.
- [38:19]
Lauren
Go.
- [38:19]
Ricky Shockley
Google best pizza in Chicago. What you'll see is the businesses that show up have a large volume of reviews. It's not the mom and pop that has perfect five stars showing in that Maps pack necessarily. It's the business that has 13,000 reviews because a lot of people have been there. Now we can't get away with a low reputation as a med spa. So it's important to maintain the five star rating. But if you can maintain a high star rating, the next most important thing is review volume and recency. How many people are actually leaving Google reviews? That is the proxy vote for how many people are doing business with you. So star rating priority number one, review volume priority number two, review the next things. There are your category tags. Make sure your category tag is correct. Make sure your service list is filled out, meaning everything that you offer is in your service list. I think those are the easy things, Lauren. Anything to add to that in terms of bells and whistles to optimize for where you're showing up in the Google Maps results.
- [39:15]
Lauren
I would say too optimizing your description so making sure it's keyword rich too and explaining all the services that you offer and then keeping your photos up to date and adding new things to your posts and photos as well just to keep the listing up to date too.
- [39:30]
Ricky Shockley
Yeah. And if you have new patient promos, make sure that they're, they're, that information is contained in your Google listing. Again, this is, this is your chance to develop that connection. Right. Have nice photos. Make people feel as comfortable and confident coming into your spa over the other options that they have available. But those are the simple things that impact rankings. So when you get emails out of the blue from somebody saying I'm a marketer, I'm going to help you rank better in the Google Maps pack. It's not that easy to game. It is. It is a pretty good representation of the most reputable, most popular providers. So it's kind of a catch 22 because to be in the Maps Pack you have to be the most reputable, most popular provider. And to be the most reputable, most popular provider, you need to be in the Maps pack. So I understand as a catch 22 if you're a newer business that's going to take some time. You might want to look more at Google Ads and other places to generate business early on. But as you become more established, if you you can maintain a high star rating, Google Organic search via the Maps Pack is going to be a more consistent source of your business. So that's it for our Q and A segment today. We'll wrap with Mindset Minute. Today we're going to talk about the leadership ripple. Whether you realize it or not, you're setting the emotional tone for your entire business. If you walk in stressed, rushed or reactive, your team feels it. When you show up with clarity, comparison, compassion and confidence, that energy spreads too. Leadership is not about having all the answers. It's about being the kind of person others feel safe following. So today, take a breath, check your energy and lead in a way that lifts the room, not just runs it. Thanks everyone for tuning in. This podcast is a production of Med Spa Magic Marketing. If your Med Spa or aesthetic practice is in need of digital marketing, search services, help with advertising on Facebook, Instagram, Google Lead generation and booking more appointments, please visit Medspamagicmarketing.com.