A (0:00)

Foreign Ricky Shockley, back with another Wednesday thought, it's been a while. These are shorter videos where I'm just sharing kind of something that's on my mind. Recent news or some quick tidbits. And today I wanted to talk about what we saw over the summer months. So on our client roster, July was an exceptionally slow month. We still had clients that were performing really well. Over half our clients still had under $150 cost to acquire a customer on something like Botox. But on the tail end, there were some clients that really struggled with conversion rates and numbers that just looked really bad. We've seen that bounce back a little already in August. But that news or that that trend forced me to go do a little bit of research. And I stumbled across this Abbey V earnings report from April 2025 where the CEO shared that at that point Botox sales were down 11% year over year and Juvederm sales were down 20% globally year over year. Right. That's very interesting. I didn't at that point up until recently realized that that was the case. We're so used to these things growing and the people talking about the esthetic space growing. But the reality is year over year we've seen a decline in overall sales. So a few things that I want you to pay attention to and some takeaways in terms of action items. Number one is I would caution you about overanalyzing year over year comparisons. When I started in the marketing space in 2009 as a professional, from 2009 to 2020, we had pretty slow incremental growth on a lot of things. So it was easy to look at something like Google Analytics data for your website and look at year over year trends and look for year over year growth. Since COVID we've seen a lot more volatility. Right. You had a drop during COVID a post pandemic boom and a leveling off. One of the other things I saw here was that these sales on Botox were the slowest they've been since the post pandemic boom. So number one is I would caution you about doing not only month to month analysis. Right? Why is August so much worse than or why is July so much worse than June? We were doing so much better in the spring. There is seasonality and there are a lot of market conditions that impact that. So I'd caution you about those month over month. And even at this point, year over year comparisons, just look at the strategies that you're implementing to attract new clients. Use common sense and Discernment to make sure that you're positioning yourself as attractively as possible. But I would caution against thinking something's majorly wrong if you're looking at month over month or year over year comparisons. So number two is that means there's a smaller pie, right? There's less people spending money on Botox or spending less money on Botox, and there's more competition. So that means you're going to have to fight harder for your same piece of the pie and potentially even a smaller piece of the pie as long as those market conditions are present. Now, we've already seen looks like August may be rebounding a little bit from what we saw over the summer. But again, if that holds true or you run into months or seasons where that's the case, remember that means you have to fight harder for your share takeaway. Number three is there's less margin for error. When that's the case in boom cycles like we saw with Semaglutide, you can get away with slopping, sloppy marketing, sloppy operations, because the reality is the market is growing so dramatically that you're able to capture a growing piece of the pie without having to do much work in tighter conditions. You have to be dialed in, right? Your messaging, your positioning, your promotion and pricing strategy offer attractiveness. You have to be providing white glove service from lead to consult to service and post appointment holistic treatment planning. All of those things have to be really dialed in. So we've talked about a lot of that stuff on the podcast, but this doesn't mean you can't succeed. It just means you're going to have to be dialed in to make sure that you still capture your piece of the pie. Especially when you have rising competition, right? Market down 11%. And for all of us, increase competition means we need to fight harder for this. You also have to look at your positioning. If you're, if you're holding to really high price points, if it's working for you, great. But if you're holding to high price points and you feel like you're struggling to retain or attract clients, you might want to look at how you can increase volume with slimmer margins per client while still boosting overall revenues and profitability. Takeaway number four Is opportunity still there? In down markets, weak practices are going to pull back. Stronger practices can grab more market share. So that's important to remember. This can be a time to be more aggressive. Also, retention and education, I think, matter more than ever if we want people to choose us for that first visit and to stay with us on an ongoing basis. They have to feel like we're providing a level of skill, knowledge, expertise and results that are unparalleled. And that education component, communication component is really important. Consumer demand is obviously still there for aesthetics. It's just now flowing more to the best, most efficiently run businesses. So while global sales are down, the exact reason, I think that's the exact reason to double down on fundamentals. Use this as an opportunity to reset, to look at everything that you're doing and to dial in to get to the next level. I hope that was helpful. Hopefully we see a little bit of a boom back here in the fall. And again, this is not an excuse to see bad results. It's just an awareness of the market conditions and a quick update on some of that news. Thanks and see you on the next one. 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, 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 medspamagicmarketing.com Sam.