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Med Spa Success Strategies
Recession-Proof Your Med Spa, Irresistible Offers, Reduce No-Show Rates & More
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- [00:02]
Ricky Shockley
Welcome to Med Spa Success Strategies. I'm your host, Ricky shockley, owner of MedSpa Magic Marketing. And this is where med spa 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. I felt like this week would be a good time to talk about how to recession proof your med spa. There's a lot of stuff going on in the economy. There's, there's a lot of uncertainty about things going on with tariffs, things of that nature. So hey, let's cross our fingers and hope that we don't have a recession, but let's just plan as if we do, right? Because I think these are, this is good advice regardless. So I know you might be feeling a little anxious right now. I think, I think the last six months or so really dating back to like the, the late fall, I think the economy, a lot of the stuff that happened during COVID and the years after is really caught up with us. And then you add in tariffs and the uncertainty of tariffs on top of this and I think there it's definitely this risk of an economic slowdown. No, this is not my specialty area, but it's definitely a point of interest and I want to make sure that our listeners and our clients are prepared. So I think that means getting ahead of the storm. So let's go through a little bit of information and advice on how to recession proof your med spawn. I'm hopeful this will get you thinking a little bit more clearly in terms of changes that you might want to consider making. Two things you're already doing marketing wise, financially, operationally. So the first thing is we want to double down on retention in slower times. Right. Acquisition can get expensive when markets contract, but your existing patients that already know you, now's the time to love on them a little bit more. So things that I would recommend doing to double down on retention, texting your clients. And I don't mean a mass text blast that gives them like a special for, for April, although that might be a good idea. What I mean is actually go back manually when you have a little bit of downtime in the office or your receptionist after hours. Even go text some of your top spending clients and just check in on them, ask them how they're doing, show a little extra in terms of personal touch. You can do the same thing with email. You do maybe want to consider reasons when, if we do hit the. If your med spa is maybe slowing down, giving people a reason to come back and be careful with the way that you do that. Because one of the dangers when we start to use price slashing as a strategy to get people through the door is we risk training our customers to always shop at a discount. So be very careful with the strategy and strategies and tactics you use if you're going to use price as an incentive to get existing customers coming back. Now those of you who listen to us regularly, I want to re explain this nuance. I'm a very big proponent of new patient special offers and discounts and price slashes as a first time use strategy to get new patients through the door to give you that at bat and that chance to develop a relationship and then after that really want the existing clients that I have that I have a relationship with, paying my normal price points. So another good idea, surprise them with a VIP perk. Is there something you could do like a cool little party for your VIPs that doesn't cost them anything? It isn't a sales, it isn't a sales thing. Right. It's actually just a little fun after party on a, on a Friday after work or Thursday after work. Those types of things I think can be really helpful. Number two, resist the urge to slash your marketing budget. I've conversations with clients when, whether it's the economy or just their businesses and you know they're under financial pressure, one of the first things people look to is they want to cut off their marketing. But the problem is this often will cause whatever the problem is to get even worse. So instead of cutting your marketing, I think you want to focus on lean and smart marketing and optimization. If you understand the ROI and the measurement behind your marketing results, you're going to have, you need to have the confidence that your marketing is truly an investment. And if it is, that means you're spending a certain amount of money to make a significant return, right? You're spending a thousand to make 3 to 5,000 over the next, you know, 90 days, whatever that might look like for you though. But if that's the reality is that your marketing is doing what it's supposed to do and it's producing roi, then by cutting your marketing expense, you're going to actually make all of your problems worse. So I do think there's a necessity to get lean and smart and to optimize. But resist the urge to go dark. The brands that keep showing up during the downturns, they have the opportunity to gain market share when others pull back. So as long as your numbers are still good on your promotions and Campaigns that actually might be a catalyst to offset the slowdown that you see organically. So just resist the urge to slash your marketing budget. Of course, I'm a marketing person. So you think, you know, I hope by now we've earned enough of your trust through these episodes and all the content to know that we're just giving our best advice. And I really believe that to be true. Number three, build trust, not just offers. When people are financially stressed, their buying behavior shifts. It's less impulsive, more intention based. So give them clarity. People are not going to buy on a whim. They need to have confidence in their purchase decisions. They want the smartest, most trust, trustworthy choices. So make sure that you're providing that for your clients. And also focus on emotional connection to beat a discount every time. Lauren had a really good tip on our morning call this morning that she's going to start implementing that I really liked. And this is the idea that you probably have something that you believe about the products and services that you offer. That's a little bit of a contrarian view. I would lean into some of those things in your social media content, in your email newsletters and things like that to kind of differentiate and to show people that you're thinking critically about the services that you offer to elicit additional trust. Number four, diversify revenue. You know, make sure that you've got things coming in from multiple places that are cost effective. And I would do this without adding an additional overhead expense. So the one thing I would not do when we talk about diversifying revenue, my opinion again is lasers and devices. That is, that is too much risk. It's a big expense. If the product doesn't sell, you're further in the hole. So what do I mean by diversifying revenue? Memberships are a good option. If you're not looking into memberships or maybe loyalty programs to increase retention. Do you have skin care products or add ons? One of our clients is this really cool thing they do. It's a matrix and every, every condition they've got like a service, a product and a device. They've got like several different layers of things that they can implement for a client for a specific need. That's a really good way to diversify efforts. Flash sales on gift cards I think is a good idea. So something else to maybe consider. And then number five, focus on operational excellence. I think this is the most important bullet point. It's time to clean up the back end. Right. Let's make sure that our staff are trained properly. We're maximizing every lead and opportunity to improve conversion rates. We're tracking our numbers. We're financially sound, we're not over leveraged in debt. Our front office is dialed in. Our providers are efficient. Really focusing. Focusing on operational excellence is going to allow you to survive and even thrive in a potential downturn. A recession is a place where sloppiness gets exposed. So take this opportunity to dial in your systems and you'll emerge even stronger. The reality is you're going to have competitors. This is a We talked about this in recent videos and recent news articles. The market is growing, but it's becoming more saturated in terms of competition than the growth. So I don't know what these exact numbers are, so don't hold me to this number. But if we expect the industry to keep growing on it by 15%, but the provider growth is happening at a rate of 30%, right? We've got more providers than the increasing demand justifies. So a recession is going to put businesses that aren't financially and operationally sound out of business. And the people that emerge on the opposite end are going to be stronger as a result. So again, sloppiness gets exposed during a recession. So I would really dial that in as you look to a potential economic slowdown here in the middle part of 2025. And just remember, brands that lead with empathy, consistency and value, they don't just survive downturns, they can eventually actually grow through them. Hey, practice owners. Today's news story comes from MedSpa mastery and the article title is Will Tariffs Make Botox more expensive? Here's what MedSpa owners need to know. Trade wars aren't just for economists and politicians anymore. With proposed import tariffs making headlines in 2025, med spa owners have a new concern on their radar. Will neuromodulators like Botox, Dysport and Jeuveau become more expensive? Short answer is yes, possibly. And if you're running this practice that depends on injectable treatments, you'll want to stay ahead of the curve. So as of filming this, we've definitely had the tariff whiplash going on. It's on one day, it's off the next. And I think you can see that in the markets really trying to find a settling ground here based on clarity. So there are of course implications for most businesses related to tariffs. And the key takeaways from this article highlighted at the bottom are this most injectables are imported. Botox, for example, is made in Ireland. Dysport comes from the uk Jevo South Korea. If a universal import tariff takes effect as proposed, all of these drugs will be affected. Um, Daxify is made in the US so it might dodge tariffs completely, becoming potentially more price competitive. This episode is brought to you by MedSpa Magic Marketing, my agency. We help med spas and aesthetics practices grow with more effective marketing strategies. And I know that's a vague phrase, right? That's a vague claim. So I have an offer for you. I offer this to any new prospects if you're interested in exploring any of them, another marketing option, a new agency, or just getting into Facebook, Instagram, Google Ads for the first time. I'd love to show you why we're different, what we're doing for clients. And we can do that via a one and a half hour planning session where I'll outline a specific marketing plan and I'll give you all of the blueprints that we would implement if we were to do business together. Now, you can take that, use that on your own, hire someone else to help you execute it or work with us. We really don't hold anything back on that strategy call. And I think you'll have a lot of confidence in how you manage your marketing investment moving forward, understanding some of the nuances that can help you implement more effective marketing strategies for your business. So if you want to do that, you can go to medspa magicmarketing.com hey there. Wanted to briefly interrupt the episode to make a quick ask. If you're a podcast listener, it would mean the world to us if you'd leave a review for the podcast, whether that's on itunes or Spotify, it's something I hadn't really remembered or thought of asking for. But it does help us show up more frequently so that 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. So if this is true, roughly your cost would rise 10 to 25%. There have been a lot of exemptions with the tariff plans. It's very, very hard to follow exactly what's going on. So just this article recommends kind of planning for if the tariffs hold to any extent, you're going to have maybe a 10 to 20% rise in costs. So that means a vial that costs you $600 jumps to 750. So you want a plan to adjust pricing without losing clients. Stock up wisely, diversify your injectable lineup and prep your pricing strategy. I think this is good advice. There's not the good news is in any market where this is going to have an impact and this is I'm not a fan of the tariff policy as currently instituted, or at least the rollout of it I think is is it's not being presented clearly. So that's why you have all this confusion in the markets. But if this does happen and you see this 10, 20% increase in costs of some of these products, it's going to be universal. Your competitors are going to have that price adjustment too. We also don't know how short lived this is going to be. So I think a couple of good takeaways from this article. Maybe now is a good time to stock up. Especially if if you see the news kind of go being volatile back and forth when you can make the purchases without pricing being effective, make sure you're making the purchases now to kind of stock up on supplies gives you a competitive advantage if you do have a few months where tariffs continue to be in place. Also sounds like if you've got some US based products, it might be a good idea, if you're not already doing it, to include some Daxify in your injector injection portfolio. So those are a couple cool takeaways I thought were relevant to the news of today from this article. As of filming this, it's Thursday morning on the 10th. This episode will come out on Monday. So obviously there's been a lot of change even just leading up to this podcast. So keep an eye on the news, be prepared, be aware and make sure that you're ahead of the curve in terms of strategy adjustments you might need to make as tariffs potentially affect some of the drugs that you're supplying as a Med Spa. All right, so so I know our monologue and our news stories were kind of on the same topic, which is a little doom and gloomy today. Probably just the mood I'm in maybe with with some of the stuff going on with recession talk and tariffs and just some of the volatility in the markets, but I want to shift to a little bit of a positive tone here and that's going to be our Magic Moves segment presented by Med Spa Magic Marketing. So this is the segment where we bring new ideas, shares and just what's working now in in marketing specifically, but also operations, retention, anything we can pull from our experience in the space. So I know we had a few really cool ideas here that we wanted to go over. Lauren first being the model framing. So this is a framing that we've experimented with. I don't remember Lauren how the origin of this idea, I think they wanted to do this.
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Lauren
Yeah. It started because one of our clients wanted to do a text blast for a model call because they had an injector that was newer and didn't really have her schedule filled. Needed some before and afters of her work. And so they said let's do a model call text blast. And we sent it to their list. I think it was only like a 3000 person list and the responses just flooded in so quickly. Everybody was interested it like they couldn't even keep up with it. The whole model day booked almost within like 20 minutes I think that it was. So I said why don't we roll this out in the ad space? And it's been really, really cool since then and we've seen a lot of good stuff coming from it across facets.
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Ricky Shockley
Yeah. So. So real quick, before you get into the details of the model call framing and how we could apply that to our ads. And when we say ads for this purpose, we're talking about meta. So Facebook and Instagram ads. If you're spending ad dollars there, this will hopefully be a really helpful tip to improve performance. And if you're not and you want to get in the game, good place to start potentially. But real quick caveat to that is I was listening to Gary Vaynerchuk podcast recently and he was talking about using your organic social media posts as a testing round for like, hey, what's the thing? What are the things that resonate best? That's probably a good place to like restructured a little bit and turn it into an ad. So what Lauren's talking about was a text. But I think offers and offer framing, your text list is a really good place to test those things. If you send a text blast out to your existing clients, the people that already know like and trust you and love you and those people don't bite, you can pretty much guarantee that it's going to stink when you try to run ads against it. So good example of using that as a testing round. If your existing audience, if something resonates with your existing audience, probably a pretty good chance that's going to be a better performing ad as well. So Lauren, the model call framework, give us the overview of what that strategy entails for us.
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Lauren
Essentially the model call framework is basically exactly what we do in terms of promo. So not much changes in terms of what the offer is or what we're running. So you probably hear if you watch the podcast, a lot that we do offers like 20 units of Botox for $179 or one syringe of filler for $250 off, things like that. So the offer stays the same, but we frame it as model call as the title. And then right below the subtitle would be what the promo is and what it's for. And then we use some images on the side with some badges, teach about the practice or the provider too. So it could be a provider image with three badges that say their ratings, how long they've been in business, and maybe where you're located. Or we do a cute model photo if you have models that have already worked with you. Like, one of our clients is the official med spa of one of the cheer teams. So we have one of those models on the ad and it says, join the cheer team of XYZ and become a model for the spa. So we frame it like that. Go ahead, Ricky.
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Ricky Shockley
So no, go ahead, continue. Sorry.
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Lauren
No, you're fine. So that's kind of the framing. And I think why it stands out is like what we always say, it's just different. It's not a lot of what other people are doing. It's easy to just say 20 units, 179. But it's definitely a different angle. And it also provides some incentive for the consumer to want to come in too. Right. I think it's a cool feeling to feel, oh, I'm going to get to be a model. I'm going to sit in this chair, I'm going to get cool pictures taken, and maybe I'll be used in the ads too. So I think that framing really stands out in two different ways. A couple things really cool that have come from it for us, ads wise, are a huge decrease in cost per lead. I've had some clients where we can't get their cost per lead under 20, $25 and their model call cost per lead is at $12. So huge decrease in cost per lead. It also helps when things are getting stale. So if you've run the same offer for a really long time in some markets, it does get stale. So it's just something different. And then from that too, like I said, with the incentive, we've actually seen a much lower no show rate with this ad than we have standard Boto. Um, Ricky, I don't even think we've talked about this yet, but the client that I just compared it for, who's been running it now for two or three months, their no show rate, they've only had one person, no show from this model call ad. And previously it was a 20% no show rate or so. So I think having that incentive to come in makes it, oh, this is going to be a fun, exciting visit to come for. So it adds in that layer of wanting to be there rather than no showing that visit too.
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Ricky Shockley
Yeah. Then you're kind of like you're making them feel like a VIP and more important just based on the framing.
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Lauren
Right.
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Ricky Shockley
So they're, they're not like, well, I'm just a customer who responded to a coupon. It's, oh, I'm gonna, I'm going for a model call. Like, imagine you're texting your friend and you're like, oh, I got a really good deal, so I'm going in for Botox. And so I responded. I got selected for this model call at a med spa. Just seems like a cooler thing to be a part of. Right. I think framing that's just goes. Goes to show you though how important strategy is. We're talking about the same offer, the same price point. And Lauren's giving an example here where cost per lead was lowered in half and no show rate dramatically reduced just by coming up with a more creative framing. And this is a never ending process because once these things start to work, people start to adopt them and they become stale. Right. People catch on. You train people to tune out when something becomes very normal and overused. So I love this idea that it was super cool. Kudos, Lauren, for implementing that. Exciting to see the early results. I know one of the concerns I had early on was like, how do we, how do we make this seem authentic? Because is this really a model call or is this just our clever way to get people in for a discount? We talked about some different ways to do that. Lauren. What, what did we kind of settle on? Like, how do we get, how do we keep this rolling in perpetuity? So without like an end date on it, without it seeming inauthentic, basically we need a refresh every month of like new models. Is that kind of what we settled on?
- [18:55]
Lauren
Essentially. So some of the language that we use is like, our next model week is next week. So we have it kind of like a rolling thing where most weeks are end up being mod weeks or certain models and then we do end up using their photos in a lot of different stuff. So as soon as we are able to get before and after pictures, or even just pictures of them getting treated, we start using it right away so people see active images being added in and used. We'll use it many places. So ads, the website, your landing pages, boosted posts, a bunch of different facets where you can use them. But just so people are seeing updated content all the time and that it really is being used.
- [19:31]
Ricky Shockley
Yeah. Even if you're just using it as like a rolling, ongoing list of success stories. We're looking for our next rolling list of success stories. That's why we do a model call. So we're trying to also make sure it's authentic and it's not just a bait and switch that's going to turn people off. And I think that's calibrated well the way that we've kind of rolled it out.
- [19:47]
Lauren
Yeah. The other way that our clients are using it really well I think too is for some services that are a little bit harder to sell or machines that they have that aren't pushing as much. One of our clients really wanted to push microneedling with their esthetician and they were having a hard time pushing it. So they opened up Wednesdays or model dates for microneedling. One of our other clients is doing Tuesdays are lip filler model days and they're doing it like a 50% off discount. So getting them in for that first service and getting them to try new things too. One, it gives us a lot of really good before and after content to start using for those services. And two, it also pushes a thing that isn't pushed because of that unique framing too and that sense of urgency that it's only for that one day or those couple hours.
- [20:28]
Ricky Shockley
Yeah, I love that. So hopefully that was really helpful. I think that was an easy thing to kind of copy and implement into your ads. Ads efforts and also a way to do it without being inauthentic. So hopefully we give you some help there logistically for implementation. Next thing I wanted to talk about was the importance of an irresistible offer. Had a conversation with a sales prospect last week. And to be fully transparent with us, laser hair removal has been like, draw up the double X's. We don't want to run these ads really hard to make the math work. They're commoditized. It's race to the bottom in terms of price point. There's not much retention after the initial package sale. You squeeze all the margin out. Like it's just after customer acquisition cost. It can just be not one of the Top performing ads. Let's just say that it could be a massive struggle from an advertising standpoint. So we've a lot of times recommended specifically on meta, Facebook and Instagram not running laser hair ads because it's such a needle in the haystack in terms of response rate. But I talked to a sales prospect last week and we were looking at his ads and he showed me his stats. We went over stats. I was like, and he asked me basically like, is that good? I said, that is phenomenal. So long story short, he was basically paying something around $50 in customer acquisition cost. His lead cost was about $10 and he was converting about 20% of them. So $10 for a lead on Facebook and Instagram and converting 20% so $50. He was closing a new client in the door for service. Now the caveat was, but this is the interesting part of the strategy. He was using a truly irresistible offer. He basically was saying $30 for your first session on a small area to come, try it out and make sure you feel comfortable. Especially with laser hair when people are worried about pain. He was pretty confident that the pain threshold on his device is pretty low. And giving himself that at bat and that opportunity to develop the relationship has been extremely lucrative. So instead of what everybody else is doing, which is buy one, get one, buy four, get two, he went with a truly irresistible offer. Eliminated friction to create the initial interaction with $30 initial session for a small thing. He has his laser already paid off. He has very low consumables, so it doesn't cost him much to do that service. And he was selling for every person that came in for that test run. And they knew it was a test run. They knew that this isn't the full result. But for every person that came in for that test run, he converted, he said about 80% of them, let's even say it's 50% though that means you're paying $100 in customer acquisition cost. And his average package sale was, I don't know, 500 to $1,000. So you're creat to 10x return on your investment, return on your ad, spend on laser hair ads using a truly irresistible offer. So we talk about it all the time, coming up with creative framing like Lauren just talked about with the model call. But sometimes the easiest way to up the ante on your ads performance and to get those at bats and butts in the seats is to really go crazy with the offer. Again, you have to understand the math as it trails from the acquisition costs. If you're doing this for something like a facial. And people aren't upselling, they're not cross selling. You need to track those things to have confidence in the numbers. But one of the first goals of ads in the Med Spa space is we want at bats with people that might spend a decent amount of money with us. We want to be able to have the opportunity to develop those relationships. And we can't develop a relationship until they come through the door. So I thought that was a really good example of thinking outside of the box and going in a totally different, super aggressive direction with an irresistible offer. So for those of you that do laser hair and you're struggling with ads, performance might be something to at least experiment with, not, I don't know, those results. That was just an anecdotal example. But I do think it illustrates a greater point which we've seen play out time and time again with different ad strategies that we've implemented. Even with the facial. Lauren, we've had clients struggle with facials, but we had one client that did a crazy $25 facial offer and they paid less than $10 in customer acquisition cost. They had literally hundreds of bookings over the course of a month, I believe. Right. Was it something ridiculous? Because they were paying less than $10 to get a facial booked. So if you can do that, you're eliminating your risk because you don't have, you have low cost of goods. You can afford to pay a little bit to acquire the customer if your cost of goods are low and you're not getting, you know, eaten on the margins of that initial service. And it gave them a ton of opportunities to upsell, cross sell and retain. And even though the overall retention rate might not be phenomenal, by casting such a wide net at such a cost effective rate, that was like a home run campaign in their eyes because they were selling Sculptra and signing people up for the weight loss program. And I think that's a really good example of just leaning into the idea of an irresistible offer. Our last thing here for Magic Moves is Lauren wanted to go over just some updates on Meta's ad targeting changes. Lauren, you want to give us just the synopsis of those changes?
- [25:09]
Lauren
Yeah. So quick synopsis. Basically, in the ads targeting, we now have two categories. When we build ad audiences, those are our suggestions and then our controls. So essentially Meta is only giving us certain things that we can truly control. Now prior, what it looked like was Advantage plus Audience. You got to turn it on or off. Advantage plus Audience essentially says, hey, here's who I want you to show my ads to. Maybe that's ages 27 to 60, and maybe that's 15 miles around my practice, and maybe it's women only. Advantage plus allowed you to say, hey, Meta, this is what I really want to show my ad to. But you can go outside of that if you're able to find a lead at a better value or more leads. Um, so that was an option to toggle it on or off. Now that's not really an option anymore. Advantage plus is on all the time. And the two ways that you have are your controls and then your suggestions. Your suggestions. They essentially say, here's what I think you should show my ads to. But at any point, you can show it to people outside of that. So within those now it's the age range and it's the gender. It's actually interesting. We've seen a lot of our clients recently getting mail responses to more of our ads that we never had before. So that's something definitely to keep an eye on. And then in the controls setting, your locations are there, and then a minimum age is there. So the max. Minimum age. So the lowest you can go or the highest is 25. And those are the things that you can control. So you set that and they can't go below that age in case there's certain sensitive project prospects. And then your location is something that you're telling them is my control too. And they. You can't go outside of that. From there, though, basically, Meta is having the reins with your suggestions, so your age range to go outside of that and to reach additional people. So I think for us as marketers, it's more challenging because we need to keep an eye on who's actually coming through our ads, see if there are more, you know, nifty ways we have to go in and build audiences in the back end of things. And for you, that's to keep an eye on what type of people you're getting through the door and what quality. Mainly for us, we see that quality starts to drop off once we hit people outside of what we really want to be targeting, especially because maybe they're too young or maybe they're driving in from too far away, or maybe they're too old for a certain promos. So it's definitely something to keep an eye on in terms of what quality people are coming in as well to pay attention to.
- [27:31]
Ricky Shockley
Yep, good updates. We got to work with what we have from the. From the platforms. We can't change the rules, so we Just got to do our best to play within the framework that we're provided.
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Lauren
Yep.
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Ricky Shockley
Cool. All right, well, that was it for today's Magic Moves segment presented by Med Spa Magic Marketing. We're going to jump into some follower Q and A next. So again, please, if you have any questions, we, we want to answer these questions. We want to be able to have more to work with for this segment. We've been asking for some reviews. I want to say thank you for all of you who have been going and leaving reviews on your podcast platforms. I've seen those popping over for the Q and A. If you've got anything that's on your mind just to struggle with your current marketing agency, your operations, your retention, anything that you're wondering about, shoot those over supported spa magicmarketing.com or shoot us a message on Instagram. If you're on Spotify, I believe you can leave a comment in the Spotify section. These are a lot of questions that have come up from clients recently. So we picked a couple of the questions that have come up from clients and we threw those on our follower Q and A for today. So the first one, we had clients wanting to test this on and off and I think you guys played with it last week. Lauren on the team, Advantage plus Creative. So some we had people ask, hey, Facebook has this feature called Advantage plus Creative. It helps me make my ads for me, we don't need a designer. This is awesome. Let's try that. So Lauren, real quick, if people want to experiment with Advantage plus Creative on Facebook, for those of you that are in the weeds on Facebook, what does that generally look like right now?
- [28:57]
Lauren
I hate to say it this way, but.
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Ricky Shockley
And that's the only answer we. Yeah, yeah.
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Lauren
It is not good. It is definitely a struggle. If you want to experiment with it, it's experiment so you can see how bad it is. That's typically what we say when our clients ask us. Sure, I'll do it. I'll show you. And then you, you let it generate the result and send a picture. Essentially they pull one photo that they think matches and then puts a headline on it that they pulled from whatever you gave them. So when I tested it for a client last week, it was for a branding ad or know like and trust ad. And they pulled a photo of like four women in a laboratory and they made the title number two in the nation. So that was what came from it. So terrible. Essentially we would get nothing from the ads, but it's definitely worth seeing. You know what it comes up with it's interesting. Maybe someday it'll get better. And you know, I know ChatGPT is even working on a version of that too. That's also pretty horrible. But at some point, maybe it'll get to where we think it can be.
- [29:53]
Ricky Shockley
For all the advances in AI, even the ChatGPT and the the meta models for how they come up with actual creative is pretty bad. I was playing with Chat GPT, the Canva. For those of you who aren't familiar, Canva is like a really easy do it yourself graphic design tool. We use it as an agency. Lots of marketers and small businesses use Canva and They've got an AI plugin with ChatGPT and you can give it prompts. And I was shocked at how bad those were too. Like really completely unusable. So again, will it get there at some point? I'm sure just nowhere near. Nowhere there, nowhere close yet in terms of AI. For all the cool things that AI can do now. Okay, next question on our list was how much should a med spa be spending on ads? This was actually the question I got from that same person I talked to who's doing the laser hair promo that was getting really good results. It's kind of pushing, like, what, what should we be spending? And I think this question has multiple layers. I'll add my two cents. And Lauren, if you want to fill in the gaps, let me know what you think. So the first thing is you have to kind of reverse engineer into the business goal to some extent. What, what are you trying to accomplish? How many appointment bookings do you want? What is it going to take to get you from wherever you are now? So if you're at $100,000 a month right now as a business and you want to get to $200,000 a month or $150,000 a month, what I would recommend is, is go download our ROI calculator. You can leave a comment on this video or on the podcast, just write ROI calculator and maybe put your email address and we'll send you that ROI calculator because that can help you project pretty accurately via advertising, how you can get from point A to point B with certain amount of ad spend. So that's the first thing you need to kind of reverse engineer into the goals. Second thing is, if your marketing is actually working, it really is an investment and not an expense, then the sky's the limit. And my argument would be as long as you have the capacity to take the appointments, you want to be as aggressive as possible. And the only limiting factor there is the size of your audience. And that's where we get into an issue where we talk about reach to frequency cap or saturate market saturation, like their ad fatigue or some of the things that we talk about in this regard. But it's basically, hey, we're spending so much money that it's making our ads incrementally less efficient because we're reaching the same audience over and over and over and over and over again. So that's not a clear answer in terms of the numbers. So now if I had to ballpark it for a single location med spa that's, that's healthy and looking to grow, I would say somewhere in the ballpark range of $4,000 minimum per platform, $3,000 minimum, I would say per platform. So if you're running ads on Facebook or Instagram, I think you want to be at least in the $3,000, $4,000 a month range. And same thing with Google. And to give you a little illustration of what that's going to do for you, at three or $4,000 a month per platform. At $3,000 a month, if conservatively, your customer acquisition cost is 150, that's going to give you 20 new patients a month. Month. If that is not enough to reach your growth goals and keep your books full, then you're going to have to spend substantially more. So we have clients that spend $25,000 a month on advertising. So that's why I say you just need to have a realistic expectation for what it costs to acquire a customer and reverse engineer from there. So most of Our clients minimum 3 or $4,000 per platform per month per location. And I would say on the high end, once you get close to $10,000 per platform per location, you do start to experience ad fatigue, especially if that's not split across a bunch of different offers and promos. So somewhere in that range, if I just had to ballpark it. Lauren, I don't know if you have any insights on that.
- [33:26]
Lauren
No, I think that's perfect.
- [33:29]
Ricky Shockley
Okay, cool. Next one. Lauren, I know we wanted to talk about this has been something that's been coming up commonly in questions from clients for us, which is advertising for filler. Does it still work? Is it a good use of ad dollars? What's changed and any ideas? So, Lauren, you want to give us the synopsis and the questions we get around advertising for filler specifically?
- [33:53]
Lauren
Yeah, I feel like it's going around a ton right now. We've heard from it from our Allergan rep, a lot of our clients are saying similar things that filler sales have really dropped off recently, especially over the last like six to eight months or so and especially now as of very recent. I think a lot of what's happening, at least from our point of view is things are shifting towards more natural like products or different products. So things like Sculptra Easy Gel, more of those types, types of fillers that are more natural into the face. And I think a lot of the look of filler is shifting too. So I think it's really important how we frame, how we do filler. I think a lot of people are talking now, at least from my clients I've heard the buzzwords are, you know, it's making people very boxy or looking in certain ways. You can tell that they got treated rather than more of a natural look. So I think sales are down really across the board, making ads a lot more challenging to push unless our promo is really, really att. Going back to what Ricky was talking about earlier, so I have a handful of clients who are doing at least 250 to 300 off of a syringe. Some clients are doing half syringes for like a mini lip filler which is working well. But as soon as you go below that mark of having a really attractive offer, it is really challenging to push. And you can have customer acquisition costs upwards of $400 plus. So some of the things that we're testing now are more Sculptra Easy Gel type model calls pushing those types of products too. So that's kind of my two cents. Ricky, have you heard anything on your end different?
- [35:32]
Ricky Shockley
No. So while you were talking, I was just kind of interested. So I looked at Google Trends data and I did a video recently on our YouTube channel about some Google Trends data post pandemic. And if I just look at lip filler and I look at, I don't know, the last five years as a, as a trend and this is not a perfect tool, it shows a drop off specifically happening. And I don't know if this is across the board in April, but I'm, I don't know, like, I'm wondering how much of that is more of the trend in terms of like use case to Lauren and people maybe just looking for alternative products.
- [36:05]
Lauren
Right.
- [36:06]
Ricky Shockley
I think that for sure the one thing we've all seen is the trend from looking like you've had something done and it being very obvious and almost like a style choice to the goal is just to enhance your Natural youthful appearance as much as possible where people don't exactly know that you like. Subtlety is definitely the name of the game nowadays. So that's interesting though I think being on the front lines of it with our clients, we probably get even though that's anecdotal data, it's probably pretty representative of what's going on in the markets because you usually see those things anecdotally before you start to see them in trend data. So I think that's an interesting observation for sure.
- [36:40]
Lauren
Yeah. All right, last question, Ricky, I'll bump it to you. You want to talk a little bit about Google Ads and performance max campaigns?
- [36:48]
Ricky Shockley
Yep. So this is another question we've been getting, I would say a lot over the last couple of years was or people saying I'm running Google Ads but I'm using a performance max campaign style or I saw somebody the other day using smart campaigns. So on Google Ads, Google Ads are not. It's not just one product. There are a bunch of different products built into Google Ads. Performance max is a campaign type where you basically can load a bunch of different assets in and Google kind of has a freer for a looser leash on what they can show your ad for and how they can display your ad to certain users. The targeting is a little more iffy than traditional search ads. So this has been coming up more and more. I just talked to somebody recently that was struggling with ads performance and they were using performance max. I know we've got some contacts in the industry that like this campaign style perhaps maybe in certain use cases. I would say for us, the performance max campaigns have not traditionally been very effective. We've stayed away from them. Now does somebody else have a cracked the code that we haven't cracked with how to use performance max for med spas? Possibly. So I'm just giving you our experience and our data to the best of our knowledge and ability. We do not like those performance max campaigns. Do not like smart campaigns. If you're running Google Ads, the most effective way to generate a result is with a Google search campaign. That's an actual type of campaign set up in expert mode where you have full control over the campaign. I think anything less than that, you're risking. You're really just rolling the dice in terms of performance and measurement. So my 2 cents on performance max right now is thumbs down in most use cases. We really prefer Google search ads. If you're going to do performance max, I would recommend keeping that as a smaller part of your budget. Testing the results and seeing if you can maybe scale it effectively. But in general, if you're struggling with Google Ads performance, one of the things I would go look at is what is your current setup? Are you using Google Search ads and do you have maximum control? One of the one of the fastest ways I think you can check on maximum control is check to see if your conversion data is accurate. Are you actually tracking the lead captures? And then number two in your Google Ads dashboard, you can go to Insights on the left column and then look at something called Search Terms. You put all these keywords in that you think you're telling Google you want to show up for, but that Search Terms report will show you what people are actually typing in before seeing and clicking on your ad. So my additional 2 cents there on the Google Ads build out and campaign type. So I'd say no to performance. Max Long story short, we're gonna wrap today's episode with a mindset minute focused on caring first and always. In the medspa world, it's easy to get caught up in the metrics. Revenue per appointment, conversion rates, show up rates. But let's pause for a moment and remember, behind every booking is a person. Someone who may be insecure, nervous, or hopeful that this is the time they'll finally feel good in their skin. Customer service isn't about being perfect. It's about caring deeply, listening when others rush, reassuring when others sell, and doing what's right, not just when it's profitable. When you lead your team with a care first mindset, patients feel it. They trust you more, they tell their friends, and they come back. That's not just good karma, it's good business. So today, ask yourself, are we doing the right thing or the easy thing? Because in the long run, brands that care win. Especially in this space. 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 medspa Magic Market marketing. Com.