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Med spas are a growing industry across the United States — and for good reason. Medical aesthetic practices and medical spas offer a wide variety of motivations to expanding clientele in the forms of newer technologies, updated treatment practices, and the possibility of avoiding surgical procedures. These, among others, have brought an influx of new and younger patients to the market, which has created a significant opportunity for all existing spas, but has understandably brought new players to the field as well. It is important that you understand how to take advantage of these opportunities.

With an increase of spas to the market, there will be an increase in competition even as the consumer-base expands. Therefore, it is essential that you understand the important role of marketing in your business, and how the marketing landscape has changed drastically as digital marketing continues to evolve. In order to keep competitive in the industry, you will need to update your marketing tools just like you update your spa.

Med Spa Marketing Essentials in 2019

We have created a comprehensive guide for you to reference as you research how to keep your business competitive in this growing market. Each step is very important to consider, and with the right attention and execution, will greatly increase your visibility and boost your future business. Modern communication technology facilitates modern marketing techniques and businesses who opt out of this updated marketing model not only miss out on new clientele but risk losing current patients as well.

This list will go through the key details one-by-one, explaining the importance of each, and providing examples of how you can capitalize on each opportunity to help grow your business effectively. You can use each of these tips, starting right now, to update your marketing plan and give your med spa a big push.

The guide is broken down into a series of key factors, and will each discuss how they relate specifically to med spa marketing plans and actionable changes that you can make.

The guide consists of the following:

1. Your Med Spa’s Brand – an inviting, trustworthy, and fashionable spa will draw in new customers
2. Your Website – websites are essential marketing tools and should be easy to navigate and offer great information about your services
3. Landing Pages – each well-designed landing page is another opportunity to generate leads and develop new clients
4. Your Blog – Blogs are a great way to give insight into your practice, share your ideas, and promote your brand with shareable content
5. Social Media – Reach potential clients directly with engaging and interesting social media practices
6. Email – Email is an excellent way to nurture your leads, keep your brand top-of-mind to potential clients, and communicate important information
7. Online Advertising – target your ideal consumer using Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaigns, and well-executed Search Engine Optimization (SEO) practices
8. Offline Marketing – support your online marketing campaigns using traditional practices without relying on them like you once would
9. Patient reviews – word-of-mouth has an even wider reach when your satisfied patients share a public review of your work online
10. Events – By creating attractive opportunities for interested consumers to visit your spa, you will be able to establish direct contact
11. Effective Budgeting – make your money and marketing spend work as effectively as possible

Strategy Is Key to Online Marketing Success

As the med spa market continues to expand, there will be more and more diversity among your clientele, meaning that there is no one specific “audience” that you can market to. Understanding each audience in your market is essential to communicating the appropriate messages, focusing on the right value propositions, and addressing the right challenges that each group faces.

Aging patients may be focusing on “turning back the clock” and restoring their appearances, but this message will not resonate with a younger crowd. In addition to age, male and female patients may have different motivators, and as you continue to research and refine your target markets, you will uncover even more granular sections of your market with specific traits and specific benefits that speak to them. Luckily, digital marketing makes for highly-scalable segmenting and targeting based on all sorts of attributes, instead of relying on and once-ubiquitous direct mail ad, or an ad in the telephone book.

According to the 2017 Medical Spa State of the Industry Report, 69% of med spa patients are now under 55, and Millennials account for a full 17% of the total. As these numbers continue to shift, you will need to continue to adjust your message to ensure that the benefits of your medical spa are being shown to the people who will benefit from them.

Regardless of the segment that each individual patient falls into, they will also have their own specific challenges and concerns that they want to address, and it is important that you make sure they know that they will be able to have their concerns handled by you and your team. With an integrated marketing plan, you will provide yourself with the tools and the structure to ensure that your patients can find the help that they need from your spa.

With strong marketing, you will be able to maximize the hard work you have put into building a world-class med spa by sharing your message and values to the clients who will benefit from them. Unfortunately, even the best med spas may go unnoticed if they do not support their excellent business with an excellent marketing plan. Luckily, we have laid out this guide to help you communicate the value of your business with a modern, digital approach.

1. Your Brand – Make a Lasting First Impression

Competition in the med spa market is increasing, but an experienced business owner doesn’t need an industry report to know this. As new competitors enter the market, patients are given better choices, but can also be overwhelmed by options. This is why your brand is absolutely essential — it creates a strong impression during the critical research phase that a potential patient will go through. A recognizable name and strong reputation will help build trust and confidence and will be the first step in acquiring new patients and retaining current clients. Make sure that your brand is consistent, or you will risk confusing your prospective clients as you are working to reassure and impress them.

Your brand goes far beyond your name and a logo — your brand is the promise that you make to potential patients that they can expect the same excellence and professionalism that all of your clients receive. Therefore, it is essential that your brand promise goes beyond marketing, and is put into practice every single day.

Brand Messaging

While the actual treatment that your patient receives is physical, it’s important to understand that they are coming to you for emotional reasons, most often relating to their self-image. Your messaging should be sure to address these emotional reasons, instead of simply providing prospects with a simple bulleted list of the actual services that you offer. They understand the services — they want to know that you will help them feel the way that they want to feel. Of course, it is important that you share the factual information about your spa and services, but by doing only that, you will not be addressing the core issues.

Positivity is absolutely essential in brand messaging — negative or hurtful attitudes about looks or adequacy will only serve to alienate your prospects, not endear them to your brand. If someone feels judged while they are researching your brand, you can be certain that they will expect the same judgment when they walk through the door of your med spa. Since med spa patients are looking for an emotional boost as well as a physical treatment, you can be certain they will not want to be judged.

Honesty is just as important as positivity — if not more. While your potential clients want to feel welcomed to your spa, they also want to know that they can trust your assessments, outcomes, and opinions. Wishful thinking is not the same thing as positivity and will come across as untrustworthy. In addition, you may find yourself liable to legal trouble for making false statements, which is never a good look for your brand. Avoid superlatives or guarantees; instead, talk about the truth in your goals such as “enhancing natural beauty” or “rejuvenation treatments.”

Patient testimonials are an excellent opportunity to put words to your client’s experiences in an approachable, honest way. While your marketing and brand messaging are essential to building a trustworthy practice, it is important to use your client’s words in addition to your own in order to support your services and create a relatable voice that potential patients can relate to.

Each testimonial is another opportunity to show real successes, which is an excellent marketing tool and can help build trust with prospective clients.

Here’s how Hello Rache , a Healthcare Virtual Assistants provider promotes its customer testimonials:

Avoiding medical jargon, industry terms, and clinical descriptions of services or products are other great ways to communicate your services in a conversational tone. Instead of reading like a textbook, speak in the second person — terms like you and me and us — to reinforce that you are a comfortable and welcoming business.

Remember that two of the most important things you should be focusing on while developing your brand messaging is answering these two simple questions:

• How will I benefit from this procedure or treatment?
• Why should I choose your med spa to get these benefits?

Keep in mind that a large market of diverse prospects means that you will need to consider a variety of factors when crafting your brand messages so that they speak to your target audiences based on their key demographics.

Brand Visuals

Your imaging sends an important, immediate message to your potential clients. While you may find it tempting to use photos of stunning models with perfect skin, amazing bodies, and beautiful looks to show the ultimate “after” picture, remember that you must stay honest with your clients. Nobody will look at these pictures and think that your procedure will turn them into the most beautiful person on the planet, and they are not coming to you with these hopes. By presenting these images to your potential clients, you are subtly telling them that you are not for them and that you cater to an elite clientele that fits a narrow expectation of beauty. They will opt for a med spa that doesn’t project their unreasonably high standards on their clients, and will instead go where they feel welcomed and accepted.

Using images of real people and real results will reinforce your honesty to potential clients, and it will inspire them to feel both comfortable and confident in your work and your outcomes. It is important that clients have realistic expectations about their possible outcomes, and just like testimonials, sharing real images will inform these expectations.

Another important thing to note with your brand visuals is the value that you portray. Just like images of models will alienate potential clients, brand aesthetics that are overly-ornate or gaudy may imply that your spa is overpriced for the benefits. Med spas are able to offer a wide range of procedures and treatments are a reasonable cost, especially when compared to surgical alternatives. It’s important, then, that your visual marketing appeals to a wider audience by presenting a sophisticated image with clean, simple design elements.

2. Your Website – The Essential Medi Spa Marketing Tool

Much like brick-and-mortar retailers have felt increasing pressure from e-commerce, you can expect that potential clients are not very likely to come into your med spa to inquire about your services. They will use your website to research you against your competitors, meaning that your website must answer all of their questions and address all of their concerns in a way that is simple and understandable. Much as an in-person inquiry may end in the individual booking an appointment, your website should make this option just as easy.

Think of your website as a tool for facilitating the entire in-person interaction, from answering questions and discussing services all the way to scheduling service. You must be able to show your visitors that you are knowledgeable and professional, offer the services they require and are able to help them get these services. People want to be able to see that your med spa is clean, tidy, inviting, trustworthy and that you have a welcoming personality. If a visitor can see that you will help them both emotionally and physically, then you have sent a strong message that your med spa is the right option for them.

The Importance Of Your Website

You only have a few moments to communicate your value to a visitor on your website, meaning that it is essential to capture their interest and encourage them to do more comprehensive research. A well-designed website will help visitors navigate through your services, products, and procedures as they decide whether or not you are the right fit for them. While they are learning about the actual services offered, the design of your website will subtly illustrate that your shop addresses their aesthetic concerns such as cleanliness, organization, and image.

Your website must give each visitor the option to find what they are looking for with ease. Your content must be easily navigable, it must communicate the information that the visitor needs, and must provide it in simple terms. If a visitor feels like they are being harassed with sales pitches instead of helped to the information they are seeking, they will be turned off very quickly and will seek help elsewhere.

Instead of relying on these aggressive sales tactics, help your visitor research at their own pace, and use your strong content as a highly effective call to action. Your content will inform potential clients and will save you and your staff time that may otherwise be spent presenting this information in person.

Keeping Your Website Current

Web design is continuously changing, and when a website falls behind, it is extremely apparent even to visitors who are not well-versed in digital design. It is extremely important that you keep your website “current,” for a variety of reasons. Considering that your services are intended to help patients feel and look younger, an outdated website will send a distinctly different message. In addition to the aesthetics, search engines rate websites based on their content and structure in order to determine how to present them on their search results page. This is known as Search Engine Optimization, something we explain in greater detail in Section 7. Poor SEO strategy translates directly to lost business and diminishing opportunities.

In addition to SEO functions, the basic issue of navigability must also be addressed. Most online searches come from mobile devices, meaning that it is extremely important to have a website that is compatible on a wide array of devices and browsers and offers full functionality on any platform. Since navigating to a new website is so simple, most users will not excuse difficult navigation, and will instead simply go to the next search result to find an easier site.

Check to make sure that your website is built using responsive design, meaning that it will determine the most appropriate display regardless of the device that your visitor is using.

Inform and Engage

Make sure that you don’t just list your services like a menu, without providing additional context or information to visitors. Of course, a potential patient needs to know if you offer the services they need, but they will also need information that will help them make their decision. If visitors are arriving at your site with a specific search intent, they must be able to verify that you have the product or service, but if they arrive looking for general options, must also be able to learn about what you offer, how it may benefit them, and discover new options. This is called “suggestive selling,” and it is an excellent way to grow your business.

If a visitor arrives at a site to find that it is an exhaustive list of products and services without anything more than a one-page list, you can be almost certain that they will opt to find an easier website. It is far easier to back out to the search results page and find a new site than it is to scroll through an enormous, uninformative list. Making your content easy to use encourages your visitors to interact with your site, and is another way to show potential clients that your med spa is “user-friendly.” By utilizing effective hierarchies throughout your site, you will be able to expose varying degrees of information to a visitor who can then decide if they would like to learn more about a product or service, or simply understand how it fits in the overall set of treatments.

If your med spa specializes in specific areas, it is important that you build your site around these offerings. Since you focus on it at your med spa, you should equally focus on it on your site to let visitors know that they will be dealing with authorities on the subject.

3. Landing Pages – Convert Visitors to Clients

Landing pages are essential tools on your website to developing leads and converting new patients. In fact, a landing page is a great way to give a visitor the option to schedule a consultation or book a treatment right away.

Landing pages are specialized locations on your website — each is intended to communicate a single value proposition or address a singular reason. Landing pages have a specific action that they guide a visitor towards because the visitor has arrived there in order to complete that action. This might include things like signing up for your newsletter or blog, downloading an e-book or other premium content, request a consultation or ask a question, book an appointment, or register for an event.

Each landing page varies in purpose, format, content, and appearance, but each is there to help your visitor take the next step. This means that the content and design for each page must be considered as ways to achieve that specific goal. Take a look below at some of the important factors to consider:

Landing Page Content

When a visitor arrives at a landing page, they are there to gather specific information or to perform a certain action. Your goal is to help them perform this action or achieve this goal, but in order to do so, you must provide them with something equal in value. If the goal of one landing page is to collect the visitor’s email address, you must be able to offer them valuable or enticing content that is easily palatable and compelling, such as tip sheets about skin care, explanations of procedures, or e-books that share some “industry secrets.”

Landing Page Design

As you are building or revising your website, keep in mind that a med spa is in the “appearance” business, and your website should reflect that. If visitors arrive at a landing page and find it to be jumbled, bland, gaudy, confusing, or outdated, they will not be overcome with confidence in your spa’s ability to help them with their own appearance. Make sure that your landing pages are well designed, informative, and stylish in a way that encourages conversions and supports your brand.

Landing Page Promotions

Oftentimes, visitors arrive at landing pages after clicking on something called a “Call to Action” (CTA). CTAs appear in relevant areas of emails, websites, blogs, or ads that are relevant to the landing page they direct to and offer additional information or further steps that the visitor can take.

For example, if you have written a blog about a specific procedure, you must be certain that you do not include so much information in the article that it will drive your average prospect away. However, if someone is reading your blog who has a specific interest in this procedure, a blog post alone may leave them with much to desire. Enter your CTA: with your Call To Action, you can encourage this reader to visit a landing page that offers them additional information, such as an in-depth guide on the procedure or other, more granular details. When someone clicks this CTA, there is a higher likelihood that their intent is greater than someone who does not, meaning that you can provide them with them to book an appointment or schedule a consultation from that page, now that they know you have authoritative knowledge about the subject.

Landing pages are excellent tools for sharing your digital content beyond your website. By creating specific, informative, and useful landing pages, you are creating shareable content that you can include in emails, social media posts, and even in offline marketing like print ads or billboards.

4. Your Blog – An Effective Educational Tool

Blogging is the foundation of any effective marketing effort because it offers a wide, dynamic variety of benefits including:

• Positioning yourself as an expert in the field
• Get exposure with new potential patients
• Keep your business top-of-mind
• Educate potential clients about procedures, information, and best practices
• Boost your search engine optimization (SEO) to encourage more organic web traffic

Blogs are an excellent way to answer specific questions about services and procedures that go beyond a brand name search. Often, queries on search engines are seeking answers for very specific questions, and each blog post that you create is another opportunity to drive traffic to your site by offering useful information.

The Essentials of a Great Blog

Getting started with your blog can always be difficult, and determining the right topics can feel overwhelming. As a med spa marketing, there are many great options that are available to increase your website traffic and offer highly informative information to visitors. Take a look at some of these examples:

• Education about specific treatments or services such as the benefits, differences in options, and what to expect.
• Discussions about new procedures that prospects may not have heard of, or only know very little about. Not only are you helping to educate, but you are also indicating that your spa is constantly advancing.
• Healthy living tips for diet, exercise, and skin care all relate to the services you offer and will be very helpful for your blog visitors. Patients want to know that you are concerned about the “big picture,” and not just the specific outcomes your services have.
• Inform your patients how industry news or advancing technology will help benefit them, and how your med spa is incorporating it.
• Share your good news! If your med spa receives media coverage, awards, or honors, your blog visitors will be happy to learn about these successes. Not only does it let your patients celebrate with you, it further proves your credibility and trustworthiness as well.
• Introduce new staff members or other updates to your med spa to keep your patients and blog visitors feeling like they are “in the know.” This feeling of familiarity and comfort is a great way of letting everyone know how inviting and welcoming your med spa is.

Keys To Blogging

• Make sure that you are using everyday language in your blog. Of course, you want to sound professional, but you also want to think of a blog as a direct conversation with someone.
• Consistency is key. Pick a realistic schedule, regardless of whether it is once a day or once a month. Readers like predictability, no matter the frequency.
• Promote your blog in email campaigns, social media shares, and even as links in mail signatures. Give website visitors ample opportunity to subscribe to your blog, as well.
• Don’t over-do promoting your blog. If readers feel that your blog is a shameless plug for your med spa instead of an informative or entertaining piece of content, they will be turned off.

Hire a Marketing Team for Blogging

If planning, maintaining, and executing a blog turns out to be more challenging than you had originally thought, there are other options. We offer blog writing services for our clients because they are a fundamental part of your marketing strategy and we are here to drive your campaigns forward.

5. Social Media – Find Your Prospects

Social marketing is a highly effective tool for increasing awareness and reputation of your business, as well as your staff. You can target audiences based on a variety of specifics, including their locations and other demographics that indicate a likelihood that they will value your services. Though effective, you must be strategic about your social media marketing.

Using Social Media Properly

Good content ideas on all social media platforms include things like special offers, links to content, directly responding and engaging with customers, running contests, and sharing before and after pictures (with permission, of course!). These posts can all encourage engagement and share information with prospects. Never use your personal social media accounts to engage with patients.

Each social platform is different, and each requires different handling:

• Instagram is highly visual and is a great way to share successful procedures, happy patients, and new products.
• Twitter is a great way to provide quick comments or news snippets, or for sharing links and notifications.
• Facebook gives you the opportunity to expand on your content by providing a brief intro to a link you have shared, inviting followers to events or promotions, sharing photos, more.
• Snapchat is another rapidly growing and effective tool to reach your target audience. Snapchat is a great way to share candid photos or videos, as well as hosting Q&A sessions and interviews.
• YouTube is an excellent way to distribute information with short videos, but be sure that you NEVER share actual procedures, as these can be very off-putting. You can embed YouTube videos into your website to curate your message even further.

The Rules of Social Media

Social media is all about broadening your reach by having your content shared. If you think about these platforms as conversational tools, it will really help your strategy by creating discussions and giving you insight into what your followers are interested in and concerned about. You can use this information to further develop your marketing strategy in ways that your patients will appreciate.

In keeping with the idea of a conversational platform, avoid constant sales pitches. Nobody would want to have a conversation with you if they felt that everything would lead back to pushing for a sale, and social media interactions are the same way. Give your followers the content and information that they are interested in, and you will find that you will expand your reach and increase your chances of follow-up conversations. It’s in this followup that you can talk about sales.

STAY PROFESSIONAL! If shareable content is key on social media, then nothing is more shareable than a business interaction gone wrong. Having contentious or inflammatory interactions on your social media (or anywhere) will do nothing but damage your reputation, and may have the unfortunate impact of spreading your brand far faster than your marketing plan will.

Strategize

While social media is conversational, make sure that you have a plan. If you do not have goals for your social media, you will be putting time and effort into a medium that you are unable to determine is effective or not. Some goals may be generating more leads, building your brand, increasing awareness, or nurturing current leads. There are many targets you can aim towards, but be sure that you have targets so that you can measure and quantify your efforts.

Understanding which platforms your target audiences use is extremely important as well. If you are spending a disproportionate amount of time on Facebook, but your target audience is on Instagram, then you will not be getting the results you need.

6. Email Marketing – Nurture and Convert

Even though you need to focus on social media, blogging, and your web presence, email is just as important as it has always been. Email can reach your audience in ways that other platforms do not, and it integrates great with other channels. With a combination of strong email marketing, an excellent website, and an engaging blog and social media strategy, you will be operating a wide-scale and effective marketing campaign.

Email is most effective for lead nurturing, meaning that you can continue to stay in contact with website or blog visitors and share information that they value specifically.

Effecting Content for Conversions

Make sure that you are including the following:

• An attention-grabbing subject line
• Concise body copy that provides good information
• Links to your website or blog
• An effective call-to-action

You can use email to send targeted promotions such as specials, or you can create multiple workflows that present the user a certain journey. Usually, a workflow is 4-5 emails in total and brings them along a certain topic providing different content in each email.

Marketing automation software can help you time your emails, and set triggers that remove users from workflows if they take the desired action, and allows you to track their interactions through the whole process. Using the email tracking, you can identify the most effective messaging that you are using, and further expand on it.

Making Your Email Marketing Work

You must be sure that you conform to the legal requirements for email marketing, such as only sending marketing emails to someone who has opted in and giving all email recipients the option to unsubscribe. In addition, recipients can mark your email as “spam,” which can be avoided by only sending relevant content at a reasonable rate.

In addition, you need to track your email metrics such as open rates, click-through rate, and your subscriber list. If you are getting poor open or click-through rates, then you will need to consider changing your strategy to provide more useful and engaging content. Your CTR is the best indicator of how well you are achieving your email goals — how many readers are responding to your emails. With your email metrics, you can drive down into your user groups and determine the messaging that is most-effective to each segment while determining what messaging is either disliked or disregarded by whom.

7. Online Advertising to Increase Reach

Online advertising can go through paid channels as a highly effective way to bring valuable prospects to your website and communicate your services to them after they have indicated that they want what you provide. You can do this with paid campaigns, or create more organic traffic by Seach Engine Optimization (SEO). Each has a different benefit but can all work together to improve your visibility and traffic to your company.

Search Engine Optimization

SEO is a method of driving traffic by creating effective, relevant organic content that generates high rankings in a search engine’s results. SEO requires a clear strategy and understanding of your target audiences, as well as the capacity to generate the necessary content.

Pay-Per-Click

PPC refers to the ads that you see in the tops of Bing or Google search results. They are targeted based on keywords, location, and a variety of other factors, and operate on a bidding system managed by platforms like Google Ads or Bing Ads.

Display Ads

Display ads are more commonly known as “banner ads,” and appear in the margins of websites in order to appeal to prospects based on your targeting criteria. Display ads have a wide range of options.

Social Media Ads

Social media ads are a great way to either increase the visibility of an existing post or to target your audience using messaging tailored specifically to their interests and the way they use social media.

Retargeting

Retargeting uses “cookies” to track visitors to your website as they go to other locations on the web. These ads serve to remind these prospects about why they visited your site and gives them an easy opportunity to return and resume their journey.

Native Advertising

Native advertising is a less-obvious form of advertising and involves placing informational content on someone else’s website that is formatted like that site but directs readers back to your service.

Bringing It All Together

No matter what which advertising channels you use for your brand, it is important that you are running a cost-effective, results-driven campaign that ties back to your goals. In order to maximize your efforts and ad spend, you will need to ensure that you are targeting the appropriate prospects with well-crafted ads, effective bid strategies, excellent landing pages, and comprehensive tracking and analysis.

If you are only looking at a narrow selection of metrics, it may not be telling you the big picture. For example, if you have a high CTR on a display ad, but are getting little or no conversions, then your ad is effective but your website is not. You are paying for these clicks, but you aren’t getting anything in return for these bids. If you are not tracking your bids and calculating your cost per conversion, you may be getting conversions but not realizing that you are spending more than you are making, or may be hesitant to increase your bids for a keyword that will make you more money.

Digital ad campaigns such as PPC and SEO are great tools to promote your med spa but should be parts of your overall med spa marketing and branding campaign. Without a full effort, you may be focusing on “vanity metrics” that show superficial gains, without addressing an underlying weakness in your marketing journey.

8. Offline Marketing – Tried and True

While digital marketing offers major advantages (and should be your primary focus), it does not mean that you won’t get a boost from the classics. Depending on your goals, your target audience, and how you want to execute your online campaigns, you can incorporate print ads, billboards, tv ads, direct mail campaigns, radio commercials, or promotional giveaways to drive traffic to your brand (and your digital campaigns). When an offline marketing source directs a prospect to your simple website, an informative blog post, or an actionable landing page, then your offline efforts have come full-circle.

Keeping an open mind when you are developing an overall marketing strategy is the most important way that you can stay competitive and continue to adapt to a changing marketing landscape. Consumer preferences for marketing can change rapidly, and so it is important that you continue to test and evaluate instead of putting significant effort into a campaign and then ignoring it. Just like your products and treatments are constantly evolving for better outcomes, so should your marketing.

9. Patient Reviews – Important Social Proof

No matter which medium is the most effective for marketing today, tomorrow, or any time in the near future, people will value word-of-mouth and recommendations over some of the best marketing campaigns. If a prospect moves through the funnel of a perfectly executed campaign only to find that an acquaintance had a horrible experience, then it is highly unlikely they will convert.

By providing testimonials and encouraging your patients to write reviews on the variety of review sites available online today, you are reinforcing your credibility, and proving that you stand by your service and quality.

How To Get More Reviews

• Just ask! A satisfied or loyal customer might be glad to spread your name after a great experience.
• Put a sign on your reception room indicating your preferred review sites and encourage patients to leave a review.
• After an appointment, ask for direct feedback before the patient leaves. In addition, ask if they may be willing to leave an online review. You may even be able to email or text them following their appointment to remind them about leaving a review.
• In your followup email to thank patients (if you don’t send one, you should!), you can leave links to suggested sites and ask for a review.

Managing Reviews

After a solid run of good reviews, it may seem that managing your reviews only serves to boost your self-esteem and confidence in your med spa. However, it is important that you develop a consistent management system so that you can handle both negative and positive reviews professionally and strategically.

When responding to positive reviews, leave a sincere thank you as a reply, or send personal messages for especially flattering comments. However, do not reply to every comment, since it will seem robotic and hollow.

As hard as it may be, you must ALWAYS respond to negative reviews. Post a public response to general complaints, apologizing for negative experiences, and let them know what you are doing to make it right. Consumers understand that nobody is perfect, but want to see that businesses take responsibility for their problems. In the case of very serious negative reviews, give a general apology in public and then follow up directly with the patient in order to remedy the issue.

Share Great Reviews!

When you get great reviews, use them on relevant pages throughout your website, incorporate them into marketing material, and share them on social media. In addition, you may be able to use some reviews as “case studies” to determine how and why a certain patient had an exceptional experience, and how you can replicate this continuously.

Events – Group Marketing With a Twist

Events are a great way to introduce prospective new patients to your med spa facilities and verify your services by interacting with loyal clients. They are also a great way to increase your patient retention and instill a feeling of relationship and loyalty with existing patients.

Events generate awareness of your business and give you an opportunity to put your brand into action. It offers social proof of your clientele and can help you introduce prospects to your services while making them feel comfortable in a group as opposed to an initial one-on-one. If they attend with a friend, you are both increasing your reach, and letting attendees feel more comfortable as they start to interact with your med spa and your brand.

Here are some event ideas:

• Celebrations like grand openings or patient thank you parties
• Theme events such as “back to school,” inviting mothers to treat themselves with refreshing procedures
• Cause marketing is a great way to signal your med spa’s commitments by aligning with a charity and hosting a fundraiser for a cause that you and your clientele care about
• Educational events like Q&A sessions online, streaming of non-invasive procedures or hosting a panel of experts to discuss a broad range of topics

What Makes a Great Event?

To have an event that prospects and patients remember, be sure that there is plenty of social interaction, drinks, and snacks for everyone. Make sure that you provide a presentation or other way to communicate information to attendees to ensure that they feel that their attendance taught them something. Offer event-specific discounts to encourage attendance, which is a great way to bring new prospects as well as existing patients.

Your events are a great chance for you and your staff to socialize with your customers, both prospective and active. Make sure that the event is fun and engaging, and focus on the social aspect of your presentation. Your presentation is important to add a focus to the event, but it should not be the “main event.” At the end of your event, be sure that attendees have a clear call to action on how to follow up, such as scheduling a consultation or booking an appointment. This is when your event-specific offer can really help.

11. Loyalty Programs – Reward Repeat Business

Acquiring a new customer can cost anywhere between 5-7x more than retaining an existing customer, meaning that it is extremely cost-effective to reward patient loyalty. By creating a loyalty program, you will develop a base of recurring customers that will help you with financial planning and stability, and continue to grow your services and clientele to continue increasing your med spa’s capacity and revenue.

Retention and loyalty are just as important as patient acquisition but must be continuously nurtured like any relationship. If you don’t focus on your existing patients, they may drift away and leave you looking for new clients without a loyal base. When you offer excellent services and promote loyalty, you can look forward to familiar faces returning, increased spending, and an additional marketing channel.

Loyal customers generate more than their own expenses at your med spa by sharing their experiences with friends and colleagues, both in person and online. In many ways, this sharing is similar to customer testimonials that you share online, but from a “brand advocate” who can attest to your quality and will spread the word within their personal network. Maintaining loyal customers can pay dividends beyond their own spending.

Examples of Loyalty Programs

Rewards should be relevant to your patients so that they seem thoughtful and your patients truly feel that you are grateful for their patronage. Special deals on services are always appreciated, but there are many other options that you can offer repeat patients.

The type of loyalty program can vary, with many different structures to choose from:

• Special gifts or discounts for social media interactions
• Monthly emails offering monthly specials for current and former patients (or segments that you choose with your email marketing tools)
• Surprise gifts for long-time patients
• Priority scheduling and access
• Special events for “VIP” patients

Make It Simple

If you introduce a complicated or confusing reward program, you can expect it to go unused. Users want gratification for their loyalty in a tangible, simple way. CRM software or tracking apps can help patients keep track of their rewards and give them a simple way to use their benefits.

Don’t Forget To Promote Your Program

A loyalty program will help retain clients, but can also work to encourage new patients or prospects to take part in your services by showing them what they can get in exchange for their business. If you are not promoting your program, then those who are not “in the know” will not realize that they are missing anything, and will not see that there are additional incentives for their business.

Post signs in your office, invite or inform new patients about the program, and track status regularly. By tracking user points or status, you have another relevant piece of information for marketing, too.

12. Budgeting Your Plans

Clearly, a marketing plan isn’t executed for free. However, you want to be sure that the money you are spending is giving you a return that justifies your time and expenses. This means that you need to have a marketing budget that considers your spending abilities, as well as your financial goals for this process. Treat your marketing budget as an investment — an account that you will make an initial deposit into, and will withdraw the dividends over time. Like any investment, you must do your research to ensure your principal deposit is going to the right place.

How Much To Spend?

Determining your budget is subjective to your med spa, taking into account your revenue, types of services you offer, location, and your goals. Newer businesses may want to spend more on marketing than an established med spa, in order to drive new customers to the business and establish a clientele.

In order to begin marketing, you will need an initial investment that includes your branding, logo design, website creation, social media, and marketing automation platform builds, and all relevant signage and collateral. This can be a significant up-front cost of between $15,000-25,000 but is an extremely important first step.

Once you have put the basics in place, you must build a marketing budget that reflects your current spending abilities, as well as your projections for the following years. This should include the ability to shift to new opportunities and adjusting your campaigns to make sure that you remain current.

As the business matures, you will want to continuously re-evaluate your marketing budget to ensure that it is realistic and effective. This means refining your budget to include the total amount, but also means evaluating where you are spending your marketing dollars, and determining if you should continue, or if you should make adjustments to focus on different channels or ideas.

By staying flexible and continuously evaluating your marketing efforts, you are staying competitive in a constantly evolving marketing landscape.

In Conclusion

The med spa industry is growing rapidly and will continue to do so. With this in mind, it is important for any med spa to focus on marketing their brand and spreading awareness about the medical aesthetic procedures, treatments, and specialized products that they offer. It is important that you focus on capitalizing on these opportunities while illustrating that your med spa is trustworthy, professional, and comfortable for new prospects as the market continues to grow.

In a rapidly-growing industry, it is essential that your marketing plan is strategic and comprehensive. Clearly, this guide shows that there is a lot that must be covered, but if you approach these steps methodically then you will see great progress. More than anything, understand that a marketing plan is not set in stone and that in order to stay successful, you must stay dynamic and respond to your prospects.

By taking a holistic approach to marketing, tracking your performance, and providing relevant useful content to your audience, you will begin to understand how each market force works with your plan, and how to increase or decrease focus on one or more channels.

The most important thing to remember is that while marketing is intended to bring prospects to your business, your med spa is the most important factor – if patients feel supported and comfortable with your med spa, in particular, then they will choose you. Marketing campaigns simply increase your visibility and explain to prospects how you can help them, but the most important thing is the help that they receive.

What Next?

Your patients come to you because they trust your expertise in improving their appearance and self-image. Essentially, this is what a marketing agency will do for your business by improving your outward appearance and the image you present to your audiences. You may be surprised at the results you see!

As you begin to focus on building a modern, relevant, and aggressive marketing campaign, you may find that you are struggling with the complexity of the issues. ClearPivot can help. Schedule a marketing consult with us, and we will explore your situation, discuss how we can work with you to grow your med spa business, and give you a better understanding about the benefits of partnering with ClearPivot for your marketing solutions.