Everything you need to know to market your aesthetic clinic, attract new customers and increase your revenue.
Looking for a marketing strategy for your aesthetic clinic?
Discover how to market your medi-aesthetic business with 14 must know strategies for success.
Whether you’re launching a new medi-aesthetics business or you’re growing your clinic’s customer base, you’ll need to understand all the aesthetic marketing basics.
Don’t worry, it’s not rocket science! There are five core areas to focus on:
Every aesthetic clinic needs a marketing plan! You won’t get far without one, but that doesn’t mean you need a 100-page detailed strategy.
Focus on where you are now and what you want to achieve, then map out how you’re going to do that. What steps do you need to take? It’ll help to think about the areas below – who you are, who your target customers are, and where to market your business. Don’t forget to make sure your whole team is onboard with your plan too.
A strong brand is essential to any aesthetic marketing plan. You’ll want to have a great looking business of course, with a professional design – including logos, marketing materials and a website, but your brand is much more than that.
Think about who you are. What makes you different? How can you stand out from other clinics and get noticed? What’s your personality like, your tone of voice? Then focus on how you’re going to communicate who you are and why customers should choose you with some powerful messaging.
Your marketing has to appeal to people who want to buy medi-aesthetics services and treatments. So before you can begin targeting potential customers, you need to know exactly who they are and how you can improve their lives.
What does your ideal customer look like? Do you have a range of customer types? Are some clients more important – more valuable to you than others? Are there some customers who are more hassle than they’re worth? Everyone is different. And they act differently depending on their priorities – which means different types of marketing.
When you know your audience, you can start thinking about the right marketing channels to attract new clients.
Do they use social media? What kind? Do they all live in a similar local area? There are too many channels to focus on all at once, and some might not give you the right returns, so prioritise which are most important to you and your clients.
Below is a quick overview of the marketing channels that are available, and links to some of the guides that we have created for them:
SEO is the process of trying to make your aesthetic clinic's website appear at the top of the Results Page for certain search terms or keywords. This is known as an organic ranking, because it happens 'naturally' through search engines believing your website to be a good match for their users.
Organic rankings are a very powerful form of marketing, because while there is some upfront cost and effort to do properly, the website traffic generated is effectively free.
There is a whole industry around SEO, with experts tailoring their entire career on just this marketing channel. It might sound daunting to try and compete with the pros, but with a little bit of guided effort it is completely possible to generate results for your aesthetic clinic.
Pay-per-click is the sister of Organic ranking. This is where you pay to appear at the top of a Result Page (look for the little 'Ad' next to the result).
The name refers to the payment model, where you pay a cost every time a user clicks on the advert. It is important to tread carefully with PPC because as the name suggests, you pay for the click even if the user doesn't make a booking with your clinic.
The cost that you pay per click can vary greatly and depends on lots of different factors, including things like how many other people are bidding for the same search term, and how well your website matches the search term.
PPC can be an extremely effective marketing channel, especially for aesthetic clinics, because of the localised nature of the service. For example, if you were to bid for the term "buy botox treatment" it would be expensive However, if you bid for "buy botox treatment in London", or better still "buy botox treatment in Putney", then it would be more relevant to your business and cheaper.
Email is a critical form of marketing in today's digital world and any aesthetic clinic that is serious about growth should have this in their arsenal. Emails have the advantage of being easy to create and extremely scalable - you put in a similar amount of effort sending an email to 100 people as you do to 1000. There are many different Email Service Providers (ESPs) available, with some offering free or low cost subscriptions, so there really is no excuse.
While creating emails has been made easier by ESPs, the trick to effective email marketing is in building a strong contact list and segmentating the list ton work out when to send an email to them and what to say. Personalisation is the name of the game, and the more personalised you can make your clinic's emails the better they will perform.
For example - if your aesthetic clinic gave a botox treatment to a customer that was intended to last 90 days, perhaps the ideal time to send that person an email offer would be around that time?
SMS can be thought of as spin-off from email marketing. While there is a cost to sending each text, the open rate of text messages is around 99% compared to email's 20-25%. Similarly with SMS messages you are limited to using words rather than the rich-media available for emails - things like photos, videos, and fancy fonts / colours.
An aesthetic clinic that uses SMS marketing well will have a very strong advantage over competitors that opted out of it. Again, the key is in segmentation (splitting up your contact list into similar groups), personalisation (making the text as specific to the person / segment as possible), and timing (knowing what to send and when).
Local Search is a sub-category of Search Engine Optimisation. If a potential client searches for "botox treatment near me" and a clinic shows up on the map results - that is as a result of Local Search.
This is a particularly important marketing channel for location based services because its is a channel where there is limited competition (there are only so many aesthetic clinics in an area), and is a very common method for the public to look for a service they are after.
Local Search is easier than you might think, and we have a couple of guides that show you exactly how to get started. Put in the effort, and make sure that you are the one ranking in Local Search for your area and not your competition.
The one that probably needs no introduction - many businesses think of social media as an easy quick fix, but the truth is that in order to stand out from the noise of everyone else, to do social media well takes commitment, time and effort.
Social Media is a particularly powerful marketing channel for aesthetic clinics because of the before-after photos. What better way to show how good you are at what you do than to proudly display the results for all to see.?
Whether its photos, testimonials, or links to your blog posts, an active social media account acts as a strong form of 'social proof' - meaning that potential clients will be more likely to trust your business and make a booking in your clinic if they can see that others have done so and been happy with the result.
Word of mouth (W.O.M) is arguably the most effective marketing channel there is, and on average, is responsible for 13% of all sales globally. There are two types: organic W.O.M. (where it happens naturally) and amplified W.O.M. (where you undertake marketing campaigns to try and make it happen - such as working with influencers).
Aesthetic Clinics have a fantastic opportunity for W.O.M advertising, because patients who are happy with their treatment results are likely to talk about it with their friends and family. Recommendations from friends and family is proven to lead to the highest level of brand trust - and that's why you should be serious about making the patient experience the best your possibly can, because happy clients leads to more referred business!
This refers to things like billboards, radio, direct mail, and tv/newspaper adverts. While you might think this kind of marketing is too expensive - you would be surprised what you can achieve with a relatively modest budget.
When you have all the basics of your aesthetic marketing plan in place, there’s one final area to focus on – your goals. How will you know if your marketing is working if you don’t have a target (or targets) that you’re working towards
It’s important to set realistic, achievable goals and then make sure you know how to track your marketing efforts. You’ll want to monitor what you’re doing and be ready to make changes in areas where it’s not working, or double down in places where it’s successful.
When you’ve covered the marketing basics and want to step up your approach to growing your aesthetics business, there are lots of areas to explore in more detail. If you’ve focused on promoting yourself on social media, why not look at some offline marketing channels, like direct mail, flyers and magazine adverts?
If you’ve done lots of work attracting new customers, don’t forget to market to existing clients, to boost loyalty and retention. Maybe you could turn your clients into advocates for your brand, and encourage them to market your clinic on your behalf?
The key to more advanced marketing and more success? A better experience. Focus on delivering a seamless customer experience at every touchpoint, and automate your efforts wherever you can.
From email and SMS marketing campaigns to loyalty programs and referral tracking, Pabau makes aesthetic clinic marketing easy.
Got successes to share? Ideas to try? Pitfalls to avoid?
Let us know and we’ll spread the word across the aesthetics marketing community.
