158 – Medical Marketing Aesthetics Insider: March Edition

MATT COFFY: All right, here we go for the March episode of the aesthetics insider. This is the 2021 version, and we’re gonna be talking about things that we see in the market across dozens and scores of accounts that we work with across the country. It’s really important. If you are in the aesthetics business, you work in, dermatology, plastic surgery, aesthetics in general, or any of the combined services thereof. We can give you some information we see in the field, hopefully help you make some better decisions and give you some insight to what we see right as we work on every account you could possibly imagine from California to New Jersey, all across the country. We’ve got customers all across this great land, and we’re going to give you some tips on things that we see in the market. The first thing we’re going to start out with, the number one thing, is steady quality.

MATT COFFY: So right now we’re finding that people who are running ads right now on Facebook especially, and Google as well, are seeing better quality come from the patients. I think that’s almost, traditionally this time of year, we started to see the quality of patients come up because they’re actually starting to make decisions now, because this is the time of year as we approach spring. Almost always between early March through May, we see a tremendous flow of patients. It’s the equity that you’re going to be delivering from, the ads that you run today that will deliver your long-term benefits. So if you’re not out there getting these quality patients right now, somebody else is, so make sure that you are today. If you are in the business, you should be having, some catchment out there, to get new patients in as this season is going to be one of the largest that we are going to see on record.

MATT COFFY: As people spring back from all the pandemic issues that are out there, we’re going to see the opening up of a lot of things that weren’t open before. And again, that means people are out. Obviously you still have the Zoom face world, which is that people are still taking care of their skin, so there’s a huge market as well. Being that this is going to be a new season for us, for CoolSculpting, we’re seeing a lot of people coming in now, especially in the Northeast for their first CoolSculpting treatments. And usually these lasting, you know, multiple times, so that they’re thinking about May and June right now, they’re getting themselves ready and they’re going through their multi treatments. So that’s one of the biggest movers we have across the deck, both Midwest, Northeast, and even in the South as well. Although they’re a little further ahead of us here, but we’re seeing the pickup happening right now.

MATT COFFY: As we mentioned in the last episode in February, we are also seeing thread lifts. Thread lifts have been really incredibly important for a lot of practitioners who have some alternative ways to bring in different types of procedures that are, let’s just say out there that are, less invasive. And, this is one of the most promising procedures for crossover sales as well. We have a lot of uptick in this, as I said from February, if you watch the first episode, this year we talked predominantly that this was a trend in the market and that we’re seeing a lot of the practitioners move into this space because of the ways that it is actually beneficial for a lot of patients who maybe can’t go under other procedures. The last thing I want to talk about is laser hair removal, laser hair removal in the Northeast, especially right now, is taking off.

MATT COFFY: The reason why that is, is obviously there is a 4 to 6 week period afterwards after, to, not be in a certain types of light and certain exposure, because of the certain responses to the skin. So we are seeing those people pick up those services now. So it’s a great time if you haven’t had investment into maybe running some advertising for laser hair, which is a great revenue maker for a lot of practices. That is something that is going to get you on the board with some wins. We really want to encourage people to think through their processing, their language, their copy skills, when they run ads, so don’t just put up an ad, expect people to show up; make sure you have an offer and good copy. If you want to work with someone like us, we’d be happy to help you out, or at least run it by somebody to make sure that you double-check your language because the most critical point is that your patient is out there and you need to treat them the way that you treat them in a normal circumstance.

MATT COFFY: You know, too much over usage of just throwing numbers out, really confuses people. You need to make it super simple and easy for people to understand. We also are seeing, so this is the second thing that I want to talk about. We are seeing e-Com as a huge drive now for a lot of the practices that we’re working with. N ow, there are some sort of plug-and- play methodologies like SkinMedica and some of the other services that are out there that would just add a link to a private sort of e-Com portal for all the services. But those have been sort of okay. But we’re seeing, which has been better, is that the practices build their own e-Com portal so they can have a hundred percent margin. Now, this obviously does mean there has to be some thought in fulfillment, but at the end of the day, a lot of this is very simple and it’s very marginal and great product, great cross sell

MATT COFFY: especially if you have a good base of customers, you can make thousands of dollars over a weekend, with an offer that’s put out into the market for your own services. And speaking of offers, what we’re finding is that e-Com can be super simple. You don’t even need to sell products. You can just have gift cards for sale. And just having the fact that someone could check out on your website and purchase gift cards through a very simple e-Com system is something you can do to enhance your revenues right away. It’s literally like bolting on 10 to 15% of revenue to your business just by having that, because you can also, when people check out and they leave your business, you can give them either a card that says, Hey, you know, give you 10% off. If you shop on our website, or you can tell them that their next purchase, can be, X percent off.

MATT COFFY: If they come in X amount of times. There’s so many ways to work an e-Com store on your own. It’s an extremely important factor. What amazes me, we still only see about 50% of the med spas that we even work with have an e-Com store and it just staggers me how people don’t want to add this revenue sector. One more thing to think about, please do not confuse a e-Com store with a point of sale system. And that’s one of the things that confuses customers, as well as that, when you’re trying to check out online, you want to make it as easy as possible to not lose the sale. And a lot of the challenges we face is that people are trying to immediately try to get it, to connect to all their systems and go through their entire platform and their point of sale system.

MATT COFFY: And it’s not necessary. You can just set up a simple Stripe account and start taking orders and not worry about trying to incorporate it all within your entire infrastructure. Now, the next thing I would say is most important, I can see is the number three thing on my list today, which is reactivation. Now reactivation for a layman’s terms means you just want to get your database built. So you have, let’s say a couple thousand customers in your list. You’re sending them a text or an email, but you’re sending them an offer and you’re sending them an offer in a way that brings them back through a creative way to get them in back into your physical location or back into a sale online. One of the things that we see that is going to help you with this, is being consistent with your language.

MATT COFFY: And I said this from the very beginning, in the first section of this video, is that you have to think about being very careful with your copy. You know, there’s a lot of people that just send out spammy type texts or spammy type emails that don’t get attraction and don’t cross over to conversions. So if you use creative strategy, you get them to, you ask them a question or you get them engaged, and then you take them back to a landing page that talks about the offer and then converts them. And don’t try to convert them in the email or convert them on the text, take them back to somewhere where they can make a decision based off of not just a line of our sentence in a email or a sentence in a text; it’s very important to get the trust back built, and then you can convert them to another appointment.

MATT COFFY: Of course, you want to put the offer strategy within the text, but bring them to a place where they can see something that they want, because it’s very, very easy for someone to go from a text to a landing page, to an offer, to a closure for an appointment. We see it all the time and being consistent with this is super important. So think about your reactivation strategy, the things that you’re going to do to bring people back, beyond running just straight ads out to new customers, but your existing customer base to have a consistent calendar on what you’re going to offer and think about it in advance. We do this with a lot of our customers to help them with the strategy and build out a calendar of what they’re going to do during the month. And that reactivation strategy brings in, again, another 10, 15% of the revenue just by adding in another normal basis. The number four thing.

MATT COFFY: And I’d like to get into some of the product that we’re seeing out in the market. We are starting to see no needle Botox. We’re starting to see the alternatives to the evasive no needle world that we see in some of the worlds that are online that are, especially as there’s a lot of YouTubers out there now, starting to talk about it. It’s incredibly important to get ahead of this, and show alternatives, for people who may not necessarily want needle, they may want to use some of the other different alternatives instead of trying to, fight against it. It might be good to have some of this built into your strategy. We’re going to talk about this more coming up in another episode, we’re going to feature one of these products. But I think the key is to make sure that you have some alternatives, you know what’s out there,

MATT COFFY: these are the things that are being talked about in the medical med spa groups that we belong to. People who are in the know, understand that these things are being picked up because it’s an alternative and it’s new. I mean, anything that’s new gets a highlight towards it. So again, number four is to look out for the non-invasive or the no needle Botox that’s out there. Number five is the last topic I want to talk about is some of the product services from some of the shops that we’re seeing out there. Especially, we are seeing Evoke and Evolve, from InMode out there, starting to pick up steam, we’re starting to see this to become a trend that there is more people picking up these machines. You know, we talk a lot, we have a lot of customers of CoolSculpting.

Speaker 1: We have a lot of people who have got sculpture. We’ve got a lot of people who have got multiple machines and, InMode seems to be taking some more strides in marketing themselves. They seem to have a grasp on the market, and they’re also starting to penetrate some more, different types of practices. So we’re starting to see them become more of a player. So look into that. Again, we don’t have any relationships with these companies. We’re just talking about what we see in the field. We’ve started to see these machines show up, at some of our practices. So, again, these are things to think about. I hope you enjoyed this insider. This is a great thing that we try and provide for our clients internally and for people who are interested in this field, and we hope that you can come along with us on our journey. Again, it’s Matt Coffy from Practice Bloom. We’ll see you in the next episode.