Every small business owner wants to see their revenue heading on a straight upward line year after year. The closer it looks to a rocket launch, the better! But the reality is, even highly successful and well run businesses are subject to broader market trends, bumps in the road, and unexpected shakeups.
What’s this have to do with your medical practice? In the primary specialties we serve – cosmetic surgery, plastic surgery, and medical spas – many of our clients are hearing WAY more crickets than they would like to. Business is slow. Many factors are in play, including:
- The rocky economy. No, we’re not talking about Sylvester Stallone in sweats, but the tough business climate may have you feeling like you got a nasty right hook from that guy. Prospective patients seem especially nervous to spend, and web search volume for elective surgery is down, indicating folks are pushing the pause button.
- Natural demand cooling after insanely busy post-pandemic years. Ah, the glory days of 2021 and 2022. We hope you set aside some of those bonkers revenue months so you can smartly invest now in achieving a steady revenue stream.
- Market saturation, especially in med spas but also in surgery as more doctors have entered the field. The lower barrier to entry for med spas, combined with several regional and national chains backed by venture capital, has made the nonsurgical cosmetic market ultracompetitive, and margins have dropped as a result.
Add it all up, and you have a recipe for cosmetic practitioners twiddling their thumbs. The next obvious question is “what can I do on the marketing side to drum up some business?” Here, we encourage clients to be very methodical and strategic about spending more marketing dollars in the current climate. Let’s take a look at some of your best bets:
- Ramp up PPC, but do it wisely. All your competitors are slow too, and there is no “low hanging fruit” on Google Ads. Google Ads is at heart an auction for ad space, and when more people compete in that auction, it drives up ad cost. So let’s say you want more breast augmentation cases. Great. So does everyone else in your market. Plan to spend accordingly, or get more creative in finding less competitive search terms that still end up converting well for you. This involves a good deal of trial and error, but a talented PPC manager can do a deep dive into the Google Ads metrics to find the opportunities others are leaving behind.
- Use big discounts to get attention. Now is not the time to just throw your patients a bone. Extending the metaphor, you should be tossing them a a whole bag of premium dog food, and a brand new Busy Bee too. OK, that got a little weird, but hopefully you get the point. Offering $100 off Morpheus8 will likely get you completely ignored. Offering $1,000 off for one lucky patient will get much more attention. Here’s a challenge: think of some offers that just seem ridiculous to you. Then find a way to make them happen, without breaking the bank.
- Get more aggressive on SEO. As you know, there’s only so much premium space in Google’s search results. It doesn’t really matter if you rank in the 30th spot for an important keyword and move up to 25 after some optimization work. Almost all the action in organic search happens in the top 10 results, and really, it’s all about the top 3 spots. We’re offering a new medical SEO service to guarantee top 10 rankings for up to 10 terms in each client’s market. It’s an intensive effort, but we are seeing some serious ranking gains for very popular terms. If you’re ready to rocket up the rankings and get found by more people on Google search, talk with us more about this tactic.
- Watch how much you’re spending on “impressions” and “branding.” We’ve all but eliminated paid ads for clients on Facebook and Instagram. In years past, social ads have helped to get client brands out to a wider audience, which may not have immediately paid off in leads, but helped position them as a go-to source when people got serious about cosmetic procedures. We think that’s a luxury most clients can’t afford now. Marketing dollars need to drive immediate conversions, period. To that end, if you’re still dying to give Zuck some money, focus on boosting posts about your monthly specials or offers for $20-30 each.
- Focus even more on delighting your patients. We can think of 2 immediate benefits here. First, delighted patients are much more likely to write you a positive review online, and reviews continue to be a huge influence for patients shopping cosmetic surgery. But even more important than snagging that glowing online review, you are planting the seed for strong word of mouth and doing your part to earn a patient for life. After all, keeping existing patients in your practice is far more affordable than constantly hunting for new ones.
- Promote your financing options. As we all know, rates are still through the roof, but several of the big players in cosmetic surgery financing – CareCredit, PatientFi, Alphaeon, Cherry – are getting creative to get approvals for people with “less than perfect” credit. Some of your patients may not know financing is an option, and others might think it’s out of reach for them. It’s not worth overpromising that you can get any patient approved, but it is worth keeping the door open and helping prospective patients when money is tight.
- Stay in touch via text message. It ain’t 2004 – peeps aren’t religiously checking their ever-flooded email Inboxes. But as we’ve noted in other recent posts, they are still reliably viewing and engaging with text messages. Does that mean you should just gather up phone numbers for your entire patient list in your EMR and blast them with a bunch of random texts? Um, no. Both legally and ethically, you need to ensure that you are only sending messages to people who have opted into wanting to hear from you. From there, you also need to be strategic about how often you bug them, and how enticing your message is. We have a lot of experience managing text message campaigns and crafting messages that result in action. When things are especially slow, a text message campaign may be just what you need to stoke the campfire.