“Branding is what other people say about you when you are not in the room.”
Branding is what people say about you when you are not in the room. The definition of your brand does not lie in your logo, product, or service, but rather in the emotional connection that the audience makes with your story.
Successful branding should evoke emotion at every level and at each individual client touch point. This consistent repetition fosters a strong association between how your audience perceives your business and how it makes them feel. It can be said that good brands are well known, but great brands are well loved. Always remember that everyone is not your audience. If you attempt to appeal to everyone, you will appeal to no one. The more generic your brand, the more watered down your message becomes, and will speak to fewer people.
Services
Logo creation
Logos are intended to be the “face” of the practice. They are graphic displays of the practice’s unique identity. Through colors, fonts and imagery, logos provide essential information about a company, which allows the customer to identify with the company’s core brand.
Branding booklet
Design a custom brand booklet that provides the web designers with branding guidelines to ensure all marketing pieces are consistent. Branding booklet will include:
- Typography header
- Typography sub-header
- Typography body text
- Color palettes (including pantone and CYMK color codes)
Mood board
This collection of colors, textures, and patterns evolves into a visual style guide to ensure MOD and the practice share the same vision. The mood board will act as a tactile and visual sandbox, a place where we can openly experiment with the different facets of a design. This provides the creative director with the ability to show clients a proposed look without investing too much in a failed direction.
Branding
Design
“Design is the silent ambassador of your brand.”
Design won’t save the world, but it sure makes it look better. Consumers of aesthetic and lifestyle brands expect authentic design that is simple, yet alluring. Design that is distinguished and chic is equally crucial to both traditional and more eccentric brands.
Don’t be afraid to shake things up; it will be a refreshing departure from the commonplace campaigns that we are all bombarded with daily. Create a brand and a story that stands alone and inspires envy in all competitors.
Services
- Brochure creation
- Business cards
- Branded stationery
- Office signage
- Event collateral
- Social media templates
“Marketing is really just flirting.”
Marketing is a contest for people’s attention. To effectively captivate your audience, you must adopt a customer-centric mindset, developing a story and message that is relatable and speaks to your customer’s reality in a creative way. To put it simply, the best marketing doesn’t feel like marketing. Of equal importance is selecting the appropriate mediums to circulate your message.
Services
- Email marketing
- Copy writing and editing
- Loyalty programs
- Blog writing
- Event marketing
While positioning the features of your product or service as ‘benefit statements’ meets the customer’s logical needs for your product, weaving a story into the message draws on the emotional wants of your customer, thereby creating a love affair between the customer and their brand. It gets right to the heart and soul of your customer by alluding to the experience of using your product and to the lifestyle associated with your brand. Successful marketing is enthusiasm transferred to the customer.
By selling the intangibles of experience and lifestyle, which seem just out of arm’s reach, luxury brands transcend simple monetary value and are launched into a realm of worth that’s attached to the product, to the person who purchases the product and to the personalities who endorse it.
Marketing
“Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.”
Implementing a loyalty program is one of the most effective ways to build a strong business foundation through patient retention and repeat business. Many practices want to focus solely on gaining new patients and do not think about ways to capitalize on the patients they’ve already captured. To put it in perspective, studies indicate that you have a 5 – 20% chance of selling to a new customer versus a 60 – 70% chance of selling to an existing customer. With that said, you do still need to create a marketing strategy to grow your patient base. However, be sure to keep your priorities straight when determining the amount of time and money being invested into these 2 initiatives.
Services
A loyalty club has 8 objectives:
- Reward patients for their loyalty.
- Upsell and cross sell within all profit centers.
- Reduce the # of events and specials.
- Maintain a regular, steady flow of business all month long.
- Modify patient buying behavior.
- Attract the ‘right’ patient.
- Boost product sales.
- Increase rebooking rate.
When you start making headway in these 8 areas you will start to see the foundation of your business strengthen. This stability will allow you to invest in other aspects of your business and will allow you to start growing in new directions. Whether it is bringing in a new profit center such as a non-invasive fat reduction device, launching an online retail store, re-branding the business with a fresh look or renovating the space for a more modern feel, you will have more financial room to take these types of projects on.
There are 5 club essentials needed to create and launch a successful club. They club requires the following:
- Club structure
- Club branding
- Club marketing
- Staff buy-in
- Staff training
If you do not have these essentials in order before launching, you will be setting yourself up for failure. It is critical to fully understand what these essentials mean and what you need to do to ensure that you do not fall victim to the most common mistakes made when creating a loyalty club. If you think this sounds like hard work, you are not wrong. However, keep in mind that once the time and energy is put in at the beginning it only gets easier from there. Most importantly, the blood, sweat and tears are well worth it when you start reaping the rewards.
To put it in perspective, we are sharing a case study on a practice that successfully captured 31 members for their monthly skincare club at a rate of $99 a month.
- 31 members @ $99/monthly.
- $3,069/monthly revenue.
- $36,838/yearly revenue.
- 48% (15) opted for injectables, upgraded their service and purchased products.
- Botox: $550 average price/tx, additional $7,425.00 revenue per year. *
- Filler: $975 average price/tx, additional $13,162.50 revenue per year. **
* RealSelf. https://www.realself.com/Botox/reviews
** Realself. https://www.realself.com/Injectable-fillers/info
We intentionally are showcasing a practice that has more conservative numbers to prove a point. You can see that even though less than 50% of the members opted for injectable treatments, they still made an extra $20,000 with just that alone. That is not including their upgraded skincare treatments, product sales, patients that opted for non-invasive body contouring, etc. This is also based on the assumption that the patient only opted for injectables one time during the year. We know that most patients get treated with Botox at least 3 times a year and dermal filler 2 times a year. As you start adding in those figures you can see how $20,000 can keep growing into a much larger figure.
There are several ways to structure a loyalty club and there is no such thing as a “one size fits all” when it comes what structure would be best for you. We specialize in creating and implementing loyalty clubs and have successfully done so with many practices. With our experience and expertise, we can help guide the way through the key decision-making process when developing a loyalty program for your practice.
Loyalty Programs
Consulting
“Doing what is comfortable is rarely profitable.”
It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change. Keep this thought in mind when assessing the aspects of your aesthetic practice that need to change.
The first step is to be honest with yourself in terms of where your practice stacks up against both local competitors and in the aesthetics industry as a whole. You cannot change what you don’t acknowledge. If you are unsure what about what your position is in the market, MOD Aesthetic Marketing can help you get an accurate idea. Some of the key areas we help practices get a better grasp on include:
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Menu of Services
How current is your menu of services? Are you maximizing the procedures and treatments you currently provide to increase profitability with your existing patients? If not, there are some easy modifications you can make that can cost little to no additional investment to expand your menu of services. An easy way to do this is to offer medical skincare treatments that include multiple modalities. Not only do these types of treatments increase profit margins, they can also enhance patient results and satisfaction. For example, if you offer dermaplaning, mild chemical peels and oxygen masks as stand-alone treatments, you are really missing an opportunity to create a customized protocol that includes all three of these procedures combined into one protocol. There are effective and affordable options to expand your menu of services without spending tons of money on new technology and devices.
Product Lines
Many practices ask how many product lines they should offer. There is no magical number that is the right answer for all practices. It is recommended that each of your product lines and products fill a different gap. For example, you can have 8 different moisturizers if each of those moisturizers falls into 8 different categories such as oily, dry, normal, acneic, sensitive, anti-aging, all organic ingredients, hyperpigmentation (non-hydroquinone) and hyperpigmentation (hydroquinone). The goal is to ensure your products are not repetitive or competing against each other in the concerns that they address. If your team cannot tell you the key differences between all 8 moisturizers, you can be assured your patients will not be able to either. Keep your inventory streamlined and purposeful. Don’t bring in products just for the sake of it, you don’t want your money sitting on your shelves collecting dust.
New Profit Centers
Determining what new device or technology to bring into your practice can feel like a real gamble. The sheer number of options can be downright overwhelming when trying to pick your winning horse. However, there are simple ways to begin ruling out what options would not be a good fit for your business, so you can have a more manageable list of selections to consider. There are also some very effective ways to do your own research and learn what patients and doctors are saying about their experience with these different technologies. Never make a big investment without doing your homework, otherwise you are driving blind and hoping for the best. At MOD Aesthetic Marketing, we can give you the tools to help you make decisions as well as analyze your practice so that you have additional insights to consider. However, a quick and dirty method is to look up the patient satisfaction rating on RealSelf.com. This always helps gives a good indication if the device is worth considering or not.
Patient Testimonials
Garnering new patient testimonials on review platforms such as RealSelf, Facebook and Google+ is an invaluable component of your marketing strategy for your aesthetic practice. Many practices do not actively pursue positive testimonials from their happy patients or have a set protocol in place to keep a regular stream of reviews coming in. One of the most common reasons practices do not make testimonials a priority is because they feel uncomfortable asking for five stars. However, this does not need to be an awkward moment for you or the patient. Instead of asking patients to write a positive review, ask them if they would be willing to share their experience with other patients that are considering the same procedure. When you frame the request as a valuable educational tool for other patients, you’ll find that most people are happy to say yes. After the patient verbally agrees to participate, inform them that they will be receiving an email later that day from someone at the office that includes a link and instructions on how to share their experience. We have found this approach to be the most successful at gaining new reviews and making the process simple and stress-free for all parties involved. If this is something you would like us to help you implement at your practice, we are happy to help customize the process for you.
Product Sales
Retail is harder than ever with customers purchasing their items online from sites such as Amazon, DermStore and Lovely Skin. However, there are ways to combat these challenges to increase your products sales. While every practice is different in how they approach medical skincare products with their patients, the key element to success is centered around product education that starts in the treatment room and ends at checkout. The aestheticians should be following the 80/20 rule, which means 80% of the conversation in the treatment room should be centered around the patient’s skin and 20% around getting to know the patient personally. The patient should be hearing about what products are being used on their skin and what their being skin concerns are throughout the treatment. At the conclusion of the skincare treatment, the patient should be escorted to the retail store where the aesthetician shows them what products were used, with testers available so they can see and feel the product for themselves. The patient should leave with an at-home protocol to follow. Lastly, if you want to really amp up your product sales game, create and implement a patient loyalty club that includes products. That is key to encouraging patients to only purchase from you. It is easy for patients to buy from you at first and then replenish their products online once they know the exact products you’ve been using on them. A loyalty club gives them an incentive to purchase from you when they are in for their skincare treatment instead of opting to shop online.
Social Media
Are you unsure of what social media platforms your practice should be on, what you should be posting or how often you should be posting? Are you curious if the content you are posting is relevant to your audience or how to get more followers and engagement? We can perform a social media assessment that will provide insight on whether you are on the right track with your social media strategy. We will also share best social media practices and the changes we recommend. There is a wide array of social media components that can be measured, but we will focus on the top 3-4 elements that will make the biggest difference in your results.
Social
“The goal of social media is to turn patients into a volunteer marketing army.”
Stop selling. Start educating. There is no doubt that social media has changed marketing across all industries, including for aesthetic practices and other lifestyle brands. Social media is an ideal way to maintain a ‘front of mind’ presence with your audience and to communicate in a way that is consistent and appropriate to your brand.
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One common theme you will find among established brands that have found success through social media is that they act as a resource for their core audience, not as a sales pitch. Your followers are looking to you as an educator in your field of expertise. Sure, they may be interested in learning about your next event or promotion, but that was not what motivated them to click the follow button. They want to know what your opinion is on the new lip filler that was just released or the top 5 reasons Retin A should be a staple in everyone’s daily skincare regime, or see the transformative before and after photos of your non-invasive body contouring treatment.
Determining the purpose of your content is always essential to developing anything from a simple post to a social media campaign. Posting without a purpose is like driving without directions, you’ll roam around aimlessly without actually ever getting anywhere. Reviewing your monthly reports and analytics to learn the demographics of your audience and what types of posts your audience responds to most favorably can provide insights into how to effectively plan your future social media campaigns and optimize them for best results.
Customized posts and social media campaigns play a crucial role in distinguishing you from your competitors. Your goal should be to have a healthy mix of content to keep your audience interested and engaged.
Followership Program
For aesthetic practices that are challenged with expanding their followership online, increasing post engagement, identifying new groups and communities within their niche and developing valuable engagement with new prospects, our Followership Program takes a customized, multi-pronged approach to account growth to ensure your brand’s success in the continually evolving social media landscape.
Whether you are struggling with just a single platform or a combination (Instagram, Twitter, Facebook etc.), you can expect safe, consistent and replicable results that will drive more traffic and more leads to your business. Our advanced digital tools will cherry-pick key targets, groups and communities, made up of real people, within your niche who show a genuine interest in your practice and are the most likely to engage.
Audience targeting will be fine-tuned each month to ensure your account is running smoothly and delivering optimal results to grow a strong, steady audience base.
Services:
Instagram Audit
As your numbers on Instagram start to grow it’s natural to become curious about the people who choose to follow you. What sparked their interest, who are they and where are they coming from are top of mind in our quest to learn more. And as you observe how they react and engage with the content you’ve carefully curated, it may get you wondering how active and engaged the followers of another profile are and how you stack up.
We have the tools to give you valuable insights and analytics on your own account as well as the public Instagram accounts we have carefully identified as your key competitors. A detailed analytics report will be delivered to you with a letter grade that reflects the overall health of your account. Our goal is to improve that grade on your behalf. The report will include a breakdown of followership and how your account measures up against global averages. You’ll receive insights on the activity level and engagement rate of your followership, as well as a Top 10 list of your most engaged followers who regularly like and comment on your content. The reporting will also spotlight your most popular post, which you can use as a guideline is shaping future content to keep your audience engaged.
This service is currently available for Instagram only, but will be expanded in 2019 to include Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter and other social networks.
Follower Cleanup
Our objective is to ensure that all your followers are real, active people that want to engage with your brand. After performing an audit, we can then effectively scrub your follower count to remove all followers that have been flagged as fake or dormant. Should you have a custom list of followers you would like removed, be sure to provide it to us and we’ll do the rest.
Engagement
By auditing and scrubbing your account, we are able to remove the fake and dormant followers that contribute zero engagement to your account while retaining the followers who are active and legitimate. This will improve your engagement rate on Instagram, which will in turn broaden your reach. This will ensure that more posts are seen by your followers and that you are discoverable to new ones.