How to Sell Plastic Surgery Online While Building Trust & Authority
It’s no secret that to attract more (and better-fit) clients, plastic surgery offices need to be able to showcase the benefits of their services to online audiences. But how do you sell online visitors on something that’s so visual?
… We’ll show you. 😉
From your plastic surgery clinic’s website design and content to launching, analyzing, and optimizing both earned and paid media, digital marketing is a crucial element of every practice’s successful online marketing strategy.
3 Principles of High-Performing Plastic Surgery Websites
Most prospective customers will visit your website before they ever step foot in your clinic. And — you know this better than anyone — those first impressions count.
No matter how breathtaking your clinic’s physical location is, no matter how many awards you’ve won…
If your website doesn’t leave a good impression, you’re hurting your chances of winning new clients.
Luckily, excellent website design doesn’t happen by accident. To create a high-performing website, focus first on three key principles: branding, usability, and optimization.
1.
Branding & Aesthetics
How Your Site Looks & Feels
The look and feel of your website is just as important as the presentation of your physical clinic, so it’s worth taking a hard look at your branding.
(Note that “branding” doesn’t just refer to your clinic’s logo and color palette! Your brand is about how you make your clients feel. So your website needs to align with (and add to) that feeling.)
In the past, plastic surgery industry branding often presented a glamorous, exclusive feeling. While this angle still appeals to older client bases, if you also want to attract younger customers, you’ll want to focus a bit more on the ease, simplicity, and accessibility of your services.
Try emphasizing a clean and modern aesthetic on your website to welcome a wider group of potential clients, while upholding the same professional, high-end feel you offer in-clinic.
2.
Usability
How Your Site Functions
To turn your curious website visitors into paying clients, you need to ensure they have a positive experience when using your website. That experience largely boils down to usability — AKA how visitors interact with your site.
You want to offer visitors an intuitive, enjoyable experience. But too often, plastic surgery clinics overcomplicate their navigation, offer unclear direction, and even have broken “Contact Us” forms. (If you have a contact form on your site, go submit a message right now and make sure it’s not broken.)
Here are some tips to improve the usability of your website:
- Use a consistent layout on every page, so users know where to look for information
- Make sure it’s easy and intuitive to navigate, and that you’ve front-and-centered the most important or popular info
- Incorporate lots of headings and subheadings, so content is easy to skim
- Make sure your page load speed is fast (ideally under 2 seconds) — because users won’t wait around
- Make sure the site is mobile-responsive, AKA looks good and is still fully usable on every type of phone
- Check for broken links — this advice is so important, we’re repeating it
It’s also important to consider the architecture of your website. Are your pages divided into separate categories for facial, body, and skin treatments? Do you have dedicated sections for surgical and non-surgical treatments? Or are your treatment pages all mixed together without a logical hierarchy?
Consider the type of structure that will make it easiest for users to find what they’re looking for. Then build it.
3.
Optimization
How to Constantly Improve Your Plastic Surgery Website
Creating a more user-friendly site using the tips above will help your website rank higher in search. What else will? A solid search engine optimization (SEO) strategy.
SEO makes it easier for search engines to understand the pages on your website. After all, if search engines (which read every single line of text) can’t understand what your website is about, you’ve got no chance of showing up when someone searches for “plastic surgeon in Los Angeles” or “what’s the recovery like following a tummy tuck”.
Some things you can do to optimize your website include:
- Ensure your title tags, headings, and URLs are well-written — when in doubt, don’t be afraid to add detail, even if it lengthens a heading
- Include alt text on all images — this tells search engines more about the content of your site, so it knows what search inquiries are relevant to you
- Add internal links between pages on the website — referencing yourself isn’t just a power move. It can actually improve your search ranking!
- Use structured data to potentially snag yourself some rich snippets — yes, that was a lot of jargon. Essentially, this means: offer Google more information in context and you might show up as a search “snippet” that compels users to click through
- Include social tags to control what information is shown when your website is shared on social media — It’s all about those clicks, baby
👆 Got all of that? Great.
Now it’s time to look at your content strategy.
What blogs, articles, videos, and other types of content are you publishing on your website?
How to Develop Powerful, Useful Content to Promote Your Plastic Surgery Clinic
As you probably already suspected, your content can make or break your online marketing.
From your page content, to your more specialized landing pages, to your videos and blog posts, the content on your website is your opportunity to demonstrate your knowledge and expertise.
Remember, you’re asking people to trust you with their health and well-being!
You need to build credibility and instill confidence in potential clients by showing them you’re a reputable clinic that can perform procedures safely and achieve excellent results.
What kind of content will help you get there? Great question. Before digging into blogging, you’ll want to focus first on improving your main site page content.
First, Nail Your Page Content
Your page content needs to be engaging and informative.
It should clearly present:
The range of surgical and cosmetic procedures you perform
1
How a customer will benefit from having each procedure.
2
Why they should choose you to perform that procedure.
3
Chances are, your current site is hitting one (maybe two) of those points. 😬
Along with making sure your content is clear and informative, the way you structure that content is important. Develop tailored content for individual procedures, treatments or products, and keep it clean and concise.
Your content is also a great way to build your brand, so consider publishing things that readers will value, like:
Before-and-after pictures that demonstrate your level of experience and the type of results that can be achieved
Client testimonials and patient stories (while being mindful not to identify patients/stay within HIPAA compliance)
Biography pages about surgeons and other staff in the clinic
It’s also a good idea to include plenty of visuals, videos and infographics to break up text and explain complex concepts.
If you’re feeling stuck, just imagine your page content is a way for prospective clients to meet you and your staff before they ever step foot in the door. Ask, “What would they like to know?”
Next, Create Blog & Video Content About Plastic Surgery
If you aren’t already, you also need to start blogging.
Blogging helps improve your search rankings in multiple ways. Not only does it add to the volume of content on your website — telling search engines “Hey, this site is worth checking out” — it also means you’ll be mentioning all-important industry keywords, which search engines love.
Develop a blog publishing schedule (whether that’s weekly, fortnightly or monthly) and stick to it to keep your content fresh and relevant.
What should you write about? Lots of things.
Here are some tried-and-true blog content ideas:
Spotlight a certain procedure you perform. Educate readers, answer their questions, and communicate the benefits of undergoing the treatment.
Explain and showcase the latest cutting-edge plastic surgery techniques or tools. This will reinforce your position at the forefront of the industry.
Answer common questions and concerns in an interview-style format. There’s a reason FAQ posts are so common — readers love them!
With every blog, speak conversationally and clearly, as if you’re talking directly to the reader.
How to Generate More Leads with “Earned Media”
What’s earned media? Broadly speaking, it’s any “free” or unpaid traffic you generate from things like mentions, shares, reposts, and reviews.
Earned media is great not just because you don’t have to pay for it, but because the more other websites and social media users are talking about you, the more online authority you gain.
Let’s look at a few ways to earn more mentions and attention.
Build Your Social Media Presence
Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube are powerful tools that plastic surgery clinics can use to build your brand, increase your reach, and engage with your audience.
To build a social media presence that generates actual leads, try the following:
Create visual content that’s highly shareable
Show plenty of before-and-after photos
Provide interesting statistics and facts
Link to your blog content
Allow and respond to comments to create a two-way conversation
Post regularly to keep followers engaged
Harness the Power of Patient Reviews
Word-of-mouth referrals have always been considered marketing gold in the plastic surgery arena. But with the rise of the Internet, online reviews have virtually replaced the traditional referral model.
In fact, almost three out of four plastic surgery patients will look at online reviews before choosing a physician! That’s why it’s imperative to build review requests into your patient experience.
Encourage patients to leave you an online review about their experience on Google, RealSelf, Facebook, Yelp, HealthGrades, or Vitals. For best results, focus on 1-2 of these platforms to build a collection of reviews in one place, vs. spreading them across a dozen review sites.
Of course, whenever you invite feedback, there’s bound to be some criticism.
How you deal with that criticism will tell future patients what to expect from your practice.
Use Paid Media to Help People Searching for Plastic Surgery Find You
You also have the option of using paid media to get your plastic surgery clinic seen by your target market. Paid media includes channels like pay-per-click (PPC) ads, social media advertising, display ads, retargeting, and sponsored content.
Now, that’s a lot to choose from. So you might be wondering…
Which Paid Media Channels Are Ideal for Plastic Surgery Marketing?
PPC advertising is one of the most popular forms of paid media. With PPC, you can bid on plastic surgery- and location-related keywords, like “plastic surgeon San Francisco” or “breast implants in Houston,” to get your clinic displayed at the top of the search results.
You can also target a very specific type of clientele through social media advertising on Facebook and Instagram. To get the most out of social media paid ads, develop ads with images or videos that showcase your clinic or treatments. You can also use previous client testimonials to give viewers a firsthand account of the level of service your clinic offers, and the types of results you can achieve for your clients.
In all of your paid media, make it explicitly clear what you want the viewer to do (this is known as a call to action) — whether that’s subscribing to your email list or booking a consultation with one of your surgeons.
Psst, Don’t Forget to Fine-Tune Your Paid Media Targeting & Spend
With so many competitors in the plastic surgery arena, it’s dangerously easy to spend a lot of money on paid media without getting much return on your investment.
To keep your advertising expenses in check, pay close attention to your ad positioning, design and content, as well as your targeting strategy, keywords and bidding prices and thresholds.
Make sure you also keep an eye on important statistics like click-through rates (CTRs), cost per click (CPC), number of conversions, and cost per acquisition (CPA) to assess how well your paid campaigns are performing.
If This All Seems Like a Little Too Much…
Lean On Us for Plastic Surgery Marketing Made Easy
Congrats on making it all the way through this plastic surgery digital marketing primer! Hopefully you’re taking away some useful insights.
One last thing:
If you have the time and resources to manage the online marketing for your plastic surgery clinic yourself, that’s great. But if, like many busy clinic managers, you’ve got enough on your plate… let us handle it for you.
At MD Logica, we design highly customized online marketing campaigns for a wide range of medical businesses and plastic surgery clinics like yours. From creating beautiful and information-packed websites, to improving your SEO, to running effective PPC marketing, we can take care of everything.
We’ll bring you the patients — so you can just focus on providing outstanding care.
Find out if we’re the right fit to work together.
Beverly Hills, CA 90210