Plastic surgeons, in this video and article, I’m going to share with you the four channels that are available to drive leads for your clinic. Which channels are going to be short-term? Which channels are going to be long-term? What are you looking at from a cost perspective, and what is the difference in the quality of the leads that you get from each one of these channels?
Let’s get into it. My name is Frank, I’m the founder of Sagapixel. We’ve been rated by Semrush as one of the top healthcare digital marketing firms in the country. I’ve been doing lead generation with plastic surgeons for 7 years now, and I meet with dozens of plastic surgery clinics every year. So it gives me a good view of the lay of the land, what we see with our clients, and what our leads are seeing from other agencies and what they’re doing internally.
If you’d like to learn more about generating leads for your plastic surgery clinic, schedule a call with Sagapixel today.
Plastic Surgery Lead Generation Channels
1. Google Ads: Short-Term Approach for Plastic Surgery Leads
This is the fastest to work but also the one that’s probably going to have the highest cost per acquisition.
When you perform a search like “rhinoplasty near me,” the first thing that you’re going to see on the page are these local service ads and these ads that appear above the organic results.
The first of these up top are referred to as Google Local Service Ads. These operate on a per-lead basis. That means that you pay when someone calls the phone number that’s listed on the ad. Below that, you have the regular Google Ads (PPC ads). These are a pay-per-click model, meaning you pay when someone clicks on the ad.
Now the great thing about Google Ads is that it quite literally starts working the second you turn the campaign on. Over time, you can refine the account, stop showing the ads to the wrong potential visitors, and collect data to learn things about the times of day, the days of the week, the demographics, the interests, and other types of dimensions that correlate with lower cost per lead. So that you can end up, over time, refining your account and minimizing waste.
I assure you it takes time to do this. This is why, when we deploy Google Ads campaigns for our plastic surgeons, we never start from scratch. We have split-tested campaigns with negative keyword lists. In other words, you don’t want your ads showing up for searches like “Did Kim Kardashian get a rhinoplasty?” When you bid on the keyword “rhinoplasty,” your negative keyword list will prevent that from happening.
As you refine your campaign, however, it’s important to point out that there is a life cycle when it comes to Google Ads that is inherent to every industry and every market. Google has to show, over time, as more advertisers join the platform, the cost per click goes up, and with that, your cost per lead.
This is why I usually advise our plastic surgeons, if they’re doing Google Ads, to also look at other organic channels that can supplement them that are not going to have an increasing patient acquisition cost over time. Because it very well may be that 5 years down the road, the leads are just not profitable anymore.
2. Facebook Ads: Short-Term Approach for Plastic Surgery Leads
I’m sure you’ve seen these ads as you’re scrolling through Facebook. You see the brand that says “sponsored,” and there’s some sort of ad there.
As annoying as they may be, they work, but not for every plastic surgery procedure out there. Generally speaking, we’ve seen Facebook ads not do particularly well for services related to rhinoplasty, facelift, brow lift, and neck lift.
We have seen them produce for lipo, BBL. They can work for injectables. So I would include Facebook ads as part of my marketing mix for your plastic surgery clinic’s lead generation if it’s been shown that the types of procedures that you’re advertising do well there. Because there are a lot that won’t do well with Facebook ads and others that will.
As a matter of fact, on a per-lead basis, I’ve pretty regularly seen that the leads that come in for lipo ads from Facebook actually come in at a lower cost per conversion than Google Ads.
But there is a second part to that. Anecdotally, our clients that have a CRM that see what patients came in from what campaigns have reported that, generally speaking, the Facebook ads are, quote-unquote, “not as good.”
It makes sense. Generally speaking, Google Ads leads are in-market—they’re looking for the thing that you do—versus the Facebook ad that just kind of interrupted somebody as they were scrolling cat videos.
3. SEO Can Drive Plastic Surgery Leads in the Short Term (Sometimes)
This is a short-, mid-, to long-term plastic surgery lead generation strategy.
If you have a plastic surgery practice in a small market that’s not very competitive, the website’s been around for a while, I’ve seen a ton of examples where we were able to take those websites and, within a month, put some of their practice pages on page one.
This isn’t going to happen in LA, Miami, or Boston. In those cases, you’re going to be looking at SEO as more of a medium- to long-term strategy. Meaning, if you’re investing in SEO and you’re working with a good SEO company, you should start seeing rankings in that 6- to 12-month mark, and the leads should start coming in around then.
Now, if you’re doing content marketing as part of your plastic surgery SEO strategy, meaning that you’re writing blogs (I don’t think you should be writing blogs, I think you should be shooting videos and turning those videos into blogs– I’ll link to a video all about that in the description)—as plastic surgery patients discover your content, read those blogs (which you shot videos for), some of them are going to start to feel like they know you, and they’re going to like you.
You are going to be the plastic surgeon that’s giving them all the information that they wanted about the procedure that they were interested in.
From those practice pages that you have ranking in organic search, you’re going to start answering the questions people have about your procedures, and you’re going to start getting in front of plastic surgery patients that way as well. And that will start generating leads as long as your content is really good.
4. Organic Social Media is a Long-Term Lead Generation Strategy
TikTok
It’s an amazing place to get discovered. It’s very hard to grow there these days. It’s not 2019 anymore, and even when you do build a following, very often, the people that are following you don’t necessarily even see the content that you’re putting out.
It’s more of an discovery social media platform. But if you do manage to become TikTok famous, expect a flood of leads.
Even harder to grow an audience on. However, it is an engagement platform, not a discovery platform like TikTok.
That means that the plastic surgery patients that you’ve had come in—maybe you also offer something like injectables or coolsculpting—getting those patients to follow you on social media and stay engaged with you over time could very well result in them coming back and then being a repeat customer, which is effectively a lead.
So, my thoughts: Instagram really should be the place where you’re trying to nurture the audience, the plastic surgery patient base that you already have. It also is a place where the leads that you get, that you’ve already generated from other channels, are going to check out who you are.
They’re going to look at your reviews. They’re going to look at your before and afters, and there’s a good chance that they’re going to want to see your Instagram. So having a great Instagram feed could help convert more of the visitors to your website that are considering converting into a client.
YouTube
Yes, YouTube technically is a social media channel. YouTube marketing is my absolute favorite social media for plastic surgery lead generation.
First of all, the content can be evergreen. Look at how old some of these top results are. “How long does a hair transplant last?”—9 years ago. This is a plastic surgeon that shot a video almost a decade ago, and he’s still the number two position on YouTube and probably still generating views.
YouTube is also the second biggest search engine. (Number one is Google. Number two is YouTube. So there’s a lot of people, as they’re looking into the different procedures that they’re considering, that are going to turn to YouTube to get that information.
The barrier to entry is a lot higher. It’s honestly a little more involved to produce a video than it is to write a blog post. But if you checked out the video that I talked about earlier, which you definitely should check out, you can take your YouTube content, if you do it the right way, and turn that into SEO content as well.
So you are getting organic traffic over to your YouTube channel, and you’re getting YouTube visitors over to your website.
Facebook (Organic)
Honestly, organic Facebook for businesses is kind of dead. There are some little points in there where it’s not dead, however.
First are the Facebook groups. Becoming a member of an active Facebook group can help you to establish credibility and build your name. For example, I could imagine a plastic surgeon that does a lot of liposuction to correct gynecomastia may be able to generate leads from becoming part of a weightlifting group on Facebook, for example.
I really just would not recommend investing any sort of resource into creating dedicated Facebook content for your clinic’s page and trying to build a following there. That ship sailed about 12 years ago.
Grow Your Plastic Surgery Practice with Lead Generation Strategies From Sagapixel
Generating the lead is only going to happen if you have an effective website or landing page. I have a whole series of videos on plastic surgeon websites, what makes them work, and what they can improve. I’m going to link to that in the description.
I also have a full plastic surgery marketing playlist. I’m going to link that in the description as well. I definitely recommend that you check out both.
If you’d like to discuss more plastic surgery lead generation strategies for your practice, schedule a call with Sagapixel today.
