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Hopefully, your cosmetic practice already has a pretty good process for capturing patient results and publishing them to your website. But there’s always room for improvement, no? Take a look at these tips and while you’re at it, refresh yourself on the basics of capturing great before and after photos.
Provide More Context
As a surgeon or provider, you have a well-honed sense of the difference between an “OK” cosmetic result and one that truly stands out. But the people viewing your gallery have far less experience with this, so it helps to clue them in about what makes your results so good.
For starters, make sure to include as many relevant details as you can about the patient. For instance, a breast reduction case might include patient age, height, weight, bra size before surgery, volume of tissue removed, and bra size after surgery. These details can help viewers judge how similar a case they’re looking at is to their current look and their actual goals.
But beyond the metrics, more description of how the surgery was planned or performed, or specifics to note about why the result looks so good (for instance, the excellent scar healing, dead-on symmetry, or improved overall proportions) can give an added dimension to help viewers understand what they’re looking at. It also helps to position you as a true expert who is dedicated to perfection.
Include Social-Media-Safe Shots
As you should already know, exposed breasts, privates and butts are a no-go on socials. But that doesn’t mean you can’t share your breast and body cases there. You just need to follow the rules. When taking before images, take a set with the patient still having her bra/panties on.
Sure, this will somewhat mask the results, particularly for breast enhancement cases. But it’s a useful set of images that will keep your social accounts safe and has the added benefit of giving people who view your cases on your site an idea of how they could look after surgery in a swimsuit or attractive lingerie.
Consider Adding a Search/Filter
We’ve all spent time sifting through products online looking for that perfect lawn tool, wireless speaker, or holiday sweater. And while your patients certainly aren’t products, many of your website users are conditioned to expect that they can sift and sort to save time and get to the information they want quickly.
Which is where a filter for your gallery can prove quite valuable, but you have to be willing to do the work to set it up and maintain it. Let’s say you want your gallery viewers to filter by variables such as height, weight, and age. Just to have a functional filter option for these variables, you will need to capture this information and update it on each case. Which can be a lot of legwork for your front office staff. And then you have to get in the habit of adding this info in whenever new cases are posted.
And that’s just the basic stats. If, for instance, you want gallery viewers to be able to filter tummy tuck cases by waist measurement before/after surgery, amount of tissue removed, or other variables, you’ll need to be able to add that information in for all cases. Otherwise, your filters will be returning incomplete results.
The ABCs: Always Be Casing
To paraphrase Alec Baldwin, the most important thing you can do to maximize the value of your photo gallery is to constantly add cases. Even if the suggestions above are a bit more of a lift than your office can handle right now, don’t lose sight of the fact that you should Always Be Casing, ideally adding at least 5-10 new cases online every month.
This is hard to tell a surgeon or any other dedicated medical professional, but don’t let perfect be the enemy of good here – your results deserve a chance to be seen by as many people as possible. Take good quality photos and get them posted as soon as you can, with an eye on continuous improvement as your bank of cases grows.
