EP 454: Marketing Month Part 2: Using AI to Solve Real Marketing Problems (Not Just Add More Tools)

Welcome back to part two of marketing month right here on Spa Marketing Made Easy. I am Daniela, and I’m back again with Lucy, our marketing manager here at Addo Aesthetics.

Now in part one, we talked about the foundational documents that every spa CEO needs when you’re going to be incorporating AI into your business operations, your company bio and your ideal client avatar document. Those are super, super important. So if you didn’t listen to part one of marketing month, then go back and listen to that, because those are super, super important. Those are going to be crucial for getting your marketing to sound just like you, so that you’re speaking to your ideal client. 

Now today, we’re actually going to take that foundation and show you how to use it strategically. Okay, the AI tools that are out there and that are available, they can cause shiny object syndrome to those spa owners who are on this path of experimentation with me, who are out there testing the different AI tools and seeing what is available. And it’s honestly like, every two months, there’s something new and exciting that you can do, and it’s really, important to not get shiny object syndrome with AI tools. 

Okay, we’ve seen how that doesn’t work with devices and equipment, and we’ve got to stay focused on solving the specific problems in your business and using AI to do that faster and more effectively. Okay, so we don’t want to incorporate everything that we can with AI just because we can. We want to look at, what are we trying to achieve. What problem do I have in my business, and what can ai do to make me get more time or get more money effectively in the business? All right, so in today’s episode, Lucy and I are going to walk through how to identify the real problems in your marketing and your lead generation, how to use the data to understand what’s working and then choose what AI tool is going to help you solve those problems. Okay, so we’re diving into one of our favorite lead generation tools, and we’re talking about how we have been using this to with our own lead magnet. 

We’re using our Growth Factor® the digital version of our Growth Factor® magazine, which has been working really, really well for us. It’s a high-value piece of content. We don’t hold anything back, right? We’re giving so much incredibly valuable information away so that we’re setting the stage of like who we are and what we’re about to build that first impression with our potential clients.
All right? So I’m gonna let you go ahead and listen to part two of Lucy and I’s conversation for marketing month. I hope you enjoy. Just before recording this, I was wrapping up a call with our growth factor elite beta members. And we do a lot of AI inside of that program, where it’s a lot and today we were talking about these different tools, and it’s very easy, you know, in previous years, aestheticians would get shiny object syndrome because of the latest technology that has come out. And, oh, if I buy this device, then it’s going to, you know, make me make all of this money and make all of my problems in my business go away. And now there’s so much talk and pressure and all of this stuff around AI that it’s very easy to be like, Oh, well, I’m not using that tool. Or should I be using this one? Or should I be using, you know, like, what should I be actually doing? And so we had this, like, zoom out conversation, and I was like, Look, you have your ICA Doc, you have your company bio. What we need to do first is understand what is the biggest problem you’re facing in your business right now. And almost all of them said leads. And you know, I need to make sure that I have lead flow. And you know it is really important to understand, like, Do you have a lead flow problem, or do you have a retention problem? So we’re first understanding that. But because there has been, there are, there have been a lot of changes, a lot of shifts, what we’re seeing is the patients or clients who used to come in monthly, are now coming in every six to eight weeks. They’re they’re kind of spreading it out a little bit in in different areas, and so clients are neat, or spa owners are needing to get more clients than they used to have. Have to ensure that they have that 80% booking, and they’re still doing well, they’re still booked, but they’re just seeing that they need more people to keep their capacity up to the same.
So we have this document inside of Growth Factor®  Elite. It’s called your client acquisition cost tracker, and essentially, what it does is calculate the cost that it takes to acquire a new client. So every month you’re writing down, you know, how many new leads come in over the course of the month? And did they come from SEO? Did they come from social media? Did they come from word of mouth? Did they come from a strategic partnership, or were they a walk in? Right? We’re looking at these different things. And I used to teach, you know, just grab a notebook, write it down if you don’t have this tracker. This is the easiest way to do. It is just have a notebook next to the front desk and have three columns on the side.
One says SEO, one says social, one says word of mouth. If you have a lot of strategic partners, or if you’re in a storefront that you have walk-ins, go ahead and add those tabs there, but you just write the name, and you check the box of where they’re from. And every month you review that and you see, what is the trend of where are most of my clients coming from? What our tracker does to make it such a powerful tool is it’s going to break down. You’re going to put in the amount of money that you spent on SEO, if any, the amount of money that you spent on social media, including payroll, cost of people that you’re paying to create content for you, even if you’re not spending money on ads, right? And so we’re looking at that and saying,
Okay, well, it’s costing you this amount to get a new lead in from social it’s costing you this amount to get a new lead in from SEO, or it’s costing you this amount to get a new lead in from referrals, and the cost would be if you’re offering any sort of complimentary treatment to one of your guests to invite somebody else in. So the consumable cost of that would go there, and what that does is give us data. So most of them were saying that the majority of their new leads were coming in from Google. And so I said, Okay, so now we know the problem that needs to be addressed. We need to look at, how do we improve SEO on our our website? And I said, 

How many of you have put into ChatGPT, please scan my website and tell me how I can optimize it. How many of you are doing blog posts every single week? How many you know like we’re going through, and we’re saying, these are, these are use cases where you can first understand the data, right? Like you’ve got to understand the problem that you’re trying to solve, and then you need to, then say, How can AI help me to do this faster. What other you know you for our marketing meeting every week, you’re obviously going through the stats and then kind of giving me the updates. What do you think for you as a marketing manager has been the most important stats to keep an eye on.

I think that, honestly, it’s similar to our students, and what they’re talking about is the lead generation, because we want to make sure that not only are we attracting the right person, but then when we have attracted them, what type of messaging are they initially getting from us? And I think what we’ve done really well in the last couple months is we’ve built a new welcome sequence. Obviously, the last year, we’ve been transforming our programs, and we’re getting very clear on the tracks that we’re offering now. So obviously the signature program of growth factor framework is something that everyone knows about, but now we have to educate them on the two different tracks. And the best thing that I think we’ve adopted into our business is our Growth Factor® magazine that is used as a lead generation tool, which is right there behind

that, right here

now it’s now it’s printed, which we’re so excited about, but that has been such a great source for us to get very clear that we’re attracting the right people, because that’s a very specific piece of content that is only applicable to this industry, but it is including. So many different sections that can be applicable to employees. It can be applicable to a spa owner, a doctor, or whatever it may be. So I think that’s definitely been really important for us to track. 

And I did also want to say that I think a really big issue that a lot of people will bring up with their website is not having the time to update it, and I think you hit the nail on the head with talking about AI with that, because a lot of people are like, Well, I’m not a writer, and I don’t know what I would talk about, and I don’t know what I would I just don’t know what I would post if I was going to post a weekly blog. You are an expert at what you do in your business, and I think that’s a confidence thing, but it’s also a reminder that you have to say to yourself that I am an expert on this service, and I can use AI as a tool where I talk to it like I would talk to a client, and then I ask it to formulate that for me in a 1000 to 1200 word blog post that’s SEO optimized. And when you get really granular on those keywords, like we know that we want to say spa CEO, that is a that is a title that we use to describe our people. 

Then you can tell chat things like that, like this. I want to call them guests. I want to call them clients. I want to call them patients. 

Whatever it may be to like, make yourself stand out. I think the the when people say that time is a big issue there that’s that’s being solved in real time right now, because I’m able to take just five to 10 Minute transcripts of you talking and turn it into a 1500 word blog post.Yeah, there’s, there’s a really cool AI software tool called Whisper Flow, and it does a phenomenal job of translating voice into text. So there’s a lot of you know, you’re you, you can text message like that. There’s a lot of things, and it will maybe not do the best job, or it’ll misspell things or get the wrong word, especially if you have an accent, you know, it’s not going to hear it correctly. But whisper flow does a phenomenal job, and you can even use that. You can just talk to it in your car when you’re driving to work, and answer whatever specific questions it’s going to dictate. 

All of that. And then, you know, think about the 10 most common questions that people are going to ask you, or how would you explain this specific service to a patient? Or how would you you know those types of things that you are answering all day, every day, and then you upload that into chat and say, write an SEO optimized blog post with meta descriptions, right? And so we’re using it to solve the problem. I think the thing here is, like AI is not just one more thing that you have to learn how to do when you’re already overwhelmed and exhausted. It’s something that, if this is a tool that you can implement to make your life easier than do so and and the thing that’s great is that you can have most of the AI tools are somewhere between 10 to $20 a month for a subscription, so they’re not expensive. I know some people are like, Oh, I don’t want any more subscriptions. But if you think about like, this is your marketing team, if you were before, spending $2,500 a month on a marketing team that comes in and takes photos and writes blogs, you can do that for $20 a month, right? 

I mean, it’s, a whole different thing. Okay, so now we are going to hit pause there for this part of the conversation again. If you did not listen to part one in the series, be sure to go back and listen. Next week we’re going to have part three of this four-part series. So every single week we’re having a new section of the conversation, and I’m giving you some action items so that you can listen and then apply so that you’re actually making progress in your business. Okay, so the takeaways from today’s episode: understand the problem, first gather the data and then find the tool that helps you to solve it the fastest. Okay, so whether that’s improving SEO with weekly blog posts, whether that’s tracking where your leads are actually coming from, or even creating a powerful lead magnet that speaks specifically to your ICA, all right, so what I want you to do this week for your action items, number one, we want you to track your lead sources. Okay, so just. Is make it simple. 

Grab a notebook, create three columns, one that says Google, SEO, another one that says social, and another one that says word of mouth. If you have strategic partnerships, if you have a lot of walk-in traffic, add those columns as well. That’s totally fine, and then have that notebook at the front desk so that every single time that a client or patient walks in that they are new to your practice, write their name and ask them where they heard of you. 

How did they hear about you? Okay, at the end of the month, I want you to review that data to see where most of your leads are coming from. Step two is to calculate your client acquisition cost, okay, and this is just if you’re ready, all right, but I want you to look at how many new leads came in, and then look at how much money you spent on SEO, how much money you spent on paid ads, how much money you spent on marketing in general. You’re going to take that dollar amount, that top dollar amount, you’re going to divide it by how many leads came in, and that’s going to tell you how much it costs you to get a new lead in your business, all right, and that should help you to understand, hey, I’m getting most of my leads from SEO, or I’m getting most of my leads from social. I’m getting most of my leads from referrals. And then you can be really clear on how and where you’re going to spend your marketing dollars. And then, number three, I do want you to audit your website for SEO opportunities. 

Okay, so go to ChatGPT, or whatever preferred AI tool you’re using, and ask it to scan your website and say, How can I optimize this for SEO? All right, this is not obviously going to be as good as bringing in an SEO company, but if that’s not where you’re at right now, just take this step, okay, and it can give you some step-by-step instructions on how to better optimize your website. All right, so you’re going to want to make sure that you have keywords. You want to make sure that you have your proper, you know, headings and subheadings and all of that, your meta descriptions, etc. Okay, so you want to really focus on that, and then go ahead and choose the top 10 most common questions that your clients or patients ask, and create your first AI-assisted blog post using the process that Lucy described. Okay, so if you really want, like, bonus points, then think about a lead magnet as well. 

That’s going to help build your email list that is a little more sophisticated of a strategy. We do have to put some if-then rules in there. We do have to build some funnels, but if you are there, this is a great way to attract new leads. All right, so you are an expert at what you do. You have the knowledge AI is just the tool that helps you communicate it faster and more consistently. All right, so take action this week, and I will see you next week when we go to part three of marketing month.