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Why do plastic surgeons need digital marketing?
To strengthen your position in a highly competitive market, you’ll need well-formulated and perfectly executed digital marketing strategies. This will build brand awareness, improve credibility and trust, and convert more leads into paying patients.
Whether you are starting your new practice or have been running your practice for years, digital marketing for plastic surgeons is becoming essential to financial sustainability. This article will explain why plastic surgery digital marketing is so vital and explore ways how you can master it and boost your revenue streams.
Why digital marketing for plastic surgeons is becoming more essential?
- Changing consumer behavior
Referrals are losing power. This is experienced by all providers in the medical industry due to changing consumer behavior. Studies reveal that 88% of people trust online reviews, and the percentage of people changing their minds after viewing online reviews is also increasing.
That means that although a trusted acquaintance or even a physician refers a potential patient to a plastic surgeon, they will go online to investigate and possibly choose another plastic surgeon if they don’t like what they experience online.
- Economic factors
To date, 2023 has painted a nightmarish landscape for the future of consumer spending. Plummetting stock markets, disintegrating digital currencies, and exploding inflation are some of the main factors why consumers are tightening their belts.
With less disposal income, consumers are bound to spend less on non-essential goods and services, which means the pie is getting smaller, and competitors will fight harder for the crumbs. Digital marketing for plastic surgeons is essential to slap the hands of your competitors to allow you a more significant share of the potential patients pie.
- Post- Covid
During the Covid-19 pandemic, Zoom became a household name, and people were spending more time onscreen meeting for work or social purposes than ever before. This led to the so-called Zoom-Boom. A percentage of people that saw themselves on screen more than before didn’t like what they saw, which led to an increase in cosmetic procedures worldwide.
People were also spending fewer thanks to lockdowns, and government stimulus also helped to fatten their wallets. But now, the lockdowns are over, and the government stopped the Covid stimulus in September 2021. This will also contribute to the reduction in demand, which will make the competition more fierce.
These are only the main factors supporting the case for aggressive digital marketing strategies to be implemented as soon as possible.
Boosting your brand with digital marketing strategies
Differentiating yourself from competitors should be the primary motivator behind a plastic surgery marketing plan. Establishing your brand identity and promoting brand awareness are the foundation of your marketing strategies.
We highly suggest getting professional help from plastic surgery marketing experts to overhaul your marketing plan, starting from building your brand identity to reputation management. An ROI-based strategy with ongoing monitoring after implementation is the best way to secure continuous growth.
We highly recommend that you also read our article regarding the importance of reputation management for plastic surgeons.
We will now examine some pillars supporting digital marketing for plastic surgeons.
A great medical website is the Sherman tank of your marketing attack. Although all the other digital marketing tools like social media marketing, email marketing, online reviews, etc., are vital and assist in creating a marketing synergy, your website remains the anchor of your online presence.
In a previous article, we did an in-depth exploration of plastic surgery website design, and we highly recommend that you read this article to get a better understanding of how to elevate your website.
Building a fantastic website does not help your cause if your website only appears on page two or three of the various search engines’ results. A recent study revealed that 98% of respondents do not browse past the first page of search engine results.
This is where SEO comes into play. Optimizing your website to improve your search rankings is one of the most important things you can do to boost your digital marketing efforts.
SEO is a monster to master. The search engine algorithms look for a myriad of things before changing your ranking on search results. Also, these algorithms constantly change over time, which means what you do today might not be effective tomorrow.
Very few plastic surgeons have the wish to study and master SEO, and even less have the time to do so. Hiring experts with a proven track record in boosting SEO is your best bet to optimize your website so that you can climb the search results ladder.
While SEO is a long-term strategy for organic growth and sustainable lead generation, PPC ads will provide you with those quick wins over the short term. PPC advertising refers to advertisements on Google, Facebook, YouTube, etc., where you only pay if someone clicks on your ad.
PPC will bring more potential patients to your website, and more traffic on your website will also help boost your SEO.
Create social media profiles and provide links from your website to these profiles. This is a straightforward way to boost your SEO also. But when it comes to social media, simply having profiles and posting content is not going to get you more patients.
Creating a robust content plan with a posting schedule is the first step in harnessing the power of social media. Your social media marketing success depends on various factors, including posting frequency, content characteristics, and interaction.
Mastering social media marketing is not a slow process as you will only learn what works and what doesn’t over time. Collaborating with marketing experts initially is the best way for you to boost your online presence and boost your brand awareness. During this time, you could learn from the marketing experts and take over their responsibilities in the future once you have more experience in the field.
Creating blogs on your website and promoting them via social media is a great strategy to get more web traffic. In addition to boosting traffic, content marketing can also contribute to SEO and boost your rankings.
Keywords can be included in articles that will be sniffed out by the search engine crawlers and match your website with search queries with more ease.
Content marketing also helps boost your credibility and generates trust in your practice. People will become more trusting of your brand by publishing interesting articles about the news of your industry, procedures, and other health-related articles.
Content marketing should be a priority when it comes to digital marketing for plastic surgeons.
Part of your content strategy should include posting videos. Create a YouTube channel where you post exciting videos featuring the same topics as explained in the content section above. It is also a great way to exhibit your practice and the people that work there.
By experiencing more of what is going on inside your practice, patients become more trusting and susceptible to selecting your service.
- Google My Business (GMB)
As we mentioned earlier, there are many tools to boost your online presence, but they also work together to create synergy. GMB is one of those tools.
Google My Business (GMB) is one of the best tools to promote trust in cosmetic surgeons. It is an intuitive tool for managing your online presence across Google and Google Maps, and best of all, it is free.
Apart from just providing a window into your business, being on GMB and other online directories is something that search engines look for, and you will be rewarded with higher ranking points.
When done correctly, email marketing is a powerful tool for generating leads and fostering patient growth. But again, there is a lot to learn about email campaigns, and doing it wrong, could have a reverse effect.
Just the way marketing emails are written is something that very few copywriters can master, let alone people outside of the industry. Choosing the correct software to run email campaigns smoothly, monitor effectively, and be able to determine ROI is also essential when considering email marketing.
Again, we recommend getting a digital marketing agency to assist you with the initial setting up and the first couple of email campaigns at least.
- Press releases and guest posts
External references to your practice are not only great for attracting potential patients but also assist in boosting SEO. It is similar to GMB and other online directories that help to boost SEO.
Certain businesses end up in press releases without attempting to do so. This could happen for the right or wrong reasons, but in either case, it helps direct traffic to their website nonetheless. As a startup practice or small-to-medium-sized practice, you’ll need to create your own press releases to expand your online presence.
Finding news sites that allow self-published news articles or even websites that will enable guest article blogs is a great way to create links back to your business.
- E-books
Perhaps you have heard of the term ‘lead magnet’ before. If not, a lead magnet is something that attracts someone to your business or prompts action from them, such as subscribing to a company. One of the most popular dangling carrots for subscribing to a company is free e-books.
The e-book should contain information related to your industry or services but should be something that readers would want to read. It is tricky to create this e-book because what you think is interesting as a plastic surgeon might not necessarily be what people are looking for.
A digital marketing agency will have experience in the field and can determine through market research what works best for a particular industry. Most digital marketing agencies also offer ghostwriting services where their own professional writers will construct e-books and articles anonymously.
It is an effective strategy to include if you want to pursue email marketing and need to expand your email database. It is also an excellent tool for targeted marketing. Suppose someone downloaded an e-book about breast enhancements. In that case, you know exactly what this potential patient is interested in and can direct your marketing efforts accordingly.
Hiring an agency with expertise in digital marketing for plastic surgeons.
You would’ve noticed throughout the article that we mentioned digital marketing agencies. It is not mandatory to hire a digital marketing agency, but it would save you tons of time and frustration. As we mentioned, mastering all the aspects of digital marketing is not an easy task.
SEO in itself, with all its ever-changing moving parts, is extremely difficult to master. And getting all the other marketing tools to work together harmoniously to create synergy is even more daunting. And where would you find time to invest in these formulating, executing, and monitoring these strategies when you have the practice to run.
Even something as simple as content creation is tricky. Being a maestro in your field, you could probably (if you had the time) knock out an interesting 1000-word article in no time. But without proper keyword research and inclusion, specified plastic surgeon SEO formatting, backlinks, etc., the article would appear very low down on search engine results.
Reputation management is vital to drive potential patient interest, but it consumes a lot of time. Digital marketing agencies have the software to track online sentiment and react fast to ensure that your online reputation remains positive.
The list goes on. But the value of digital marketing agencies extends beyond the formulation and implementation of digital marketing strategies. Continuous monitoring and support afterward are essential to ensure optimal brand awareness, lead generation, and getting you the best ROI.
Practice Tech Solutions have been focusing on plastic surgery digital marketing for over a decade. We offer end-to-end digital marketing solutions starting with brand identity and fit-for-purpose medical web design, all the way through to reputation management.
More importantly, Practice Tech Solutions offer ongoing support and provides a comprehensive dashboard with statistics so that you can see your plastic surgery digital marketing plan executed efficiently.
Allow us to stand in your corner and support you while you fight for that potential patient pie in this environment of increasing competitiveness.
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