The aesthetics industry is on the rise. Cosmetic procedures are no longer a hushed-up secret with women and men alike happy to admit to minor and major appearance tweaks. With an increase in people looking for safe and legitimate aesthetic clinics, more and more continue to pop up across the country.

With more competition than ever before, your aesthetic clinic’s marketing needs to be second-to-none to help you pull ahead of competitors and build your client bases. How do we know? Well, our full-suite digital marketing agency has extensive experience working with clients across a range of industries; however, one of our longest-standing clients Acquisition Aesthetics is an award-winning training provider, offering aesthetics courses to medical professionals across the UK. So, follow our step-by-step guide on how to market your aesthetic clinic – accompanied by real-life examples of our very own success story.

STARTING AN AESTHETIC CLINIC – WHAT TO CONSIDER

Your USP

Once you’ve decided to start an aesthetic clinic, like any business, you’ll have a lot to think about. The aesthetics industry is rapidly growing, so first you’ll need to identify your USP: what sets you apart from your competition?

Determine what you can offer that clients won’t be able to get from elsewhere. Are you trained in a specific area to a high standard? Do you use new products that aren’t available to everyone? Do you offer special packages? Perhaps you have educational knowledge that you bring to your aesthetic treatments? Whatever it is, you need to make it the very core of your aesthetic business, ensuring that all marketing activities align with this.

Competitor Research

Undertaking competitor research is always beneficial when launching a new brand. Take a look at what similar clinics are doing and try to identify where you can provide something even better. This could be anything from offering a more competitive rate, having better trained staff or using more high-quality products and equipment.

When taking over Acquisition Aesthetics’ accounts, our initial step was to take a full social platform audit using our reporting tool to pull data on both the client’s accounts, as well as their core competitors. The result? We were able to establish which content performed best within the industry, and align future content with this. And remember: industry trends are ever-changing, so you need to ensure that you remain alert and reactive to what’s hot, and what’s not.

Know Your Target Market

It’s also a good idea to speak directly to your target market. Identify the key demographics that you imagine would form your client base and undertake audience research in order to find out exactly what they look for when choosing an aesthetic clinic. This will help you to determine everything including branding, prices and treatment.

As a service provider, Acquisition Aesthetics were keen to hone in on their audience, targeting users in the specific locations that they operate in. We therefore executed a geographically targeted campaign, which resulted in Acquisition Aesthetics’ audience being predominantly made of followers within the five localities that the business was operating – increasing their likelihood of attracting and converting prospective customers.

Branding

One of the key things that can make or break the setup of any business is the branding. Think about some of your favourite businesses and brands; we can guarantee that they all have key trademarks that help them to stand out in your mind. Maybe they use specific colours or their logo is instantly recognisable, or perhaps the tone of voice they use is synonymous with their brand. Your branding will help clients to instantly recognise you on every touch point and will help to build brand consistency and confidence.

For Acquisition Aesthetics, we established their best performing content and used this to develop recurring themes, including: female empowerment, before-and-after results and industry insights. We then used listening tools to track hashtags associated with these themes, so that we could track trending articles within these topics, while consistently infiltrating their social media content with #femalebusinessowner, #girlboss – and the like!

After designing and launching a successful social media campaign around being a female-led company, Acquisition Aesthetics has now gone on to become a well-known business within the aesthetics space, renowned for their support of other women within the medical industry. To this day, this remains their most successful content on social media.

MARKETING FOR YOUR AESTHETIC BUSINESSES

Marketing your aesthetic clinic is the key way to build up a customer base as well as brand loyalty and trust. There are various different marketing tactics you can implement, but the first thing you need to do is identify exactly how your target market consumes media and marketing.

For instance, if you wanted to target “Gen-Z”, we know that this demographic has grown up with technology and are social media savvy – meaning the best platforms to target would be Tiktok, Instagram and your own website. If you were looking to target an older audience, however, then more traditional media coverage and Facebook advertising may work better.

The key element of aesthetic clinic marketing is showcasing two things to your audience: results and safety. It’s unlikely that anybody is going to convert into a customer if they can’t see the expected results and understand that the procedures are licensed and safe. These two elements should run through all of the marketing content that you create.

You can make use of various different platforms to spread your message including social media, email marketing, your own website and on-site content, and reaching out to publications and influencers within your niche. Don’t be tempted to stick to just one platform either, try to reach your customers across various touch points in order to increase brand awareness and the chances of them converting.

HOW AN AGENCY CAN HELP YOU MARKET YOUR AESTHETIC BUSINESS

Business marketing can take a lot of time and effort and can often take your focus away from the everyday tasks that running a business entails. Marketing agencies like Social Chameleon can help lighten your load and take over the running of your marketing plans – but when is the right time to hire extra help?

Are You Ready For Agency Assistance?  

If you feel like your current marketing activity has stalled or isn’t getting your desired results then it may be time to bring in the experts. A marketing agency will look at everything with fresh eyes and their experience and knowledge can help to kickstart your marketing again, helping you to achieve the results you’re after.

What’s more, when you’re running a business, you wear many hats – from team leader to finance manager to social media manager – and it’s only natural for some things to start slipping. You have to prioritise, and sometimes marketing simply isn’t at the top of the list. If you don’t have time and your marketing simply isn’t getting done, then maybe it’s time to bring in the experts!

The Results an Agency Can Give You  

It’s all very well for agencies to pledge to transform your clinic’s online presence – but is there concrete evidence that this can actually happen? To give you a real-life example, we’re proud to share the impressive results of our long-term collaboration with Acquisition Aesthetics. Initially this client was seeking help with social media marketing. Having been active on socials for a number of years, they were not seeing the same results as their competitors and wanted to revise their strategy to increase engagement, and ultimately, drive conversions.

After undertaking our extensive aforementioned research, we leveraged this to create new content for the client – which we published daily. In tandem, we increased their outgoing engagement through organising LIVE sessions with other high-profile accounts in their industry, tapping into the audiences of other key influencers and organisations. To improve conversions, we adapted their social bios and pinned content to navigate users towards their website. We also used their CRM to create embedded enquiry forms which we added to their social platforms so that users could navigate directly to an enquiry form from their Instagram and Facebook profiles. This soon resulted in: 29% Increase In Reach, 32% Increase In Engagement, 33% Increase In Organic Following and 160% Increase In Sales Enquiries. Pretty impressive, right?

Acquisition Aesthetics thought so too. After presenting results at their annual strategy meeting, we were asked to extend our services beyond social media management. Our team took over management of the client’s SEO in June 2021, after coordinating the re-launch of their new website. Since June, the site has experienced month-on-month growth – totalling an increase in 38.3% in users and a 30.6% increase in site sessions. This has been achieved through a combination of SEO activities, including: social listening (to track trending content with the client’s industry), increased site content such as blogs, digital PR and link building and metadata.

After taking us on when they were a relatively young company in early 2019, Acquisition Aesthetics has now been awarded Best Independent Training Provider 2021 in their industry awards. Now, these are the results we like to see! If you’re looking for transformative digital marketing services for your aesthetic clinic, get in touch with us: your journey could begin today.