Spend Baby Spend (The 9 COSTLY Marketing Mistakes Commonly Made By Plastic Surgeons) Part 3

Do you like to buy stuff? Of course, you do.

Most people love to buy stuff.

They buy stuff they need. They buy stuff they love.

And the weird thing is, people also like to buy stuff they don’t need.

More often than not, they buy stuff they don’t even want.

Just look at your garage or your wife’s closet, and you'll know what I mean.

Buying, and spending money, makes you feel good. Right down to the cellular level. Buying activity releases dopamines. Researchers at London University discovered that spending money triggers as large a release of endorphins as sex.

It doesn’t matter on what you’re spending your money. Food, books, or shoes.

Just the fact that you're spending money makes you feel powerful. It gives you a sense of control. It gives you the illusion that your life has just become better.

Spending money is one of a very few “legal” activities that give you the massive endorphin boost we all seek.

All we need is an excuse to justify our spending, and some money to spend of course. Keep reading, and I’ll show you exactly how you can get more of that from your practice in a bit.

Why do you think businesses spend billions on marketing and advertising every single day? Actually, it's more like every single hour.

It's to give us the excuses we need to justify our purchase to ourselves or the people around us. They do it so we won’t look, or feel, stupid when we're spending our money.

And it works.

Thanks to all the fancy brochures, flashy TV ads, and very persuasive sales reps, people are wasting their money, buying things they don’t need.

When I say people, I mean you. And when I say things, I mean that $10,000 piece of hardware that's sitting in your storage room collecting dust. You know the one. The rep swore up and down that it would transform your practice and then he disappeared as soon as you paid his invoice. The equipment for which you're still paying a monthly lease.

You can’t wait to get rid of it as soon as you recover your original “investment.” Which, if you're honest with yourself, you know will never happen.

What if I tell you that there's a way to GUARANTEE you get a positive ROI with every new piece of equipment you purchase? That every service you roll out in your clinic will be a smashing success?

Do you want to know how?

Of course, you do. You'd be crazy not to.

For $4,999 I'll share with my secret ROI-positive formula to help you...

NO... I’m just kidding.

Let's get into the last three COSTLY Marketing Mistakes Commonly Made By Plastic Surgeons, and how you can fix them so you'll never waste money buying useless things for your clinic ever again.

Now that I think about it, I should probably charge you $4,999 for this information because it's at least that valuable. Imagine what would happen if you could go back in time and tell yourself NOT to buy that dust-collecting leech on your bank account.

[Mistake #3] Letting Your Staff and Sales Rep Dictate Your Marketing, Instead Of The Market

It’s tempting to assume that if you like something, everyone must like it too. I see far too many cosmetic surgeons that fall into this line of thinking. You might be guilty of the same. You add products and services because you, your staff, or your wife likes them. You oversee the creation of a web page and assume it’s great simply because you had a hand in it. You set your office hours to match your schedule and keep these hours, giving no thought to the needs of your prospective clients.

The fact of the matter is that there is only one opinion that matters to your practice: the opinion of the patient. And by that, I don’t mean that you should run surveys and add every suggestion that comes out of one of them. I'm saying you need to focus your practice on the needs, wants, fears, and desires of the market.

Business is simple. The market will always tell you if you’re doing the right things or the wrong things.

Through careful and controlled testing, you can quickly find out if you’re doing the right things to grow your business. In fact, you never have to guess at buying new equipment or adding a service if you’re willing to put a little bit of money towards accurate testing (e.g. by running some Pay-Per-Click campaigns).

Let’s assume a rep comes to you with the latest and greatest piece of technology that she swears up and down is in high demand. You’re not sure what to do because it’s a huge financial investment and reps often exaggerate consumer demand. A controlled test will safely and efficiently produce data indicating the equipment’s worth, or lack thereof.

You can run an ad targeting the brand name of the service or device, which will immediately tell you what the consumer demand is for that exact machine in your area. Send those ads to a landing page promoting a special introductory offer for the treatment to anyone that fills in a form.

This will let you gauge the number of serious potential buyers. Even if you don’t buy the equipment, you now have a list of potential patients you can make an alternative offer to. You’ll, of course, have to be honest on the page and tell people that the offer is under consideration and you have to comply with all your local disclosure laws (I’m not a lawyer so ask yours about these laws.) However, you will now know what the right decision is based on what the market tells you.

Easy!

I had a client that let his twenty-something-year-old office manager decide what treatments and services to offer, without any consideration for the market. If she liked it, it was often added. He refused to listen to reason when I discussed this with him because of the strong bond of trust she had built with him over the years. The result was a constant waste of profits on purchasing bandwagon equipment for treatments that were little more than fads. They were sometimes profitable over the long run, but it left little on the table for marketing and business stability.

All this boils down to one simple concept: do what’s right for your client, and that will end up being what’s right for your business. Start using your patient’s logic and decision-making path as opposed to your own. It’s not about what you do. It’s about what you do for them.

Listen to the market. Listen to the market. Listen to the market.

I cannot stress that enough.

The Market is ALWAYS RIGHT, and we're wrong more often than not. 

It doesn’t matter if you’ve been in practice for decades. And it doesn’t matter that I’ve been able to help build multiple 7 to 8 figure cosmetic and plastic surgery clinics over the last decade. (Shameless plug here… go ahead and check out my LinkedIn profile if you want to see some case studies from my successful clients).

Our opinion doesn't matter much. If you’re going to base the success of your practice, and your child’s college fund, on what you, or I, like or what we think is going to work, you're making mistake number two.

And you're going to be in TROUBLE!

Mistake #2: Letting “Experts” Tell You What Works Instead of Testing It for Yourself

We trust experts with our wellbeing. After all, they know better, right?

This instinct, at its best, drives you to seek competent help for your practice. It drives you to call someone like me who knows exactly where to push and how to aggressively market.

At its worst, it sends you into the hands of companies that look professional with a large client list.

The kinds of businesses that help you to equate activity with progress (mistake #5.  Click HERE and check out this article if you want to stop spinning like a hamster in a hamster’s wheel).

These are companies with a beautiful portfolio and no financial metrics to back up their claims, with no active testing protocols to show you that what they do makes a difference.

These companies are typically better at getting your money than they are at growing your practice.

The truth is that your practice doesn’t have to rely on any unfounded principles. You went through medical school learning to test and observe. You learned the science and the art of medicine. Marketing is no different. While the artistic component does rely on you hiring an expert, you don’t have to rely solely on his opinion. There is only one relevant opinion that matters when it comes to practice growth.

Listen to the Market

The market will tell you if you’re doing the right things or the wrong things. The market votes with the only thing that matters to a practice: dollars and cents. If you change your website, the only goal for that site is to drive more patients through your doors and into your waiting room. It’s to put people on your operating table and money in your bank.

“There is only one boss, the customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.”

— Sam Walton

If you don’t have multiple incoming telephone numbers for your different marketing channels, such as your print ads and website, you’re operating blind.

If you don’t know how your web pages are converting your visitors, you don’t know what your site is doing.

If you don’t know which PPC ad and landing page combination are more likely to convert the prospect, you’re wasting your time and money.

If you don’t listen to incoming calls to determine if your staff is saying the right things and booking those precious leads, you’re just plain dumb. (Check your local laws before you do this.)

If you’re not testing, you don’t know what you’re doing. You're leaving money one the table by not talking to the right prospects, and you are wasting your money with all your marketing efforts.

YOU HAVE TO TEST!

Which brings us to the number one MOST costly marketing mistake you're probably making right now.

It’s about implementation.

So far I’ve shared with you eight mistakes.

Hopefully, if you're serious about growing your business, you’ve looked into all of them. You figured out which mistakes you’re making, and you already have a plan to fix them.

Let’s be blunt here.

Running and growing a plastic surgery clinic can be challenging. There are a lot of competitors out there.

A Lot.

The Internet and social media only make things more difficult. Being the best doctor you can be no longer guarantees you'll become the most successful in town.

Competence is still a requirement; you can’t be a crook for long without getting caught.

Just a few bad reviews online can kill a thriving practice. I’ve seen it firsthand. We had to do some “intervention” to help revive some doctors' reputation with our reputation management service.

You’d be amazed at how big of a difference not having these bad reviews online, along with a few substantial testimonial can help boost your bottom line.

Every success in your practice will always be built on you being an experienced, skillful practitioner. But that’s only the foundation.

The looks and feel of your clinic, how your front desk picks up the phone, how you conduct the first office consultation, what you do after the consult, the follow-up, and even what you do one year after the surgery. They ALL MATTER.

They matter a great deal if you want to build a 7-8 figure empire. 

It takes work, and it requires effort. The great thing is you, and I both, know how financially rewarding this business can be.

It's possible to make millions of dollars in this business while putting in part-time hours.

I’ve seen it with my clients. You know someone from school who's doing exactly that.

So here are the big questions for you.

Why are you still struggling to get more patients and book more surgeries?

Why don’t you have a waiting-list practice with people lining up at your doorstep?

Why aren’t you getting the respect and recognition you deserve from your peers even though you're an excellent surgeon?

The answer in one word: Implementation.

You probably know you're making some of the mistakes I outlined previously.

I’m sure you’re probably looking for solutions to fix them as we speak.

You wouldn’t be reading this article if that wasn't you.

Stop.

Stop looking for the problems by yourself.

Stop trying to come up with the solutions by yourself. 

Stop trying to fix the problem by yourself. 

You're not trained to do it. 

It's too overwhelming to do all of it by yourself.

You can’t do it because you are too close to it. There’s no way for you to be objective and know what the right things to do are.

You're too busy doing the things that matter. Like surgery. Every minute you waste on marketing is a minute you're not getting paid. 

The #1 Marketing Mistake

The number one mistake is so important, I’m going to write a separate article on it, so make sure you keep your eye out for that. It's too much to get into here.

In the meantime, it’s time for you to listen.

Listen to the market and figure out WHAT it wants to buy from you.

Listen to the market and understand HOW it buys from you.

More importantly, stop trying to decipher the market all by yourself.

You don’t know what you’re doing and doing this wrong will cost you a lot of money.

It's a classic case of being penny-wise and pound foolish.

I put together a “market analysis checklist” that can help you quickly and accurately find out what the market wants to buy from you. Hit me up on LinkedIn, and we'll go over it together.

I also have a 360 degrees cosmetic clinic web presence and marketing audit that can help you identify if you are making any of the costly plastic surgery marketing mistakes. Again, this is a shameless plug, but this will be helpful to you.

Same process here. LinkedIn message me if you want to go through the audit. If you're not a connection, use my email to connect: [email protected]

It’s comprehensive, and I guarantee you won't do a better job by yourself, which you shouldn’t be doing anyway.

Keep an eye out for my next article, and I’ll convince you why you should never be doing this on your own.

LinkedIn message me and ask for the “market analysis checklist” if you want to start listing to the market, or you want to go through our 360-degree marketing audit so we can come up with a comprehensive plan to identify and fix all your marketing mistakes.

It’s going to be worth your time.

Thanks for reading to the end and we'll talk soon.