Effective Website Platforms for Medical Spas

Effective Website Platforms for Medical Spas by Ryan Harris, Co-founder of the Medspa Marketing Institute.

Are you unhappy with your website? Is it a good tool to help you generate leads and get new patients in the door?  If not, you may want to consider your medspa website’s “platform”.

The first thing that you need to know is that the platform your medical spa or aesthetic business website runs on is very important to the search engines.  If you just have a few static pages that rarely change, with mostly sales pitches and no real content, the search engines will never rank your website high in the organic search results.

Google and Yahoo understand that these types of websites exist just to sell a product, not to educate the visitor on a particular topic.  It usually ranks these sites low, but with the right platform, the content limitations can be overcome.

On the other hand, if you create a very rich, robust, and in-depth site that educates visitors on numerous topics by having lots of original, great content, then you are much more likely to be ranked higher in the search engine results pages (SERPS).  However, this is only a general guideline, and not an absolute rule.

We have seen numerous cases where a salesletter website very thin on content outranks a website that has an incredible amount of content, and this is due to the platform that the site is built upon.

The reason is that when search engines spiders “crawl” (analyze) your site, it analyzes not only the content for keywords, but it analyzes the site structure and design to try to determine is function.  It gives a fairly considerable weight to well-organized websites that provide good metadata about the contents of the site.  Metadata is simply “information about information”.

In the last few years, there have been some website platforms known as “content management systems” (CMS) that were created specifically with search engines in mind.  The best of these CMS systems is called Wordpress.

Wordpress actually has two variations, a hosted version at wordpress.com, and a “host it yourself version” found at Wordpress.org.  The self-hosted version is the most robust and flexible CMS ever created, and the search engines really like it, and therefore give Wordpress websites high ranking fairly quickly compared to other platforms.

The real beauty of Wordpress is that the source code is open to anyone and everyone, so a community of tens of thousands of programmers has sprung up to design themes and plugins for it, to enhance Wordpress functionality.

Many of these plugins are related to social networking sites and SEO, so with the right plugins, a Wordpress website can be extremely powerful for search engine ranking and driving traffic from social networks.  They can also look very good without a lot of custom programming or design work.

It is definitely worth investigating whether or not converting your medspa website to the Wordpress platform will help you drive more traffic to your site to make you more money.  Converting your content over isn’t very difficult, and because Wordpress is a content management system and blogging system, your pages can be reorganized to be search engine friendly.

You can “tag” every page with the relevant keywords, add search engine summary excerpts, and many other functions that the search engines value.

Probably the single greatest feature of Wordpress sites is that every time you make a change or update content on the site, when the content is saved, Wordpress will automatically update a long list of blog directories, notifying them that you have added new content.

This contributes significantly to your search engine rankings.  It has been referred to as “post and rank” – as in get better page rankings and SERP listings.

If you do not have a lot of content on your website, that is ok, it is easy and inexpensive to get good spa content written for your site.  The more articles and educational content you have to educate your visitors on your services and treatments, the more Google will like your site, and the more likely it is that other websites link to your site, which is a common and significant SEO tactic.

Getting traffic to a website of course is just Step 1, converting visitors to actual patients is Step 2, and it isn’t difficult if you know what to do.  That will be the subject of the next post on Internet marketing for medical spas.

Happy Marketing!

-Ryan

Diversify Your Medspa Marketing

It is said that there is no one way to get 1,000 new patients but there are 1,000 ways to get 1 new patient. That means you need to diversify your marketing efforts, take massive action and don’t put all your eggs in one basket.

When you understand how marketing strategies work, you can initiate them to bring a flood of new patients through the door. Think about it, if you have 10 different strategies to get new patients, that’s better than 1. The more reliable systems you have bringing in a steady flow of patients, the more stable your medspa business will be.

For example, if you have 10 different strategies bringing in 20k per month and one stops working, you will be fine, but if you have only one strategy and it stops working, you are in big trouble.

Diversify your marketing – protect your business.

Online Marketing that Works – a 3 Part Series

This is the first in a 3 part series on effective online advertising.

Despite the technical mumb-jumbo, marketing your business online is not complicated. If yours is complicated,, then it?s time to rethink your online marketing strategy. It doesn?t matter whether you are a medspa or a car dealer, you can use online marketing to effectively boost your business. I have consulted with hundreds of business over the years, and the prevailing issue that I come across again and again is that business owners start spending money on their website and online advertising without having a solid goal in mind. Begin with the end in mind, and work backwards from there. You cannot have any hope of succeeding if you don?t have a specific, measurable goal for your online marketing efforts.

There are only two real functions of online marketing, and chances are good that your current website accomplishes neither. If so, you are wasting money. The first function is lead generation – new patients / clients coming to your business ready to hand over their money in exchange for your services.

The second function is to market additional services to you existing patients. Now in this sense, I use the term ?marketing? loosely, because marketing to existing clients usually resembles educating them. Educating them about your services, offerings, advantages, strengths, and doing it in a way that makes them ready to come in for more. Does your existing website truly educate people?

One of the main principles we share here at the Medspa Marketing Institute is the concept of the marketing funnel. The marketing funnel is your lead generation system, and it?s a series of marketing steps that turns prospects into patients. The second major system we teach ids the patient profitability pyramid (PPP). The two go hand in hand. You get new patients into the business via a well thought-out marketing funnel. Then, once they become patients, you use the PPP to get them back into your spa or practice, buying additional services – ideally more expensive services.

Your website and online marketing efforts are a component of both of these systems, but a single website cannot fulfill both. So , you may need to entertain the idea of having multiple websites. One for your lead generation efforts, and another to support you patient profitability pyramid. That may sound like a lot of work, but it?s really not, it just takes a bit of planning, and being strategic with your marketing efforts.

The next installment in this series will discuss how to create websites (or modify your existing sites) to effectively generate leads, or get your existing patients spending more money. Until then, happy marketing!

The KISS Principle

The KISS Principle – Keep it Simple, Stupid

No matter the city or location, medspa and laser skin care center owners all say pretty much the same things, talk about the same challenges.

There’s no point being grumpy about it. But marketing your Medspa doesn’t have to be confusing. Do the simple stuff first.

Here are the top complaints:

• “I want more patients, and I don’t know how to get them.”
• “I want my patients to come back more often, and spend more money.”
• And “I want to get ‘off the tools’ but I don’t know how.”

There’s a whole seminar, a dozen books and several university degrees in every one of these questions, but for clarity, let’s just deal with the top two. The faster you find answers to those two, the easier it is to find an answer to #3.

First, some basic Marketing 101.

There are only TWO types of people: Clients you already have, and ones you haven’t met yet.

And it’s a mystery to me why so many business owners spend ALL their time, energy and money, busting a gut to constantly find new customers, while ignoring the farm in their own backyard.

For years a prominent hair replacement surgeon has paid every month, to advise her on marketing.  This surgeon is spending many tens of thousands of dollars a year on newspaper and Yellow Pages advertising to attract balding guys willing to pay an average of $14,000 to get their mojo back.

But the business has the names and addresses of over 8,000 guys who, over the years, have put their hands up and said ‘I’m interested?’ – and haven’t signed up.

Astoundingly, the surgeon doesn’t spend a single dollar on so much as a monthly newsletter to these highly-qualified, very warm leads. And yet we KNOW that if you market to people regularly, with a worthwhile, interesting newsletter, 80% of them will buy from you over a two-year period._

Do the numbers: if only ONE PERCENT of them signed up in a whole year, that’s EIGHTY customers @ $14,000 average = $1,120,000! The whole business only does about $2 million annual sales!

Talk about ‘acres of diamonds’!

So, let’s keep it simple. Here’s a very basic framework/schedule – the bare minimum requirement – for marketing to both get new patients, and get your existing/new patients coming back.

To Get New Patients

1. an ACTIVE – not passive – referral program. It’s a systemised, generous referral program designed to get your best patients referring their friends and colleagues. (Why ‘best’ patients? Because people tend to hang around with people like them. If you want impoverished, penny-pinching patients, sure, ask those patients to refer their friends.)
2. Lead-generating mailbox flyers, newspaper ads, street signs and window posters. Essentially, lead-generators involve making an introductory offer of some kind of FREE service – with restrictions on numbers, days available etc, to drive them in on days when your appointment book is empty anyway – with the purpose of getting the prospect’s backside in your chair or treatment room for an hour or two. That’s when you sell to ‘em, not off the page.

Why would you offer something free? Because, silly, you know that an average patient is worth $X to you in a year? and you know if you get ten new prospective patients in the door, you’ll keep say 5 of them for the long term. Five times $X = ?

You need to know your numbers!

To Get Current & Past Patients Coming Back: Here’s the very basic stuff.

1. Regular (Monthly!) newsletter. Anything less than monthly is a waste of time. There is a whole seminar just in newsletters. It doesn’t have to be glossy, ‘professional’. In fact, the more it looks like it’s been hammered out on an old typewriter on your kitchen table, the better. Personal stuff, about you, your kids, your staff? and with an offer in it. Simple, single sheet of double-sided paper, an envelope and a stamp, and the job’s done.)I cannot stress enough the value of a regular newsletter. They always produce sales, always bring in more than they cost. And they keep your patients close. And they generate referrals.
2. ‘Raise the Dead’ letters: go to your database, pick all the patients you haven’t seen for three months or more?and send them a letter with an offer in it. And for those who don’t respond, send them another letter. Do this every three months.
3. New Patient Letters. If they don’t immediately re-book, every first time patient should be receiving a series of follow-up letters, offering them a Gift Voucher to re-book NOW.
4. Memberships. Want your patients to pay a year’s worth up front? Or commit to a regular credit card payment every month? A member of your ‘Premium VIP Club’ who’s paid for a year of services up front isn’t going anywhere else. Plus, once they’ve spent the money, they’ll soon forget about it?.and spend more on products every time they come in.
5. In-Spa special promos. One smart spa owner produced a series of big posters offering a range of value-add services ranging in price from a couple of hundred bucks right up to $500 or more. These offers were placed all over the spa.  And for a month, the staff talked them up, holding people back till the beginning of the following month. They sold over $16,000 worth of these packages in a matter of days. And the more expensive ones sold best!

There you have it. If you employ only that handful of strategies, do it regularly, do it well, you cannot fail.