Lead generation is important for any industry, but lead generation for cosmetic surgery requires an integrated multi-channel marketing approach with a lot of moving pieces. As a plastic surgery marketing agency, we know just how important every marketing channel is when it comes to generating leads for your practice.
While PPC, SEO and social media all have their individual strengths when it comes to lead generation, the real magic happens when each of these marketing strategies work together in one cohesive marketing approach.
If you’d like to speak with a marketing strategist to discuss plastic surgery lead generation options for your practice, click here.
PPC is the Fastest Lead Generation for Plastic Surgery
Why are PPC services the fastest lead generator for plastic surgery? It is going to come down to two major factors: targeting and location.
With PPC, it is much easier to target a very precise audience with a high likelihood of an impression, and the location of ad placement is just as important.
One major benefit of PPC across the board is that you have highly specific targeting that is tailored to your practice. Plastic surgery lead generation can be difficult through other marketing strategies because of how many users can come across your website with a more general keyword that won’t lead to a conversion. But with PPC, you can get as targeted as you want with very little room for unwanted clicks.
The targeting for PPC can be focused on two major areas: keywords and location.
PPC Keyword Targeting
While keyword targeting is not just for PPC, it is much more extensive than in other platforms. In SEO, you are able to use a target keyword on your page, and hopefully Google will understand that is the target keyword and not serve your page on the SERPs for unqualified searches. But in PPC, you can physically enter your target keywords and Google will only bid on those keywords without fail.
This means that you will never spend a dime on unqualified searches as long as you have made an effective negative keyword strategy to accompany your targeted keyword list. This is a major reason as to why lead generation is so effective in PPC.
PPC Location Targeting
There are two different parts of PPC location that are important to note. The first of which is location targeting of your ads. With PPC ads, you are able to edit your settings so only users that are in a specific geographic area can be served your ads.
In organic search, you cannot stop someone in New York from seeing your page for plastic surgery in London if they happen to enter the query “plastic surgeon in London.” But, in PPC, it is possible for you to restrict your ads to only show for users that are in your target location. This ensures that there will be less unqualified traffic coming to your site.
The second part of PPC targeting that is so important is the physical placement of the ads when they show on the search engine results page (SERP).
You can have the best organic page in the world, but even the number one position on the SERPs is going to be lower than the lowest placed PPC ad.
This means that your ad will be the first thing that people see after they type their query into the search bar.
These things combined, leads to a platform that can generate leads much faster than other platforms. That being said, it is also going to be the most expensive platform to utilize. If you’re looking for a more cost-effective strategy, SEO services may be the better option for your clinic.
SEO is the Most Cost-Effective Lead Generation Tactic Over Time
Where PPC is a faster option for plastic surgery lead generation, doing SEO for plastic surgery is the slow-and-steady, cost-effective approach to lead generation.
There is a three-step process to ensure that your plastic surgery SEO strategy is working to its full potential.
First, you need to choose your target keywords, then you need to optimize for those keywords, and finally you need to acquire links to those pages.
SEO Keyword Targeting
When determining the target keywords for your plastic surgery website, you should focus on the search intent of the keywords. Make sure that you are targeting your procedure pages to the right kind of keywords like “plastic surgery procedures.” You can determine if you have found the right target keywords by performing a SERP analysis.
Once your primary procedure keywords have been found, you need to build out dedicated pages that are optimized for each procedure you perform, combined with the geographic area that you target. Building these pages will ensure that you are maximizing the lead generation potential of each procedure page on your website.
SEO Keyword Optimizations
There are two places you need to optimize for your new target keywords to maximize your lead generation efforts: your website and your Google My Business page.
If you want your pages to show up on the first page of the SERPs, you need to make sure that you are target the right keywords for a plastic surgeon. Once you’ve performed keyword research to identify these keywords, you need to place your target keywords in your title tags, headers, and throughout the entire page. Don’t do it too much, or it will become keyword stuffy, but if done correctly it will help the page rank better on Google.
The other place that you can show up in the search engine results is through your Google My Business listing. Local searches are an extremely important part of organic search, so you need to make sure you are placing your target keywords throughout your GMB listing too.
If both your GMB and your website are properly optimized, there is a chance that you can show up more than once on the first page of Google. This ensures a higher chance for organic lead generation.
Acquire Links
Having a strong page for your plastic surgery company is one thing, but if no one is linking to the page then there is much less of a chance for it to show up in the SERPs. That is where link building comes into play.
Search engines use links to help discover new web pages, and to help determine how well a page should rank in the results. This second part is so important because Google uses these links to measure the quality of pages by assessing how many pages are linking to your page. This higher quality helps your pages rank higher in Google’s SERPs.
Additionally, having links to your page on other high quality sites will increase the chance of people clicking on that link and going to your site, which has the potential to turn into a lead.
Brand Building Through Social Media
Social media can be an incredibly powerful marketing channel for a plastic surgeon if done well. While social media marketing is not something that you have to use, properly using a social media platform can help you build a solid fan base in your region, helps you effectively, and quickly, engage with your clients and potential patients, and eventually generate leads.
As you get started in marketing your plastic surgery practice on social media, don’t spread yourself thin. Pick a social media channel to focus on and build an audience there. You may want to consider the visual nature of a channel such as Instagram or TikTok when making this choice, since it best lends itself to talking about a visual service such as cosmetic procedures.
You need to remember that social media is a conversation, a two-way street. The interactions you have on your social media platforms can help build brand trust and for a community around your brand.
Trust in a brand is a key factor in lead generation and this interaction will allow you to present yourself as a medical professional that people can trust. This can have a great effect on how potential patients view your brand and the trust that can be built.
Lead Generation Is Just the First Step
You have now built out the different ways that you can generate leads, but now comes the real question: Will the lead convert?
Getting someone interested in using your brand is only half the battle. Just because someone clicks on a PPC ad, finds your GMB through organic search, or has a good interaction with you on social media does not mean that it will lead to a conversion. That comes from what you can offer once users reach your site.
Once a lead has come to your website, you need to turn them into a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL), or someone who has identified themselves as interested in your product. To do this, there needs to be some sort of call-to-action, such as contacting a specialist for a consultation.
If a potential patient is willing to contact one of the surgeons or come in for a free consultation, then there is a high likelihood that they are going to convert.
Conversion Attribution
Through conversion tracking, you will be able to tell exactly what marketing channel has brought in the most qualified leads. You may find that PPC is excellent at driving traffic, but they aren’t converting for some reason. Or you may find that your organic search is driving the majority of your qualified leads depending on what kind of conversion attribution model you have been using.
For quite some time, most conversions were attributed to a specific marketing channel just based on the last click. This means that if someone clicked on your PPC ad and filled out a contact form, then the PPC channel would get 100% of that conversion attribution. But that isn’t how things work all the time.
People like to do their research for quite some time. That means that someone may have seen your brand on social media and decided to look up your website on Google. They then decided to click on your ad because it was at the top of the page. And while they did not convert in that visit, they came back to your page the following day through an organic search and finally converted.
Using the last-click attribution, only SEO would have gotten credit for that conversion, but it was actually three channels that worked together to get that conversion. Both conversion attribution models have their places in plastic surgery marketing. For some companies, it may be important for them to solely focus on the marketing channels that brought in the conversion, but for others it may be more important to see the journey that the customer took.
We believe that plastic surgery marketing is not a single-channel approach, so it is better to use either the linear attribution model or the time decay attribution model.
Have a Varied Marketing Mix To Improve Lead Generation
When people are trying to find a solution online, it is often not a one-time search that leads to a conversion, but a mixture of different marketing channels working together to bring in qualified leads. And that is why having a varied marketing mix is so important for your overall marketing strategy.
While these channels may be separate and have different skill sets to use them effectively, they are most effective when they can work together. For most companies, that may mean hiring a marketing agency to take over the heavy lifting for all of your marketing channels.
Contact us for a consultation on how we can help with your plastic surgery practice lead generation.
