Why Your Brand is the Tie Breaker

Written By TouchMD

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The trick to reaching the right patients isn’t using every marketing channel. It's finding the right mix of both internal and external channels that fit your personality and stage of practice, balancing risk with certainty.

Looking to the future, Influx Marketing's Max Baybak sees marketing in aesthetics built on diversified, authentic branding and smarter use of technology. Practices that connect with patients on a personal level—whether by channel or message—will stand out.

Learn why a more integrated tech stack is key to retention, how to market toward different age groups, and how AI agents could end up taking on busywork so humans can focus on high-value patient relationships.

In the end, your brand will be the tie-breaker. Strong, authentic branding builds trust, loyalty, and what Max calls “return on brand.”

About Max Baybak

Max Baybak is the co-founder and Chief Growth Officer at Influx Marketing, where he helps aesthetic practices grow with smart, creative strategies. With 17 years in marketing—and more than a decade focused specifically on aesthetics—he’s done it all: from digital ads and SEO to automation, PR, and social media. Max has led successful campaigns for everyone from scrappy startups to Fortune 500s, and he’s passionate about bringing that same level of strategy and results to the aesthetics industry.

Guest

Max Baybak, Co-Founder & Chief Growth Officer

Influx Marketing

Host

Tyler Terry, Director of Sales, MedSpa

Nextech

Transcript

Announcer (00:06):

You are listening to the Aesthetically Speaking podcast presented by Nextech.

Tyler Terry (00:11):

Hey guys, welcome back to the Aesthetically Speaking podcast presented by Nextech. My name is Tyler Terry, and I'm your host. And today we're coming to you live from the Medical Spa Show in beautiful Las Vegas, Nevada. Today I have a special guest. His name is Max Baybak. He is the Chief Strategy Officer for Influx Marketing. Max is also somebody that I've always looked up to and he's actually a good friend of mine. To me, he's a legend in this industry. He would probably get bashful and say, no, no, no. But honestly one of the coolest guys you'd meet and somebody that you should get to know. Max, welcome to the podcast.

Max Baybak (00:48):

Thank you, Tyler. You're too kind. I'm excited to do this.

Tyler Terry (00:51):

Yeah, me too, me too. Alright, so tell us a little bit about yourself.

Max Baybak (00:55):

Well, so as you said, Max Baybak, one of the co-founders of Influx Marketing, my title's changed over the years at some iteration was chief strategy. I felt like it wasn't attached enough to action. You know what I mean? I think there is something to be said about strategy. But anyway, I've overthought my role and my title many times, but it currently actually sits at Chief Growth Officer, which allows me to focus on what should our clients be doing? What's coming next in our industry that our clients should be doing, and what tactics and strategies, so it is still strategies should they be doing, should we be implementing so that we can best serve our clients and what should we also be doing to continue our own growth and to continue providing value to the industry. So I spend the majority of my time, which is a very nice place to be that I'm at the point where I can spend my time doing that. In our company today, we've been in business for a little over 10 years now.

Tyler Terry (01:42):

Wow. Congrats.

Max Baybak (01:43):

Been in aesthetics. Thank you so much. Yeah, no, we're proud of what we've built, but at the same time, I'm always looking at what's next.

Tyler Terry (01:48):

Yeah,

Max Baybak (01:49):

I've been in marketing for, oh gosh, 16, 17 years. Been in aesthetics for 13 of those, kind of accidentally fell into it and then just sort of kept going with the momentum of started with plastic surgeons. Now it's pretty even mix of med spa and plastic surgeon. Of course, that includes a host of clients who are both surgeon and have a big nonsurgical component. And then maybe 5% of our clientele are cash pay and other medical specialties. But the common thread is that they're all cash pay medical practices.

Tyler Terry (02:20):

So how did you accidentally fall into it?

Max Baybak (02:23):

Myself and my business partners worked in another agency that did aesthetics among other things, but aesthetics was one of their focuses. So I guess that part wasn't so accidental, but we went off to go start our own agency and to do something totally different. We didn't think we were going to continue to pursue aesthetics. So our first client was DirecTV. We were doing social media, really interesting. It was the early days of social media 2014. We were doing a lot of influencer stuff when it was relatively early, there weren't platforms for influencer buys.

(02:48):

Pulling our hair out, trying to get internet personalities to abide by contracts and do posts and things like that. And over time we had people who came to us, the aesthetics kind of came back to us. Like I said, we went our own way and an agency that we were with had some aesthetic clients and when some of them called on us, we said, we really don't, we want to make this a clean break. We weren't trying to create any animosity, but after a few years, some people who knew us from that space came back to us. So I created a separate brand. We had two brands at the time, and I created a separate brand because I really do believe you need to have a focus as an agency, and I believe that's where things were headed. In the beginning. It was enough to be focused on we understand digital marketing, but over time I knew that you're going to have to understand digital marketing for a specific industry. So we created a separate brand and that brand really took off even though we had awesome clients in totally different industries, and I loved those which just kind of went with the flow. We were able to bring something to aesthetics that wasn't there at the time and we leaned into it.

Tyler Terry (03:45):

I love it. I love it. Thank you for sharing that with us. So let's kind of peel back the onion a little bit on your role as a chief growth officer, but let's talk about strategy. How has the strategy changed, let's just say, since COVID?

Max Baybak (03:57):

It's interesting because on the surface, the marketing channels that this industry focuses on or that you see the broad, broadly speaking, you see a lot of agencies focus on certain marketing channels for these types of clients. The basic makeup of it hasn't changed tremendously, but there's a lot of nuance that's changed for sure over the years of how you approach each channel. And then we see new channels emerging that have not come to fruition yet, like AI led platforms and search engines that I think are interesting. So I'm always looking at those.

Tyler Terry (04:28):

You guys are actually the first that I heard talk about that how chat GPT is going to have its own search engine and it's going to be similar to Google, but it'll probably even be better than Google. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Max Baybak (04:40):

Yeah, and I'll get back to answering your question of what's changed too. I don't think I really answered it, but a hundred percent. One of the things I pride myself on is trying to pay attention with our content to what's coming and inform people in our space, providers, business owners, meds, spa owners, plastic surgeons in our space, what's coming marketing wise. Sometimes I wonder if people want to look that far ahead or if they need to, and I understand you need to be focused on your business now, but I appreciate that there were rumors of OpenAI chat GPT releasing a search engine. We were talking about it, and then there was this date, this cryptic date being talked about on Twitter

(05:11):

And we were talking about it and it didn't happen, but some months later they did exactly that. I think if you're paying attention early, it can have an advantage, but sometimes these things take longer to play out, for example, that has played out. We do now see a very concerted search effort from OpenAI or chat gpt, however you want to look at OpenAI being the parent company, the product being chat, GPT. And I definitely, just anecdotally, I'm seeing for myself, my friends, my family, more migration over from what would've been a Google search to a search on chat GPT. But what I'm really watching for, and I think this is what I would boil down to, if anyone's wondering how does this commercially affect my business, what I'm watching for is, first of all, do they make any effort to commercialize it through advertising? There's no indication of that yet.

(05:55):

Their only way they're making money and they're, they're not making money as a company yet. They're still burning millions, tens of millions building out their ai. They obviously see a huge future there, but you can pay 20 bucks a month if you want to use it, and it's pretty cool. It is a better experience, but I haven't seen 'em do any kind of advertising. Why is that important right now? And you can tell me if you agree with this, Tyler. I will go all the time now to chat GPT for what I would call an informational search, particularly if I'm, it's kind of a little more nuanced and I almost need it to do a little bit of research for me. I was actually going to do an interview with someone and I said, tell me what their title is and a little bit more background information about them. I was googling and searching and I couldn't find it quickly, and it just said, this is the person, this is their title. This was their previous roles. Probably took a bunch of it from LinkedIn, but some of it was from other places. And it just was like great. It just saved me probably 10 minutes. And it did it in 10 seconds

(06:48):

To come back to how does this affect businesses or what do we watch for to see how it actually commercially impacts our clients and people in the space you have, and my business partner, Adam will refer to this all the time, I think I kind of stole this from him, like informational searches or transactional searches, and I like that breakup. It's a clean, neat way to mentally organize it. So what you and I are basically saying is that the commercial searches, we don't go to chat GPT for if I need to find a doctor, if I need to find a restaurant. The experience is not there yet. It doesn't make sense yet to do that. Now you can't ask chat g pt, what is the best med spa near me? Actually, I'll tell you a cool story. We got to sale of a new client who found us through chat, GPT.

Tyler Terry (07:30):

Really?

Max Baybak (07:31):

Yes. So that is an indication, and I was actually going to make some content about this. It just happened a few weeks ago. It's our second, I think, or third lead that came where the client said, yeah, I asked chat GPT, what's the best marketing agency for aesthetic practices or med spas or it might've been a plastic surgeon and we got two leads on it so far from that medium or from that channel, and we got a sale.

Tyler Terry (07:54):

Wow, congrats. That's huge.

Max Baybak (07:56):

I think it's absolutely huge. I think it's a little bit maybe more niche where it is almost an informational search. They're asking it to do the research a little bit. Hey, who's the best? And I don't want to dig around on Google search results page. I'll tell you, we're not doing anything than our normal SEO to show up there. People say, how do you show up on chat GPT, all I can say to date is that the things that you do for SEO historically and for Google do tend to translate, but with less predictability because it's not the same search results every time where you can hold the number one position for some period of time on Google predictably, that's not the case here, and it'll be very personalized to exactly what words the person put in and who they are, but that I believe is huge. However, for something a little bit with a little bit more broad consumer appeal, like a med spa, you can search it and it'll give you results and they'll change. You could try five times and you'll see slightly different results and it'll give you links to different med spas that it's recommending. But I don't know that that's how people are searching yet, and I think if they change that user interface to make it more conducive to a consumer commercialized search or if they bring in some sort of sponsorship opportunity where you can be there, I think it's going to be big trouble for Google.

Tyler Terry (09:12):

I do too. I would go there just because I live on that. It's an app that I actually go to every other day, if not daily now, and whereas I don't pull up Google all the time. I mean, I have to go into my search engine and figure out whatever I'm doing within my browser, but I also feel more trust towards chat GPT. Personally, I trust it more than I trust Google because I'm worried about what is that algorithm pushing? Is it being paid for, and I don't know, maybe it is in one day will be with chat GPT, but we'll find out. But I think when they make the switch, at least for me, that's where I'll be going to ask which restaurant I should go to and get the directions.

Max Baybak (09:54):

A hundred percent trust is a factor. And that leads me to, we can come off the AI subject if you want to, or I can riff on this.

Tyler Terry (10:00):

Let's keep going.

Max Baybak (10:00):

Okay. Trust is a major factor. It's interesting because it's ai, but you have to think about how is this trained? Where did its data come from? Who owns it? What are their incentives? And it'd be the same for any of these platforms. However, that makes me think of what I truly believe is going to be so important for our space as it relates to ai, and it always has been important is reviews. They've always been important, but I believe they're going to become super important. Again, and just really quickly summarizing it, AI is trained on data when it comes to consumer data. If you're asking what's the best to go to, who should I go to? Who's the best or who's most suited to me? Or at the end of the day, the only real consumer data would be a review. If AI can be trained on reviews, what I believe, and I could go into it more, but I think we'll save it for another time, there are ways to validate and verify that a person was a verified customer.

(10:50):

So if you have verified customer reviews and that's the data that's being fed in, then I think you have trust. Then I think people will go to these platforms and say, yep, there's real data being ingested. That's informing the decision of who they're recommending, because right now it feels a bit random, but as soon as that changes, I think it's lights out for the old paradigm of Google for sure, for our industry.

Tyler Terry (11:10):

Yeah, I couldn't agree more, and I think people would shift their marketing dollars overnight to chat GPT, especially for the new generations.

Max Baybak (11:19):

Totally agree. They're in such a strong position of leverage and probably they just have so many opportunities to be chasing up right now, and who knows if they're chasing the right things. They just released this whole imaging thing, which is impressive, but I don't know.

Tyler Terry (11:29):

It's super impressive.

Max Baybak (11:30):

It's very impressive. Another thing I find interesting is the ability to upload screen caps. So I was looking at something on an Instagram post of ours, and I was like, interpret, basically analyze these analytics screen cap, make quick three screen caps on my phone, uploaded them and it interprets it. People really need to understand how good of an assistant this is for you.

Tyler Terry (11:49):

Oh, yeah, that's one of my, I love that you called out the screen captures to pull in. That's my way to pull in data real quick, whether it's from an email instead of copying. So for those of us that are listening, instead of copying and pasting the text in, just take the screenshot. You just plug in the screenshots. You can ask it a question on what it is that you want Chat GPT to look at or AI to look at, and it'll answer the question based on the screenshots that you took.

Max Baybak (12:13):

It's incredible.

Tyler Terry (12:14):

Or if you throw in spreadsheets or whatever you want to plug in, you can plug in a PDF. You could take a picture of something and ask it.

Max Baybak (12:21):

Now that we're talking about this, since we are a marketing agency, and I'm talking a lot here about marketing for aesthetic practices in our industry, I think another thing that's going to become revolutionized is reporting. You jump on a call with your agency to get an interpretation, a breakdown of your analytics, of your marketing reporting. I think you're going to be looking at these tools to help you interpret and understand, probably plug it directly into Google Analytics and other analytics platforms eventually, and be able to pull out incredible insights, what ads are working best. I think we're going to see some pretty amazing stuff in that category coming up here soon too.

Tyler Terry (12:58):

Yeah, so let's talk about the different channels of marketing. That's something that we've heard recently from Erica Crawford on Instagram, recommending that practices use a minimum of 10 channels. Can you tell me more a little bit about that?

Max Baybak (13:13):

Definitely. So Erica, for those of you who don't know, is our president at Influx Marketing. She works across our entire company, overseeing a lot and works with a lot of our clients and always has Sage advice, and yes, so we put out a little clip recently on our Instagram where she was giving advice for aesthetic practices to really be approaching their marketing with a very diverse approach and making sure that they're not just all in on one marketing channel. A channel is a very broad word. Social media broadly could be considered a channel, but then each platform could be considered a channel. TikTok could be channel, and so you hear the word used a little bit loosely. I once saw this list of marketing channels. It said over 500 channels for marketers, and one of them it said smells, and I laughed, but then I realized that, what is it, Jersey, Mike's Jersey Mike's? No, what's the jersey? The one that says free smells on their side.

Tyler Terry (14:08):

Oh, Jimmy John's.

Max Baybak (14:09):

Jimmy John's. That's what it is. So I guess smells is a marketing channel, so it's a funny way to think about it.

Tyler Terry (14:16):

Disney or Disneyland, right? It's a marketing channel when you're walking down Main Street.

Max Baybak (14:20):

A hundred percent. Yeah, Yeah. Oh,

Tyler Terry (14:23):

The churros, the popcorn.

Max Baybak (14:25):

I always go for the funnel cake on my way up.

Tyler Terry (14:27):

Oh, the funnel cake. Yeah.

Max Baybak (14:30):

So yeah, I mean that's something that captures attention and potentially brings in a lead or whatever. So any of these things can be a marketing channel. So yeah, Erica typically recommends 10 marketing channels at least. Now that seems overwhelming, but if you think about it, another way that we like to break things down, and I think most people in this industry do think about it this way, is the internal, external or internal marketing. So that's across all of those. So internally speaking, you might have loyalty programs, membership programs, signage and internal new TVs offers the TVs, and then on the external meaning sort of forward facing new client, new patient facing, you could look at doing meta ads as a channel, doing Google ads as a channel, doing your SEO as a channel. I don't think of your website as a channel, typically you could loosely speaking, but I think of it as the hub for which all of these channels feed into. And when you think about it that way, a lot of times you start a new practice, you put up a website and you go, okay, great. Crickets. So what are you doing to pour energy and to pour traffic into that website? You want to be diverse in your approach. So I could say more, but that's the general logic of multichannel diversification in your marketing.

Tyler Terry (15:42):

What do you think is the most underrated channel?

Max Baybak (15:44):

I don't really have an answer, and here's why. It really depends on your exact situation. I think that I want to hammer on that because I think people do come to us and they want to know what's the best, and it probably depends on their style too. It depends on their style, it depends on where they're at in practice, depends on their mix of services and if personality, personality for sure, especially as a relates to social personality, very much matters, right? Lean into the thing that makes the most sense to you, but what sort of resources do you have? Do you have to be scrappy? Do you have the luxury of investing a little bit more in something? Your mix of services really matters. You wouldn't be marketing on certain channels, certain services just don't make sense on certain channels or they're going to get you less return.

(16:23):

So when you do see agencies that sort of lean into one thing, that's okay as long as they make sure their clients are all a good fit for that. Lemme just give you an example. If you just start off with a brand new med spa, SEO doesn't really make a ton of sense. If someone said like, Hey, we're really good at SEO, so you should be doing SEO, and that's what you put all your beans into, you're going to be sitting around waiting, there's, there's a good meme about sitting around waiting for the SEO to kick in and you're going to be sitting around waiting for that SEO to kick in and you're going to be like, this isn't where I should have. You should probably start off by doing your own organic social media, getting out there and using social media as a channel while also taking any advertising, any marketing dollars you have, and putting it into advertising to just start getting that first trickle of patients in. But once you can afford to focus on something like SEO, it's an amazing channel. That's an example of a channel that I think is tremendous, but honestly is an awful channel for you in the beginning. And also what's the best possible channel is word of mouth. But when you first start, you need something. So you run some ads, you get your first patients, you give them a great experience, you start getting word of mouth. So I think of it as these different channels open up different opportunities and what you really are going for, I don't have a favorite channel, but what you really want to do is have the right mix for you that gives you diversification. Thinking about it like a financial strategy.

(17:37):

Why would you want to go all along on some

Tyler Terry (17:41):

Startup tech company.

Max Baybak (17:42):

Startup tech company, some risky meme coin? Yeah, maybe put a little bit into some risky meme coin. There are new social platforms that come up and we don't know they could blow up, so maybe dip a little toe in that water, but don't go all in on it, so to speak. There are ways to think to apply the analogy of financial diversification and financial strategy to market because what is it? It is investment marketing is putting out dollars needing to get a return. So you can think about it exactly the same. Something that my dad always used to teach me when it came to investment is invest in what. And so when you talk about personality, I agree with that wholeheartedly. Some people feel really uncomfortable going into certain channels and make no mistake, the time that you have to put into social media today is an investment.

(18:25):

The point is in invest in what you know. If there's anything that feels unnatural, uncomfortable or doesn't play to your strengths, certain channels ask different things of you in terms of being a content creator, go to the thing that you think you're going to have an advantage because of who you are and what your strengths are. So I could go on forever, but I don't have an underrated or favorite channel. It's really about trying to find a mix that really suits you and gives you a little bit of a fallback plan while taking on a little bit of risk and a little bit of like, we know this is always going to work and get us new patients and bringing that all together.

Tyler Terry (18:57):

Well, that's perfect. That's exactly the answer that I was looking for. It relates to everybody and everybody could take a page out of that book. So just shifting gears a little bit, I want to talk about different generations. How do you think about marketing the different ages of patients.

Max Baybak (19:11):

Building your brand, you really need to understand who your consumer is, and if you know skew older or you skew younger, you're going to build your brand around that. And I think that's been a core tenet for influx since the beginning, which is if your site and your digital presence, if your personality comes through, you're going to have a higher conversion rate. There's a lot of people I know who are going to say it doesn't really matter, just the website is a website is a website and there's a degree of just a good functioning website. We'll get you a certain amount of performance. But we've launched websites where we're not driving any more new traffic to the site. We just launched a new site and just on that alone, we see more conversion rates with the same amount of traffic going through it just because we have a better site that speaks to that consumer. I really believe you have to have that personal connection on that website. So if you want to have a personal connection, you want to speak to that consumer, you need to know who that consumer is and build your brand around it. I could say a lot more on that, but that is definitely when it comes to building your brand, you want to think about what is that age range and much more than age range. Who are they down to the details.

Tyler Terry (20:08):

Is there something that you teach them, like you teach your clients, like building a persona for the client profile that you're going after?

Max Baybak (20:15):

We try to almost do it for them because a lot of times they're so busy, so if they've got a good brand that they built up, so we don't really, we used to do logo design and branding. We refer that to partners now so we can focus on your digital footprint, your website, and your advertising and your social media if we're involved in assisting with social media. So I would love to teach them and we do preach that, but we try to make that no work for them that we're just bringing that out there. Also, if you can go out and Duke, we're bringing that out of them, but if we can go out and do custom media assets, it really goes a long way to showcasing who they are and helping the patient to connect with them, which I just think is so important, is only going to become more important. You really need to connect with that, even if you can also connect with a brand. More people are going with a brand led versus provider LED can also connect with a brand. Nothing says that doesn't work either.

Tyler Terry (20:58):

So I know you build beautiful websites. What are your thoughts on web apps?

Max Baybak (21:03):

It's all about what kind of information can you pipe into that app? So what makes it worth a client, A patient going through the trouble of downloading and actually using your app is I think you need to make sure that you're giving them enough value in that for them to be willing to do that. Of course it makes sense for the practice because that's sticky. That creates more stickiness. That creates more loyalty. You can remarket to them. The question isn't really that. The question is can you get the patient doing that? And I think it's all about the value of what you can put in.

Tyler Terry (21:29):

I couldn't agree more, and what I've seen just over the last decade in this industry is now you have almost every company, whether it's pharma or device or skincare, they want the practice to utilize their app or their online store. And the problem with that is how many logins does a patient want? Ideally just one. They want to log into one central app or hub and they want to be able to log into Alle, log into Aspire, they want to see their memberships, they also want to see their photos, they want to do all the things and they needed to be convenient, but there's a limit to how many apps patients are going to download, and that's the problem.

Max Baybak (22:09):

Completely agreed. And that's nice about the open web and Google. You don't even remember the website. You type in what you vaguely remember, you get to it and then you still could potentially have a login issue to your point, but at least you're not going, what was the app again? I don't remember that loyalty program.

Tyler Terry (22:22):

And that's where chat g PT comes in, tell me how to find this. Oh, that's what it was.

Max Baybak (22:26):

And I mean it could come in even more significant ways to consolidate all these things and just go pull it out of, it could be the hub that connects all these things together. How many points do I have in this reward program? If you sort of opened up access for it to everything, which I think will happen.

Tyler Terry (22:41):

Oh wow. Now that's cool.

Max Baybak (22:42):

But it's too fragmented. I totally agree. And you brought up the companies, the manufacturers of these products, all trying to get into the patient's pocket a little bit as well and are onto the phone, adds more to that fragmented experience.

Tyler Terry (22:56):

We need to bring the silos down and get rid of the silos, and this is just creating silos.

Max Baybak (23:00):

It's all that it's doing. And sure, I understand again why the manufacturers wants to each do their own thing, but at the end of the day, the patient will win the patient experience, the best patient experience. It's slowly but surely. People are just going to have to learn and the patient will get what is best for them, and that will be these silos broken down.

Tyler Terry (23:19):

Last question for you. Where do you see this industry heading? The aesthetics industry?

Max Baybak (23:23):

To be honest with you, I mean I think about it a lot through the lens of marketing, but I do think of this becoming part of everyday life that might mean different things for different people. We see emerging of wellness and aesthetics within a lot of our clients that are in the nonsurgical, focused on nonsurgical where they have a lot of wellness components. I'm sure you see this too, right? That trend, right? Think we even talked about that recently?

Tyler Terry (23:44):

Yeah. Yeah. I mean everyone's offering semaglutide.

Max Baybak (23:47):

So true. But even for all the weight loss stuff, we saw a lot of practices taking a holistic approach to aesthetics and wellness all under one roof. It's been fascinating, even in my 12, 13 years in this space, seeing it go from my friends, none of my friends did any of these procedures. They didn't really even know about it. I think it's going to become relatively commonplace to visit a practice or a healthcare location that's going to offer these aesthetic services as well as other wellness services. And I think the marketing for it is going to dramatically change too. It already is. I think the playing field is going to become relatively leveled. We actually just recently did, Eric and I did the podcast for AM Spa with Alex, which was awesome, to be honest. His guests, and we were talking about how this playing field is going to become leveled marketing wise, and I don't even think that your marketing agency is going to be the major differentiator.

Tyler Terry (24:40):

Really.

Max Baybak (24:40):

I just don't think so. Now there are marketing agencies how reliable they are, what their work ethic is. Sure, for sure. But I think the tactics and strategies are going to become relatively homogenous for everyone, so to speak. It's just kind of the same thing we see in other industries as they become more commonplace, as there's more awareness. You just need to have certain things in place. But the tiebreaker is what I always say.

Tyler Terry (25:03):

Yeah, what is it?

Max Baybak (25:04):

Well, it goes back to something we were talking about earlier, and it's a term that I've, I'm trying to coin it. Let's see if it sticks, which is return on brand. And I think you really have to work on your brand because of a consumer is finding a couple different practices, a couple different med spas, and they're finding them on the same channels. We talked about those 10 marketing channels earlier. At the end of the day, they're going to go with the business or provider that resonates with them most. And I think you're going to see a lot of separation between the way the practices market. If I'm a Gen Z practice, you're going to know I am, you're going to go to you. My identity is going to be clear upfront as to what kind of a practice I am, and you're going to be the no-brainer choice for me over this other one that clearly caters to an older audience. So I think it's going to be about having really niching down on your brand more serve loyal patients.

(25:52):

Absolutely. If you do this, that will result in more loyal patients. I think right now today, it's a lot like marketing agencies. In the beginning it was easy enough to say, Hey, yeah, we actually can understand how we understand how to help you succeed online. And people were saying, what's the internet? So that was enough. Right now, that's not enough. That's not a differentiator anymore. The internet that's come and gone as far as a shift in the way that we did things as a part of our lives. Now, what do you know about MySpace? Sorry, not the platform. MySpace. What do you know about my industry? We were talking about MySpace earlier. What do you know about my industry that will give me an advantage? How can you help me specifically with my exact problems to give me an advantage as an agency? So that's why I do think you have to have a real specialty and a real focus.

(26:36):

And I think the same will be true here where maybe it's just that the needs of a certain demographic, I'm not saying you have to specialize only in one procedure or something like that, but you really understand. You really focus on a certain type of consumer's problems and you market really specific to those. So that's what I think is we're going to see more clear separation in that way. And I think we're going to see that your brand is going to be the tiebreaker, if that makes sense. And that includes what you put out on your social content, not just it's by no means just your website.

Tyler Terry (27:05):

I love that. Your brand is going to be the tiebreaker. And if you think of that right there, if that is the common denominator in all that you do, you're going to focus on brand.

Max Baybak (27:15):

Yeah, a hundred percent.

Tyler Terry (27:17):

Because that's the differentiator. Alright, last thing. You have a podcast, what is it called and where can we find it?

Max Baybak (27:23):

It's called Next Level Practices. You can find it on our website, influx marketing.com. We have been working to get a lot more episodes out, more consistently. You are hustling a lot better than I because, and among everything else we're doing, sometimes those episodes are the things that we deprioritize, but we are actually going to be putting out a lot more on that. And we try to have a marketing focus specific to cash pay, healthcare practices and mostly aesthetics. And then separately, we produce the technology of beauty, which is Dr. Grant Steven's podcast. But it's sort of a joint effort that we create together. And what that is is where you can hear from the industry side and Tyler's been on the technology of beauty. It's amazing. And I think it's unique only in that there's not another podcast that I'm aware of that's a hundred percent focused on industry within aesthetics.

Tyler Terry (28:04):

Oh yeah. I thought it was so cool. I mean, number one, it was fun to drive my family out to Manhattan Beach and just kind of hang out. The vibe was amazing. The podcast studio was top notch. But I love that he actually didn't want to get to know me at all before the show. That's what he does every time. He's like, wait, I'm going to wait for the show to start. When the lights, camera, action, when all that hits, that's when he gets to know all of the guests. And the questions are organic, right?

Max Baybak (28:30):

A hundred percent. Grant will not write down questions in advance. He will talk to a guest, they'll say like, Hey, here's some things I would love to chat about and that will be helpful. But a lot of that happens in the 10 or 15 minutes before we start rolling the microphone. And then he takes the approach of really wanting to get to know the guest, which is cool. You and I like what we just did here. We know each other and we'll sit and we'll chat about what's coming. Technology. He will do that in the second half, but the first half is really get to know you, which wasn't really planned. It was just the way the podcast started to take shape. And what's cool about that is I sort of feel like we're documenting the aesthetic industry.

Tyler Terry (29:04):

Yeah, that's true.

Max Baybak (29:04):

And we're getting to know.

Tyler Terry (29:05):

Kind of a time capsule a little bit?

Max Baybak (29:07):

Yeah, we're getting to know all the players in the space, but there's just different people that you start to see these certain names come back up doing innovative, cool things. And we've had them back on the show several times. We've also had the CEOs of all the biggest companies, many others, we've got over 150 episodes.

Tyler Terry (29:21):

Yeah, Bob Rattigan, he's awesome.

Max Baybak (29:22):

Bob's super, I love it. And he's coming in the studio again, and he came on during Pandemic remote, so he is going to come in the studio again soon. Anyway, that's a fun podcast. If you're interested in hearing, because we talk a lot about sort what are the innovations things that are in a, that are in clinical trials now that are working towards FDA approval or just being commercialized. And if you're running a practice where you want to be kind of ahead of the curve on those things and understand the thought process behind these kind of new innovations that are coming to market.

Tyler Terry (29:52):

Yeah,

Max Baybak (29:53):

That's what the podcast is all about. So that's another one we do.

Tyler Terry (29:55):

And personally, that's my favorite podcast. So I mean outside of Aesthetically Speaking.

Max Baybak (29:58):

Of course, of course.

Tyler Terry (30:01):

Alright, Max, well thank you again for your time. Again, appreciate your friendship. And for those of you that are listening, be sure to check out the show notes to follow Max, to follow Influx, to follow Next Level Practices and the technology of Beauty. Max, again, thank you for your time and until next time.

Max Baybak (30:19):

Thank you so much, Tyler. I had a blast.

Tyler Terry (30:22):

Thanks for listening to Aesthetically Speaking, the podcast where Beauty Meets Business, presented by Nextech. Follow and subscribe on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you like to listen to podcasts. Links to the resources mentioned on this podcast or available in your show notes. For more information about Nextech visit nextech.com or to learn more about TouchMD, go to touchmd.com. Aesthetically Speaking is a production of The Axis.

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