Are Your Before & After Photos Helping or Hurting Your Business?

Most aesthetic practices aren’t prioritizing before-and-after photos the way they should. Candace Crowe drives home the importance of photography in  patient decision-making and shares the best practices for capturing meaningful results while making patients feel comfortable throughout the process.

Candace’s mission in aesthetics is for everyone in the practice to understand that patient photography is more than just marketing; it’s about education, trust, and showcasing real results.

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Guest

Candace Crowe, President & Founder
Candace Crowe Design

Candace Crowe has worked with aesthetic medical practices throughout the U.S. and Canada since 1999, helping to pioneer the marketing through patient education strategy. She built her firm based on a passion for art, beautiful design and love for the aesthetic patient.

Her company, Candace Crowe Design, was created to meet multiple needs in aesthetics. She developed BRAG Book to enhance before-and-after galleries, Advantage Play for digital signage, and a range of digital marketing services, from email campaigns to online ads.

BRAG Book is an interactive gallery where patients can log in, favorite photos, and even become leads. More than just a showcase of results, it also ensures authenticity with its Quality Score, which rates photos based on:

• Industry-standard angle - 20 points
• Lighting consistency - 20 points
• Lens quality and distortion control - 20 points
• Camera settings and image clarity - 10
• Patient preparation - 10 points

Links

Connect with Candace on LinkedIn

Follow @candacecrowedesign on Instagram

Learn more about BRAG Book and Candace Crowe Design

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 (00:12):
Hey guys, welcome back to the Aesthetically Speaking podcast, brought to you by Nextech. I'm your host, Tyler Terry, and we are coming to you live from the Nextech EDGE users meeting in beautiful Orlando, Florida. Today, I have a very special guest who is somebody that I consider not just a friend, but also family. She has been one of the most kind people I've met in my 12 plus year career, has one of the most beautiful hearts and souls. Anybody who knows her would feel the same way. Her name is Candace Crowe. Candace has worked with aesthetic medical practices since 1999, helping to pioneer the marketing through patient education strategy. Candace, welcome to the podcast.

Candace Crowe (00:58):
Thank you, Ty.

Tyler Terry (01:00):
Of course.

Candace Crowe (01:00):
Glad to be here.

Tyler Terry (01:01):
I'm so happy and very grateful to have you on the show. You bring a wealth of knowledge you thought of and saw this pain point of patient education in practice, marketing, photography, all the elements of what we know and love about TouchMD. You saw that before anybody saw it, so I want people to know that are listening. Candace saw it and was an innovator and is an innovator and deserves credit for that.

Candace Crowe (01:31):
Thank you. Yeah, it was 1999. I saw my first ASPS video and it was a doctor in a white lab coat standing, talking to a breast augmentation patient, how to prepare, how to take care yourself afterwards. And I go, it was Debbie Boyd, the doctor's wife, Debbie, you got to go to the powder room. You cannot do this. You cannot talk to women like that. It's woman to woman. So at that time, we would sit side by side. It was usually the surgeon's wife and they had these photo albums and you'd sit right there by them and you'd flip through these photo albums and you'd tell stories, and then you'd flip the page and you'd talk another story. And it was two women sitting telling stories. And that's how I learned how to market. I'm an innovator. That's what I love doing. And you took this idea that you didn't even copy me, you had it independently. I remember walking in, I think it was 2009 in Seattle.

Tyler Terry (02:30):
Seattle.

Candace Crowe (02:30):
Holy. I go, oh.

Tyler Terry (02:35):
That's my idea.

Candace Crowe (02:36):
No, and you had like eight people, eight salespeople, and going, TK, go over there and look.

Tyler Terry (02:45):
Yeah. Candace, tell us a little bit about your business and sprinkle in a little bit with your career too. I know you told us a little bit, but tell us a little bit about your business and your career.

Candace Crowe (02:55):
My company is a family company and really grew out of a need. I've always been an innovator, an entrepreneur, but never really wanted to grow a company. But I became single and I had four sons to raise, three to 13, and I needed to figure it out really fast. So I worked with a business coach and figured out, okay, this is what I'm really good at. And then we figured out the product and we developed it was called REVENEZ. We developed that and that really did a great job at taking care of my kids through that particular phase of life. Then we shifted into branding and stuff, and then currently we are half software and half digital marketing. So the software side is BRAG Book. It's our before and after gallery. It's a WordPress plugin. It has so many benefits that it will maximize the value of your before and after photos. And so that is key to all marketing before and afters and reviews. And then the other one is a digital signage platform. It's called Advantage Play. And so it's drag and drop into a playlist and hit play and it plays on your tv.

Tyler Terry (04:03):
How did you find yourself so motivated to help level up photo galleries?

Candace Crowe (04:07):
So there's a evolution, right? So when you all came to market, I realized you are doing such a good job. Where am I going to find my niche? And at that time, the internet was really slow and doctors were asking, can we update our own photos on our website? And that was really a rough deal. So we put together, I think it was 2013, a real rough upload, your own photo kind of thing. And gosh, people kept asking for it. So then over the years you go, okay, well I got to figure out how to do this better and better and better. And so that's been around for a good 10, 11 years. And then we just recently released a total upgrade, a whole rework of it.

Tyler Terry (04:51):
And that's the WordPress plugin, is that right?

Candace Crowe (04:54):
It was always a WordPress plugin, but this one, it comes with a dashboard. So it's just like your QuickBooks. You log in, you go, okay, these are my analytics. These are the most favorited photos. I can see how many people have uploaded over the last year or two. I've got a graph for that. You can save as drafts, so you have somebody proofreading things.

Tyler Terry (05:12):
Patients can heart the photo.

Candace Crowe (05:14):
Patients can heart the photo, you get a lead. It's got a quality score so somebody can log in and say, Hey, I've got these 18 items that I can update to get a hundred percent on my quality score. It's just got lots of things to be able to tell you, you're maximizing your before and after marketing, not just a feature to have a feature, but this is how you get a better ROI on your before and after leads than you would on a Google ads.

Tyler Terry (05:40):
Wow. Wow.

Candace Crowe (05:40):
Seriously.

Tyler Terry (05:41):
You mentioned something earlier on a panel, which you were phenomenal on by the way, where you noticed with a study or trends, you'll have to clarify here, where a practice that has a set of five before and after, so like a set of five angles compared to a set of three or just one, the SEO is a lot higher. Is that right?

Candace Crowe (06:02):
The time on pages.

Tyler Terry (06:04):
Time on page. Okay.

Candace Crowe (06:05):
There's a whole lot of variables into that though. Do you have a patient story? Do you have, basically some before and afters are just nude and Google's going to pick it up as pornography. And if you don't have enough data in there to say, this page isn't pornography. So we really encourage our users to add those fields, but we also have a little AI tool that they can use to generate that. It reads the picture, it kind of puts a nice little case description together for them. And so yes, we've done some studies. It's not just the number of angles that you have. It's having all these other things like internal linking back to your procedure page. Let's say it's a breast augmentation photo. You put a couple links in that case description back to those breast aug pages. It's a variety of things, but we've got a formula for that. You want to get the most out of it, you get a hundred on your score.

Tyler Terry (06:57):
Can you talk to us about this score and the mechanisms in terms of how you would judge this and the value that it provides to the patient, most importantly?

Candace Crowe (07:05):
So I can give you a quality score for a gallery, but we're not going to get into photo taking. So Ty, this is your deal, and I've got a list here for you of five things that we're going to do to get you a quality score.

Tyler Terry (07:19):
Yes.

Candace Crowe (07:20):
And then you could have a quality score posted on your website, even that has these listed out the things that make these photos authentic and real. So I'm going to just list off the five real quick.

Tyler Terry (07:32):
Okay. Tune into this. This is amazing everybody.

Candace Crowe (07:35):
Okay, so it's already been set the industry standard angle, so that gets 20 points. I'd love to get listeners feedback on this: lighting consistency because that can change the shape of a nose, it can change the shape of a chin. I've given that 20 points. Authenticity and editing restrictions, I want to limit that to just maybe rotation by one or two degrees, just very limited cropping and identify the cropping that is done. We have a goal of actually being able to put on bikini bottoms and lace bras so that the censoring isn't just these godawful pasties or this little triangle down here. I encourage the people that are taking the pictures to make eye contact, touch them on the shoulder, maybe even put their hair, put them at ease, have some slippers there for 'em, piece of chocolate, whatever it takes. Lens quality and distortion control, 20 points. Camera settings and imaging clarity is 10. Patient preparation, that means no jewelry, hair pulled back and so forth, 10 points.

Tyler Terry (08:43):
Candace, why do you think photos are not prioritized in some practices?

Candace Crowe (08:48):
It's just not a priority and it has not been. And so I'm calling them out on it. I'm calling them out and saying, go to the Rolex store, look at that Rolex brochure, and you might pay five or $11,000 for a Rolex and a facelift costs $35,000. And I'm just saying you are competing with a Rolex. Or look at the food networks and the restaurants you go to. And Michelin wouldn't put a fuzzy photo of a delicate plate on there.

Tyler Terry (09:20):
Never.

Candace Crowe (09:21):
And you wouldn't go to it.

Tyler Terry (09:22):
You would question it. You'd be like, no, I'm not going in there. Just like when you read a review, you're like, I'm not buying that. It's a 4.1.

Candace Crowe (09:27):
So I've done a lot of deep dives into different hardware and different setups, and I'm a big advocate for TouchMD. I really am. And I do though want you to take ownership. I want you, the doctor, the business owner, to take ownership of your before and after gallery, your before and after taking, photos, will.

Tyler Terry (09:53):
It relates to everything in your practice, right?

Candace Crowe (09:54):
Oh my God.

Tyler Terry (09:55):
Everything that you're doing it is showcasing and putting on display, even if it's just for the patient, even if it's not for all of your patients in your gallery. It is on display. It is your work.

Candace Crowe (10:05):
It's your legacy.

Tyler Terry (10:07):
How do patients use photos to help them make buying decisions in your opinion?

Candace Crowe (10:12):
This story probably tells it the best. We were at the facial meeting in New Orleans and we were right across from a rep that had breast reconstruction, and she was a young girl and she's nervous as all get out about it. And she searched high and low for somebody that was her age, her race, all the particulars. She searched high and low all over the internet to try to find somebody just like her so that she could identify with and see what she might look like or see somebody that was like her

Tyler Terry (10:45):
To relate.

Candace Crowe (10:46):
That's human though. We gravitate to people

Tyler Terry (10:50):
Who we want to be like or similar to or find interesting.

Candace Crowe (10:52):
Aspire to.

Tyler Terry (10:53):
Aspire to.

Candace Crowe (10:54):
Yeah. So that tells it in a nutshell, if you ask me.

Tyler Terry (10:57):
Yeah, I couldn't agree more. Could not agree more. I know you're really big on the DSLR, which one is your favorite?

Candace Crowe (11:05):
So this is what I want you to do, if you're listening, I want you to go to your phone and search what's the best lens for portrait photography. Did I say that?

Tyler Terry (11:17):
We got it.

Candace Crowe (11:17):
I think I got my words all mixed up. But yeah, just search and it's going to tell you a 70 or 80 millimeter lens. All of the iPhones, all of the phones have incredible marketing and believe me, they take great photos, but they have filters and they use a wide angle lens. So I don't know if you're watching or not, but a wide angle lens is going to get you this much. A 70 is going to get you this much, which will reduce the barreling. It's not going to take care of it a hundred percent, but let's say you're a rhinoplasty doctor and you take a picture with all that barreling and you take it into your OR with you, it's not going to help and it's not going to show a proper outcome. It's not a medically correct photo. I actually try to categorize photos. These are marketing photos for the spa. I'm going to be a little more lenient and say, use whatever you have. Take photos. Don't let a patient go without taking photos.

Tyler Terry (12:17):
Please take photos every time. If a practice is not taking photos, start taking photos yesterday.

Candace Crowe (12:21):
Exactly. Don't disgrace the industry.

Tyler Terry (12:24):
Yeah, I love that. And for those listening, think of the story and the timeline and the journey of one single photo. You take that photo now, where do you want it to go and how quickly can you get it there? Right? You want it in the consult room? You want the patient to potentially see it on their phone? You potentially might want to use it on social media. So why is it important if we kind of peel back the onion, why is it important to get a great photo? Well, because that photo is going to represent your practice when that patient is at her daughter's soccer practice showing her friend on the portal. Or it's on social media, or you wish you would've gotten a great photo because you got a great result.

Candace Crowe (13:00):
And I do also want to understand SNAP and your SLR, how do they work together?

Tyler Terry (13:06):
Yeah, of course. So essentially SNAP is our photo app. It runs exclusively on Apple devices being iPads or iPhones, and essentially it can sync with any Canon camera live as long as it's hardwired. So you do have to hardwire it. There is a brand new one. It's the R 50, yeah, Canon R 50. And it uses a U-S-B-C port and it just goes USBC to USBC. Most of the new iPads and iPhones are USBC. Essentially, the idea is if you don't just want a photo taken on an iPad or iPhone, which is a computational photo, right? It's usually multiple photos stitched together and you want the raw photo, which is what we're talking about, you would use that Canon camera on a tripod. Of course you want it to be a certain distance from the patient, and typically you want to have that marked out for your staff in the room. Ideally, you'd have a photo dial or a photo mat so that you can have the patient standing on the ones and the threes and the fives and the sevens for the different angles. But essentially the way it works is the iPad is going to be mounted on the tripod along with the camera, and it's going to be hardwired. What you would do is you would ideally, let's say patient is getting ready to be roomed into the photo room and we give her slippers, right? To make it comfy and cozy,

Candace Crowe (14:19):
Maybe put some music on.

Tyler Terry (14:20):
Maybe some music, maybe some scents going, I love it. So she would go and stand or he would go and stand up against that whatever color wall.

Candace Crowe (14:28):
You got your pictures on the wall.

Tyler Terry (14:31):
You've got, ideally pictures up on the wall with the sequences so we know that,

Candace Crowe (14:34):
Know your process.

Tyler Terry (14:35):
Patients here today for whatever the case may be, BBL, halo, Sciton stacking of treatments. So then we're going to have her, for me, I would have a seat personally, so I would have the patient sit, but if you want the dial, that's great too. So either or. And imagine having that tripod right there. I don't know, maybe six to 10 feet away from the patient. The iPad is going to be mounted, SNAP is going to be on there, camera's on and on the iPad. Imagine it having a live view of what's being captured on the camera.

Candace Crowe (15:08):
Yeah, that's nice.

Tyler Terry (15:09):
With the grid lines and the hosting and the sequencing. And then you can draw

Candace Crowe (15:12):
And a leveler.

Tyler Terry (15:13):
And a leveler and it has an auto capture and all those different things that you need. And then you can capture photos or videos of the patient. And so you're bringing the best of both worlds together. You're getting raw photos, the real photos from the Canon camera, and the beauty is real time without our technology. The pain point is, oh, I took the photos on the DSLR mirrorless camera, but now I need to pull out the SD card, put 'em in, and then make sure that I delete 'em so it's safe. And what we do is nothing saves on the camera. It deletes after it imports into SNAP, so it's extra secure, which is pretty cool.

Candace Crowe (15:47):
That's real cool.

Tyler Terry (15:48):
Yeah.

Candace Crowe (15:48):
Now I want to understand what happens then. Are they file named? Are they put in folders automatically or how does that work?

Tyler Terry (15:57):
So you launch the app, you have the patient logged in, and then at that point you can title the session, you can tag the session, choose the sequence if it's breast or body or face. And then those sequences will have a number next to 'em to say, Hey, you've got seven or three or five angles that you're taking with the sequence. And then you have the ability to choose the background removal potentially. And with background removal, you actually can choose any hex color. So literally if you have an exact color of your logo, we can type in that hex color code or que, utilize that exact color, or we have a droplet, which we can grab an exact color, but essentially any color on the spectrum we can add as the background. And then that way, if you don't have the luxury of having a great photo room or backdrop, we're essentially using a lot of apple's tools and TouchMD's tools, but it automatically cuts around their body or face in real time before it's even taken.

Candace Crowe (16:51):
That's an excellent, excellent way to do it. I would also want to hear about, I understand that you can save them a couple places if the practice has their own hard drive that they want to save them to because they want to avoid extra redundant steps for the users, because ultimately they need to get 'em either to social media or to their website. And I'm going to help them with getting th.em to their website. And right now, my clients only know about downloading them one at a time, and that's not true. They can actually, you can bulk download

Tyler Terry (17:24):
Bulk download and bulk upload to social. So this end-to-end photography experiences capture photos consistently, which that sounds easier said than done, but consistently capture photos. And then how do we instantly get them to the console? The next pain would be, okay, you captured them consistently. Now gosh, I need some tools to showcase them in the room. Great. We have console, we have beautiful tools, sliders, watermarking, all the cool tools you need. Alright. But then after that, it's alright, we save them and we draw on them, we put our watermark on it, it's ready for social. Now how do we get it? There's two more spots that needs to go either, well, potentially three, your EHR, we need to send 'em back to Nextech. We need to send them to social media, TikTok, Instagram, wherever you want to send them. And then we need to get 'em potentially to the patient.

Candace Crowe (18:10):
Oh, you totally forgot the website.

Tyler Terry (18:13):
And the website is, oh, sorry. I was just thinking the TouchMD pieces, but the website is even, it's just as important if not more important than any of those three. Right?

Candace Crowe (18:23):
Social media is important, but you need one storehouse. These are like 500 of your golden before and afters here. It's so impressive. Especially if you hold them to a high standard and you have them all in one place.

Tyler Terry (18:37):
Yeah. We provide, of course, unlimited storage. We save each photo, we save multiple times.

Candace Crowe (18:42):
So we're going to figure out how to get 'em easily from your system into BRAG Book

Tyler Terry (18:46):
Yes.

Candace Crowe (18:47):
Before and after gallery. It's a WordPress plugin, installs on websites.

Tyler Terry (18:53):
That would be amazing.

Candace Crowe (18:54):
Of all of the major web hosting companies we have on all of them, even three web companies are now using it exclusively for their websites and reselling it is going to be something that you're going to want to look at and take ownership of because until you do, you're just kind of the whim of staying with the web company that you're with. This one will move with you if you change web providers. If you ever want to leave BRAG Book, we export all of the information for you and give it to you that way rebuilding isn't like $5,000.

Tyler Terry (19:32):
Yeah.

Candace Crowe (19:32):
The web companies that are using it can charge 500 to $5,000 less for a website.

Tyler Terry (19:37):
Wow.

Candace Crowe (19:37):
We offload all that work for them.

Tyler Terry (19:39):
Yeah. I hope I want us to be able to get that integration. A few more questions for you. Are descriptions and demographics a nice to have or a must have?

Candace Crowe (19:49):
Does Google know that a naked picture isn't pornography without any descriptions or metadata? So there's one reason right there. And we go back to how we used to sit side by side, going through a photo album telling stories. Women like to hear stories. The most common one is the mommy makeover. This 32-year-old wanted to get her body back after, if swimsuit season was coming up or the high school reunion or whatever. And she just didn't want to feel dumpy. And she came in and she had these whatever treatments done, and she was a little shy about giving her before and afters, but after some talking about education and how she used before and afters to make her decision, she said, okay, just a story. With our tool, if you put in all the data or if it comes in over from the EMR, the AI will write your story and then you just read it and edit it how you want.

Tyler Terry (20:51):
I love that. And it makes perfect sense. I mean, just that first question you asked, does Google know the difference?

Candace Crowe (20:55):
Yeah. Google doesn't.

Tyler Terry (20:56):
Google doesn't. Okay. So what are some other smart ways that you see practices leveraging before and after photos and marketing?

Candace Crowe (21:03):
I did a lot of research before this just to see, because I'm not a real big social person, I don't enjoy it. I kind of poke in and out of it. Sometimes we do social creation at the company and stuff like that, but I wanted to really test out a lot of the AI out there, and there's just so many that you all are already using. I would just want you to explore all those tell stories, figure out your brand. There's some ones that you'll put your colors in there, give it a good prompt, and it'll put a frigging video together for you.

Tyler Terry (21:41):
Pretty amazing.

Candace Crowe (21:41):
With a voiceover and really nice transitions and it's out there. And I do see more and more practices hiring somebody like that to do that. I think we're just in the infancy of some of that. But story creation in your, not just Instagram posts or of a before and after been traditional. Do not overlook Google business profile though. When you're doing this, make sure you deck that one out because we have seen a change in the way people search with this AI. In fact, some of our doctors now tell us that patients tell 'em they find them through chat GPT.

Tyler Terry (22:18):
Yeah. They have a search component now, which is crazy. I mean, I look up things through chat GPT a lot more than Google now.

Candace Crowe (22:26):
Same here.

Tyler Terry (22:27):
Yeah. It's just a place to go.

Candace Crowe (22:28):
It's just easier

Tyler Terry (22:29):
To get more concise, more dialed in.

Candace Crowe (22:30):
Yeah. Where do you think I got that headline about Michelin?

Tyler Terry (22:33):
Yeah. Well, you don't go through rabbit as many rabbit holes for me. I mean, you can go down a rabbit hole by continuing to ask questions, but it's easier to find what you need. I want to end with this question. What do you see our next, let's just say, five years looking like in this industry? It's pretty important years when you think we kind of just all came from this social media boom, there's no discrepancy on if you should be on social media, right? But now we've got chat GPT and AI everywhere you go.

Candace Crowe (23:02):
Well, I do know that we have today and that we need to get up and do the very best we can today. I call it doing the dishes.

Tyler Terry (23:10):
Oh, I love it.

Candace Crowe (23:10):
You get up and you do the dishes every single day, and then tomorrow's going to be a little better. And quite often I'll ask myself, what can I do today to make tomorrow better? And I know for me that I can do that. And if I can do that, then you can do that. And if you can do that, then you can do that. And we don't have to go down the dark side. And I do pray for this country. I do pray for everybody to choose to be kind.

Tyler Terry (23:33):
Be kind. I love it. Leave things better than when you left them, right?

Candace Crowe (23:37):
Yeah. We all are going to die one day. That's important to me because I want to live every minute I can while I'm here. I just went through breast cancer and I'm just on my way of climbing back out. I'm up to a 16 and a half minute mile run.

Tyler Terry (23:55):
That's amazing.

Candace Crowe (23:56):
That would've been embarrassing before. But

Tyler Terry (23:58):
You were so tough, you were in here doing so many pushups right before this episode. I was so impressed. Wow.

Candace Crowe (24:05):
You get to a point in life, I love being older where you just can't help it, but you just want to live every minute that you're here.

Tyler Terry (24:12):
Wow. Wow. And how are you feeling, by the way?

Candace Crowe (24:16):
I'm ready to go home.

Tyler Terry (24:17):
Good.

Candace Crowe (24:18):
I live here in Orlando. Just appreciate you having me as a guest.

Tyler Terry (24:22):
Oh my gosh. I appreciate you being on, and I just want to share this one final thought that was sparked by what you said. I was listening to a basketball debate show, and they were talking about how the new basketball players need to leave the next generation of basketball players a better league than when they found it. Just like Michael Jordan left for Kobe and Kobe left for Kevin Durant and Steph Curry, and they feel like that's not happening. Basketball viewership has gone down. And it made me think of our industry that those coming in, our new plastic surgeons and dermatologists and ophthalmologists and med spas, and all the different specialties we should think to leave our industry better than we found it, and us as professionals, as colleagues, should leave it better than we found it for the next generation. I love that, Candace. Well, I just want to thank you again for taking time to be on our show and appreciate your friendship and appreciate all that you shared and would love to have you back on, of course.

Candace Crowe (25:17):
Thank you, Tyler.

Tyler Terry (25:18):
For those of you that are listening, please be sure to check out the show notes, to check out the different links that we're going to include about the photo score that you can take a look at. We'll also have links to social media to follow Candace's Company and Candace as well. So Candace, thank you again for your time.

Candace Crowe (25:33):
Thank you.

Tyler Terry (25:34):
Okay. Until next time. Thanks guys.

Candace Crowe (25:36):
Yes. Thanks. Bye.

Announcer (25:39):
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, theaxis.io.