Building Trust Through Aesthetic Education and Care | Jessica McNeil from Pure Skin and Wellness

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Stay relevant to your visitors and increase conversions by 50% by adding Pathmonk to your website in seconds, letting the AI do all the work, and increase conversions while you keep doing marketing as usual. Check us out on pathmonk.com. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Pathmonk Presents. Today we are joined by Jessica “Jess” McNeil.

She’s the nurse practitioner at Pure Skin and Wellness. Jessica, welcome to the show.

Jessica McNeil: Hey.

Rick: Good to have you here, Jessica, and maybe we get started with the basics, right? Tell us a little bit more about Pure Skin and Wellness. What’s the heart of what your clinic does? And if you were explaining what you do to a friend over coffee, how would you do that?

Jessica McNeil: So Pure Skin and Wellness is a medical clinic that focuses on anti-aging treatments. We do aesthetic treatments along with combination of cosmetic dermatology treatments. So the easiest thing is, I tell my patients, our goal is to have you maintain youthfulness and look the most rested version of yourself.

Rick: I love that. I love that. It’s… I’m getting towards the age where I start looking at that, right? So, one of the things that I wanted to find out about is what’s the kind of type of patient that you have? Is it mostly women? Is it also men, right? I just wanna understand a little bit about your space and your clinic specifically, but tell us a little bit more about your ideal client and how they essentially get in touch with you guys.

Jessica McNeil: So there is… I feel like going back to doing aesthetics, there are more and more clinics popping up. So obviously a lot of things now are social media driven. But honestly, it really goes back to a referral base. So having a friend or a patient have a great experience just as if someone recommended a doctor, like, “I had a great experience with this person.”

So it is a referral base. We mostly have females, but there are men that are coming in too, just wanting to look a rested version of themself as they see themselves aging. They’re wanting to do skincare, Botox, things like that. Females are mostly, ideal clients are anywhere from age 30s to 40s, to 50s.

We have some in their 60s and older, but basically, they’re just wanting to figure out what they can do. A lot of times they come in, and they just say, “I feel like I look tired,” or, “My skin is not what I want it,” or, “Can you just put Botox in this wrinkle to make it go away?” So that’s sitting down and having a realistic conversation with them and telling them exactly what we can do because Botox doesn’t fix everything.

Rick: That’s a great point. So, I’m curious ’cause you just mentioned about social media, right?

Referrals being a big part of how you essentially get people to work with you. Now, referrals are great, and it’s one of the oldest marketing methods, if you will. It is. That’s just word of mouth, and it works both ways, right? It works if you work really well, and it works also if you don’t work really well ’cause people will talk about it anyway, right?

Jessica McNeil: Right.

Rick: As far as the digital marketing world is concerned, how are these clients getting to know you? Do they… For example, do they find you on Google? Do they find you on social media? And I guess in a way, in other words, I’m looking to understand a little bit more about your marketing channels. What’s become your go-to for bringing in more patients, more leads and more patients, if you will?

Jessica McNeil: So I think that is finding what works best for you. When I started aesthetics, honestly, like, I came from true bedside medicine, and I honestly had no clue what I had gotten into. So as the years have gone by and we have more social media, there are so many clinics opening, and it’s… even if I Google within a 10-mile radius of my address where the clinic is located, there are, like, 12 other clinics.

So it’s honestly finding a provider that has a background that you go to, whether it’s their social media or you go to their website, something that you can identify with. Not somebody that just came out of school, not somebody that’s running a sale. On social media, we do a lot of education, so being able to connect with the patient and, for instance saying, “Oh, well, you have this wrinkle here,” or, “You have this wrinkle here,” and telling them what exactly it is that’s gonna fix it or coming in for a consultation or these are things that we can do.

So the patient thinking, “Oh, okay. Well, maybe I should go see this person ’cause it seems like they know what they’re talking about.” Versus where you have true bedside medicine, which is people don’t have really an option. They come because they’re sick. That makes sense.

Rick: Okay. Yeah, I see what you’re saying. So essentially you have a more consultative approach to sitting down and having people coming in and saying, “Okay, maybe you wanna understand the bigger picture before you actually just recommend, this is what you need to do,” right? “This is Botox or this is something else.”

Am I correct or—

Jessica McNeil: Right. Right, because a lot of people just know the word Botox, and they think that it will fix anything on their face, and that’s not the case. ‘Cause also, social media can make unrealistic expectations, especially with all the filters and things like that.

Rick: That’s a good point.

So again, we go back to social media, people showing up. Now I’m also curious, how much of a role does your website play in pulling in new patients, if you will? Is there anything about it that you think really works at the moment as far as getting people through the door or anything you got your eye on improving?

Jessica McNeil: As far as the website, I feel like the biggest thing with websites is you wanna make sure that it’s easy to navigate, that it’s not constantly having to click to find a service or find a provider, trying to understand what is best for you. And so I feel like websites need to be easy to navigate through, where the patient can be like, “Okay, well, that was easy.

Let me just put my stuff in. Here’s the appointment times, here’s the days. I’ll choose this opening.” And I feel like it really just goes back to referral base. If you Google Botox in Franklin, Tennessee, it’s gonna pull up clinics. So depending on what are your reviews on your website. But honestly, I feel like it goes back to just simplicity, if that makes sense.

Rick: It does, yeah. And that’s what we see across most industries, most verticals, and businesses. Keep it simple, right? You don’t need to overcomplicate things, and if you wanna get people through the door, just make it a simple booking form or whatever the case, and they’ll show up. But if you don’t, then you make it so that it’s convoluted and people don’t know where to click, then it’s gonna be a tough time for you guys.

So I’m curious, based on your experience, you don’t have to give a specific split or actually draw from data necessarily on this, but what would you say is the split between people that are coming through word of mouth and actually people booking through the website, finding out about you for the first time, or maybe they heard about you, read about you on social media?

Jessica McNeil: Gosh, I feel like majority of the patients will come from, honestly, referral-based word of mouth. Unless they have put in the keywords or hashtags on social media, Botox in Franklin, skincare in Franklin, Tennessee, we will pull up as providers, and maybe I have explained something, or I’ve connected with them in some way that they feel like, “I can make an appointment with this person, and she seems to know what she’s talking about, and is educated enough that I trust her to help me with my face goals, and trust me…

Like, trust her to sit down with her and help me as a person, that she’s not going to sell me things, or that this is going to be mostly, like, a transactional relationship,” if that makes sense.

Rick: Yeah, it does. And in fact, I wanna stay on that note for a second, talking about trust, talking about yourself even as a service provider.

So maybe switch gears for a second, Jess, and we talk about you, right? We talk about your role and essentially what it means to work at Pure Skin and Wellness. What’s a day in the life like for Jess, right? What’s a typical work day look like for you, and what are the main things you focus on a day-to-day?

Jessica McNeil: So a typical work day looks like, it starts early with me getting my two boys to school. I get to work on time in a rush within a few minutes to spare and go over what patients I have for the day, and kinda see what treatments we have done and what they’re coming in for.

Honestly, it just… It involves me putting on my thinking cap, my bedside manner, and me fully being open to taking care of those patients just as I were taking care of them in the hospital. You have to have a good bedside manner. You have to connect with the patients. You have to have empathy because some of them, they’re there in your chair because something bothers them.

They may not be sick, but they’re there for a reason because something is bothering them. So really just helping them find what it is truly that is gonna make them feel the best about themselves.

Rick: Okay. So it sounds like it is a lot of active listening, right? A lot of being able to empathize with them so then you can just tailor your approach in a way, or the treatment of course, to them specifically, not just saying, as you were saying earlier, not just to check a box or to sell something, but to actually make them feel better.

Jessica McNeil: Right. That’s one thing that aesthetics is not covered by insurance, so it is a very cash pay driven service. But I never want any patient to feel like they have come in and that I’m solely trying to take their money, or that it’s just a transactional interaction or relationship.

I always make sure I try to get to know the patient, exactly why they’re there, what they do, what their husband does. Are they married? Do they have kids? Where are they from? Those are huge things for me to know for the patient, to connect with them and be able to understand what their needs are, what they have going on in their daily life, things like that.

Rick: Okay. Makes a lot of sense. And I’m also curious about, with all of this, right, this is part of your workday, just switching topics for a second, but I think it’s somewhat related, right? So time is limited most of the times, right? There’s a flood of content out there, as far as social media and trying to learn.

And the question really here is, how do you stay focused and keep learning about your job, about even communication, if you will? Are there certain places or people or maybe even routines that you turn to for inspiration or even staying ahead?

Jessica McNeil: So aesthetic medicine is actually a specialty in medicine that’s more coming to light and being more recognized.

We are, I would say within the past seven to eight years, they are focusing on it more. They are offering more education, more hands-on training. They’re doing actual conferences that we can attend several times a year for continuing education. I like to look at social media, but also I feel like it can just be a lot of background noise for me because some of it can be clickbait.

Yeah. Everything I see on social media doesn’t drive me to follow the trends or things like that. It really goes back to making sure that I’m educated, I understand exactly what my patient needs and what I am doing, so I can make the best choices and help them.

Rick: I like that.

And just being able to turn off social media, in a way, just get out of that noise. It’s, the background noise, as you mentioned, it’s a lot, a skill in itself, right? It’s just ’cause we’re bombarded, and you don’t know what’s true, you don’t know what is.

Jessica McNeil: Yeah.

Rick: I know personally, I like to take a break every now and then. In fact, I’m not on social media at the moment at all, right? So I like to just delete my apps, forget about it, and focus on my day-to-day, on the people I speak to, like yourself, and it makes a whole lot of difference.

Jessica McNeil: It does. If I could totally not have social media, I would. The unfortunate part is a lot of my patients will find me that way. And so, or patients that I have that are existing patients, they may send me a message on social media like, “Hey, I’ve seen this. What do you think about this?”

Or, “Hey, I need to get an appointment with you. I don’t see that you have an opening.” So I’m always having to engage, always having to put stories up, just to constantly educate patients and keep them engaged and you know what’s going on. But if I didn’t have this type of job where it was actually promoted and driven by social media, I wouldn’t have it.

Rick: I see. I see.

Sometimes that’s what you have to deal with, right? Personally, I’m on LinkedIn all the time, and that’s the only thing, but I keep it work-related, right? So it’s a good thing that maybe you do just turn it off as soon as you’re home with your two boys and your family, and you don’t have to worry about it, if that makes sense.

Jessica McNeil: Yeah, I try to keep Instagram, I keep very work-related. And Facebook, I’ve had since, oh my goodness, early 2000s maybe. Before, then we had MySpace and then Facebook. And that is more family-driven. I did have it a little bit more to the public. And then recently I put it back to private ’cause I was like, “I… This is exhausting.”

I have to remember that social media does drive a big part of aesthetic medicine and I still have to stay relevant and promote and make sure that my patients are educated. And even if I could just reach one person out there that is thinking about aesthetics or has questions, like that is very important to me, making sure that they are educated correctly and not going to someone that is not educated, just has gotten out of school, are going to try to take their money and sell them an unrealistic result.

Rick: Yeah, of course. And I think it’s very wise as an approach, right? Now, Jess, we have a few minutes left. We are in the back half of our episode together. What I love to do before we go is to go into a rapid-fire segment of the podcast, right? So it’s just a few light and engaging questions.

Nothing crazy really, but are you ready for it?

Jessica McNeil: Yeah, I’m ready.

Rick: Okay, let’s do it. So when it comes to consuming content, right, we’re just on the topic, do you prefer watching, reading, or listening?

Jessica McNeil: I feel like I have to read all the time for education. Content-wise, I’m always in the car, so I listen to a lot of podcasts.

I do like to read. If I’m reading, I like mystery stuff.

Rick: Okay. Okay. That’s a good one. So based off that, right, what’s the latest piece of content you picked up? Maybe it’s reading, maybe it’s listening, so could be a podcast, could be a video or a book that you picked up, and was there any gem that really stuck with you in it?

Jessica McNeil: So the most recent book that I read is actually really special to me. A family member wrote it. She typically writes with a co-author, but it is actually her first solo book.

It’s called All Your Reasons by Felicity Vaughn. It is a murder mystery romance, and it is my baby cousin who I am over the moon so proud of.

Rick: That’s amazing, and I appreciate the plug here, so we’re gonna… If we find the link, we’re gonna definitely put it in the show notes.

But that’s… no, that’s a good one. So, the other question was more about, if you had a magic wand, let’s say, in your daily life, what’s one frustrating thing you would fix in your life with tech, in your life with marketing, anything at the clinic?

But you could pick whatever you want. It’s just one thing that you’d fix with a magic wand.

Jessica McNeil: There are hurdles in everything every day, and so I constantly… I call myself adaptable. Just from working in healthcare for so long and then being a mom of boys, I think I get overwhelmed with the social media.

If I could just have a magic wand and it tell me exactly what to post, what time to post, everything that I need to do, that would be my magic wand.

Rick: Okay. It checks out, right? You were talking about it just a second ago, so fair enough. Fair enough.

Now, last question on these. So if you were to go back at the start of your career, let’s say, and give yourself a quick pep talk at the start of the journey, right? What kind of advice would you give yourself?

Jessica McNeil: Oh my gosh. At the start of my career, I would say if I went back and told baby Nurse Jess that this was gonna be a bumpy ride.

Just hold on.

Rick: Sets the expectation, right? So—

Jessica McNeil: Yeah.

Rick: Okay, that’s good. Jess, again, I wanna thank you for being on the show with us today, and as we wrap things up, also wanna give you the last word. If someone forgets everything about the interview today, Jess, what is the one thing that they should remember about the work you guys are doing?

Jessica McNeil: One thing I always want you to remember is that we are here to provide you safe care, and to help you look the most youthful and rested version of yourself.

Rick: Perfect. What a way to close. Yeah. Jess, if someone wants to check you guys out, in fact want to understand more about your services, how to get in touch, how could they do it?

Jessica McNeil: They can go to Pure Skin and Wellness, our website. They can go to pureskinwellnesstennessee, or TN on Instagram, or they can find me at jess_pureskin_np on Instagram.

Rick: Perfect, and if they have any questions, we’ll send them your way. But Jess, again, thank you. Thank you for the insight. Thank you for the interview today, and I’m gonna wish you a wonderful day.

Jessica McNeil: You too. Thank you so much.

Rick: Of course. All right. Bye, everyone.

Jessica McNeil: Bye.