10 Things to Fix Before Your Med Spa Wastes Any More Money on Ads

Speaker A: Oh my gosh. If I see one more generic stock footage, whatever ad like that's a waste of money. You have got to be targeting and actually clarifying what it is you do and your position in the market. Otherwise you're going to be white noise. Welcome to Keep what yout Earn the show for business owners who want to scale profitably and build a business that's actually worth something. My name is Shannon Weinstein and I run a fractional CFO firm to help seven figure aesthetics and wellness practices scale with clarity, cash flow and confidence without burning out or guessing their way into growth. Each week you'll hear practical CFO insights, real stories about scaling and exiting, and clear financial strategies designed to help you understand what's holding your business back and how to fix it. If you want to follow along with the exact framework that we use with our clients, sign up for the free five part video series for Aesthetics Practice Owners where I walk you through the financial building blocks required to scale your practice and increase enterprise value. You'll find the link in the show notes. So I have my phone pulled up with a post that I made a few weeks ago, uh, around the 10 things you need to do before you spend more in marketing. And I wanted to actually go through these in more detail, but I'm a verbal processor, which is why I have a podcast. And I thought it would be fun to go through these on an episode and actually break it down in the right amount of time so I don't lose you guys on Instagram and go over the real time limit. And this is a really important post to me because I think this is the number one thing that Medspars aren't getting right right now. I think this is the thing that is holding a lot of people back, a lot of people from unlocking the cash flow that they should be. And I think this is the one thing, if you don't listen to anything else we post, this is probably the advice you should take. So I'm going to go through the 10 things you need to do before you spend another dollar in marketing. Let's go number one, you need to know your conversion rate. Here's why. Because if you don't know your conversion rate, you don't know what the likelihood is that those leads will turn into customers. Therefore, you don't know how many leads you actually need in order to accomplish your goals. So if your conversion rate is below 50%, then you're going to have to get a lot more leads and spend a lot more money just for the same outcome. So the best thing you can do is fix the conversion rate. It's like pouring more water into a pipe that's clogged. That's not going to unlock the clog. That's just going to make it worse or it's going to be a more costly mistake. What you need to do is get a plumber in there to fix the clog so that you can actually accommodate more water through the pipeline. And that is exactly what you're doing with your leads. You're actually, you have them in a clog in your conversion cycle. And then what's happening is you're saying, I need more leads. And it's like, no, you just need to let the ones that are in there through the process a little bit better and smooth the flow. Number two is you need to know your margins. So the reason for knowing your margins before you spend any money on marketing is because you need to actually understand which of your services is truly profitable and how, by how much. So what services should we be promoting in our marketing? What Google keyword should I be using? What specific content should I be making? Because what am I trying to point my customer to do? What is the call to action? And if you're too scattered and you're too vague that then it's not going to be effective anyway. So this is just money flushed down the toilet on marketing. If you're not specific about what you're asking your customer to do and if you're not sure about what to make them do, I'll tell you, the margins are a great place to start. Because if you have a high energy treatment that is going to be, you know, a 75 to 80% margin for you and then you have a different type of service, maybe it's ah, uh, an aesthetics treatment or an injectables treatment that is closer to like 35, 40%. Well put them more toward that laser treatment, that high energy service, because now that is going to be a better use of your time and your energy and your marketing dollars. So know your margins before you dive into marketing because you could just be eroding what is already a small margin in the first place. Number three is rebook every appointment. And I would say that you should not just rebook every appointment, but that should also be an indicator. Not like every appointment, right, because not every appointment requires rebooking. I actually like better the elev of your services into another treatment. So you should be graduating people into other treatments and elongating their lifetime with you. So we're gonna get into that in a little bit, but you have to be ensuring you have retention. So when we talk about rebooking appointments, we're talking about retention of your actual patient and making sure that they're coming back for additional services and repeating those services if they're routine in nature. So make sure you have a good rebooking rate. Number four, fix your lead, follow up speed. So speed to lead. We talk about it all the time. You have got to respond to your leads quickly. You've got so many leads in the pipeline that you're probably not working. And yes, there are gonna be so many leads that are gonna be sitting in bed at night after a long day of work and finally realize, oh, I need to book that appointment and they're gonna go on your website at 11:12, one at night and then they're going to reach out to you. Now two things. One is that no one expects you to respond at 1am, maybe first thing in the morning. But the other thing is we have this amazing technology now with the use of AI that you could do some basic discovery questionnaire questions and get a consult on the schedule through some basic qualification during that overnight time and respond to them immediately. The key is an immediate response. It doesn't mean that you're going to book them immediately, but be the first one to start that relationship with them first through some type of automation. So even if you're not available to immediately respond to them, have some type of automation that will address them immediately so that they stay engaged with your med spa, your aesthetics practice. Because if you don't, someone else will and then they will be the first one to be seen. And this is so true of in any space, by the way, that the first person to respond is generally going to get the work because frankly patients, including myself, and don't really have the time to shop around. We're just trying to like reach out to five different places for us to respond. I'm going to uh, engage with, but we're just hedging our bets by reaching out to five or six just to see if I can get one to respond because unfortunately my expectation these days is that y' all aren't responding. So I'm going to reach out to five or six because then one of you will cut back to me. So that's actually what people are doing most of the time is just trying to get speed to booking themselves. They just want to get this done and they want to get the appointment booked and you're adding resistance in the Way to qualify them. So the sooner you can get them on the call, the sooner you can qualify them. Boom. Um, lead to conversion. Now, number five is know your cac. Your CAC stands for customer Acquisition Cost. Cac. Know how much it costs to acquire a customer, meaning how much are you spending on all of your marketing spend in your business in order to acquire the new customers that you've acquired. And a lot of times people are failing to include in this the additional costs that they have to their marketing agencies or their, even their canvas subscription. If you're just using it for marketing or your social media marketing, your Google Ads. Yes. But like these other little fringe costs creep in that you're spending on marketing. It might be travel, it might be going on other podcasts, it might be on God knows what, right? So you have to remember every penny, every dollar that you've spent in the effort to acquire new customers belongs in your acquisition cost category on your P and L, which is what we do for our customers. We have an acquisition cost category. Then we use this to do cac. So we take all of this and then you divide it by the number of new customers you've acquired during the course of the year. And we'd like to do this on a much broader scale because it's really hard to assign specifically, like, oh, I got 10 new customers from this particular dollar I spent, other than your digital marketing, actually tracking some of that, it's really hard to do. So more useful would be, did I get this many new customers once I spent this much money? What was working, what wasn't working? It's really important to measure that at a macro level. But know your cac, know how much it costs to acquire a customer, and don't be spending too much to acquire a customer that's not going to have a high ltv. That's what we're going to talk about in a few minutes. So number six is clarify your offer and positioning. Oh, my gosh. Please do not pour gasoline on the fire. Please do not put ad spend behind, uh, an ad or a piece of content that is vague, that is not speaking to your ideal customer, that is not identifying your services, that is not clearly articulating what it is you do and who you serve. Oh my gosh, if I see one more generic stock footage, whatever ad like, that's a waste of money. You have got to be targeting and actually clarifying what it is you do and your position in the market. Otherwise you're gonna be white noise. Number seven is that you have Capacity. I feel like it's weird I have to say this out loud, but I do that. Before you pour a lot of dollars into marketing, make sure you have the space in your schedule to fulfill, uh, for those types of appointments and that you have the right staffing aligned and the right utilization. So you should have a very clear idea of how many more appointments you can handle per week in your practice. So if you can only handle a dozen more appointments per week, you got to be careful with. Okay, well, if it's only a couple more appointments a day that I have open, you might be in good shape and that you don't need to pour a ton of marketing money in. But if you're like, no, I like an entire day open, you know, my schedule is 30% open. Okay, that makes sense. I'm not saying wait until you have that to pour money into marketing, but just be aware that if you're going to put money into marketing, can you accommodate the demand influx that could come in from that? Number eight, track your lead sources. Oh my goodness, know what's working. So to my point earlier about cac, you have got to understand what is working to acquire a customer. So where did you find us? Where did you come upon us? If they're a first time visitor, how did you find out about us? Write that down. Put that in the CRM system or the emr, wherever you're tracking this information for your patients, because understand where people are finding you and then double down on that. And if it's mostly through referral, oh my goodness, fantastic. So now let's, let's implement a, essentially a referral program or loyalty type thing where maybe as a thank you to Susan who just referred you for patients, you're like, hey, next one's on us. As just a thank you for being supportive of our business, whatever you can do. So just remember, know where those people are coming from. And another thing too, just circling back to your CAC is you could be acquiring a lot of customers through referrals, which are a zero CAC acquisition, which will help lower your CAC overall. But just understand that because that's a zero CAC acquisition. That's our favorite. So before you spend any marketing dollars, have you really exhausted your referral network of your existing patients? Because you should be always getting zero CAC referrals through word of mouth without even having to ask. That should be a thing. And if it's not, I would check on why no one's recommending you or just remind people that we always appreciate Those know your average client ltv. So I alluded to this a couple times. LTV is lifetime value, which is generally how much money the customer will bring in for your practice over the course of their time as a patient. So when we're thinking about this, we're thinking about the revenue they're spending the. Or the money they're spending, which you call revenue. And the. I actually look at it as lifetime gross profit. So I say the revenue coming in minus the direct costs of the consumables and the labor. But you can look at it as lifetime revenue just as well and do this analysis. So if we're looking at a lifetime revenue, net revenue, say net of, uh, any refunds, discounts, chargebacks, whatever net revenue, then you have to be looking at what's the ratio of that net revenue you gain from what you spent to acquire them. That's the LTV to CAC ratio. And that is a powerful tool to understand if your marketing is efficiently operating and that you are extending the lifetime value of your customer effectively. The average client lifetime value should be pretty high. I. It disappoints me so much when I hear practices say that their customer lifetime value is sub 000. Like that's not even two injectables appointments for most people. So how is it possible that like your average is that someone comes in twice. We gotta fix that. You gotta be fixing that, which goes into the rebooking, which goes into the treatment plan, which goes into all of these other factors that you've gotta have people coming back in and all of this to tell you. You've got to be milking the existing patients you have for the appointments they should be booking in their treatment plan for the goals that you guys went through in their consult before you go, try to like find new people. That is where all the money is. And then of course, number 10, have a referral system in place. We talked about this. You've got to have a solid referral system. People have got to know that that's a thing so that you can have a zero CAC acquisition and that you need to make sure that you are sharing that system in place with your team, with your customers, and that people are willingly and gladly telling their friends where they got their services done. They should be proud to showcase it. You should be able to, you know, openly talk about it. And uh, definitely even bring a friend type promotions, things like that. Like have people come in as a team. It's phenomenal. So these are my 10 tips on things that you could be doing before you spend new marketing dollars that I think will make you more money, honestly. So give them a try. Hey, thanks for tuning in to today's episode. If it left you feeling inspired to take action, make sure to check out our free video series that walks you through the same framework that we use as a CFO team to identify what's holding a practice back from growth and how to fix it. Links in the show notes. See you on the next episode. Sam m.