Overview of Digital Marketing for Plastic Surgeons

With the growth of digital marketing and the online world being more commonplace, conventional advertising and marketing approaches have taken a backseat. This is nothing new, but it is not going anywhere, and many digital marketing experts predict it will only continue to change, expand, and replace conventional marketing as we know it. 

This brief overview will describe the actions required of you as a plastic surgeon and describe what digital marketing for plastic surgeons looks like today. 

With traditional advertising approaches, it is most commonly referred to as outbound marketing, and digital marketing, as we know it today is the opposite and is called inbound marketing. The difference between digital marketing as an inbound marketing strategy is that you are attracting clients in the online spaces they are in already. As an aesthetic digital marketing consultant, I have seen digital marketing for plastic surgeons work and will outline a few techniques of inbound marketing that you can apply to your practice’s marketing strategy today.

Digital Marketing for Plastic Surgeons Starts With Identifying A Target Audience 

The foundation of any successful digital marketing for plastic surgeons’ plan is identifying your practice’s target audience. If you’re unsure where to begin, then here are a few questions to ask to define your targeted patients:

• What’s the age bracket? Male or Female, both?
• What is their socioeconomic status? 
• What motivates them to get plastic surgery?

Once you’ve identified your target audience and have a clear picture of who they are as a persona, you can start to build your marketing plan. The target audience personas of an aesthetic brand marketing plan will determine your brand positioning in your local market, your brand’s messaging on the different web platforms, and the digital marketing channels you use to market your business. This step is a significant portion of what it takes in a plan for marketing aesthetic services.

How to Reach A Plastic Surgery Target Audience 

Search Engine Optimized Website 

All advertising should lead back to a strategical search engine optimized website using plastic surgery SEO services. It is an explicit part of marketing collateral, however many practices fail to get a website that’s good at persuading people to take action.

Successful sites have an elegant simplicity. First of all, they communicate your brand value and expertise as a plastic surgeon, so that it’s clear exactly what you offer and why you are the ideal physician in your local market. The website should be keyword optimized with clear and concise copywriting. The website design should be easy to navigate, mobile-friendly, and logical. Imagery ought to be high-quality, consistent, and communicate the feeling of beauty offered by plastic surgery procedures.

Bear in mind your plastic surgery site isn’t, in fact, all about your practice. The attention of your website content and design should be on your target audiences’ needs and desires. This goes back to knowing your target audiences’ motives for deciding to get plastic surgery in the first place.  Consider these things and more when marketing a plastic surgery practice.

Social Media Marketing

Some of my plastic surgery clients struggle to see the connection between their practice’s social media presence and their bottom line. Although that may be difficult to correlate directly, what is also true is that millions of your target audiences are on social media platforms every day. So it is highly essential you maintain a level of brand awareness on your practice’s social media sites. 

The exciting part about using social media platforms, like Facebook and Instagram, is that their algorithms are designed to help you target your exact audience in your local market. This kind of precision is simply not found in other forms of digital marketing or marketing platforms in general. By participating in social media marketing, you can ensure you are attracting and reaching your target audience with a high probability of those users clicking through to your website and converting. 

A few of the more successful social media targeting strategies I have used when implementing digital marketing for plastics surgeons is what’s called a lookalike audience and a friends of friends campaign. They are similar in approach, but it is a way to target prospective clients by using demographic data points from your existing client and follower pool. You can target an audience of prospects who have visited your site and utilize Facebook Lead Ads to make them schedule a consultation — without needing to depart Facebook. Say you ran a video ad on Facebook. It’s possible to target an advertisement just to individuals who watched over 75 percent of your video ad.

The key here is that social media platforms, like Facebook and Instagram, include strategies and granular targeting that is incredibly detailed. When you locate your target audience, you can attract and reach them with well-targeted social media marketing.

How To Convert Your Target Audience into Plastic Surgery Patients 

Attracting new patients is only the tip of the iceberg to strategic digital marketing for plastic surgeons. The actual work begins when you’ve got their attention and will need to keep them engaged so you can convert them to plastic surgery patients. Below are a few strategies I have used to convert plastic surgery leads successfully.

Content Marketing 

What is content marketing? Listed below are examples that plastic surgery practices can use today to start their content marketing plan. 

• Blog articles describing plastic surgery procedure techniques 
• Social media ads linking back to your site with an infographic that offers skincare suggestions
• Downloadable E-book about what to expect after a plastic surgery procedure
• Video overview from the plastic surgeon inviting the user to a complimentary consultation 

By providing customized content that informs, educates, and adds value to your target audience, there is a higher chance for your website to convert those leads to patients.

Video Marketing 

It remains underused, so a very successful video campaign may provide you a competitive edge. Video is a great way to show off your practice’s personality and make people feel more comfortable about what to expect when they meet you, your staff, and walk into your office. 

Be sure to state a very clear value proposition when talking about an operation, and provide a clear call to action to schedule a complimentary consultation. Try to avoid an excessive amount of detail concerning the surgeon’s credentials and education, and be conscious of the length of the video. Videos over 2 minutes long historically perform worse. Don’t forget to use the opportunity to mention a powerful testimonial from a real patient! 

Retargeting Campaigns

Often people think marketing works like this:

• An individual decides they need a plastic surgery procedure
• They search for a few practices nearby and choose one they feel they can trust
• They sign up for a consultation

However, these three steps in that order infrequently happen. Instead, what occurs is:

• An individual decides they need plastic surgery 
• They search for practices and visit many different websites but do not take any actions
• They take months if not years to discuss it with friends and family and continue to research and examine and compare physician’s before and after photos
• Then they eventually choose to do it but are biased towards the brands they have been interacting with

Stage four is crucial here. While a lead is in this stage of hesitation and reflection, if you’re able to increase the visibility of your brand, you prejudice the individual towards picking you when they eventually opt to act.

This is the area where retargeting comes in to play. Someone visits your site searching for information and doesn’t directly convert; however, they do drop some information about them. A part of code (known as a pixel or cookie ) is added into their browser, so it’s possible to display advertisements (such as the Facebook advertisements ) to continue to expose your brand to them as they travel about the internet.

Retargeting is the very best approach to increase the touchpoints with prospects as they proceed through their decision procedure. It is often inexpensive, with higher ROI.

How To Close The Deal and Schedule The Plastic Surgery Procedure 

Now your attempts to develop a relationship with your audience have paid off, and they’ve converted into a qualified lead. It’s time to close the deal and schedule the plastic surgery procedure. At this stage, they have provided your practice with their personal contact information, hopefully, they have noted what procedure they are interested in and offered a little bit of insight into why they are interested in getting this plastic surgery procedure. 

Your team will most likely immediately pick up the phone or fire off an email to get this lead booked for a consultation with their physician of choice. Then, ideally, the lead will show up for their consultation to meet with the plastic surgeon and discuss the procedure. All of these things are getting the lead closer and closer to booking the surgery and putting down a down payment, but, often, a prospective patient still needs time to decide.

Set Up A Drip Campaign

Now you can add them to a drip campaign to help them in their decision-making process before and after their consultation with your practice utilizing decision-focused content. Here are a few examples of what content in this stage looks like and how to use it:

• Email campaigns designed to describe the next steps, credential the surgeon, showcase video reviews, before and after photographs, and finance choices

• An eBook describing the process in detail, together with possible side effects and advantages related to that. The publication could also detail the preparation process, what to expect before and afterward, scarring, retrieval information, and a brief bio of their surgeon.
• Followup emails and phone calls from your patient coordinators to keep in touch with the patient, offer guidance, and continue to answer questions while always asking if they’re ready to get booked for surgery.

Let Your Satisfied Patients Do The Talking

It remains true that the supreme advertising and marketing content isn’t what you say on your own, but what customers tell their friends about your job. You will want to assemble testimonial and reviews content everywhere possible. You could begin with a more testimonial-focused content piece using any one of the ideas mentioned in this digital marketing overview for plastic surgeons. 

Focus on the content and testimonials that will relieve fears of operation. Remember, it’s not all about you and your practice, putting the patient experience first and the promoting the testimonials that address any concerns, doubts or hesitations a prospective patient has is more powerful than your credentials, at times. 

Ensure your best testimonials can be found on every digital marketing channel you have from your website, social media pages, and listings. Google My Business is a fantastic spot to promote brief, favorable comments.

Digital Marketing for Plastic Surgeons Continues After A Successful Surgery 

Well after a patient has had surgery and is in love with their results, your job is not finished when it comes to continuing to promote your brand. After you have collected a review from a satisfied patient, now it’s time to promote the review online. And in the unfortunate case, a patient was not satisfied, learn about that patient’s experience from their perspective and have an open mind so that you can apply that feedback to improve your next patient’s experience. 

Don’t be too quick to remove this patient from your email or SMS text lists (unless they opt-out) so you can keep them updated on any ancillary products or services you sell or current specials. Even if they don’t buy from you ever again, it’s important to keep your brand top-of-mind for them in the event they are asked where they got their plastic surgery done or whom they would recommend for a particular surgery. 

Hire An Aesthetic Marketing Partner

Hopefully, these digital marketing tips and plastic surgery advertising ideas have helped you get an idea of how to take your business to the next level. But it’s also important to realize everything in this overview takes time, money, and a lot of trial and error to perfect for your specific practice needs. I highly recommend hiring an aesthetic marketing partner who can help you carry out and implement these digital marketing techniques effectively.