2 Plastic Surgery Marketing Mistakes Costing You 7 Figures

Exactly how much does it cost you to book a new patient consultation?

If you can answer that with a real number, you’re on your way to a successful practice. A 7 to 8 figure cosmetic surgery empire.

If you can’t, your practice was built on a happy coincidence. The number of patients you see swings from one extreme to another depending on the time of year. You’re either too busy to take time off with your family, or you’re sitting at your office waiting for the “new patient” who was supposed to show up for her consultation 45 minutes ago.

At this moment in time, your practice is unscalable.

Worse than that, it’s unpredictable and unstable. You can’t make plans and grow because you can’t anticipate where the next patient will come from. And you’ll never break the eight-figure mark until you know your magic number: what it costs you to book one new patient consultation.

The Practice That Booked 42 Consultations a Week

Here are some numbers from a client I worked with, as they stood when I first wrote this in early 2017. Earlier, during a recession, we had taken him from 72 to 125 surgical consults a month. He kept growing from there.

On average, he received 50 phone calls a week from prospects looking to book a surgical consultation for breast augmentation, and his clinic booked 42.4 in-office initial consultations a week.

That’s not a typo.

It took us about 6 months to help him create a marketing funnel that positioned him as the leading authority on breast augmentation for the Toronto area. That process is what let us figure out exactly what it cost him to book a new patient consultation.

We then spent another two months working with his front desk receptionist on a patient-centric phone script. It screened out tire-kickers (the bane of my existence) and answered the questions prospects asked most. That script is one of the reasons he booked more consults than he needed.

Booking the Consultation Is Only Half the Battle

We sent prospective patients a series of emails, text messages, and voice follow-ups so they showed up to their appointment.

The result: leads arrived on time, eager and ready to speak with my client. They were convinced he was the best, and only, choice for the procedure before they’d even spoken to him. What happens in the room after that is its own discipline, and I’ve written about it in the consultation is where you win or lose.

All of this was possible because we helped him figure out his magic number. He knew exactly what it cost to book an in-office consultation, which gave him the clarity to know precisely where, when, and how to spend his marketing budget. Every dollar he spent on advertising came back with friends.

Enough about him. This is about you and your practice.

If you can’t tell me how many new leads you’re getting a week, or where those leads are coming from, it’s not unusual. It is NOT your fault. You’re being kept in the dark by one or more of the 9 costly marketing mistakes commonly made by plastic surgeons. I covered the first four in part 1 of this series. Those were the fundamentals.

Now that you know what you’re doing wrong, it’s tempting to jump in and start “fixing” things. That’s when you fall into the trap and make the next two mistakes.

Mistake 5: Equating Activity With Progress

I see this over and over. It’s how most marketing, consulting, SEO and design companies sell their services. They give you a set of activities they’re going to perform. Everything from redesigning your website and posting on Facebook twice a day to the number of links they’ll build weekly. It’s usually presented as a nice mindmap or a long list of deliverables. You feel good because you can see all the stuff you’re getting for your cash. You feel great because you know people are “working” for the money.

Activity does NOT equal progress.

If you’re paying attention to how much your staff or contractors are doing, you’re watching the wrong metrics. It’s not about the level of activity. It’s about results. If what you’re doing doesn’t rank your site higher, doesn’t convert more prospects into paying patients, and doesn’t put more money in your bank account, you’re doing the wrong things.

Running around in a circle doesn’t mean you’re taking a single step forward.

When I walk into most practices and evaluate their efforts, it reminds me of my time as a young boy. Growing up, I’d watch my grandparents kill a chicken for dinner. They’d grab one from the yard and quickly sever the head with a knife. The chicken would thrash around the yard for what seemed like 30 minutes to me at the time, until it exhausted all its blood and effort. Then it was ready for plucking and cooking.

Most practices are no different. They stick their neck out unwittingly and put their fate in the hands of a marketing amateur with a good portfolio, featuring other chickens he’s plucked. They expend tremendous effort accomplishing no meaningful action. All that thrashing doesn’t save a failing practice.

Whatever you’re doing, stop. Look at your activity and ask whether it has made a meaningful difference in your business. I don’t mean the modest growth most practices drift into over time. I use the word “meaningful” deliberately. Are your efforts propelling you to the head of the industry in your city? If the answer is no, you’re equating activity with progress.

Mistake 6: Changing for the Sake of Changing

One of my clients had a simple strategy for his advertising. He changed things all the time. He rarely ran the same ad twice. There was no strategy other than change, no reason behind it other than a gut instinct that something needed to be done.

His real problem was that he didn’t test. He had no way to gauge how much business came from which advertising vehicle. He lumped everything together and hoped for the best. The danger with that kind of thinking is that you’re just as likely to kill a profitable marketing vehicle as an underperforming one. If you’re not testing and tracking, you have ZERO idea what’s working.

John Wanamaker, the merchant many consider the father of modern advertising, put it this way:

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”

Wanamaker had an excuse. He was buying newspaper ads in the 1800s. You have call tracking numbers, instant ad testing on Google, and split testing software. There is no reason to operate with the ignorance my past client did. He didn’t listen, and he didn’t change. I learned long ago that I cannot, and should not, care more about a client’s business than he does.

Find Your Magic Number

So here’s that critical question once again: Exactly how much does it cost you to book a new patient consultation?

Without that number, there’s no chance of building a real strategy and a step-by-step plan to move your business forward. Most of what you’re doing to grow your practice will end up being busy-work that leads nowhere. You know this is true, because with all the time and money you’ve spent on marketing, your schedule is still half empty.

Remember the client with 50 calls and 42.4 booked consultations a week? He was just like you when we started. He couldn’t even tell me how many new patient calls he received weekly. By the end he knew his cost per consultation, and at the time, every dollar he spent on marketing brought ten back.

His challenge stopped being the next patient. It became managing rapid growth. When you quadruple your business in 12 months, it’s not all roses. I can’t tell you how many times his receptionists called asking us to turn the traffic off because they’d hit full capacity. By the time our work together ended, he had an 8-month waiting list.

It’s a problem. But it’s a fun problem to have. And it all started with one number.

There are three more costly marketing mistakes on the list, and I cover them in part 3. Before you read it, do the homework: figure out your magic number. Pull your marketing spend for the last 90 days, count the consultations you booked, and divide. If the answer embarrasses you, or you can’t get the data to calculate it at all, that’s exactly the problem we fix for surgeons. See if your practice is a fit.

Until then, go find your magic number. The last three mistakes will mean a lot more once you have it.