To say that the med spa industry is competitive might be an understatement. According to the most recent Medical Spa State of the Industry Report, more than 5,400 med spas are open in the United States alone - that’s more than 100 med spa businesses for every state in the country.
It’s not enough to simply offer great spa treatments and hope for the best. Well-established spa marketing efforts, from fliers to local advertisements, are no longer enough. Instead, med spas need to go beyond traditional marketing techniques to reach prospective patients living in close proximity.
Fortunately, building that strategy can be relatively straightforward, as long as you know where to begin. In this guide, we’ll explore just why a digital marketing strategy is necessary to effectively promote your med spa services before exploring seven digital marketing tactics that can help attract new patients and grow your revenue.
Why Do Med Spas Need a Digital Marketing Strategy?
In a mobile-first world, digital marketing has become an essential promotional strategy in every industry. Today, more than 77% of U.S. adults own a smartphone, and studies show that the average adult spends almost seven hours every day on the internet across their devices.
Meanwhile, the use of more traditional media, like local newspapers, is plummeting. It’s no surprise, then, that most of the commonly-cited marketing strategies with the highest return on investment are digital.
That general statement holds true for the med spa industry, as well. More than three-quarters of consumers research a business online before physically visiting it. Your website becomes your “digital doorstep” for prospects looking to learn more about you, whether they’re at home on their desktop, at work, or on the go using their phones.
If your digital doorstep makes a bad impression, they won’t even make it to your physical doorstep. And if they can’t find your digital address at all, chances are they’ll frequent a business they can more easily learn about online.
7 Effective Medical Spa Marketing Strategies
Knowing that you need a digital strategy is the first step to med spa marketing success. Understanding just what strategies you need, however, is just as important.
A word of caution before we cover some of the most important options below: no strategy exists in isolation. Only a mix of digital tactics can help you optimize your digital doorstep in a way that attracts, engages, and drives potential patients into your business for skin care, laser hair removal, and other services.
1. Build an Inbound Marketing Strategy for Your Med Spa
Inbound marketing describes a philosophy in which rather than pushing out promotional messages to your audience, you pull them in through content that is valuable enough for them to want to learn more. It’s a complex infrastructure that attracts visitors to your website, keeps them around, then converts them into leads that (through careful nurturing) turn into long-term patients.
To accomplish that feat, successful inbound marketing for med spas relies on a few important components:
- Engaging content focused specifically on your audience’s interests and needs.
- A stunningly designed website that’s built to convert your visitors into leads through a stunning first impression, strategic sign-up forms, and a great user experience.
- A lead nurturing process, typically via email, that sends additional value messaging to leads and keeps your med spa business front of mind for when they’re ready to become patients.
Building this type of comprehensive strategy is complex but can also be immensely successful in driving new patients. Because of its value-first focus, it can help you establish immediate credibility and communicate your expertise in a way that turns first-time visitors into long-time patients.
2. Create a Med Spa Content Marketing Strategy
Content marketing is closely related to inbound marketing in that it’s the engine that drives attention and pulls in your audience. Like inbound marketing, it requires an audience-first approach that focuses on value over cheap promotions to build long-term, mutually-beneficial customer relationships. The content drives the attention, which your inbound-focused website can then turn into leads and patients.
But content marketing deserves unique consideration because it’s not just about driving leads. Instead, it focuses on creating a steady stream of content on your website that your audience can consume at their leisure, a regular stream of new content that answers the most common questions and objections of prospective patients.
Most frequently, that involves a blog, but the opportunities can go much further. Case studies of successful patients and in-depth testimonials can be great content for your audience. So can before-and-after photo galleries that show the impact of a skin tightening or body contouring. Ideally, your steady stream of content continues to hit common audience needs and pain point that keeps them coming back for more information over time.
3. Emphasize Your Med Spa Website’s Search Engine Optimization
Med Spa SEO is the process of making sure that your business website ranks at or near the top of relevant search engine results, especially (but not limited to) Google. Beyond some basics that need to be in place, like a mobile-responsive website design and high-quality content that keeps your audience engaged, some advanced med spa SEO strategies include:
- Keyword research, or understanding exactly what terms and phrases your audience searches for when looking for services like yours.
- Local SEO, including strategies like building your Google My Business profile and ensuring a presence on Google Maps.
- SEO-optimized content marketing, focused on the right keywords and phrases to attract new visitors to your site.
- Link building, both internally to connect different sections of your website and externally by getting other relevant and credible websites to link back to yours.
- Technical SEO, ensuring a positive user experience through relevant title formats, fast page loads, and more.
The best SEO is both strategic and integrated with many of the other strategies listed in this guide. For example, reputation management (covered in more detail below) becomes an important part of your local SEO efforts. Much like inbound philosophies, building your entire digital marketing strategy with SEO in mind can go a long way towards long-term, sustainable success.
4. Establish a Paid Advertising Strategy for Your Med Spa
While organic, value-based tactics like content marketing and SEO are a crucial promotional component for med spa businesses, paid advertising can and should play a prominent role as well. It produces faster, more immediate results than SEO, can help to highlight valuable content immediately after publishing, and offers tight targeting parameters that allow you to show ads only to your most relevant audiences.
Another benefit of most modern digital ads is their payment structure. Programmatic advertising tends to be pay-per-click, which means the budget is charged only when your ad is interesting enough for a user to click on it. An automatic bidding process establishes how much a click is worth, then places your ads accordingly within your budget.
Digital ads, of course, can come in a number of shapes and forms. Most prominent are social media ads, which are largely visual and targeted based on user demographics and interests, and paid search ads, which are text-based and targeted based on specific keywords. A mix of both ad types can help you effectively target your audience with (almost) immediate results.
5. Take Your Med Spa Social Media Marketing to the Next Level
Most med spas have at least some social media presence. Taking a strategic approach to it can go a long way to building brand awareness and community among your patients. That means focusing on the channels where your patients are most likely to spend time.
As with content marketing, the key is focusing on audience value over promotions. Rather than simply posting about your skin resurfacing service, show a quick video or image that demonstrates how the procedure works in general. Visual content especially drives significant engagement on social media.
However, even with a strategic approach, non-paid social media marketing can be limited in terms of reach and engagement. Consider boosting individual posts to make sure they get seen outside of your existing followers and build your audience over time.
6. Manage Your Med Spa Online Reputation
Reputation management for med spas involves taking an active role in managing your online reviews on sites like Google, social media, and listing sites like Yelp. Amplify your positive reviews while responding to and address concerns found in any negative reviews.
Google reviews are a crucial component of your local SEO, as well. A well-reviewed business will receive more prominent placements on search results as well as more clicks. Meanwhile, proactive management of negative reviews can turn angry customers into loyal ones.
Positive reviews are perfect to add to your website and integrate into your content marketing. Depending on your business size and budget, reputation management can be done manually, or you can use a marketing automation tool to scale more easily.
7. Embrace Marketing Automation Tools for Med Spas
Digital marketing can get complex quickly. Fortunately, a number of automated tools can help you keep it simple while still reaping the rewards of all the strategies outlined above.
Thousands of medical practitioners, for instance, have added patient acquisition platforms like DoctorLogic to the backend of their website. These platforms can automate a wide range of tasks:
- Content creation
- Search engine optimization
- Google Review collection and solicitation
- 24/7 managed live chat
DoctorLogic’s agency side can even help to build or redesign your website to fit your inbound marketing strategy, attracting visitors and strategically turning them into patients. You can focus on offering the best dermal fillers possible, while we build the foundation for your digital promotions and strategy.
Build an Impressive Digital Doorstep to Optimize Your Med Spa Marketing
A mix of the above tactics build a comprehensive web of digital marketing strategies that effectively promote and grow your med spa business. However, it all starts with building an impressive digital doorstep that finds your audience, offering so much value that they can’t help but turn into patients over time.
The more impressive that doorstep is to visits, the more likely they are to convert into leads. Through a patient acquisition platform, you can then implement the tools to convert leads into patients, creating a reliable pipeline in the process.
In short, you don’t have to complete the transition to digital on your own. Request a free demo to learn more about DoctorLogic’s patient acquisition platform today.