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Foreign. Back to regularly scheduled programming here with the podcast and the YouTube channel. So if you didn't watch our 2026 series, please go back and listen to as many of those episodes as you can. We jam pack and give away all of our top performing strategies, offers frameworks. Every single thing that we coach on, we give away for free in that YouTube series. So if you're struggling or you're a successful established med spawn, you're just trying to level up and you want to find greater efficiency and a greater path to growth here in 2026, second half of 2026 and beyond, go watch that. We jam pack it with value. I employ you. Please go back, listen to the podcast episodes, watch the YouTube series, think it's one of the most impactful things we do all year. Moving on. Today I have a few things on my radar and so I was just kind of prepping some notes and there are a few things that have come up in the last couple of weeks through the course of our business that I thought would be helpful to talk about this week. So I've got three different topics on the agenda here. And let's start with the first one, which is increased competition. I talked to one of our clients this week and I was astonished by this. I didn't fact check this to see if it was 100% true, but I think you all will resonate with this idea, at least in terms of just the principle. Maybe not the specifics, but this client had claimed that when they moved into their space in 2022, they that there were three med spas, three people providing the services that they offer, Botox, injectables, other med spa services in their town. And they said in their recent round of research, we're now four years post launch for them, four years after they started their business, that they now have 34 providers. So that could be ranging from like solo providers all the way up to established med spas and growing med spas. But 34 competitors when they used to have three. Three. Now that is a crazy increase in competition. And some of you, a lot of you that listen to this probably resonate with that, right? I you've been in business a little while, you're looking around and now you've got a med spa popping up on every corner. What does that mean for your business and what are some implications as it relates to your marketing, client acquisition and your growth path? Well, first of all, the client that I was talking to, when we're typically talking to our clients about marketing results, we're narrowly focused on the results of our marketing efforts. Right. So if we're running ads and Google Ads and meta ads, we're looking at the results directly attributed to those efforts. And we're making, you know, a judgment on whether or not they're within a successful benchmark range based on certain criteria. But that doesn't necessarily always look at the big picture for our client, at least not when we're looking at our immediate data sets. So I was on a call with one of our clients this week, and her numbers are good from an ad standpoint. She's acquiring clients. She's pretty busy in terms of new client acquisition. Their schedule is pretty tight here heading, heading into the end of the month. But she mentioned that there were several months in the last year or so where new patient acquisition was significantly slower than it was two or three years ago. And there are a few things at play there that I think might all of you might be experiencing, or many of you might be experiencing but not fully aware of. So I wanted to take these one by one. So the first is she was looking at new patient revenue, your new patient revenue as your schedule gets more full. This one's kind of obvious, but as your schedule gets more full, you know, in the early days of your business, the vast majority of your revenue is probably new patient revenue. And as you become a more established business, a greater percentage of your schedule is going to be comprised of existing patients. So if you've got limited availability for new patients because your schedules are more full, of course you're going to new patient acquisition might go down even when your business is growing. So you might be doing more revenue, seeing more patients, more visits with a more complete set of books. But your new patient growth might be down just in terms of absolute volume. That's possible, right? So keep that in mind. But in her case, there was something bigger at play. She was looking at total new patient revenue. And I realized when we're looking at her numbers, that even in her most successful months two or three years ago, the majority of her new patients, during those really big months where she was doing 50 or 60k just in New patient revenue wasn't coming from ads. A given month from ads for her was probably something like 10 to $15,000 in initial visit revenue from new patients. So that means 60%, 70% of the revenue coming from new patients was coming from outside of the ad space. And I don't think she was totally aware of that. So in our conversations, she was feeling like maybe something's wrong with the ads, we're not getting as much as we used to get. But the reality is there's not so much of a drop off in the ads. There was a big drop off in the business coming from other sources. And without good data, you sort of have to reverse engineer and unwind this, which we did, because she doesn't have the best her data sources and her emr. The functionality is a little bit limited, but we were able to reverse engineer this, I think with a decent amount of confidence. And if I go back to the way that I intro this conversation, her population of her town has grown about an estimated 2% in the last four years. But there's been a 1,000% increase in competition. So all of the business. Early on, when she was one of only three med spas in town, the organic, the word of mouth, the Google searches were only split between three practices. Now, the word of mouth, the convenience, the Google search results, the maps results, all of the traffic that's coming in from those sources, instead of being split three ways, is being split 34 ways. That's according to her research. Again, their research, they said that that's what they saw in their numbers. 34 competitors. When they first started, they said it was three. So even if it's not that extreme in your business, understand that there is a time where you're just like, you're making hay while the sun shines kind of thing. And that's not going to maintain forever. And so you need to have a strategy to adjust if you were getting enormous organic growth because the situation was just prime. So even GLP1s in a microcosm, we can look at GLP1s. For example, if you were running ads for GLP1s three years ago, you were killing it. You could charge whatever you wanted, you'd be as busy as you want it to be because there was limited supply and there was astronomical demand. But as demand has increased, supply has also proliferated. There is every primary care doctor, med spa, everybody that can possibly prescribe the drugs, the drug companies, direct to consumer are prescribing these GLP1s. And so now the market is split and splintered in. Everybody's getting a much smaller slice of the pie. So you can see that with GLP1s, you're not going to be able to recreate the magic of, of three years ago when there was a gold rush around this. And the same thing could be true for your med spa, just in general, if you were in a low competition area that's had an expansion in terms of competitors. So what does that mean for us and what do you do? First of all, be aware of it. Understand that you might have effective marketing, you might be doing some things well, but there could be a bunch of business that you were getting for free before, meaning you didn't have customer acquisition cost associated with generating those clients because they were organic or they were word of mouth from Google. Those types of things that now you're going to have to supplement because you're probably not going to recreate the heyday of only having to split that pie three ways when there's now 34 slices of the same pie. I want to tell you about an event that we're excited about, hosted by our good friends Stephen and Renata Roddy. It's called Modern beautycon and it's unlike any other in the aesthetic space. This is not an event for people looking for social media content or recycled influencer tips. This is for providers and owners who retire to sponsor driven sales, sales pitches and want unbiased expert led education. We're talking 19 CE credits in an intimate environment focused on one thing, a safer, more profitable practice. I'm actually going to be speaking during the virtual business Pass portion of the event and I'd love for you to join me there. If you're ready to challenge your thinking and elevate clinical standards, head to modernbeautycon.com that's modernbeautycon.com you can use code Ricky R I C KY100 to get $100 off your tickets. There's no limit on the code, so get your whole team involved. Stephen and Renata have built something special here. Don't miss it. The event is May 1st through 3rd in Boston Park Plaza, Boston, Massachusetts. So a couple things. One is you might have to start paying to acquire the customers you used to get for free. If you used to get 30,000 of your $50,000 a month in new patient revenue from organic and you need to supplement that because you still want to be hitting 40 or 50k in new patient revenue in a given month, then you're going to need to do that with more aggressive advertising. That's just the reality. So the traffic that you were getting for free before, you're now going to have to pay to acquire. And that's with Facebook, Instagram ads, Google Ads, and maybe some other sources. That's the reality. You're probably going to have to pay for traffic you used to get for free. So that's kind of takeaway number one here. Takeaway number Two action item number two for you if this feels like it resonates, is you're gonna have to level up in all areas. If there's increased competition and there's 34 people splitting the pie we're having, we're facing this a little bit as an agency right now. To be transparent. The things that we were doing 18 months ago when I would get on a call with a med spa owner, wow, that was, it was amazing. Nobody else was really paying attention to it. They hadn't tried this kind of stuff before. A couple of years later. Things like using high level, it's like par for the course. All marketing agencies are doing that. So we're having to extra intentional about making sure that we're differentiating and building on our service offering. Dotting all our eyes, crossing all our T's. I've got a whole checklist of things I'm working on right now to make our agency more attractive to our prospects. And so you're going to have to do the same thing in your med spa. That means going and revisiting some of the things we talk about in the validation phase. Checklist things like is your website really positioning you as the expert? Is it super user friendly, is it robust, does it highlight your reputation? You have authentic imagery, is the design good and up to 2026 standards, all of those things that you might have not had to have dialed in all the way to 100 two or three years ago. You know, probably the time to go close the gap on some of those things. Your Instagram, if you're just posting to social media every once in a while, some generic before and afters or static images, it's probably not good enough to win the validation phase. If people have 34 different select options to select from when they go do their research. You need to do everything to make your med spa as attractive as possible. So dial in social media, dial in your website, make sure Google reviews are up to par, that you're consistently growing there, all the little things you can do and all the little bells and whistles that can help set you apart. You need to dial in right now. So that was just a little segment there on increased competition, an anecdote and hopefully some takeaways to help you if you're facing increased competition in your area. Number two thing I wanted to go over here is downsides of using price as a lever. So I've noticed for our team when we're talking to clients, we go back to the purchase matrix. We always talk about the purchase matrix and the purchase matrix again is reputation, convenience and price. Those are the three buckets that influence the purchase decision. And what we generally say is big picture. Price is probably the least important, but it's the most powerful lever to influence your client acquisition. And so for those of you who have not heard this spiel, I've said it a million times. But my favorite quote, one of the quotes I use all the time in marketing is from a book called the Advertising Effect. And the quote is that action changes attitude faster than attitude changes action. The best way to shape perception is through experience. So our general philosophy has been, and this makes sense logically and it works our best ever case studies to this day. The clients we're getting results for right now use a, use this as the primary lever for action. But what the general strategy is is I'm going to run a very aggressive introductory offer for new patients to give my med spa a try. And if they have a great experience, I know I'm going to retain 40, 50% of them, they're going to come back for recurring service. And that's probably the most cost effective way to acquire clients. But what I've noticed is this kind of feels like it hits a little bit of a wall at times. And so if we have increased competition, I do think there comes a point where the answer can't always be lower, lower, lower on the introductory price point. And again, the introductory price point. When I say this, we're only using this to incentivize people to tip the scales in our favor, to break the tie, to get people to choose our med spa for the first visit and then we want them coming back because they know, like and trust us based on personal experience. But I do want to talk a little bit about the downsides to constantly pushing this lever with, you know, no limit, essentially. Right. We just keep going lower. Well, there's more competition. So your new patient, Botox special, that was 20 units, 179 maybe. Should be 20 units, 159 now. It might work. Let me add that to the top of this. That might work. That might be the simplest, cleanest way to jack up your response rate and to improve your customer acquisition costs. Very well might be. But what happens to an extent when you push too extreme at times on price is you have to understand the trade offs and you have to have measurement on the full data set to see if you're experiencing this. So these are a couple things to watch for if you feel like you're in this battle. Number one is as you go lower, lower on price, you increase the chances that price is an increasingly bigger portion of why the person chose to visit you in the first place. In an ideal world, price is the tiebreaker. It's the cherry on top. It's not the main reason people were choosing you. And so as you go lower and lower on price, you increase the chances that price was the single factor that led you to win out. And when you're doing that to an extreme, you do risk attracting an outsized portion of discount shoppers, people that are coming to you primarily for the deal, who have less intention of returning. And this happens on a spectrum. It's not black or white, it doesn't turn on or off overnight. So it's just going to just know it's going to increase that. So to get out of that, one of the things I wanted to recommend is being really intentional with, with reputation and the things that you surround your offer with so that people are excited about your med spa and the offer is just a cherry on top. So we have a client in Georgia that does this really well. Their introductory new patient offer is not super attractive. They pay a little bit more to acquire a client, but when they look at the trade offs, they believe it makes sense. And I would tend to agree for them, I think this is a good strategy. But they're able to get away with a less compelling offer because they make up for it on the other parts of the purchase matrix scorecard. So they're making up for it in reputational elements. If you go to their Google listing, they have something like 670 five star reviews with a five star rating on Google. If you go do research of best med spas in this specific town, you are going to continuously get pointed in their direction so they can get away with that. If your med spa has a subpar reputation, your brand is sort of blah, blah, your reviews are average for your market, then this is going to be a challenge for you. So if you want to avoid having to push the price lever to consistently improve your client acquisition and to stay ahead of your competitors for getting that first at bat, you're going to need to do extra work on the reputational front to make up ground. Another thing is, as you increase price as a lever, you do increase the chances that people are driving from a little further away that wouldn't normally come to your med spa that are only coming for that deal and have less of a chance of even considering becoming a long term client. So if you want to avoid that, you need to make up for it in reputation. That's my kind of key takeaway there. If you want to avoid the never ending push on the price lever to go lower and lower to incentivize new visit. It works, don't get me wrong. But there is a downside trade off that I wanted you all to be aware of. Hey practice owners and marketing directors interrupting this episode to invite you to schedule a one on one strategy call with me to discuss how we might be able to improve and level up your digital market marketing efforts. So we're rated five stars on Google, we're HIPAA verified by Compliancy Group and we have a track record of taking clients from 30,000amonth to $120,000 a month and adding multi millions of dollars in additional revenue for some of our bigger multi location med spas from more effective marketing strategies. So on the free strategy call, it's really educational. I basically spend an hour going through detailed reviews of all of our best, best performing plays that we run for our clients. You have it to take and run with it if that's what you want to do and if you think it might be a fit to work together, then we're excited about the possibility to partner with you. But if you're interested in better, more effective digital marketing solutions for your Med Spa, visit Medspamagicmarketing.com that's Medspamagicmarketing.Com to schedule your one on one strategy call with me. Okay, last thing on our list for today is the value in saying something different. So kind of picking up on the last point. In a competitive landscape, if we're saying the same thing that everybody else is saying, it becomes increasingly more challenging to stand out. So if we are one of the only people in our market running a 20 unit 179 introductory Botox offer on Facebook and Instagram, it's probably going to work pretty well if we've got a good reputation. If we are now one of six med spas running a 20 unit 179 AD in our area and we want to avoid just having to go price jump each other. 169, 159. Right. That never ending battle, then we're going to have to be more intentional about changing our marketing message. And so this is a little hard for me to pitch because again when I'm talking for our marketing agency, I'm going to separate this. I'm going to put my just putting my consultant hat on for our agency clients. This works really well. I do not want to Pretend it doesn't. These, most of these offers, they are tried and true. This is why we've built our case studies. But looking toward the future, one of the things that's on our radar is how do we help our clients stand out and say something that's just fundamentally different. I'll give two examples. One for our agency, you see, if you're a med spa owner, you probably and you log into Facebook and Instagram, you see all sorts of marketing agencies talking about something similar, which is patient guarantees, running ads, generating leads, booked appointments and appointment setting. Right? Everybody sort of talking about the same thing. And when you're talking about the same thing, winning becomes a battle on the margins. It's how do I make my thing 2 or 3% better than theirs? Worthwhile endeavor. If you want to play that game, it can be effective. If you can figure out to keep positioning yourself 2 or 3% ahead of your competitors in terms of the feature set, the price of the promo, whatever those things are, then you can win. But one thing that I think is worth keeping on your radar is just saying something different. So for us, if everybody's talking about meta ads, what if I invite everybody to join us on a consulting open office hours, right? It's just something fundamentally different in their feed. For you as practice owners, is there a value in trying to market to the local audience with something like different like events maybe instead of just the new patient promo? Again, if this is working for you, do not stop doing it. It's a very effective strategy to use the new patient offers. But if you're feeling like you want to test some different things and you want to expand beyond that boundary, then you have to say something different than your competitors are saying. So for example, if you have an event once a month where you do special pricing and you have a happy hour and you invite people to RSVP for that complimentary event. And it's a fun thing where women get to get together and they get to be in your med spa with some exclusive promotions. You might be offering the same deals, but the framing is just different. Right. Instead of just a new patient promo, I'm going to try inviting you to this event. Now, again, as an agency, we don't have data to say that that strategy works at a consistent rate from an advertising standpoint versus the new patient offers. But to put that on your radar, if you're managing this on your own, I think that's something that's worth exploring the value in saying something different. So you move beyond everything being apples to apples and whose apple is a little bit bigger to hey, if everybody else is selling apples, why don't I pitch this really nice juicy orange? So that was one last thing I wanted to mention. There is just the value of saying something different. So as you think about your marketing investment, your ad spend, hopefully those are a couple things your competition in the local market that can help you dial in and boost your results. One last little bonus, because this was on my mind too, is on social media when we talk about the validation phase and making sure that you're positioned for success when people find you on social media. This is a PSA to end this episode. I think that there's an epidemic right now in med Spa social media, where everybody's primary form of content is the fun, playful, goofy trend. Think about what social media is designed to do for your med spa. It's yes, it's designed to show personality, but it's designed to convince and convert prospects that you're the best provider of services and you're the place they should know like and trust at a maximum level. Does a video of us kind of like flipping our hair walking out of the office, voicing over like a silly trend audio accomplish that? Probably not. So if that's the bulk of your social media content, my PSA today is to encourage you to try to be a little bit more thoughtful about educating your prospects, saying something different, and giving people compelling evidence to choose your med spot over your competitors. Try to tilt more of your content on social media toward that. I think you'll see a better result. Remember, social media is largely there for people who are thinking about doing business with you and are doing research and give them the information they need to help you win the validation phase. Thanks. Hope that was valuable and we'll see you on the next episode.