We believe we’re the best at what we do. That’s why we don’t require long term contracts, yet, have clients who have been with us since we started (as Shockley Marketing) way back in 2012! We get real, meaningful, and impactful results for our clients and we consistently implement marketing initiatives that generate new business and increased revenue. Don’t take my word for it though, check out our service pages and case studies like this one and this one.
https://medspamagicmarketing.com/facebook-ads-case-study-veincentre/ (these Facebook Ad leads generally cost ~$15 per lead and close at a rate of 1/10)
https://medspamagicmarketing.com/google-ads/ (these Google Ads leads generally cost ~$30-60 per lead but close at a rate of 1/4 or 1/5)
On occasion, we’re asked to work for a share of profits or commission on sales / appointments generated. While we’ve actually explored this option and understand the desire of business owners to pursue this type of relationship with an agency/consultant, there are several reasons we’ve been unable and unwilling to do so…
Reason #1 – We don’t have start to finish control of the sales process
For many of our marketing and advertising campaigns, we have the ability to accurately measure and track each and every lead. We also have outstanding, best-in-class, HIPAA-compliant automation follow-ups that can help nurture leads. This system includes automatically generated text messages, emails, and even pre-recorded voicemails. It’s outstanding. If you have online booking systems, we’ll even direct users to book online.
With that said, patients are generally conditioned to booking medical appointments via the phone. It allows for them to ask questions, explore options, etc. That means your front office staff will share in the responsibility to convert leads into booked appointments.
Reason #2 – Lack of bottom line sales data
Unfortunately (unless you’re an ecommerce site), we won’t have the bottom line data on your sales numbers and business closed. Although we can track leads generated, we’d be forced to rely on our clients to report and accurately record the bottom line sales data used to make this type of relationship work. That would mean monthly audits by a neutral third party accountant/bookkeeper (extra cost) and quite a bit of legal assistance from both parties to determine specific details of our profit sharing split and agreement.
In addition, any marketing initiative needs to evaluated based on lifetime value. That means we’d need to agree on an average lifetime value of a client to negotiate our payouts. What if certain leads don’t pan out to meet your typical average expected lifetime value? If you’re paying out based on lifetime value estimates, this also means you have to be willing to lose money on the first and maybe second visit on average. If an average patient is worth $4,000, lifetime value (considering some will be one and done, and some will stay with you for years), are you willing to pay in excess of $1,000 for that new patient? That is, however, an outstanding 4x return on investment.
For these reasons, the marketing agency to client relationship is much more easy to manage and beneficial for both parties using flat fee pricing. As you successfully scale and improve your marketing returns, you’re not paying exponentially more for every new patient that comes as a result.
Reason #3 Attribution of Results
While some forms of online marketing are extremely traceable (Google PPC and other direct response ad campaigns), there are MANY leads and new customer acquisitions that are much harder to track and attribute. If a customer first sees your print ad, then later performs a Google search before calling your business…how is that lead attributed? Many people will go to Google already knowing about your business, but that lead data may show the visitor came from “organic search”…should that lead be credited to our SEO work? Probably not.
A customer may be touched or affected by multiple marketing campaigns and messages and properly attributing leads is unlikely to be an exact science. Because of that, we’d experience numerous issues and potential disagreements over how to attribute new business generated.