Do you struggle with keeping up with your marketing plan? Don’t worry. You’re not alone. Most practice owners we consult do too.
We know you get so busy working in the business you forget to work on the business. In this video series, Kelly is going to explain how to avoid Profit Killer #2, the lack of an annual marketing plan, and she describes how to plan your marketing for the entire year, easily.
We create our content to share tips and tricks on effectively growing your practice’s revenue and profit margins and making your business virtually recession-proof.
What Is An Annual Marketing Plan?
It’s a one-page chart that shows every promotion, event, and contest that you’re going to have for the entire year, on an 8.5” x 11” sheet.. That might not sound hard to create, but it took me years to develop this concept.
I opened a med spa in ’99, sold it in ’04, and sold it for an excellent return on investment. It’s still up and running today. And one of the things that I did as an owner and operator was create a quarterly marketing plan, so that I always had a cross-promotion because I have always wanted to try and avoid discounting. I like to do packages or cross-promotions and gifts with purchase. That’s what I teach, what I’ve used, and what’s been the secret sauce to my success. Just to have a plan in place and know what you’re going to do all year long, including events, is a fabulous, freeing experience.
Things To Consider When Creating Cross-Promotions:
When we create cross-promotions, you look at your finances and the cost it takes to render a service. What does it take in terms of price, whether consumables plus labor, or products plus labor, or time and capacity? You need to make a profit at the end of the day. You must run your practice and promotions correctly with a net profit!
Why Do I Need An Annual Marketing Plan?
You want to create the right promotions that are seasonally going to work for your clients, with enough benefit and enough savings for your client to want to take advantage of them, but for you to still be profitable. Don’t create so many sales that you run yourself out of business!
- The first step of creating your annual marketing plan is to figure out what cross-promotion you want each month that will also apply to most of your patients. Now, you might wonder why a cross-promotion for each month? It’s to get the phone to ring or the email request or question to come in so you can start the dialogue. Start the conversation. That’s when the true conversion begins!
- You want to make sure that there’s at least a 20% benefit to the promotion, and you want to make sure it fits the season. Make it fun because you’ve got to stop the scroll and reach your potential buyer’s attention!
- Advertise these deals on your social media and your website, have them at your front desk, and email them to your clients. You’re going to utilize this all month. This is a great way to get your clients to do more than just injectables with you. Why is that important? Well, let’s go back to the basics.
There are three parts to a business; Marketing, Finance, and Operations!
Operations:
We’ve talked about how operations take over a large part of your time. Is someone not coming in today? Do I have a clogged plumbing problem? Is there a machine that’s gone down? That’s the firefighting…that’s operations.
Finance:
Marketing is where you have the power to influence your revenue even once the month is going. If we create a plan for the entire year, and you know your events and promotions for the whole year, the early bird does get the worm.
Did you know that clients’ retention rate increases dramatically when they do multiple services? So the reason why we want your injectable clients to become your laser clients, to have skincare, and maybe try a new service that you bring in, like radiofrequency microneedling, is because for every product they buy and every additional service that they get from you, the more committed they are to your business!
How PGC™s Marketing Team Can Help You:
We create that cross-promotion of the month for all 12 months. Then, we pick one of those two services to do your contest of the month on social media. What is so helpful about this is creating consistent content on Instagram, Facebook, and email marketing. You have to come up with what you’re going to talk about. And that is a big part of the challenge for most social media managers and marketing managers.
Now, you know from the PGC™ 5 that you want to post every single week. Post about your cross-promotion, about your contest of the month, a video showing a service, and hopefully some posts about the benefits of those services or a client testimonial. Additionally, asking a seasonally relevant question or about your services, in order to get some engagement. Essentially, that’s how you get enough content consistently to get the compounding effect for more followers and more new clients or existing clients to try more services.
A unique part of our industry is that there’s always new technology, with so many different names. It’s hard for us to keep up on it, let alone the clients. So instead of looking at ‘what am I going to promote’, but rather, ‘what’s the benefit for the client, making sure that we educate clients on what we can do for them.’
Creating A Quarterly Sales Event
The best strategy I have found to use with our clients is to create quarterly events. Space them out long enough that there’s excitement and attendees. You can host them closer than that, some practices can, but it’s a lot of work for the staff and your clients. You kind of get overwhelmed with too many events back to back unless you go really narrow on the focus.
Consider your event focus and the season you are in. What I love to do in the spring is a body event. So whatever you do for the body; whether it’s laser lipo, minimally invasive, or non-invasive, spring is a great time to focus on that since patients are thinking about the ‘summer body’ they want to have.
Moving on to summer, I love to suggest the feminine health area because it doesn’t matter if you’ve had sun exposure; there’s no downtime. Additionally, during the summer, moms may have a little more time, which seems to be good for that.
Then an anti-aging event; could be any of your surgical, non-surgical skin care and injectables. Typically, around the holidays is a fantastic time for an anti-aging event.
So you’ve got your feminine health event, anti-aging event, and body contouring event. The fourth one that I like to do is an invitation-only VIP event, and it’s the only time of the year when they’ll get exclusive discounts that are better than any other discounts. Plus, they’ll get a swag bag of prizes or goodies when they come to the event.
Commit To Scheduling Out Your Social Media Posts:
Have a schedule for vlogs, blogs, and your social media accounts. That’s what we will highlight during the four weeks of social media. We teach to do one video a week or two, depending on how savvy you guys are at video production and utilizing that technology: the more video, the better. Even if you announce a contest for the video, we get even better results. As for contests, we have a free contest guide on our website if you’re interested. Feel free to visit us at Projected Growth Consulting™ and visit the online learning section. We’ve got courses and workshops and free ordering for our book!
Summary:
If you would like to book a consultation, we can build your annual marketing plan with you.
This one-sheet marketing plan will be tailored with cross promotions that benefit you and your practice. We will utilize free services and products from supporting reps, as well as ensure that every piece of equipment is operating and busy. This will align your team, make sure you’re selling at a profitable level, and offer so much peace of mind. You will get the most participation from all your supporting reps, and your team will know what the year looks like.
So please comment below, and we’ll be happy to send this out to you or book a consultation. You can also head over to our website and check out all of our free tools, our online courses, and our strategy sessions. We can do this for you if you don’t want to do this project yourself.
Click here to book a free initial consultation with one of our PGC™ advisors.
Thank you for reading!
