Digital marketing specialist Adam Hampson provides a beginner’s guide to DIY digital marketing

Digital marketing is a vast landscape of specialties and tasks, but there is plenty you can do in-house to increase your online visibility and brand representation. For small-to-medium sized clinics, working with a budget-friendly agency is essential, and the tasks you can take on yourselves will inevitably be the most cost-effective. In this DIY digital marketing guide, I’m going to detail which steps you can do in-house with your team to boost the new client bookings for your aesthetic clinic

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SET OUT YOUR STRATEGY

AND GOALS

A proper content and digital marketing strategy goes a long way. Set out your goals and how you think you should get there before starting your digital marketing journey. Decipher what you’re missing, what you can do inhouse, and what might need a little extra time or research or even outsourcing. The approach to digitally marketing popular treatments such as dermal fillers is vastly different from promoting an event or launching a new machine online, so decide exactly what you want to push for the next month, three months, six months, a year. This will help inform your content strategy and how you’re going to execute your plans over time.

Set out your goals and how you think you should get there before starting your digital marketing journey

OPTIMISING AND INCREASING YOUR

SOCIAL MEDIA PRESENCE

It will come as no surprise to hear that social media is an actively and aggressively growing digital marketing platform. The main trick to social media marketing is working out where your target demographic is spending their time, and then spend your time there too. A Facebook Business Page (FBP) is always useful for a business, as you can link it your website and vice versa. FBP reviews also show up on your Google My Business (GMB) profile once you link the two, which we’ll discuss further later on. The majority of aesthetics clinics’ social media traffic is spread across Facebook and Instagram, so these are two key platforms you should be optimising.

FACEBOOK BUSINESS PAGE

Creating a FBP is really simple, and Facebook itself will walk you through this. Optimising and populating it, though, is crucial to the trust your page inspires in potential new clients and followers. Updating your contact information, opening hours, price ranges, services, and geographical location shown in a Google-style map allows visitors to your page to find out vital information. Without this information to inspire trust in your business, you risk not looking ‘legitimate’ and therefore alienating potential clients and followers. A FBP is far more than just posting content; it needs to be fully optimised with your username, business details, and even an ‘Our Story’ segment to gain the trust of potential new clients. Creating a content strategy to stretch across all of your social media channels is important for unity and also showcasing the treatments and products you’re seeking to promote.

INSTAGRAM BUSINESS PAGE

Connecting your FBP to your Instagram page results in an Instagram Business Page. This is why it’s important to fill out all of the vital location and contact details on your FBP, because the information will directly translate to clickable buttons on your Instagram Business Page. This encourages higher click-throughs and conversions, because a potential client can immediately request a consultation or get in touch with your reception team. Creating synergy between the two accounts will also help to create client trust, as social media users will see that neither platform has been neglected and that your clinic is actively inviting clients.

SOCIAL MEDIA CONTENT

Once you’ve optimised your social media platforms, it’s wwwwnow time to start posting on them. One of the downfalls of in-house social media marketing for many clinics is that they simply don’t have the time to formulate a proper content strategy.

Consider the top three or four treatments you want to promote, add a product promotion as well if appropriate, and post about them frequently. Visuals such as before and after images are particularly compelling, as your Instagram grid or Facebook posts can become comparable to a portfolio. Potential clients will see the kind of results you’ve produced for others and that you have been trusted by their peers, increasing the chances of them booking with you. This kind of imagery performs exceptionally well on Instagram and only marginally less successfully on Facebook, but they are extremely valuable to new client conversions.

One of the major benefits of posting before and after images on your FBP is that you can also include a live link to your website in the caption, encouraging immediate click-throughs from potential clients. You can even monitor how successfully these posts perform when you visit your analytics and take note of the link clicks. Articles and blog posts, especially those from your website, also encourage click-throughs and engage with your followers on your FBP, but please note that Instagram does not currently support direct links in captions.

GOOGLE MY BUSINESS PAGE

Setting up and optimising your GMB profile is an easy task to perform in-house that will help boost your local SEO and potentially drive new client enquiries. Your (GMB) can be set up through Google. If you don’t have one yet, you should definitely add it to your digital marketing shopping list as it is incredibly useful. A fully optimised GMB page includes premises photography, business category, map location, address, opening hours, contact number, and website link. The main ranking factors for whether your GMB profile shows up first for relevant keywords, such as ‘aesthetics clinics near me’, is if it is optimised with all of the valuable content detailed above.

A GMB page also allows your current clients to leave Google reviews, which have been shown to more compelling than those on a FBP. That being said, linking your FBP to your GMB ensures your Facebook reviews average will also show up, and your Instagram profile can also be featured. This kind of cross-linking provides your searchers with plenty of opportunities to interact with you and can positively influence whether they click-through to your site. It doesn’t necessarily boost your SEO, but it can greatly impact search behaviour.

WEBSITE CONTENT

On-page optimisation and the written content on your website positively influence your SEO efforts when done correctly. Writing and rewriting your own content is an easy task to do in-house, or to entrust to a member of your team, especially if your website has an easy-to-use content management system. This may be through regular blog posts or your own treatment pages.

WEBSITE PAGES

Your written website content can be optimised through on-page SEO. This is one of the easier SEO tasks, as others such as increasing your domain authority and link building can be complex and are best trusted to an agency. Writing (and rewriting) your website content to contain the keyword relevant to each page and your location will help search engines to positively identify the correlation between your web pages and searches your traffic are performing. This means those searching for ‘dermal fillers’ or ‘laser hair removal’ will receive relevant search engine results from clinics close to them. Incorporating ‘laser hair removal in Nottingham’, for example, into your written content will help people searching for that treatment in that location find your website. Optimising on-page content will help draw your potential clients to you, but it’s always advisable to do this in tandem with other SEO tasks to truly make an impact.

BLOGGING

Blogging is an easy in-house task you can perform that will positively boost your digital marketing efforts through appeasing Google’s algorithm. Fresh content is valued highly by search engines, almost above all else, so updating your blog once or twice monthly with a new blog post could drastically improve your SEO.

Writing a blog post on relevant subjects and answering key questions such as ‘are dermal fillers safe?’ increase the likelihood of your website and blog posts getting noticed. The way your potential clients are searching for answers is literally through questions, so by offering a question and answer in a blog post you drastically increase the likelihood of you being noticed in search engine results. Blog posts are also extremely valuable on your FBP, because posting them not only informs your followers of your expertise and continued investment in content for them, but it also encourages click-throughs to your website and potential appointment bookings. Across SEO and social, DIY digital marketing blog posts are extremely useful content.

DIY digital marketing is as simple as discussed, and there are plenty of tasks that you can perform for your own clinic. For those who simply don’t have the time or want to gain more from their digital marketing, finding a budget-friendly agency who knows your industry is a step in the right direction. DIY digital marketing can be done in-house, but you may need more than social media and blog posts to truly leave your mark in the aesthetics industry.

Adam Hampson is the founder and managing director of Cosmetic Digital in Nottingham, a digital marketing agency that specialises in healthcare, aesthetics, medical, and dentistry marketing. Established for more than 13 years, Cosmetic Digital has become one of the UK’s leading digital marketing agencies for these lucrative sectors. Cosmetic Digital’s in-house team continues to provide timeless yet contemporary websites and digital marketing solutions for clients in both the UK and overseas, and for businesses large and small.