**Important note: this article was originally published in June 2017, but has been updated in 2020 to reflect the most recent best practices, tips and information about TRBO ADvance
Digital marketing is constantly evolving, but it’s important to understand the difference between tactics and strategies. Both start with an objective or goal. For most aesthetic practices, the goal is to increase the number of procedures or treatments in a given period of time. Or, the goal may simply be to generate more revenue in a given timeframe.
It’s important to granularly distinguish your goals so you can implement a more comprehensive marketing plan of attack.
Once you’ve got your goal written down, it’s time to evaluate your tactics and strategies. First, let’s evaluate the difference between the two. Your tactics are your tools to achieve an objective, while your strategies are your processes, activities, and decision-making in how to utilize these tools.
For example, Google Ads is your tactic. The campaign structure, keywords used, and landing pages developed make up some of your strategies.
As I have mentioned in previous articles, every practice needs tools to succeed. However, the tools alone won’t make you successful, it’s how you utilize them. Start with your goals, then develop your game plan. This plan will involve tactics (tools), but your success rate will hinge on your strategies (how you use the tools).
What are the Best Practices When It Comes to Aesthetic Digital Marketing?
1) Diversified Media Buy: the more channels you have driving traffic, the better. This way, if one slows down for any reason you have others to pick up the slack. Media buy involves driving targeted paid traffic to your website or landing pages. Google Ads, Facebook/Instagram Ads, and re-marketing are just a few media buying platforms we recommend investigating.
If your aesthetic practice can create ads that generate leads and consultations from “cold traffic” – patients that don’t know you – then you’ll be ahead of 90% of your competition.
While we strongly believe in the power of SEO, generating strong organic rankings is a long game. If you want immediate results you need to invest (wisely) in media buy.
2) Focus on Creating Quality Content: even if you’re investing tens of thousands of dollars into your aesthetic practice’s digital ad campaigns, do not neglect SEO. There are 4 key pillars to successful SEO, but the content is arguably the most important. Why? Good content is more likely to be engaging (readers take action), shared, and linked to, which will help you naturally build backlinks, another pillar of SEO.
Looking to get started with content marketing? Utilize your website’s blog and follow these 5 tips. Also, if you’re investing time and resources into content marketing, you need to establish KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that you can effectively track.
3) An Active Game Plan for Generating Reviews: take control of your online reputation, but don’t overload yourself with having to manage this. Instead, use a software such as Podium or Magic Rating to help you automatically follow-up with patients to grow your online reviews. This will help build your social proof and boost your SEO.
**Keep in mind that you don’t necessarily want ALL 5-star reviews. The sweet spot is around 4.7 out of 5 because that makes your practice’s online presence, and reviews, seem more real.
4) Don’t Neglect the Details: make sure you have someone you trust constantly check your website for crawl issues, indexing problems, unparsable structured data, plugin errors, title/meta-tag concerns, and site speed, to name a few. Some of these make up your practice’s on-page SEO and some of your technical SEO, two other pillars of your overall SEO. Additionally, many of these issues can impact your website visitors’ user experience, which can lead to a higher bounce rate and fewer leads generated.
5) Get Social: only 1-2% of your Facebook “likes” will see what you post in your news feed, but you can increase that number with engaging content that people comment on, like, or share. You can also boost posts for additional exposure. Just make sure that, like your reviews, you don’t neglect your social presence. Your prospects and patients want to find you and engage with you on social media.
6) Comprehensive Lead Follow-Up Software and Processes: successful marketing campaigns can help generate qualified leads, but you need a strong salesperson, automated follow-up processes, and a detailed sales funnel to help convert these leads into consultations and new patients.
7) Detailed Analytics and Tracking: your aesthetic practice needs to be able to gauge the effectiveness of every single marketing effort; otherwise how do you know what constitutes a success? It doesn’t matter if you’re creating blog posts, running ad campaigns, boosting social posts, or sending out e-blasts. You need KPIs and you need analytics.
Google Analytics should be your “core” mechanism for tracking everything on your website. To learn more about Google Analytics check out this collection of articles.
Who is the Best Digital Marketing Growth Agency for Aesthetic Practices?
In short, it depends. The best fit for one aesthetic practice might not be the best fit for yours. Before you can determine which agency is the best fit you need to figure out what your goals are. It doesn’t matter if you’re a start-up practice or you’ve been in business 30+ years. You need to know your goals.
Choosing the right digital marketing agency to help grow your aesthetic practice is challenging. If you’ve been in business for 5-10 years, you’ve probably worked with other agencies in the past – perhaps a “local marketing company” – only to be let down.
Our advice is to find an agency that understands growth. Without growth, you will lose market share and your business will eventually die. This requires innovation and creativity, on top of digital marketing expertise.
Here are the top 5 reasons why TRBO ADvance is the leading digital marketing growth agency for aesthetic practices:
1) Industry Expertise: No matter what industry you’re in, it’s crucial to partner with a marketing agency that works exclusively with your niche. While there are quite a few digital marketing agencies out there that cater to the aesthetics industry, none are quite as hyper-focused as TRBO. We work exclusively with plastic surgeons, medical spas, dermatologists, and other elective medicine practices.
We’ve been in the industry for over ten years and even written a book on growing your aesthetic practice with social media. Our executive team regularly speaks at events – all across the country – for aesthetic practice owners.
2) Cutting-Edge Services: We’re on top of every latest trend and opportunity, staying pro-active with our marketing efforts to constantly improve our results. Our technology consists of:
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- review monitoring and generation
- state-of-the-art WordPress photo gallery plugin
- Phone Tag call tracking numbers
- TRBO Text by ZipWhip for 2 way-text messaging
- TRBO Mail email marketing
- fully comprehensive lead tracking and automated follow-up with Sticky Leadz
Look no further than our blog to get insights that you absolutely cannot find on any other digital marketing agencies’ website for aesthetic practices. This culminated in TRBO being awarded one of the Top 100 Social Media Blogs.
3) Proven Results: Our results speak for themselves. You can opt-in to view our case studies here to learn more about how we’ve helped to grow our client’s aesthetic practices. You can view our reviews from clients here and feedback from employees here.
4) Partnerships: A track record hasn’t just helped us accumulate case studies. We’ve also partnered with many major players in the aesthetic industry.
TRBO is not only a certified Google Partner, like some other aesthetic digital marketing agencies, we’re partnered with Sciton, Cutera, and the MedResults Network. These aren’t paid sponsorship partnerships, they’re relationship-based. We’ve also obtained affiliate status with Real Self – one of only a dozen agencies – as well as partnered with Allergan’s Practice Consultants.
5) Affordable Websites: Many agencies do great work with websites but charge upwards of $30k or more! Based on the marketing package you invest in, you can potentially have a beautiful, custom website designed and developed under $10k! Sound too good to be true? By investing with TRBO we’re willing to invest in your practice. We’re not here to get rich making websites. We’re a digital marketing and growth agency, although we do create beautiful and effective websites, as you can see here.
The other key thing to remember as you evaluate the right digital marketing agency for your practice is fit. Not just, does this agency cater to my industry (we’ll assume they do)? I mean, do you like the team? Are you just speaking to a convincing sales guy, but not sure about the team who’ll be supporting you?
Get to Know Turbo
The TRBO team is made up of easy-going, yet ambitious entrepreneurs. We have offices in Charleston, SC; Huntsville, AL; and Newport Beach, CA.
If you’d like to learn more about how you can grow your aesthetic practice with digital marketing then drop us a line here. You can also schedule a strategy session our growth expert Sonja Vaisz or reach us by phone at 877-673-7096 x2.
