Marketing is essential to growing a successful business, and your clinic is no exception. While up until now, you may have relied on basic marketing strategies to get new patient enquiries for your aesthetic clinic, if you want to get ahead of the competition and grow, you’ll need to step up your game.
Maintaining and nurturing your relationship with current patients is vital, but don’t forget to reach out to new patients. In this blog, we will run through five of the most effective ways of increasing new patient enquiries so that you can put them into practice immediately.
1. Create a professional and user-friendly website
These days, your potential patients are more tech-savvy than ever. This has only been exacerbated by the pandemic of 2020, where people were stuck inside spending endless hours on the internet. They are experts in finding what they want when they want it. If your website isn’t up to scratch, they’ll notice.
Your website should represent you and your clinic. A slow-loading, hard-to-navigate webpage doesn’t make a good impression. And for those finding out about your clinic through your website, this will be the very first impression.
So, what can you do to ensure patients have a seamless experience while browsing your site?
- Use high-quality images on your site
- Your fonts and the colour scheme should follow a theme
- Ensure your site is easy to navigate and the information is easy to find
- Include testimonials and social proof
- Talk about who you are and your values
- Showcase your treatments using images and reviews
- Make sure your website is mobile-friendly, with over 62% of all web traffic in the UK coming from mobile phones
- Find the balance between professional and personal – people want familiarity while feeling they are in safe hands
If you are struggling to make these changes yourself, it is worth investing in professional help. The platform you’ve used to build your website will have people you can hire to tweak your site and get it to the next level.
2. Optimise your website for search engines
If you’ve followed the steps above, you should have an attractive, easy-to-navigate website to help get your business booming. But it doesn’t stop there.
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is crucial for businesses to reach new customers. When someone searches in Google ‘’medical aesthetics clinic near me’’, you’ll want your website to appear on the first page and within the first results. This increases the chances of potential patients clicking and then converting.
But how do you get your aesthetics clinic on the first page of Google?
You’ll need patience and perseverance – and these following tips.
Using free tools such as Keyword Planner, you can research and find the best keywords your target audience will be searching for to reach your clinic’s treatments. These keywords can then be inserted into the copy on your website.
Expert tip: Don’t stuff your copy with keywords; Google picks up on this and penalises you. Keep it natural and use them where you see fit.
For more information on how keywords work and how to find them, check out our blog, which will tell you everything you need to know to do the work yourself!
Other tips to improve your website optimisation include:
- Taking advantage of page titles and header tags to help Google understand your content
- Editing your page URLs to use meaningful descriptions
- Including alt-text to describe every image
3. Utilise social media to get new patient enquiries
With 84% of the British population using social media, you’re really missing a trick if you aren’t using this platform to reach new patients.
While social media as an advertising platform is incredibly effective, you can also reach new audiences while keeping your current ones up-to-date on new treatments and the clinic for free.
If you post engaging content regularly and get your followers to participate in conversations, you’ll start to create a community.
Here are some quick tips on what to put out there to help you get your social media channels to gain some traction.
- Post pictures of the team – the more personal, the better
- Show what your aesthetics clinic looks like and what people can expect to find
- Use before and after pictures to show the incredible transformations you’ve helped your patients achieve
- Ask questions and get your followers engaging with the content
- Connect your social media to your website so they can find more information quickly
- Use trends, sounds and music to get your posts more visibility
- Create informative, interesting content to encourage engagement
- Use insights to see what is getting more attention and what isn’t working
4. Run online paid ads for your aesthetic clinic
As we’ve mentioned, social media platforms are great for paid ads to promote your business.
A
nd this isn’t the only online advertising you should be looking at for your clinic. At Ignite, we’ve found using a combination of both social media and Google Ads incredibly successful in getting new patient enquiries to aesthetic clinics.
There are a couple of differences between the two, which are important to note.
With Facebook, you’ll reach new potential patients that might not have heard about your treatments before. This is great for less targeted treatments that don’t have specific criteria the patient needs to fill in order to qualify for treatment.
Google Ads, however, can be used to target those already interested in the treatments you offer. These users are already searching on Google for those services.
With an optimised ad, Google will learn whom to show your ad to for it to be relevant for them and to make sure they are more likely to commit and follow through with treatment. These ads are effective for more high-value treatments.
If you would like a more extensive step-by-step guide on using Google Ads, look at our blog here!
5. Offer incentives for referrals to your loyal patients
While word-of-mouth referrals might not be as easy to come by, they are one of the most effective ways to gain new patients.
We trust our friends and family’s opinions. So, if someone tells us about an amazing experience, we’re likely to follow their recommendations when looking for a similar experience.
Once you’ve built up your customer base full of loyal patients, it’s time to tap into it and get some patient referrals.
How do you go about asking your patients for referrals?
An incentive will encourage them to talk about you and your clinic. The incentives could include a voucher for a discount or a complimentary treatment, and you could offer something to both the patient referring and the referred patient.
Start by telling your patients in person about the referral program you’ve set up. This means that when you send a follow-up email or text, they will already have it top of mind.
Another form of referral can work with other businesses. Find local businesses in the area and avoid those in direct competition.
For your aesthetic clinic, you could look at collaborating with hair salons and gyms – businesses that complement yours.
You can use these to cross-promote your treatments and theirs. This not only means you’ll reach a wider and local audience, but you will also help to promote local businesses in your area. It’s a win-win!
Final tips to increase new patient enquiries for your clinic
With these steps, you should be well on your way to getting those new patients lined up at your clinic door, so we will leave you with some final tips!
- Attend local events – get to know other businesses in the area and the local community by immersing yourself in it
- Participate in charity events – get the word out there about your clinic while doing something good such as team participation in a fun run or offering a treatment for free in a charity raffle
- Offer free consultations – get potential patients through the door with a free consultation where you can then explain the transformations they can expect to see
