00:00:07:17 – 00:00:54:10
Jay Shorr
Welcome to Shorr Solutions: The Podcast, and I’m your host, Jay Shorr, CEO and founder of Shorr Solutions. We are a team of national and award winning practice management consultants with experience running a multimillion dollar cosmetic, dermatology and plastic surgery practice. We’re here to share strategies and insights that will help you grow your practice efficiently and profitably. In each episode, we’ll explore the steps and actionable insights to guide you through your journey to increase efficiency, boost revenue, and decrease costs. Tune in and discover how to improve your patient experience and take your aesthetic practice to the next level.
00:00:54:12 – 00:01:25:22
Jay Shorr
Well, greetings and Happy holidays everybody, and welcome to another episode of Shorr Solutions: The Podcast, and I’m your host, Jay Shorr. Today I have a special guest on with me and it is our Director of Client Development, Ana Suarez. Oh, it is my business, one of my business partners starting in January and Director of Client Development Ana Suarez. Say hello. Ana.
00:01:26:00 – 00:01:36:05
Ana Suarez
Hi, Jay. Thank you so much for having me here with you today. I’m excited to be here and just kind of, like, share some of our knowledge with our with our audience and our, clients.
00:01:36:05 – 00:02:47:04
Jay Shorr
Wonderful. You’ll see, between today and another one of our episodes, I’m introducing Ana Suarez as one of my business partners. In January, Ana will formally become a business partner along with Christian Devoz. So as we restructure and bring on partners, this is going to be a wonderful addition. So with that being said, today’s podcast is going to be marketing mistakes to avoid in your practice. Now, Ana is our marketing guru. She heads handles marketing for our clients in addition to running our team and leading our team. So you know, Ana, let’s have a discussion about branding. I know marketing has so many facets to it. It’s advertising. It’s marketing. It is branding. It is social media. There’s so many I can’t even begin to start. So let’s start with the first one. Not having a solid brand established. So, Ana, can you go through for us like the four main things about not having a solid brand established?
00:02:47:06 – 00:04:39:06
Ana Suarez
Sure, I’ll be happy to do that. And I love that you bring this up, because not having a solid brand established is something that we see happening multiple times with all of the practices that we work with. Let’s talk about what is a brand. The brand is the identity and story of a company that makes it stand out from competitors, that sell similar products and services. So when we’re talking about branding and establishing your brand, we need to make sure that there’s like a specific identity to your practice, your medical practice. And that entails your vision statement, your mission, your values, and also the unique selling proposition as well. Or, you know, your competitive advantage in the market. So how are you differentiating yourself from the rest of the other practices? Many of our practices, they think that branding is only logos, fonts, colors. But that’s that’s not the reality, the reality that there’s so many other elements that going to branding. And we want to make sure that we take some time to take a look at our branding, see if we actually have a mission statement, where, you know, we’re kind of like communicating. What are we envisioning for our business? How are we serving our patients, and how are we different from the other competitors? That’s definitely key. We work with many practices when we sit down with them and we say, what are your values? What do you stand for? And they’re like, well, I’m not really sure. That creates a lot of problems because if you don’t have a well-defined brand identity, if you don’t know what your business stands for, what’s your specific target market and how are you different than the rest of the competition? Then you can now come up with very effective marketing campaigns and marketing strategies.
00:04:39:08 – 00:04:45:11
Jay Shorr
Ana, what do you think is the number one problem in not having a solid brand established?
00:04:45:12 – 00:05:43:22
Ana Suarez
You’re not setting yourself apart from the rest. And as we all know, there’s many, many, medaps and plastic surgery offices where there’s, like, very high competition in this type of market. Patients want to make sure that they get the best services. The latest and greatest. But if you don’t have, something that differentiates yourself from the other practices in the market, it’s almost like they don’t get to know you. They don’t know why they they should go and see you. They should go and learn more about your specific practice and get their services or their needs fulfilled by your practice. The biggest issue with that is you just get lost with everybody else and you’re not standing out in the consumer’s mind. And so whenever I’m ready to get my Botox or whenever I’m ready to get some lasers, when I think about where could I go? Then your practice doesn’t really come up because you don’t really have a specific market placement within the consumer’s mind.
00:05:44:03 – 00:06:16:09
Jay Shorr
Okay, so when we talked about that, how about if we talked about not having a strategy and analyzing results. Because you know, we deal with a lot of clients. They think they have a strategy. So they go and they hire somebody and they do social media, SEO, PPC, whatever that might be. They have that strategy and then they have no idea of the results. So let’s talk about creating that marketing plan and defining the key to it. And then the metrics. Let’s talk about that for a second.
00:06:16:11 – 00:08:35:12
Ana Suarez
Yes. In that we could basically have like a whole podcast about the marketing plan and tracking results. This is a big one, and that’s why I wanted to make sure that we talked about it today, basically because many of our clients and just like practices in general, it’s kind of like what you said, they think that just having a social media campaign or doing an e-newsletter that that is marketing. When in reality, marketing is like a lot of different activities in tactics, efforts put together after you consider, you know, your branding, your target market in, pretty much like who who’s your ideal patient? So with that said, we need to make sure that there’s a holistic marketing plan in place. And basically what a marketing plan is, is pretty much a structured roadmap for a medical practice to achieve its marketing goals by defining the target audience, outlining the strategies, basically what you’re doing to, you know, to get your results, allocating the budget and setting measurable goal objectives. So it’s basically a roadmap. It’s a plan about who are we targeting. How are we getting to our objectives, how much money we’re investing. And then kind of like taking a look at the results and the, you know, key performance indicators in kind of like seeing if it works or if it doesn’t work. The other thing I was talking to one of our clients, and she told me that they had done a paid ad campaign, and I think they received like about 50 new leads, which was it was pretty nice. And, you know, they they tracking all of this information. But then I asked her, so out of those 50 leads, how many of them actually converted? How many of them actually came in for a consultation or like an appointment? And she just couldn’t tell me. And I will say, well, we need to be tracking that as well, because it is it’s a process. It’s not just like one little step, one little campaign. It’s an entire process. And that’s why you need to have like a holistic, comprehensive marketing plan in place so that we can follow from the ideas that we come up with to like the tactics or the marketing efforts, or we decide to do to the results how we go from those efforts. And if they’re not working, then we need to go back and we need to make adjustments and see what works and how we can improve those results.
00:08:35:14 – 00:08:59:07
Jay Shorr
So let’s talk about analyzing. What should you look for, what we analyze them. I mean we look for how much we spend. Is that good enough or is it good enough? How many leads that we received? Is that good enough? Is it what is the best metric? Because you know, in our marketing, when we hire a website, company or social media company, all that we can ask them to do is really bring us the lead. It’s up to us after that.
00:08:59:09 – 00:10:37:08
Ana Suarez
Yes, Jay, I completely agree with all of that. We have to track how much we’re investing, how much we’re getting out of that investment. And then, you know, we need to evaluate, do we want to keep doing this or not? But I think what you’re, making a reference to is that after we put so much effort into, like, the branding and the marketing campaigns and making sure that we’re targeting our ideal patient, then we start receiving some of those results. We started getting the calls. We started getting the emails, which are getting the messages. However, the people that we have answering those calls, those emails, they, you know, we should they’re usually they’re patient care coordinators or director of first impressions. They don’t usually have the proper training, the proper customer service. And sales type of skills training to take care of those leads, to nurture the leads, to develop the relationship and eventually convert them into a patient at the practice. Because that’s the goal. The goal is to show them everything that we have to offer for them, how we can solve their problems or concerns, and how they should be coming our patients right now. So that goes back to the training. And I usually call it like wasting your marketing dollars, right. Like just throwing them away because, you know, we’ve put all of this effort into the campaigns, working with our marketing agencies, our marketing employees. But then when we get the calls, we don’t have the proper training for our patient care coordinators and our directors of first impressions. So that’s something that is another huge mistake when it comes to the marketing. Because yeah, you could a thousand leads, but if none of them are converting, then what is the point? Right. What is the point of like kind of like putting all of those efforts, all of that time, all that money?
00:10:37:08 – 00:10:49:01
Jay Shorr
Well, you stole my next question because I was going to get into throwing away your money and your efforts like what do you train and then what type of a tracking process do you put into place?
00:10:49:03 – 00:12:43:18
Ana Suarez
Well, yes. And that’s another excellent point. So it’s not only having the right person, you know, that fits those positions. Someone that is outgoing, that it has a service mentality. In addition to that, making sure that we give them the proper training, right, that we kind of like, teach them how to credential the providers, how to get all of the necessary information about the patient so we can add them to our database, follow up with them, via emails and newsletters. But then in addition to that, having some type of, lead management tracking process as well. We talked to so many clients, so many practices that they tell us about this great marketing programs that they have in place, but yet they’re not tracking anything. And when it comes to like lead management tracking, we could just use a, CRM like customer relationship management system, like something like Salesforce, maybe even just like a, an Excel spreadsheet will definitely do the job where you can just kind of like, track how many people called, why were they interested on, you know, do you need to follow up with them with an email, sending them information about the specific procedures and the treatments, and then making sure that we get them on the books? So if we didn’t, if we weren’t successful the first time around, because we always try to get them on the books right away in the first time that we have an interaction with them, and we provide them all of the information, then we have to keep tracking that lead. We have to keep nurturing the lead and keep calling them, many of our clients, they they say, well, I call them two times. And that was, that was that and you know, I, you know, we say, no, that’s not it. Do you have to keep calling? You have to keep following up. And because, you know, people have a lot of options are patients, they have many options. They can go to other practices. They can go to other med spots and want to make sure that we’re reassuring them and providing them with the information that they need to make the right information, the correct decision and come to our practice.
00:12:43:18 – 00:13:29:05
Jay Shorr
Maybe we shoot ourselves in the foot. You just mentioned something. Well, I’ve called them two times. Or better yet, I sent them a text or an email and never spoke to them. What’s the danger behind that? Right? My favorite line is because I’m older at this point. You know, and I always say, did you pick up the phone? All right. So, we need to ask our own selves some questions because we make our own mistakes in the practice with our branding. By not keeping our patients top of mind, many times we’re too worried about our own selves. So can you expand on that? The problem that happens by not keeping your patient front of center?
00:13:29:07 – 00:16:02:17
Ana Suarez
Yes, that’s that’s another thing. And I know that it keeps coming up with, the practices that we work with where, many of the practices, they think that we’re here, we’re providing a service, we’re providing a treatment, and that will do it. But again, going back to your branding, to setting yourself apart from the competition, going back to keeping in mind that there’s so many other practices that are providing the same exact services that you know that your practice may be providing. We have to make sure that we’re not only offering our patients services, but we’re actually creating an experience for them. We’re actually setting ourselves apart. But, you know, maybe, you know, making sure that our staff is nice or pleasant when interacting and communicating, with our patients, maybe even like, like small details such as, like playing some music in the background, offering some water, some tea when they come to our practice, just following up with them, sending them little postcards. Whenever is their, their birthdays or, whenever something important is happening in their lives like a graduation or they have a daughter being born or whatever it may be. Because we need to set ourselves apart, and we need to keep in mind that we’re not just there to kind of like, do a transactional type of business. It’s more like creating a relationship and developing an experience so that patients look forward to come to your practice so that patients remember that experience that they had when they came to your practice versus just like, you know, just going somewhere when you say business as usual and then it’s like, well, you know, what is my incentive? Why should I go back to this practice when I have five other practices that they’re like following up with me, they’re sending me, you know, happy birthday notes. Whenever I go there, they made me feel relaxed. They don’t rush me. They listen to my concerns. So we kind of have to keep that in mind. And I think that that’s something that is coming up even more nowadays. Just because there’s a lot of competition in this type of marketing, our industry, and we have to set ourselves apart. It’s not enough your qualifications and your experience and having an amazing marketing campaign, but it also comes down to the people that you have in your practice to the experience that you’re providing for your patients, just kind of like differentiating yourself. So that’s why branding is so important. You know, having that mission and that vision so that you know what you’re doing, you know, what is the end goal. And day in and day out, we work on those objectives.
00:16:02:19 – 00:16:07:18
Jay Shorr
Would you say that it’s kind of similar to restaurants and hotels?
00:16:07:19 – 00:16:10:00
Ana Suarez
Definitely. Completely.
00:16:10:00 – 00:17:01:23
Jay Shorr
What do you have other than the experience? Unless you want to go to a lower budget hotel or restaurant, for example, because I need to get in and out real quick, and I don’t want to have the dining experience or I’m traveling and I don’t need a four and five star hotel. All I need is a bed and a shower. Because I’m here and I’m leaving in the morning. I just need a place to sleep, right? So it’s kind of like the same. But if you’re going on a vacation or you’re going somewhere and you have expendable income, just like our patients have expendable income and that’s where they spend their money that they walk out with the experience, now results matter. Because if you have a great experience with terrible results, you don’t want to go back like a restaurant. I had a fun time, but the food was awful. All right. So I don’t want to go back.
00:17:02:01 – 00:17:45:01
Jay Shorr
Let’s take a quick break. I want to tell you about our Cascade 2.0 online course. In just a few hours, you and your team will learn how to attract more patients, convert more consults, and turn new leads into loyal patients all at your own pace. Along with lifetime access, you’ll receive downloadable tools such as phone scripts, marketing checklists, and conversion tracking tools to help improve your sales and customer service skills. And as a special thank you for being a podcast listener, use code podcast to get 20% off. Click the link in the show notes to sign up today.
00:17:45:03 – 00:18:17:06
Jay Shorr
All right, so with that in mind, let’s talk about memberships. You know, when I formerly had my practice, we had a club that you could join, but we didn’t have formal memberships. This is many, many years ago. And think about the benefit of recurring revenue that memberships provide, allowing us the opportunity to upsell the upsell. So Ana, let’s speak about not having monthly memberships.
00:18:17:08 – 00:19:25:11
Ana Suarez
Yeah. And if you notice, all of this is related because you’re talking about creating that experience, going the extra mile for our patients since there’s such a competitive market in kind of like going back to like it’s kind of like a hotel experience, right? So the memberships, how they help us with this whole experience that we want to create and, how we want to elevate our marketing is making sure that we have that recurring interaction. I mean, it’s definitely, an additional source of income, revenue stream. So it’s just, you know, additional income that you get on a monthly basis. And that’s really nice because it’s going to be something stable. But in addition to that, you do get the opportunity to have that contact with that patient every single month and every single month. That gives you the opportunity to, like, either upsell the patient if they needed to get to know more about them and develop that relationship. And so then the lifetime value of that patient increases instead of just being like a one off type of interaction, one off type of appointment, this actually becomes an actual relationship, just like how we have, you know, our hair stylist.
00:19:25:11 – 00:19:30:11
Jay Shorr
Yeah. Oh yeah. It’s my, my hairstylist does a pretty good job. She’s pretty consistent. Right?
00:19:30:12 – 00:19:36:23
Ana Suarez
Yes. I bet you have an awesome relationship with your hair stylist.
00:19:37:01 – 00:20:14:04
Jay Shorr
yeah. All right. In conclusion, before and after photos, people think that the purpose of a before and after photo is to be able to defend your innocence or to show a patient that, yes, this is what you had before and this was your improvement. But there’s so much beyond that. All right. So let’s talk about having a good solid gallery of before and afters and how that helps with our brand.
00:20:14:06 – 00:21:17:06
Jay Shorr
Yes, that is critical. To like help with the branding, with the marketing and most importantly, to establish yourself within the market. As we know, this type of industry is very visual, so people want to see results in a way to show that is, you know, with a photo, right? They are worth a thousand words pictures. And so people want to see those, visual, tangible examples of what the providers are able to do for them. Right? So it’s more like social proof. And so they’re critical. They need to be included on the website, even newsletters, when we do our monthly newsletters for our clients, we make sure that we put examples of like, you know, before the procedure was done and after, a couple of treatments have been completed so they can see what they can expect in the type of experience that our providers have and what they can do for them. And so it just helps tremendously when it comes to the social proof, when it comes to elevating your your marketing and credentialing, credentialing, what the, physicians can do as well.
00:21:17:08 – 00:21:40:18
Jay Shorr
Yeah, Ana let me ask a question. So how important is that, on the website, isn’t that one of the most important things that a prospective patient, not the existing patient, because it’s just one patient may already trust you because they’ve been there before. But let’s talk about the gallery. How important is that gallery on a website? Because that’s branding.
00:21:40:19 – 00:22:39:05
Jay Shorr
That is branding. And that will make the difference, you know, between a patient deciding to go with your practice or to go with the competition. And this is something that many of our clients, many practices, they forget the importance of the gallery. And so what we do is like on a monthly basis, we’re always following up with our with our clients, making sure that they’re having someone designated at the practice and medical assistant, whoever it may be, that takes those photos. You know, obviously with a patient consent, but they collect those photos and then those are uploaded and sent to the marketing company on a monthly basis, because otherwise you just can show what you’re capable of doing. A picture is worth a thousand words. And so as long as we have the photos, we can show, oh my gosh, this is what I’m able to do for you. And so it’s so much easier for people to just make the decision. You think, okay, I love that. I like the results. I’m going to call them. I’m going to become their patient.
00:22:39:07 – 00:23:05:11
Jay Shorr
Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. Well, ladies and gentlemen, that includes episode number 120 about branding. And I would like to thank our Director of Client Development and Business partner, Ana Suarez. Thanks again. And until episode number 121, good luck and God bless.
00:23:05:13 – 00:23:44:15
Jay Shorr
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