With everything in your life getting more complicated, we’re excited to offer you a pretty darn simple formula for growing your aesthetic practice. Can it really be this easy? It can! But spoiler alert: the devil is in the details and your mileage will vary depending on how well you execute on each step of this method.
1. Get Patients’ Attention
Anyone who’s tried to ask a significant other to do a chore or a tween to do anything without a screen in front of their face knows that attention is in awfully short supply these days. How do you get your practice into the vast mind mix churning through people’s thoughts? The most proven method is through repeated positive touchpoints. For instance, think of all the different ways Coke makes its way into your mind:
- Iconic, consistent branding, colors and messaging
- End caps, coolers at check-out stands, and in-store seasonal displays
- Paid ads on streaming services, before movies, at sports events, and more
- Tie-ins with trending brands, influencers, and complimentary products
- Paid placement in shows, movies, and video games
- Targeted marketing and events for limited-time flavors and products
While your practice doesn’t have the resources or the reach to match Coke’s advertising budget, you can still steal their fundamental marketing concepts. At the core of it all is a recognizable brand. From there, make a mark on all the digital touchpoints your prospective patients might hit – Google search, Google Ads, social media, YouTube, etc. Give them something memorable on your site, whether it’s a treatment planner, super-helpful video, or even dazzling real patient photography. And while digital is still by far the biggest bang for the buck marketing channel, don’t completely dismiss offline channels where receptive eyeballs may be lurking. Maybe that’s a community newspaper or magazine. Maybe it’s a billboard by your office. Maybe it’s a co-branding opportunity with a local salon.
2. Keep Their Attention
Now for the tricky part. Maybe your brand has left a mark for many prospective patients. How do you stay top of mind? The best way to do that digitally is to have a bangin’ social media presence. Do what it takes to bring your personality and differentiators front and center in fun, engaging ways. All of our clients who “get it” have a dedicated in-house resource to capture videos, photos and more that will resonate on Instagram and TikTok. They follow the trends and keep a close eye on views and engagement to do more of what works. Beyond that, email and text campaigns can also sell your value and convince prospects to take the next step. An informative drip email campaign, monthly newsletter, or text message about a blowout special provides prospects with value associated with your brand.
3. Make the Sale
At some point, the followers and fans you’ve built by contributing to the conversation and earning trust will be ready to take the next step and inquire about your services. Think of this stage as the most important touchpoint of all – when a prospect chooses to reach out to you on a personal level, they are expecting you to 1. deliver on all the things you’ve been saying, and 2. make their engagement as effortless as possible. This is your chance to either delight or deflate your prospects.
The first key to success at this stage is deep staff training. The folks who field phone calls, respond to social comments, and triage your email Inbox all must have internalized the importance of customer service and the value of every lead that contacts you, wherever they choose to contact you. Even the person with the “dumbest” question deserves a thoughtful response. It can help to offer your staff scripts and templates so that your messaging stays fairly consistent, but make sure they never lose sight of the fact that they need to have a real conversation with the person on the other end of that keyboard or phone line.
And a note about automated/online scheduling. This can be a great option for medspas, just make sure that your high level of personal touch and excellent experience carries through. A janky or outdated scheduler will very quickly kill the good vibes you’ve created by offering the convenience of online scheduling.
The second key to success is offering an unbeatable consultation or treatment experience. It’s true what they say about first impressions. Carry the touchpoint concept into your office. Heck, start with the parking lot. Do you have easily seen signs at every entrance? Clear indication where guest parking is? Easy to follow directions to your office suite? Hopefully, you get the picture. Put yourself in a patient’s shoes and look at every aspect of your office for ways to make their experience more inviting and pleasant.
From there, it’s time to do what you do best – provide excellent care that is attentive to every need.
4. Get Them Talking
So you’ve done a great job with everything so far. Now it’s time to reap the rewards (well, besides the patient fees you already collected, ha). Excellent experiences are rewarded by excellent reviews. The best practices have developed ways to remind, nudge and arm-twist if necessary to get their patients to leave lots of reviews online. We’re fans of using an automated tool like BirdEye along with a personal ask in the office when a service is completed or follow-up visit takes place. But the how is not as important as long as you are consistently building positive reviews online.
Another way to get your patients talking is through a referral program. Think this will be a pain in the butt to administer? It doesn’t have to be! BirdEye offers a referral widget, and there are many other similar ones available online too. You can simply give your patients a personal referral link that allows them to keep track of referral rewards easily.
5. Welcome Them Back
The same channels that brought your patients in can be used to incentivize them returning for additional services. Create a loyalty rewards program and promote it on social media, through your newsletter, and via periodic text reminders. There are several good out-of-the-box digital loyalty apps to administer these programs, or just go with a more traditional self-run option. Keep the excitement going by offering bonus rewards certain months or times of the year. In addition, you can hold exclusive events for past patients, showing them how much they mean to you.
At the heart of any growing practice is stellar patient care. None of the above will be successful without covering that fundamental. But by putting this 5-step process in place, and continually measuring where you are seeing success, and where your pain points are, you have a proven way to maintain a patient pipeline in both good and bad times.
