Creating The Ultimate Online Marketing Plan For Your Plastic Surgery Clinic
Plastic surgery clinics need marketing plans to be competitive. Today, the most effective marketing plans are those that emphasize the importance of your online leads.
Nearly 60% of people search for local businesses online every day. That makes the internet the main source of leads for most surgical clinics, especially those that depend on local leads. If you don’t maximize your visibility, those leads will go to your competitors instead.
In this guide, you’re going to learn how to put together a marketing plan that considers all of the most important elements of your online presence. We’ll cover how to:
- Optimize your website for client intake
- Maximize your visibility on search engines
- Manage online customer relationships
Optimize your website for client intake
Your website will be the headquarters for all of your future online marketing efforts. Every customer that you attract from search engines, social media, or even ads will land here.
That means all of your other investments are wasted if you don’t make the right impression. Your website must:
- Be attractive and professional
- Include the information that your leads are trying to find
- Offer visitors a convenient way to convert
How to apply it to your marketing plan
If your website doesn’t yet meet the standards listed above, your plan needs to include all the work you’re going to do to bring it up to code.
The first thing you should do is provide a budget for the improvement of your site. This can be a one-time expense to hire a design team or a monthly budget that allows for upgrades over time.
If your budget is limited, you can focus on maximizing the value of a single page, and directing all of your traffic there until the rest of the website is complete. In marketing, pages designed to convert visitors into clients are called ‘landing pages.’
Even after you’ve completed your upgrades, a budget for your website should be part of your marketing plan. This budget will allow you to steadily add new content to cover your services or to match upgrades that your competitors are using to get ahead.
Maximize your visibility on search engines
Research has shown that search engines drive nearly 3x as many visitors compared to non-search visitors. Search engines like Google are likely to be your most significant source of traffic, but you’ll only get traffic if you’re highly visible.
To be visible on a search engine, you need to appear on either the first page (searchers rarely go to the second), or in special search features such as the Map Pack.
How to apply it to your marketing plan
If your clinic doesn’t appear on the first page when you search for terms such as…
- Plastic surgery clinics
- Plastic surgery clinics near me
- Plastic surgery clinics in [local city]
- [plastic surgery procedures] near me
…then you need to make Search Engine Optimization (SEO) part of your plastic surgery marketing plan.
Fortunately, SEO is more cost-efficient than most other kinds of advertising. Simple steps like adding high-quality content to your site can help you climb the results quite quickly.
Another important step is to make sure that your business is registered with Google My Business (GMB). GMB is a free service that allows you to create a business directory style profile. You can add your address, services, opening hours, and contact information.
Only GMB-registered businesses appear in the local map results. However, Google will create profiles for popular businesses, and wait for the owners to claim them. Make sure you do that now if you haven’t already.
Establish an ongoing budget to monitor and improve your SEO performance. Steadily producing new content (such as 1 new blog post about your services a month) will have strong long-term effects.
Manage online customer relationships
Potential clients who discover you online expect to be able to communicate with you quickly. They may use the following methods to voice their questions, approval, or frustration:
- Contact forms
- Social media groups
- Reviews
Some of these messages will be visible to the public, so it’s important that you monitor them. You should check all email and social media messages daily, and monitor all reviews for your business.
Bad reviews may not be removable (except by the person who posted them). These reviews can remain in place for years and cause you to lose leads the entire time.
How to apply it to your marketing plan
Managing customer relationships can be a full-time job. If you have room in your budget, you can assign someone to make sure that each type of message is checked every day.
Build your own pages on social media. You should have a clinic page for Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. It’s not necessary to try to develop a massive following. You just want to make sure that local customers with personal questions can find you on their platform of choice.
Establish an ongoing budget, or set some time aside each day, to make sure that you respond to online reviews. If they are positive, leave a thank you message so that any customers who read the reviews will develop an even better impression of you.
Bad reviews require immediate attention due to their potential cost. Your GMB profile is likely going to be the source of most of your reviews but watch out for activity on other sites, such as Yelp, or cosmetic-specific sites.
In many cases, it is practical to give full refunds to remove bad reviews, even if your clinic is not at fault. If you have a high volume of patients, you may need to consider a monthly budget for this.
Build a comprehensive clinical marketing plan
By focusing on your website, your search performance, and the relationships you have with customers online, you can take control of how your clinic is seen. Develop a plan that allows you to properly track and improve all of these vital elements.
