What do my potential clients want?
What questions are they asking Google?
Do I provide the services they seek?
These questions, among many others, are important questions to ask yourself when building your medical spa marketing strategy. According to the American Med Spa Association, “New technology, younger patients, and a desire to avoid surgery, among other motivations, have led to an explosion of new consumers.” You need to ensure your medical spa is getting its fair share of consumers in this rapidly growing and competitive industry.
We’ll guide you through analyzing aspects of your business that strong, as well as where there’s room for improvement. Smile MEDIA wants to make sure you are converting as many leads as possible for your medical spa business. Let’s get started!
Steps to Make Your Marketing Better: A MedSpa Marketing Guide
1. Your brand must be inviting, accessible and high-end.
Patients go to med spas to make physical changes that derive from emotional distress. Everyone wants to look the best they possibly can - and your brand story needs to play into that desire. However, we at Smile MEDIA do not recommend using pictures of perfect-looking models or celebrities for your advertising campaigns. Everyone in this market is heavily aware that those airbrushed, photoshopped looks are completely unattainable.
A great example of this beauty advertisement battle is Aerie vs. Victoria’s Secret. Several years ago Aerie stopped airbrushing their models, and in just one quarter they had a sales increase of 9%. Victoria’s Secret still receives tons of backlash from many women across the globe, who feel upset about VS’s marketing and the perpetuating of the eating disorder culture amongst young teens. Typing ‘#iamperfect' into Twitter or even Google will reveal some heavily weighted arguments.
2. Your website needs to attract, engage and convert users.
What does your website look like? Is it crowded with information? Is it easy for your users to read? Are users being directed to where you want them to go? There are various marketing methods you can apply to your website to help increase conversions and get patients coming to your door.
Video, for example, makes your website 53x more likely to rank in Google compared to competitors who do not use video marketing as a method at all. People are visual learners, they like to see a process to understand it. There is more information about how to drive conversions towards the end of this article under step 9.
3. Your medspa blog needs to rank in Google.
Your customers have questions, and you need to answer them. For example, according to our research, “Botox for migraines” is a keyword that is searched for more than 18,000 times per month on Google. This might
come as a surprise to you, but “Botox for migraines” is searched 6,000 times more per month than “Botox before and after.”
Therefore, if you wrote an article that had roughly 1,300 words that discussed the benefits of Botox and added “Botox for migraines” as a section within that article, you would increase your traffic significantly. This is however, so as long as you can get to the front page of Google.
If you do decide to write articles like this, listing the many benefits of every service will help Google realize your information is valuable and will begin to rank you higher. If you would like to know more about what topics would be best to write about, and exactly what keywords to use, Smile MEDIA can help you create a content marketing strategy.
4. You need landing pages and emails to help gather leads.
Landing pages are a great way to gain specific information about your target demographic. Landing pages allow for the collection of knowing the individual’s age, gender and in some cases email. Landing pages usually have information about your business or a specific service you offer. The more niche your landing page is (e.g about laser hair removal) the more likely your users will want to convert.
After obtaining emails, you can now effectively build an email marketing campaign to get these new leads to convert. Send them an exclusive offer for “25% off their first medspa visit,” or something similar. This will be enticing enough to officially turn your leads into customers. Once they find themselves walking through your office doors, you take it from there by listening to their needs, establishing trust and giving great results.
5. Social media is where your user base is; be on every platform.
You undoubtedly need to be on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. These are the top most popular social media platforms and if you are not on here, you are being seen less than competitors that are. You need to provide backlinks to your website through these platforms, and vice versa, there needs to be backlinks from your website to your social media platforms. Google’s algorithm can read these connections, and the more established your business is across many platforms, the more Google wants your business to get to the front page.
Smile MEDIA knows what you might be thinking - “Should I seriously make a Facebook business page for my business with all of the crazy Russian and Cambridge Analytica scandals going on right now?” The answer is YES! Facebook has over 2 billion active users per month and over 1 billion active users per day.
Most of the users on Facebook are between the ages of 18-45, with still a staggering number of users above the age of 45. To the left are some statistics from Statista - how many users are currently on Facebook from the U.S.
6. Local SEO cannot be ignored.
You need to know location related keyword targeting for your medical spa when beginning the Google rat race. Medical Spa alone isn’t going to cut it.
For example, Smile MEDIA is located in Boston, so some keywords we target are web development in Boston or web design in Boston, Boston marketing agency and so on. If your medical spa is in Boston, you will want to have medical spa in Boston or even laser hair removal in Boston which has 1,600 searches per month on Google.
Smile recommends that when starting out, you gather at least 50 keywords related to your business and services, but no more than 100. If you are unsure what keywords to use, you can ask us. We at Smile MEDIA have the tools and technology to help you discover what is worth targeting in your industry, and what is not.
Many businesses that aren’t familiar with marketing may believe they can just start successful campaigns on their own. While physically you can, if it is not done correctly, you could go for months investing in marketing and see no results. It is best to have experienced marketing professionals guiding that online traffic through your business doors.
We’ve written some great articles on learning more about Local SEO and following SEO best practices overall.
7. PPC Marketing is quick and will enhance organic efforts.
Pay-Per Click marketing (PPC) is an effective way to rank in Google faster, solely because you are buying advertising space (adspace) at the top spot on Google for specific keywords. PPC requires a financial evaluation to determine how much you can budget per month for PPC campaigns, and how much of that you want to invest. Some of the greatest advantages of PPC involve only paying when a customer clicks on your ad, the results of PPC are seen much faster than SEO, and once the data is measured it can help you improve other marketing channels.
8. You need to have sparkling Google reviews.
Sparkling doesn’t necessarily mean having 5-stars and over 100 reviews; it more so means having the highest score in your area for your industry and with a formidable amount of reviews to establish trust online with potential customers. 88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations, and 86% of people will pay for a proven better experience.
However, be careful about trying to achieve 5-star reviews across the board because 30% of consumers assume online reviews are fake if there are no negative reviews. Businesses will often make fake accounts or hire an agency to generate fake reviews. Google has an algorithm to search for fake reviews, and when Google finds them, they delete them. This article about why Google reviews matter covers a more in-depth understanding of the psychology behind why consumers choose a business with better reviews.
So how do you get great reviews for your business in a short time? Well, Smile MEDIA has the tools and technology you need in order to do so. Our reputation management service tool helps us to automatically reach out to your existing customers and promote positive reviews on the most popular social media sites and review platforms. Learn more about this service by contacting us at Smile MEDIA.
9. Design your ads and website around human psychological impulse.
We saved the most interesting topic for last. Sometimes, getting a user to convert can be as easy as making your content highly noticeable. Here’s a big secret that usually no one will come right out and tell you:
Reds, oranges and yellows should more often than not be used as call-to-actions, such as purchasing an item online or getting a lead to contact you and provide their email address. However, if your brand color and site color is predominantly red, you would likely be better off having the color green for your call-to-actions. These observations are made by OptinMonster, who claim that in order to have successful ad campaigns it’s important to use either complimentary colors or colors that align with your brand - such as a triadic scheme.
Image via ModernMan Collection
It is also important that text on your call-to-actions pop, thus garnering more attention from your users. You want to make sure that out of every element you have on your landing page, email or website - that the call-to-actions are the ones the eyes are drawn to, urging an impulse click deeper into your website.
Image via Smashing Magazine
Pro tip: In order to get even more customers without going through a massive amount of effort, some people are perfectly fine with booking an appointment online after reading about a business and scanning through their reviews. Sometimes people are just too busy to make an appointment by phone, and enjoy the leisure of being a couple clicks away from being marked down in your schedule. Smile MEDIA can integrate your systems with an online booking tool, giving you the upper hand over your competitors.
At Smile MEDIA, our Boston digital marketing team is highly skilled at delivering the profitable results you’ve been looking for. If you’re wondering what all this agency can do for your medical spa business, contact Smile MEDIA today to get started with our Medical Spa Marketing services.
