The apple of your eye: marketing in aesthetics

The clutter factor

The greatest challenge is the clutter factor. The costs of marketing have risen, but effectiveness has fallen. There are two parts of marketing activities: firstly, initial contact. This is critical to success as patients will make a snap decision in regard to your promotion, branding or offer within seconds, and if it not remarkable or fails to stand out, you will be lost within the clutter they are bombarded with on a daily basis. The second part of the activity is ongoing, also known as TOMA (top of mind awareness). Many patients will need timely, regular reminders of your facial aesthetic services and big corporate companies do this exceedingly well.

Here is an exercise for you: name a soft drink, a fast food chain and a luxury car manufacturer. Most will answer along the lines of: Coca-Cola or Pepsi, McDonald's or Burger King and Mercedes or BMW. The reasoning for the continuous spending of these companies is that when you are ready to make such a purchase, you will visit them first because of this. Without the initial and ongoing marketing, patients will not be attracted to your services. You may be the best practitioner, have outstanding customer care, have the patient's best interests at heart, but without them knowing about this, there will be no patients. However, the opposite is also true—if what you are offering is substandard, then all of your marketing efforts will be wasted.

‘Don't expect customers to flock to you. Success is not an entitlement. They, like the rest of the world, don't appreciate new ideas easily. Good things take time to come. You have to see that customers, like every other hurdle you pass, i.e., bankers, suppliers, will not buy into your vision initially. It won't be easy at the beginning. You'll need stick-ability. Keep focused, and you will succeed.’ (Hashemi and Hashemi, 2007)

There is no magic formula

Marketing and advertising can be considered conservative investments. They are not miracle workers, nor magic formulas or instant gratifiers. If you do not recognise that marketing is a conservative investment, you will have difficulty committing to a marketing programme. For example, let's say someone buys a share in a company. After a few weeks, it decreases in value, but they do not sell it. They hold onto it and hope that the value will increase, and in all likelihood, over the long term, it will. Such is the nature of any conservative investment.

Marketing should be perceived in the same way. If it does not produce instant results, it is because most marketing does not. However, if it does produce instant results, then excellent, but this should not be expected to happen every time. Marketing can make you rich, just like this person in the following story. A son asked his father how he made his money. The older man fingered his expensive wool vest and said:

‘Well, son, it was 1982 and I was down to my last £1. Marketing was the key to my success. I invested that £1 in an apple and spent the entire day polishing and promoting it via advertising, flyers through people's doors and word of mouth, and I sold the apple for £2. The next morning, I invested the £2 in two apples. I spent the entire day polishing them and sold them for £5. I continued this system for a month, by the end of which I'd accumulated a fortune of £30… Then your mother's father died and left us £2,000,000.’

A systematic approach

Companies need to have a yearly marketing plan. This can tie in with special events, such as Valentine's or Mother's Day, so you can have a systematic approach to what it is going to market, when it is going to market and who it is going to market to. This ensures that you are not having a knee jerk reaction where maybe one month, you are not turning over as much profit as you had hoped and got careless for a couple of hundred quid to produce an ad. You need to have a structure to your marketing plan. Stick with a plan and commit to that plan.

Budgets then need to be looked at and addressed. With these, it is essential that a specific marketing budget is established. In the first year, it is normal for a new business enterprise to set the marketing budget as a percentage of the gross turnover that is expected to be generated during this period. This will come from the detailed financials in a business plan. The budget for the following year could be a percentage of the forecast net profit, the thinking being that in the first year, investments should be made in raising patient awareness of the new venture. The marketing budget has to cover all of the expenditure that goes into launching the business, and then the ongoing requirements to create and maintain local patient awareness of the treatments available. Once there is an opportunity to obtain financial support from some activity from the manufacturers, you must expect to invest the practice's funds into the marketing budget. Once established, the budget should be reread on a monthly basis and any piece of expenditure justified, as there will be several different social media platforms to advertise on. It is very important that each patient is asked where they heard about or discovered the practice, as this will make social media selection and planning for the second year much more cost-effective. Again, the team must be responsible for keeping a database of the responses to this key question.

Marketing approaches

Test everything. Split test different ads, change the headline, colour, text, photo, and copy to see which performs better. Following this, disregard the worse performing marketing tool and split test again the winning one.

I am always looking outside my industry to see what grabs my attention and what stops me in my tracks. I keep a scrapbook of adverts that have caught my eye. If it can work in one industry, then it can work in mine too.

Marketing is critical to success. Remember, right now, competitors are currently trying to come up with new ways to take your patients!