Cameron Hemphill discusses the challenges and expenses of marketing in the medical aesthetics industry. He highlights the rise in competition, leading to increased ad spend and higher lead costs, with average CPL now around $60-$70. Hemphill emphasizes the importance of investing in professional tools and services, estimating that managing marketing and practice management in-house can cost $50,000-$60,000 annually without ad spend. He recommends allocating 5% of top-line revenue to marketing and suggests attending the Aesthetic Next event in Dallas for networking and learning opportunities.

Transcript

This is medical millionaire the podcast, helping your Med Spa increase in status, visibility and profitability. Join your host as he dispels myths, shares trends and gives you actionable steps today that will take your medical practice to the next level. Here’s your host, expert marketer and founder of growth 99 Cameron Hemphill,
Hey, what’s up, everybody? Cameron Hemphill, here your host for medical millionaire. Hey, first off, thank you so much for taking the time to tune into our podcast. Our goal is to give incredible value and insight into the medical esthetics market. So if you’re an injector, you own a medical esthetics practice, you want a dermatology clinic, you’re you are a plastic surgeon, you’re in the dental cosmetic space. This podcast, it’s 100% designed for you, and we get into specific tips and tricks around various things, right? If it has to do with running your practice with tools, if it has to do with marketing, if it has to do with allocations of finance, if it has to do with anything that you are experiencing in your own personal challenges, right? So my team and I, we consult some of the top medical esthetics practices all over the country, actually inside the UK and Canada at this point in time as well, but primarily United States. And we see practices that are that are absolutely thriving. We see ones that need serious help. We see a tremendous amount of practices that are coming on the horizon. And we also see practices that are starting to like incubate. And what I mean by incubate is basically saying that, hey, you may have a DERM practice now they do injectables. You may have a dental office that now does injectables, right? We see a lot of CO mingling taking place, right? So it’s an interesting era in the world of medicine, in the world of pharmaceuticals, and how you market these pharmaceuticals. And so what I want to get into today is, is some of the challenges and how expensive marketing can actually be for a medical esthetics practice or medical clinic, for example, right? Because there is so much going on. And you, if you’re tuning into this, and you happen to be one of these candidates that own a practice or thinking about getting into it, or you you have multiple locations, wherever you’re at within your journey, right? It’s, it’s extremely challenging and and very expensive to have a robust marketing system and process and execution in place. You have gone to school, right? Or training and taking courses continuous education to do your trade and your skill set right? And there’s other folks that have have taken the time and experience to invest in their skill set. Maybe that’s marketing, maybe that’s technology, whatever it is, right? And so what we have seen, you know, over the course of, let’s call it, the last 12 months, we have seen this industry explode. We have seen medical spas open up, like on every corner, right? That’s like the new running joke, right? They’re like, Starbucks are everywhere. So what is that doing? It’s creating a tremendous amount of competition. What else is it doing? It’s driving the ad spend volume up. Now, what do I mean by that? It’s driving the ad spend volume up, where people are trying to market, Facebook, Instagram, Google, right? Years ago, you know, even like three years ago, you could get pretty dang least decent lead volume through these channels, right? And so, like, an average cost per lead was was pretty low. It was, like, even on Google, it was south of $20 per lead, right? And so when I’m using terms like CPL, I mean cost per lead, or customer acquisition cost, or patient acquisition costs, like, what is the true acquisition cost of a booking that actually shows up in exchanges dollars for a treatment service, right? So what’s happened, right? Is we’ve seen a lot of we’ve had conversations with clinics that have been open for years. And like, Man, I used to be on the number one spot at Google. Or, like, I’ve never done marketing. I’ve never had to, and all of a sudden I’m not getting the amount of business that I used to get, and they’re confused, and you know, it’s because, well, look this industry, it’s exploded. There’s now other people in this space. There’s other people that are capturing market share. They are investing in channels such as Instagram, such as Tiktok, such as Facebook, such as Google, their websites, their SEO, like all of these particular things that are taking place. Yes, there’s more population, there’s migration taking place in certain markets, right? But overall, there’s just more competition. And I know that you know Instagram has done, has has really exploded that because you can share content so fast, you can share success so fast. Projects. And I think you’ll also see a lot of, you know, folks that have been working in hospitals, you know, and they’re kind of, you know, not really, maybe feeling valued at the current hospital or the current position, and they’re looking for alternative ways to produce income, or maybe just go, you know, make their own hours and open up a business, right? And so what I want to what, basically, what we have seen is a lot of clients have signed up for growth 99 right? That’s, that’s the company that that
really kind of helps produce this podcast, right? So this is medical millionaire growth. 99 is the company that we have. We don’t talk about it much on this podcast, because that’s not the purpose is, we’re not trying to pitch our services. This is all about giving consulting and giving back to the community and the industry to help you wherever you’re at, right? But I’m just going to share like what we have seen now is a lot of people that have come into this, this market, and they think, and this is a misconception that I just want to like set straight for everybody. All right, if you’re coming into this space and you think that you can spin up a website and spin up a Instagram page and start doing postings, and start running search engine optimization for a couple months, and maybe run a Facebook ad, here and there, and it’s just hasn’t worked for the first 3456, months, or even first 12 months, and it just hasn’t worked. And you think that you failed, you’re wrong. You’ve learned a lot. You figured out what to do. You figured out what not to do. You may have learned to build your own website, right? Because of, let’s just call it, you know, budget limitations. You know you have a certain amount of budget to open up your practice, or you’re bootstrapping it, or whatever you’re trying to do, which is totally normal with a new business and a new practice, right? So you may have figured out how to do things that you never had to do before, like you never had to build a website, maybe you never did post on social media, maybe you never have run a Facebook ad. Maybe you never have run an Instagram ad, right? Maybe you’ve never done a reel or or a story or created a podcast episode, or, you know, whatever it is, everything that you’re doing to try to get your name out there, right? You’ve never had to invest in technology like practice management solutions, EMR solutions, online booking solutions. There’s a lot going on with running a practice, and it, I’m you need to fall a few times and get back up, okay? Like, if you can just learn from this, like, every single failure is not a failure, it’s actually a learning experience. This is, this is just common in entrepreneurship. Opening up a practice in a business, you have to learn new skill sets. You’re probably going to learn some level of accounting. You’re going to learn like, sales tax. You’re going to learn how to work with a CPA, how to file your taxes as an entrepreneur and and maybe running an S corp and taking a draw and doing distributions, and like everything that comes with this, the proper insurance, the continuous education, like, it’s crazy. There’s a lot going on, right? So I see folks that have come in, they’re like, Hey, I saw so and so on Instagram, and they look successful, and I’m in a market that’s more predominant and and I can do it, and I can do it better than them, right? And shoot anybody. Can do anything if you put your your part, mind and soul, and have the discipline and the accountability to do whatever you want, right? It’s totally doable, but it takes time, and it takes accountability and discipline. So marketing and technology this can become it’s expensive. It is expensive to run Google Ads effectively. It’s expensive to run Facebook ads effectively. It’s expensive. Cost Per leads have gone through the roof. Search engine optimization has gone through the roof. Everybody wants to be on the first page of Google for every single service. So does everybody else you want to be there. So does everybody else. So everybody’s constantly clawing and thriving and trying to scrape to get the top of that mountain all at the same time, right? So if you’re trying to do all of this yourself, right? Or if you’re trying to, like, piece mail this together, it gets 10 times as expensive, right? So if you’re gonna build a website, and you’re like, Okay, I’m gonna do it myself, because I don’t want to invest the capital and hiring a professional, what I want you to do is say, Okay, you’re going to go build that website. Well, what platform are you going to build that website on? Right? You may not be knowledgeable on what platform to build on. You may go pick like Wix or Squarespace or something like that, and that may work for a time being, but I can tell you 10 out of 10 times you’ll end up migrating to a different platform, because those platforms will limit your growth. Okay, you’re locked into their framework, right? You can do some SEO, and you can run some ads, and you can build some stuff on there, and that’s fine, but there will be a point in time where you go on a more robust platform that will actually put you in a position to scale further. Okay, so. And so if you think that you’re going to go do that, you’re going to save time. Like, hey, I can build this myself. I’m not going to hire somebody. If this takes you 10 hours, 20 hours, 50 hours, whatever it takes you, what is your average cost per hour? Like, how much are you worth per hour? Right? Does it really make sense for you to build your own website if you’re worth let’s just, let’s just make numbers easy, right? You make 100 bucks an hour, and this thing takes you 50 hours, right? That’s gonna, that’s gonna cost you, what is it? Five grand, right? It’s gonna cost you $5,000 why not hire somebody get it done, and then you get your time back. You get all that time back, and now you can go work on other components of building the practice of things that you know how to do. Okay, let’s talk about running Facebook ads for a second, let’s say, and I’ll compound that with Google ads. Okay, so how do you run an effective Facebook ad campaign? There is people out there. That’s all they do. They’ve been doing it for years, and they have to keep up with Facebook’s best practices, Facebook’s new policies and procedures, Facebook’s new algorithm, even when, like the new iOS doesn’t update, it affects the Facebook marketing campaign. It’s crazy, like, how much these marketing professionals have to keep up in order to run effective campaigns and monitor them and then build look alike audiences, right? So if you want to go create a Facebook ad and create the ad copy, create the sales copy, create your landing page, and then build out the audience and build out the campaign, you could probably learn that, right? Watch some YouTube videos, go hire a coach, go hire a professional. You know, you could probably do that, but that is a skill set that is very, very unique, and it’s extremely hard to maintain and monitor while at the same time running a practice. So it, what it does is it creates a negative ROI based on time, based off of leads, based off of investment allocation. It creates a negative ROI for your practice.
Thank you for listening to medical millionaire. I wanted to take just a few short moments and tell you all about growth 99 University, naturally, if you’re listening to medical millionaire, the success of your Med Spa is extremely important to you, and as it should be. And if you’re listening to medical millionaire, you are obviously looking for the best, most effective ways to take your Med Spa to the next level in both profit and customer success, enter growth 99 University ranging from online education courses all the way to the full suite of marketing and web services. Growth 99 has your Med Spa covered. No matter the challenges that you’re facing, we are ready and able to help you achieve your next level in business profit and freedom to inquire about all of our support services and products, please visit growth 90 nine.com and while you’re there, click the university link and check out the companion course to this very podcast. Back to the show.
Let’s talk about Google ads. Okay, so now you want to go run Google ads as well, right? And let’s just what’s the difference between Facebook ads, Instagram and Google ads, Facebook ads and Instagram ads is when somebody is scrolling on their device and you interrupt them with an offer or a hook or a promo. Right They click on your ad and there’s I could go down the rabbit hole on what different avenues you could take them. You could do lead generation campaigns. You could do landing pad, landing page lead captures. You can do book now buttons like there’s so many ways to bring these leads in, and then when they come in, how do you hit them with automation? Because they all come into the Facebook ad manager. And if you don’t have a tool that sucks the data out and puts it into a CRM system that starts hitting them with emails and text messages and putting you in a position to make a phone call in, like an effective CRM system. You’ve now invested time, money, effort, to get zero results, right? So now let’s go over to Google. What is what is Google? Well, Google is all keyword based, right? Pay Per Click ads when someone goes to the internet and conducts a search, like medical spa near me, Botox near me. You know, breast augmentation near me, nose job, you know, rhinoplasty, whatever they’re searching, right? So the only way to get to the top of Google search, like overnight, is to buy ad space, and that is very expensive. The average cost per lead across the board right now industry average, some markets are higher and some markets are lower, but I’m just the average is about 60 to $70 a lead right now. That’s a lead. That’s not a booking. That’s a lead. When that lead comes in, if they’re going to a landing page and fill out a form, and you’re capturing the data, and that’s going to a system, and you’re making a. Phone call very quick, and you’re sending them automated text messages and automated emails. It’s a great way to run Google ads. If you’re running Google ads and they’re just going blind and you’re not calling the leads, you don’t have time. Maybe you’re injecting all day long, and you’re running ads and you don’t have somebody that can make the calls, or you don’t have a system that automatically sends text messages and emails, your conversion drops, and again, you’re spending $70 a lead. That’s not your customer acquisition costs, your patient acquisition costs. Patient acquisition cost is going to be right around $100 to get that booking. So it becomes extremely expensive, and it compounds the the amount of investment if you’re running this and doing this yourself, right? So let’s talk about search engine optimization. What is search engine optimization? Search engine optimization is what you do on your website and how you rank organically. Keywords, h1, tags, metadata, long tail, short, tail, phrases, blog posts, content creation. It’s crazy. There’s a lot going on right? Go ahead and post a blog to your website every single month. Like, when do we have the time to do that? Who are we gonna hire to do that? Let’s hire a content writer. I don’t know if you guys have been to Upwork lately or anywhere and try to hire a content writer. They’re outrageous right now because you have all of these freelancers that are at home, and they want to do very unique jobs, and everybody’s an expert all of a sudden, right? And they want to charge for it, you know, I had a, I had a call with a client the other day, and he wanted, he’s like, you know, I’m going to hire somebody to do our content, and I’ll have them do that. Well, a couple weeks went by, I said, Hey, have you gotten to the content yet? I know you were going to, you know, have somebody do it. No, I they were outrageously expensive. You know, we just have your guys’ team do it, right? So it becomes extremely expensive when you try to piecemeal things together, or you want to do it, do it yourself. And then how do you, like, keep up with all the algorithms? How do you keep up with all of the best practices, tying all the systems together and running the entire component. Okay, let’s talk about reputation management for a minute, right? Google reviews, what helps you gain credibility? Press releases, what helps you gain creative credibility? Credibility, right? So if you don’t have technology in place that sends text messages and emails to say, hey, please share your experience on Google with us, right and have the ability to navigate and monitor that reputation if they didn’t have a good experience, being able to have tools that intercept that and give you the feedback versus public forum via one story view on Google, for example, That would also impact your business and practice drastically. Right again, you guys are medical professionals like poking people in the in the face and, you know, changing physical appearances, credibility is huge in this space, right? So that becomes expensive. Let’s talk about local listing syndication and listing citation directories. I just said that. That sounds like totally nerdy, but what it is is the ability to be to have your location, your medical esthetics practice, or wherever, whatever it is on, like Google, my business, and then push that data to all the other online directories. And then what happens if you change locations? What happens if you change your address, your phone number, all of your services, your attributes, your descriptions, everything. How do you maintain all of the other channels, right?
So that becomes expensive.
What about sending mass emails and mass text messages like patient retention?
Right? That becomes expensive, that becomes time consuming,
right? What about investing in CRM solutions? Right? There’s like standalone CRM solutions, customer relationship management or lead management solutions, right? That’s a piece of software that’s expensive. It’s expensive to set it up, right? So what I’m really getting at is the marketing, patient management, patient retention, web presence creation, the ability to run your practice with ease is going to make you very successful. Okay, I would strongly suggest investing in tools. Tools are way cheaper than people, right? You obviously have to invest in people. I’m not just you know, discrediting that, but tools are very, very important. There’s pieces of software out there that can help run the practice, online booking. There’s software CRM system. There’s software reviews and reputation management. There’s software blog creation for SEO. There’s marketing companies that can do that, powering the website, changing the website. Like think about any time you need to make a change your website, you roll out a new service, you hire somebody. Need a bio written, you. Fire. Somebody. Need to buy it taken down. You want to update your website with the new specials that you have this month. Now, you got to go, go into Canva, create something, put it on your website like there’s a lot going on right? And so if, if you’re trying to do this yourself, I It’s impossible, like it’s impossible, to run an effective practice and do all of this yourself, right? And so I ran some really cool, interesting calculations recently, because I was thinking late at night, and I was thinking, man, like it’s expensive to run growth 99 like you have people, you have technology, you have we do everything that you guys do, except for do medical treatments, right? Like we have tech, we run campaigns, we do all this stuff. We produce podcasts, like we’re doing here. We do lots, and it’s expensive and it’s very, very time consuming, but, but it’s important to understand, like, if you don’t hire the professionals to help you, it’s way more expensive, and you’re, you’re just gonna, you’re just gonna get eaten alive by everybody that has been doing it with credible firms, right? So I was running this calculation, and if you choose to basically piece mail this together, right? Maybe you hire somebody to build your website, you hire somebody to do your CRM, you hire somebody to do your EMR, you hire somebody to create a blog post for you once a month. You hire somebody to run your social media. You hire somebody to run your Google ads, you hire somebody to run your Facebook ads, you hire somebody to whatever else you have to do. Right when you piece mail it together or you’re doing it yourself. The calculation comes down without ad spend, like without any ad spend at all, based on these are some of the line items I came up with, building a website with unlimited changes, hosting the website lead capture tools with like chat bots, virtual consultation lead captures search engine optimization, Google reviews, listing, syndication, blog posts, having somebody on your team to help you right. Somebody needs to know how to update the website and create stuff, running ads on Instagram and Facebook, like by creation all of this stuff, sending a mass email, sending a mass text message, because then you have to create the content, and you have to buy the technology to send it out, right? The what it takes without ad spend, okay? Without ad spend, it’s it ranges between 50,060 $5,000 a year to maintain that by piece, mailing it or hiring different parties to run everything. Okay? So if you, you know, let’s just call it $60,000 divided by 12. What is that? That’s That’s five grand a month, right? So when you look at what you what you currently have, like, let’s say you have invested into a verticalized marketing company, then maybe they do all of these, all of these things for you at at a pretty decent price, right? I would encourage you to look at what your current landscape is, how much time it would take for you to like, invest and do all this stuff yourself, and also run an ROI calculation on on not only like, like the SEO, like the numbers and stuff like that, but the overall time that it would take to to encompass something like that and the investment, right? And when I give those numbers, that number doesn’t factor the people running it like a person on your team, that person on your team that would effectively have to run it, they’re probably 50 to $60,000 a year. So now you’re at six figures right to run this system, right? And I haven’t factored an ad spend, right? So a good rule of thumb is you want to invest about 5% of your top line revenue back into marketing. Okay, that’s a good rule of thumb, and that was also backed up by some very well known financial groups in this industry that go into EMR systems, and they can basically look at data showing where your providers are most effective and where they’re having downtime and kind of you know, key point where the inefficiencies are right. So 5% of your overall top line should be funneled back into marketing. So if you have all this piece meld together or glued together however you want to do it, and you have different people doing different things. And then you have to hire a team internally to run it. You’re at six figures. Okay? Now it’s built in ad spend, okay, so if you are doing a million dollars in book of business annually, you know, you should? You should, you know, be contributing a decent amount of ad spend? Okay? And at the 5% factor, you’re now at $150,000 a year. Okay, so it gets, it gets expensive. And so again, I want to leave you guys with, you know, invest in good, you know, good tools, resources, teams, you know, and make sure that you have a good team that can, that can really, you know, execute on doing everything within one specific vendor, right? Because then you don’t have to have a vendor that’s running the SEO, a vendor that’s running, like the Google AdWords event, and that’s running the Facebook ads, and then having them talk to each other, and it’s just really inefficient. It becomes very, very expensive, right? And so I’ll leave it at that, guys, I hope that you got a lot out of this episode. There’s a lot of times that I dive into other specific topics, but I felt this was really relevant for the current economic understanding of where we are and also we are headed to esthetic next, next week. So we will be there. We’ll be in Dallas. We fly in on the seventh. The show ends on the 11th. So September 7 through the 11th, we will be there. We’re one of the sponsors there. We’ll have our booth there. We want to talk to our clients. We want to talk to our potential clients. We want to talk to everybody, so come see us. I forget what booth number we’re at, but we have a booth there, and it’s at one of the very well areas that you can find us. I think it’s like right in the front, somewhere in one of the main stages I will be speaking as well. So I’m actually speaking on Thursday, Friday, and then a panel. We have a panel over a couple hours on Saturday with a couple very well known industry expert leaders that will be joining on that panel. And so go to the prospectus and come, come to come see us. Come to esthetic Next, if you haven’t gotten your ticket, like come to Dallas, this is a great place where you can network, learn, see who like people. Discuss their failures, they discuss their wins, they discuss everything that they’re using, technology, tools, techniques, procedures, courses. And you’re gonna meet a lot of cool people. So definitely come, come check it out. If you haven’t yet. There’s still time. There’s still places to stay. Esthetic record is the one. Is the group that puts on the show. Esthetic next, super cool product. Great people. I’ll leave it at that, guys again. This is Cameron. Hopefully you guys found this episode very helpful and tune into our podcast for additional episodes. Thank you so much for tuning in until next time. Happy. Injected, you.