Are you prioritizing your aesthetics clinic’s digital marketing efforts only to find you’re not increasing bookings, let alone engagement with your ideal prospective patients? Discover our top five tips that both cover the basics and add a little creativity to your online marketing to ensure you’re capturing and keeping patients’ interest online.

Starting in 2016, mobile use among consumers surpassed desktop and the balance hasn’t swayed since . While it may be easier and much more productive to complete most of your website, social, and other digital marketing work on a desktop, it’s imperative to have a mobile device nearby to ensure compatibility, as some unique issues may arise on mobile that could dissuade many consumers to give up on your aesthetics clinic before they even attempt contacting you for a consultation.

One example may be that some appointment booking services, while optimized on desktop, could cause countless headaches on mobile that may make prospective patients just give up altogether. A smooth and fast experience on mobile, including an online booking option, will attract digitally engaged patients and increase your consultation bookings. To ensure you’re catering to consumers’ habits rather than causing headaches, prioritize optimization for mobile devices first, and then focus on ensuring desktop users also have a good experience. This is also good advice for increasing your Google rankings, as mobile compatibility is a factor in determining where you rank in the behemoth’s search engine results.

Speaking of the power of Google, if you’re a regular reader of our medical aesthetics marketing advice posts, this next tip might not be a new one. Digitally engaged patients are certainly going to make search engines their first stop when looking for a certified treatment provider to perform their desired cosmetic treatments. Google is the search engine of choice for 90% of the market base, with the search engine recording an average of 3.5 billion searches daily.

To boost your search engine rankings and be the first listing to pop up in prospective patients’ local searches—and make finding you a whole lot easier for them—register your medical aesthetics clinic with Google My Business (GMB). Taking this quick step and performing a little regular maintenance will allow you to provide the most up-to-date information on clinic hours, services, promotions, contact information, and more, so patients have all the details they need to make your aesthetics clinic their top choice. You may even incorporate an appointment booking service into your listing to better convert queries to consultations.

Authenticity in your aesthetics clinic’s online branding must be of the utmost priority. Consumers value businesses that offer transparency and maintain a good reputation. In fact, according to the 2018 Edelman Trust Barometer, 64% of the informed public says they trust businesses and that trust, if lost, is even harder to regain.  

While there are many ways to use authenticity and personal branding to build trust and support business growth, showcasing a candid personality is an easy way to retain trust as current and prospective patients get to know the main face or faces behind your clinic. Whether it’s in podcasts, at conferences, or broadcasting live to social media, it’s much easier to maintain consistent personal branding when it just comes naturally. If you’re just being you, it’s much less likely you’ll slip in or out of character during appearances or even when patients encounter you in person, which could risk losing their trust. Showcasing this personality provides online prospective patients a better way to remember your aesthetics clinic and makes consumers even more eager to book an appointment and meet you in person.

It can be difficult for businesses to garner a reasonable level of organic engagement on social media without some creativity. While prioritizing authenticity and staff engagement on social media can offer one way to personally connect with current and prospective patients and encourage engagement for further visibility, sponsored posts and paid partnerships are another option. Many social platforms—Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram included—offer business accounts the opportunity to promote a post for a price. With this sponsored post purchase, businesses can also select some demographic information to better target their ideal clients through the apps.

Alternatively, social media influencers—usually content creators who have large followings on one or more social media platforms—will work with businesses on paid partnership posts. In other words, you can contract their services to post content you work on together to their accounts. Best practices, of course, are to allow the influencer the main creative control over what is posted—they have the following for a reason after all. You’ll want to select influencers who mesh well with your clinic’s branding and who might regularly post on cosmetics or related topics, so the partnership doesn’t appear inauthentic to their followers. You may also consider sponsoring an influencer’s treatments to show followers what they might experience during the treatment, or have the influencer explore a variety of treatments to showcase your clinic’s range of offerings.

While getting into the scientific details behind your aesthetic services may seem a little dense for social media, a blog post may offer the perfect opportunity for a deep dive into this topic—or at least a little more detail. You’ll want to steer clear of jargon and you may need to stylize some infographics or illustrations to better demonstrate how, for example, collagen and elastin support a healthy skin structure, alongside some of your best before-and-after images. Regarding the illustrations, if you’re unable to find adequate stock images online, look to a freelance graphic designer to supply some work-ups you can use across all of your online and print marketing materials.  

These detailed blog posts are the perfect way to engage the patients who are looking for proof that you know what’s going on behind the technology, while also affording you the perfect opportunity to talk up advanced technology or new devices that may set your aesthetics clinic apart from your competitors. To improve the visibility of these articles, promote them via your Google My Business account and in social media postings.

Gain access to more tips on how to better market your medical aesthetics clinic to attract digitally engaged patients through a partnership with Venus Concept. Our unique business model provides our customers with ongoing practice enhancement support to ensure your marketing strategies are always hitting the mark. Contact an expert today to learn more.