The 2024 Plastic Surgery Marketing Guide to Reach New Patients

Why Applying These Tactics Are Important

This marketing guide is meant to help plastic surgeons reach new patients and grow their practice. While some of these tactics are fundamental, the method and general tips will enhance any cosmetic healthcare marketing. By applying these guidelines, you can reach new patients and grow your practice through the basics of marketing for plastic surgery.

Foundation for Cosmetic Practice Marketing

Successful medical practices, cosmetic health included, have a solid foundation around the patient experience. Before new practices jump into marketing to reach new patients, they first need to know how they communicate the expected result.

As a physician, you already know the result of the procedures you offer. However, is this reflected when a new patient visits your website, or goes through the process of scheduling an appointment, or even the experience of walking in the front door for the first time? Your new patients will form a first impression of your practice long before stepping foot into your office. The key is to create a brand foundation that reflects the quality of your work you perform.

A large part of this foundation is your digital presence including your website, social media, and other ways patients interact with your brand online such as a Google Business Profile. Here is a quick checklist to ensure your brand experience is ready for new patients:

Make sure your logo and branding reflect the quality of your services. For plastic surgeons or cosmetic healthcare practices, we find clean, modern, elevated logos are best.
Branding across all platforms including website, social media, location listing, print materials, signage, etc. should all be consistent.
Your website should be easy to navigate, load quickly, and be designed to make your patients feel the quality and trust for your practice.
On the website you should include social proof elements such as testimonials, before and after images, reviews, as well as pictures of the doctors with a little bio about them.
Additionally, there should be an easy way for potential patients to learn more or schedule a consultation. Ideally an automated online scheduling tool.
The Google Business Profile (GBP) and other location listings should include images of inside the practice and images of the doctors.
Identify your brand voice and apply it in content across your site and on social media.
Walking through the practice, make sure the design and experience also reflects your quality of work and the brand. Include interior signage or decor items as needed.
Ensure your team is aligned with the quality and brand voice of your practice.

All of these elements make a crucial impact on the patient experience and thus can alter the perceived value and status of working with your practice. Be warned, however, to avoid seeming too elite or exclusive when elevating your brand as this may drive people away depending on the market.

New Patient Marketing for Plastic Surgeons

To generate new patients for your cosmetic healthcare practice or plastic surgery practice, you first need to understand your market as well as how people find and engage with cosmetic brands. Even here in the metro Detroit area, consumer behavior can vary greatly from zip code to zip code. While each market can vary based on income, social influences, and a myriad of other factors, we find these marketing tactics tend to work best for cosmetic healthcare.

Map Out The Customer Journey

Deciding whether or not to have someone alter your physical appearance through medical means can take time if you’ve never done it before. Even more so, deciding on who should be the one you trust to undergo this transformation can be an even more rigorous process. Mapping out what that decision process looks like and thinking about where you can make an impact will help guide more patients to your practice.

While mapping out the customer journey, understand that there is not one straightforward path that customers can take. Each person may start at a different point and use different platforms at different stages. Instead of mapping out a hundred different possibilities, we recommend identifying if and how each platform could play a role in each stage.

The customer journey, which applies to plastic surgeons and cosmetic healthcare patients as well, is typically defined with the following stages; Awareness, Consideration, Decision, Retention, and Loyalty. Every platform that you utilize in your marketing strategy should help move new potential patients through to the next stage.

As an example, maybe your ideal audience is not yet aware of the results they can achieve through your cosmetic healthcare practice, so you use a targeted video ad on YouTube or Instagram to introduce the brand and the services you offer. As such we would add YouTube ads or social media ads to the Awareness stage.

In a different example, if someone is ready to schedule a consultation, and searches “rhinoplasty surgery near me”, having a search engine optimized website or a PPC Search Ad campaign can get you in front of that person. In this case we would add search engine optimization (SEO) and PPC Search Ads to the decision stage.

Mapping out the customer journey takes some thought and experience in consumer behavior, but after it is documented, you can be more intentional about the positioning and messaging at each stage.

Attract Patients through SEO

There are multiple stages to the customer journey for new patients. Often considered the most important, the decision stage is usually associated with getting found online through search engines like Google or Bing. The truth of the matter is showing up in the organic search results for a plastic surgeon’s marketing starts much earlier than when someone decides they are ready to schedule the procedure. The majority of consumers research online before making a new purchase, especially when it is a large purchase, and even more so when it involves their physical appearance.

Search engine optimization, or SEO, plays a factor in the customer journey with your practice long before you hear from them. In fact, depending on the person, the first thing they could do, before even asking their spouse or friends about the procedure, is do a quick Google search. There’s no risk, no obligation, and no fear of rejection. SEO should be a platform at both the top and bottom of the customer journey.

To properly optimize your site, you need to consider your on-site SEO, off-site SEO, and technical SEO. There are a lot of aspects to each, but some of the more simple things you can work on without the help of a digital marketing agency include:Changing the page title to the primary keyword or phrase people would use to find that service

Only using one H1 (heading 1 format) text on the page that is the main keyword for the page
Filling out the meta description on pages so it is specific to that page
Making sure your site navigation is easy to use
Using a site that is mobile friendly and puts the mobile experience first
Adding alt text to images you use on the site

Another important category of SEO is content. Creating articles, or blog posts that are genuinely interesting to your audience and are authentic in nature help sites rank higher. Read up on Google’s EEAT documentation to learn more.

Connect with People through Good Content

To stand out from all the noise in the world and set your cosmetic healthcare brand apart from the competition, well made content is key. This can be in many forms from social media, to video, to on-page content for your site, but whatever you are utilizing, it needs to be valuable and authentic.

Think of it this way, your ideal patient only has a limited amount of time, and if they have already started their journey to finding a plastic surgeon, they have likely seen a dozen ads and videos from your competition. Usually they see the same old, lifeless graphics telling them about the local practice. Every piece of content you create for your brand should be able to answer this question; how does it give value to the audience? Or how does this earn their attention?

Good content helps and connects with people. It is made for the person not for the brand. If a new patient is unsure about recovery time for procedures and what to expect, answering that question is valuable. If a potential patient is daydreaming about the possible outcome of plastic surgery and is scrolling through before and after images on your Instagram, the temporary escape into a potential future is good marketing content. Simply offering a service and letting them know how to reach you, on the other hand, is not valuable and has not earned their time. For more on building an authentic brand, you can read this article.

Here are some additional ways content marketing can be effective for a cosmetic surgeon practice:

Show before and after images or testimonial videos on Instagram and your website
Create video content introducing the brand and anything you do differently to enhance the patient experience
Create blog pages dedicated to answering common patient questions on your website and link to these pages in email marketing
Create an email drip campaign with valuable information for the patient with automatic contact points through the customer journey
Talk through industry updates, do’s and don’ts, or what to consider when choosing a plastic surgeon in a show format for a podcast or YouTube channel – but only do this if you can keep a consistent schedule for years.

Content marketing for cosmetic healthcare practices heavily relies on being authentic and valuable to the audience for success. It is also a way to add social proof to your marketing efforts and raise your brand’s status and legitimacy. Consistently creating good marketing content can help generate new patients and position your cosmetic practice as the experts in the industry.

All Star Plastic Surgery Marketing

People want to know who they choose for their cosmetic medical procedure is trusted by others who had a good experience. The first place they turn to can be the people they know who had a similar procedure done, but after that they need to rely on the online reputation of brands. This means for cosmetic medical practices, reputation management is crucial. When someone looks at your reviews online from a review site or just as a referral, it needs to be glowing.

Reputation management is worked on after the patient had a great experience, but highly impacts the number of new patients you will attract. It includes gathering new reviews, optimizing review listing platforms, responding to all reviews, and encouraging your current patients to be advocates for the brand.

When gathering reviews, you should have either an automated system in place which can contact patients by phone or email to ask for a review. It needs to be easy to use with only a few clicks for the highest impact. Otherwise you can try to train your staff to use an ipad or ask for a review at the time of checkout, but usually it is not a convenient time for the patient and it negatively impacts their experience, or, the staff will sometimes forget. An automated, professional tool is best.

To optimize your review listing platforms, such as Google Business Profile or American Society of Plastic Surgery listing, fill out the profile as much as possible. Depending on the platform, provide images of the doctor, the interior, exterior, and anything that represents your brand. While a more robust plan can be made by a marketing agency, filling out the profile in every section with thoughtful, helpful information will go a long way.

Additionally, it helps to respond to every review that is made on the practice. The fun and easy ones are when someone shares how much they love your work with a five-star review. The tougher ones are the dreaded complaints. In the case of a bad review, remember to not get offended and instead reassure them that your quality of work is important to you followed by asking for them to call or email you to provide more information. The idea here is to take the conversation offline to address their concerns, but also to show anyone else reading the review that you are responsive and find poor quality service unusual.

Encouraging current patients to become advocates can be done in multiple ways. Often referral patients are the best because they already have a champion for your brand, improving your status. You can encourage more of these referrals through creating an inclusive culture of patients that want to show off their good decision by asking to feature them on social media. Or if you find not enough referrals are coming in organically, you can run monthly giveaways as an incentive. There are many ways to encourage people to recommend your practice in person or online, but it all starts with that foundation of their experience.

Turn Up the New Patient Dial with Ads

With the foundational pieces in place, an understanding of your patients’ customer journey, and a way to create a flywheel effect through reputation management, you can now turn up the dial for new patients using ads.

When investing an ad budget on top of your other marketing efforts, we usually recommend starting with the lowest stage of the customer journey and moving your way up. PPC ads such as Google Search ads can be used at the time of decision but also to be found initially in the Awareness stage.

YouTube ads or Connected TV ads, such as streaming ads on Hulu, can help introduce your brand to more people in the Awareness stage. Or well crafted and targeted social media ads such as on instagram can help improve the number of people that move from the Consideration stage to the Decision stage.

Working with a marketing agency can provide access and expertise to get the most out of your ad budget. However, if you are more of a DIY type person, we have a few quick tips before venturing into paid advertising:

Know your audience; how they engage with the platform, what is important to them, and who they are. Too much ad budget is wasted on the wrong people or the wrong message.
Know the lifetime value of your patient and a reasonable cost per acquisition you can achieve while making it worth your time.
Do not assume the auto-recommendations from the platform will provide the best results. Ad platforms like Google and Meta are offering more auto optimizations to make it easier to use, but they often don’t result in the best ROI.
Do not put money into the easy “press a button to spend” type paid media, such as boosting a Facebook post. These will not provide the same level of results and often end up wasting the budget.
Before starting paid ads for your cosmetic practice, add all of the tracking tags and analytics needed to understand if it is working or not.
Especially if you are collecting information off-site or tracking calls, make sure you are HIPPA compliant.
Have a good call to action, value, or engagement factor as part of your ads.

When going through this guide and the accompanying checklists, keep in mind not to simply run through and check off the box. Good marketing takes time and thoughtfulness about the human experience. In this case especially, input impacts the output and rushed marketing efforts just turn into noise. If you’re looking for additional help or have more in-depth questions, feel free to contact us and we’d be happy to chat