SMME EP424 How to Use ChatGPT to Supercharge Your Lead Flow & Future-Proof Your Spa Business

2:09PM Mar 6, 2025

Speakers:

Daniela Woerner

Keywords:

Chat GPT

spa marketing

lead flow

SEO

content creation

Instagram ads

Google optimization

blogging

AI tools

human connections

strategic partnerships

community engagement

email marketing

networking events

local business relationships.

Welcome to spa marketing Made Easy, a podcast for spa owners who want to step up their leadership and business skills and step into the role as Spa CEO. I'm your host. Daniela Woerner, CEO of Addo Aesthetics and founder of theGrowth Factor Framework Program, where we teach, coach and guide spa owners in scaling their spas to the next level of growth and unlocking freedom in their life and their business. I'm so glad you're here now. Let's dive into the show.

Let's talk about the reality that spa owners are facing right now, if you feel like it's getting harder and harder to attract new clients, if you're struggling to find high quality staff, especially when fast food places are offering $22 an hour. You are not imagining things. It is harder, but it's not impossible. Now we are in a time of massive transformation. The way that we market, the way that we connect, and even the way that we run our businesses, is shifting at such a rapid pace, and a huge part of the shift ai ai, is changing the game, not just in our business, but also in our daily lives. So today, right here on the spa marketing Made Easy podcast, I want to pull back the curtain and share exactly how we're using chat GPT to streamline our content, optimize our lead flow, and give ourselves back the time to focus on the most important things, building real human to human connections. Now I'm also going to give you some specific chat GPT prompts for spa that you can plug in and start using today. All right, so first up chatgpt. This is by far the AI tool that we use the most. We have the paid version. So there is a free version and a paid version. The paid version is $20 a month. It is so worth the $20 a month for the just incredible output that it has. So highly recommend getting the paid version. Now, when I started playing around with chat, we people will call it Training, and I didn't really know what that meant, but essentially training it to understand your brand, your voice, your business. I was simply uploading transcripts from my podcast episodes. I was adding blog posts that we had written in the past. I uploaded our brand style guide. I uploaded the PDF of our book. I asked chat GPT to scan my Instagram and my website to understand the tone, and I was also always prompting it to only use my content as a source. That's really important, because one of the big kind of red flags that people are bringing up around chat is that it is essentially a giant search engine and can pull anything from the internet. So if you are educating on something, you want to make sure that you're using your own unique content. Okay, so the other piece that I want to add in there, when we're talking about training our chat, when you have the paid version. So I have the $20 a month version. There's a little sidebar that you can add that it's you're always using that same folder on the side. So mine is auto content creator. All right. You can have different sidebars over there. My husband actually has one that helps him come up with his morning workouts. He trained it to make sure that it knows all of the equipment that we have in our gym, and he just plugs in a few things of how long he has, what areas he wants to work, and it just pumps out his settings for him. So side note, that's a way that you can use it personally. But when we're looking at how we're using this for business, these are the types of things that I was doing, and I'm always making sure that I'm using that auto content creator right there. So once I trained chat, the more that I trained it, the more that I gave it feedback when it was giving me a good response or a bad response, the easier and the better that it got, and it also gave me that confidence that the the content that I was creating was uniquely mined. So here's what happened when we really started to use it strategically. Number one, our blog output skyrocketed, which meant better SEO and more organic leads, right? So we we're going to get into this in a little bit here. But the way that spas are getting leads is typically social, which in our industry is 99% of the time going to be Instagram search. Search, SEO, Google, or referrals. And so if we want to look at those three different ways that we are getting leads in a way to really increase our search is through blog post, through consistently blogging. Okay, the other thing that we noticed, we were able to streamline our content creation. So whether that's emails, blogs, social posts, they all start from one piece of content. So for example, if we write a blog, then maybe that blog, we're also going to be able to create an email about a blog or the social post about the blog. We're actually even training chatGPT to generate our podcast, show notes, emails and blogs simply by scanning the transcript of each episode. It is unbelievable. Now it's not perfect, but I would say the output is about 85 to 90% there, and it just keeps getting better and better. So when I do a podcast episode, this podcast episode, for example, I'm going to take this transcript, I'm going to upload it into chat, it's going to give me a summary, it's going to give me the kind of first draft of our email. It's going to give me social post. And then I use my marketing manager, my copywriter, to refine it, to read through, to make sure that it makes sense. But I know you know, reading through something and refining is a heck of a lot faster than starting from scratch and kind of staring at that blank page. So the time savings and the financial savings are huge, and that time savings is key, because that allows me to focus on additional lead flow channels. And what I'm going to get to by the end of this episode is the lead flow channel that I feel is most essential here in 2025 All right, so let's get into how you're going to use this in your spa. So as I mentioned before, lead flow comes from three primary sources. So we're looking at social, and when I say social, that is Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, Pinterest, you know, whatever, YouTube, whatever you're using for social. And we have both organic and paid ads. Now for the sake of simplicity, I'm going to be referring to Instagram, because I know most of you out there, that is your primary platform. The other place that we're getting lead flow from is Google. So this is your search. This is your website optimization. People naturally finding you when they're looking for facials near me, or Botox near me, or micro needling near me, whatever they're searching for with your city name, if you're coming up on that first page, they're going to be able to find you, see your reviews, head to your website, and hopefully make a appointment. The third way is referrals. And when we think of referrals, we're typically thinking of word of mouth from our existing patient base or client base, referring their friends. Well, I want to take this a step further. I want to be able to really control this word of mouth, because again, if you don't have those existing patients in the first place, which we're typically getting from Instagram or Google. How are we going to have them refer so we've got to have a way to get more people in on the regular I also put strategic partnerships into this referral category, which is huge. So we'll again more on that a little bit later in this episode. Now, having a diversified approach of lead flow, when I'm talking about lead flow, is super, super important. We don't want to put all of our eggs in one basket. So we want leads coming in from all three so let's just start off with Instagram. Okay, we're gonna look at paid ads organic when it comes to social. Instagram is a key player in Spa marketing, especially when it comes to paid ads. And paid ads were life changing for me. They helped me build my email list. They helped me grow this podcast, helped me generate millions in revenue. But here's the thing, I would never rely only on ads as my only lead source, and for me, it was a big wake up call when there was the iOS 14 update. And you know, it adds like the cost increase, they just weren't working the same. This the iOS 14 updates was when Apple allowed its users to opt in or opt out of tracking. That was a very big thing for the marketing world. Okay, so imagine if. If you're running ads, you're getting, you know, maybe you're getting 20 new patients or clients every single month, and then all of a sudden, your Facebook account gets hacked or it gets disabled, which we're seeing a lot right now, because there were some pretty big updates to metas advertising policies and so sometimes accounts are getting shut down or disabled incorrectly. Well, if that is the only way that you are getting leads into your practice, that could mean hundreds or even hundreds of 1000s of dollars for you in lost revenue. So I was actually just having a conversation with someone who's in this exact situation. Her Ad Account got shut down again, not uncommon, you know, she could have been doing everything right, and there was just some sort of glitch that got her shut down, and now she's having to spend time and energy, you know, getting that reinstated. But she was trying to figure out how to get new leads through Google or some other way. So again, while we use ads, we believe in ADS. We recommend that you use ads. It is not something that we want to steer clear of. It's an absolutely essential, important part of your advertising strategy. We want you to use AI to help support that, to help streamline that. Okay, so we've got a chat GPT prompt for you here. So write three variations of an Instagram ad for my spa that promotes, and I'm put in brackets what it is that you're wanting to promote. So signature facial membership, NEW CLIENT OFFER. Now, one of the tricks with your prompts is, when there's those brackets, the more information, the better. So you can you can let chat know this is a signature facial here's what's included, here's who it's for, and then we add after the brackets, the tone should be warm, inviting and focused on relaxation. Include a strong call to action to book an appointment. So we are going to continue to refine and refine and refine our post, but that can be the starting point. Okay. Now here's another one, and this is from our good friends over at successful ads club. This is the place to learn all things ads, and it has to do with metas, new ads policies. So the prompt starts off with, I need you to analyze my website for potential compliance risks with metas, new advertising restrictions for 2025

please evaluate the following. And I'm not going to read this whole thing, because it's pretty long. There's section one, content. Section two, user data practices. Section three, event tracking, section four, messaging and targeting. And then each of those has its own instructions, and then there's a report at the end. So we are going to, we actually have a freebie for you guys with 26 chatGPT prompts for spa. You can download it at the bottom of this episode. It's gonna have all that there. So if you are like scrambling to try and write some of these down, Fear not. We have these for you. But let's you know, for the sake of time and your listening pleasure, I'm not going to read out the entire chatGPT prompt for that one, all right, so let's move on to Google, all right. And SEO, website optimization, something that happened for me that I noticed that was probably one of the first things that made me feel old was that my neighbor across the street, who is like 13 or 14, said that only old people use Google. Every all the young people are using Bing. And I was like, what? Who uses Bing? But, you know, times are changing, and I don't think that that's a call to action to shift over to Bing, but I think that it is a possibility that Google is not always going to be the end all be all. Maybe it is. I'm still sticking with Google. I believe in Google. Google has been great for me, but I want to keep my mind open to other search engines if things shift. Okay, so for now, Google is still the huge lead driver, and so what we want to do is make sure that we are showing up in the map section. We want to make sure that we are on page one of results. And now, if you've noticed, there's even these AI generated answers right up there at the top. So there's a summary, and then there's an AI generation. So how do we show up up there? Well, for us, we've worked with HLM to optimize our website for SEO. We are also paying for SEO, but AI has been a game changer in our strategy, and this goes back to those blog posts. So the more that you're regularly updating your website with relevant content, the more that that gets posted to Google, the more that your website is getting updated, the more that Google says, Hey, this is an active website. This is, you know, somewhere where I'm going to continue to go back. So SEO takes a little while. It's not something that happens overnight, and we've been working on this for a little while now, and actually just last week, or is actually about two weeks ago, we had eight new leads reach out via our website in one week. These are people who are not on our email list and had found us through search. So that is incredible. That for me, says, Okay, our blogging is working. The updated website that was optimized for for SEO is working. People are starting to find us through search. We are already ranking on the front page. We're actually number one nationally for a couple of our search terms, which is really exciting. That's taken a lot of work, but we're now starting to see the results. We're starting to get the benefit of all of that work that we put in. So now I have lead flow coming through ads, and I have lead flow coming through search that makes me feel good again. I am someone who likes a stable, secure business. All right, so I've got another chatgpt prompt for you. So generate 1000 word blog post optimized for SEO on include whatever you want. You can say best skincare treatments for aging skin. And then you can include the skincare treatments that you offer at your spa. You can make it educational, engaging and formatted for easy reading. Include relevant keywords for search visibility, such as and what you want to do is include your city name, all of that, so that you're coming up in search for that. Okay, so again, posting blogs consistently tells Google that your website is active, valuable and deserves to be on page one. So the more visibility that you have, the more potential leads. Now we like to post weekly, and if you're like, Well, how am I going to come up with 52 topic ideas? Well, start by coming up with the 10 questions that you get asked most in Spa and ask chat to come up with a list of blog topics around those 10 questions. All right, you can start there. So we're freeing up time. We're freeing up money by using chat to help with our marketing and our content. So what do you do with that time and money? How do you benefit the most out of it. Well, my thought is that you need to get out in your community. I always tell our students, be the mayor of your town. And I don't mean like, actually run for office. I want you to be out there getting involved, especially because right now, trust is low, skepticism is high, and consumers crave real human connection. Think about how you're engaging with other businesses. So that means more than ever. Right now, in 2025 you have got to be attending chamber meetings. You've got to go to networking events, these networking groups like BNI, you've got to go to there's all different types, right? Ask chat for the networking groups in your area, showing up at Charity functions, building relationships with local business owners who serve the same audience, positioning yourself as the go to esthetic expert in your area. And the reason for this is because no algorithm change with social can change or take away the power of human to human relationships, all right. Relationships open doors. Relationships create new opportunities. Relationships generate referrals. Relationships are the start of strategic partnerships. Relationships are the the reason that strategic partnerships thrive, and these relationships can bring in 10s of 1000s of dollars in new business. All right, so try this chat, GPT prompt, write an introduction email that I can send to a local business. Yoga studio, hair salon or wellness center, to explore a partnership. The goal is to offer value, introduce my spa services and start a collaborative conversation. Now, when you're building authentic relationships and not transactional relationships, right? We don't want to be like I think LinkedIn kind of got this reputation of all those like random, spammy posts that just felt very transactional. For a relationship to be fruitful, you have to show up from a place of service, from a place of giving, to learn about other businesses, to frequent other businesses, you've got to give, give and give and give and have no expectation to receive. All right, you want to build a personal relationship and also a professional relationship. They overlap. Guys, they overlap. So it's really, really important to have a strategy around how am I going to show up? How am I going to provide value? What can I do to help others grow? And then it naturally happens that others help you as well. Okay, so friends. AI is here. It is not going anywhere. The spas that adapt, that embrace new strategies and stay ahead of the curve, you're gonna thrive. This is gonna be amazing for you. This is gonna be a record breaking year. But at the end of the day, AI is a tool, just like any other piece of software, it is how you use it that will make or break your business, and if you're not break if you're not using it, there's a lot of other spas that are going to be light years ahead of you. All right. So here's my challenge for you.

Start using chatGPT to streamline your marketing. Try the prompts that I shared today and look at how much time you save. Now, remember, we've got the link that you can download those 26 prompts below this episode. Download those. Use them, test them, refine them. Train your chat yourself. Don't rely solely on social media, SEO for your leads. All right, we've got to really take control of our referral relationships. We've got to really start to build local community, right? That is the strongest way. When I asked someone, what's their what's the best way that they've built their business? How do they do it? They're always going to say, word of mouth, right? Word of mouth, word of mouth, word of mouth. So why don't we take that and expand upon it in a deeper way? Well, I mean, the reason is, everybody's tired, everybody's busy, everyone's overwhelmed, right? So the thought of going to a chamber event or putting yourself out there when you're you know, I know for me, I don't like to be in a room with a lot of people I I just don't, and it can be uncomfortable, it can be scary, it can cause anxiety. But you've got to figure out how to connect. What are the ways that you can connect, that you can build relationships. If you don't like being in big rooms, there's ways that you can do it where you can find connections and just go for a one on one coffee, right? Like there is a possibility for every single business owner to do it in a way that works for you. All right, you've got to get out in your community. Now, again, I know copying and pasting is a heck of a lot easier than transcribing from this episode many of you are listening, or you're driving or you're working out, so again, we created that free download for you that has 26 chatGPT prompts that you can use in your business to help with lead flow, to help with marketing, to really streamline those other two areas of social, of ads, of SEO, so that you can get out there and get in your community. Okay, now we've got the link right below this episode, or you can go to our Instagram at auto esthetics, we're gonna have a pinned post right up there at the top where you can just comment chat, and we will DM you with the link to get that freebie. Thank you guys for listening. I will see you next week with more strategies to help you build a profitable spa.