How can plastic surgeons master digital marketing

Plastic surgery is a touchy subject. Not a lot of women and men have a t-shirt with the words, “I got work done on my body”. Beautiful could mean many things to different people. To some, it might be health and happiness. To others, it’s larger breasts and a smaller nose. 

What we need to understand is how a plastic surgeon can reach each individual with the right message.

What I am going to try to do is understand the demographic that wants work done on their body and help you understand the data I collect so that the message of your business is clearly explained.  

Who are we marketing to

A study by Joel Schlessinger, Daniel Schlessinger and Bernard Schlessinger ran a survey of 336 women in Omaha, Nebraska to examine age in relation to partner and patient demographic. 

The study showed that 66.9% of women who received cosmetic surgery had a college degree or higher. The study also showed that 74.3% of these women were employed.

The study revealed an interesting trend with women who were older or younger than their partner. Women who were older than their partner had plastic surgery done more than women who were younger.  

This is not a study of thousands of women but we can anecdotally conclude that women with younger partners tend to get more work done. Specifically, dermal fillers. These women are also more educated with a higher employment rate than the general public. It’s also interesting to note in the study that 74.5% of women who had cosmetic surgery done were women. 

Users of fillers in the “older than partner” group had an average age difference of 6.1 years versus 4.8 years in the “younger than partner” group. 

You can read the full study here https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2989811/

Breaking the data down

In a report from plasticsurgery.org, we can go over the top five cosmetic surgical procedures for the year 2018 (compared with 2017).

The top five procedures for women were:

1. Breast augmentation – Up 4% from 2017
2. Liposuction – Up 5% from 2017
3. Eyelid surgery – Down 1% from 2017
4. Nose reshaping – Down 1% from 2017
5. Tummy tuck – No change

The top five procedures for men were:

1. Nose reshaping – Up 1% from 2017
2. Eyelid surgery – Down 2% from 2017
3. Liposuction – Up 5% from 2017
4. Breast reduction – Down 1% from 2017
5. Hair transplant – Up 17% from 2017

Read the full plastic surgery statistics report here. 

Another very interesting study is the influence of social media on the decision to undergo a cosmetic procedure. The study of 816 participants found that 48.5% of respondents were influenced by social media to consider cosmetic surgery.

To market a plastic surgeon ethically, we’ll need to understand the negatives. For example, in a study done in 2001, suicide rates were significantly higher for women who had breast augmentation procedures. Researchers speculate that unrealistic expectations might be a reason why. 

What can we gather from these studies

It looks like the women who commit to getting plastic surgery or dermal fillers are more educated, wealthier, work more, tend to be older than their partners and are likely to be married. 

We also know that unrealistic expectations might increase the likelihood of suicide. 

Let’s get into what keyphrases people are looking for when they’re interested, intrigued and ready to commit to finding a clinic to go to. 

Plastic surgery keyword research

I am going to conduct my keyword research a little different versus my previous posts. The reason being is that plastic surgery is sensitive and I need to know where a target demographic is when they start thinking about getting work done when they are interested and ready to ask for a consultation. 

To keep focused and not get repetitive, we’ll only research the most popular plastic surgery procedure for women. For the time being, that’s breast augmentation. 

Above the funnel keyword research for breast augmentation 

We’re going to focus only on keywords with volumes of more than 50+ searches per month. 

I found 60+ keywords with traffic equaling to 11,510 searches a month. I can immediately see our content strategy forming here just by looking at what women are asking. 

Here are some quick takeaways:

1. Women want to know what breast augmentation is and how it’s done
2. They want to know if they can breastfeed
3. They are asking if they should get a breast augmentation procedure (confirmation bias)
4. What does going from one cup to another look like
5. There are safety concerns, which need to be addressed 
6. What’s the healing process 

Here’s the full list of above the funnel keywords for breast augmentation.

I’ll talk about how we can automate our marketing strategy from top to bottom later in this post. 

Middle of the funnel keyword research for breast augmentation

The assumption at this point of our keyword research strategy is that we now know that women have looked up information about breast implants/augmentation and are now trying to learn more. Sometimes, keyphrases above the funnel blend into keyphrases in the middle of the funnel. We have to keep that in mind in our research. 

For middle of the funnel keywords, I found a few keyphrases with 40 searches per month, which look enticing and can be used to our advantage. 

There are 9,900+ searches a month from what I could find sifting through my research documents. I am sure there are more opportunities but this is a good start. 

Key takeaways:

1. Again, there are lots of questions about price and financing
2. More duration questions about getting back to normal life
3. Some preparation questions 
4. A couple of interesting questions about hiding the surgery
5. And a few questions about what type of apparel to wear after breast augmentation 

Here’s the full list of middle of the funnel keywords for breast augmentation.

Bottom of the funnel keyword research for breast augmentation

This is the point when women are ready to commit and are actively looking for a surgeon to help them with their journey. It’s imperative to collect personal information at this point and create custom marketing campaigns on different channels for this group. 

If we’ve done our keyword research right, the flow of how a visitor lands on the website and becomes interested in contacting us will be congruent with their objectives. 

We’re now looking at women ready to commit to a consultation. Here are our takeaways for our bottom of the funnel keywords:

1.  A lot of searches with “near me” in the keyphrase. I’ve worked with a lot of high-profile websites who want to rank for their primary keyword with “near me” at the tail-end of what they want to target. In all cases, we were successful in building links on other websites using anchor texts in this order: NEAR+[CITY], NEAR the city of [CITY], NEAR [STATE/PROVINCE]
2. New York City, Los Angeles and Beverly Hills take the cake with the most interest for breast augmentation 
3. The terms “best surgeon” is searched for frequently 
4. Before and after keywords are common (before and after keywords can also blend into middle of the funnel marketing campaigns) 

Here’s the full list for the bottom of the funnel keywords.

Loyalty/Advocacy part of the funnel

What happens when a patient has left the clinic? How do you make sure they become loyal or even become an advocate of your clinic? And how do we find patients who have questions after getting work done on their breasts from other clinics? 

This is where we can shine and create content strategies to become the authority on the subject. 

Here are some takeaways:

1. Women seem to want to know how to sleep after getting breast augmentation 
2. There is a lot of interest in scar removal and reduction 
3. Some searches are related to pain relief 
4. There a few questions about the type of bra to wear after a procedure is done 
5. And there is a good amount of search volume for getting back to work, flying and being able to exercise 

We’ll tie our keyword research and marketing strategy below with how we will dominate search rankings and increase lead numbers once we have a little more information of the area we want to target. 

Locality and rankings

I want to be more specific and to help you understand how we can improve the rankings of business, I’ll find a clinic in NYC on the second page of Google. Once I pick a clinic, I’ll take their breast augmentation page and try to optimize it. 

Assume that we’re trying to rank for, “breast augmentation near me” within the first five positions.

I am picking https://www.newlooknewlife.com/breast-augmentation/ for our research and recommendations. They’re on the second page of Google for our target keyword. I also looked at, “breast augmentation NYC”.

Who ranks on top for breast augmentation near me

Here’s who shows up for the map pack:

Here are the top five organic search results. 

1. https://www.drgreenwald.com/
2. https://www.doctorsplasticsurgery.com/
3. https://www.drpfeifer.com/
4. https://www.drpfeifer.com/
5. http://drkolker.com/

Now let’s compare the top five domains with New Look New Life . 

From the looks of our keyword GAP analysis, Dr. Karlinsky-Bellini needs a little help competing with Dr Greenwald and Dr. Feifer. 

Here’s where Dr. Karlinsky-Bellini stacks up organically for the keyphrase breast augmentation NYC:

Dr. Karlinsky-Bellini does show up on Google but not where it counts like Manhattan, Midtown Manhattan or Upper East Side. She does, however, show up on the second page near Yankee Stadium and Ridgefield. 

Optimizing the breast augmentation page

We use an expensive and very effective tool provided directly by Google. Their AI & machine learning products are incredible if you know where to look.

In this case we’re going to use NLP (natural language process) which uses machine learning to reveal the structure and meaning of text. I am not going to dive into the science of how NLP works so let’s just get into it. 

There are more than a dozen touchpoints we would go over by using our AI system. For the sake of time, we’ll go over the most important SEO strategies. 

True density report

Remember, we’re trying to optimize https://www.newlooknewlife.com/breast-augmentation/.

By looking at our report, we can see opportunities not being capitalized on for the breast augmentation page. 

Download the full true density report here. There are clear opportunities here. We just have to take advantage of them. 

Words in paragraphs

It might sound trivial and antiquated but word count in paragraphs matter if search engines tell us the top five positions have more words on their money page than us. 

In this case, our top five competitors all have more than double the word count in their paragraphs on the homepage. Is that coincidence? I think not. 

Our copywriter, designer, media and user experience team would have a field day with this page. We have a lot to improve. 

Off-page search engine optimization

There are several ways to improve your website authority and build trust with Google. One of the biggest and most effective tactics has always been link building. 

Building links on relevant and authoritative websites will always yield sustainable long-term results.

Here are some ways to build links: 

1. Find out if there are websites linking back to a 404 page for your competitors. You can then write a relevant post and ask for the link to be replaced with yours.
2. Write in-depth studies and publish them on your website. Other websites will eventually notice your content and link back to you. If you do a good job promoting this piece, you’ll have no issues getting backlinks
3. Find out what the most common backlinks are for the top five spots on the first page of Google – I’ll go over this tactic with you all 
4. Build links on niche directories – Careful with this one because you don’t want to build links on garbage directories which don’t really pass value
5. Create media no one can refuse – Become the outlier and lead the industry with compelling media content – We’ll go over this later in this post
6. Hiring an agency to do an outreach campaign – We specialize in that and can help
7. Get involved in the community – There are many local organizations right in your community who help XYZ. You can sponsor them or even volunteer (win for you and the community)
8. Get interviewed by local news 

I can go over dozens of ways to build links but for now, let’s focus on the most common links of our top five competitors.

Get the full report for the most common backlinks here. 

Before I move on, let’s try to go over the common backlinks document and see if I can find an opportunity for Dr. Karlinsky-Bellini. 

It looks like https://www.refinery29.com/ is a very common backlink for the top listings in Google for breast augmentation surgery. Now Dr. Karlinsky does have a link on Refinery29, which is good. She just needs to be in more places to increase her authority. 

I’ll help your marketing team out with the link to contact Refinery29 and try to get approved as a contributor. Simply go to https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2014/04/66412/writing-for-r29 and you’ll get the details of what they’re looking for. You can then email [email protected] to get started. 

I’ve given actionable advice for marketing your breast augmentation page. Our agency will do this for every page for our clients. Our process does not cut corners. We have one goal in mind: Increased revenue for our clients. 

User research

Does your marketing team conduct user behaviour testing to determine if a page is performing like it should? Do they ask your current and future patients what they were thinking when they were ready to book a consultation? 

When we sign a client for https://www.dripmarketing.co/ we immediately go into studying the demography we’re trying to target. Here’s how we test our hypothesis:

1. Record 100 visits to the website and take notes 
2. Study heatmaps 
3. Interview sales staff
4. Interview directors
5. Run surveys on the website
6. Run user surveys for current patients 
7. Run randomized surveys for the general public 
8. Record people going through the website

After all our results are in, we start writing the copy, improving design and putting our content strategy together. 

On-site user survey questions

We run exit surveys to find out why visitors decided to leave our website. Here’s what we ask right when a visitor is ready to leave:

1. What was the purpose of your visit? 
2. Were you able to complete the purpose of your visit today?

If the answer to question #2 is no, then ask the following question:

• What stopped you from completing the purpose of your visit today?

These three questions alone have sometimes helped us completely pivot on our marketing campaigns in the past saving us time and money. 

Thank you survey questions

Most clinics have their own thank you survey or user satisfaction questions. In most cases, they’re related to the service. If we can add a few marketing questions, it helps our team adjust our copy, content and media effectively. 

Here are some sample questions to add to your post-surgery questionnaire:

1. Where exactly did you find out about us?
2. What persuaded you to become a patient?
3. Which other options did you consider before choosing New Look New Life?
4. What’s the one thing that nearly stopped you from becoming a patient?
5. What was the biggest challenge, frustrating or problem in finding the right surgeon?
6. If you could have us create something just for you, what would it be?
7. What other products or services should we offer?

Question number four is one of my all-time favourite questions to ask patients, customers and clients. It tells us exactly why they might have picked someone else or stopped altogether. 

User recordings and heatmaps

We run user-recordings and heatmaps of all the pages in a website before and after tests/changes. We’re in this for the long-haul and any data that can help us improve our lead numbers is taken seriously. 

Here’s an example of a user recording:

See the recording here.

Here’s an example of mapping user behaviour:

I have nothing to hide so if you would like to do this yourself, head on over to https://www.hotjar.com/ and sign up. They offer a very affordable way to understand your visitors. If you want someone to interpret the data, then you would hire someone like me. 

Increasing your authority 

I’ve explained in all my posts that increasing your authority in your field is key to getting not only more patients but also a higher quality lead count. 

I am going to explain my case. Before starting this website and blog, no one really knew about who I was and what I could offer. They didn’t know how I would help them increase their visibility, revenue and create an automated marketing campaign, which will only improve over time. I stepped out of my comfort zone and started this blog with a podcast. My bubble has burst into a community who needs my services. 

Here are the steps to increase your authority in the plastic surgery industry:

Podcast – Start a simple podcast and address user intent. There are real people asking questions online and if you can be there when they’re looking, our team can chase them around the web with a marketing strategy to push them down our funnel. An example is, “how much does plastic surgery cost”. It has 1,300 searches per month in the US. 

You can start different playlists to address different questions. Our media team has done this successfully in industries with not a lot of interest. The results have been amazing. 

Video – Considering the industry, video can be extremely powerful. In this case, using video to explain different topics will boost your authority tenfold. On the breast augmentation page, Dr. Karlinsky-Bellini has a video talking about breast implants:

It’s a good video but it needs improvement. I’ve learned a lot since hiring our media director to shoot 4K video with incredible sound quality. 

Here’s a quick probono example we’re proud of showcasing:

For people to take you seriously, you have to take production quality to a different level. Your work is high-level. Why would your media strategy be any different? 

Paid placement

Combining your organic visibility with a paid marketing strategy is another powerful way to take up more real estate on the search results page and social media channels. 

We don’t run ad campaigns until we’re sure the landing pages we send visitors to follow scent in terms of marketing copy, intent, and offer. We also ensure we are confident enough about our demographic needs and behaviours before having our clients pay thousands into paid ads.

Automating our paid campaigns  

I can’t show historical data of what competitors have done because of the pandemic so unfortunately, we’re going to have to skip that this round. 

What I can and will do is show you how I would automate the marketing automation process for the breast augmentation page. I call it, automated patient acquisition funnel: 

Download the full automated patient acquisition funnel here. Use it to plan your next marketing campaign. Before you do, I’ll explain a scenario you can try:

1. A visitor lands on the breast augmentation page
2. They are entered into a facebook audience list for a top of the funnel marketing campaign
3. This visitor is shown a video of why Dr. Karlinsky-Bellini is better than all the rest with this procedure
4. If this person watches 50% of the video, they’re entered into a new list for a different campaign
5. We will now run a campaign to show them a testimonial video
6. If they watch 50% of the testimonial video, we’ll put them on another list for a different marketing campaign
7. Finally, we’re going to run a test with two ads. One ad will be a form directly on Facebook to capture their personal information and the other is to run a campaign with a call to action button which will lead this person back to our breast augmentation page

This process will be fined tuned until it’s a conversion machine. 

The information architecture for the breast augmentation page

What I am going to show next is the framework for our breast augmentation page. It will have all the qualities to not only rank well but also convert visitors into leads. 

The issue I am working with is that the breast augmentation page on New Look New Life is a wall of text with no visual queues. Also, stock photography doesn’t do the page any justice. 

Download the PDF version of the wireframe here. I would take this one step further with an amazing content strategy plan on the blog, which will be linked on the breast implant page.  

What I’ve done is a draft wireframe of the breast augmentation page. If you don’t take advantage of what I am sharing for free, I am not sure what else I can do. 

Content strategy

Now that we’ve done our keyword research, determined what the user intent is for breast augmentation page, have a clear automation strategy and have built a wireframe that’s easier to digest, we can now talk about our content strategy/calendar. 

There are dozens of topics to try and rank for so we’ll try to focus on just one keyword for our post. 

I am going to pick the topic breastfeeding and breast augmentation. The parent keyword is can you breastfeed after breast augmentation. 

Looks like it’s pretty hard to rank for but that shouldn’t stop us. We have to determine who the competition is and see if we can do better.

It looks like we have a few pages ranking for what we want to show up for with very low page authority scores. We have a shot at this. 

Where do we start? What are people asking? I wasn’t going to leave you high and dry so let’s dig in further. 

Download the variations, questions and related keywords. 

You now have a topic which can bring in thousands of visitors if you strategise a great content strategy. What does that mean?

1. Don’t just write a wall of text. You need to understand the pain points of people looking for answers
2. Try to take a main topic/question and create clusters of content. We can then interlink them together
3. Incorporate media into your posts. This includes diagrams and interviews. Absolutely no stock photos
4. Try to run a study with a few women and release these numbers. It might seem hard but we’ve done this with a small budget and a tight timeline. The results are incredible 

How to get your post ranked

Coming up with incredible content is one thing but having it show up in Google is completely something else. 

We’re working with an authority score of 32 for our primary domain at New Look New Life. 

Here’s the secret sauce all the other agencies might not be telling you. You need high authority links back to the pages you want ranked on Google. Without links on other websites, you’re not the popular kid on the block. 

We don’t build links at our agency because it’s very time-consuming and labour intensive. What we do is hire the best in the world who specialize in this field and whitelabel the links. I have nothing to hide and am proud to say that our top-tier content pieces have done amazing for us when we’ve built a few links to them. 

Automating how you interact with patients

Have you ever thought of how you would interact with future, current and past patients? Do you have a content strategy for that in your CRM and email marketing campaigns? Let’s talk about that? 

With our keyword research, we can make an educated hypothesis about the marketing funnel we’re working with. 

Here’s a birds eye view of the funnel:

1. Once a person is thinking about getting breast augmentation, they’ll start searching for keywords like, is it safe or how much does it cost to…
2. Once they’re interested, they might be thinking about recovery time 
3. And when they’re near the bottom of the funnel, they’ll be looking at pricing and locations for a consultation 
4. Once they submit their details in a form, they’re put into an automated email marketing campaign. 

Number 4 is where we can really try to impress them with our clinic and how we run our business. What would our strategy for this email look like?

For starters, they would get a confirmation email about their booking. Here’s an example:

The next email should be an automated message with the most frequently asked questions answered in short sentences. Preferably, this email would be sent out 72 hours before the consultation. It would be even better to have Dr Karlinsky answer these questions in a video, which we can put in this email.

Once a potential patient visits the clinic and commits to a procedure, they should be put into a new email list (which is connected to your CRM) of how they need to prepare. Once again, we want to focus on questions and answers plus a video explanation of what a person should expect. 

If the consultation does not turn into an appointment for a procedure, the person will be entered into an email list to get a testimonial video of why Dr Karlinsky is the best at her craft. This is the final email and drop-off point for potential patients. We can take this a step further by having a social media ad campaign for people who visited the clinic for a consultation and did not turn into a patient. 

And finally, when a patient completes their procedure they are entered into a new email list to give you feedback about how they felt about the whole process. Here’s an example from scoot.  

I am not going to leave you high and dry. I’ve wireframed the survey email for New Look New Life so you can get a feeling of how we work. You can use this wireframe with any business. Just change the words. 

Download the review email PDF here.

We’re not done yet. If the feedback is positive they will be sent a final email to leave you a review on Google. 

All of this is automated. We just have to set it up and brand the emails. Of course, we’ll be testing the whole process based on our results.

Final words

I didn’t think I would go in depth for this post but I am glad I did. 

You now understand the process and work involved to run a successful marketing campaign for a single service. Now imagine this for your whole organization. 

If you’ve made it this far, you must be serious. Let’s chat if you have questions.

Until then, I’ll catch you on the next post.