If you’ve ever thought about using marketing automation software for your plastic surgery business, you might only have thought of scheduling social media posts and sending automated sequences of emails. But marketing automation can do far more than that. It can take some of the most common and repetitive marketing tasks off you and your team and allow you to focus on the big picture and building your business.
In this article, we’re going to look at what marketing automation for plastic surgeons is and how it can help you save time and money while continuing to build your business.
What is marketing automation?
Marketing automation is simply using the right software, quite often on one single platform, to perform any regular or repetitive tasks for you. We already talked about scheduling your social media posts or sending automated email sequences, but you can also schedule your content, request and remind people to write reviews, nurture your leads, and update over 80 business directories with just a few clicks.
Automation can really free up a great deal of time in your business and you may be able to reduce marketing costs as well.
Why is marketing automation important?
Few businesses had an easy time during the pandemic and many businesses didn’t make it through. Of those that did, some are still, even today, working to get back to where they were pre-pandemic and to start to grow again.
Even without a global pandemic, running any kind of business is never easy. It’s hard work and few get to go home at exactly 6 pm on the dot or escape working at least some weekends to catch up or try to get ahead.
And that’s not all you’re dealing with. The economy is ever-changing, and so too are marketing trends, apps, jargon, and tools – had anyone even heard of Threads a few months ago, for example? What clients expect has changed over the last few years too. Due to the pandemic, many people turned to shopping online, and they began to expect ever higher standards and a smooth and frictionless customer experience. They wanted to contact the businesses they deal with in any way they chose, whether by phone or email or even by public or private messaging on social media. This new set of expectations from customers is still with us and every business owner still has to keep up and adapt to changing conditions and trends.
No wonder some business owners feel overwhelmed and frustrated, and some even quit altogether.
But there’s no need for that. Marketing automation can’t take everything off your plate, but it can certainly reduce the hours you spend on your marketing and bring you better results too.
Benefits of marketing automation
No doubt you’re already beginning to see some of the benefits of marketing automation, but here are just a few more:
1. Improved efficiency
Marketing automation can help you save time and reduce the need for manual tasks. We’ve already given you quite the list of tasks that can be automated, saving you time, making your budget go further, and improving efficiency across your business.
This doesn’t mean you don’t have to do any marketing at all. It’s a good idea to look at your marketing and see if you have any areas of improvement before you start automating. You can gain even bigger results and save even more time if your business is already as efficient as possible before you introduce marketing automation.
You’ll need time to plan your marketing and to set everything you want to automate up ready for automation. Of course, there are also those tasks that aren’t one-and-done or set it and forget it. Yes, you can schedule many of your social media posts, for example, but you still need to spend some time interacting personally with your audience, commenting, liking, and answering their questions to build rapport.
Before you bring in automation, it’s worth looking at what you can automate, and what you can’t, and working out how to best use automation for your plastic surgery.
The setup and planning might take some time, but the results will be worth it when you have far more free time to focus on building your business and working on more complex marketing campaigns.
2. Enhanced targeting and personalization
No doubt you’ve already done some work on your buyer personas and your target market, but marketing automation can help here too. With quality analytics and detailed reports, you can continually learn more about your target audience, better understand them, and target them even more closely, allowing you to create more personalized and effective marketing campaigns.
This will have a knock-on effect on everything from what you post on your blog and social media to more efficiently targeting and nurturing your leads and better building of your next marketing campaigns. Clearly, the better you know your audience and what they are looking for, the more easily you can give it to them and turn them into dedicated fans of your business and leads that are more likely to convert.
With email segmentation, for example, instead of sending general newsletters to everyone and leaving it there, you can personalize what you send and target the people on your list that are more likely to be interested in particular services. You will gain an increasing knowledge of your patients from all the data and analytics available the more you use your marketing automation software. This puts you in a position to, for example, pick out the newsletter subscribers who are looking specifically for breast reduction or eye bag removal and send them targeted emails explaining what they can expect with those procedures. You may even want to send special offers or codes to particular segments of your newsletter and it’s easy to do that.
For subscribers on the receiving end of that kind of campaign, they will feel as though they are getting exactly what they want and need from you and that you really know and understand them. That can only help you when trying to convert people from leads to booking appointments.
3. Better measurement and analytics
We’ve talked about what measurement and analytics can do above, but having access to this amount of data and reports really can help you focus your budget on what’s working and stop doing any marketing tasks that aren’t paying off. You’ll save money and you’ll save time too because you aren’t throwing away any effort or marketing dollars on what will never work for you.
You can also use your reports for continuous improvement by identifying areas of strength and areas for improvement quickly so you can do something about anything that isn’t helping you or moving you forward.
4. Greater reach and visibility
With such detailed analytics, you will get to know your audience far more quickly and find out for certain which social platforms they frequent, when is your best time to post on each platform, what your most popular posts and content types are, and what people aren’t interested in.
With that knowledge at your fingertips, you can closely target your audiences with what they want and need and provide the right content at exactly the right time.
Provide that degree of targeted content to an audience and you will gain an excellent reputation online for yourself and your plastic surgery practice. Build your online reputation and you will start to get more reviews and more people recommending you, which, of course, leads to reaching more people, building your audience, and gaining even greater visibility.
5. Improved integration and collaboration
With marketing automation and everyone using the same platform, everyone can have access to the same data and the same reports. Providing this enables each person on your team to understand what is working and why, and to understand what their team members contribute.
With that comes closer bonds between your team members as they appreciate what each person brings to the table.
It’s never good to have siloed teams or people who try to keep knowledge to themselves, and you can prevent this and build a far closer working relationship between team members and other teams simply by letting people see how they all work together to get great results.
As we mentioned earlier, you can also improve your efficiency, reduce or eliminate any tasks that simply waste time or take too long, and begin to focus on what really works. That reduces frustration and leaves your people in a far better position at work. They’re no longer firefighting or fighting the system, they’re using real data and analytics to make it even better for themselves, for you, and for your patients.
Attend a Surefire Local Marketing Platform demo
With Surefire’s business intelligence marketing software, you can automate so much of your marketing and save yourself a great deal of time and money.
You can manage your email marketing, content marketing, schedule your social media posts, nurture your leads, manage your paid ads, update over 80 business directories, and so much more.
And as it’s all done on one easy-to-use platform, you don’t have the learning curve of having to learn multiple pieces of software. Nor do you need to spend time logging into and out of different systems or trying to get different software to give you a full picture and reports of your marketing activities.
Simply use our highly detailed analytics and reports to tailor your marketing, save time, and learn what really works.
Why not book a demo and find out what a difference using the right automation software can make?