Vivienne Echendu: Hi, Instagram! Welcome back to ARTV, your guide to current events within the aesthetic industry. I am your host Vivienne Echendu, the vendor relations specialist here at Aesthetic Records.
Thank you guys for tuning in to episode 4 where we continue supporting small businesses that are doing big things. Today, I am so proud to introduce our guest speaker Cameron Hemphill, CEO of Growth99 — a US-based advanced technology company that supports aesthetic practices design and develop websites, create and digitize its engaging content, optimized SEO and manage their online reputation.
Today Cameron is here to help guide your practice to performing at the highest level, generate pre-revenue sales and clinic’s online presence, and ranking to gain even more traffic during your brand re-opening. All of that in the most effective manner. Cameron, thank you for joining please help your viewers get to know you, your journey to Growth99, and Growth99’s unique approach to supporting clients within the aesthetic industry.
Cameron Hemphill: Thanks for having me on guys, (I) appreciate it. It’s definitely crazy, it’s so exciting to be a part of this. Growth99 is founded back in 2015. I’ve been a serial entrepreneur my whole life and started companies, had companies fail on the odds but had some really good exits as well. I primarily just focus on the technology space. My wife has been in the health and beauty space and I found some shortcomings in terms of marketing, technology, digitation, online reputation management. How do you really get traction and leads and convert those leads into clients? That’s really what Growth99 is all about. We build state-of-the-art websites, unlimited changes, redesigns, enhancements, unlimited support, and provide a foundation for our customers to convert leads into real customers.
VE: How do you engage with your client?
CH: What Growth99 will do when we’re engaging with the particular prospect or customer, we want to understand what their requirements are, what platform are they on if they have a website, do they not have a website, have they been down the path where they just can’t be found on the internet? A lot of the things we come to find is some customers will in fact have a website but in fact, is just nowhere to be found on the internet. It’s almost like the cornfield in Nebraska.
It’s extremely important to have a solid real estate placement when it comes to websites in general. Search engine optimization does that. So we build websites in state-of-the-art-platforms, we host it on state-of-the-art hosting, and we take customers through the journey — from creating content, indexing the website through Google, we’re partners with Google, Amazon, Bing, and Yahoo. We want to make sure that the content is perfect, where the keywords are indexed correctly with H1 tags metatags where it is SEO optimized, so you have good placement.
Furthermore, we have listing citation integration which really helps with map placement so if you want to be found, you know when somebody searches “Botox near me” or “injectors near me” for example, you want to be found on all of the listing directory searches. We have proprietary tools that we use to push that content out. A big part of that too is reputation. So, when it comes to Botox, plastic surgeon, general medicine, reputation is vital.
You can do a good job of building a beautiful website, have a call to action, having it be the fast performance, mobile-friendly, but even if it’s a referral or even if you have a beautiful website, people will look you up online. They are going to look you up in Google My Business, they’re going to look you up on Facebook, they’re going to look you up in Yelp. I mean they are going to ask around. They are going to see if you have visual case studies, or “before-and-afters”. So, all this stuff, you have to have a plan and a process in place in order to increase your conversions.
We have clients we’ve done AB Testing on where you have a specific use case as somebody that has 2 or 3-star reviews or maybe a review rating that’s below a 4.0 and they do a tremendous amount of Facebook Ads and Google Ads. But we found that those conversions are actually lower than somebody that has above a hundred reviews or you know 4.5 index when it comes to reputation management, so reviews are vital in this space.
VE: The primary concern for practice owners is ensuring that they have everything in place to open up their doors. For many, this is a major opportunity to resurrect them from the financial hiatus these past few months. So why should aesthetic practices manage their online reputation? What should they do in terms of managing it as they prepare for reopening?
CH: Yeah, let us just look at history. I think we are on day 100 and something of this virus, right? So, unfortunately, businesses have been forced to shut down through government order and that’s been devastating to revenues, entrepreneurs, the small business owners, the person that has a side hustle, right? To be mandated to shut it down, it created a tremendous amount of concern from an economical perspective. It has been an interesting journey to talk with our clients on how best ways to handle during this — preparing for closure, managing the closure, and now preparing for the opening. A lot of the US is starting to open. I think there are some spaces in California that haven’t released an opening day yet, but a lot of US is now open. I am in UT and a lot of people started opening back up on May 1. It has been interesting to see how much people want to be open because revenue is vital to business. You have to generate dollars to maintain. These guys have expenses, they have employees, they have rent. We’re afraid of building more mortgages, right? They also have outstanding payments with vendors and stuff like that. So, its revenues are vital.
I had a good mentor told me, early on my entrepreneurial stage, that sales cure all problems. That is so true, and so these folks have to understand how to generate revenue. So, our stake on it, and really like our footprint has been, okay well, we know that digital marketing and websites is really 90% of search and this is how consumers find businesses. Well, now that is more important than ever. You have to have ad placement. You have to have real estate on the internet, and you have to drive traffic to that. Your website is, in my opinion, if you look at some of the data points, your website is probably just or more valuable than your brick and mortar store.
People can’t go to your brick and mortar store right now but they can go to your website. They can go to your Instagram, they can go to your Facebook page, and guess what? They can make acquisitions on these assets that you have. People need to understand that having a website is not just “oh everybody has one”. No, it’s a true asset that brings tremendous value in especially driving revenue.
What we have done with a lot of our clients is we’ve actually encouraged them to say, “Hey your website is vital”. It’s a tool, that is going to help you generate sales during social distancing and government-mandated shutdowns. How do you do that? You gotta make some changes. The nice thing about Growth99 is that you have unlimited changes and redesigns that are included which is really cool.
This isn’t a conversation about what we do but it’s more of a conversation about how consumers prepare and how do medical spas, plastic surgeons, and doctors prepare to open again. What we’ve done made Self Assessment important. You can now do Self Assessment, like “we are on a zoom call right now, we are on different states”. You can have these conversations even when you don’t jump on an airplane. You can get a really good framework of what somebody needs to do Self Assessment. We’ve done a lot of that with our clients, you can do Self Assessment with Growth99.
The other thing that we’ve done is that we’ve also helped with putting disclaimers on websites in terms of “hey here’s the COVID19 message”. We just go ahead and put those on the customer’s websites for them in terms of what the consumer will see when they go to the website. So, in terms of what businesses can do to leverage their websites and their digital assets, is if you been in business you have a database or at least I hope you have a database of past clients, leads and that database is probably in your AMR system or marketing tool or something of that nature you know It’s important. You got Mothers’ Day around the corner, you have a fanbase of these people. They have to understand that they have a fanbase. If they’ve gone to get Botox and they keep coming to you like you are their injector and they trust you and they want you to be open when they can come back in. They don’t want you to go out of business. Trust me, I’ve seen it so what they wanna do is they should leverage their database. They should create some very creative emails and send those out. Those emails can be based on “hey buy prepaid gift cards”, buy something for mother’s day, you could actually subscribe to discounted memberships, you can sell products I mean a lot of the stuff we’re actually doing free online stores now for all of our clients so anybody that wants free store selling products online, you now get a full e-commerce website so you can buy things around the website.
But you have to tell your customers about it. If you just tweak your website to having an online store, to Self Assessment, and all these other bells and whistles, you have to announce it. How do you announce it? You gotta announce it through social media emails, maybe some paid ads so that’s a lot of the stuff that we’ve been helping our clients get through during the shutdown. As they prepare, there’s a couple of factors you gotta consider in terms of liability. We were just talking about the malls are opening back up. Well, who wants to go to the mall? Maybe some people do but when you’re going to actually get a medical service done, these folks, and I am talking from just like my household experience, my wife wants to get service done like it’s part of what she does. They wanna make sure what procedures do we have in place. Is it safe? Is it secure? Have they cleaned the facility? What cleaning procedures do they have in place? What are they gonna do? What’s their process? So, I wanna encourage every practice to have a process in place and announce that. Look at it from a liability factor in terms of maybe you know having them sign a waiver, maybe they sign it prior to coming in.
I know when I got to my gym you have to sign a waiver now and this is just a new world that we’re dealing with but the last thing you wanna do is open up and have some sort of claim because somebody got sick that was a young healthy female or male and went home and got their grandparents sick with COVID19 and they passed away. Well, you got a claim there right, what I mean by the claim is a lawsuit. The last thing you wanna do is open up and have a lawsuit and then you’re done.
You wanna have those processes and procedures in place just to be prepared. If you’re a business, it’s not a matter of if you’ve been sued, it’s when. It’s important to have this in place.
VE: I am so glad that you mentioned that. So essential any new process whether it’s a new cleaning process, whether If now you want your patients to maybe wear a mask or any sort of precautionary measures, any sort of process is a tool that can be used to communicate with your patients on your website, email campaign, SMS text messaging. Any anything that is brand-new, I mean communicate. I think at this point people value and welcome any effort of communication plus it’s another touchpoint. Maybe they haven’t heard from me in the past two weeks, they get an email and now you’re at top of their list for people to see when things open up.
CH: Makes sense, yes exactly.
VE: You mentioned a really interesting quote earlier, that sales cure all problems. How does ORM or Online Reputation Management lead to pre-revenue sales during this time?
CM: When it comes to the medical space, again I can’t stress hard enough how reputation is so vital. You have to have a process to collect reviews. You haven’t had a process to manage your reputation and so you know it’s more important than ever that you have that reputation in place and that reputation is actually gonna pivot a little bit in terms of I mean they wanna know that you do great work, right? Like they want to know that the person that is getting the service done, but they also wanna know that they’re safe. Like safety and health is.. It has always been important but now it’s just top of mind. It is awareness.
Think about it, when you go to the store when you fill up your cars with gas, I mean people are now, I see people like holding the gasoline, with the glove or something like that or a toilet paper or something whatever it is. But it is really, health is the number one thing. In terms of, I mean you need to have a process in place. If you do not have reviews now, be mindful of them every time that anybody comes in and gets service done. Have a tool that sends out a text message or a message collecting feedback and have a process that pushes that positive feedback to share with the other potential consumers. You know through Google my Business, Facebook, Yelp, and there is a lot of other platforms as well. Encourage them to talk when you are collecting feedback. Ask them what the cleanliness of the facility was like. What is the process when they went in? What’s funny is you’re going to get all the personalities. You’re going to get the person that doesn’t care, and they’ve done their research and they feel that coronavirus is overblown. The conspiracy people are out there too, but the bottom line is safety always comes first and health comes first in any aspect of the business. I think having a process to manage that reputation is going to be pivotable now in going forward more than ever.
VE: What are some ways that practices can manage COVID19 communications with patients in a way that eases the strain on staff.
CH: I appreciate you asking that. It is more than just the consumer, it is the business owner or the doctor. It is really the staff. The safety of the staff has to be at the frontline, and you should have processes in place to make sure you know they are feeling well. I have seen a lot of places that have rolled out temperature gauging. I am a big believer in that. Because the last thing you wanna do is, it is hard, the employees wanna come back to work you know cos they wanna make income. I mean unemployment is going to run its course or whatever. I have heard interesting thoughts on that too, where people do not want to come back because they are actually making more money in unemployment which is a whole other topic. Practices should consider how they should communicate with staff. They should do some dry runs. They should not just open and the first customer comes in and they kind of figure it out. They should actually do some roleplay. They should put themselves in the footprint of the consumer and they should roleplay.
You know to text back and forth, emailing back and forth, putting up some new formatted procedures in place of how we communicate with the consumers, and what measures do they have in place.
Actually, there’s some stuff in Utah where I’ve seen one clinic is actually doing antibody testing. So maybe practices should look at doing some antibody testing before they let their staff back. I mean the thing is you can’t really socially distance when you’re doing injections. It is kind of hard and it’s actually impossible and it’s more of an art. It’s not just coming in and get your Botox done. You know these injectors, they are artists. They can look and see and know what you want, and they are extraordinary in their trade, but safety comes first. The business owner or the management level or the investors really need precautions with staff to make sure that staff is not liable, or they are not liable and everybody is safe and healthy.
VE: What should practices prioritize? Is it social media engagement, is it email campaign, phone calls, SMS text notifications? What should be the most important when it comes to maintaining communications with patients.
CH: If you look at social media engagements, it’s through the roof. Facebook just reported earnings and they were better than most analysts thought. Facebook owns Instagram right. Where do these people hang out? They hang out on Instagram, they hang out on Facebook. It is important to have relevancy and your fanbase, your clients, your past clients, your leads, your potential prospects, they’re scrolling and they’re looking and so you got to communicate in all levels. Of course, there is every demographic, there is every age. You got to have the right technology and the right tools in place in terms of sending out email blasts. There are tons and tremendous tools out there that you can print an email, send it out to your past clients informing them of what is going on or your current clients or prospects. Same with texting. A lot of where things are going to be going is text and voice. If you can send it out. You know Twilio just announced something cool which is a major SMS platform. I would encourage you to hit it on every angle. The website social media posting, social media stories, even do some boost stuff. What is the harm in spending a little bit of the asset to announce what you guys are doing? Touchpoints are huge. Emails, text messages, social media, website, anywhere digitally of course.
VE: What are some important updates that practices need to make on their online business listing directories like Google, Facebook, Yelp before they open their brick and mortars.
CH: What we have seen and what we have encouraged during the closure is that you have to update your listings and what your listings are is really, I mean you have Google My Business, again Facebook, Yelp. Those are kind of the big three and they have hours of operation on them, right. Can we work with some clinics that open Monday 8 to 5 through the week and then you know Saturday is by appointment only, Sundays are closed. So, the challenge that if you don’t have a partner that understands how to manage all of your online listing directories is, you have to go into each individual one, one by one by one by one and update hours of operation, maybe put a disclaimer on there about COVID19 temporary closed and here’s when we open. It’s really a headache, especially you wanna have more listings on the internet because the more content you have out there the more relevancy and real estate you own as a business. It is challenging for these businesses, like right now hours of operation is big, and then message about CV19.
You know it is nice our clients will call us or send a support ticket or will just be proactive and reach out to them and say “hey what is the mandate (its hard for us to know each city’s mandate) in your area” and we should consider making changes to your online listing directory especially Google my Business because that’s the number one search. We have a tool that we can go in and update all of your listing directory searches, hours of operations, and put a message about COVID19, and update all the platforms in one good cohesive nature. So, it’s really easy. You put in a support ticket, it’s updated, it’s done.
VE: Can you show us some of the transformations you made with your clients?
CH: There were a lot of the transformations that we have made for our clients during CV19. There is a couple in particular that I can talk about or you guys could share, but one in particular Form Med Spa — large clients, great practice in Salt Lake City and Common Heights and they have various other offices but Self Assessment. So, we quickly added Self Assessment. Instead of going to the website you book now, book an appointment, come visit us. We just kind of flipped the script a little bit and said Self Assessment through that button up and immediately leads start flowing in for that client in particular.
That was quick action, proactive. What we do is also put disclaimers out there for collecting data as well as subscribing to newsletters like that. Another client I wanna talk about is Skinvolution Laser and Vein Center. They’re in Arizona. Dr. Patel, she’s just been fantastic, and she’s done a great job of really just being engaged and she’s come to us for advice how do I deal with this digitally? Our recommendation to her was, “let’s flip this let’s make sure you have Self Assessment”.
You get to her website, you click on Self Assessment, leads flow in through that inbound engine. There’s also a cool little disclaimer that we put on the footer that says “hey you know we’re closed right now. We’ll be back open in May. Stay safe.”, and stuff like that. The website’s nice, there are still two call-to-actions. You could book a visit request or virtual consultation. That’s been really cool to roll out for that particular client.
Another group I wanna talk about, their website we actually just released. We met up at the AmSpa show and it is Blue Ice Medical Spa. Group of 3 gals, they are just awesome to work with. Tremendous energy and so we actually brought them from an older website to the new website. So we’re actually going through onboarding during the mandate which has been interesting and so we just had a lot of fun creating this website, making a lot of the wave, brought a lot of video to it which has been cool around the services in particular, call to action, you can do Self Assessment with them as well and soon as things open up, they’ll be announcing that.
Another client that we have consulted with, they’ve been with us for a couple of years now, Beauty Lab and Laser. We have consulted with them heavily on online reputation management and they’ve really embraced it and they’ve done the best I’ve seen in the entire country especially in our customer base. The best I’ve seen. They have almost 800-900 reviews, they have a process in place. They use our tools that send out texts or emails and collect feedback. That positive feedback pushes to their Google My Business in particular. They’ve really embraced that tool. I asked them, you now the owners over there, I said “hey I want to know after having these many reviews what has it done for sales, for reputations, and what part of revenue comes from that?”. I mean I can’t pinpoint the exact percentage but I think Andrey over there said you should be charging more. *Laughs*
WE were at the AmSpa show earlier this year which I am glad I was in January before the closure. A lot of great people, a lot of new people. My wife was with me, we just love the show and the networking was just a part of us. We were fortunate enough to have some really good conversations with Ms. Shelby Miller, a young successful entrepreneur and just amazing when it comes to aesthetics and business as well.
She’s got 80,000+ followers on Instagram so and she got a very large fanbase you know and we started chatting and talking and she’s doing a huge build-out in Lehi and she wanted to work with us in particular. We are in the same state, you know localization is good but we started building out her new website as well. It’s almost released. it’s been an amazing process. I’m really excited about it. On that website there’s e-commerce, you can book a visit, there’s an announcement with CV19 once we release it. So is her online store in there so she’s selling products, she’s doing Self Assessment, she’s doing consulting on Instagram She’s been a lot of fun to work with and I am excited to see this one go live.
VE: You shared a lot of information today with us, Cameron. Thank you so much. What is the best way for our customers to get in touch with you?
CH: Appreciate you asking that. It’s pretty simple. As a digital marketing company, you could find us online, but we’ve also partnered with a lot of companies such as Aesthetics Record. You can find Growth99 on the Aesthetic Record Marketplace. You can see other products that we have and offer, inquire and as soon as somebody inquires, our sales team or account executive team, sometimes even me, I like to be on the frontline and really communicate with the customers directly. So, sometimes I’ll even reach out. Alternatively, you can go to Growth99.com. Our phone number is on there, you can inquire through our lead form and you can find us really anywhere on the internet, but our website is a great spot you know. Again, if you’re looking for a state-of-the-art website that’s fast, attractive, reliable on a mobile, tablet, every platform, secure, we host everything on AWS on our own server clusters. Unlimited revisions, unlimited updates, unlimited redesigns. Looking for a robust reputation management tool. Facebook ads, google ads, social media automated postings, something that is really going to take your practice to the next level when it comes to digital marketing and internet real estate you know visit Growth99.com or the Aesthetics Record Marketplace.
VE: Thank you for sharing and being a part of this today, Cameron. As you’ve mentioned, your patients are your fanbase, and continuity of care involves engaging with them through a variety of ways to stay relevant and top of mind against your competitors.
That’s a wrap for episode 4 of ARTV. If you’re an Aesthetic Record user make sure to log in to market.aestheticrecord.com where you can connect with a Growth99 partner to help you stand out from the crowd. As you prepare to open up, Cameron’s team can help you with content, digitization, digital marketing, reputation management, SEO Services, technology consulting, and website design. You can choose as many options as you want to create your custom package. If you’re not an Aesthetic Record user but wish to join the AR family, visit AestheticRecord.com where our team is eager to chat with you. If you’re a small business, doing big things and would like to be featured in our next episode, email me down below. I look forward to seeing you all soon until then stay safe and stay healthy!
