Digital consultant Rick O’Neill shares his simple yet effective content strategy for promoting fillers online.
When I’m talking to aesthetics professionals for my work as a marketer, I do not need to tell them anything about dermal fillers. You became an aesthetic practitioner to help people enhance their appearance and wellbeing, and you already know the product landscape better than I ever will.
Conversely, nobody becomes an aesthetic practitioner to do marketing. Yet it is crucial if you want to make a living! And in an increasingly complex and competitive world, it is getting harder to be heard above the noise. Here, I’m going to give you a tried-and-tested strategy for putting social media at the heart of your business success.
Why is social media important?
Social media matters because ever more patients are using it as their method of research. They are talking to friends about treatments they’ve had. They are reading online reviews.
By ‘following’ practitioners and reading their articles and comments, trust is being built; trust which is crucial when a patient is considering their first ever treatment or a certain type of treatment for the first time. Plus, they are asking for social proof that treatments work; for example before and after photos and testimonials that reinforce their opinions.
Therefore, to attract this wealth of patients, your social media should be designed to present you as the trusted authority on dermal fillers. Not necessarily the world’s number one, but the trusted authority to your patients; this may be for a certain brand or technique or, most likely, in your location.
How do you present yourself as a trusted authority?
Following this strategy means successfully answering the questions your potential patients are asking online, across your social media activity, your blog, your local Google profile, your email campaigns, and your video content. The plan is simply to be the practitioner who has the answers to your customers’ questions.
To do that, you’ll need some raw data – which is easily available. Sites like answerthepublic.com, which summarises popular questions inputted to search engines, give you an instant line into your community’s heads. As I write, the big questions on dermal fillers include:
- Which dermal fillers last the longest?
- Can dermal fillers move?
When your digital channels consistently appear in search results for dermal filler treatment questions in your local area, and you have content which consistently answers those questions and provides reassurance, you have effectively invested in becoming the go-to expert in dermal fillers for your community; and that’s a sound business foundation!
What content should you publish?
The good news is, there is no shortage of material to produce content about. A few moments on answerthepublic.com shows that patients want to know where dermal fillers can be used and in what situations they are best applied. They want to understand the process, what it will feel like, and whether any aftercare is required. They want you to answer their concerns about safety, value and lifespan. And, of course, they have perfectly good questions which cannot really be answered at all, and which therefore can encourage a conversation; for example, ‘Which dermal fillers are best?’. You can build a content plan to last a decade!
To really make it work, rotate your content through the following types of post:
- Education: as discussed above, directly answering key questions
- Social proof: featuring reviews or testimonials from previous patients for dermal fillers
- Clinical proof: high-quality before and after photos
- Entertainment: a little of the human side of your practice to keep your followers engaged and to build confidence and trust, still keeping it relevant to the problems you solve for your patients.
Unlike so many aspects of marketing, the benefit of this content strategy is that it is cumulative. You do not need to have 100 articles and videos in place to start seeing the value - the more you do, the more you’ll meet your prospective patients’ needs, and the better the financial return will be. Every aesthetic practitioner is busy, but you can start small and build your library of assets.
More top tips
There will be some trial and error, but follow this simple process, and you should see measurable results for comparatively little effort and expense. Here are a few more tips which we have learned over the past couple of years executing this plan.
- Remember that many people will search online for broad terms like ‘anti-ageing’ rather than ‘dermal fillers’. They may not even know treatment names. So include content which is generic and introduces treatments for the less informed.
- Instagram and Facebook are both indexed by Google. What you write on an Instagram post can therefore also appear in search engines. This is quite new, so the words you use are more important than ever.
- Studies by HootSuite have shown that people spend longer on posts with long-form copy than just a few lines. They are happy to read in order to learn.
- Do not forget to tell your audience what to do next! You are, after all, selling. Finish each post with at least an easy way to get hold of you, even if it is just a link to your website.
- Re-purpose this content across your website, your Google Business Profile, and your email campaigns for the ultimate content strategy across all your channels.
All that said, the plan remains simple: answer real patient questions to position your practice as the trusted authority in your community. Because marketing need not be a mystery – it is just a case of showing customers the sort of commitment you are prepared to make to meet their needs.
References
1) Hootsuite, Long Instagram Captions Experiment <https://blog.hootsuite.com/long-instagram-captions-experiment/>
