Simply put, you can’t make money if you aren’t bringing in and converting qualified leads. But when running a dermatology clinic, you naturally already have a whole range of tasks that you need to do just to keep your day-to-day business running. Adding marketing on top can sometimes feel like quite an impossible task.
But while you will still have to make at least some time for your marketing, marketing automation for dermatologists can be the game changer that saves you time, improves your marketing results, and adds to your bottom line.
What is marketing automation and how can it help? Read on to see how the right software can make all the difference to your dermatology business.
What is marketing automation?
If you’ve ever used software to schedule your social media posts in advance or send out a sequence of emails, then you’ve used marketing automation. Marketing automation is simply taking advantage of specialist software, usually on a single platform, to do repetitive tasks for you.
Instead of having to manually post on your blog, you can schedule it in advance. You can manage your paid ads, automatically update your business directories and your Google Business Profile all in one go, nurture leads, send emails, remind customers to review your business, and so much more.
Imagine if all of those things were taken off your list and think of all the things you could get done instead. You could focus on long term planning for your dermatology clinic and think about how to grow your business. You could plan time off and book that long-awaited vacation while knowing that your business will continue smoothly without you.
While you do still have to do the prep work and set things up in advance, you really can save hours with marketing automation and free yourself and your staff up to do more important things.
Why is marketing automation important?
Economically, and in many other ways, business isn’t easy at the moment for anyone. We’re not long out of the pandemic and so many businesses are still recovering from that unprecedented situation.
During the pandemic, customers began expecting far more from the customer experiences they received from businesses. They shopped increasingly online where they could, and they expected an excellent experience every time. They wanted to contact businesses on their terms and in every possible way, including email, text, and phone, but also by using their social media channels. And they wanted answers immediately. That’s still the case today. Customers expect more and more from interacting with businesses online and offline.
Add in increasing competition and a seemingly never-ending supply of new marketing ideas, software to learn, and bits of jargon to get to grips with, and it can be so easy to feel overwhelmed.
Marketing automation isn’t a complete cure for all ills, but it’s certainly something that can make a huge difference in the lives of both customers and business owners alike. Customers get a better, more tailored, and personalized experience, and businesses like yours get to save time and money, and still increase their bottom lines.
According to Invesp, “…marketing automation on average drives up to 14.5% increase in sales productivity and a 12.2% reduction in marketing overhead. 80% of marketing automation users saw an increase in the number of leads using marketing automation software, and 77% had an increase of conversions.”
Benefits of marketing automation
There are so many benefits of marketing automation that we can’t cover them all here, but why not take a look at marketing software, like Surefire Local’s business intelligence marketing platform for ideas, to see how much help it could be to your dermatology business? With automation to help you manage your social media, content marketing, email marketing, reviews, business directories, and more, our software is designed to help dermatology businesses do more, better and faster.
1. Improved efficiency
We’ve given you quite a list already of tasks marketing automation can take off your list, but there are other things too. You can hand over your lead generation and nurturing to automation, along with creating reports and managing your data.
Your marketing and your business really could be transformed by using the right automation software. You’ll save time and money by letting the software work for you, and the more you use it, marketing automation software collects data to help you learn where and how you can improve your marketing efforts.
You can continually refine and improve every aspect of your marketing to bring in more and better leads and improve your bottom line.
2. Enhanced targeting and personalization
With so much data available and quality analytics and reporting, your marketing automation software can help you learn far more about your target market, including more on who they are and what they want. This is guaranteed to improve your marketing as the more you know about your potential customers, the more you can give them what they want and convert them more easily into buyers of your dermatology services.
You can tailor your content to suit your audience and each platform they are on, knowing with certainty that you’re providing what they need to make a buying decision.
You can segment your mailing list and send targeted and personalized offers to specific people on your list. For example, you can separate out anyone on your list that is interested in cosmetic procedures and products and market offers on those items straight to them. Or you could send educational information to help anyone with a particular condition or to encourage people to come in for check-ups if they are worried about skin cancer.
The possibilities for providing highly targeted and personalized information and offers are endless with automation and the more you show your clients how much you understand them and how much you can help, the more likely they are to choose you over the competition and to refer you.
3. Better measurement and analytics
One of the biggest benefits of using marketing automation software is the highly accurate analytics. Every activity you undertake in the software can be analysed and reports produced on each aspect of your marketing, and you can also get a full overview of your marketing and its effectiveness.
You can see highly detailed insights into your marketing campaigns and find information on what worked and what could be improved. You can then save your marketing budget for the things that work and cancel anything that clearly isn’t performing.
That makes your budget go further, improves efficiency, and helps you target your marketing more effectively.
You also provide your clients with a far better customer experience because you can continually tailor your marketing to suit your audience.
4. Greater reach and visibility
You can spend a considerable amount of time finding out what your target market wants from your marketing, what platforms they hang out on, and what will make them convert into paying clients, especially in the early days of your marketing.
Marketing automation can speed this up considerably due to the excellent analytics and reports, giving you a far clearer picture of your target audience and what they respond to, including the content formats they prefer, topics they are interested in, how they like to be marketed to, and more.
With this knowledge, you can be sure you are marketing on the right platforms where your audience spends time, and you can be sure that the content you are providing is what they want.
The more you do that, the more your reputation for excellence will grow and the more your audience, your reach, and your visibility will grow.
5. Improved integration and collaboration
Sales and marketing are too often seen as two separate things that have nothing to do with each other. Teams can become siloed and stop sharing information and working together as easily.
This isn’t a healthy way to work but even here, marketing automation can make a difference. Instead of using separate pieces of software and neither team being able to see the other’s data, a single marketing platform can provide all the automation and analytics both teams need.
When working using the same data and the same reports, it’s much easier for both teams to see what impact they make and to develop a healthy respect for their opposites in the other team too. If everyone can see all the data and reports they need and who has accomplished what, there’s no way to argue that or to build up any unnecessary rivalries.
A little healthy competition doesn’t hurt, but guarding of information and lack of communication can hurt a business very badly. With the right software and sharing of data and reports, you can bring your teams together and improve communication and collaboration.
Attend a Surefire Local Marketing Platform demo
With Surefire Local’s business intelligence marketing software, you can bring marketing automation and all its benefits into your dermatology business.
Use our software to plan ahead and schedule your content, emails, and social media posts. Send review requests and automatically follow up with reminders to ensure people leave you those all-important reviews, manage your paid ads, update your business directory listings and Google Business Profile all at once. You really can make huge changes for the better by using the right software.
And you can manage your most important online marketing activities all within one platform, allowing everyone to see the data and information they need and to get a clear overview of what’s working and what isn’t.
Hand over at least some of those repetitive items on your to-do list and see how much time and money you could save with the right marketing platform.
Why not book a demo with our team to see how we can help?