Starting a Medspa – Roadmap for your Digital Presence

There are 5 main steps to starting a successful medspa:

1. Creating a business plan
2. Branding
3. Generating leads with a website
4. Utilizing medspa software
5. Marketing and advertising

With a thorough business plan and a strong digital presence that continually draws in new customers, you are sure to build a successful medspa. Keep reading to learn more about how each step is vital to your business’s growth. 

The Importance of Your Business Plan

Starting a medspa begins with a business plan.

This is a summary of how your medspa will run in order to turn a profit, an analysis on the local market, and information describing its potential to grow. If you need to attract investors to get you off the ground, you will need a well-written business plan that provides them with reasons to invest in your business. 

Some things your business plan should include are: 

• Costs: The start-up costs and funding requirements for the next 5 years
• Marketing: Define your marketing strategies and how you will consistently bring in new business
• Legal: Detail the structure of your business. Is it a sole proprietorship or an LLC?
• Profits: Provide prospective data for five years of operations to give investors a good idea of the profitability
• Staffing: The staff set the tone for a business, so it is vital that you seek out candidates who fit the brand and are qualified to provide a comfortable experience.
• Insurance: What the needs are for insurance. Medical practices, including medspas, require insurance to protect everyone involved. Additionally, most medical insurance providers do not cover medspa services; however, if certain plans do, you will need to decide if your practice will accept insurance or not.

There are also other important details that you will need to iron out. For example, what services will you offer? How can your location benefit your business? 

Focus on: cost, location and competition

When deciding what services to offer, it is important to weigh the costs, the payoff, and the risk. 

It would be fiscally smart to start by offering services that are within your expertise, involve little equipment, and are popular right now. This guarantees that you won’t overspend on equipment right away. It could also be beneficial to offer some specialty services that are unique to your medspa.

This can help you stand out from other businesses in the area. 

As for location, most medical offices are a destination on their own. 

Unlike with cafes, you are unlikely to get customers from foot traffic. There is no need to pay lots for prime real estate in the heart of downtown; however, a luxury location would allow you to utilize luxury branding and charge more for services.

The key to location is to find somewhere affordable, but that seems very legitimate. 

If a medspa was located in the warehouse district or the middle of nowhere, potential customers may be less likely to trust the quality of the services.

Some things to consider when selecting a location include the “vibe” of the area, parking availability, zoning laws, and local demographics. 

How Branding Can Elevate Your Medspa

This sounds basic; however, branding can make or break a new business. Branding is more than having an Instagram account and posting about 20% off sales every other month. 

Branding means deciding on the tone, styling, and aesthetic of the business in order to maximize appeal to the target demographic. 

Social media tools like Instagram can certainly help connect leads with the business, but the first step is to brand your medspa. 

The Branding Checklist: 

• Logo – Does it communicate what the business does? Is it easy to understand? Is it easy to replicate on other promotional materials? 
• Colors and Type – Do they look good together? What is the tone they are setting for the business? Will promotional materials be readable in these colors and type?
• Tone – Who is your medspa? Does the tone match the clientele? 

How to Generate Leads With a Conversion-Optimized Website

A successful  medspa website design is great both for branding purposes and to make conversions. Because the market is so saturated with medspas and there is competition for customers, it is vital to have a top-notch website that is designed to make conversions. 

What does it mean to optimize a website for conversions? Why are conversions so important?

A conversion occurs when a lead – a potential customer or “prospect” – makes the transition to becoming a customer or client by buying a product or booking an appointment for a service. 

To make your medspa successful, you require conversions, and lots of them. Having a conversion-optimized website means that the site is designed specifically to turn prospects into recurring clients. 

How does a website do this?

There are several ways that a high-end website design can  make more conversions and bring medspas more clients:

1. Videos and testimonials: leads may not trust a brand telling them to buy a product or book an appointment, but a testimonial from a person like them will.
   
   Testimonials assure leads of the quality of your services and give a human face to the treatments that you are offering. Videos especially are a great way to show how well your treatments work and give leads insight into the medspa experience. 

2. Booking integration: this means that new clients are able to easily make an appointment through your website without being redirected elsewhere. The number one reason most leads click away from a website is that they can’t figure out how to use it or it takes too long to use. When starting a medspa, it is vital that your website is easy to use and that new clients can easily book that first appointment.

3. Information about services and staff: People like to have lots of information about something before they commit to it. Having extensive services pages, FAQs, and blogs will keep leads on your website by feeding them more information. As people learn more about a service or a topic, they will be more likely to consider booking an appointment for it later on.

Providing lots of information on your website also helps establish trust with potential clients. It shows that you are a trustworthy authority, which will make them feel more comfortable during the appointment.

Similarly, having an About page to introduce the practitioner, the staff, and their credentials will also make leads feel more comfortable about booking that first appointment. 

Medical Spa Software: The Backbone of Starting a Medspa

When you start a business – any business – there are a lot of moving pieces and parts.

There will always be a lot going on and many different things that will need your attention. This goes double for medspas. Not only will you need to keep track of appointments, manage your staff, process payments, do payroll, solicit client feedback, run a marketing campaign, stay stocked with products, and make choices about whether to start offering new services, you need to do it while being HIPAA compliant. 

The good news is that you don’t have to do all of it yourself. There are a variety of affordable, easy to use options for medspa software that will do most of the tedious and repetitive tasks for you. 

Vagaro is an affordable, user-friendly option. Subscriptions run between $25 and $85 a month. This all-in-one software will help you schedule clients, send automatic reminders, add notes, create a custom booking website, and let you livestream classes and consultations from anywhere.

It also works on any device. Vagaro is especially ideal for small practices and for people who are just starting a medspa.

DrChrono is designed to streamline admin tasks to allow your team to focus on clients, not on paperwork. DrChrono is ideal because it has an Electronic Health Record feature that works through an app on any device. It also has the option for Telehealth and allows clients to both set up their appointment and pay their bill online.

If you are starting a medspa that offers unique services or is multispecialty, this software is ideal for you. 

AestheticsPro is a cloud-based software that offers a POS system, an accounting suite, a gift card processing system, and gives you access to e-records from anywhere. It is also ideal because it is HIPAA-compliant and easily helps you utilize before & after photos.

There are many more options for medspa software. To learn more about the pros and cons of each, please read Mediaboom’s full medspa software review. 

3 Ways to Effectively Market Your Medspa

Marketing and advertising are the key to growing your medspa in the long run. Here are 3 ways that you can market your business to continually draw in new clients. 

1. Person to Person Advertising – Utilizing Influencers and Bloggers

Many potential clients will trust a recommendation from a friend or someone they look up to over the word of a company. This is why influencers and guest blogging have been on the rise as effective and affordable marketing strategies. 

When first starting a medspa, a well-known beauty blogger can help put your practice on the map and get you your first influx of new clients.

Paying an influencer or blogger to talk about your medspa and rave about your services doesn’t cost very much and their posts will continually attract an audience. A few hundred dollars spent on an influencer’s promotion could lead to thousands of dollars in revenue and many new clients. 

Advertising through influencers and bloggers is all about your medspa’s demographic. Nearly 70% of medspa customers are under 55, and a vast majority are women. Millennials make up 17% of all medspa clients. Given this information, you will want to work with an influencer or blogger who is in the 28 to 55 range, who has a large following of women in that demographic, and who is already in the beauty niche. 

When their followers see them rave about your services, they will be very likely to follow suit and make an appointment themselves. 

2. Online Advertising – Using Social Media Ads and PPC

Social media is where it is at – for all demographics, not just the young people. The average adult spends 2 hours and 22 minutes on social media a day. Of that, an average of 38 minutes a day is spent on Facebook alone. When you begin to advertise while starting a medspa, it is important to go where the people are.

Instagram, Facebook, and paid Google Ads are ideal for advertising because they don’t necessarily read as “ads” to users. They appear normally in someone’s feed, therefore drawing their attention more. 

The key to social media advertising is to produce high-quality ads that convey your brand and your services, are interesting to read, provide the user with information to better get their attention, and do not annoy them. 

PPC (Pay-Per-Click) ads are ideal for targeting certain demographics and locations based on keywords. This is an affordable way to ensure that you are only paying to advertise to potential leads who are in your area. 

3. Local Marketing – SEO and Business Listings

Unlike e-commerce websites, medspas do not benefit as much from advertising to people outside of their area. Because medical spas operate on the basis of clients coming in, the best way to generate leads who will likely convert is to market locally. 

There are two main ways to do this: local SEO and business listings. 

Developing a comprehensive SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategy will help your website show in Google results for searches like “Medspa in Orange County.” 

Local SEO means that your website is optimized to come up for searches that relate to your region. When you are first starting a medspa, you probably won’t be in the topmost Google results right away.

SEO takes time, but can deliver great results with patience.

When most people need to know information, the first thing they do is Google it. This is also how most people find services. Ensuring that your website appears prominently in the search results is the best way to connect your medspa to new clients. 

If people don’t use Google to find new business and services, they may check a business listing website like Yelp.

These websites are ideal for consumers because they can read honest reviews. The good thing about advertising with business listings is that you can easily target your area and it is relatively inexpensive to get your medspa listed.

This strategy is especially good for targeting older clients who may be interested in your anti-aging services. 

Where to Get Started

Starting a medspa can be an overwhelming process and it’s important to have all the right strategies in palace from the beginning to see the best results. For help with all your website design, branding, marketing or advertising needs, contact Mediaboom to see how we can get your medspa on the right track.

To Learn More About Starting a Medspa and How to Market Your Business, check out our other helpful resources: