By Dana Fox, Director of Client Strategies
6 Min Read:
Regardless of the industry, marketing and advertising have become overwhelmingly crowded, with as many as 5,000 ad messages coming into our personal spaces daily. We are ALL on OVERLOAD. But in the world of aesthetic medicine, the space is even more crowded, if you can imagine.
When you add the big guns, such as industry titans Allergan® and Galderma®, all the major skincare companies, and giants like L’Oréal®, your potential patients will have a lot to wade through before they get to your PPC and social media campaigns.
In a recent conversation with Peter Houtz, VP of Sales at Plastic Surgery Studios, we discussed the squeeze everyone in the marketing aesthetics world feels with stiff competition, often lousy advice, increasing business costs, and now Artificial Intelligence.
AI, the newest buzz in town, is suddenly thrust into our everyday language. This blog will explore how AI already impacts how you market your practice and how we, as your marketing agency, are working to make it all make sense.
With AI as the topic of our conversation and how we as an agency use it to our advantage, the word “pivot” jumped into Peter’s and my conversation. We agreed that we need to pivot as a company if we plan to continue offering excellent marketing products that actually work for our clients.
As a surgeon, you must also pivot if you plan to stay on the consumer’s menu. If you’re not on the menu, no one can choose you! A normal response might be “dah,” but you’d be surprised how often this fact of needing to be seen to be chosen gets lost.
If you are a plastic surgeon reading this blog, you already know you are as demanding a client as anyone else paying for marketing services to drive new patients to your door. You also know there is only so much money you can spend on meeting all those demands to run your practice.
Choosing the right marketing partner to work with is no longer as easy as going to society meetings, visiting the booths of four or five agencies, looking at their website designs, and seeing who of your peers they are working with. For one thing, you may not even be going to meetings today, and the last one you went to, there were so few people there that you wondered why you were there. To socialize with peers? Maybe. But you can do that on your own anywhere in the world.
So, what does it mean to pivot? It means changing direction from your current strategy if it’s not delivering results, and it requires strategically evolving your practice business model or, in our case, our company business model, product, services, and possibly even our market.
How this translates for surgeons might look like expanding the scope of your practice to include non-surgical options that you might not have been interested in previously. After all, you spent years of surgical training, and eliminating some of your surgical options might feel like anarchy, but who are you serving yourself or your patients?
For over 30 years, I’ve worked with aesthetic patients and their doctors. As this population segment ages and whose children are now aesthetic consumers, guess what? They want less surgery and more options to stay looking great! They get Botox® as early as 25 to prevent wrinkles from forming; who would have guessed that one? It does not mean they won’t have surgery at some point because, as we know, there are some things that only surgery can address. However, surgery is being postponed, which has financial implications for surgical practices.
As a result, your PIVOT must include some non-surgical options if you are to stay relevant and continue growing. Your PIVOT must also consider what you paid for marketing 20 years ago when you opened your doors, and what it cost today is not even close.
Social media is also driving the type of marketing you are doing today in ways you never dreamed you’d be doing in your operating room or on vacation with your family. Like me, you’ve seen it all: dancing bears in the OR, bikini-clad patients coming to your reception with frosted cupcakes that look like breasts and perfectly placed pink candy dots. Bigger, faster, louder, it’s hard to outdo the ridiculous, but for some, it has taken on an element of fun, and they enjoy doing it. If that’s you, have at it. If it’s not you, you might be able to sustain it for a time, but it will get old, and you’ll still need a strategy.
Your younger peers just starting are of the mindset that they can do everything themselves, and they no doubt can. The bigger question must be how much time one spends on marketing themselves, how much time one should spend caring for patients, and did I mention having a life? In the beginning, you have more time because the phone isn’t generally ringing. This is the perfect time to learn as much as you can about how marketing works. I recommend working with a marketing strategist who knows a lot about the customers you plan to attract and the competition you need to displace. That’s right, I said displace.
We have enough people practicing aesthetic medicine in most markets to serve the community, so that means offering people a choice, and once there’s a choice, that means someone is displaced once a choice is made. Dana Fox’s first lesson on marketing: Be the first choice!
Patients are driving the demand for less surgery, plain and simple. According to Data Bridge Market Research, their financial motivation, as much as their desire for less invasive options, accounts for global med spa growth last year valued at $18.9 billion, with a forecast of $56.25 billion by 2051.
You can fight this trend by saying, “This just isn’t right.” But in the end, do you want to be right, or do you want to be successful?
With this thought about being successful still in your mind, we’re finally back to where we started: Artificial Intelligence.
