Make no mistake: 2023 is set to be the year in which artificial intelligence makes marketing achievable and accessible to any business. That comes just in time for Medical Spas, which are seeing explosive growth in competition across the nation.
Just how intense is the competition? In the next seven years, the global MedSpa market is expected to grow by nearly 250%. This doesn’t count the dentists and other doctors whose services (like botox injections) overlap with yours. Distinguishing your clinic from those around you is not just helpful; it’s essential if your practice is to survive and thrive. That’s when you need to consider which MedSpa marketing ideas fit best with your business model.
If you want a competitive advantage in 2023 and beyond, you’ll need a patient acquisition platform that leverages artificial intelligence (AI) to attract and retain patients.
At the same time, you’ll need to keep the AI in check by using a healthcare-specific platform that is HIPAA compliant.
AI is not a magic bullet nor the best solution for every marketing idea. Below are seven MedSpa marketing strategies that can propel you forward. We’ll also cover how AI may (or may not) supercharge your marketing efforts.
7 MedSpa Digital Marketing Ideas
You must get your foundation right to create a structurally sound marketing plan.
That means that artificial intelligence can carry some, but only some of the weight. You’ll still need human experts to build and execute a truly effective marketing campaign. That means finding an agency that strategically incorporates artificial intelligence into the following fundamental marketing tactics and ideas.
1. PPC Ads
Pay-per-Click (PPC) ads are any digital ads where the advertiser pays anytime a user clicks on the advertisement. Most commonly, they’re one of two types of ads:
- Google search ads: text-based ads that appear near the top of relevant Google searches.
- Display or banner ads: part of Google’s Display Network encompassing more than 200 million websites.
Leveraging PPC marketing in your medical paid advertising strategy can get complex quickly. AI-enabled algorithms can help you understand which keywords to target and how much to bid each time your ad appears on Google or the Display Network.
But you’ll still need human expertise to optimize these campaigns alongside and on top of the algorithms. While AI does a great job of handling bidding, excluding irrelevant keywords and developing great creative are still beyond the reach of any general algorithm.
2. Content Marketing
Content marketing aims to add value for potential MedSpa patients. Your blog, social media pages, and other outlets allow you to share your expertise and build credibility.
You might have read about the emergence of AI platforms like ChatGPT, which can ostensibly replace writing this content. But that reality is still far in the future. Today’s content written by artificial intelligence can best be described as “convincing-looking nonsense.”
Yes, it can spit out plenty of words that sound remotely like they’re coming from a medical spa. But even the best AI content still needs extensive human rewrites.
Consider working on your content marketing through a patient acquisition platform instead. That route can improve the visibility of the content you or your agency create while automatically tagging each page with the right keywords and links to relevant pages.
It’s technology designed to support human-focused marketing, not the other way around.
3. Reputation Management
Reputation management is crucial in the medical spa space. It’s the strategic effort to acquire reviews, respond to reviews, and generally build credibility in the eyes of prospective and current patients.
This is one place where, when implemented the right way, AI can truly shine. The right platform can collect reviews from across the web followed by automatically tagging and posting positive reviews to your website.
Artificial intelligence can also help you become more proactive in gathering those reviews. Using gathered data, the platform can suggest the best places and channels to request reviews from, allowing you to build a more informed reputation management strategy.
4. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
In addition to paid search ads, you’ll also need to make sure that your actual website ranks well in search results for relevant keywords. This is known as Search engine optimization (SEO). SEO describes the process to optimize both your website content and its technical structure to please Google and its users and maximize your chances of a page 1 ranking.
Of course, the number of potential keywords you can target for your website can quickly go into the millions. When working with an agency that doesn’t build SEO strategies supported by AI, you’ll likely be able to target a few hundred of those.
Now, compare that with a patient acquisition platform that uses AI-driven methods for MedSpa SEO. AI-driven SEO combines both artificial intelligence and machine learning to target tens of thousands of keywords, all relevant to your MedSpa business. The result: a more comprehensive SEO strategy that maximizes your visibility on the world’s most popular website.
5. Social Media Marketing
Chances are your potential patients spend at least some of their time on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. As a result, it’s an invaluable tool to reach your audience and grow your patient base.
Effective social media marketing consists of two components, and the way AI plays into each of them differs significantly:
- Organic (or unpaid) social media marketing includes building your business pages and content on platforms like Twitter and Instagram. Your focus is brand awareness and community-building, which means it’s not the right place for automation. After all, the quality of the content you produce will drastically impact audience perceptions. One exception is scheduling tools which enable you to schedule posts ahead of time.
- Paid social media ads have become more popular as organic reach has declined. Here, AI plays a constant role as you set up your ads on the backend. Targeting and bidding is all driven by algorithms set up by the platforms.
In each case, though, working with human experts remains crucial. These experts can help you build social media content designed to convert while also helping you build ads specifically driving the highest possible patient and appointment conversions.
6. Email Marketing
As more of your potential and current prospects end up in your database, you’ll need to stay in touch with them. Effective MedSpa email marketing includes anything from appointment reminders to post-appointment follow-ups and promotions about new procedures.
Automation is a crucial piece of the email marketing equation. You can set up drip campaigns that automate individual messages, like sending a reminder a day before the appointment. Through a network of drip campaigns, you can build personalized messaging that feels relevant for every patient in your database.
7. Managed Chat
When looking for marketing ideas, you’ll find plenty of hype surrounding using artificial intelligence to power website chatbots. The idea is simple: an automated system answers questions as if they were human.
The problem is that chatbots are notoriously terrible at converting visitors into patients. They can only answer a handful of questions and get stumped once the requests get specific.
They also tend not to be HIPAA compliant, opening the door to legal jeopardy for clinics employing them.
As an alternative with many of the same benefits, consider medical-managed chat instead. It’s still a 24/7 Q&A tool available for site visitors. But instead of a machine, real-live representatives are able to answer questions. Managed chat focused built upon patient acquisition platforms are HIPAA compliant.
Enhance Your MedSpa Marketing With a Patient Acquisition Platform
Go through enough MedSpa marketing ideas, and you will likely come to a simple conclusion: it’s impossible to build a modern, successful marketing strategy without technology.
But at the same time, that technology doesn’t need to be exclusively AI-driven. Instead, patient acquisition platforms like DoctorLogic can revolutionize marketing for MedSpas through AI integration that doesn’t dominate the equation.