Marketing spend transparency is a clear way for med spas to manage their budget and drive customer growth cost-effectively. Unfortunately, those who rely on marketing agencies may end up feeling like they’ve lost control over where their money is going and why.
At Surefire Local, it all comes down to the quality of the information you’re receiving. More isn’t always better, especially if you don’t know what to do with all the data. We’ll look at the benefits of marketing transparency, why it’s important, and how our business intelligence marketing software provides you with everything you need to know.
Why Marketing Transparency Is Important
Marketing can be a sneaky industry, even for the savviest of professionals. Sometimes, a campaign looks like it’s underperforming when it’s actually building invaluable name recognition. Other times, a campaign can perform very well, but when it starts to lose traction, not everyone is paying attention to the signs that it’s slowing down. At some point, that same successful strategy can turn on you if you’re not careful.
Med spas serve an important purpose for their clientele, offering treatments that require a very specific set of skills and treatments. There are a few reasons why marketing spend transparency for med spas is so critical (and why they don’t always get it through an agency):
- Embedded costs: With so many platforms and so many fees out there, it can take a lot of time to sort through the policies, upcharges, and price increases. To a certain extent, platforms like Facebook and Twitter count on marketers to just pay the bills and move on. (Agencies, of course, will just pass the excess to you.) Marketing transparency makes it possible to allocate dollars more efficiently so you can improve your ROI.
- Wasted time: Some marketing campaigns continue to run, even when they show no signs of connecting with their customers. Marketing spend transparency for med spas makes it possible to see which messages are connecting with audiences, so the team can spend time on brand strategies that have an impact on your bottom line.
- Reduced spend: It’s one thing to use your standard budget more efficiently, it’s quite another to reduce it. With marketing spend transparency, it’s possible to reduce your spending while increasing your bottom line.
3 Ways Our Business Intelligence Marketing Software Provides Marketing Transparency
The flow of information — who has access, what they have access to, and how it’s presented — can make or break a med spa. There should be no hesitation when it comes to account access. If the agency is the one holding the cards (passwords, ownership, etc.), it opens the door to unethical practices on their end. It can end in outright sabotage of your business.
This is an important reason why many small business owners opt for software that can work with them on their level. Surefire Local’s business intelligence marketing software is equipped to give you everything you need right from the word go.
Insights and Analytics
Tracking is so important to a marketer, even when your campaigns are going well. When you know which channels are driving which results, you can improve even the most profitable of tactics. Without that information, you’re wasting money. Analytics software should be used to gather data, so you can see where your money is going and whether it makes sense to keep it up. Our marketing platform gives you all of the following insights into your spend:
- Local SEO: Keyword rankings, directory listings, website traffic: you can see it all with our software. If certain med spa treatments are catching on in your neighborhood, you’ll know about it. Start designing campaigns that drive awareness to where you are, who your staff is, and how you can help.
- Paid advertising: Your campaign performance and ad conversion stats are critical to how (and whether) you spend your money on this strategy. Some med spas are better off going the organic route. It may take longer, but the pay-off can be bigger for many businesses.
- Email marketing: Our software shows you all of the email and text marketing campaigns you have up and running. This helps you see what’s scheduled, what may need to be adjusted, and what’s become obsolete over time.
- Social media: Engagement metrics on your social media networks show you who’s interested in your brand. You can also see who’s viewing your directory listings and blog posts.
- Reputation management: Get customer feedback, respond to customers, and stay on top of your average star rating. These are important metrics for a consumer, so it pays to get involved. A few poor reviews may not impact your business immediately, but you don’t want to ignore them entirely either.
- Lead management: Are you getting more phone calls than website forms? Are more people contacting you in the chat? When you know where your leads are coming from, you can put more effort into the channels that are actually paying off.
Competitive Benchmarking
Competitor research isn’t about the superficial details, which is often what agencies focus on. It would take you no time at all to look up how many followers you have on Twitter vs. that of your top competitor. What you want to see is how customer ratings and search rankings are affecting your business. Competition is specific to your area, which is why having a local marketing software tool can make all the difference. Your profits are driven by everything from relationships in the community to how your staff is perceived to what kind of values you stand for.
Surefire Local has an Intelligent Search Tool that can show you what’s driving business and how that compares to similar businesses in your area. Marketing spend transparency for med spas should include search rankings, leads, reviews, and average star ratings. When you’re trying to decide why your med spa is losing out on certain kinds of traffic, this is the information you need to start fitting the pieces of the puzzle together.
Marketing To-Do Lists
Digital marketing agencies are often all too eager to get med spas to sign onto a long-term contract immediately, so they can use that money to fuel other projects. (This is, unfortunately, common because it’s relatively easy to conceal what exactly is going on behind the scenes.) As long as they’re within the parameters of their contract, they don’t necessarily work to deliver the results.
Marketing spend transparency for med spas begins and ends with clear-cut information. If your team is trying to make heads or tails of the reports you’ve been given, it’s a sign that the agency is trying to hide behind the jargon. Our business intelligence marketing software generates a to-do list based on your current marketing activity, so you have insight into areas that may have been neglected. A sample list may include any of the following:
- Update directory listings with new photos: If you get a new sign or paint your exterior, you’ll want your directory listings to reflect the latest improvements to your facility.
- Send review requests: Talk directly to your customers and ask them to share their experience in their own words. More than any marketing-speak could ever do, customers are driven to action by personal remarks. You can also reply to reviews as well, so you get to tell your side of the story too.
- Update your featured message: Whether you’ve hired more doctors to accommodate more requests or decided to focus more on facial rejuvenation, you can spell out your branding with a key text that says what you’re all about.
- Publish posts: Whether it’s Google My Business, social media, or blogs, our software makes it possible to publish your content from one place and then track its performance.
- Review leads: Income brackets, age, location: some prospects are always going to be easier sells based on who they are and where they come from. Reviewing leads helps you weed out people who aren’t interested in your services, so you can focus on the ones who are.
- Add new photos: Keep your website gallery fresh by adding photos of new equipment, services, and staff.
Business Intelligence Marketing Software
The Surefire Local Marketing Platform helps med spas generate leads, budget for new campaigns, and improve ROI on every dollar by providing better data. When you can see everything from reviews to rankings, it’s easier to understand why certain efforts succeed while others fall flat. You control the channels from a single dashboard, making it possible to manage your presence across the internet.
If you’re ready to break free from your agency and take control back in your own hands, it’s time to schedule a demo. Surefire Local understands how local med spas operate, and how they can switch up their strategies so they can take a bigger chunk of the market. If you don’t want to leave opportunity on the table, see why our software is so trusted and how you can use it to execute better campaigns.