As a small business owner, you need to invest your marketing resources wisely to attract and retain customers. To make a profit, you must track and measure the return on investment (ROI) of your digital marketing activities. You need to understand your customer journey and be able to correctly attribute key performance indicators (KPIs) to your various marketing tactics.
We’re going to look at some common issues med spa businesses face when trying to measure the efficacy of their marketing campaigns. Then we’ll cover five easy steps you can take to overcome these challenges and improve med spa marketing ROI.
Let’s get started!
The Challenge of Med Spa Marketing in the Digital Age
The complexity of today’s digital world presents many challenges when it comes to tracking ROI. Let’s look at some of the most common issues you’ll face when trying to promote your med spa online.
More Demanding Customers
These days, customers are much more informed about businesses. With a quick online search, prospects can see your services, customer reviews, professional qualifications, compare you to competitors, etc.
They are also much less willing to wait. With the rise of instant messaging, social media, and chatbots customers expect to be able to connect with you at any time of day. If you don’t respond to someone’s message within a few hours, you’ve probably lost that lead.
The Need for an Extensive Digital Footprint
The customer journey has grown increasingly complex with the rise of search engines, social media, and other forms of digital communication.
These days, potential patients will overwhelmingly find your business by looking online. However, they might find it in multiple ways – not just a direct search. For example, they might see your med spa when browsing the area on Google Maps. Or one of their friends is a loyal customer who mentions you on social media. It could be that someone is researching their specific condition and runs across one of your YouTube videos explaining different treatment options. Or they look up “local med spas” on Yelp with 4 and 5-star ratings.
The point is, prospective patients are everywhere online, which is why it is important to grow and manage your digital presence. You want to ensure that your med spa shows up when and where people are looking for your services by investing in:
- Search engine marketing
- Social media
- Digital advertising
- Reviews and referrals
- Content marketing
- Website search engine optimization (SEO)
- Online listings
Tracking Digital Marketing Takes Technical Skill
With all of these different channels, a certain amount of technical knowledge is required to effectively track your digital marketing campaigns. For instance, you need the skills to use:
- Keyword tracking
- Phone calls metrics
- UTM codes for different lead sources
- Landing pages
- Conversion attribution
- Follow-ups and surveys
Moreover, you have to stay on top of software updates and make sure your various tools will play nice with each other.
Knowing What ROI Measurement to Use
The simple ROI formula of (return – investment) / investment is often used by small business owners to ascertain the effectiveness of a marketing tactic. However, due to the complexity of the digital marketing ecosystem, the impact of various tactics often needs to be weighted differently.
For instance, imagine you implement a paid ad campaign and a local SEO campaign at the same time. After six months, you use the simple ROI formula to compare performance, and you see that SEO generated a 10% ROI versus the 20% ROI of digital ads. You might be tempted to direct funding away from local SEO into paid advertising. However, if you looked at the performance data at one year, instead of six months, the results could very well be flipped.
Some digital marketing tactics can take a bit of time to get established – but ultimately generate a higher ROI in the end. This fact, along with your industry, business model, and specific marketing goals needs to be taken into account when determining how you measure ROI.
Other formulas that can help you measure your med spa marketing ROI include:
- (ad spend / new customers) x customer lifetime value
- Sales growth – marketing spend
- Time spent vs. money generated
- [((number of leads x lead to customer rate x average sale price) – cost for marketing) / cost for marketing] x 100
It is important to understand which of these ROI formulas best fits your marketing strategy to ensure you are measuring the right things.
Five Steps to Improve Med Spa Marketing ROI
With all this complexity in mind, let’s look into the different ways you can simplify and improve your marketing ROI processes in five steps.
Step 1: Strategically Build Your Digital Presence
As previously discussed, there are many digital marketing channels available to you, including your website, email, voice search, reviews, directory listings, digital advertising, and countless social media platforms. While you want to grow your digital footprint to increase your visibility, you need to be strategic about it. For instance, selecting channels that your target audience uses, and allocating resources based on performance. Knowing which channels you should be on, and which ones don’t serve your goals is vital to optimizing your med spa marketing ROI.
Step 2: Select the Right KPIs
An important part of determining marketing ROI is making sure you select key performance indicators (KPIs) that are aligned with your overall business goals. KPIs are the metrics you choose to track to help you determine whether campaigns are meeting your marketing objectives. KPIs can include metrics like:
- New leads
- New sales
- Increased Traffic (both web traffic and in-person).
- Increased customer retention rates
- Higher profit margins
It is important to pair the right KPI with the right marketing objective. For example, using brand awareness metrics to measure the effectiveness of a lead generation campaign can mess up your ROI calculations.
Step 3: Test Everything
Digital marketing depends on using iterative testing to discover how to best connect with your desired audience. For example, you might use A/B tests to try out different content topics, messaging, ad copy, fonts, colors, and email delivery times. Other factors you might test include things like targeting demographics (age, gender, income level, etc.), location, browsing device, etc.
You need real-world data about customer behavior to improve med spa marketing ROI, not your personal assumptions. Ongoing testing is how you gather this data and narrow down what appeals most to your customers. While you won’t always get a perfect result, by learning from what didn’t work, you can improve your results next time.
Step 4: Measure Everything
Testing won’t do you any good if you don’t track the results. You must have the right systems in place to gather analytic data. Measuring tests results will help you determine which variables improved campaign performance according to your KPIs. AI and automation are invaluable tools when it comes to campaign measurement and can provide ROI insights and optimizations across your entire marketing strategy. Not only will they help you get the most out of your marketing budget, but they also remove the stress and frustration of manual campaign management.
Step 5: Commit to Your Strategy
When it comes to running an effective marketing strategy, consistency is key. There are always smaller facets to test and improve upon, but avoid dramatically altering your strategy every time you encounter a potential roadblock. Too many changes too often make it difficult to gather the accurate, long-term data you need to improve your brand value and maximize ROI. You must commit to a strategy long enough to gather sufficient data to see the bigger picture of what’s happening. If it turns out you do need to make a large strategic shift, you will have the data available to make informed decisions.
Med Spa Marketing Made Simple
At Surefire Local, our mission is to simplify digital marketing to help small businesses grow profitably.
We do this by providing your business with a next-level, all-in-one platform that is available everywhere you need it. From a single dashboard, you can look up near real-time performance data, like leads, reviews, star ratings, and online visibility. You can easily see how many leads you’ve generated through your various online marketing channels, including email, organic search, social media, and digital ads. Surefire Local also integrates with all the digital tools small businesses rely on every day – including Google My Business, Facebook, WordPress, Salesforce, Yelp, Quickbooks, and Yext. With all of your marketing information available in one central location, you can get easily create custom reports and compare campaign performance using the right growth metrics.
Request a demo and learn how the Surefire Local marketing platform can help you improve marketing ROI for your med spa!
