I stumbled on to this website today: http://alluremedspa.com/  I admit I don’t know all of the details, and this business failure could have happened for any number of reasons, but there are some interesting clues.

First the spa opened in 2005, and got off to a great start.  They said the first 3 years looked very promising (sustainable was the word they used).  Perhaps shooting for just “sustainability” was the problem.  They should have been shooting for 200% growth per year!

So between a promising year of 2008, and sutting their doors in 2009, something went horribly wrong!  What was it?  Who knows, but they do mention pay cuts, vacations postponed, layoffs, etc.

The most interesting note is that they have “exhausted all of their resources”!  Well I can assure you that they did not exhaust ALL of their resources, because they never contacted MMI for help.  We could have turned this around for them.  People would have kept their jobs, lives would not have been battered.

Don’t make the same mistake! Always remember that the key to any successful business is kick-butt marketing – not their medical degree, not their fancy lobby, not their pretty brochures, but  smart direct response medical spa marketing that brings in new clients.  Contact us TODAY to implement smart, high-ROI marketing in your business.

-Ryan

http://alluremedspa.com/

It is important to know that the majority of spa and medspa employees will be motivated by cold hard cash (commissions and bonuses). In addition, they are motivated by free products, preferred schedules, and free treatments.

With regards to compensation, you can have an ally with your vendors. Ask them to kick in samples, gratis, etc. for motivating and rewarding your employees. Ultimately, it will benefit them to have you sell more, so very often they will agree.

First, set your expectations for their target sales goals.

Begin with a 25% sales to service ratio. That means for every $100 service they perform, they need to sell $25 in product.

Example: On average, Suzy does 4 facials per day, for a total of 20 per week. Assuming the facials are $100, she will produce $2000 per week in services. Her retail goal then would be $500 per week – or $2000 per month. Set up a daily sales log so that Suzy can track her sales at the end of each day.

You can see how quickly the sales will compound by having 3, 4, 5 employees.

Set commissions on a sliding scale – enabling employees to make more if they sell more. Also set up a minimum required sales goal to even be eligible for commissions.

Example: $500 per month will be your recommended minimum sales goal. Anything under $500 employees won’t be eligible for commissions. At $501 up to $1,000 she will receive a commission rate of 10% of the total sold.

When Suzy sells between $1,001 and $2,000, she will receive 15%. But, when Suzy goes for it and becomes a super selling machine, and sells beyond $2,000, she will receive 20%.

The best way to show how this will benefit Suzy, show her in terms of dollars and cents. Work backwards from a dollar amount. If she wants to earn $1,000 in commission per month, show her how much she will need to sell to reach that goal (in this case it would be $5,000).

Example: “Suzy, I want you to really benefit from your expertise and recommendations. I want to make it possible for you to make a lot of money with us. Here is an example of how you can do that.” Proceed to show her on an excel spreadsheet how she can achieve her goal.

$5,000 might sound like a lot to sell to her (or you), especially if her current monthly sales are hovering around $1,000 – but lets break that down to see if it is really unattainable. If Suzy works full time, 5 days per week, 5k per month is $1250 per week, or $250 per day. If Suzy sees 4 clients per day, that is only $62.50 per client, the price of a moisturizer.

Seems pretty attainable now, doesn’t it? Please refer to the next section (product bundling) to learn how to make sales seamless and effortless.

We strongly advise you to track and measure the results of your marketing campaigns and the same is true of tracking the sales of your staff. There is something to be said of being accountable – and being accountable in a public way is a great motivator. Nobody likes to be last and studies prove that performance improves when results are measured.

A performance chart should be placed on the front of your office door for everyone to see.  Some employees will disagree with this method of posting, and those are usually the ones that have the poorest sales performances.

Every medspa is going to be slightly different, but here are a few categories that would be beneficial to measure:

Total $ for the day: Total sales and services for the day

• Total product $: The total dollar amount of all products sold for the day
• Total services $: The total dollar amount of all services sold for the day
• Transaction average: The total number of transactions divided by the total product sales
• Average Units per transaction: The average units (or products) per transaction
• The number of re-bookings
• The number of testimonial and/or feedback forms completed
• The number of thank you notes written

By providing all of this information on a daily basis, your staff always knows where they stand and in addition, it will give you a benchmark to determine who needs coaching and who needs recognition.

We can help you identify different retail profiles, how to motivate your staff, how to work with vendors and how to introduce and sell products within the medspa.

First and foremost, retailing should be a key component to your business plan. When executed properly, it will supplement your income in a major way. So don’t think of retailing as an after-thought.

Your staff will respond to “selling” by how important it is to you. Don’t expect them to get excited about promoting products if you don’t make retailing an expectation of their job.  If you demonstrate enthusiasm and build a reward structure to demonstrate your commitment to it, they will respond positively.

Here is a breakdown of the most important fundamentals of retailing:

Product selection: Make sure to carry a nice variety of products to accommodate all of your patients. That means you should offer moderate to luxury price ranges

Product Training: It is mandatory that each and every staff member receive vendor training and products to try on themselves

Bundling: Bundle products with services to move more items. Don’t expect patients to come to the conclusion that they need sunblock, skin lightening serum and mineral makeup with an IPL treatment. Make it easy for them to make the right decision

Sales Goals: Each staff member must have clearly defined sales goals and repercussion for not implementing and rewards for implementing

It is important to know that the majority of employees will be motivated by cold hard cash (commissions and bonuses). In addition, they are motivated by free products, preferred schedules, and free treatments.  Fpr more on how to motivate your staff, click here.

Here are just a few quick words on the important of a well-trained reception / front desk staff for spas and medspas.

Your front desk staff can make or break your business. If not properly trained to close a sale, you can watch your marketing dollars go right out of the window. They will be using the most important tool in your business, the telephone – so leave nothing to chance and set up phone etiquette standards.

Develop a phone script system for all aspects of your business:

• Script how your staff will answer phones
• Script how your staff will handle walk ins
• Script how your staff will confirm appointments
• Script how your staff will book promotions

Instead of hiring young college coeds (that may look beautiful) for minimum wage, hire the best you can afford. In fact, you could go so far as to hire professional telemarketers and station them in a separate room away from the front desk to close/upsell/confirm appointments.

By doing so, you will boost the number of appointments that you book significantly.

The Medspa Marketing Institute offers affordable in-spa training of your staff and front desk and can develop effective phone scripts for you.  Please contact us for more information.

Are you unhappy with your website? Is it a good tool to help you generate leads and get new patients in the door?  If not, you may want to consider your medspa website’s “platform”.

The first thing that you need to know is that the platform your medical spa or aesthetic business website runs on is very important to the search engines.  If you just have a few static pages that rarely change, with mostly sales pitches and no real content, the search engines will never rank your website high in the organic search results.

Google and Yahoo understand that these types of websites exist just to sell a product, not to educate the visitor on a particular topic.  It usually ranks these sites low, but with the right platform, the content limitations can be overcome.

On the other hand, if you create a very rich, robust, and in-depth site that educates visitors on numerous topics by having lots of original, great content, then you are much more likely to be ranked higher in the search engine results pages (SERPS).  However, this is only a general guideline, and not an absolute rule.

We have seen numerous cases where a salesletter website very thin on content outranks a website that has an incredible amount of content, and this is due to the platform that the site is built upon.

The reason is that when search engines spiders “crawl” (analyze) your site, it analyzes not only the content for keywords, but it analyzes the site structure and design to try to determine is function.  It gives a fairly considerable weight to well-organized websites that provide good metadata about the contents of the site.  Metadata is simply “information about information”.

In the last few years, there have been some website platforms known as “content management systems” (CMS) that were created specifically with search engines in mind.  The best of these CMS systems is called Wordpress.

Wordpress actually has two variations, a hosted version at wordpress.com, and a “host it yourself version” found at Wordpress.org.  The self-hosted version is the most robust and flexible CMS ever created, and the search engines really like it, and therefore give Wordpress websites high ranking fairly quickly compared to other platforms.

The real beauty of Wordpress is that the source code is open to anyone and everyone, so a community of tens of thousands of programmers has sprung up to design themes and plugins for it, to enhance Wordpress functionality.

Many of these plugins are related to social networking sites and SEO, so with the right plugins, a Wordpress website can be extremely powerful for search engine ranking and driving traffic from social networks.  They can also look very good without a lot of custom programming or design work.

It is definitely worth investigating whether or not converting your medspa website to the Wordpress platform will help you drive more traffic to your site to make you more money.  Converting your content over isn’t very difficult, and because Wordpress is a content management system and blogging system, your pages can be reorganized to be search engine friendly.

You can “tag” every page with the relevant keywords, add search engine summary excerpts, and many other functions that the search engines value.

Probably the single greatest feature of Wordpress sites is that every time you make a change or update content on the site, when the content is saved, Wordpress will automatically update a long list of blog directories, notifying them that you have added new content.

This contributes significantly to your search engine rankings.  It has been referred to as “post and rank” – as in get better page rankings and SERP listings.

If you do not have a lot of content on your website, that is ok, it is easy and inexpensive to get good spa content written for your site.  The more articles and educational content you have to educate your visitors on your services and treatments, the more Google will like your site, and the more likely it is that other websites link to your site, which is a common and significant SEO tactic.

Getting traffic to a website of course is just Step 1, converting visitors to actual patients is Step 2, and it isn’t difficult if you know what to do.  That will be the subject of the next post on Internet marketing for medical spas.

Happy Marketing!

-Ryan

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.

No amount of paid advertising can do what a well intended testimonial (or “word-of-mouth” advertising) can do. Example: Imagine three girlfriends going out for a night of fun. It has been awhile since they have seen each other. After all, the demands of kids, a husband and a full time job is time consuming. When the girls do meet for cocktails at the martini bar, Debbie looks different. Well, maybe different isn’t the word-  rested is the word. After the small talk about school and husbands and the latest job promotions, they get down to the nitty gritty… “You look amazing Debbie, what’s the secret?!”

And with baited breath, Debbie reveals her secret. She has visited the local medspa for a mommy makeover. A little Botox here, a little Restalyne there and a micro current facial thrown in for good measure. Instantly, 10 years younger!

Question: Do you think her girlfriends would be more inclined to call the medspa after seeing Debbie, or after reading an ad for a medspa in the local newspaper? You guessed it, Debbie is the perfect billboard for your medspa services but the key is ensuring that Debbie sings your praises to the people who are in the market for getting these services in the first place.

Did you know that Google ranks websites by testimonials? Have your patients leave you a testimonial by going to www.Google.com/maps. Have them put your business name in the search box. There will be an option to “leave a comment”.

Likewise, get patients to become “yelpers”. Visit www.Yelp.com and set up an account to have your voice heard. This is where the people vote on the best (and worse) services in their area.

Make it easy for them, upon completion of a service,  give them a  card that says:

“If you enjoyed your services with us today, I would sincerely appreciate your help in growing our business.
You can do this by going to www.Yelp.com and reviewing our services. It’s a great way to let your voice be heard and we would be sincerely grateful.”

Aim for 10% of your patients to leave feedback. Make sure to track it so you thank them.

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

By: Jennifer Devlin, Marketing Goddess, www.MedspaMarketingInstitute.com

They say time is money and that phrase couldn’t be more true when it comes to spending quality time on retailing.  Here is a universal truth about spa owners/spa directors: Most of them don’t spend quality time with their vendors and that’s a shame because your vendors can and should be your partner. They can provide displays, schematics, employee incentives and bundling ideas and, if they are really good partners, they will help you move dead stock by either creating a unique promotion or doing a stock balance return. However, if they don’t hear from you, they will assume you are doing fine. I have said it before and I will say it again, choose your vendors not only by the reputation of the products they sell, but (almost more importantly) by the service they provide.

1. Schedule a monthly conference call with each one of your vendors: Find out what is new, what press they have been mentioned in, what promotions they are offering, schedule an event in your spa, schedule training for new hires, create an monthly employee incentive and most importantly- share your sales figures with your vendor (for their products only).
2. Reports: The information is in the data and you should have at your fingertips all the necessary information which will give you a clear cut picture of your retail business. An accurate report will provide you with how much you have sold by vendor, your top sellers and your slow movers. Your monthly orders should reflect these reports and you should never be out of stock on a top seller. Likewise, if you have merchandise that has been sitting on your shelf for three months, it’s time for a sale.
3. Create retail product bundles by price: Generally speaking, people don’t like to make decisions, and if they do, they are afraid to make the wrong decision, so make it easy for them – create retail product bundles by price and lifestyle and then feature them prominently in your spa.
4. Use celebrity power to boost sales: If you have a variety of merchandise, find out from your vendors which celebrities use their products and then boast about it! People love to use what celebrities use.  Many times a vendor will create shelf-talkers featuring magazines covers and excerpts which you can then use in your merchandising efforts.
5. Tie in services to retail bundles: Every single service you offer should have a suggested retail component, especially packages. For example, a fathers day promo should include (or at least suggest) a shaving cream and SPF moisturizer. You can either include the cost of the bundle with your service and present it as a free gift or offer it as an add on for a price break.
6. Change visual displays at least once per week: This is a staple in most high-end department stores. Referred to as a “floor change”, they understand that people respond differently to different things. You have to keep your retail area fresh and relevant, especially if you have the same patients coming through every 4 weeks.
7. Appoint a designated person to handle retail: This includes speaking with vendors, writing orders, checking in orders, etc. Too many cooks in the kitchen – and things get lost in translation. It also makes it difficult to for the vendor to communicate if they have to repeat the same story to several different people. If you have a lot of different vendors, spread the responsibility over several employees.

Great retail doesn’t just happen. I wish I could tell you that placing pretty boxes of merchandise on a shelf and then forgetting about them would make you rich,  but it won’t. It takes focus, attention and planning, but when it  takes off, it can be a silent selling machine, providing a constant flow of residual income.

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/