Internet Marketing for Medical Spas – Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Internet marketing for Medical Spas – Search Engine Optimization (SEO) by Ryan Harris, Co-Founder, Medspa Marketing Institute

As a medical spa (medspa) or day spa owner interested in Internet marketing, you may be wondering how search engine optimization (SEO) fits into the picture, and whether or not you should even bother if you have a good Pay per Click campaign that is performing well for you to generate new patient / client leads.

Let’s discuss some Internet marketing fundamentals for medical spas.  There are two main types of traffic you can get to your website: free, or paid.  These are also called “organic” or “PPC”, respectively.  PPC campaigns are to drive paid traffic to your site.  But wouldn’t you rather get free traffic?

Of course you would, but it’s not a matter of choosing one or the other.  So the short answer is YES, you should be performing SEO to improve your websites ranking in the organic search results.  All savvy internet marketers do both.

So what is SEO exactly?  SEO is nothing more than changing the contents and/or the “metadata” information about your site so that the search engines consider it to be a “high quality” site, and therefore give it a high ranking relative to other websites that are on a similar topic.

Google in particular has a strong commitment to helping Internet users find the most relevant websites, and they spend an extraordinary amount of time and money to define what they consider a high quality website, and then promote those websites over lower quality websites.

The problem is that Google only provides general guidelines on what they consider “high quality” because they don’t want webmasters to exploit weaknesses or loopholes in the algorithms that they use to determine the quality.

SEO is both a science and an art form, because Google and the other major search engines constantly change what their algorithms factor in as “important”.  Therefore, SEO is an ongoing practice; you cannot just focus on it for a brief period and expect to be done with it forever.

On the other hand, there are some specific things that you or your SEO management firm can do quickly to ensure that Google understands what your website is about and how to properly “index” your site. Indexing means to add it to their database of websites based on your keywords and content.

Stepping back and looking at your overall website marketing strategy is important.  Some websites spend considerable amount of money on ongoing SEO to get their websites ranked on the first page of Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs). The traffic that comes to you as a result of free SERP listings is called “organic” traffic. Website owners who do this successfully can get an extraordinary amount of free traffic to their website.  In fact, you can get so much traffic that you don’t even need a PPC campaign to make a great profit.

However, many medspa owners have also been shocked and disappointed when Google makes a change to their quality algorithms, and overnight their medspa websites go from page one, to being buried on page 20 of the SERPS.  Their traffic literally vanishes overnight!

That is why it is important to do both PPC and SEO.  You never want to have all of you marketing eggs in one basket.  You need multiple traffic sources, and you don’t want to be reliant on PPC, or organic (free) traffic exclusively.  Nor do you want to rely solely on a single search engine.  You should be using all three major search engines to send you both PPC and organic traffic to generate leads and get new patients.

So back to SEO for your medical spa website: now that you know why you should be doing it and the value it can have for your Internet business, what should you do to maximize your search engine ranking?  As we said before there is no single correct answer, but without a doubt you should be defining what your site is all about by defining which keywords are most relevant to your site.  You should make sure that these keywords are contained in your keyword metatag.  You also need to make sure that these keywords, and similar contextually relevant keywords appear on your site frequently.  Google search bots actually calculate your keyword “density” and if it is too little or too much, you will be penalized for it.

You also want to make sure that you have your website pages properly named, with a keyword rich title.  You need to have a good search engine friendly site map.  In addition, you need to make sure you set your metatags to tell the search engines how frequently to re-index your website, and which pages within your website should or should not be indexed.

The truth is that there are literally thousands of SEO methods and techniques to make your website more attractive to the search engines, and the “to do list” is always evolving, so the work is never complete.

What most website owners do is spend a few months focusing on SEO to try to do as much as possible in a short period, covering all of the basics.  Then they spend less time and money after that, but doing SEO upkeep to fine tune their SEO practices, usually purchasing an ongoing monthly SEO contract with a qualified SEO management company.

If you would like advice on how to allocate your Internet marketing dollars, please email us.  Visit the Contact Us page up above.

It’s No Wonder Medspa Owners and Operators Are Confused!

by Ryan Harris, Co-Founder of the Medspa Marketing Institute

I am thumbing through a recent copy of Spa Management Magazine “the world’s only spa management journal” and I can see why medspa owners and operators are confused about what works in marketing, and what doesn’t.  The first thing I noticed is that I couldn’t find the word “profit” anywhere in the magazine.  Even the ads from vendors of spa equipment, who should be touting how their equipment will help a spa improve business are devoid of any references to increasing revenue.

Perhaps I am mistaken, but aren’t you in business to make money (while doing what you enjoy)?   Why aren’t the ads in magazines and trade journals that are supposed to be “selling” top spa owners touting how their products will help you make more money, so you can take a month off from work and go play gold or lie on the beach somewhere.  THAT is a benefit worth touting!

But instead I see page after page of 90% nude beautiful women, but not an “effective” ad to be found.  As a man, I appreciate the nudity, and as a marketer, I know that sex sells – sometimes, under very specifc circumstances.   But do you think sells sells massage tables, skin care products, and laser packages to anti-aging practioners, doctors, and the people who help others look younger and feel great?

If the vendors of equipment to the spa industry don’t even understand the fundamental of marketing or creating display ads that get response, how can doctors, who are trained in medicine, not marketing, understand it?  Doctors and spa owners are not marketing experts, nor do they need to be.  But unfortunately, humans have the tendency to look around at what everyone else is doing on the assumption that if other people are doing it, that it must work!  Don’t buy into that marketing myth.

In fact, the opposite is true.  If everyone else is doing it then it is almost guaranteed to NOT WORK.  The crowd is never right when it comes to doing things that are highly effective.  Don’t follow the crowd.  In fact, if you want to be successful, all you have to do is look at what everyone else is doing, and do the opposite of it, and you will right on the money 95% of the time.

To get people to respond to an ad, you have to appeal to an emotion beyond just the sex drive.  Listing features of a product or service is nice, but it’s the BENEFITS that get people to respond.  Benefits that appeal to emotions.   In my next post, I will discuss some of these emotions and how you can tap into them in your next marketing piece, to experience a significant jump in the response rate, so you can make more money with no additional effort.  That’s what it’s all about.

And to the folks at Spa Management – I love your magazine, and look forward to seeing better ads in the future from your customers.  If you want them to keep advertising in your magazine, help them to help you, by providing some advertising guidelines based on a hundred years of direct response marketing principles.  If you’re not sure how, send them our way, and we’ll help break them of the “branding marketing” habit.

Dedicated to Your Prosperity,

-Ryan Harris

Marketing the Recession, are You Crazy?

A recent article in the OC Register, a Southern California online newspaper, talks about one doctor’s advice – to turn to plastic surgery to get a competitive edge for those who are seeking employment. While the idea seems silly at first glance, there might be something here to consider. Looking confident certainly has an effect on how well a person interviews for a job. Admittedly, most folks when unemployed are not going to be able to splurge on cosmetic surgery or anti-aging procedures, but it does raise an interesting point for medspa owners.

Incorporating current events into your marketing message is an excellent way to reach out to your existing patients or clients. Finding a popular story, especially one involving a celebrity, then writing about it is an excellent way to ensure your emails and newsletters get read. In addition, done properly, a well written, controversial article placed on your website that relates to a hot topic current event might just get some serious traffic to your website. There is a whole art form dedicated to this method, called linkbaiting, should you care to learn more, but for the average medspa owners, a linkbaiting strategy is not going to be effective. However, the idea of building on current events is a proven strategy, and the grim economic news can be turned into a positive thing. Perhaps you should consider writing a brief email to your existing patient base informing them of the article. It does cite the fact that 25% of people surveyed said they would reconsider getting Botox if it meant helping them to land a job. That sounds like an excellent hook to me!

If you spend just a little bit if time thinking about this “unemployment/recession” topic as a marketing hook, you’ll find that there are numerous ways to spin it. This will give you something meaningful and relevant to say to your patients, and of course you should encourage them to come in for additional treatments as a personal “counter” to the recession. You could even run a Botox / massage special where they get both packages for one low price. The possibilities are endless , you will have to find a combination that works for you. The idea is to get you thinking like a marketer. Whether you agree with the article or not, it provides food for thought that you can use to your benefit. Happy marketing!

Here’s the link: http://inyourface.freedomblogging.com/2008/10/16/economic-recovery-plan-plastic-surgery/1152/

Effective Online Marketing, Part II

Effective Medspa Online Marketing Part 2

by Ryan Harris, Director, Medspa Marketing Institute

This is the second post in a 3 part series on effective online marketing.

If your website is not capturing your site visitors contact information, you are making a critical mistake. After all, most visitors to a medspa website will NOT book an appointment right there and then, unless the site visit is coming at the tail end of a very strategic marketing strategy, and you?ve put an irresistible offer in front of their face.

But for most websites, visitors are there because of the results of a search engine (Google) search looking for a particular spa, a spa in their area, or a medspa in their area that offers a particular treatment that they are searching for. If your website is the one that they find, there is a very good chance they will poke around your site for a minute, then leave. That is because it is very difficult to make an online sale in a single visit.

You must ?court? your potential patients, build a relationship with them, and market it to them over time, with some kind of ?drip? marketing campaign then gives them more information about the treatment they were searching for in the first place, and why you are the medspa they should choose to get it.

And the only way to do that is to capture their personal contact information by putting an opt-in form on your site. When they fill it out, they will go into your prospects database. Let the courting begin!

But wait, why will they fill it out, you ask? The answer is that they won?t unless you give them an incentive. You must offer them some kind of (perceived) valuable incentive for doing so. A free report, free samples, an offer of a ?special deal available only to our members?, etc. People will give up their personal contact information all day long as long as they feel they are getting something of value in return.

So come up with something valuable, and offer it on your site, but only after they fill out the opt-in form. It?s that simple. The ?autoresponder? list building services such as ?Aweber? that provide this are very moderately priced. This only costs about $20 bucks per month to build a prospect database.

What you do next to convert them from prospects to patients will be the topic of the next post in this series. Until then, think about ways to establish a long-term relationship with your prospects, and what kind of offer you can make to get them calling to book an appointment.

How to Burn Money in Your Medspa

Cost versus Value

by Ryan Harris, Director, Medspa Marketing Institute

Cost is what you pay, value is what you get. Remember that, especially when your advertising exec. is selling you a ?great deal? to either advertise in more issues or increase the size of your ad, or when you come across a spa consultant ?guru? promising you instant riches. Or even when you venture out to hire an in-house marketing director to promote your medspa.

Everybody wants a deal, but sometimes in the ?searching for a deal? frenzy, they forget that even paying just $100 for an ad that nobody sees or responds to is not much of a deal. That?s a wasted $100.00. And how much are your largest ads costing you? Upwards of $5,000 per month, or more? We hear some crazy stories!

Everything you pay for (especially your marketing dollars) must have a measurable return on investment. At the very least, it should pay for itself. If it doesn?t, it never will. For example, if you place a nice colorful ad in your neighborhood ?Clipper Magazine? at a cost of $3k, you should get at least that much back. Let?s say that ad didn?t produce any measurable results but the following month, you placed the same ad in again (which is cardinal marketing sin #1), you?ve just wasted another $3k!

This is called ?operation money suck? by advertisers. Do you think they care if your ad doesn?t produce? NOPE, not their problem! They will tell you one of a few well rehearsed advertising lies: ?You need more exposure to get people to respond? or ?It?s the economy, everyone is slow? or ?Maybe you should consider offering a bigger discount?. It takes time to build your ?brand?. ALL LIES.

Now let?s talk about so-called experts who claim to bring you instant riches. Here is a dirty little secret about the spa consulting industry. The retainer fees are billed much like a high profile public relations firm, with no guarantees. By the time you realize they haven?t added anything significant to your bottom line, you are out thousands of dollars.

In addition, they receive kickbacks from every vendor they recommend to you ? so they have more motivation to sell a recommended product than to save you money. (There are good consultants out there; you just need to know where to find them).

If you?ve had a bad experience with a spa consultant, you may have decided that the best way to go is to hire an in-house marketing director. That sounds good, right? You can go one of two ways with that. You can either hire the best that you can afford (and expect to pay at least 50k in a larger market) or you can try and get away with paying a college student $8-$15 an hour. In any case, you have to spend time training them and then cross your fingers that they understand how to hit the ground running ? that is, can they produce a marketing plan for you that will provide instant results?

No matter which person you hired, let?s say for arguments sake that you like the person you hired because she was nice, pretty, or showed up on time (or all three)! But, by month three, she is sort of a warm body, but not a producer (that is ? she is polite to the other staff members and patients but you haven?t seen any real differences in your marketing efforts). Sure, your ads look pretty (she?s a wiz on the MAC) and they get to the ad sales department on time (something you hated to do anyway!) BUT, is she unleashing the floodgates of new patients parting with their hard earned cash? The answer in 99% of the case is NO.

Suddenly hiring someone doesn?t seem like such a bargain, does it? You paid dearly for your time to train your new employee, you spend money on her salary, paid her taxes and maybe even threw in a free treatment or two. What does that all add up to anyway?

Are you getting the point? If you can?t measure and track every single marketing dollar, it?s like throwing money out of the window. That?s precisely why you should always look at the value you get rather than the cost you pay. Smart and effective marketing pays for itself ten-fold. Experts in their field always guarantee results. Ask the right questions and you?ll never waste another marketing dollar again.

How to Become an Instant Authority

by Jennifer Devlin, Marketing Goddess. We talk in depth about the importance of “positioning” (note I didn’t say “branding”) and how easily it then becomes for you to command higher fees for your medspa services. Most people wait to be “appointed” an expert by some authority. The truth is, you can become a guru in a relatively short period of time with this easy-to-implement formula:

Step 1: Join 2-3 industry trade organizations

Step 2: Read 3-5 top selling books on your ’specialty topics’

Step 3: Give at least 1 free seminar about your topic per month

Step 4: Submit 1-3 articles to your industry trade publications about your ’specialty’

Step 5: List yourself as an industry expert on sites such as www.profnet.com

Within 6 months of applying this formula, you will be enjoying the perks (and revenue) of being a “medspa celebrity”. There are many ’specialties’ within a medspa that you can become an expert at (laser hair removal specialist, sun spot removal specialist, injectable specialist, etc).

Consider having an area on your website or in your newsletter for q & a from your patients that allow you to showcase your knowledge. Once you become known in your area as the “laser queen”, you will have them beating down a path to your door!

Med Spa Marketing 101

Confused by what’s marketing, and what isn’t? People tend to make things more complicated than they really are, so I feel it’s time for a refresher course on the absolute basics of direct response marketing for salons and spas.

First of all,

What IS Marketing?

It’s not just advertising, or direct mail, or Public Relations, or TV, or radio? or any of those things in isolation. It’s actually VERY simple, folks:

Marketing is ‘any activity which brings a customer to you with a pre-disposition to buy from you and only you, at the price you wish to charge?”

As Ray Kroc, founder of McDonalds, used to tell his staff, clean toilets is marketing.

So let’s start Lesson #1 with something everybody can understand, a form of marketing almost everybody does – a plain old space ad in the printed media such as Yellow Pages or the newspaper.

As you know, Inner Circle Members all over the world bombard us with ads, flyers and sales letters they want us to critique, to knock into shape. And the biggest single mistake most make is burdening their ad with too much work to do.

Eg., they want their ad to sell ‘off the page’, expecting their $250 ad will somehow, miraculously, sell a bunch of high-priced body wraps or microdermabrasion courses. But just in case that doesn’t work, they also include a whole slew of other products and services, like “Ask us about our facials, manicures, pedicures, hot stone massages?” etc etc.

Here’s an example: a hotch-potch of nothingness, meaningless ‘motherhood’ statements, unreadable italic text, and no offer whatsoever that asks the prospect to do anything?. let alone pick up the phone and call!

Here’s the thing:

Confuse Your Prospect, and He/She Won’t Make a Decision

In any kind of marketing, you need to put ALL of your effort, energy and copy towards a single purpose.

Decide before you advertise – as part of your Sales Thinking Process – exactly what you want your prospect to do. And then give them no choice but that. It is very difficult, if not impossible, to sell a big-ticket item or service ‘off the page’, i.e. expecting a single ad to sell a high-priced service in a single step.

So if you’re trying to use say, a newspaper ad to sell a big-ticket item – and that’s probably anything more than $200 – your ad is going to struggle to do that.

(You might get a handful of people actually pick up the phone and call you. But for every call, there might be 10, 20, a hundred who almost pick up the phone – but don’t quite.)

Better: use the ad to give something away – it’s sole purpose is to get the prospect to raise her hand and say ‘Hey, I’m interested in what you have to sell – but I’m not yet convinced enough to give you my money yet.’

Selling a big ticket item is often going to need a multi-step process.

1. Generate the lead with a freebie offer.
2. Get the prospect to come in for the freebie.
3. Give the freebie service.
4. Use that time to sell the prospect on the benefits of the full course or service.
5. Close the sale with a compelling, unbeatable, value-added offer.

When you advertise you MUST

1. Decide whether you have a 1-step or multi-step sale to make.
2. If multi-step, recognize you are advertising to generate leads and do nothing else that takes away space, time attention from that task.
3. Feature your freebie offer up top and early – don’t hide it. Eg, “LADIES! FREE ‘HOLLYWOOD STAR’ (INSERT YOURS) TREATMENT VALUED AT $X – FIRST 17 CALLERS ONLY!”
4. Make the offer as exciting and valuable as possible.
5. Give multiple ways to respond, emphasizing the one you would prefer, eg phone first, then website. Whether you should push as many as possible to the web is debatable. Yes, sending people to the web gets you their email address and name – presuming you have a name-capture device. (see www.beauty-salon-marketing.com for an example of one). But the phone is always handy, a computer may not be.

The KISS Principle

The KISS Principle – Keep it Simple, Stupid

No matter the city or location, medspa and laser skin care center owners all say pretty much the same things, talk about the same challenges.

There’s no point being grumpy about it. But marketing your Medspa doesn’t have to be confusing. Do the simple stuff first.

Here are the top complaints:

• “I want more patients, and I don’t know how to get them.”
• “I want my patients to come back more often, and spend more money.”
• And “I want to get ‘off the tools’ but I don’t know how.”

There’s a whole seminar, a dozen books and several university degrees in every one of these questions, but for clarity, let’s just deal with the top two. The faster you find answers to those two, the easier it is to find an answer to #3.

First, some basic Marketing 101.

There are only TWO types of people: Clients you already have, and ones you haven’t met yet.

And it’s a mystery to me why so many business owners spend ALL their time, energy and money, busting a gut to constantly find new customers, while ignoring the farm in their own backyard.

For years a prominent hair replacement surgeon has paid every month, to advise her on marketing.  This surgeon is spending many tens of thousands of dollars a year on newspaper and Yellow Pages advertising to attract balding guys willing to pay an average of $14,000 to get their mojo back.

But the business has the names and addresses of over 8,000 guys who, over the years, have put their hands up and said ‘I’m interested?’ – and haven’t signed up.

Astoundingly, the surgeon doesn’t spend a single dollar on so much as a monthly newsletter to these highly-qualified, very warm leads. And yet we KNOW that if you market to people regularly, with a worthwhile, interesting newsletter, 80% of them will buy from you over a two-year period._

Do the numbers: if only ONE PERCENT of them signed up in a whole year, that’s EIGHTY customers @ $14,000 average = $1,120,000! The whole business only does about $2 million annual sales!

Talk about ‘acres of diamonds’!

So, let’s keep it simple. Here’s a very basic framework/schedule – the bare minimum requirement – for marketing to both get new patients, and get your existing/new patients coming back.

To Get New Patients

1. an ACTIVE – not passive – referral program. It’s a systemised, generous referral program designed to get your best patients referring their friends and colleagues. (Why ‘best’ patients? Because people tend to hang around with people like them. If you want impoverished, penny-pinching patients, sure, ask those patients to refer their friends.)
2. Lead-generating mailbox flyers, newspaper ads, street signs and window posters. Essentially, lead-generators involve making an introductory offer of some kind of FREE service – with restrictions on numbers, days available etc, to drive them in on days when your appointment book is empty anyway – with the purpose of getting the prospect’s backside in your chair or treatment room for an hour or two. That’s when you sell to ‘em, not off the page.

Why would you offer something free? Because, silly, you know that an average patient is worth $X to you in a year? and you know if you get ten new prospective patients in the door, you’ll keep say 5 of them for the long term. Five times $X = ?

You need to know your numbers!

To Get Current & Past Patients Coming Back: Here’s the very basic stuff.

1. Regular (Monthly!) newsletter. Anything less than monthly is a waste of time. There is a whole seminar just in newsletters. It doesn’t have to be glossy, ‘professional’. In fact, the more it looks like it’s been hammered out on an old typewriter on your kitchen table, the better. Personal stuff, about you, your kids, your staff? and with an offer in it. Simple, single sheet of double-sided paper, an envelope and a stamp, and the job’s done.)I cannot stress enough the value of a regular newsletter. They always produce sales, always bring in more than they cost. And they keep your patients close. And they generate referrals.
2. ‘Raise the Dead’ letters: go to your database, pick all the patients you haven’t seen for three months or more?and send them a letter with an offer in it. And for those who don’t respond, send them another letter. Do this every three months.
3. New Patient Letters. If they don’t immediately re-book, every first time patient should be receiving a series of follow-up letters, offering them a Gift Voucher to re-book NOW.
4. Memberships. Want your patients to pay a year’s worth up front? Or commit to a regular credit card payment every month? A member of your ‘Premium VIP Club’ who’s paid for a year of services up front isn’t going anywhere else. Plus, once they’ve spent the money, they’ll soon forget about it?.and spend more on products every time they come in.
5. In-Spa special promos. One smart spa owner produced a series of big posters offering a range of value-add services ranging in price from a couple of hundred bucks right up to $500 or more. These offers were placed all over the spa.  And for a month, the staff talked them up, holding people back till the beginning of the following month. They sold over $16,000 worth of these packages in a matter of days. And the more expensive ones sold best!

There you have it. If you employ only that handful of strategies, do it regularly, do it well, you cannot fail.