Buzzy new body contouring procedures and innovative injectables – new trends and technologies in the medical aesthetics industry seem to be cropping up every day. And as acceptance of cosmetic surgery among all demographics continues to increase – largely thanks to more effective non-invasive treatments and social media influencers making it mainstream – these trends will only keep coming.
As an expert in the medical aesthetics field – whether you’re a plastic surgeon or a med-spa or offering some combination of similar services – your clients look to you to be a trusted interpreter to digest and distill the latest trends for them. Give them this information, and it’s precisely what makes them loyal to your practice and trust you with whatever their future aesthetic treatment plan may hold. So where to start? By building up your blog presence, followed by an email strategy to get that content out (we tackle the email portion in Content & Email Strategy for Med Spas: Part 2). But first, here’s our roadmap for a content marketing plan and strategy that builds client trust, while fueling knowledge that empowers their future purchasing decisions.
Evaluate the Type of Content That Will Appeal to Your Clients
Before you dive in and start building your collection of content ideas, you’ll want to gauge what types of blog posts will perform best. Here are four places you can turn to get a sense of what matters most to your audience.
Common Client Questions
What types of frequent questions do you get from clientele when they are there for an on-site consultation? Is there confusion about what certain therapies/treatments do versus others? Say, liposuction versus body contouring – what are the differences and what treatment serves certain kinds of clients better? Your content is a way to answer customers’ biggest questions to help inform them and get them in the door.
Website Analytics
Use Google Analytics to dig into which pages on your website are getting the most visitors and highest-engagement levels. Are they spending more time on a particular page for certain services – say microneedling, drainless tummy tucks, 3-D imaging tech for best breast augmentation results, or other? Where the most time is spent is where you should brainstorm topics around.
Your Own Email Campaign Reports
Are you sending out any campaigns currently – transactional, news-related, list of services, other? What links within past email campaigns had the most clicks? This can also inform the kind of content topics people are responding to most.
Competitors or Like Brands
What kind of content, if any, are your competitors or other health and beauty brands pushing out on their own blog sites? Even if you don’t think it’s good content, it can still help you identify the kinds of topics or blog formats not to do.
Determine Post Frequency & Create an Edit Calendar
In general, the more posts you publish, the better the chances you’ll have of capturing more traffic (note: Google’s web crawler likes seeing regular posts and new content and will reward websites that do so with better search-page ranking). Ideally, for smaller companies, that’s posting once a week (three to four times a month). But be realistic: If you have no in-house marketer, you likely won’t have time for that frequency (however, our Hawthorn content team does and can help brainstorm, craft, and load content for you). So aim for at least one blog post a month to start, then stick to that frequency.
To help you stay on top of writing and posting regularly, we suggest using a content calendar to plan out your topics and their publish dates – perhaps to coincide with a certain time of year (i.e., a post about “Top Tips For the Best-Looking Skin in the Heat & Humidity of Summer” should naturally go live during the summer months) or special promotions you might be running at those times. Something as simple as a Google or Excel sheet will work to corral this content plan.
Establish the Content Hub
Yes, this means your blog, the central spot where all content lives, and all clicks lead back to. Ideally, it lives on your website (for SEO impact). But if your site doesn’t have blog functionality, you can turn to building a blog in a subdomain (ex: blog.yourmedicalastheticcompany.com) and using a basic blog template as the starting point – Squarespace and WordPress both offer blog templates, many of which we have used for our clients.
If you currently have a blog, but it could use a little reformatting, refreshing, and redesigning to better showcase your content, you’ll want to work with a web developer to tweak the CMS template you’re currently working in (again, Hawthorn has our own web developers for help with this).
Write & Present the Content in a Way That Best Serves Your Clients
It’s not as simple as write, load, publish, and done. Here are a few ways to ensure your customers will actually read the content you have invested all this time and effort to get in front of them.
Easy-to-Digest Posts
We live in the age of convenience, where people want to get their info fast – otherwise, they won’t invest the time. Therefore, your content shouldn’t be too long (aim for 500 to 700 words per post) and avoid large, long-winded chunks of text. This means breaking up the format of your posts with numbered or bulleted lists, Q&As, or, much like this very post your reading now, divided by different subtitle headings and sections. This helps readers easily take in and jump to different sections. You can also employ design details (depending on your CMS template), like separating blocks of copy with images, videos, or pull-quotes.
Avoid Too Much Selling
If you’re writing a post about liposuction versus body contouring, it’s only natural to link to a page on your website that details the service, downtime, or cost range. But be careful not to oversell, as your clients might start to feel that you’re not providing genuine advice (and remember, the name of the game is earning their trust). Link to different service pages no more than once within the copy or place a clickable call-to-action at the bottom of relevant posts.
Inspirational Visuals
The medical aesthetics industry is known for its sterile-looking “before and after” pictures. And while those are valuable in other pages of your website, your blog shouldn’t be one of them. Rather, opt for images that convey natural, healthy, and effortless-looking beauty and well-being – what your clients’ beauty aesthetics aspire to be. Think people enjoying life and looking good doing it. For example, while a clothing brand, Free People’s wellness blog sets a standard for the kind of images that work well.
Keywords
While this is the last item in this list, researching unique keywords to write into your blog posts is still an important one. While they won’t help more of your clients open the eventual email you will send that links to this content, they will help new clients find your content organically (meaning via search engines). After all, the more eyes you can get on this content, the better for the blog post, and the better for the SEO of your website. Use a keyword search software, like SEMrush, Moz’s Keyword Explorer, Soovle, and others, to evaluate effective keywords and other long-tail phrases prior to writing.
Now, Get That Content Out
Once you’ve begun posting content regularly, you should see some results in terms of your website’s SEO and attracting new clients organically via keyword search terms. But that’s just half of the heavy lifting: Email is the number-one strategy to get this content out to your clients. Learn how in Content & Email Strategy for Med Spas: Part 2 – Email.