Archive for Aesthetic Marketing
Communicate With Your Aesthetic Patients
Posted by: | CommentsYou thought you had a good relationship and now you realize you haven’t seen them in over a year – What happened?
The #1 reason patients leave your practice is not because of a bad result.
And, it’s probably not because they didn’t like you and your staff.
…..It’s because of your indifference.
They are being ignored by you so they don’t feel compelled to return. And, they still wanted aesthetic services so they drifted off to your competitors.
Did you know you lose 10% of your patient database with every month that goes by without you staying in touch?
They did not stop wanting aesthetic services….
They just stopped wanting aesthetic services from you…..
How Many Thousands of Dollars Do You Lose Each Year
By Ignoring Your Aesthetic Patients?
Make your patients feel your concern for them and their welfare by keeping in touch with them and reaching out to them regularly.
I promise you – they want to hear from you as long as you are educating them and giving them compelling reasons to return.
You most likely have a database full of prospective patients who came in for a consultation but didn’t book, who came in a couple of times and then wandered off and then those you haven’t seen in months or years.
I guarantee you – they did not stop wanting to look good.
They just went somewhere else where they weren’t ignored and were treated better and made to feel special.
Tip: It’s always faster, cheaper and easier to reconnect with patients who have visited you before than it is to attract total strangers to your practice.
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For more Free tips and videos, visit www.CosmeticImageMarketing.com. Catherine Maley, MBA is Author of Your Aesthetic Practice/What Your Patients Are Saying and her firm offers everything you need to succeed in aesthetic medicine. You can call Catherine at (877) 339-8833 or email her at info@CosmeticImageMarketing.com.
Understand the Decision-Making Process of an Aesthetic Patient
Posted by: | CommentsThe aesthetic patient is more confused than ever. They have many choices and are overwhelmed with the amount of information available today.
Know how difficult this process can be for your patients. This consultation with you is probably awkward and uncomfortable for them. They want to change something about their appearance that makes them feel insecure or unsure of themselves. They hope fixing, repairing, or enhancing it will make them feel better and more confident. They feel vulnerable and are looking to you for help.
That said, it’s important to note that patients also want to avoid making a bad decision. They do not want to regret their choice. A major part of your job is to reassure them they are in the right place for the right procedure and they will be happy with the result.
Note: If a patient is afraid, uncertain or confused,
they will opt to do nothing.
Aesthetic Patients Want to Experience Before Buying
You are in a tough position when it comes to promoting your intangible aesthetic services. You don’t have a product your patient can hold, touch and feel. You don’t have a product she can use all of her senses for to see, feel, hear, taste and touch to then determine its value to her.
With an intangible service such as aesthetic enhancement, she can’t “see” the quality of your materials or the effort that went into the details of producing the finished piece; which is the result she gets.
Since the aesthetic patient can’t see the excellence of your expertise and cannot touch or feel the superiority and knowledge that will go into the aesthetic service you provide her, you are at a disadvantage.
Give her as much as possible to touch and feel and use as social proof such as photos, testimonials, your credentials, celebrity, your office, your shoes, your greeting, your staff and any other detailed detective work she can experience to give her clues to help her determine you are the right physician for her to give her what she wants.
How Decisions Are Reached
The decision-making process is an entire subject on its own; however, here are some basics to consider:
- Decisions are quickly reached by emotion and then justified with logic.
- People act on prejudices, habits and past experience much more than on knowledge.
- It takes a patient a split second to make a decision but getting ready to make that decision can take a long time.
The point here is to address your patient’s emotional motivators for wanting enhancement but also equip them with the logical reasons why you are the perfect choice so they can easily relay that back to their family and friends if they are challenged.
The prospective patient is doing a cost/benefit analysis in their heads to decide if what you are offering them is worth the time, money and effort and if the benefits will outweigh the risk. Help them see and feel what you offer is more than worth it.
Tip: Aesthetic patients buy what they want – NOT what they need.
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For more Free tips and videos, visit www.CosmeticImageMarketing.com. Catherine Maley, MBA is Author of Your Aesthetic Practice/What Your Patients Are Saying and her firm offers everything you need to succeed in aesthetic medicine. You can call Catherine at (877) 339-8833 or email her at info@CosmeticImageMarketing.com.
Is Price Everything?
Posted by: | CommentsThere is one more false belief that can cripple your effective interactions with your aesthetic patients and that is the one about money – or lack thereof.
If you and your staff believe “nobody has any money”, “they can’t afford it” and “my patients are cheap”, you will project those beliefs onto your patients so they don’t buy as well as your prospective patients who will appear cheap to you because that is what you believe. But please consider this:
If pricing was the only determining factor, then:
- - everyone would drive a Honda
- - everyone would wear a Timex watch
- - everyone would shop at Walmart
- - everyone would eat at McDonalds and so on..
I promise you, the majority of your aesthetic patients are not looking for the cheapest price but they are looking for a good result at a fair price so it’s the value they want.
The point is if your patient is only concerned about price, it’s because you haven’t educated them about other variables they should consider when choosing an aesthetic physician.
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For more Free tips and videos, visit www.CosmeticImageMarketing.com. Catherine Maley, MBA is Author of Your Aesthetic Practice/What Your Patients Are Saying and her firm offers everything you need to succeed in aesthetic medicine. You can call Catherine at (877) 339-8833 or email her at info@CosmeticImageMarketing.com.
The Aesthetic Physician in 2010 and Beyond
Posted by: | CommentsThankfully, the worst of the Recession is behind us. A recent survey on CNN shows that 27% of people believe the economy is going to be much better… and 77% of that same group of people says they personally are doing better – yeah!
To read what that means for you, and how your competitors are reacting, CLICK HERE.
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See FREE videos on www.CosmeticImageMarketing.com where Catherine Maley lays out 5 easy ways to introduce aesthetics to your current patients. Her firm specializes in attracting cash-paying patients to a medical practice using PR, advertising and creative marketing strategies. Catherine can also be reached at (877) 339-8833.
Fix Your Phones
Posted by: | CommentsWe offer a mystery-shopping service for our clients. That means we call their office many times asking various questions about their services and then we critique them to determine how the calls could have been handled better.
Boy, do we get an earful! Many of these calls go so poorly that when I report back to the doctor my findings, they almost don’t believe what I am telling them we heard. They are sure I’m exaggerated so, we now tape these calls.
I continue to be amazed at how much physicians complain to me their business is down, their schedule has holes in it and their marketing doesn’t work when I know their issue is “bad phones”. Nothing else you do means anything if the patient can’t get through, is put on hold or is handled in a curt way. Almost as bad is a nice person answering the phone but having no idea how to answer questions and not having enough sense to admit it, get the caller’s name and promise to have a more knowledgeable staff person call them back with the answers to their questions within the hour.
The average practice loses more than ½ million dollars per year on bad phone techniques. Please get your front office staff trained properly on how to answer the phone, bond with the caller, answer their questions and book the appointment. It could make the difference between thriving and surviving this year.
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For more Free tips and videos, visit www.CosmeticImageMarketing.com. Catherine Maley, MBA is Author of Your Aesthetic Practice/What Your Patients Are Saying and her firm offers everything you need to succeed in aesthetic medicine. You can call Catherine at (877) 339-8833 or email her at info@CosmeticImageMarketing.com.
What’s the Objective of Your Website Home Page?
Posted by: | CommentsMost doctors get this wrong. They truly believe the home page is designated to tell the prospective patients all about them, their credentials, skills, expertise and then the laundry list of services they offer.
I guarantee – that’s not it! The true objective of your Website Home Page is to get the casual web surfer to stop-notice-act once they land on your site. How do you ensure that happens? You answer the burning question most on the prospective patient’s mind which is,
“Hey, what’s in it for me?”
The secret is to talk about the patient first – not you. They don’t care about you – yet. Right now, all they care about is do you have a solution to what is bothering me right now? That can be a tall order; however, because you offer many services which is why the most sophisticated practices put up separate Websites for different procedures.
A typical aesthetic consumer is looking for information to a specific procedure so design your Website to give that to them in the form of free reports and videos they can view when they provide their name and email so you can follow-up. Start with emotional copy that addresses their fears and apprehensions, show lots of before/after photos and as much social proof (patient testimonials) as possible. Then, get into you specifically.
I guarantee if you first give the patient what they want which is information, they will then be much more open to learning more about you.
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For more Free tips and videos, visit www.CosmeticImageMarketing.com. Catherine Maley, MBA is Author of Your Aesthetic Practice/What Your Patients Are Saying and her firm offers everything you need to succeed in aesthetic medicine. You can call Catherine at (877) 339-8833 or email her at info@CosmeticImageMarketing.com.
Don’t Mess With Price-Buyers
Posted by: | CommentsYou have probably felt the pressure to lower your prices during these tough times – I know I have – but you want to re-think that strategy.
The pure price-buyer is thinking about only one thing and that is “How can I squeeze every discount and freebie out of this practice before I say yes?” They will haggle and spend your staff’s time going back and forth so by the time they are done, nobody is happy except the frugal patient. They are perfectly content knowing you didn’t make a profit off of them and now they’ll tell their other penny-pitching friends to visit and do the same. Is that what you want? I don’t think so.
In case you’re not convinced, here are other reasons to let these thrifty patients go (especially to your competitors):
- - They take up all your time: they will beat you up on price and then want to think about it so they can beat you up some more later. Now they are wasting your time and money.
- - They do all the complaining because they learned long ago the squeaky wheel gets the oil so now they are unpleasant as well as cheap.
- - They drive off your good customers because they bring negativity to your office and infect you and your staff so you are not at your best for your best patients.
- - If they came for price, they will leave for price so do you really want to work with this fickle consumer?
A much better strategy is to see less patients but spend more time and energy on your most loyal, affluent patients who understand you get what you pay for. They want top quality service from someone they know, like and trust and price is not their ultimate deciding factor.
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For more Free tips and videos, visit www.CosmeticImageMarketing.com. Catherine Maley, MBA is Author of Your Aesthetic Practice/What Your Patients Are Saying and her firm offers everything you need to succeed in aesthetic medicine. You can call Catherine at (877) 339-8833 or email her at info@CosmeticImageMarketing.com.
New FTC Endorsement and Testimonial Guidelines
Posted by: | CommentsIn case you haven’t heard yet, the FTC issued new guidelines regarding the use of endorsements and testimonials in advertising. The result of these new guidelines change the entire landscape of testimonial-based marketing (of which I am a big fan of for aesthetic marketing).
The gist of it is that if you use a patient testimonial to show off the results from your product or service, the ad should clearly and conspicuously disclose the generally expected performance or result of your product or service that others can expect. However, if you advertise “Experience Testimonials” that are simply complimentary to you and show that your patients are happy with the products and services you provide, then the FTC guidelines have no impact. So you can use experience testimonials in the same ways you have been using them.
I am not giving you legal advice. I am simply saying if you are using patient testimonials in your external promotional efforts to showcase your products and services, be sure they depict what other patients could generally expect from the same. Then run it by your attorney to be on the safe side.
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For more Free tips and videos, visit www.CosmeticImageMarketing.com. Catherine Maley, MBA is Author of Your Aesthetic Practice/What Your Patients Are Saying and her firm offers everything you need to succeed in aesthetic medicine. You can call Catherine at (877) 339-8833 or email her at info@CosmeticImageMarketing.com.
Back to Aesthetic Marketing Basics
Posted by: | CommentsWhen you first started out, what did you do to grow your practice?
I’ll bet you read books on business and or marketing since you learned nothing about that in medicine school. You probably talked to other colleagues as much as you could to learn what they were doing or did to grow a patient database quickly so you could do the same. You most likely networked like crazy in your community and offered to speak to groups who could potentially become aesthetic patients for you.
And, when you did have patients come to you for aesthetic enhancement, I’ll bet you treated each patient with kit gloves by giving them your undivided attention, the friendliest service and the best result possible so they would return and bring their friends with them.
So, do you still do those same things that made you successful to begin with?
If not, why not?
During these crazy economic times, now is the perfect time to get back to the basics that made you successful. Reconnect with your patients who know you well and tell them you want more patients just like them. Get their input on what you could do to attract more patients to your practice. I guarantee they have lots of good ideas as well as contacts.
It’s human nature to help someone you like when you are asked so start talking to your patients to get things moving. They want you to succeed!
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For more Free tips and videos, visit www.CosmeticImageMarketing.com. Catherine Maley, MBA is Author of Your Aesthetic Practice/What Your Patients Are Saying and her firm offers everything you need to succeed in aesthetic medicine. You can call Catherine at (877) 339-8833 or email her at info@CosmeticImageMarketing.com.
