Giang Le: Welcome back to Beyond the Screen. I'm Giang Le, founder of Studio Germina, and today I sit down with Adam for a conversation about med spa marketing, specifically why so many practices run the whole plan backwards and end up training their patients to wait for a discount.

Adam: Thanks for having me back, Giang. This one actually hits close to home because I know a couple of people who work at med spas, and they're always running some kind of promotion. So let's start there. You're saying the promotion is actually the wrong place to start the whole plan?

Giang Le: It's the most common place to start, and it's the wrong one. A promotion gets you bookings this month. But if that's the first move, a year later you've got a patient base that only shows up when there's a deal, a brand that looks like the fifteen other med spas in the same zip code, and an ad bill that stops working the second you turn it off.

Adam: So what's the right first move, then? Walk me through where the sequence actually starts.

Giang Le: It starts with positioning, in writing. Who is this practice for, and what is it known for. Is it the natural-results practice, the medical-rigor practice, the one place that does one specific procedure better than anyone in the region. The narrower the answer, the stronger everything else built on top of it.

Adam: Narrower is stronger, that feels counterintuitive. Most owners would want to say yes to everyone walking in the door.

Giang Le: Right, but if you're everything to everyone, your brand looks identical to every other med spa nearby. In aesthetics, the injector is the brand, so this is also where you decide how visible that provider is going to be and build their presence on purpose, not by accident.

Adam: And you said intake fix, in the same quarter. What does that actually mean, mechanically?

Giang Le: It means mapping the exact path. Inquiry, to consultation, to treatment, to follow-up, to the next visit, and fixing the leaks in that path. In a cash-pay practice, the second visit is the business. And no marketing dollars go out the door until that path actually works, plus a measurement system, call tracking, form tracking, so you can see inquiries and conversions by source every month.

Adam: Can you give me a concrete example of what it looks like when someone gets this order wrong? Not just in theory, an actual scenario.

Giang Le: Sure. Say a spa runs a two hundred dollar off Botox promotion in month one, before any of the intake work is done. The ad brings in fifty inquiries. But there's no call tracking, so nobody actually knows which ones booked. Half never get a follow up call at all. The ones who do come in already expect a discount on their next visit too, because a discount is the only relationship they've ever had with the brand. A year later, the spa has run four more promotions just to keep the calendar full, and the average patient is worth less, not more, because they were trained to wait for the deal instead of trusting the practice itself.

Adam: So the mistake isn't the promotion itself, it's running it before the system underneath it can actually catch and convert those leads.

Giang Le: Exactly right. Fix the pipes first, decide what you're known for first, and then a promotion works like a promotion instead of feeling like a going out of business sale every single month.

Adam: Okay, quarter one is the foundation. Quarter two?

Giang Le: Search and content. Most med spa patients start with a map search, so the local business profile has to be complete, accurate, real photos, regular posts. Then the website, one page per procedure, written for the patient's actual questions. What it is, who it's for, what it feels like, what recovery looks like, why here.

Adam: And content sits in this quarter too, not quarter one?

Giang Le: Yes, because content is where the position becomes visible. The provider's approach, education on what a treatment can and can't do, real results with consent. Short video is the natural format here. The provider on camera explaining something is genuinely the single most effective asset a med spa has.

Adam: Let's get to quarter three, because I think this is where a lot of practices actually try to shortcut things.

Giang Le: This is reviews, referrals, and retention. Reviews have to be requested systematically after every treatment, timed well, responded to every time, without clinical detail, and never bought or gated. Referrals are a structured program that rewards existing patients for bringing friends, built to fit your state's rules.

Adam: And retention is the maintenance plans?

Giang Le: Exactly, membership or maintenance plans built around treatments that need repeating, recall sequences, plus partnerships with local businesses that share the patient, fitness studios, salons, physicians who don't do aesthetics themselves. The patients you already have are the cheapest growth you'll ever get.

Adam: So paid ads finally show up in quarter four. That's a long wait if you're an owner who wants results now.

Giang Le: It is, but here's the mechanism. Paid advertising amplifies whatever already exists. A practice with a clear position, a converting website, strong reviews, and working intake gets a real return on that spend. A practice without those things just buys price-shoppers who leave the second a cheaper option shows up.

Adam: So the ad dollars aren't wasted, they're just premature if you run them first.

Giang Le: Premature and expensive. Search ads on the procedures and the neighborhood, landing on those procedure pages from quarter two. Social ads built from content that already performed organically. Retargeting of site visitors and consultation no-shows, within the health advertising rules that restrict what platforms allow for medical services. I'll put the links in the description if you want the detail on those rules. And budgets set from your own numbers, not a percentage of revenue somebody read online.

Adam: So if I'm restating the framework, quarter one is position and fix the pipes, quarter two is get found and demonstrate the position, quarter three is compound what you already have, quarter four is amplify it with paid. What does a practice look like at the end of that year?

Giang Le: It's known for one thing, findable for the procedures it does best, trusted because the reviews are real, retaining the patients it has, and advertising into a system that actually converts. That's a med spa with a strategy, instead of one just running promotions on a loop.

Adam: You called something in the source material 'the honest part.' What's the honest part?

Giang Le: That almost none of this is clinical work. A provider running a full treatment schedule cannot also build the brand, run the site, produce the content, chase the reviews, write the email, and manage the ads. It's a full marketing and business function, and it's the difference between being one of fifteen look-alike med spas or being the one people drive past the others to reach.

Adam: That's a clean way to end. So, restating it back to you, positioning first, intake before spend, search and content before reviews compound, and paid ads only once the rest is actually working.

Giang Le: That's the whole sequence. You are the medical expert, we are the marketing and business experts, and that's genuinely the whole arrangement at Studio Germina. We work through all four quarters with you, so the clinical work stays the only part you carry yourself.

Adam: Giang, thank you for laying that out quarter by quarter, it's a lot clearer than I expected going in. And if you're a physician or healthcare creator who would rather just do the clinical work and let someone else run the brand, the intake, the reviews, and the ad spend, book a consultation at studio germina dot com and let Giang's team handle the business side with you. The links are below, we'll put them in the show notes. Thanks for listening to Beyond the Screen, we'll catch you next time.