Whether you use an in-house marketing staff or agency to promote your cosmetic surgery practice, planning is essential. Strategic planning ensures you target the right customers, in the right place and louder and better than your competition.

First you need to assess your current and past marketing efforts. Look at the last 12 months, pull together reports for all your online and offline marketing activities. Look through the reports and objectively answer the following questions, using actual data. Don’t make excuses for failed campaigns and be honest about the real benefit each vehicle brings to your practice.

Marketing Analysis Questionnaire (Click here for .PDF)

Analyze Current and Past Efforts

• Are potential customers aware of our practice and our services or do we need to build brand awareness and visibility?
• Can we distinguish between marketing activities that build brand awareness and visibility and those that are meant to generate leads?
• How do we develop then cultivate our brand and image?
• How much of our marketing budget should we allocate to brand/image building and cultivation?
• What do we want our image to be? Does our current brand strategy support this image?
• What lead generating activities had the highest ROI? Best Cost per Customer or Cost per Lead?
• What marketing activities directed the most valuable leads? (Define what a valuable lead is to your practice.)
• How many leads resulted in repeat business or referrals?
• Were there any negative consequences of the activities? ie, brand misrepresentation or promotion that cost the practice money
• Where did we fall short in the last 12 months? Where were we successful?

Competitive Analysis

• How broadly visible are our competitors?
• What are our competitors doing that we aren’t? i.e., directories, search engine optimization, social media, TV/Radio
• What are our competitors doing well? Doing poorly?

Customer Analysis

• Where are our customers? How do they research cosmetic procedures? What propels them to select one plastic surgery practice over another?

When developing strategy make sure you distinguish between branding and direct marketing activities. Branding activities are those that build recognition of your practice. The value of branding is intangible and difficult to measure. A customer may see your brand in a Google search, on a billboard and in 3-4 plastic surgery directories. Research shows that the more often a consumer sees your brand, the higher their comfort level with your practice and the more likely they are to schedule an appointment. Branding addresses the entire customer experience and should communicate your main value proposition to customers.

Mobile computing has been a hot topic for the last few years. With the release of tablet computing devices, like the iPad and Kindle, there has been a significant rise in traffic from mobile users. The image below from eMarketer shows the significant growth in mobile usage from 2011 to 2012. Clearly mobile is an increasingly important web platform and your website needs to be easily viewed and navigated on a mobile device. So why does Google say don’t waste money on a separate mobile website? Because there is a much better, simpler, more cost effective option than creating a mobile website.

If a website doesn’t have a mobile version a user will be directed to the main website. Smartphones view the website at the same resolution as a desktop computer, so the user will see a miniature, zoomed out version of the website and have to zoom in to read content and use navigation.

Tablet computers can generally view both traditional websites and mobile versions. However, a number of companies are now requiring the user to download an app to visit their mobile website. In some cases a tablet user can’t even bypass the mobile version to view the traditional website. Most people don’t want to download an app to view a website.  This is a huge useability roadblock.

Creating separate mobile websites is also not ideal for webmasters and site owners. Maintaining two separate sites, updating content and software parameters for all platforms and the various screen resolutions takes time and energy. There are also SEO concerns with two versions of a website, the mobile and traditional. Your webmaster will need to properly implement redirects to avoid duplicate content issues.

Luckily, we offer a better alternative here at Advice Media. We have technology that consolidates the mobile site and website into one, providing a single website that works across all platforms. Our technology automatically senses what platform your visitor is using and adjusts the content delivery to that format. Known in some circles as mobile responsive websites or liquid layout websites, our technology allows us to deliver a platform that works on desktops and mobile devices at a lower upfront cost and a lower ongoing operating cost than anything else on the market. There is no need for separate mobile website design, layout and management. You don’t have to worry about your site working on the latest Android platform or newest iPhone. Our technology uses a liquid layout that adjusts to fit any device, any screen size on any platform.

Advice Media’s mobile responsive platform stacks and prioritizes content as the screen gets smaller. The most useful information to the device user is put at the top of the page and any features that aren’t required for mobile browsing are removed. All of this is controlled by the backend code of the site and can be adjusted to fit your individual needs.

Google uses similar technology to Advice Media’s and recommends it over a separate mobile website. In a recent blog post on the official Google Webmaster’s Blog, Google talked about the benefits of mobile responsive design and why they decided to abandon separate mobile sites.

Advice Media is leading the way in mobile responsive websites for plastic surgery, cosmetic dentistry and other businesses. While most of our competitors are pushing separate mobile sites, we are building sites with responsive design and liquid layouts that don’t require any additional design or development costs to reach the full array of web browsers. Contact us for a demonstration and to learn how our solution will save you money.

Online visibility is a term used to describe how easily consumers can find your company in relevant online channels. The goal of an online visibility strategy is to ensure that a brand is represented across all popular online channels. Online channels include: search engines, local websites, social media sites and directories.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization is a key component of any successful internet visibility strategy. Internet users go to Google, Bing and Yahoo multiple times a day to find everything from plastic surgeons to grocery store coupons. SEO strategies aim at getting a brand in front of interested search engine users by optimizing for key terms related to the brand’s products and services. Search engines use over 200 different ranking factors to deliver websites for a given search query, including website content, links, social media statistics and site architecture.

Websites that show up on the first page of Google get exponentially more traffic than sites that show up on page 2, 3 and 4. SEO puts your company in front of thousands of people looking to buy your products and services.

Today SEO is as important to branding as it is to driving traffic. Internet users associate companies that show up at the top of the search engine results page (SERP) with the terms they search for. Just by showing up, you have created brand awareness. If you company doesn’t show up, you aren’t relevant.

Local Websites

Google places is a local-based search product launched by Google to cater to people looking for local businesses in their area. Local searchers are valuable customers, they often are ready to purchase the product or service they are looking for.

Google Places listings show up in the most valuable real estate of the search results page, the top of the organic results.  A businesses Place page contains: company address, phone number, map, photos, description and customer reviews. Companies with an optimized Places listing will direct more local traffic to their business and will likely gain an overall increase in their sales volume.

Social Media

Social media sites like Twitter, Google+ and Facebook are integrated into every aspect of our lives. Facebook and Twitter are the most popular websites online, visited by millions of people multiple times a day. Your customers are on social media sites, does your business have a presence?

 Pay per Click

Pay per click (PPC) are paid ads that show up in the top of the SERP and along the right side of the organic search results.  PPC offers businesses the opportunity to buy keywords that are relevant to their business When a user clicks on the ad, the business is charged.  The cost for keywords varies depending on the competition for the term, the day of week and even the time of day. PPC strategies combined with SEO increase the odds of users clicking thru to your website from the search engines. PPC can also be used to gain instant brand visibility while building up a presence in other online channels.

 Directories

Directories are much more than lead generation engines. Internet users go to directories to find information, websites and professionals. Recent studies show that consumers typically visit multiple directory sites when researching a product, procedure or service. The more often they see your brand on these sites, the higher their trust in your company and the more likely they will be to call or visit you.  Directory site owners work very hard to ensure their sites rank in the top of the search engines; this means more visibility and branding for your business. In some cases your directory listing will rank higher than your practice website.

 Reputation Management

Online review sites are growing in popularity. People go online everyday to research companies and products. Reviews from real people carry a lot of weight and show up in highly visible areas like Google Places. The more positive reviews your company has, the better customers feel about your brand and the more likely they are to spend their money at your establishment. Customer perception and trust is especially important for plastic surgeons.

Reputation management strategies also focus on occupying as many positions in the search engine as possible. The more real estate you own in the SERP, the more likely a consumer will hear the message you want them to hear and not the message of someone out to simply assault your reputation.

A properly implemented online visibility strategy will directly impact your bottom line by increasing brand recognition and connecting your company with interested consumers. Advice Media has implemented and refined online visibility since 1998. We understand what to do across online channels to make sure your company sends the right message to the right consumer at the right time. Call us to learn more about our visibility services.

At Advice Media, we know how to manage Pay Per Click campaigns for you. One thing we have found that is backed up by some big league research is that offers draw clicks. The goal of a Pay Per Click campaign is to get a patient into your office and have them purchase a procedure. However, to get them that far you must show them something that grabs their interest and makes them click on your ad. Once they have clicked, what they see and read must be compelling enough to make them call your office, schedule an appointment, show up for that appointment and pay for a procedure.

Free and discount offers tend to be the most successful ads you can run for getting people in the door. This is our experience and it is backed up by some interesting research just conducted by none other than Google itself. Google conducted a broad survey to find out what kind of information consumers found appealing and what their click through rates would be for certain types of ads. Offers and discounts topped the list with 2/3 of respondents saying that they considered offers and discounts to be useful or very useful.

To design a successful campaign, first you must know your prospective customer base, then you must know their online activity patterns, then you must know what to present them to grab their interest. Offers and discounts should be one of your most important tools for doing that.

• Breast Augmentation and Breast Implants
• Liposuction and Tummy Tuck
• Facelift and Rhinoplasty

The right rail on each of the pages above shows 3 of the 10 closest plastic surgeons in our database to the visitor. The 10 are rotated through on a random basis 3 at a time. On page refresh, the system assigns a new random 3 from the 10.

Click through to most of our content pages and you will see this Featured Practice module in the same location on the right rail. This consistency of presentation means that consumers always know where to look for it. In addition, we are helping plastic surgeons to build brand recognition on every single page of our sites by displaying their brand in the Featured Practice module. Research shows that branding works and ultimately leads to more patients and a more successful practice. But that’s a topic for a future post!