Beginners Guide to Plastic Surgery Marketing

Are you a newly-minted plastic surgeon or have you recently branched out on your own to start a practice? Or, you may have years of experience but never concerned yourself with digital marketing. Regardless of your circumstance, getting into digital marketing is daunting. That’s why we’ve put together a simple checklist for plastic surgeons new to digital marketing.

Let’s assume you have a website. It’s 2018 after all, so if you don’t have one you might as well be invisible! Whether you put together your own website or paid ten-thousand dollars for a custom site, there are a few features your website needs to have before you invest any time or money in digital marketing:

Basic Website Essentials for Plastic Surgeons
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  • lead capture forms prominently placed on every page 
  • each individual procedure you offer is highlighted on a unique page on your website (ideally with some kind of social proof on each page, such as a before & after, video, or review)
  • a photo gallery (or at least a game-plan to grow case photos to eventually add to the website)
  • a detailed About Us page highlighting your credentials

*Disclaimer: the four bullet points above are enough to get you started. That said, you really should ensure your website has properly optimized title tags and images, an XML sitemap, and other more advanced components, but this is a beginner blog so we’ll get to that in a future blog. Also, you might want to consider a Finance page to help convert price-conscious patients (even if you’re not the cheapest doc in town).

Once you’ve beefed up your website, or at least have a plan in place to do so, it’s time to jump-start your digital marketing efforts. Here are five tasks to get you started:

1) Ensure you have Google Analytics installed and tracking conversions: Google Analytics is essential for evaluating traffic to your website. If you don’t have this set up you’ll want to sign up here. Once you’ve got Analytics installed the next step is ensuring you’re tracking leads (conversions). This means setting up unique Goals in Google Analytics to track submitted web forms (and possibly even phone calls).

conversion tracking in Google Analytics

2) Verify and optimize your Google My Business location: Start by Googling your practice name to ensure your Google My Business listing shows up. You should be able to login here to access your GMB listing details to make edits. From that interface, you can verify that you’re the owner of the business via a postcard or phone call. Once you’re verified, make sure you’ve completely filled out your profile and consider utilizing some of the new features GMB has to offer, such as posts and video.

3) Create an initial game-plan for generating reviews: Start by making a list of your VIP patients that you can personally ask to leave you a review. If you’re truly starting from scratch at your practice your VIP patients should be your friends and family. Keep in mind that I’m not advocating for “fake” reviews, but you need to start somewhere. More importantly, you need a plan for connecting with new patients. You can follow up manually or you can utilize a software to help you automatically grow your reviews. In addition to growing reviews, you also want a plan for generating referrals.

Google My Business Posts

4) Create an initial game-plan for growing the website content: Like reviews, growing quality content will take time. That’s why developing a game-plan is sufficient to start. Think about how much time you can devote each week to creating blog articles, videos, or taking new gallery case photos.

For blogs, start by focusing on the top 10-20 FAQs you get during consultations and write a blog about each one. Get down to the basics of what patients what want to know about: cost, how quickly they see results, and recovery time, to name a few. For videos, you can record yourself with your smartphone by following these simple tips. Make sure you upload these videos to YouTube or Vimeo and embed them on your procedure pages and blogs.

Once you’ve checked off those five tasks then it’s time to consider advertising. Google AdWords, Yelp, and Real Self are all mediums to evaluate, but if you need immediate visibility I’d lean toward AdWords. In a perfect world, you have a $10k/month advertising budget, which you can split among those three ad mediums, but if you’re working with a minimal budget start with AdWords. Click here to check out our three-part series on the best places for aesthetic practices to advertise online.

Overwhelmed? Don’t be! We can help!

If your plastic surgery, medical spa, or dermatology practice is ready to take the next step with its digital marketing then simply click here to request a personalized Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) video for your practice so you can get a head start on turning your website into a lead generation machine!

If you’d like schedule a call with TRBO simply drop us a line here or give us a call at 877-673-7096 x2.

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