Raise Your Prices Without Fear

Andrea (00:04):
Well, hi there. I am Andrea Watkins, and if you're listening to this, while juggling three patient calls, checking in a couple patients, taking a payment, selling skincare, and trying to catch your doctor in between procedures, you might be working in an aesthetic practice.

Blake (00:18):
And I'm Blake Lucas and this is Practiceland. This is not your doctor's podcast.

Eva (00:23):
Welcome back to Practiceland. I am Eva Sheie standing in for Blake and Andrea. We're here today because one of the things on this podcast we try to do is help you earn more, and I did not want to pass up the opportunity to bring in Erica Crawford from Influx Marketing to talk about pricing. She has an absolutely viral talk that she's given at asaps twice and is going to be doing at AFPRS this year about how to confidently stand behind your prices without fear of losing patients and even raise them. Welcome Erica.

Erica (00:57):
Thank you so much for having me. Excited to be here.

Eva (01:00):
Tell us a little bit about your work.

Erica (01:02):
Yeah, so I'm the president at Influx Marketing, which means I handle a lot of the day-to-day operations of the company and client delivery and everything that's kind of under that realm. We do patient acquisition for medical aesthetic practices, so med spas, plastic surgeons, cosmetic dermatology, all aesthetics and yeah, it's a little bit about me.

Eva (01:22):
How'd you get into it?

Erica (01:25):
My background is actually public relations, so I started in PR. That's my first job ever where I started out my passion and then about a decade ago I transitioned from PR to digital marketing. Not the same at all, although some people like to think so, but I would say that they're cousins, they have some similarities, they go hand in hand. And then after a while in digital marketing, I ended up in medical aesthetics about six, seven years ago. So I've been here ever since.

Eva (01:58):
I know you like to refer to pricing, the whole world of pricing as a rat race. Why do you call it a rat race?

Erica (02:06):
You do. You've been listening. Yeah, because I feel like aesthetics has changed drastically, right? Over the last five years, particularly since 2020, there have been a lot of new plastic surgeons, new med spas, new large private equity backed aesthetic practices, and the competition has gone way up. And with that, a lot of the prices have been driven down for a lot of aesthetic procedures. And so a lot of people who have been in this space for a long time are like, wow, people are balking at my prices, or Why don't they understand the value of this work? And it's challenging because you have to reposition yourself to compete with that without bringing down your value. And for a lot of people it feels like a rat race. They're constantly getting patients coming in who's like, well, this surgeon does it for this or this injector does it for this, and they're comparing the prices with each other and you're like, okay, do I give them a discount or what do I do? And you're trying to figure out as a practice owner or patient care coordinator, what do you do in this circumstance? Do you bring down your value? Are you going to lose a patient if you don't.

Eva (03:14):
Yeah, just say, well, why don't you go over there then?

Erica (03:16):
Exactly. I'm a big fan of not bringing down my prices, which is what we're going to get into, but the majority, we work with about 400 medical aesthetic practices just for context between surgical and nonsurgical. And the majority of them are at the high end on the pricing. And we've been there, we've started them with the low end, we've been there with them through the high end or they were always at the high end or in their medium and out there high end. But we've gone through this process many, many times. So I know what it's like for the ones at the high end and what they have to do to get there and more importantly, almost what do they have to do to stay there even as competition keeps going and flooding in the market and trying to bring down those prices.

Eva (03:57):
Are there some common mistakes that you've seen over and over?

Erica (04:00):
Yes, many actually. I feel like a lot of providers feel like my work speaks for itself. Like you can look at my before and afters and that's why I'm worth the value. And I wish that were a hundred percent true, but it's not always true. It's just it's not enough. It's not enough. There's a lot more that you have to do outside of that. And I feel like some people who have been a provider for a long time, they're still stuck in that because that used to be enough. That was enough for so many decades. And then to be honest, post pandemic, a lot more practices opened up, private equity came in, people opened up more locations and the whole trajectory of medical aesthetics has changed completely. So what used to be enough is no longer enough, and I think that's the biggest mistake because people like to go, well, this worked before, so why can't it work again? And unfortunately you do have to shift and grow and change as your practice does.

Eva (04:55):
Okay, so what are we adding to the to-do list?

Erica (05:01):
I'm a big fan of branding and public relations. And a lot of people mistake what a brand is. They think a brand is like your logo and color scheme and fonts. And I'm not saying that's not part of a brand, but that's like 10% maybe of your brand. So sure you have colors, you have fonts, but your brand is your voice, right? It is how you say things. It's how your content is written, it's what you're known for. Are you known for being a perfectionist? Are you known for being really warm and friendly? Are you known for having a family practice where everybody's been employed and around for a long time? There is a brand that you have and you have a targeted audience, but that little niche that you have is going to be something. It might be a type of person, it might be a procedure, it might be an age range, it might be something, but your brand has to include a niche of some sort, whether it's procedure focus or patient persona focused, even down to a personality that a patient might have.

(06:04):
So branding is figuring out that whole process, everything about you, who you want to target, who you want to be, who you want to sound like, how you do your consults, and without nailing down that exact brand, none of the rest of it can fully work. Meaning having your prices at a high level or really doing a really good job at marketing and getting a lot of new patients before all of that comes your brand. And in a perfect world, you would've figured that out before you open your practice, but I have seen many people who have been in practice for 20 plus years who are having to do that for the first time because they didn't really need to go that far the first time and now they do. But that is the first step and then it resonates through everything. It's down to the staff you have, the scrubs you use, to how your office looks, to how your website looks, to how you communicate in emails and texts. The brand permeates every touchpoint of a practice. If you ever go to a website and somebody has a PR logo wall, meaning you're like featured in vogue this that I promise you, there is a lot of engagement that happens with that. It goes a long way to have public relations and to have a PR firm that works with you and gets you into various things because it credentials you. And generally speaking, the people who have high prices almost always use a PR agency. They do. They do a lot of PR, they do a lot of articles, they do a lot of different write-ups and different things and they post different things out there, but they are almost always use a PR agency and are active on social media. And not necessarily crazy active. I'm not saying they have to be an influencer. I definitely have some clients who maybe have less than 10,000 followers, but they're at least post regularly plus the PR and that's enough. So it just depends. But I would say you have to have that PR agency to help credential you, and that will help differentiate.

Eva (08:02):
There's a graph that I refer to year after year after year. I think in 2024, only 18% of women between 35 and 54 said Instagram was their primary social channel. So if 18% say Instagram's their number one social channel, what percent of 18% is willing to engage with and follow and mess around with plastic surgery content on Instagram? So the size of the audience is tiny. The amount of effort and the amount of resources going into talking to that audience is, in my opinion, extreme and out of balance with what should be happening. Let's come back to pricing a little bit because this is what we're really here to talk about. So we've got it in our heads now that brand is how you maintain your price and theoretically bring it up. How do you set your pricing in the first place? What factors do you think we need to use in order to get to the right prices?

Erica (09:06):
Sure. So when you first start out, let's say you're I mean, you're beginning, right? You're in a city, you're starting your practice, you're just going from scratch. So what I would do in that circumstance is when you don't have a brand yet, you're not known, nobody knows your work, you're just beginning, you do need a secret shop a little bit. You do need to find out what that baseline is for that market, right? I'm not saying you need to be the lowest. I'm not saying you need to groupon. I'm not saying any of that. I'm just saying you do need to be in the mid-market at that point. If nobody, you don't have your brand, you don't have your PR, you don't have anything worked out. So I would do some secret shopping. I would look around, I would ask around and find out what most med spas or plastic surgeons are charging around you, and I would set your prices about the same. And then you have to develop it, develop your brand, develop your website, do social media, get active and start promoting yourself, so that you can raise your prices because it's a combination of all of those things that will allow you to raise your prices. And raising your prices it's slow. It's not something that happens overnight. There is a point you hit when you raise your prices and it's when you get really booked out. Every time I have a plastic surgeon that's like I'm booked out four to six months, I'm like, raise your prices. Soon as you start hitting that window, it's like, do it every time. I promise you I will not lead you wrong. It's like clockwork. As soon as you start getting that window, you're losing patients at that point. A lot of patients are willing to make months for surgery, but once you kind of go past four months, four to six month window, you're now just throwing away patients at that point. So raise your prices and then do it again. So maybe you're now at the three to four month window, get yourself back up to the four to six months window, raise your prices again, and you just repeat. Now, that's for surgical. For non-surgical, that window is even smaller because most people are willing to wait a matter of weeks to get injected, generally speaking, right?

Eva (11:06):
There's a lot of really smart consultants who work almost exclusively on this exact problem, and they do this all the time. And I've learned from enough anecdotes from them over the years, the one I come back to over and over is that most plastic surgeons have 23 hours a week that they can do surgery in, and the other hours are for all the other things they have to do, clinic and administrative and life, things like that. Not everybody wants to work a hundred hours a week either or can't. So if you only have 23 hours a week to generate revenue, you have to generate as much revenue in that 23 hours as you can.

Erica (11:44):
Exactly.

Eva (11:44):
And there's going to be a ceiling. There's a ceiling for everyone.

Erica (11:49):
Couldn't have said it better.

Eva (11:51):
One thing I haven't asked you is, what can go wrong if you focus on patients who choose their provider entirely on price?

Erica (12:00):
You're going to have bad patients. I hate to say that. There are patients you just don't want, they're not worth the hassle, right? Gosh, if you see something like price shopping on a rhinoplasty or revision rhinoplasty, especially anybody who's had work before and they're price shopping, it's, I'm not saying it's a hundred percent time goes poorly, but a lot of the time it does. It's not worth it.

Eva (12:26):
How does someone's online presence play into the way that the pricing is communicated and shared with patients even ahead of making a phone call or sending a message?

Erica (12:38):
I'm a huge fan of pricing transparency. I think you should have your prices on your website, and I'll tell you why. They don't have to be exact. They could be a very broad range, even if the range is from 10,000 to 40,000, that's fine, or they could be a starting at, starting at blah. You don't have to give specific prices. We all know it depends on the consult, what that final price is going to be, and if you actually have it on your website, you're just going to get a lot more traffic. It's also going to weed out the people looking for the $7 unit Botox. So it's a win-win it means that when people convert and you get leads, you have just a tiny little bit of friction where they already know what your prices are, so you're not going to lose them right away or have a range.

(13:19):
So you're going to get the right person submitting a lead form, plus you're going to get a lot more visibility. Like I said, it's for an SEO perspective, there's a lot of search traffic around that, and without that sort of pricing page on your website, there's pricing sections, you're going to lose out on all that visibility. So for me, from a patient acquisition standpoint, I'm like, it's a win-win. You filter out the people that you don't want and you get a lot more traffic because there's a whole bunch of keywords that gets unlocked the second you have pricing pages on your website. I also would say you should also always have financing on your website. That's one thing I love about PatientFi, but it should be there. So you should have your PatientFi and then you have your pricing right underneath. So you also give them a solution in the same context.

(14:04):
It should be together, the patient financing and your pricing should be together, and you could do it two different ways. You could have a singular pricing page on your website where everything's listed, or you could have the pricing on your sub pages where it's like, let's say it's a breast aug page or a Botox page or Morpheus page. You have the patient financing and PatientFi, and then you have the pricing right underneath. It's full transparency. It's there, you see it. You see the breakdown. You also see an option to get financing if you need help, but it's there. And I think that that's really important for all practices.

Eva (14:37):
I believe that good people, the kind of patients that we all want to see, they also, when they know the price ahead of time, they're not going to come in and waste your time or their own. And that information is so important to moving forward that you can't wait to share it until too late.

Erica (14:54):
Exactly.

Eva (14:55):
It's really unfair to everybody if you don't give it to them early enough.

Erica (14:59):
I agree. It saves a lot of time and resources as well just to get the right kind of patient.

Eva (15:04):
Let's go through a couple of scenarios. I want to talk about the person who's maybe just opening up their practice or maybe they've moved to a new city, they're brand new. How do they think about pricing and what do they need to know about opening their doors at the beginning?

Erica (15:22):
I would do branding. I would have a website, a really good one. It's worth investing into a good website because that's where your brand lives, that's your online storefront. And then just starting out, I'd probably run ads because you need patients and you need patients quick. SEO is a long game. It's probably one of the highest ROI marketing channels you could possibly do, but it could take yours, especially in a competitive market to really get the results you want. So you need to eat right, you need to feed yourself right away. So I would run ads so you could get the patients that you need so that you could then reinvest into doing more marketing channels. I've given this kind of talk before, but I'm a firm believer that 10 is the minimum. 10 meaning 10 sources for patients, 10 patient acquisition panels.

Eva (16:07):
Oh, Iove this, when you talk about this.

Erica (16:09):
Yeah, I'll say I try to swing it into every talk I give no matter what the subject is. I'm always like, you have to be able to count it out. It's 10. It's not necessarily even all digital marketing. That might be events and loyalty programs. It might be all sorts of things,

Eva (16:23):
But I'm pretty sure the first time I heard you say this that we were somewhere together and I ran over to Max and I said, Erica's a genius.

Erica (16:31):
Thank you.

Eva (16:35):
I have a similar, yours is much easier to understand than mine. I get a little analytical sometimes, but I looked at the marketing funnel once and I thought, do doctors even know what the marketing funnel is? And so one day I put it in front of 15 doctors in the same day, and only one of them had ever seen a marketing funnel. The rest were like, I've never seen that. I don't know what that is. Never.

Erica (17:01):
Gosh.

Eva (17:01):
No idea. So I started mapping the 10 marketing sources to the funnel because, and I did this out of necessity at the time, but now I do it all the time when I'm trying to solve a problem. If you only do everything in the awareness and you don't think about conversion or you don't think about loyalty, you're not going to have a healthy pipeline of patients coming through because you're losing people, right? That's the old leaky funnel. And so the 10 sources thing, I think if you came up with 10, you would have to put one in every one of those segments because really, it's impossible not to, right?

Erica (17:40):
Yeah. Those are the three minimum things I would do to get started.

Eva (17:43):
Well, having a website is like having a phone.

Erica (17:46):
Exactly.

Eva (17:47):
Can't not have a phone.

Erica (17:49):
I would do those three things first if I was just starting and that's all I had. That's what I would do.

Eva (17:54):
That's interesting. I think I would have to argue that starting with, these are more infrastructure things than marketing things maybe or sales enablement things, but I would be absolutely rigid about my before and after photo process, and I would make sure every patient is incentivized to return for that after photo in the beginning. And I would put resources behind that, both incentivizing a staff member to make sure it happens for that six or 12 month after.

Erica (18:27):
I couldn't agree more on that. And if I was factoring in more operations, my three might be different. I'm just more thinking just the base things that you need to eat. You have to get the patient in the door first.

Eva (18:40):
You do.

Erica (18:40):
And if you got nothing, nothing. I'm like, that's where Google ads or meta ads, depending on what procedures.

Eva (18:48):
Well, you can have three and I'll have three different ones because I can't choose.

Erica (18:51):
I love it. I love it. It's perfect. It's perfect.

Eva (18:54):
So mine would be that photo system, making sure the photo system is ironclad and perfect. And then the second would be incentivizing the patients you do get to refer more patients and having that system set in place. So we kind of talked about if you're new to practice or new to town, what you need to do. But what if you're in the middle and you're halfway through your career or late career, you're established, but you can feel yourself not being as competitive as you used to. Things are harder, things are getting more expensive. It's probably time to raise your prices. What advice do you have for that situation? What would you look at?

Erica (19:42):
Well, now we got to talk PR because let's say you've been established, right? You're doing lots of marketing, you have leads coming in. Your SEO's decent, you got some ad campaigns are doing good, right? You got all your basics in, right? What's next? PR, PR, PR, PR all day. People are like, well, I don't get any patients from that Castle Connolly issue or whatever. That's not the point of it. The point is to credential you when a patient researches you, right? So a patient's going to find you at multiple touch points. So let's say you're running a Google ad, that's how they find you, and they go to your website, then they go to your social media, then they just Google you and to see what comes up when they put your name in. Then they look up Reddit and then they're like, oh, wow, they're in these magazines and they got these great quotes here and they seem really nice in this interview. And then boom, now you have a patient. So people always think about the first point of contact as in the patient acquisition, where did they originally come from?

(20:40):
And that's where your marketing comes into play. That's your SEO, your social media, your ads, that's your first point of contact. But PR is after that, right? It's after that first point of contact. This is when you're researching you and they are researching you. That's not a question, that's a fact, right? They're looking at you to decide and they're looking at you In many sources, typically speaking, before they actually even put that consult form, you could sometimes see somebody bounce around. You could put a tracking number, and they're like, they're there, they're there, they're there. You could actually, we see it all the time, right?

Eva (21:15):
Yeah.

Erica (21:16):
And that's where PR comes in. Is it credentials you? But no, it's very rare that you're going to find a patient that goes, I saw you in this magazine and now I'm reaching out. Unless you were on some big TV show or Netflix or something, that's very unlikely to happen, but that's not what you're doing it. You're doing it because you're increasing your conversion rate. You are improving your leads to booking, you're improving your click to lead, you are improving your conversion rate, and you'll later be able to raise your prices because of that. So you're getting more value out of the leads or out of the impressions or clicks. So that is where PR comes in really amazing. And I know that's so much harder to quantify, but it's a really huge misconception people have is that, oh, I'm doing this PR to get leads in. You're like, no, you're doing this PR to get people to convert.

Eva (22:07):
Okay, let's say two scenarios. You have budget for PR, you don't have budget for pr. Give us the rundown of how you do PR in both of those worlds.

Erica (22:19):
Typically speaking, by the time you're ready to hire a PR company, you do have budget for PR right? Like I said, it's not what you first started with. You've established yourself a little bit. You've been open for a couple of years, you've been doing marketing, you have ads running, you do SEO, you've done a lot of the marketing. Typically speaking, a lot of people do PR when they've already been doing a lot of marketing. Marketing's first just get the patients in the door and then the PR is to refine it, improve your conversion rate, raise your prices. You see how that's connected?

Eva (22:49):
Are you saying don't do PR if you don't have budget?

Erica (22:52):
Most good PR agencies I know of are, and the five to 10 K a month realm, they're expensive. They're more expensive than a marketing agency. Typically speaking, the lower end being like your local PR and then the national PR being the high end, it is pay to play. I'm just going to rip that bandaid off now. That is a fact. Unless you are incredibly famous already, unless you were an incredibly famous practice already, you're a famous person that people like because you've been on Netflix and you have your own TV show, and then that happens organically for those people, but 99% of the time people are paying for it.

Eva (23:28):
I got pitched by one of the most famous plastic surgeons, PRs in the whole world last week, and they were lovely, but even the most famous plastic surgeons are paying PR agencies.

Erica (23:40):
And a few times I've seen it not be that way, it's generally some TV stuff where they get, I've seen some exceptions to that rule, but yeah, it's pay to play. It's all pay to play everything, everything. Not just forget about our industry for a second. Even people who are in Forbes and stuff like that, it's all pay to play. I feel like that shocks so many people and it's so surprising, but it's just the fact. One thing you can do that I absolutely love. Have you ever heard of HARO, help a reporter out?

Eva (24:10):
Yeah, I used to use it all the time.

Erica (24:12):
Yeah, so they got bought and they revamped recently, but

Eva (24:16):
It still works.

Erica (24:17):
Yeah, it still works. I mean, it's not going to be some big amount of huge publications, but you can definitely use it to get some local PR going. It's completely free. It's basically tarot. They'll be looking for a surgeon to write a article on doing a tummy tuck

Eva (24:36):
Kris Jenner's facelift.

Erica (24:36):
Or whatever.

Eva (24:42):
The whole last month has been can we get a comment on Kris Jenner's face left?

Erica (24:44):
Yes, exactly. And then you just pick it and then you just write it and then boom, it's PR right? The link to your website, your name is there. Maybe they're not huge articles, but at least you're getting something going. So I'm like, everybody should be using HARO at least to get just started at the very base level. If you want to do something that is free to do, just take some time.

Eva (25:05):
I'll put that in the show notes. If you're listening and you want to see what we're talking about, it's HARO and I think it's help a reporter out.com. Is that right?

Erica (25:12):
Yeah.

Eva (25:13):
What's a good rule of thumb for marketing budget?

Erica (25:16):
I work with some amazing financially financial advisory companies like Skytale and Maven, and I work with a lot of great consultants like Terry Ross, and they all have somewhat similar, they have a little bit differences depending on the company, but I do think that there's a roughly agreed upon range that is not just from me, and I would say roughly seven to 12% of your revenue should be reinvested back into marketing, and I'll put PR in there as well. And seven to 12% is a pretty large range because it depends on how established you are. If you are a brand new practice just starting out, that number actually might be way higher because you might even be going at a loss until you are able to build up your practice. But let's just say you're a couple years in and you're still pretty new and you're trying to build up more patients, you might be on that 12%. If you're really established and you're doing really well, you're going to be on that lower end if you're crazy established, really big, not in a competitive market. I've seen people do as low as 3%, right? It does depend, but let's just take it in the middle and say 10%.

Eva (26:19):
What do you do if somebody calls and says, this doctor gave me this price. Can you match it?

Erica (26:28):
No.

Eva (26:29):
No, I can't.

Erica (26:30):
I'm not a huge fan of price matching. I am a fan of this, and this is really important because I think it helps. I'm a huge fan of adding value and not necessarily price matching. I'm a fan of this on my ads too, because a lot of people are like, oh, I don't have a discount so I can't run an ad. And when it comes to Google ads, there is some truth to that on meta, that's another discussion. But social media ads typically perform a lot better if there is some sort of offering. But with Google Ads, it's not true. You could absolutely run Google ads without a discount on the landing pages, but having value and adding value is a workaround for it. So I'll give you an example. So summer typically July and August is not the best months in our industry.

(27:13):
Let's be real, people aren't getting lasers cuz they're in the sun, they're on vacation, they're not always doing big surgeries because they got kids, family, whatever. So there's ways that we work around that. So having summer offerings and programs for a lot of practices works really well where it adds value. Where for example, it's like I'm come and get your mommy makeover. You are going to get three lymphatic massages valued at $800. You're going to get a medical grade skincare kit for sun exposure. I'm sure there's a better way you could say that valued at $1,200. We're also going to give you three sessions of CO2 laser post-op to help reduce any scarring and valued at whatever $2,000. So it's going to be X amount of value all for free for those who book their procedures of July of August this year. So don't try to price match out value.

(28:09):
Is the competitor adding all in pricing? What are the costs of like, is it just like one price? Is there separate anesthesia costs? Are the implant costs? Just look at that first and see what value they're going to give. Do you have a surgery center on site or let's say you have a bunch of injectors, yours have more experience, try to out value them. For example, I love it, and I know this is such a pain, I totally get it, but when people have an accredited OR, where they build it out, the surgeons that I have that go through that complete headache to have their own NR, OR in their practice, it's so worth it. That is a value add. People love that. There are people who literally will choose them. I'll see it in the lead forms and stuff just because they don't have to go to a medical center or hospital, and that means a lot to that person. So that's a value add for example.

Eva (29:03):
I think even just including the language that says all inclusive is a good signal to send so that if people are making phone calls and shopping around and talking to different coordinators, they've got it in their head that there's not going to be any surprise add-ons later. This is what it is. Once we give you a quote, there's nothing else that's going to come up. How do you use financing to make the price even sound less when it might be more?

Erica (29:34):
I think it's great. This, I think it's valuable. It doesn't cheapen the brand at all, but having something that's like, and I know PatientFi does this starting at x amount a month, starting at 199 a month, payments starting at that. That's a lot easier for a lot of people to wrap their head around. There is a huge difference between being able to afford something and having a cashflow. And this is something not a lot of people understand, but it's important, right? There are a lot of people out there who are easily could afford payments on let's say 50 grand easily. They're like, not a problem. I could pay that off. I could even pay that off before my interest goes up. I could pay it off in two years. Totally. But if you were to ask them to hand you 50 grand, they could not. It's cashflow, right? So the reason I say that is that by offering finances, financing, you are able to open that up for that market. So sometimes people think this have this weird concept that by having financing available, they're going to get the cheaper patients or something like that. I'm like, it couldn't be further than the truth. So I think financing is a must, and I think you have to have it very visible.

Eva (30:47):
I think it would be a mistake for us to assume that we know how people want to pay. And so I think the smartest thing we could do is change the way we think about it so that we're offering options all different kinds of ways that makes sense for all different kinds of people and the way that they think about their money. On this podcast, we always end with a segment called She Did What? Andrea likes to say it in a really sassy voice that I won't try to imitate, but basically it's a story that can either be something someone did that was great or scary or it could be a cautionary tale, anything like that. What do you got for us?

Erica (31:27):
When it comes to marketing, I could tell you a lot of stories. I'm going to give a story and I'm going to give a little preamble, which is that in marketing there's a phrase or a statement called black hat, and I don't know if you've heard this before.

Eva (31:43):
Oh I have.

Erica (31:43):
It basically means unethical or shady marketing tactics, whereas in white hat means ethical standard marketing context. Two things, most platforms have their own policies. So Meta, which is a company that owns Instagram and Facebook, they have policies. Tic-Tock has policies, Google has policies, and you are supposed to follow these policies. So that's one level. So if you don't follow policies of these various companies, you're going to get in trouble with them. But then on top of it, there are a ton of legalities when it comes to marketing. There are different protocols about different types of marketing and things you're not allowed to do. And there are regulations and things about mis-marketing or giving incorrect marketing specifically when it comes to medical. So medical, and there's also patient health information and there's hipaa and there's just a lot of regulations, which is why I always tell people when it comes to marketing, you have to have to choose a company that is solely focused in medical or aesthetics. You cannot pick a different industry. They just won't know because it's so regulated.

(32:52):
And I see people trying to go black hat and trying to get around these regulations and people get sued. So I know, not a client, but I do know of a practice that tried to get around the Google Reviews policy, which is there is legalities bad. So it's not just Google's policy, but there are legalities about fake reviews and mis-marketing through reviews, and there's laws that cover this. For example, I don't know if people know this, but you're not allowed to compensate patients for reviews in any way, shape or form. You're not allowed to offer discounts or give gift cards or anything. Reviews have to be, you can ask for reviews, but you cannot compensate financially in any form for review. People always try to get around that, but it's a pretty strict rule actually with Google. So practice decided to go shady, and they were paying people to do reviews. They were getting fake reviews. They were saying that some of the bad reviews, that the people weren't ever patients there and trying to get them removed when they were patients there.

(33:53):
They got sued for $5 million. They had to pay. Yeah.

Eva (33:56):
They had to pay?

Erica (33:57):
Yeah. A lot. And I've seen this a lot. The whole subject of reviews is pretty regulated, and I always tell people, don't mess around with that. Get them organically. It's slow. And then I've heard people go, yeah, but I know that blah in the street, they have 700 reviews and I know some of their fake, they will get caught. Trust me, it might take a while. And I know it's annoying, and I'm sorry they haven't been caught already, but give it time. Also, if you really want to be a little petty about it, or maybe I'm not even petty, but enforce some sort of ethical conduct, report them. You can literally go to their Google profile page and just report them and be like, there's fake reviews on here.

Eva (34:36):
There is a mechanism for that. You're right.

Erica (34:38):
Yeah, exactly. So I guess a takeaway is like don't buy reviews.

Eva (34:43):
Don't cheat.

Erica (34:44):
And in general, don't buy followers. Don't buy engagement. Don't it. Be patient and do it the organic way.

Eva (34:53):
And on Instagram, where can we find you?

Erica (34:57):
You can just find me on honestly at Influx Marketing, Instagram Influx Marketing, and then my own personals, Erica Crawford with a little underscore at the end. But you could just find me through Influx. They'll be easier for you,

Eva (35:09):
And we can send you a DM. It'll reach you eventually.

Erica (35:12):
Oh, no, I'm really good about it.

Eva (35:14):
Oh, it's you.

Erica (35:15):
Mm-hmm. No, I'm really good about it. I don't run the influx profile, but my influx guys are really good at it. On my own personal, I am one of those people who zero out their inbox every day on their emails, texts, slacks, and DMs. I am very particular about it, actually. So yeah, you can reach me pretty easily.

Eva (35:33):
What a peaceful way to live.

Erica (35:36):
I mean, yes, but I'm also one of those people who literally can't sleep without it. So maybe a little obsessive, but it's okay.

Eva (35:44):
Okay. Next time on the podcast, Erica will teach us how to get to inbox zero.

Blake (35:51):
Got a wild customer service story or a sticky patient situation? Send us a message or voicemail if your tale makes it into our "She did what?" segment, we'll send a thank you gift you'll actually love. Promise, no cheap swag here.

Andrea (36:03):
Are you one of us? Subscribe for new episode notifications and more at practicelandpodcast.com. New episodes drop weekly on YouTube and everywhere you can listen to podcasts.