When it comes to marketing, everyone makes mistakes. Part of growing any business involves trial and error. This is no different for medical spas and other cosmetic practices. However, the following marketing mistakes should be universally avoided at all costs.
1) Too many or too frequent discounts: You never want to brand your practice as a “discount center.” If patients start to expect low prices out of you then they lose the incentive to purchase now. I’m not suggesting that you shouldn’t have monthly specials, but limit them. Keep the total number of discounted services low.
2) Purchasing general email or mailing lists: This is a waste of money. Not only are you marketing to a list of people that’s majority is outside of your target market, but they likely don’t know who you are. How quickly do you delete or throw away “spam” that you receive in the mail or via email?
3) Sending too many (or too few) emails: Email marketing is important, so work on building your list naturally (as opposed to buying lists, as mentioned in #2). You should be making contact with your list about every month. If you’re sending more than two emails per month you may be overwhelming your list, resulting in higher opt-out rates. Too few, or no, emails and you significantly limit your practice’s exposure.
4) Neglecting review sites: Contrary to what Yelp and other review sites may say, you can and should promote your review pages. Their reasoning makes sense: they only want reviews from people who use Yelp. However, if you ignore your review sites it may lead to more poor reviews. Encourage patients to leave you a review, as well as another local establishment. This way their review doesn’t get filtered out.
5) Neglecting potential partners: Joint ventures are critical to most businesses, and the same can be said for cosmetic practices. If you can find another local business with a similar target market then you can cross-promote your business to a whole new audience. Best of all, assuming this partner has a loyal following, you’ll gain credibility because of their endorsement of your practice. Consider joint events or open houses to introduce yourself to these new potential patients.
Feel free to add any of your own marketing blunders to this list. If you’d like to learn more about stepping up your marketing then contact TRBO today. You can leave us a note here or call 877-673-7096 x2.
