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Med Spa Success Strategies
Profit vs. Growth: How to Align Your Med Spa Marketing for 2026 Success
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I think it's the best call reporting and attribution platform on the market. Hey practice owners, Today I wanted to talk about alignment between our marketing and our business and growth goals. We all have different things we're trying to accomplish in our businesses, different speeds at which we're trying to obtain those goals, and our marketing strategies need to align with what we're trying to accomplish. So this is a blank canvas. There are a lot of different directions we can go with our marketing and marketing can accomplish different things for our business. So getting clarity and alignment I think is really, really important and that's what we're going to talk about today. I just got off a call with our team where we were talking about this related to one specific client and some of the things that we've done for them that have been really successful and some campaigns that are struggling and some of the reasons why. And also giving the client a clear picture of like hey, when we say something is or isn't working, that's probably too black or white. Here are the trade offs that you make between different strategies and really depending on what you're trying to accomplish in your business, we might lean one direction versus the other. What is our risk tolerance too? Right? These are all things that come into consideration. So that's what we're going to talk about today. Alignment. So let's talk about the first thing which is long term revenue growth verse short term profitability and making sure our marketing strategies are aligned here. So when you see case studies and marketing agencies throwing out a result It's a surface level result a lot of times. Right. It's like how many patients did we acquire? That only tells us a small portion of the picture. What types of patients, how much were they spending, how profitable are they? Are they coming back for recurring service or they want off package sales? There are a lot of things that go into that. And the first thing we have to get clear on is are we trying to build maximum profitability on an individual interaction today or are we trying to position ourselves long term for maximum growth 24, 36, 48 months from now and beyond? And so that's step one here. Let's get clear on that. And if we want to do a little bit of both at the same time, that's fine. But different strategies take us in different directions. We've talked about this before, but if the goal is to maximize profitability today, I'm willing to pay more in customer acquisition costs as long as the gap between customer acquisition cost and gross margin on my initial sale is big enough. So what do I mean by that? If I'm able to sell like let's use emsculpt. I think this is a quintessential example that works well. If we're selling $5,000 Emsculpt packages with a thousand dollar customer acquisition cost, that creates a pretty big profitability number on initial package sale. But the volume of clients we're seeing is pretty low. Right. If I'm spending $10,000 a month on ads and I have a customer acquisition cost of $1,000, I'm only seeing 10 Coolsculpting clients per month. So I'm only seeing 10 new clients in my med spa. Those people might be generating 40, $50,000 in initial visit revenue from package sales. And so it creates a pretty big profitability gap. There's very successful from a short term profitability standpoint. But long term, I'm not building a CL that's coming back for recurring service at an efficient rate, you know, 12, 24, 36 months from now and beyond. Right. You look forward three or four years from now. If I want to maximize revenue growth, I need as many people as possible coming back for recurring services every month. And that strategy does not align with that growth goal. So if we're in need of short term profitability, great strategy. If our goal is to maximize long term growth potential, I want to lean in a different direction. Right. I would want to find a cost effective way to maybe build my injectable client base. So I have a bunch of people who are coming back to my practice three or four times a year for recurring service spending, 1500 $2000 a year. That's going to put us in the best long term growth position. So let's kind of trade off. One is do we want to optimize for profitability today or long term revenue growth? And there's a middle ground there. You can, you can kind of find the gray area where you're kind of getting a little bit of both in certain directions. But to illustrated at the extremes, that's decision one that we need to make. The second decision we need to make is quantity versus quality. And I want to illustrate this point clearly because when we optimize for quantity, meaning butts in seats, we do generally see that that still gives us the largest absolute volume of patients left over and the best financial growth forecast. So what do I mean by that? If we use a discount based strategy that's designed to get butts in the seats for, let's say injectables, to make the example easy, I might see 10 clients for every thousand dollars. Even if only four of those clients are good quality clients have four clients that are good for $11,000. That gives me an effective customer acquisition cost for the good clients I captured of $250. Right? I spent 1000. I saw 10 clients, only 4 of them were good. So I'm going to take the dollar amount spent divided by the good clients that I liked that were left over. That's generally financially advantageous verse trying to optimize for patient quality upfront. When we optimize for patient quality up front, we might only see three clients for every thousand dollars from the get go. Right? So Yes, I saw 10 and strategy one with the discount strategy with only four good ones. So relative percentages, I'm not like my client quality is worse on strategy one, but I still have a larger absolute volume of patients left over than I do when I optimize for patient quality upfront. So understand the trade off there. If we're trying to optimize for quality upfront, you pay more in customer acquisition cost, which means a slower growth path and that we're seeing generally a smaller number of clients every month. So when we look again long term, fewer, a smaller number of people. In our recurring revenue model, MEDSPA owners, we are hosting a free training on December 18th at 3 o' clock Central to show you the exact strategies, frameworks, offers and ads that are working best for our clients right now. I don't think there are many people doing this. We're going to peel back the curtain. We're going to show you stats, ads, offers, frameworks, the service direction. Like hey, why are we putting our clients ad dollars here and not here? How do we prioritize ad spend? It's going to be my deep dive detailed crash course into the strategies that are working best for our clients right now. I'm confident that it'll transform your marketing investment and your patient acquisition for 2026. So don't miss this opportunity. If you're watching this before the deadline December 18th at 2:00pm Visit Medspamagicmarketing.com 2026 to sign up. So that's Medspa Magic marketing.com/2026 to register the next trade off that I want to discuss in terms of alignment is risk tolerance. If we're, if we're willing to see 10 clients to get four good ones. Right. I call that this probably, probably need a better analogy here than sifting through the dirt to find the gold. I don't mean to call those patients dirt, but these are the kind of clients that are just jumping from place to place for a deal. They're looking at Groupon. They're just kind of. There are the, they are the extreme discount shop that will jump to another facility for a better deal on Botox or Dysport next month. I might have seen six of those people out of 10 to get the four good ones. And the risk that you face there is provider provider alignment. Are providers having a bad experience at work? Are they frustrated? Is it, is it screwing with their comp structure, their commission structure, because their schedules are full of these bad quality clients that they don't want to see, even though again, overall volume of the good quality clients left over is good? Are we risking negative Google reviews if our providers are having experiences that are kind of iffy, where clients are coming in that are discount shoppers and they're complaining and they're causing the ruffling feathers and they're and we're putting Google reviews at risk. There's another thing we need to talk about in terms of alignment. Is that a risk we're willing to take or are we willing to pay more to acquire clients, knowing we're going to see fewer clients? And maybe our revenue growth projections are not going to be as aggressive as they would be in example one, but we're willing to do that because we don't want to take the risk in terms of provider burnout or a negative Google review. That's the next thing we need to talk about. In terms of alignment, this also might branch over into knowing your team and knowing your providers. If you've got providers that you know are really good at dealing people, they can see these types of patients that are coming in for a deal and they generally are going to have a good experience and it's not going to be an issue and they're not going to be frustrated, then you can lean into that strategy more so than if you can that maybe you have a provider that's a little bit green, they're not as good at explaining the service, their upsell, cross sell and retention rate isn't as good as. And by not pre screening for quality, you're seeing too much attrition and initial visit revenues that are really low. And like it's sort of throwing a wrench in the system because your providers don't kill it with that strategy. There's something else you need to understand in terms of alignment. Right when you talk about providers. An esthetician. This is a great example. We've got a facial ad that we like to run which is basically dropping the price of a facial to dirt cheap, like a $29 introductory custom facial. And I'll explain why we do that here too because I can't, can't mention it without explaining why. But if you use that strategy, it's reliant on maximizing at bats with the, with going into it, knowing that my provider needs to be killer at retention, thrilling and delighting the prospect, cross selling them. And we have to have a good internal strategy as a business cohesively as to how we're going to get that person or as many of those people as possible to purchase other services to upsell, cross sell and do other things with our practice after the initial visit, right? Or during the initial visit even. But that's really, really important. If your providers aren't dialed in, you don't want to use that type of strategy. But if they are and you have confidence they can upsell and cross sell somebody who's coming in for a really good deal, then that might be a really effective strategy. So provider alignment, knowing your team, really, really important. The reason I mentioned that $29 example is this is a good aside here, but if we were to do a $99 introductory facial and our customer acquisition cost is, let's just say $99 and so we're breaking even on those first visits. If I can do a $29 facial, that's so much more attractive that my customer acquisition cost is now $29, I'm not making money on the initial visit for each of those people. Right. 99 to get the $99 person, $30 to get the $30 person. But I'm seeing triple the amount of clients. So if the entire strategy is reliant on at bats that give me the option to cross sell or the opportunity to cross sell an upsell, I'd rather see three times the number of people. And so that strategy might make more sense. But alignment in terms of provider knowledge is very important. Right. So we talked about long term growth and revenue growth versus short term roi. We talked about quality versus quantity and some of the trade offs that we manage there and the importance of alignment. Knowing our team and what we're trying to accomplish in terms of hey, our team. So the next thing is understand your business goals. Are we trying to grow our like our injectors, the future of our business, we're going to be 60, 70% injectable based business. Then it makes sense to continually build that. If I'm in a time of need right now where I've got an esthetician that needs booked, I might need to run some strategic ads that align with growing the business for the esthetician. And you don't want to jam a square peg into a round hole just because you need that thing. I mentioned this a lot. It might be the case if you want to sell more microneedling packages. My contention would be the best way to do that is to build your injectable client base. And now you have people that know, like and trust you that are more likely to buy a top tier premium service that's a little bit more expensive at the standard price point. So you might have to reverse engineer into the, into the goal. But understand what you're trying to accomplish. There's who needs to be busy, right. If I've got a provider that's been with me for a really long time, I'm trying to grow the business. But I've got a provider that's pretty busy. I don't probably want to send that provider a bunch of new discount patients that probably doesn't. That probably just is not necessary. Their schedule is already busy. We can't extract more out of them. I don't need to fill their schedule with new patients that are coming in at a severe discount. Doesn't necessarily make sense to do that for someone that's already busy. But if I've got a new injector or that person's busy and it's time to get a new injector early on, it might be a really good strategy to use an aggressive discount to book that new person, assuming we're confident they're going to delight the clients. But right, that might, that might be an indication here. In terms of alignment, who are we trying to get busy and what's the next move in our business? Are we growing the esthetician based services? Do we need a new injector? So our injector busy and the opportunity for revenue growth is to get a new injector. That strategy can also change and evolve over time. One of my favorite examples in terms of let's talk about alignment in terms of pricing strategy. Mary, my wife and business partner, when we first met, she managed a high end pet spa where we lived in West Palm Beach. And her boss used this very simple strategy, but it's so effective and I love these that he did this. And you see a lot of big businesses do this too, which is if he was the new person in town, he knew he didn't have a reputational advantage so he would be the cheapest and he would do a phenomenal job. So he was providing an exceptional value early on to clients because he was the lowest price. But he was doing as good of a job as the luxury providers. And as he built the reputation from growing the client base originally from the discount based strategies, he would elevate his price points based on demand. So there might be an alignment conversation in terms of timing. Right. Are we at a point in our business or is there a provider in our business that we need to utilize a strategy for that's different than another provider that makes sense depending on the timeline of your business and what you need now. Right. Who needs busy? Very, very important. So I think the takeaway from today is make sure that your marketing is aligned with your growth goals. If you're working with a marketing team, if you've got an in house, provide in house marketing person, you're working with an agency like us, have these conversations, talk about the big picture. Where are we now? What are we trying to do in our business? What are our growth goals? How are we going to get there? What services do we want to promote? What services do we believe in? Who's the next person in our business that needs more appointments and needs to be busier and how can we calibrate this over time? Also balancing the difference between short term profitability and maximizing at bats and the gray area that lives in between those two things. So my reminder here going into 2026 is work on alignment, make sure that your marketing strategies are aligned with your growth goals and the needs of your business. There's not a one size fits all approach all the time, and you have to know exactly what you're trying to accomplish so you can communicate that effectively to your marketing provider so you can have that alignment going into 2026 and beyond. If you have any questions, shoot them in the comments below. Hope this was helpful. It.