Every business needs a consistent stream of quality leads and a great conversion rate to keep the company growing. Med spas are no different and, as a local brick-and-mortar business, what med spas need in particular are quality local leads from people in the area their business covers.
Localizing your marketing tactics can help you achieve that, and it’s far more effective than simply pumping out general content and hoping that somehow, because of sheer volume, you will find your ideal customers.
Not only are you trying to beat out the local competition for leads, but you’re doing it against the noise and distraction of the internet. But you can make things easier for yourself by tightly focusing your efforts on local search marketing strategy.
Local search marketing tactics for med spas can help you get found in your local area by the exact people who are looking for your services. Read on to find out what you need to do.
Know Your Local Community
As a local business owner, we’re sure you know you can’t start marketing without knowing who you are marketing to. So, the starting point here, as with any marketing, is to get to know your customers, and also get to know your competitors.
1. Conduct a thorough demographic analysis of who your “best” customers are
Dig out your old buyer personas if you have them and look at what you already know about your existing best customers. Write everything down and then it’s time to do a refresh on what you have or dig deep into your customers if you haven’t done this exercise yet.
You’ll need to look at your existing analytics for social media, your website, and any paid ads you might have run previously. These statistics can tell you a lot about who your customers are and what they really want. You can see on your website analytics what questions they are asking, what keywords they put in to find your site, and what your most visited pages are, among other interesting things.
This gives you a starting point, but then it’s best to just ask your customers. Talk to them naturally when you see them and see what they think about your practice, their treatment, and any other feedback they might have. You can also send out a short survey with specific questions to find out anything you need to know. Don’t make the survey too long or they won’t fill it in. You could also offer a gift voucher or a code for a particular percentage off their next treatment to encourage people to fill in your survey.
Then analyze your results and update those buyer personas fully.
2. Identify key local trends, interests, and preferences that matter to your customers
No doubt there’s a lot going on in your local area that wouldn’t mean anything to outside residents. If you have more than one med spa, you’ll probably have seen that some of what you talk about in one local area isn’t something that matters to people in other areas. This is important because you can keep up with local news, key trends, interests, and customer preferences, so that you can more easily market to potential customers, by understanding and talking about what’s important to them.
You can use what you discover to inspire your blog and social media posts and to add to what you can talk about to engage your audience specifically in the local area. If you post about an amusing local incident, for example, you’ll make people laugh and get a lot of likely equally funny comments, all of which can make your audience feel understood and closer to you. That kind of local knowledge can’t be faked by an outside company easily, and it’s something you should take advantage of to attract quality local leads.
3. Understand your local competition and their online marketing efforts
More often than not, your competition is aiming for the same people that you are, so what better to do than analyze what they’re already doing? This isn’t to copy them but to get inspiration and ideas for your own marketing.
This analysis is quite similar to what you do to understand your customers better. Look at your competitors’ reviews and see what people are saying about them. You can learn what people do like and what they don’t, and what you can perhaps improve or put in place so that you are better than the competition. You can also look at what they post on social platforms and how much engagement they get. This can save you time by not trying things that didn’t work for them and give you possible topics to write about for your own content. You can also see what keywords they are using to add to your collection, and what people are saying in their comments. You can learn a lot from the comments, including what questions people are asking, what they might want that they can’t currently get, their preferences, any negatives, and more. This all goes to learning more about your competition and your audience, so you can more carefully tailor your own marketing to give your audience what they want.
Localized Online Marketing Tactics
1. Optimize your Google Business Profile
If you haven’t already done so, go to Google Maps and claim your Google Business Profile (GBP). You will then need to verify your business on Google to be able to edit your profile, but this is easy to do by email, phone, video, or text.
This is a free marketing profile supplied by Google and it’s vital for local SEO that you use it and use it well. Google takes note of the quality of the content and the information provided on here, and they look at your reviews and star rating, so you do have to keep sending customers to your GBP to ensure they regularly leave reviews. If you can, encourage them to use location-based keywords in their reviews to help with their local SEO.
Before you move on to other local marketing tactics, you will need to fully optimize your GBP and fill in every section of your profile with quality, well-keyworded content. That includes using local keywords and your standard keywords and phrases to help you get listed in local search. You should also include high-quality images and videos to make your profile more attractive and eye-catching.
You have to be highly accurate with your business information, and particularly your address and contact details, and your opening hours. Ensure you tell your ideal customers exactly what they want to know. In particular, you should include your business hours as people can then use voice search to search for “med spa, your local area, open now.”
2. Localized Content Marketing
Create location-specific content that resonates with your customers and ensure that you incorporate local keywords naturally into the content of your website. You can create local pages for each of your med spas, if you have more than one, or create a single page with local information if you have one location. On these pages, make sure you’re adding local keywords about that particular area and not including any from other areas or zip codes.
You should also use your local keywords in your page URL for each local page, and in the top heading, at least one subheading, the first paragraph of your content, your meta title, meta description, and on any image descriptions.
Don’t overdo the keywords and write naturally for people first and the search engines second but do get them in where you can.
Going back to what you learned in your earlier research, you can also mention local events, news, and trends in blog posts and social media updates. This shows potential clients that you are in the local area and that you do understand who they are and what they need.
3. Local SEO Strategies
We discussed creating separate pages for each med spa location, and that really does help when it comes to getting found on local search. Implement on-page SEO tactics with a focus on the locations you want to rank highly in, including local keywording as we mentioned above, and creating dedicated pages for each location.
You can also get to know your community and swap backlinks with any quality and related businesses, including pharmacies that sell skin care products or anyone focused on anti-aging or health and beauty. It’s possible to work with other businesses to cross-promote each other and reach people in each other’s audiences you couldn’t reach in any other way. Backlinks could come from business directories and other community websites.
This is all for nothing, however, if your site is slow loading and not mobile-friendly. People won’t wait if your site takes more than a few seconds to load. They’ll disappear to the competition, potentially never to be seen again. In the same way, you will be losing potential customers if your site doesn’t work on mobile phones. Too many people shop that way and research for you to be able to ignore mobile traffic.
4. Local Online Advertising
While you can do so much with free or low-cost marketing, “paying to play” with paid ads can make a huge difference in attracting your ideal local customers. You can create targeted online ads through platforms like Google Ads and Facebook Ads and carefully target those ads to reach people within only a certain radius of your location. You can also target demographics, preferences, and more to craft ads that appear to the potential leads you want to find.
Ads aren’t “set it and forget it” marketing, though. You will need to monitor and analyze the performance of your ads to see which ads are working and to shut down any ads that aren’t. You can then continue to tweak and optimize your successful ads for continually better results.
5. Local Branding
For local businesses, it’s always a good idea to get involved in your local community. You can network with other businesses, get support from local resources, and also partner with complementary local businesses for cross-promotion opportunities. You can then reach their audiences to talk about your business, as they reach yours in return. You could even set up a joint prize for a competition to attract people to sign up for one or more of your newsletters for the chance to enter.
You can also connect with local charities and community leaders to do some good in your area and build your local reputation. Most charities appreciate the support of local businesses, and they tend to promote the businesses that help them in return, both in their newsletters and online. You may also benefit from the local press by choosing charities and other community groups to support.
It’s particularly beneficial to participate in events that have a strong online presence, as you can also gain local followers and engagement from the online publicity.
6. Monitor and Analyze Performance
Before you start marketing, you should set goals for your business and measure your performance against those goals by tracking your key performance indicators (KPIs), such as your website traffic, conversion rates, and local search rankings. Keep an eye on these metrics each month, each quarter, and each year, and see how things are going compared to previous periods. You can act to stop any lower numbers and look into what is causing any problems.
You can also use tools like Google Analytics to gain insights into local customer behavior, including how they found your business, what content they interacted with, and what actions they took on your site. Your website analytics also provide information on what people used to search for your business, what keywords they used, what questions they have, and what your most popular posts are. All of these insights are excellent for helping you tailor and improve your marketing over time.
With so much data and knowledge on hand, you can then make data-driven adjustments to marketing campaigns based on performance.
Localize Your Online Presence with Surefire Local
You really can make a huge difference to your bottom line if you focus on localizing your online marketing. You can improve your online visibility, increase engagement, target specific zip codes and areas more precisely, and attract more local customers to grow your med spa business.
Surefire Local is keen to help small businesses with their localized online marketing, and we’d love to help you build and grow your online presence and find your ideal local clients. We are the all-in-one marketing platform for local businesses, with a range of professional features that can help you get your marketing done more efficiently and quickly, saving time and helping you spend your budget more wisely.
- Website / Local SEO optimizations – creating geotagged content that is published on your website, blog, and social media profiles
- Online review management – send review requests, write responses to reviews, and analyze your brand sentiment to learn what customers think about your business
- Directories management – claim, edit, and publish new content like photos or a special offer for your business across 80+ online directory listings platforms
- Content marketing – tools to create locally targeted and relevant content on your blog, Google Business Profile, business directories, and social media profiles
- Social media management – tools for scheduling posts, tracking engagement metrics, and responding to comments
- Local online advertising – Ads designed to attract only the attention of customers within your service area
- Analytics and reporting – Transparency into campaign performance and how much revenue your marketing dollars are generating, with AI-generated recommendations on specific actions you can take to see improvements
- Educational resources – webinars and blogs designed to help small businesses learn all things local online marketing
If you think your med spa could benefit from a highly knowledgeable marketing company and professional software to make your marketing easier, why not attend a Surefire Local demo?