Do you run a plastic surgery clinic? If YES, here are 20 powerful ideas on how to market your cosmetic and plastic surgery services to high networth clients.
Aesthetic medicine is a lucrative business that has created a fiercely competitive industry. As a result of this fierce competition, plastic surgeons now believe that diversifying into niches is their best bet if they are to gain any footing in the industry.
One of the niches surgeons who want to set up their cosmetic and plastic surgery service can look into is servicing high net worth clients. But the problem here is to make sure that this set of individuals can come to you. The only way you can do that is through marketing.
Yes, you need to market to your target population. But you should note that not all marketing strategies will work on high net worth clients because these people just don’t roll like every other person. Your duty now is to find ways your business can gain visibility in the world of the rich, and that is what we want to show you.
If you want to market your cosmetic and plastic surgery services to high net worth individuals, these few tips will help to set you on the right path.
20 Ways to Market your Cosmetic and Plastic Surgery Service to High Networth Clients
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Mind your location
The rich have set a sort of societal Rubicon that they cannot cross (and who can blame them?). If you pay no mind to these subtle signs and decide to set up your practice where you think is cheapest, or has better foot traffic, then you will only have yourself to blame because you cannot attract the rich to that kind of location.
You should know that to get the attention of the rich, your cosmetic and plastic surgery service should be located in a high brow area.
Note that this location must be away from foot traffic as well as the hustle and bustle of city life. In fact, if it can look like a get-away spot, the better for your image.
With your address taken care of, inside your office should be similarly decorated with class and posh. Your clients are familiar with class, so give them that.
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Create an air of exclusivity
Rich people are all about class and privacy in their dealings, and so if you want to attract the rich to your cosmetic and plastic surgery business, then you have to make it to be very exclusive. You have to make sure that there is a touch of class in everything that you do.
You need to use the best and latest equipment in the market, your customer service should be second to none, and your after care services should blow their minds.
You also have to make sure that you only consult for the rich because the rich likes meddling with the rich, anything short of that would earn you a bad name in their circles and you may never get any repeat customers, talk more of referrals.
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Build your Referrals
If your business is going to grow big, one of the ways it can do it is through referrals. It is a known fact that people prefer services that others have tried and have given reviews about.
This is same with the rich, and the amazing thing it that they band together and tend to go with whatever services their circle of peers describe as awesome.
Because of this, you have to ensure that your first few clients leave your services very happy and satisfied. This is not the time to allow any slip ups as you may not get another chance to show your skills. To ensure patients and clients leave your practice happy, treat them well while they’re in your office.
Respond promptly to their questions and concerns before and after treatment. You’ll want to ask patients to sign a release if they are willing to share their pictures and testimonials about their experience with your plastic surgery practice.
4. Sell happiness
Everyone wants to be happy in life, and this is more especially for high net worth individuals that have the money to buy it.
Skilled surgeons devote years of professional training and experience to the fine art of excellence in Augmentation Mammaplasty, Blepharoplasty, Liposuction, Rhinoplasty and many other procedures that many patients don’t recognize by name. For that matter, patients are not motivated to shop for “eyelid surgery,” “nose reshaping,” or even “breast augmentation.”
What people buy is happiness. Although these are the names of some of the most common plastic and cosmetic surgery procedures, but your patients come because of how it makes them feel, and they care less about the name.
The individual purchase decision factors may vary somewhat, but the primary motivations are to improve their appearance, bolster their self-image and/or to feel better about their appearance.
So, one of the cornerstones of a successful plastic surgery marketing and advertising is to effectively communicate the prospect of improved self-esteem, life satisfaction and self-rated physical attractiveness–happiness.
5. Use target oriented advert medium
Your ideal prospective patients are those who are mature and affluent enough to invest time, money, and efforts to receive your services.
As such, you need to target them specifically with your ads, if not, you’ll lose them. The best platform to target them is Facebook.
Targeting options on Facebook go beyond just demographics. Annual income level, relationship status, dating interests, shopping behaviors, interests in beauty and related products, activities and purchases are some of the many other options that you can leverage.
Not just Facebook, Google Ads also allows for targeting potential users based on different parameters, including their income level.
6. Stay Connected with Previous Patients
Your previous (happy) patients are a great source of new referrals; and their word-of-mouth advertising is more effective compared to any other option.
However, you’ll need to consistently feed them with something new about your practice or service, which they can share with others.
Staying connected with them through email newsletters, social media, and texts is a great way to keep them aware of the latest offerings and achievements of your practice. That way, they’ll always have something on their mind about you to include in their chats and conversations.
7. Give Free ‘Photoshop’ Consultations
Many potential clients, because of their fear of a botched surgery, back off even after taking a consultation (it happens to everyone, not just the rich).
The best way to ease that fear is to show them what exactly they’ll look like after the surgery. This will totally eliminate the possibility of a situation caused by wrong expectations.
With technologies like Adobe Photoshop, it’s as simple as taking a picture of the to-be-altered body part and manipulating it on a computer in front of your patient’s eyes.
Visually, being able to see the results will put them into a completely different mindset and they would feel confident to take the surgery.
8. Build an Effective Plastic Surgery Website
No matter where your potential patients hear about you, they’ll still search online and eventually land on your website to learn more. Because of this, it is crucial that your website is effective enough to persuade visitors to take action.
It should be visually and layout-wise non-confusing and logical, and it should convey your value proposition. Before and after images, patient testimonials, and any mentions of individual awards and certifications are the other things that your plastic surgery marketing website should prominently display.
9. Dominate Google Search Results
One of your main goals is to appear on the first page of searches when people in your area look for your services online. Searches like “best plastic surgeon near me,” “top nose job specialist in [your city name],” etc., generally indicate strong purchasing intent and that’s why getting traffic for these is extremely valuable.
You can easily rank for those keywords with local search optimization (SEO) strategies such as local directory listings of your site, maintaining NAP (name, address, and phone number) consistency, adding location pages to your site, creating local content, online reviews, local link building, social media community management, etc.
10. Utilize Paid Searches for Instant Ranking
Local search organic ranking methods, as given above, are an excellent way for long-term benefits; but, you can’t always wait for the organic methods to show the results. That’s where Google’s Pay-Per-Click (PPC) comes into the picture.
PPC is where you bid on Google Ads’ auction system to place your ads for relevant and high intent local search terms. Your budget and the placement of your ad will depend on the competition. With PPC, you get complete control over your site’s local search ranking.
11. Take Advantage of Google Display Advertising
Google AdWords is a keyword based advertising service that makes it easy for businesses to expand their online reach. Display ads are commonly seen alongside, above, and below the content of popular, and industry related websites. You can fine tune the targeting to stay in front of your audience and engage them effectively.
12. Make every patient experience exceptional
An exceptional patient experience is the most effective marketing tool for any healthcare and cosmetic surgery institution, more especially if you are targeting the rich.
To achieve an outstanding customer experience, you need to create and maintain key performance indicators that ensure quality service.
Some of the strategies that you can put in place to enhance the experience include cultivation of a healthy work culture at the premises, quality leadership programs, bench-marking the leading plastic surgery organizations in the industry and coming up with ways to measure customer satisfaction.
In the digital era, most people will look at the reviews of service or product before making a decision to buy. Hundreds of raving customer reviews will get the institution hundreds of interested customers.
13. Guest Blog on Relevant Sites
Obtaining high-quality links take time and effort. One of the ways you can acquire quality backlinks is to guest blog on relevant sites, such as, beauty blogs. These websites are glad to have articles written by a professional plastic surgeon in exchange for a link. This is an awesome way to increase visibility on search engines.
Working on this same medium offline, you can write feature articles about plastic surgery. Contact health editors at local or national magazines or newspapers to publish your articles.
You may even want to write a book about your plastic surgery specialty to share your expertise. Although articles and books don’t count as marketing efforts, informative writing can attract prospective patients to your practice.
14. Use emotionally compelling adverts on offline media
Even with the rise of the online media, the offline media is still very effective in marketing plastic surgery and healthcare services worth to high net worth individuals. Thus, it is important to include it in your marketing plan.
According to a study by Google on healthcare marketing in 2012, it was found that 84 percent of the clients used both offline and online sources for their research before deciding on the service provider to use for their treatment. A similar thing would happen with plastic surgery.
Emotionally compelling print, TV, and outdoor ads stir up the emotions and feelings of happiness, self-love and achievement.
These adverts are very effective in driving the audience into action. Just ensure that the adverts are spun in a way that they are positive and have a clear call to action.
You can then reinforce this strategy by providing a lot of information and offers through your online platforms. You can combine as many strategies as possible for your plastic surgery practice. However, given the costs and efforts required to ensure that each of the strategies work, don’t spread yourself too thin.
15. Prove That you are an Expert in Your Field
While having an optimized site is important, it is not enough to turn your online visitors into paying clients. People looking for plastic surgeons are intelligent and are ready to spend on cosmetic procedures.
To convince them that you are the right person for the job, you need to incorporate quality content into your marketing strategy.
Include information about the different procedures you offer. Search engines value quality content and the more information you provide, the higher your chances of ranking highly on search engines.
You can make work easier by having all the relevant and current information in different formats such as infographics, contact information, blogs, and social media posts. Most importantly, prominently display before and after pictures of your work so that clients can get a feel for your quality.
16. Follow Your Website Visitors with Remarketing
Prospective plastic surgery patients generally do not convert on the first visit on your website. By the time they are ready—after having considered other options—they may have already forgotten you.
With Remarketing, you can keep yourself on top of their mind during their entire research phase. A cookie or pixel (a piece of code) is stored on their system through their browser when they visit your website, which allows you to display ads (including the Facebook ads) on any site they access from the same browser for a defined period.
17. Manage Your Reviews and Reputation
Reviews play a significant role in your prospective patients’ decision-making process. That’s why you need to gather as many reviews as possible.
If your service is top notch, you’ll receive mostly positive reviews that will add to your reputation. However, as no one is perfect, you may receive a few negative reviews which can be disastrous for your online reputation.
Employing an online reputation management (ORM) solution can help you efficiently manage every aspect related to online reviews—collecting them, directing them to review sites, responding to them, and even analyzing them to learn different aspects about your service and the overall patient experience.
18. Publicize Your Awesome Reviews
Patients trust reviews as equally as personal recommendations, so why not amplify their reach to the maximum number of patients?
Select some of the awesome reviews and sprinkle them as testimonial quotes throughout your website. You can also use relevant quotes in marketing campaigns for specific procedures.
Moreover, you should also create a testimonial page on your site and regularly update it with positive reviews, especially those which mention specific value points about your practice.
Those words will be added up to the weighted pages, and as the testimonial page will be indexed regularly by Google, it will also help in your search rankings.
19. Improve Your Social Media Listening
Having a way to listen to social media conversations is crucial as it lets you keep track of general patient opinion and learn about your areas of improvement.
Those learnings can be utilized for different purposes, like creating more value-centric ad campaigns and making needed changes in staff behavior and clinic culture.
One of the best ways to listen to social media conversations is by using social analytics tools like Netbase. These tools use Natural Language Processing (NLP) to analyze social conversations.
Their intuitive reports and charts help you understand the prevalent public opinion about your brand, and let you compare it (your brand) with your competitors.
20. Increase your budget on videos
Video is the hottest form of content online. By 2022, 80% of internet traffic will be coming from videos. Most of the video content will be consumed through social media platforms and YouTube. This calls for increasing the budget spend on videos in your social media marketing strategy.
Patient testimonial videos, short explanatory videos about a procedure, and candid videos of the staff are some of the highest performing forms where you need to invest your time, money, and efforts.