As we head into the new year, many plastic surgery practices are reviewing their current marketing strategies for acquiring new patients. If your current digital marketing strategy does not include a dedicated digital lead generation effort via the social media platforms, then you’re likely missing a substantial amount of potential patients and paying too much for the patients that you are reaching.
Although there are many ways of marketing online, digital lead generation represents the most efficient manner to aggressively market to gain new patients.
A digital lead generation campaign, on a platform such as Facebook, will enable you to utilize Facebook’s exceptional targeting tools to highly target a finite universe of prospective patients that rival the search results of a Google paid campaign but at a lower cost per acquisition. Facebook, for example, maintains 1.49 billion daily users on average and Instagram has 700 million! Building a dedicated digital lead generation campaign is an aggressive marketing approach which continues to grow in popularity as social media platforms get more and more intelligent about the demographics and interests of their users. For example, your practice can effectively target prospective patients interested in Mommy Makeovers who are aged 35-44, Rhinoplasty patients between the ages of 25-34, and filler patients in their mid 20’s.
Proper targeting ensures that your ads are shown to a highly qualified audience that has a high propensity to respond to your offer. Lead generation ads lead to landing pages, or micro-sites, which are designed to capture your prospective patient’s name, email, and phone number. Utilizing a direct response format, the prospective patient opts in and is funneled to a landing page where they can instantly take advantage of an offer or informational content pertinent to your practice by completing a form. This targeted advertising approach to a defined audience is designed to keep your marketing costs low and your new patient conversions high. Also, since all of your leads will not convert into new patients, capturing this prospect information also enables your practice to re-market your services to the prospects that did not turn into new patients from your first attempt. Another benefit to digital lead generation is that your campaign is linked to your social media pages so you can grow your followers for the future while you build your practice by adding new patients in the present.
The demands of building and maintaining a successful digital lead generation campaign are substantial. Hiring an experienced digital lead generation company can ensure steady growth for your practice as it’s critical that your lead prospects turn into new patients. As more and more practices set aside a budget for digital lead generation campaigns, don’t run the risk of being left behind. It’s critical to make digital lead generation a priority to your marketing plan in 2019.
There are a number of ways to passively market to your potential new patients. They include search engine ad campaigns, websites, and blogs, maintaining social media pages, incorporating social media influencers, and buying lists. Other marketing outreach, such as email campaigns, require that you have the prospect’s email address first before marketing to them.
A paid Google campaign can be a part of a successful marketing strategy but when you’re paying high amounts for clicks from a search engine to your website, you better have an effective way to capture that traffic to your website to get names and emails or you won’t realize any return on your investment.
Websites and blogs are essential for building your brand. However, they are designed to offer the visitor a number of options to explore such as About Us, Services, Testimonials, Contact Us, etc. so they are not ideal for capturing visitor information.
Maintaining pages on the social media platforms is a solid strategy for growing your followers. This, however, is a long tail approach as you have no way to market directly to your followers because you do not have their email addresses. Over time, as trust is built, having a large following can transform followers into patients but it is a passive marketing approach.
Social media influencers, such as Kim Kardashian, Kylie Jenner, Jenna Tatum, and Cara Delevingne use their massive followings to influence which procedures are in vogue in cosmetic surgery and who the preferred providers are. Becoming a follower of these influencers can open your practice up to these audiences which total in the 100 million.
Buying lists of potential patients from list vendors is not advised as these lists are sold and re-sold and typically have many bad addresses mixed in which makes them a very costly strategy, both in time and money.
The internet affords prospective patients the ability to research and compare physicians like never before. The marketplace has, therefore, become very competitive for plastic, cosmetic, and reconstructive providers to establish themselves and stand out. How do you market effectively online so that your practice is selected as the practice of choice? Digital lead generation is one of the best strategies for connecting and engaging with your prospective patients to aggressively build a marketable list to grow your practice. Have a prosperous New Year!