This past week has been a mixed bag of positive and negative macro-level signs for the U.S. On one hand, more cities and states are opening up, and the stock market is soaring. On the other hand, unemployment has reached 25% and the Coronavirus death toll in the U.S. surpassed 100k.
On a more micro-level, as of May 28th, most aesthetic practices are now open, and those that are not are planning to re-open in the next 1-2 weeks. That’s great news.
Even better news… consumer demand for aesthetics continues to rise! There are also still opportunities to get into both Google Ads and Facebook Ads and take advantage of this demand with bargain cost-per-click prices.
What Google Trends is Telling Us
It’s been almost 3 weeks since my last article about consumer demand. In that article, I noticed a “bottoming out” of consumer demand for aesthetics sometime between late March through early April, depending on the query.
It’s now late May and you can see that the momentum aesthetic search popularity gained from early April through early May has only picked up over the past few weeks.
Take a look at the 90-day trends for the aesthetic queries below. You’ll not only see that dip from early March through April and the rise since mid-April, but you’ll also notice that since May 8th (the date of our last consumer demand article) every term has trended up. This is great news and proves that the gains from mid-April through early May were not random or fleeting.
For a couple of search queries, we’ve even surpassed pre-pandemic search demand levels!
What Google Ads is Telling Us
As I mentioned above, the average cost-per-click has fallen and it hasn’t jumped back up to pre-Coronavirus levels.
The past two weeks our clients have seen an average cost-per-click of $1.61. That’s down 54% from that same period in 2019!
For some perspective, using those average cost-per-click numbers, with a $50 a day budget you can generate 31 clicks this year compared to only 14 last year. Assuming you averaged a 5% conversion rate, that’s the difference between generating 1.55 leads per day vs. generating 0.7 leads per day, without changing your budget!
Now is the time to get on the Google Ads train while the clicks are cheap!
What’s the Summer Forecast for Aesthetic Demand?
One thing is clear thus far, unless there is a second Coronavirus outbreak that forces cities and states to shut down again, demand is up and I expect it to continue to grow as we head into June and July.
Part of the reason for these expectations is the trends we’ve seen thus far. Another part is the pent-up demand from people being “trapped” indoors for months (too much Zoom time)!
For our top spending Google Ads clients, the average cost-per-click in the Summer of 2019 either stayed the same or grew slightly from June through October, before dropping.
Even with the threat of record unemployment and a horrific death toll there is still aesthetic demand. The hope for every American is that if social distancing measures are followed the total Coronavirus cases continue to drop, along with unemployment, and we’ll resume more “normal,” albeit safer, lives. In theory, this should increase aesthetic demand even more.
Barring any shift in policy regarding businesses remaining open or new stay-at-home orders, I expect aesthetic demand to continue to rise through June and into July, but we will closely monitor the data and trends over the next few weeks so stay tuned for our next article.
TRBO Can Help Your Practice Capture Market Share as You Re-Open
If you would like help with marketing strategy or simply need to refine your re-opening game plan then schedule a strategy session our growth expert Sonja Vaisz. You can also reach TRBO directly at 877-673-7096 x2 and drop us a line here.
