The demand for a skilled and qualified plastic surgeon continues to rise as people become more conscious about how they appear. An increase in disposable incomes is also a major reason why people are more interested in cosmetic surgery. As a plastic surgeon, if you want to reach potential patients, you need to improve your presence in the market. Since most people use the internet to learn about plastic surgery practices, digital marketing is essential for your success.
Why Digital Marketing Is Essential for Plastic Surgeons?
In today’s competitive environment, having a plastic surgery website to promote your practices and clinic is not enough. You need a proper digital marketing strategy to ensure you are visible to prospective patients. Well-planned digital marketing strategies can benefit your plastic surgery practices in more ways than one.
- Through search engine optimization, paid advertising, and personalized campaigns on social media platforms, your practice can appear at the top of search results and reach a broader audience.
- Digital marketing strategies like Geofencing allow precise targeting, developing campaigns that are personalized to meet patients’ needs, interests, and pain points.
- You can earn the trust of your prospects by sharing valuable content through content marketing. It also lets you build authority in the field of cosmetic surgery.
- Social media activities also allow you to stay connected with your target audience and strengthen relationships with existing clients. Engaging with the target audience also helps you build a strong online community.
Moreover, digital marketing is much more cost-effective than traditional advertising methods.
Who is the Target Market for Plastic Surgery?
Before we discuss the effective digital marketing strategies for plastic surgeons, it is important to understand the target audience. A report by the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) revealed that 15.6 million patients underwent cosmetic procedures in 2020. 92% of those clients were women. The age group of 40-54 year olds accounted for 45% of cosmetic surgeries.
The same report also revealed that more than 4 million patients (mostly women) went for Botox, a minimally invasive cosmetic procedure. This indicates that marketing strategies for plastic surgeons should primarily target middle-aged women as prospective patients. However, there is a growing trend among men to undergo cosmetic surgery to enhance their appearance.
Studies also suggest that celebrity culture has deeply influenced public interest in cosmetic surgery. Both men and women around the world want to look aesthetically pleasing. Certain celebrities have also normalized gender reassignment surgeries, as well as mastectomy in cases of breast cancer. This is why it is crucial to promote your plastic surgery practice while keeping such patients in mind. The marketing efforts should also highlight the application of plastic surgery in helping patients who want to correct accidental impairments or congenital defects.
A majority of prospective patients obtain information about plastic surgery practices from the internet. Millennials are at the forefront when it comes to choosing a plastic surgeon based on online reviews. While determining the target audience for your plastic surgery marketing efforts, you need to keep this information in mind. Influencers are another group of audiences that often require cosmetic surgeries to look more pleasing on social media.
How Plastic Surgery Demographics Impact Marketing
Plastic surgery demographics have a significant impact on your cosmetic surgery marketing strategy. Understanding the major demographic factors in this line of work can help you create an effective marketing strategy.
Age
The most common age range for plastic surgery patients is 30-54 years. However, there is a steady rise in the demand for cosmetic procedures among younger people.
Gender
Women are more likely to get plastic surgery to improve their appearance. Surgeries like breast augmentation, rhinoplasty, facelift, and Botox are quite popular among female patients.
Location
Cosmetic surgery is more popular among people in urban areas. If you are planning to promote your plastic surgery practice to potential patients, you need to focus your marketing efforts on a city-based audience.
Key Digital Marketing Strategies and Ideas for Plastic Surgeons
There are plenty of ways to promote your plastic surgery practices to prospective patients. Since a majority of plastic surgery patients do their research about plastic surgeons on the digital medium, you need to focus your efforts on digital marketing strategies. Let’s take a look at some of the key plastic surgery marketing ideas that can boost your online presence and reputation as a brand.
1. Local SEO and Google My Business Optimization
The field of plastic surgery is not as glamorous as it is portrayed in the popular media. For the majority of plastic surgeons, the typical clients are kids, teens, and adults. More often than not, these clients begin their search on the internet with keywords like “plastic surgeon near me.”
In order to cater to these clients, you need to create a Google Business profile and optimize it for local SEO. This practice will help your profile appear at the top of search results. There are three major ranking factors of Google that you need to consider:
Relevance: Make sure that your business profile matches the search query well. Add all the required details and optimize your Google business profile for better results.
Distance: Try to target your content to the local audience so that you can appear in the clients’ local searches.
Prominence: The online and offline reputation of your business also contributes to your visibility in local SEO rankings.
2. Geofencing Marketing for Targeted Advertising
Geofencing marketing is an effective way to target potential patients. By using GPS, RFID, WiFi, or cellular data, you can create a virtual “fence” around a particular location. When someone enters the virtual fence, they receive a notification on their phone or other mobile devices. This notification can be an ad, a coupon, or even just a personalized message from your plastic surgery clinic.
Geofencing marketing can be used to target people who are near a specific location, such as your clinic or a competitor’s clinic. By targeting potential customers who are already in the vicinity of a business, the targeted advertising strategy can effectively boost footfalls to your clinic.
Geofencing marketing also helps you target potential patients with content that is timely and relevant to their interests. After creating a virtual fence around a specific geographic area, you can send customized messages to nearby individuals. You can use this marketing strategy to promote special offers, raise awareness about plastic surgery practices, or simply announce the launch of a new procedure or service at your clinic.
3. Paid Advertising (Google Ads & Facebook Ads)
Focusing on your local SEO efforts can provide you with long-term benefits. However, you cannot always bank on the organic methods to show the desired results. In such scenarios, Google’s pay-per-click (PPC) comes into the picture. PPC advertising allows you to bid on Google Ads’ auction system to place your ads for relevant and high-intent local search terms.
Facebook Ads is another popular PPC ad platform where you can promote your plastic surgery services to the audience. Your budget and the placement of your ad will depend on the competition. With PPC advertising, you get complete control over your site’s local search ranking.
The goal of using paid advertising campaigns is to reach your target audience quickly. You can run PPC ads based on demographics or keywords like “plastic surgeon near me.” This strategy will help you capture potential patients actively searching for cosmetic surgeons. Again, try to promote your paid ads to areas near your plastic surgery clinic.
4. Programmatic Display Advertising & OTT Advertising
Introducing video ads via OTT advertising is an effective way to hyper-target potential plastic surgery patients. It also helps your brand reach a highly engaged and specific audience. You can find numerous OTT platforms like Roku, Hulu, Amazon Fire TV, and more. Do your research to understand which OTT platforms align with your target audience’s preferences and demographics.
Programmatic display advertising is another powerful way to market your plastic surgery clinic and practices. This is an automated process of buying and selling banner ads that are placed on specifically designated areas of websites, social media platforms, or in apps. Their purpose is to get the attention of the target consumer and are usually part of a brand’s retargeting, brand awareness, or acquisition campaign.
5. Website Optimization and Conversion Tracking
In this competitive market, having a website is not enough. The website is the first touchpoint for most of your patients with your cosmetic surgery practice. You need to optimize your website in a way that it can convert. You can use the following ideas for website optimization:
Have Clear, Compelling Messaging: While designing (or redesigning) your website, make sure the visitors get the message you want to convey. People often miss the crucial elements of a website if it is cluttered with unnecessary elements. Use images that align with your plastic surgery offerings. Keep the usage of text to a minimum.
Optimize Service Pages for Search Engines: Make sure your website has dedicated, search-optimized pages for every treatment and procedure you provide. This will ensure that your website pages also appear in the search results for specific queries related to plastic surgery practices.
Make the Website Load Faster: Most plastic surgery websites feature multiple high-resolution images. As a result, it negatively impacts the site’s loading speed. You need to take the necessary measures to ensure your website can load in less than 2.5 seconds. You can compress the images, enable browser caching, use a CDN, and more.
After optimizing your website, you need to monitor crucial metrics to determine the site’s performance. Keep track of impressions, click-through rates (CTR), conversions, and more.
6. Blogging
Blogging is one of the most effective ways to build an online presence for your plastic surgery brand. It is a strategic move to engage with your potential patients. Well-written blogs on relevant topics can help you communicate your expertise in a way that is easy for people to understand. Instead of writing blogs on random topics, use them to answer the questions people usually have about the plastic surgery procedures you perform.
By posting insightful blogs on a regular basis, you can build an online reputation for your brand as well as yourself. Create a dedicated blog page on your site and post a variety of content, including blog posts, case summaries, infographics, and videos. While creating such posts, try to incorporate relevant keywords in your blog posts. You should also explore content outreach opportunities and distribute your content through different social media platforms.
If you find it difficult to make time for blog posts, you can hire a third-party content marketing agency. The team of professionals can take care of blog posting, outreach efforts, social media posts, website content, and more. They can also conduct proper keyword research and build an effective content strategy for your brand.
7. Video Marketing
Video content is highly engaging and effective for today’s marketing initiatives. Your plastic surgery clinic can also benefit from creating interesting videos that align with your services and offerings. You can produce videos explaining specific procedures, give virtual tours of your clinics, or provide educational content. Videos humanize cosmetic surgery procedures, making it easier for patients to trust and relate to the benefits of plastic surgery.
If you ever run out of ideas for your video content, you can record patient testimonials and share their stories with your audience. This type of content gives your marketing content a personal touch, giving you the ability to engage more intimately with your audience. You can also produce videos where you answer some common questions you receive on a regular basis. You can even combine it with your social media strategy and have “ask-me-anything” sessions.
Facebook, Instagram, and X (formerly Twitter) are great options to consider if you know which group of audiences to target. You can also have a separate YouTube account and post your videos regularly. While regular landscape videos are good for longer posts, you should focus on creating vertical videos for short-form content like reels, shorts, and more.
8. Take Advantage of Word of Mouth
If you want to earn the trust of your target audience, you need to focus on word-of-mouth marketing as well. It is more cost-effective than traditional marketing or paid marketing. It has more persuasive power because it is built on personal endorsements. This strategy also nurtures customer relationships by encouraging direct contact with the target audience.
This can be done in several ways and on different platforms.
Online Reviews: Most people share their recommendations (and warnings) through online reviews. Ask your patients to share their experience on public platforms like Google Maps, Facebook, Yelp, etc.
User-generated Content: Encourage your patients to share their own content about your clinic or cosmetic surgery practices in creative ways. It can be a review, a post about the services available at your clinic, or an interview with a surgeon at your clinic. This helps spread positive word of mouth.
Social Listening: Paying attention to tags and mentions about your surgery practices or your clinic on social media can give you a clear idea about what people think about your brand. You can use these insights to improve your services and offerings.
Influencer Marketing: If you want more people to learn about your plastic surgery clinic and the services you offer, collaborating with an influencer will be a good idea. These influencers have thousands (often millions) of followers.
Once you get people to start talking about your plastic surgery clinic, you can promote user-generated content (such as testimonials, reviews, and interviews) on your social media accounts.
9. Use Reviews in Your Marketing
Talking about reviews, they play a massive role in helping you build your online reputation. When a patient discovers your plastic surgery clinic or gets to learn about your practices, the first thing they usually do is check online reviews. The reviews people have given your clinic or your services play a crucial part in the consideration phase of a plastic surgery marketing funnel. If your clinic lacks positive reviews, it can stop a potential patient from exploring your services further.
All kinds of customers, including plastic surgery patients, are more likely to leave a review when they are unhappy than when they are happy with a service or product. This is why you need to be proactive about collecting reviews. Actively asking your patients for reviews can help you offset the impact of negative reviews. However, a lot of patients do not want to share their story on public platforms, as they do not want people to know they had a cosmetic surgery.
To overcome this challenge, you should reach out to every patient with a template email that makes it easier for them to leave a review. You should also discuss how incredibly helpful these reviews can be for you as well as the potential patients who are considering getting plastic surgery done. By establishing a review acquisition as a part of your follow-ups, you can steadily accumulate reviews that can help boost your online reputation.
10. Implement Email Marketing
Sending regular newsletters or updates on new plastic surgery procedures, the launch of new clinics, or other alerts can help potential patients as well as the previous ones stay informed and engaged. You can also personalize email marketing based on patient history or interests, boosting the relevance and effectiveness of communication.
Creative email marketing campaigns for your plastic surgery practices can help increase patient retention, provide an avenue for you to market special promotions, and drive traffic back to your website. So, your aim should be to build an email list from the very beginning. The more email IDs you have, the better your chances are for conversions.
11. Test Various Ad Campaigns
A/B testing is a great way to optimize your ad campaigns. Whether you are conducting a PPC ad campaign or running an email marketing campaign, always make sure that you are sending your best set of ad messages to your target audience. A/B testing can help you identify which ads will work the best for your plastic surgery clinic.
Try different ad messaging, extensions, ad formats, and landing page optimizations to find the most successful combinations. As you test every possible combination on a sample audience, you get a clear idea about which is working and which is not.
Always run the tests for an adequate period of time to get meaningful results. Ensure there are no external factors that could influence the results. Also, the results should be statistically significant to draw meaningful conclusions. While optimizing your ads based on the test results, ensure they are optimized for a better mobile experience.
Conclusion
It may not be possible for you to execute all these strategies by yourself. While you can build an in-house marketing team to manage all your marketing efforts, it is more cost-effective to hire a plastic surgery digital marketing agency for the job.