Introduction
Roberta Del Campo is a board-certified dermatologist and future leader of the American Society of Dermatologic Surgery. Roberta Del Campo is also known for her outstanding ability to build a relationship with millennials. She claims that the “young patients are the future of aesthetic business because they’re the patients that are going to drive in new opportunities.”
In this article, Dr. Del Campo will uncover how to generate revenue in the changing landscape. The changing landscape includes COVID-19, new technology, millennial outreach, and advances in aesthetic medicine.
The Millennial Opportunity
According to Roberta Del Campo, MD, millennials tend to be very proactive rather than reactive.
- This means that millennials often reflect on their future and how time might affect their skin. For this reason, they tend to be extremely health conscious as well as cosmetically inclined.
- Social media is the main influence on why millennials become more inclined to aging and health. Their ideal online image is to be young and healthy, in other words being “their best self.”
- Due to this, millennials are now considered the largest market for aesthetics.
- Millennials will invest their time to explore advanced and natural options that could protect their youth and prevent early signs of aging.
- They are willing to spend money regardless of cost if they feel that their experience was valuable and effective.
- Once they find a provider that understands their wants and needs, they will become loyal in terms of returning back and referring their friends to help grow your practice.
- Millennials will share the news about their newly established relationship with their provider through social media.
- As a result, this will draw attention to one’s practice with mass amounts of referrals coming in.
Now that we discussed the wants of millennials, let’s dive into what their needs are and why providers should be aware of them.
- Millennials have an active social life so they want a treatment that can support their lifestyle. This treatment would have to provide quick results and gratification.
- Unlike the old saying “pain is beauty”, millennials seek gratification by gaining youth and beauty with minimal discomfort.
- Millennials are technological experts since they grew up with technology. For this reason, millennials often seek the latest and greatest to address their concerns.
- The greatest kind of technology for millennials are the ones that can provide natural looking results.
- To successfully provide millennials with their desired results, Dr. Roberta Del Campo created customized experiences. To millennials, Dr. Del Campo providing customizable treatment plans makes her unique and trustworthy.
- This uniqueness builds her relationships with millennials.
A Millennial Unifier
Even with a substantial age gap between the younger and older generation, there is a common factor when it comes to aesthetically treating both.
- Commonly, the younger and older generations main skin concern is aging.
- Dr. Del Campo claims that nearly 73% of procedures performed in the aesthetic realm address anti-aging, proving this unification to be true.
- The main difference between the two generations is that the younger generation is seeking prejuvenation while the older generation is seeking rejuvenation as well as prejuvenation.
- Though the younger generation doesn’t yet show signs of aging, their main concern is to keep their skin looking young.
- As a result, they will seek out providers that can help them prevent their skin from aging or appear aged while also addressing systemic conditions like acne.
- On the other hand, the older generation often seeks treatments that can address visible signs of aging such as sun damage, facial redness, fine lines, wrinkles, age spots, melasma and hyperpigmentation.
- According to Dr. Roberta Del Campo, “not only are you trying to prevent, but you’re also focused on correction.”
- Prevention is key when it comes to treating the older generation. Dr. Del Campo claims “you can be 75 and you are also into prejuvenation because you’re not 80. You’re trying to rejuvenate and prejuvenate.”
- Once the older generation achieves their desired results, they often focus on maintaining their new youthful appearance.
Though the commonality between older and younger generations is anti-aging, the characteristics of a millennial patient is different. Dr. Del Campo explains the top 5 ways millennials make unique patients.
Top 5 Characteristics of Millennials
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Tech-Focus Spans All Industries
It’s important to utilize technology and advanced treatments to address a millennial’s concern. Relating back to the millennials growing up with technology, they naturally seek the “next best thing” according to Dr. Del Campo. By using advanced technologies to treat millennials, this will increase their patient experience and build their trust in the provider’s practice. -
Willingness to Pay for Value
Dr. Del Campo claims that “It’s important to understand what the newest, latest, most advanced options are because they will pay for these treatments. They will pay for these supreme, premium experiences. They’re willing to invest in treatments, they’re willing to invest in you and they’re willing to invest in themselves most importantly. That’s why it’s important for you to talk to millennials about the uniqueness of the treatment.” -
Customized Experiences
Millennials seek treatments that are unique and suited specifically for them. In a way, this customized treatment brings value to their experience. -
Quick Results and Gratification
Millennials often have busy schedules and social lives so they tend to prefer treatments that provide them with quick results and gratification.
Dr. Del Campo dives deeper into this ideology by using Amazon Prime as an example of their want for instant results; “You really have to understand where the direction of the world is going, not just in aesthetics. Everyone is looking for fast-paced, quick results. I will tell you that I’m a big lover of Amazon Prime because I know when I order, it’s going to be at my doorstep within one to three days. It’s a fast turnover. This is what we’re used to and this is what millennials want. They want what they want and they want it now.” -
Natural Results and Remedies for the Skin
Millennials are more focused on natural results and remedies that keep them youthful. This want relates back to their desire to be treated with the latest technology. Advanced technologies, such as the Aerolase Neo Elite, can naturally promote younger looking skin. For example, instead of using botox to fill in fine lines, the Neo Elite can promote collagen production to naturally plump the skin back to youth.
With the rising popularity of energy-based devices that is growing with the millennial generation, it is important to find a device that supports a provider’s overall goals in their practice. Dr. Roberta Del Campo began to work on a project focused on how to choose the device that best suits one’s practice. This project later became known as the DREAM Algorithm
DREAM Algorithm
During her cosmetic fellowship at the University of Michigan, Dr. Roberta Del Campo spent one year studying all different energy-based devices on the market. After gaining intensive knowledge of device options, Del Campo reached out to Tina Alster for the American Society for Dermatologic Surgeons on how to develop an algorithm to help others understand and know how they could grow their business aspect with energy based devices.
- The idea behind the algorithm was to separate what is most commonly seen in practices, such as sun damage, redness, dyspigmentation, etc from the different devices on the market. The devices can be distinguished by the skin concerns they can address, what they cost, what consumables cost, safety profile, and their efficacy profile.
- Dr. Del Campo explained this further, “the algorithm helps to cater the brain into where you would be most business savvy in terms of an energy-based device purchase. It’s important to stop and think where you’re looking to go, where you are at that time, and what gaps you have.”
- During her studies, Dr. Del Campo determined that one of her gaps when opening a practice was to find a device that would target many different skin concerns with little to no risk, fast results and treatments, and had little to no consumables.
By utilizing her algorithm, Dr. Del Campo was determined to buy the Aerolase Neo Elite; “When I was looking to branch out on my own, I knew that there were better devices on the market and through my extensive research I nailed on the Neo Elite and said, ‘Look, I can do the same things I can do with an IPL plus a lot more in a much safer spectrum and I can treat all skin tones.” Now that Dr. Del Campo bought her first device, she was ready to approach her millennial patient population.
Developing the Millennial Approach
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Be Authentic
According to Dr. Del Campo, “If you recommend something that you’ve never tried, or you recommend something that you don’t get results from or your staff doesn’t get results from, they’re not going to be as driven. It’s not going to be as powerful. Be authentic, show a personal side of yourself, show them your results, show them who you are and educate them.” -
Educate About Your Art and Options
“I really educate them on what results they’re going to see, what’s different about these treatments, how they’re going to really benefit from this combination therapy.”
“You should really be discussing what the real results are, what they can expect, but showing true, genuine passion. When you have a device that you’re passionate about, it’s easy.”
Natural results and remedies with modern options to address common concerns. -
Tech-based approach for unmet needs and populations
“In my practice specifically, these are the common skin concerns that I specifically work on. I tend to do a lot of skin rejuvenation, we do a lot of rosacea, acne. I think it’s important to really understand what the common concerns are within your patient population but also find something that’s a niche for you. I point this out because I’ve had a lot of success and I’ve grown my practice a lot over the last year, specifically with melasma, why? Because I offer the Neo Elite treatment.”
Conventional Treatment Model Issues
With melasma, “specifically understanding the epidermal and dermal treatments is important”, says Dr. Roberta Del Campo.
“It’s essential to talk about different technologies, different options that are more traditional, such as hydroquinone and IPL, other laser-based devices. We can have treatments that make melasma worse, we can have treatments that can be irritating to the skin, like hydroquinone, and we can have treatments that just patients don’t want to stick with because the adherence is low, maybe because of cost, maybe because of number of treatments needed to see results, maybe because of downtime, but understanding there are these conventional treatments that don’t necessarily fit the patient expectations.”
“There’s really nothing out there that’s considered a first-line therapy and what gets deep enough to really treat that pigment. This is where these traditional light-based therapies can cause rebound pigmentation. They can cause more inflammation.”
Despite her doubt in using energy-based therapies to treat melasma. Dr. Del Campo decided to demo the Aerolase Neo Elite. After treating her melasma, Roberta Del Campo saw a drastic improvement in her pigmentation and overall skin tone/texture. Her own personal results led her to change her mind on the use of energy-based therapies to treat dermal and epidermal pigmentation.
Melasma and the Aerolase Neo Elite
There are different components of melasma, such as inflammation and redness, that we can address to improve the pigmentation in the dermal aspect. However, it can be difficult to treat melasma entirely due to the increased risk of rebounding. For example, with melasma the more red the skin gets, the worst the melasma can get.
Out of multiple energy-based devices, Dr. Roberta Del Campo finds the Aerolase Neo Elite to be the safest, most effective option for the treatment of melasma; “I think the Neo is very powerful since we also decrease the risk of rebound. We decrease the risk of this difficult-to-treat skin concern coming back, because we know that melasma can be triggered by vascularity. We know that if you don’t improve that vascular component, your melasma is just going to come back with vengeance. This is what makes this device very unique.”
Del Campo is a firm believer of Neo’s ability to target and treat the melasma’s vascularity. According to Del Campo, “the deep penetration of this laser not only affects the pigment that’s deep down, but it also addresses that vascular component that can lead to more pigmentation that leads to melanogenesis.”
Dr. Roberta Del Campo’s belief recently became stronger after another personal experience: “I recently was blessed to have a four-month-old beautiful baby. One of my biggest fears of getting pregnant was that my melasma is going to get worse. I’ve had melasma for so long but it’s been under such good control now with this perfect treatment. Interestingly, even though I received less Aerolase Neo Elite treatments due to my busy schedule, my melasma never flared. I get goosebumps talking about this because I wasn’t even able to use some of the hydroquinone topicals that I was using before. My melasma never got worse. It stayed exactly the same with less frequent laser treatments and no access to hydroquinone. I was a believer before and I’m even more of a believer now.”
To Dr. Del Campo, the Neo Elite is a must-have device when it comes to treating melasma; “Those of you that are on the line that have experienced this laser yourself, it is the one telltale sign of a really, really powerful device and a very unique device. You see the results after just one treatment. I always tell every single person after that one treatment, ‘Give it a week. If you think it looks good now, in a week it’s going to look better.’ And it does. In a month it looks better, and after the second treatment, it looks better. They keep coming back because they’re going to see the results the first time, the first week, the first day and they’re going to continue to see the results with each treatment.”
About Roberta Del Campo, MD
At a young age, Roberta Del Campo, MD, suffered from melasma. During her journey to melasma clearance, Dr. Del Campo became greatly passionate about dermatology. For her, dermatology gave her confidence by eliminating the melasma that made her self conscious for years. It was an easy decision for Del Campo to major in dermatology and aesthetics so that she can provide others with the results that gave her hope during her battle with melasma.
Roberta Del Campo, MD began studying dermatology at Boston University and later transferred to University of Michigan to continue her aesthetic training. After graduating, Dr. Del Campo joined a very prominent practice in Miami, FL that specialized in aesthetic devices. After working at this practice 5.5 years, Del Campo took the initiative to open her own practice with no other support but her own. Later, she built out her own space and started to purchase devices to offer patients.
It’s no secret that the dermatology and aesthetic realm has many light-based device options. To choose the device that will best fit her practice, Dr. Del Campo required her first device to be able to treat all skin tones in the most safe and efficacious way. By ensuring that the device meets these credentials, Roberta Del Campo can be at ease knowing the laser would be a good option that a secondary provider could use and sell without worrying.
When Dr. Del Campo stumbled upon the Aerolase Neo Elite, she knew this was the device for her. Not only did the Neo Elite fit her criteria, but it also subsided her melasma after one treatment. Shortly thereafter, Del Campo finalized her decision and purchased the Neo Elite as her first laser device. At this point in time, Del Campo was still by herself with no staff to help. After 3 months, Del Campo was able to pay off her device. Two years later, the Neo Elite is still “the only device that she paid off that quickly.” To this day, the Neo Elite is one of her most popular devices and treatments. According to Dr. Del Campo, “the Neo Elite has been my workhorse and has been a device that I swear by to help grow my practice and name in the area.”
The Neo Elite by Aerolase is the single leading device-based solution for a complete approach to addressing medical and aesthetic skin concerns.
