You may be thinking about opening an aesthetic clinic, or you may already have one. In either case, it’s important to create a marketing plan for aesthetic clinic to help it succeed
The reason is quite simple, one of the largest UK industry surveys recently reported, that out of the 3 biggest challenges aesthetic clinics face, according to respondents, 2 of them are related to marketing and greater competition, the survey found:
- Challenge 1 – The majority of practitioners (as answered by 350 respondents) commented that their greatest challenge was increased competition within the aesthetics industry.
- Challenge 2 – The most difficult aspect of their job, according to 53 percent of respondents, was marketing.
- Challenge 3 – Over forty percent of aesthiticians responded that keeping up with the latest products and technology was also a significant challenge.
So you can see how developing a marketing plan is essential for overcoming these challenges and to help your clinic succeed.
If you’re not sure how to create a marketing plan for your aesthetic clinic, you’re definitely not alone. A lot of business owners don’t know where to start, and as a result, they never actually create a plan at all. This can lead to a number of common challenges, such as:
- Not knowing who your target audience is
- Not knowing what services to offer
- Not having a clear goal or strategy in mind
- Failing to attract new customers
- Not being able to keep up with the competition
However, if you have a solid marketing plan in place, you can avoid all of these challenges and achieve great success for your clinic.
So, what goes into a good marketing plan for an aesthetic clinic?
In this article, we will discuss the essential components of a marketing plan and provide you with some tips on how to create one that is specifically tailored to your clinic.
Define Your Target Audience
One of the most important first steps in creating a marketing plan is defining your target audience. This is the group of people you are marketing your services to, and it’s important to be as specific as possible. When you know who your target audience is, you can better tailor your marketing messages to appeal to them.
Your customer avatar
It can be difficult to define your target audience, but it’s important to do your best to get as clear a picture as possible. There are a few different ways to go about doing this:
- Start by thinking about the demographics of your target audience. This includes things like age, gender, income level, and education level.
- Next, think about what type of patients you want to attract. Do you want to specialise in a particular area of aesthetics, such as anti-ageing treatments? Or do you want to offer a variety of services to appeal to a wider range of people?
- Finally, think about the needs and wants of your target audience. What are they looking for from an aesthetic clinic?
What are the pain points of your customer?
In order to create a successful marketing plan for your aesthetic clinic, you need to understand the pain points of your target audience. this is important because you need to be able to provide a solution and provide specific services to ease their pain?
were not talking about the physical pain, but their psychological pain. The visceral motivation behind why they want the treatment.
When you know the answer to these questions, you can create marketing messages that speak directly to them and if you get in right, it’s almost like you are inside their subconscious, it’s really powerful.
How do you reach them?
Once you’ve figured out your target audience, it’s important to come up with a plan for how you will reach them. This includes things like deciding on a marketing mix, setting up advertising campaigns, and developing a website and social media strategy.
Research your competition
In order to create a successful marketing plan for your aesthetic clinic, it’s also important to research your competition. The reason for this is that they have potentially already gone through the growing pains of finding out what works and what doesn’t. This is your opportunity to fast track through those problems and copy the best bits of what they do and how they go to market.
This means taking the time to learn as much as you can about them and carrying out a SWOT analysis on each (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.)
When you know what your competition is doing, you can develop strategies that will help you stand out from the crowd and maybe even identify gaps in the market.
The competition’s marketing strategy
When you’re researching your competition, it’s important to take a look at their marketing strategies. What types of advertising are they using? What is their social media strategy? How do they reach their target audience?
When you know the answers to these questions, you can develop strategies that will help you compete with them directly or find ways to differentiate yourself from them.
The competition’s target audience
Another thing you need to figure out when you’re researching your competition is their target audience. Who are they targeting their services at? Do they specialise in a particular area of aesthetics, or do they offer a wide range of services?
When you know who your competition is targeting, you can develop strategies that will help you reach the same audience.
How The Competition is Reaching Their Target Audience
It’s beneficial to also figure out how your competition is reaching its target audience. What channels are they using? What type of advertising is working best for them?
What Aesthetic Treatments The Competition Offers
It’s also important to take a look at the treatments your competition offer. What type of treatments do they specialise in? What are their most popular services and are they similar to yours or how do they differ, and what you can do to differentiate yourself, or even find a gap in the market that needs to be met.
Your Marketing Plan
We’ve taken a look at the audience, the market and the competition, now we can start using our findings to develop the marketing strategy for our clinic.
This should include things like what channels you will use, what type of advertising you will use, what your website and social media strategy will be, and how you will reach your target audience.
Creating A Marketing Strategy For Your Aesthetic Clinic
When creating a marketing strategy for your aesthetic clinic, it’s important to start with an evaluation of your clinic.
Try to be objective about its strengths and weaknesses? What does your target audience want? What services do you offer that your competition doesn’t?
Developing Marketing Messages
Once you have a good understanding of your clinic and what it has to offer, it’s time to start developing marketing messages. These are the messages that you will use to speak to your target audience. They need to be clear, concise and speak directly to your audience.
You can develop these messages by thinking about what pain points your patients have, and the solutions you can provide. You can also refer to your marketing research from your competitors to see what messages they are using that are resonating with their patients.
It’s important not just to lift exactly what your competitors are doing, but to add you’re own twist to it and give it your own voice.
Creating A Marketing Mix
Once you have your marketing messages, it’s time to create a marketing mix. This is the combination of different marketing channels that you will use to reach your target audience. When creating your mix, you need to consider what channels your target audience will use to access information.
You also need to think about what type of advertising will be the most effective for your clinic and what budget you have allocated for marketing.
The typical marketing budget for a business is recommended to be between 5-9% of your revenue, so if you are an established clinic then this should give you a good idea of what you’re budget should be.
Setting Up Advertising Campaigns
Now that you have your marketing mix, it’s time to start setting up your advertising campaigns. This is where you will put all of your resources into action and start reaching out to your target audience.
When setting up your campaigns, it’s important to make sure that they are aligned with your goals and the messages that you have identified as the ones that resonate the most with your target audience.
This may take a little experimentation at first before you can get in dialled in, but this is where testing your campaigns and identifying the successes and failures is so important. You’re not going to hit a home run 100% of the time.
As Henry Ford famously said, “half my marketing is a waste, I just know which half”
The trick is to improve the successes and minimise the failures and to have a process in place to manage that.
Social Media Marketing Strategy
Now that you have your advertising campaigns set up, it’s time to start thinking about your social media strategy. This is how you will use social media to reach your target audience and engage with them.
When creating your strategy, you need to consider the different platforms that are available, what type of content will be the most valuable to your audience.
One trap you shouldn’t fall into here is thinking that social media is the whole digital marketing strategy, instead, you should think of it being a tactic but part of a more holistic marketing approach for your aesthetic clinic.
Website And Marketing Funnels
Setting up your website and marketing funnels is essential for the success of your aesthetic clinic. Your website is the foundation of your online presence, and it’s where your patients will go to learn more about your clinic and the services that you offer.
Your marketing funnels are also essential, as they are the means by which you can funnel potential customers into nurturing campaigns so when they are ready to book you are always top of mind.
Business Website Essentials
Getting your website set up correctly is essential for the success of your aesthetic clinic. Here are some of the essentials that you need to consider:
- Your website should be easy to navigate, and the design should be professional and modern.
- The content on your website needs to be up-to-date and relevant to your target audience.
- You need to have lots of informational content on the site so people can read about the treatments
- The site needs to have lots of calls to action so viewers can engage with the site and either optin as a subscriber or go deeper into the site.
- probably one of the most essential ingredients is for the content to be really good quality and positions you as the expert and an authority in the space.
What To Include On Your Website
When you are creating your website, you need to make sure that you include the following:
- Your clinic’s logo and branding
- Information about your clinic, including the treatments that you offer and who you are as a clinic
- Testimonials from happy patients
- Photos of your clinic and team
- Information about the treatments, including what pain or discomfort they may cause, what the results are likely to be and how long they will last
- FAQs
- Contact information
- reviews of clients
Designing Your Website
When designing your website, it’s important to keep the aesthetics of an aesthetic clinic in mind. Here are some tips for designing a website that will resonate with your target audience:
- The design should be clean and minimalist
- The colours should be muted and calming
- The fonts should be sophisticated and modern
- There should be plenty of images to help illustrate the treatments and the results
- The website should be easy to navigate
- Including a blog on your website is a great way to share valuable content with your audience
Making Your Website Mobile-Friendly
It goes without saying that your site should be mobile responsive so it works on all devices. The majority of your traffic will be through mobile phones so it’s imperative that your website looks great and function well on mobile devices as well as larger screens.
Driving Traffic To Your Website
Once your website is set up, you need to start driving traffic to it. The best way to do this is through a combination of online and offline marketing strategies. Some of the methods that you can use to drive traffic to your website include:
Paid advertising, such as Google AdWords or Facebook Ads, but one of the most effective long term strategies is SEO.
When traffic is hitting your site, the design and the conversion optimisation will come into their own and start delivering signups and enquiries.
Advertising your Business
Advertising your clinic is an essential part of growing your business. You need to have a strong marketing strategy in place to ensure that potential patients are aware of your clinic and the services that you offer. There are a number of different advertising methods that you can use, and each has its own advantages and disadvantages.
Some of the most effective methods of advertising your clinic include:
Paid advertising, such as Google AdWords or Facebook Ads
this is a way to get immediate traffic to your site, but because you’re paying for the traffic you have to be sure that you have a set of goals and objectives, understand your targeting and have well designed and good converting landing page to maximise your budget.
Print advertising, such as flyers, brochures, and posters
This is a great way to reach your target market offline and can be very effective if you target the right locations and distribute them in the right places.
If you’re creative you can really stand out and differentiate your aesthetic clinic from all the rest. If you can coordinate it with other activities online or offline it often can have a compound effect where the results go beyond the sum of its parts.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of our favourite marketing methods purely because the engagement rate is greater than a lot of other forms of online marketing including social media.
Despite it having a bad reputation in some areas, it remains a very profitable way to market your business and nurture interested people to become patients.
Once they are on your list, they can be segmented in many ways and is also a great way to keep in touch with your legacy patients to keep your brand top of mind and to let them know about new treatments, offers, and events at your clinic.
You can also use email marketing to build relationships with potential patients and encourage them to visit your clinic.
Digital Social media
Social media marketing is a great way to connect with your target market and build relationships with potential and current patients. It’s a very effective way to share information about your clinic, the treatments that you offer, and the results that you achieve.
You should use a mix of social media platforms to reach as many people as possible but use it as a strategic marketing channel to drive traffic to your website.
SEO
SEO is one of the most effective long-term marketing strategies that you can use to drive traffic to your website. It’s a process that takes time and effort, but if you’re patient and do it correctly, the results can be very rewarding.
it will also position your clinic as the authority in the market and help to attract highly targeted prospects who are searching specifically for your treatments and information about what you offer.
Reviews
Reviews are incredibly important to generate trust and build credibility for your clinic. They are a powerful way to give confidence to new patients that they can trust you to carry out the treatment to a high standard and it’s also a way to encourage current patients to refer their friends and family members.
This type of social proof is one the best ways to gain credibility and so you should actively seek reviews from your patients and post them on your website, social media, and other online directories and should be part of your overall digital marketing plan.
Case Studies
much like reviews, case studies are a powerful way to show potential patients the results that you have achieved for other people. They are a very effective way to highlight the benefits of your treatments and can help to persuade people to book in for a consultation.
The classic before and after type of case study is really effective and gives confidence to new patients to enquire about your treatments.
Ecommerce For Your Aesthetic Clinic
E-commerce is becoming more important in several clinics’ marketing mix. It allows you to reach more people, sell your products and services online, and increase your clinic’s profits as well as a way to diversify income.
There are a number of different eCommerce platforms that you can use, but we recommend Shopify because it’s easy to use, has a wide range of features, and is affordable
E-commerce can be an essential part of growing your business and ensuring that people know about what you offer and broaden your appeal.
Selling Products And Services Online
It’s a great way to reach more people and increase your clinic’s profits by providing a strong retail element to your clinic, not only can it help to nurture a commercial relationship with existing customers, but it can also attract new patients that may not have considered coming to your clinic otherwise.
Increase Clinic Profits
Ecommerce can help to increase clinic profits in a number of ways and can help broaden the appeal of your online offering, including:
- Increased exposure and reach
- As your clinic’s products and services are made available online, they’ll be seen by more people than ever before. This could lead to an increase in customers and revenue.
- More effective marketing
Broaden Your Business Appeal
Ecommerce can also play an important role in widening the appeal of your clinic to potential patients. It can help to showcase the breadth and quality of your services, as well as increase brand awareness.
To Round Off
If you’re looking for a place to start when creating an advertising plan and marketing strategy for your aesthetic clinic, these tips should help. you don’t have to do them all but it gives you scope to target and reaches more people with your marketing as your clinic grows.
Remember that it’s important to tailor your plans to fit your clinic, target market, and budget.
We hope you found this article helpful and that it also gives you some inspiration on how to market your clinic in the most effective way possible. If all of this sounds intimidating or if you want assistance with enacting these principles, let us know! Our team is here to help
Reference used https://hamiltonfraser.co.uk/knowledge/hamilton-fraser-cosmetic-insurances-annual-survey/
