Has your aesthetic practice experimented with different marketing tactics in order to gain visibility and drive prospective patients to your website? Of course you have! These efforts are part of the “acquisition phase” and are crucial to generating new patients. However, your work doesn’t end there. You need a strategy and tactics for converting website traffic you’ve acquired.
If your goal is to convert more traffic into leads and leads into consultations then there are three key things that you need to focus on in this “conversion phase“…
1) Reviews: Generating reviews for your aesthetic practice is tough. You may have tried sending emails, postcards, or even thank you cards in the hopes of getting more reviews. You may have even posted QR codes or signs in your office kindly asking for reviews. These can all be effective, but typically the more consistent and proactive you are the better. The key is having a plan and not “winging it.”
If you can utilize a software to automate this follow up then you’ll make your life easier and get better results. Many appointment reminder software solutions also have an automated follow-up feature to help generate reviews from patients. Magic Rating is another great software to help you generate feedback, which can be kept internal, as well as grow 3rd party reviews.
Once you’ve started to generate reviews you’ll want to prominently display them on your website.
2) Before & after photos: Did you know that the among TRBO clients in 2017 the photo gallery page, on average, was the second most viewed page, after the home page? For most clients, the gallery page was not even in the top 10 for landing pages visits, which tells us that website visitors are not landing on the gallery they are navigating to it, further proving that patients want to see your work. As a highly trained plastic surgeon you likely do great work, so you need a way to display this work.
Step 1 is getting patient consent. That can be challenging, but if you’re persistent and incorporate this into your processes you’ll have better luck getting approval.
Step 2 is utilizing a tool to nicely display your before & after photos, in an organized fashion. Your website needs to utilize a quality plugin or tool to display your photos. You want patients to be able to find examples of other patients who’ve had the same procedure you’re interested in and easily be able to click to view large, clear photos and navigate to other cases. Even better if you can make it easy for prospects to review cases for patients who’ve had your procedure of interest AND who are similar to you in age and body type. The latter is how you take your gallery to the next level, and that can be done with filters.
3) Doctor credentials & personality: I would place this one firmly behind reviews and before & after photos. That said, the more educated patients are the more likely they are to consider all your credentials and certifications in their decision-making. If you’ve been in practice for 10-20 years you’ll want to highlight your experience and the number of patients you’ve seen. If you’re a younger doctor you may not have the experience to sell prospects on, so where you trained and which board-certifications you have matter more.
Personality matters too! You can be a triple-board certified surgeon, featured on Dr. Oz, with 30 years of experience but have an off-putting personality or poor bedside manner. That might dissuade people from committing to your practice. As the doctor, you’re the face of your practice, and if you have a great bedside manner and a friendly, approachable demeanor then I’d consider showcasing videos of yourself discussing individual procedures. Best of all, you can even shoot these video with your smartphone!
All three of the above are elements of social proof. They add credibility to the doctor and practice, helping to establish them as the expert. The goal here is to help prospective patients get to know you, like you, and trust you. One side benefit to generating more reviews and before & after photos is that they can help improve your practice’s SEO.
Would you like to learn more about improving your medical or aesthetic practice’s social proof? Generate more patient reviews? Improve your website and gallery? Great, TRBO can help! We’d love to speak with you to learn more about your practice so don’t hesitate to leave us a message or give us a call at 877-673-7096 x2.
