Planning is the first step to successful marketing strategy. What results are you trying to achieve? Why should you be chosen over the competition? Is timing a factor? Who is your audience? Asking and answering these and other questions will help you plan your strategy, give you a way to measure your success and build a base for future promotions or campaigns.

Goals

What do you want to accomplish? Marketing goals are as unique as your business and should bolster your business goals.

1. Are you seeking to create brand recognition and establish yourself in the marketplace?
2. Are you looking for clients?

Once you have recognized your business needs, your marketing efforts can then be used to achieve the results you want. In this section we will ask you to describe your marketing strategy. In particular, we will ask you to:

• define your target markets;
• describe your competitors and your competitive position; and
• outline your pricing, promotional and distribution strategies.

Promotional Plan

While you may be able to leverage your current patients, just offering aesthetic services is no guarantee of success. You have to make potential customers aware of your services and tell them how and where they can get the results they want. Describe how you will create awareness of the aesthetic services you will provide. Highlight the types of promotional activities you will undertake such as media advertising, trade shows, direct mail, sales calls and any other means of promotion that you will use to reach your target markets. You should take the time to create an annual calendar of promotions. Base your promotions on the time of the year, holidays and special events.

Here are some promotional ideas for medspa marketing:

• Participate in local community events, including: attend bridal shows, woman’s shows, wine & food festivals, and charity fundraisers.
• Create a quarterly newsletter to communicate aesthetic medicine procedure information and current promotions to the opt-in clients (gathered from existing clients, referrals, raffle entrants, and trade show attendance). ( Use www.constantcontact.com)
• Hold quarterly educational lectures on anti-aging, sun protection, and other general skin care topics.

Website Design – SEO

So why are we talking about SEO even before you develop your website? Because your website needs to be built around how your patients are going to find you and a description of what you offer. People want a nice clean looking website, but it needs to be designed with internet searches in mind. When the patient first visits your site, it is critical that you communicate to them what their next move should be without making them think or look for it. This covers the “How” of using your website. They should know, in under 2 seconds, what they should do and how they should do it.

Your website then has to answer the “Why.” Why should your patient buy from you? Is this the best price? Will this make them happy? Do they really need this? Is the procedure safe? etc. Your potential patient is undoubtedly going to be asking many questions in their head, it is your job to answer any concerns immediately, and make them see why your products and services will meet their needs.

Using Google and Bing SEO  

People use search engines to look up everything, whether it is a product they want or a service they require. A clinic’s potential patients are also Google and Bing Users and to get the attention of these users you need SEO marketing. SEO helps generate traffic and offers a high rate of conversion because the people who open your website by looking up SEO keywords are those who actually need your services. A practice can significantly benefit from using keywords targeted at the local audience and attract more patients to their clinic.

Aesthetic Practice Website Tips from the Experts

If you are upgrading your website or starting out and creating a new site, be sure that the overall plan of your site is based on the best marketing and conversion strategies. There is a lot of data and testing that is being done and if you can make yourself aware of it, you’ll be well served. If you don’t have the time, make sure the company you work with does. Your site cannot just be beautiful. It has to sell…in the form of sales, leads, or sign ups. Be aware of this if you are working with someone who only has a design background. And you need a Mobile Friendly Responsive Design to prepare you for mobile market growth.

General Web Design Tips

Less is more. Clean sites with good color contrast look best across all browsers, tablets and smartphones.

There is almost never a good enough reason to have a dark background with light text in your main body. And it looks terrible on smartphones.

Page speed is vital. If your site takes more than 3 seconds to load, you’ve lost your visitor.

Video is king. You need it. It’s no longer optional. It’s expected. It increases engagement, time spent at your site, and conversions. And the costs of video for web are inexpensive. And the production quality does not need to be tv level. It should also not look like your cousin Frank took the video on his 1990 sony camcorder.

Testimonials – text is not enough. Again, if you can get video testimonials, your conversions will go through the roof. And don’t just be self promoting when getting testimonials. There’s a good way to get a story from a happy client.

Social – by all means do social sites like Facebook, google+ and twitter. But unless you have a marketing department, don’t try to do them all. Take time to work with one that can support your business, build you leads and good will. Social Media posting is very important in a practice but it is very time consuming therefore you will want to invest in a Social Media service to post to your platforms.  Outsourcing your Social Media Marketing will help with your practice engagement and is a great ROI.

Women and Men have very different buying patterns and you cannot market to both in the same manner online. There are some excellent books on this subject, but in a nutshell and at the risk of overgeneralizing, women prefer a more visceral experience while men want to get straight to the facts.

Aesthetic Practice Marketing – The New Yellow Pages

Google My Business – the New Yellow Pages. 97% of consumers search for local businesses online. You must be there when people are looking for you with Google. The fastest, zero cost way to rise up the ranks of search results is to register your practice on Google My Business. Once listed, you will get a map of your location, your practice name, full address and phone number. As well, you can upload photos to a photo gallery – all at no charge! To round out your aesthetic practice marketing program, you should get listed on Yahoo Local and MSN Local Listings.

Google My Business lets you make the most of your listing and shows customers why they will want to choose you, and is a critical part of any successful aesthetic marketing program. Being on Google helps people find, share, rate, and recommend your business to their friends, and people across the web. Google My Business lets you see what people are saying, and lets you respond to customer reviews. This can be a good thing as well as a bad thing. It is very important to ensure you monitor what is being said about you on the internet, and respond to any negative reviews.

Adding a Google My Business listing takes just three steps. They are:

1. Submit your information (you need to have a physical address), from basic contact info to photos and video.
2. Verify your listing by phone or postcard.
3. Wait for your listing to appear on Google.

To create your business’s My Business page, Google will crawl the web and find information about your business from a variety of third-party sources, including Yelp and Yellow Pages. Once you have set up the listing, it’s important to fill out all of the relevant information, including hours of operation, payment options, categories, and additional details. This is not merely to help your customers navigate your My Business page. It is to help you, too: the richer in content your listing is, the more prominent your My Business organic ranking will become.

Content from the International Association for Physicians in Aesthetic Medicine https://iapam.com