As a medical provider, a plastic surgeon needs to target their marketing efforts to a local audience. If you’re not reaching new leads as effectively as you want, it may be because you don’t have a strong local marketing plan. Unfortunately, if you are targeting your marketing efforts to a local population, your message may be reaching people who live too far from you to utilize your services. Localizing your online marketing tactics is the key to running a successful local plastic surgery practice, but you may not know how to do this.
Start with Customer Knowledge
Before you can localize your online marketing efforts, you must know your local customers. Decide what your ideal customer looks like, with details about their income status, age, gender, and education level. Then, identify the local trends and preferences that match this group. This analysis will help you streamline your marketing efforts to that local audience. Once you have done this, you are ready to implement local search marketing tactics for plastic surgeons to reach that audience more effectively.
Localized Online Marketing Tactics for Plastic Surgeons
The best potential patient is one who lives in your area and is looking specifically for plastic surgery services. How can you find them? Through local online marketing. Here are the top six local search marketing tactics for plastic surgeons to use as they focus on building their customer base.
1. Claim and Set Up Your Google Business Profile
Start your local online marketing with your Google Business profile. Go to Google Maps and search for your business’s address. Is there a listing for you? If so, claim it as your own. If not, use the Google Business page to find it and claim it. You’ll want to make sure that all of the contact information is accurate and matches the address on your website.
Once you have claimed and verified the business the way Google wants, you are ready to optimize the listing. Start by adding detailed information about what you offer as a plastic surgeon. Be as specific as possible. The more data you share, the better people will be able to find you.
Next, share photos and videos that relate to what you offer. Since you are a surgeon, make sure you have patient consent before sharing videos of procedures, but the more images and videos you can share, the more complete your profile will be. If you cannot share photos of your patients, share images of your practice and the doctors in it. A robust profile needs images to rank well.
Finally, set your Google Business profile up for reviews and encourage past patients to leave one. Google rewards sites with a lot of reviews, so the more positive reviews you have, the better.
2. Create a Local Content Marketing Plan
Content marketing refers to building content on your website that attracts visitors through keywords and Google search results. As you build your content marketing strategy, keep it locally focused. This local content will resonate well with your customers, helping them view you as a local-friendly site.
This starts with using local keywords in your content. Both written and visual elements should have a local flare. If you can use a picture of a local attraction in a blog post, do so. If the skyline of your city fits your website’s design, use it.
When creating blog posts, don’t just write about the plastic surgery field. Sprinkle in content about local events and trends. Use your social media to post about local news and things to do. This type of content will signal to both the search engines and your audience that you’re a valid local option for a plastic surgeon.
3. Use Local SEO Strategies
Local SEO involves three basic strategies. These are:
- On-Page Local SEO: Build content with local keywords built-in that will draw targeted search traffic. Use local attractions as photographs. Keep your address on every page of your website so you have zip codes, city, and state keywords there. These on-page SEO efforts will show Google where you are working to reach customers.
- Backlinks: Backlinks for high-quality sites help your SEO efforts, but for local SEO, look for local backlinking opportunities. For instance, other local businesses or local directories can be helpful. You can also get a link to your community’s Chamber of Commerce site.
- Mobile Friendly: Finally, make sure your site loads well for mobile users, both in terms of the quality of the site and the load speed. People in your local area who need a plastic surgeon may spend a significant amount of time searching on their phones, so you need to reach them with your website. Also, Google awards the highest local search results to mobile-friendly sites.
4. Invest in Local Online Advertising
Online advertising is essential to growing your online presence, but you need to have a local focus for your efforts. Target audiences with Google Ads and Facebook Ads who fit within your target demographic. This will make your ads more effective, as they’ll be reaching potential patients who live near you.
After setting up your parameters to fit within a geographic radius, use local search terms to make them even more effective. Once you launch your ads, monitor their performance, and change as appropriate to get even better results.
5. Partner with Businesses for Local Branding
One of the best tools in your local marketing toolbox may be other businesses. Do you know of a massage therapist who could refer patients who need cosmetic procedures to your practice? Partner with them, and offer to send your patients to them for massage therapy services. Plastic surgeons can partner with general practitioners, health and wellness spas, health and wellness stores, and similar businesses in the health and beauty industry.
When you find a complementary business, ask them to cross-promote you. Repay them by also promoting them. This benefits your patients as well as both companies.
In addition, you can use local events as an opportunity for local branding. For example, you can connect with local charities or community leaders to offer services or donations. When you do, they will link to your site to promote you to others. You can also take part in community events. Choose wisely, focusing on those with a strong online presence to give you local backlinking opportunities.
6. Use Data to Improve Performance
Finally, make sure you’re monitoring your successes and failures. Use key performance indicators (KPIs) to figure out where you are ranking for local search terms, how your traffic is flowing, and what your conversion rates are. Most advertising and SEO platforms offer this type of data, so learn how to read, understand, and use it.
Data is vital because it gives you reasons for changes you might want to make to your marketing efforts. If something’s not working as it should, you need to make adjustments. With data, those adjustments are made based on actionable information rather than random guesswork.
In addition to tracking KPIs, you can use data to gain insights into the behavior of your local customers. Find out how they found you, what content they looked at, and what actions they took when they got to your site. You can use this data not just to inform your marketing efforts but also to inform your website design and optimization.
Choose the Right Tools to Help with Local Marketing
As you work on building a local marketing plan, you may feel frustrated about the amount of time it takes. Implementing each of these local search marketing tactics for plastic surgeons so you can reach specific zip codes and increase customer engagement is time-consuming, but the right local marketing software can help. Surefire Local is that platform.
Surefire Local allows you to put all of your local marketing efforts on one platform. You can manage your website, including its local SEO, online reviews, social media platforms, and paid ad campaigns all from one site. You can even write responses and change directory listings directly from the platform.
In addition, Surefire Local has a robust analytics and reporting platform that gives you clear insight into what is working for your marketing efforts. You can look at this to see all of your campaigns in one place so you can better target your marketing dollars to those campaigns that are working, and make adjustments to those that are not.
Finally, our platform offers educational resources that will keep you informed about what is happening in the world of small business online marketing. You can attend webinars or read blog posts that will help you learn the best strategies for local search marketing that you can implement today.
Surefire Local was designed to make your job easier so you can focus on working with your patients and engaging with new potential leads. The best way to understand how it works is to see for yourself. Attend a Surefire Local demo soon to learn more.