Cameron Hemphill, host of the Medical Millionaire podcast, emphasizes the importance of maintaining marketing efforts despite economic concerns. He argues that now is the time to increase marketing spend, particularly in digital advertising (Google, Facebook, Instagram), as search volumes for medical spa services remain high. Hemphill cites data showing a $1,000 monthly ad spend on these platforms could yield 50 leads, with conversion rates between 17-22%. He criticizes practice owners who want to grow but cut marketing budgets, stressing that marketing is essential for business growth and patient acquisition. He advises focusing on strategic growth and continuous marketing to avoid business stagnation.

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, 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 spa market. So if you’re an injector, you own a med spa, you’re a nurse practitioner, you own a cosmetic practice, plastic surgeon, you’re new to the business. You’re wanting to scale or looking to get into the business. This podcast is 100% designed for you. My team and I, we have consulted with some of the top practice owners around the country and even now outside the United States, for years, we work with some of the most well known practice owners and also meet individuals that are looking to get into the business. So wherever you’re at with your journey, we want to help you take your practice and your business skills to the next level. What I want to talk about, specifically today is stop stepping over dollars to pick up dimes. We are currently hearing individuals saying, Hey, I’m worried about the future of the economy, and I want to pull back on my overall marketing allocation, and I have to ask myself, why would somebody ever want to do that? So when I hear people posing questions like this, or they want to chat about marketing budget, or they want to have conversations of where the economy is going in medical esthetics. Obviously, we don’t have a crystal ball. We have no idea. However, all signs show positive when you look at the medical esthetics environment. So a lot of great resources you can go to is American Med Spa Association. Go to their website. They have great resources that you can look at overall medical esthetics, trends and everything that I am seeing from a private equity standpoint or economic, you know, end point when it comes to where are we historically? Where are we at today, and where are we going? More practices are opening up, and the actual end user, meaning your patient, is wanting the service because they like to feel good about themselves, and they have had the service, or have known a friend or colleague or family member that has had the service, whether it’s Botox, Discord, filler, any sort of invasive or non invasive treatment, they have had it, or you at least, have talked to somebody that has and they want the service. Therefore the need is there. And as long as the need is there, the solutions, treatments and services need to be there to provide value. Okay, so when I hear this stuff and I look at economic data, obviously you can turn off the news and you can focus on your practice and what you are doing and doubling down. I see a lot of people retracting because of noise and noise only. When you look at the word Botox near me, medical spa near me, when you’re doing a Google search, the search volumes are still through the roof. They are higher today than they were three months ago. Okay, so what does that mean when that query is being searched, the search volume based on population density, is growing, which is a good sign. Okay, so you can look at it from a digital marketing standpoint, and so when I hear people constantly are looking at price right now. What am I paying my vendors? What is my current tech costs? What am I paying my providers? Maybe you’re looking at restructuring commission plans for your current providers, or you’re trying to renegotiate lease rates, or you’re looking at all of your tech and trying to see where you can save and we see where you can pull back on marketing. I’m telling you right now is the time to double down on your marketing spend. The practices that are doing extremely well are not only confident, but they know that they’re going to be around for the long haul. Okay, so what are they doing? They are doubling down on marketing. They are looking to spend more on social. They’re looking to spend more on Google ads, SEO, all of the dig ad and all of the impressions, because they know that market share is easy to capture currently, okay? And so as they do that. This is a trend that I would encourage everybody to follow, is to start investing more into your DIG ad, digital ads, okay, your audience hangs out on primarily three areas, Google, Facebook, Instagram. If you are not actively marketing on those channels you are missing out on opportunity when it comes to Google. You have Google, my business that can be fully optimized. Please make sure to look at optimizing it. You have SEO, which is your website. Go and conduct SEO queries. Go look at your Google Analytics. Go see where you can improve your overall impressions and search queries, and then Google ads. If you’re not running them, please look at running them. Please run them. If you are running them, look at where you can lower your cost per lead, and look at your keyword searches so you can maximize your overall keyword terms and queries and get more leads and maximize what you have out there. Okay, when it comes to social media, Facebook and Instagram, cost per leads are currently trending right around 17 to $25 cost per lead. So that means, let’s just make numbers easy. If you’re spending $1,000 on ads, you should be seeing about 50 leads. Let’s call it $1,000 a month on ads. You should be seeing about 50 leads. 50 leads. You’re not going to convert all of them, but conversions we’re seeing trend right now between 17 to 22% okay, so when I hear somebody that is saying, Hey, I’m looking to save costs, or I want to pull back on my overall marketing spend, or what are your thoughts on marketing right now, should we pull back? Should we really just kind of do things organically? You know, I always look at what even outside the industry. I’m looking at what other leaders are doing, what you know, like big, successful entrepreneurs are doing big companies. I know right now, Allergan is not pulling back on their marketing. I know gal Derma is not pulling back on their marketing. MERS is not pulling back on their marketing. Okay, so what does that mean? That means that there have very smart, like minded, either CFOs or people that are always looking at market trends. You know that they, these individuals, are looking at futures, right? Because companies like this, such as Allergan, that’s owned by Abdi, it’s a publicly traded company, right? And so they have forecast around what has taken place. And this is all public data. You can go ahead and go look it up. But the point of this is, I see a lot of people saying, you know, we’ll ask them questions, or we’ll be talking to them at shows, or whatever the case is, there’s through masterminds, or whatever the case is, and they pose these questions, right? And they’re like, Well, should we pull back on our marketing spend? And, you know, I mean, we’re just seeing less traffic now versus we were seeing, you know, the last two years, I mean, you guys have to keep in mind, the last two years has been bananas, right? It’s been nuts. We’ve seen crazy economic growth because of all of the printing of the of the digital dollar, right? The currency, everything that’s being pushed out in the system. You saw a lot of retraction during COVID and so naturally, things are going to move right. So we need to enter a healthy mindset, healthy environment, in terms of steady growth, not retractive, crazy growth. Retractive. You want current, you know, good, strategic growth, okay? And continuing to get smarter and smarter and learn and learn. Okay? So kind of coming back to the point quit stepping over dollars to pick up dimes.
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.
I had a conversation with a practice owner the other day, okay? And I said, What are your overall goals and objectives? Well, we want to grow. So she says she wants to hire more providers, she wants to get a new space, and she wants to grow the business, while at the same time, she wants to potentially pull back on her marketing spend on Google, Facebook and Instagram. And I had to sit back and scratch my head and say, Okay, you want to grow. You want to hire more providers. You want to, you know, basically, advance your current footprint within your environment. You would like to get more patients. You would like to get a bigger facility and but you want to pull back on where you’re going to attract new eyeballs. That’s going to result in new patients. So I have a hard time comprehending that. Well, well, all the time, like, of course, you need to always look at costs. You got to always look at budgets. It’s always got to make sense. But at the same time, there is a tremendous opportunity to invest in marketing right now, and there is much other ways where people can pull back and if, if those other areas are negotiating with the landlord to get a better lease rate right. Because if you, if you look at what’s happening with the commercial mortgage industry right now, you actually have the upper hand. You could negotiate very effectively currently, okay, there’s other areas that you can also negotiate right anywhere that you have a specific fixed expense, or you have a specific expense line item that you could reduce, and then go invest that into marketing. You’re definitely going to want to do that. Okay, so if your goal is to grow your practice, if you say, Okay, I’m going to sit down and my next two, five year 1010, year plan, if you’re, if you’re, if your question is, I want to stay the same, or I want to get smaller. Okay, then, then maybe don’t invest in marketing, but that’s not what we hear. Okay? Every time we are talking to a practice owner, we ask, what is your goal? Like? Why are we on the phone? Why are you wanting Why are we having a conversation? I want to grow. I want to get bigger. I want to hire more providers. I want my current providers to become more busy. I want to take a step back from the practice and have my practice run. I want to open up another location, okay? I want to buy a new device so I can, you know, invest in X amount of treatments we are. I am constantly hearing this stuff while at the same time, but I want to pull back on marketing. It just doesn’t make sense. There’s an old saying that says, the minute you stop marketing. You are out of business. Okay? You can make a great living being a salesperson, right? If you’re a good salesperson, and if you’re a business owner, and you are an injector, you’re you’re a provider, you’re a nurse practitioner, you own a med spa or a practice, at some point, you are a salesperson, whether you want to admit it or not, you are a salesperson, okay? And maybe you it’s through education. Maybe everybody has their own unique style, right? But at the end of the day, if you’re not transacting, you’re not in business, okay? And in order to transact, you have to have a lead. You have to have somebody of interest. And then, of course, you obviously have to have the intelligence and understanding and education to extract information from your brain to theirs. That makes sense for them to give you $1 versus value. Okay? At the end of the day, they’re getting a better deal. That’s why they’re saying, Hey, I’m gonna give you my dollar for this service or treatment, because in their mind, it makes sense, right? They’re getting a better deal. They’re getting the better value. It’s what they want. But in order to get that individual in front of you, you have to have marketing. There’s no way that you can get people to your practice, to hear about your practice without marketing. How do you get word of mouth referral? You got it through marketing if you met Sally, for example, at the country club or at a networking event or through a friend or at a party or a dinner event or a birthday or whatever it was you had a conversation about your practice, if, like, Sally comes in, right? There was a conversation. That’s marketing. You had the conversation you took the time to go to the event. You opened your mouth. Somebody says, Well, what do you do for a living? Well, I just open up a med spa, or I have, I own X, Y, Z, med spa. Oh, yeah, I’ve heard about that. But like your marketing, you’re talking about your practice, your business, okay? And that’s that brings up another point, actually, if you’re not doing that, if you’re not telling every single person what you do, then, then that’s something that you can easily reach out to and do, right? Like all of your sphere, everybody on your contact list and your phone. Know everybody on Instagram. You don’t just have to post for people to know. Go DM people. You know. People want to know, right? So let them know, give them the information. Show them you’re adding value to the marketplace. Okay? So you’re marketing that way. Now let’s say Sally comes in. She had a great, great experience at your practice. She loved it. Okay? She leaves. She goes and pulls up her social media, her Instagram account. Oh my gosh, look at my lips are so beautiful. You got to go see my gal, right? And she tags you like, what if she has 10,000 followers you just got? I mean, that’s marketing. Okay? So you constantly have to be marketing, getting in front of new people all the time. You constantly have to think about getting in front of new people. So if you shut off the funnel, you just show you just close the doors to your business. You can’t shut off the funnel. So when I hear someone says, Hey, I want to show I think I’m we’re gonna pause my Google ads. Or if somebody’s like, hey, Cam, I was thinking about running Facebook ads, this company, you know, apparently they’re really good, or whatever, like, you know, we’re always talking to people, right? But, you know, I don’t know where, Mike, have you closed business? Yeah, we’ve closed business. Well, great. Then shoot, continue doing. Figure out how you can get better. When I hear Hey, we’re thinking about shutting off our marketing. Mike, are you going out of business, or are you closing your doors? What’s your plan? No, we want to grow like you want to grow, but you’re you want to shut off your I don’t, I don’t understand, right? Like Tesla doesn’t just shut off their marketing and then expect to produce more cars next quarter. Okay, that’s not how it works, right? And so I would encourage you guys that are tuning in to take this episode serious, because I’m seeing it a lot, and as we go to, you know, more conferences, more shows, talk to all of the colleagues within the specific medical, esthetics, vertical and industry, we’re all really it’s a tight group, and we all communicate because we want to all figure out how we can help and give value, right? But when we’re hearing stuff like this, it just kind of brings up concern, thinking, okay, so it just, it completely contradicts itself. You can’t grow your practice and shut off your marketing. You cannot scale your business and shut off your marketing, right? Apply that philosophy to other industries. Hey, I’m a real estate agent, right? I’m a real estate agent. I’m gonna go, I’m gonna close 10 more deals this year than I did last year, or I’m going to do double the amount of business I did this year versus last year. Okay, cool. Well, what are you gonna do to do that? Well, I’m gonna turn off my marketing. I don’t understand, right? It just doesn’t make any sense, right? You basically, in order to do that, you have to build up a pipeline, right? You have to talk to a certain amount of people. Maybe you have to door knock a certain amount of doors. You have to send out X amount of emails, social media posts, run ads. You have to do marketing. So, like, you can be a good or great salesperson, make great money, but the great, great marketers. They make the big money like, look at Elon Musk, right? Great marketer. Look at Berkshire Hathaway, great marketer, right. Look at Warren Buffett, great marketer in disguise. He’s like, excellent at it, because he’s like the silent killer, right? But there’s some great marketers out there, right? Gary vanderchuk, amazing marketer. Okay, so I want you to guys start thinking about that, like start thinking more about marketing, and how you can 10x every single dollar, and quit stepping over dollars to pick up dimes and really start doubling down on getting you to where your goals and your practice wants to be, okay, guys. Hey, if you found this content valuable, please share it. Let’s keep the conversation going. Thank you so much. Until next time, happy injecting you.