Your med spa needs to have customers continuously flow through in a predictable and reliable manner to provide you with a steady source of income to keep you and your practice in good financial shape. Ideally, your customers will be coming back to you again and again proving the high value of your services in the local market while adding to your business' customer lifetime value. It’s important to keep in mind that in both recessionary and rosy times, consistent sales remain king!

If your practice has been suffering in recent times, it’s critical to identify issues that are blocking your success so that you can quickly make the necessary changes that will ensure new customers are finding you and booking with your practice to keep your cash flow positive and your cash register ringing! Here are three reasons why med spas fail to gain enough of the clients they need to keep their practices humming and what they can do about it.

1) They Use Outdated Marketing Strategies

Med spa practitioners, such as Dermatologists and Aesthetic Nurses, are medical professionals first and foremost. Few in this field have experience in advertising and/or marketing which makes it completely understandable why they may lack the perspectives that a competent advertising professional possesses. You may be using marketing strategies for your practice that at one time were cutting-edge, however in today’s constantly evolving digital environment, that may no longer be the case. What are some of the marketing strategies that may seem like a wise use of marketing budget dollars but are actually outdated?

Print media was most business' primary advertising source for many decades, however in recent times this has fallen to the wayside as digital technology has captured most people’s attention. Not only has print media become viewed less, the costs are high relative to more focused digital techniques. It also has a serious drawback: you can’t know for sure where your customers are coming from unless they actually tell you! Do you think your new customers want to be asked, “Where did you hear about us?” This question is followed by a host of check boxes such as “local newspaper”, “word of mouth”, and “radio advertisement”. Only when you compile all of these answers manually can you find out which marketing strategy is working better than another, and this takes time and effort to accomplish.

The problem here is obvious: with print advertising, you lose the ability to determine which customers came into your practice in an efficient, accurate and timely manner. This makes it challenging to figure out whether your advertising dollars have given you any kind of decent return, so there’s guesswork involved. It creates the need for manually tabulating the results and even when those results are compiled, it’s often not clear why the customer chose your practice over another. Was it the location, the reviews, word-of-mouth or the price point?

Print advertising had its heyday at a time when all the homes in the neighborhood got the local newspaper. Have you ever been up early enough to see the way newspapers being delivered now? They’re thrown to one house here, and another way over there… it’s a headscratcher how the newspaper publishers even stay in business! This is not to say print is obsolete as a marketing platform, but it’s heading there.

Another outdated means of outreach is the old-school local telephone directory. Perhaps if someone needs an emergency plumber, they may look there but for the most part, this has also gone to the wayside, and increasingly so among Boomers as well as their digital acumen improves. Today, most people who have any tech savviness would dive right into Yelp on their smartphone. Many companies still use brochures and business cards which get looked over, and then overlooked! Now, it’s good to have them on hand for your practice for purely informational purposes to let prospects know about the nature of the services you offer, but as a marketing strategy, brochures are simply outdated.

2) They Target The Wrong Market

One of the more frustrating areas of determining where a med spa should advertise is trying to figure out the ideal marketing medium for your market. Some pay more for local ads that target a demographic that doesn’t use their services as much as others, leading to wasted marketing dollars and lackluster numbers of new clients and poorer retention. You may have found yourself confused about how to track your ideal target market and wondering how to best collect information that will lead to the best metrics that will help get your practice new customers. You may have a generalized view that the metrics you thought were ideal are not as focused as they could be for the highest return on ad spend.

Focusing on the wrong market can wreak havoc on the long-term viability of your Botox practice due to an inability to capture the big numbers of prospects who would otherwise be interested in your services. Many med spas and aesthetic practices are oblivious to more accurate and efficient means of allocating their marketing budgets that exist today and instead they plod along in the more staid and settled paths to find their customers. Radio and television, what are known as “push technology” due to their pushing information with no way for the listener or viewer to control it other than changing the station or channel, provide a general market without the kind of laser focus of the modern internet companies. The question remains: how to allocate your ad spend to target your ideal audience? If you’re finding inaccuracies in what you’ve been promised in traditional media, you’re not alone. It takes time and resources to build a tried and true system for capturing your ideal demographic who would be thrilled to discover your med spa's services.

The next step should be to gather enough information to correctly measure the engagement with your target audience and continually tweak the system of information gathering until you have your ideal demographic nailed. However this takes time, energy and effort! Wouldn’t you feel far more confident with a professional who could allocate your resources in the best and most cost effective manner to laser focus in on your perfect patron to give you more customers?

3) Their Price Point Isn’t On Point

The dream of owning an aesthetic practice featuring, for example, Botox cosmetic as a primary draw for prospective customers is one filled with big dollar signs and sugar plums dancing in your dreams. However the reality of trying to dial in the ideal price of those services is often seen as a trial-and-error process, depending on which type of clientele you’re seeking to attract. Some practices bring in new customers by offering sharply discounted services while others want their presence to be known as boutique. As such, they are perfectly happy charging top dollar for their services because their patrons view them as elite.

Because med spa services are relatively commoditized, there is a strata which serve various segments of the public depending on their price point while running their practices so that they can factor in both variable and fixed costs while maintaining a healthy profit margin. Therein lies the challenge! Here is an important metric for any med spa: the long-term value of their customer. Accuracy in this regard is of utmost importance because it can be tough to be competitive while keeping your business profitable! For those valued customers who enjoy the aesthetic benefits of Botox, their decision as whether to continue their services are not negotiable!

A med spa owner has to make a choice between a clientele who is willing to pay a bit more, but there will be a lower volume of customers versus a price point that makes the customer say, “Ooh! What a deal! I want that now!” One of the oldest sayings in business is “If you don’t know your numbers, you don’t know your business!” Being knowledgeable about your business’ operating costs will help you be able to adjust the price of your service which is essential to knowing at which level to set your price. Would you rather run the kind of practice that’s known as the Kay Jeweler’s or Tiffany’s of your industry?

When examining the marketing aspects of a med spa, the choice often comes down to how many booked appointments are on the schedule. It remains necessary in these times where so many businesses have been hurt by the recent pandemic to consider new and highly effective marketing techniques to ensure a steady flow of prospects that will become their customers. Neutron Agency LLC focuses on this with laser precision by bringing in a steady stream of highly motivated quality customers and placing them right in your schedule.

Putting it All Together

Bringing value in a service based business such as your med spa is necessary to give your customer the excited feeling of having made the right decision for themselves. That positive feeling keeps them coming back again and again ultimately earning you a dedicated customer for life who will recommend you and your practice at every opportunity! This hinges on their belief that they are getting a great deal for their hard earned dollars at a practice that respects them.

A huge part of that value is choosing a price point that ensures your practice’s variable and fixed expenses are taken into account first, then add a healthy profit margin to ensure the enterprise has the necessary revenue for sustenance and growth. Customers are the lifeblood of any business so your objective when marketing your practice should be one where your patrons feel they’re getting a great deal right off the bat. This opens them up to not only making you their preferred Botox provider, but telling friends and lighting up your social media presence with great reviews from raving fans.