The medical spa industry is booming, which means more patient and consumer demand. As more health companies open to meet the growing demand, the long-term success of your practice depends on distinguishing you from the competition. Effective medical spa marketing and advertising can help you bring more patients to your practice.
From the creation of an impactful brand that resonates with patients to the development of a powerful web presence and strong online reputation, your online advertising strategy can help your medical spa attract, convert, and retain more patients than your competitors.
Why medical spa marketing and advertising matters
Your medical spa practice must connect with prospective patients in meaningful ways to increase your brand awareness and new patient volume. Those prospects can be reached while they are:
- Engaging in social media
- Watching videos
- Checking their email
- Surfing the web
If your medical spa is heavily invested in traditional marketing and you’re not convinced your practice is ready for the digital world, you don’t have to make the transition all at once. One of the benefits of digital marketing is that you can start small and shift your strategy over time. Ready to take the leap — or the first step?
Here are some of the benefits of digital marketing for medical spa practices:
- Scalability. If you don’t know how to use digital marketing tools, start with a single strategy and a modest budget. Then watch how it performs before increasing your marketing spend. Add new campaigns wherever you see a good return on your investment. That will help you build up to greater long-term performance and new patient conversions. This is great news for any new company that lacks marketing experience but still wants to offer their care solutions to more potential clients.
- Enhanced targeting. Unlike traditional advertising channels, digital targeted marketing can reach a more specific audience. For instance, if you want to reach women aged 40-50 with a certain household income, you can accomplish this with the click of a button. You can even drill down to personal interests, or deliver digital ads based on a person’s search history, so you reach more of your target market. Find the clients that are perfect for your practice's innovative healthcare solutions and specialty care.
- Useful data and marketing analytics. With digital marketing, every ad impression, click, and conversion is tracked online. You can quickly learn what works for your medical spa, and discontinue campaigns that don’t deliver results. When you have these marketing metrics at your fingertips, you can spend smarter and reach more prospective patients.
How to build a digital brand for your medical spa
With increased competition in the medspa industry, it’s critical to establish a brand that sets your practice apart from others in your geography and specialty. Start with a brand strategy to help prospective patients learn about your healthcare innovations and new medical spa offerings. Here are some basic tactics to use when you want your brand to stand out from the competition:
- Design a logo that conveys the look and feel you want prospective patients to associate with your medical spa practice. Use that logo consistently across all digital and print materials.
- Select marketing colors and fonts that are defined by and tie in with your logo. Limit the colors to 3 or 4 at most; it helps make your brand more recognizable and visually appealing.
- Your value proposition sets you apart from other medical spa practices, and should include details about your unique professional services, facility, and staff. Include all of these details on your website, online profiles, and social media platforms.
- Your identity is often derived from your value proposition — a small set of words that convey the unique characteristics of your practice or how you want patients to feel. Using this set of words throughout your digital and in-office marketing can reinforce the core values and care you bring to patients.
Once your digital brand attributes are established, apply them consistently across all marketing channels, including:
- Your website
- Your blog
- Social media platforms
- The physical materials and signs you use to make your brand stand out
The marketing and advertising essentials for your medical spa practice
Medical spa practices have a complex business model, balancing medical and cosmetic procedures and services in a competitive landscape. As a result, your marketing and advertising strategies have to work hard to drive awareness and interest in a crowded and multi-faceted market.
The first step is to understand your local market and where your medical spa fits in. To establish and reinforce what differentiates your medical spa, you must know:
- What services your competitors offer
- Where they’re located
- How they operate
Let's review some proven tactics that can help you grow your practice over time through acquiring new patients and retention. If you’re working with limited resources (as many practices are), start small and scale based on what drives new patient volume.
- Start with a great medical website. Develop a website design that wows prospective patients and delivers optimal online performance (easy-to-find, fast-loading, mobile-optimized).
- Pay attention to your reputation. Use an online reputation management solution that helps you get online patient reviews and promote the patient experience at your spa. A wealth of positive reviews can help attract new patients and widen your office's sales funnel.
- Use content marketing to draw attention. Give your target audience great content to read on your website, blog, and social media platforms. Informative and engaging content highlights your authority in the medspa market and keeps you top of mind with patients. Hiring a marketing agency might do the trick, if your staff needs to outsource that work.
- Optimize your medical practice SEO. Create and implement a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy to connect with prospective patients who search online for medical spa health services.
- Supplement with digital advertising. Digital advertising (pay-per-click/PPC and social media marketing campaigns) and online marketing can help drive awareness for your medical spa.
How to establish a strong web presence for your medical spa
Even with a powerful brand, growing your medical spa practice requires an impressive online presence. For example, if a prospective patient searches for a local Botox provider and doesn't find you, they will likely turn to another provider. Fortunately, you can establish and strengthen your web presence to connect with local prospects.
- An optimized website. Your website is the foundation for your web presence, and gives you the opportunity to present your medical spa practice and brand. A great website features intuitive navigation, fast loading speeds, and a mobile-friendly interface. Consider adding electronic scheduling, digital registration, and intake forms. These tools make it easy to interact with your practice and increase the odds of attracting and retaining more patients.
- A solid search engine optimization (SEO) approach. The higher your search result ranking, the more patients will go to your website. An effective SEO program is multifaceted and comprehensive. At a minimum, incorporate keywords that align with what your patients search for (i.e., Botox, SculpSure, etc.) into your website copy and content. Links to and from other reputable sources, like the FDA and American Medical Association, help, too.
- An active local search marketing campaign. When patients look for health solutions, they usually do so locally. Increased mobile device use has also increased geolocal search volumes, and consumers are now more likely to search "near me" to find a quality medical spa. To increase your visibility in local search results, claim your profiles in popular directories, such as Google Business Profile, Yelp, and others. Optimize your profiles with photos, a detailed overview of your medspa services, and links to your website and/or online scheduling system.
- Online reputation management. A positive online reputation does more than impress prospective patients. It also signals to search engines that your medical spa is relevant in the community, popular, and worthy of appearing in local search results. Improve yours by staying in tune with your patients and responding promptly to positive and negative feedback. Implementing automated customer satisfaction surveys is a great way to keep a pulse on patient sentiment and encourage patients to submit proactive online reviews.
Attracting patients to a medical spa with content marketing
Life is busy for consumers, so your content marketing strategies should be relevant and well-timed. As part of your marketing and advertising strategy, use email marketing and social media campaigns with infographics and videos, to attract attention to your medical spa practice.
An effective content marketing strategy will support your search engine optimization (SEO) strategy, and help you connect and engage with people as they search for patient information or answers to questions related to the services your medical spa offers.
Here are some marketing tactics to help your medspa deliver meaningful content to patients seeking healthcare solutions:
- Create a blog that outlines treatment options for common skin problems, including acne or sun damage, backed up by medical research.
- Feature a Q&A with an esthetician noting what to expect from a Kybella treatment.
- Showcase a video that explains how platelet-rich plasma (PRP) works to prevent or slow hair loss.
- Send an email to patients interested in anti-aging products to highlight your latest offerings and promotions.
- Send an email to patients to remind them to schedule their next Botox injection.
- Run a social media promotion that features discounted services for people who sign up for your email newsletter.
- Feature a Facebook post with a positive online patient review.
- Share your patient “before and after” photo results on Instagram (while abiding by HIPAA regulations).
Need inspiration? Here’s a list of common health products and service offerings to consider as you develop your content marketing plan.
Medical spa advertising Ideas
- Acne treatment
- Aesthetics
- Weight loss
- Body contouring
- Body sculpting
- Botox
- Botox and fillers
- Body therapies
- Brazilian butt lift
- Chemical peels
- CoolSculpting
- Dermal fillers
- Dermaplaning
- Emsculpt
- Facials/facial treatments
- Fillers
- Hair restoration
- Hands & feet
- Hydrafacial
- Hormone replacement therapy
- HydraFacial MD
- Injectables
- IPL photofacial
- IV therapy
- Juvederm
- Kybella
- Laser hair removal
- Laser tattoo removal
- Laser treatments
- Lip filler
- Liposuction
- Massages
- Microblading
- Microdermabrasion
- Microneedling
- Mommy makeover
- Penile enhancement
- P-Shot
- PDO thread lift
- PRP
- SculpSure body contouring
- Skin care
- Skin rejuvenation
- Skin tightening
- Tattoo removal
- TempSure
- Ultherapy
- Vaginal rejuvenation
Tip: When writing for search engine optimization (SEO), think like a medspa patient. Use the questions, keywords and phrases you hear most often from your medspa patients.
How to enhance your online reputation to attract new patients
Patients are savvy and want the best of the best. They use online reviews to find the most trusted physicians and medical professionals. In fact, 72% of patients rely on reviews when looking online to choose a healthcare provider, according to a Tebra white paper.
Reputation management can help your medical spa make a great first impression with prospective patients, while improving your online authority and relevance with search engines. You can use several simple tactics to improve your online reputation. After all, marketing solutions don't need to be complicated.
- Enhance the patient experience. A seamless journey from website visit to office exit is pivotal. A streamlined process, incorporating online scheduling, digital registration, telehealth consultations, and text messaging, signals your respect for patients' time, improves satisfaction and encourages return visits.
- Keep a pulse on patient sentiment. Automated satisfaction surveys after office visits can reveal potential issues that you can address promptly. The surveys also offer a valuable patient-provider feedback loop, encouraging proactive online reviews.
- Focus on your star rating. Review sites compile patient feedback into a 5-star rating system. Tebra's 2023 Patient Perspective survey found that 69% of patients won’t consider providers with ratings below 4 stars. Furthermore, Google omits practices under 4 stars when searching for the "best" medical spa nearby. Prioritize convenience and address patient feedback to elevate your rating over time.
- Monitor and respond regularly. Each patient review, social media comment, and satisfaction survey is an opportunity to enhance the patient experience. Actively monitor and address feedback, especially when it is neutral or negative. This mends patient relations and shows that your practice is attentive and adaptive.
Working together, these tactics will help your medical spa practice enhance and optimize your online reputation and attract more patients.
Where to focus on customer convenience for long-term patient retention
For medical spa practices, attracting new patients isn’t enough to sustain long-term growth. You’ll need to keep current patients happy and coming back. Make every interaction seamless and convenient to enhance patient satisfaction.
What does convenience look like? It starts online, where patients now want the ease and simplicity of digital transactions. Practices that deliver this modern experience are better positioned to delight patients.
Research shows that 72% of patients say they’ll switch doctors to find one who can meet their preferences. Many of these preferences relate to the use of digital conveniences.
What patients really want
According to Tebra's Patient Perspectives survey, patients want:
- A good listener. Automated patient satisfaction surveys give medical spa professionals a direct line to valuable patient feedback that can help strengthen the patient-provider relationship. Clinicians can learn what patients really want.
- A short wait. Online registration and digital intake forms can help streamline pre-appointment paperwork, resulting in a shorter wait before each visit.
- A welcoming staff. A medical team that is supported by digital practice management tools (automated appointment reminders, online scheduling, etc.) can focus on making patients feel like the top priority.
- Prompt responses to questions and concerns. Patients want the ability to message their providers with simple questions without having to schedule an appointment or play phone tag. Medical spas that use secure text messaging or an electronic patient portal can respond quickly to patient questions.
- Available appointments. Practices that can’t get patients in quickly for an appointment are likely to lose business to a practice with better access. Medical spas that offer easy ways to book appointments do better than those that don’t.
- Online access to health records. Patients want electronic access to their medical information and health history. Medical spa practices that offer an electronic patient portal meet consumer demand while empowering patients to take control of their health.
- Flexible/late hours. Busy professionals often fail to make time for themselves, and fitting a medical spa appointment into a packed schedule can be challenging. Practices that offer evening and weekend hours can meet patient demand for flexible scheduling.
- Option to book an appointment online. 68% of patients say they’re more likely to choose a provider that offers the ability to book, reschedule, or cancel an appointment online. Digital scheduling can help convert more website visitors into new patients, while also keeping current patients satisfied.
Medical spa practices that combine digital convenience with a meaningful patient connection are positioned for long-term business growth and success.
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