Improve your Plastic Surgery Leads and Conversions

According to Plastic Surgery.org’s 2020 Plastic Surgery Statistics Report, the number of cosmetic procedures in 2020 was 15.6 million. The 6.8 million reconstructive procedures were a three percent increase from the year prior. The leads are out there; you just have to find them. 

How do you get plastic surgery leads?

To obtain plastic surgery leads, you should combine a combination of paid and organic lead gen measures, including paid social media advertising, blogging, email marketing, and content marketing. Your plastic surgery website must also have landing pages. 

This definitive guide to plastic surgery leads will tell you everything you need to know. We’ll delve into the pros and cons of organic and paid lead generation so your plastic surgery office can drive more clients. 

What Is a Plastic Surgery Lead?

A lead is a potential customer that requires converting on your part to encourage them to make a purchase. Leads can come from a multitude of places, such as social media, your website, search engines, or advertising. 

At this stage, the lead doesn’t know anything about you except the name of your plastic surgery office and maybe your general location. They’re unaware of the services you offer, the costs, and what the process is to consult with your team and schedule a cosmetic procedure.

The lead is at the beginning of the sales funnel. Since they know so little about your plastic surgery office right now, at any point, the lead could drop off the funnel. This can happen for a multitude of reasons.

For example, once the lead researches your services, they might realize they need something different. Perhaps the prices aren’t affordable for them. The lead could even decide they don’t want plastic surgery right now, but they might later. 

In some instances, what you do–or more specifically, what you don’t do–can cause the lead to exit the sales funnel. According to marketing resource Convince & Convert, if you respond to a lead within five minutes, you’re 21 times likelier to convert them than waiting even 30 minutes. 

Time is of the essence, so your plastic surgery office must have conversion methods in place. For instance, you might automate a drip email campaign that sends a follow-up to a lead as soon as they opt into your emails. 

Leads vs. Qualified Leads 

The unpredictability of regular leads is why many marketers seek qualified leads. 

A qualified plastic surgery lead is someone who isn’t just stumbling upon your company. By the time they reach your website or social media channels, the lead knows basic information about you.

For instance, they’re aware of most of the services your plastic surgery office provides. They might even be privy to the pricing if that’s information you publish online. Due to the abundance of information they have, a qualified lead is ready to make a purchasing decision.

Some qualified leads will make up their minds right away while others need a bit of nurturing to encourage that decision. While you still must engage with a qualified lead, the chances of them converting are higher. 

Many of the lead conversion methods we’ll discuss in the next section will help you find more qualified leads. 

You can also rely on your sales and marketing teams to track down qualified plastic surgery leads. A lead that your sales team vets before sending your way is a sales-qualified lead or SQL. Qualified leads as generated by your marketing team are marketing-qualified leads or MQLs.  

Paid vs. Organic – Which Is Better for Leads?

Now that you understand the basics of plastic surgery leads, it’s time to delve into how you’ll obtain them. Your plastic surgery office has two avenues to explore: paid lead gen versus organic lead gen.

Paid lead generation measures will require a marketing budget. The amount of money you might spend to convert one lead–known as the cost per lead or CPL–is $162 per CPL according to current data from marketing resource Unbound B2B. 

If you have 50 leads, that means your plastic surgery office would spend $8,100 on lead gen. Keep in mind that lead generation is not a one-time deal, but an ongoing part of operating your business and growing your customer base.

Organic lead gen is lower-cost and sometimes no-cost, which makes it appealing. However, what you save in money, you pay for in time and effort. 

Ideally, a combination of paid and organic lead generation will produce the best results. This way, your plastic surgery office is not too reliant on organic lead gen, and you don’t drain your lead gen budget too quickly either.

Let’s take this section to explore the facets of paid and organic plastic surgery lead gen avenues. 

Paid Media

Beginning with paid media, your options include paying for lead gen on social media channels such as Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube. You can also curate a budget for lead gen on search engines such as Google. Here’s what you need to know.  

1. Facebook and Instagram

Facebook and Instagram, besides both being owned by Facebook, are two of the most popular social media platforms to date. They’re also highly recommended for business marketing, so we’ll focus on these two specifically.

Starting with Facebook, your lead gen options are plentiful. You can pay for Facebook Ads, host a contest, offer discounts or coupons, and showcase blog content on your plastic surgery Facebook feed. 

If you don’t already have a Facebook Business Page, take the time to fill one out. You can add a call to action or CTA button with seven different options, including “Watch Video,” “Contact Us,” “Book Now,” and “Sign Up.”

We also recommend using Facebook Tabs, which are more customizable than you might have initially realized. Besides the tabs for events and photos, you can add custom tabs for lead generation forms, offers, and contests. 

Plastic surgery lead gen on Instagram can utilize some of the same tactics, such as paid advertising and a CTA button (known as an Action Button on Instagram) in your profile. You can even create landing pages on Instagram. We’ll talk far more about landing pages later in this guide, so make sure you keep reading. 

Pros and Cons

What’s good about lead gen on Facebook and Instagram? 

• Facebook is the most popular social media platform as of 2021, and Instagram is within the top five. Your audience will certainly see your lead gen tactics.
• Implementing contests, giveaways, CTAs, and ads is easy to figure out on these platforms.
• You can usually track metrics within your social media business page.

Here’s what’s not so great about plastic surgery lead gen on social media:

• Using social media ads can get expensive, especially if you don’t know how much money to set aside in a budget.
• If your social media accounts have a low number of followers, your lead gen tactics might go unnoticed. 

2. Google and YouTube

Let’s talk about the social media channel that could someday overtake Facebook in popularity: YouTube. This video-centric social media platform is yet another must-use means of finding plastic surgery leads. 

How do locate leads using YouTube? Well, there’s always paid YouTube advertising, of course. You can also find popular influencers on the platform and partner with them. Make sure that you respond to comments you get on your videos as well. 

What about the search engine Google? Your top means of finding plastic surgery leads through Google is paying for Google Ads. The ads can appear in search engine results, in a user’s Gmail account, and on other Google platforms for far-reaching advertising.

You can link your Google Ad to landing pages on your website so users are brought right to the information they seek, not some random homepage or about page. 

Pros and Cons

If your plastic surgery office is thinking of using Google or YouTube for paid lead generation, here are the benefits:

• YouTube is a huge platform that’s growing all the time. Statista reports that there are 1.86 billion global YouTube users as of 2021. It’s a useful lead gen platform for sure.
• Google lead gen can supplement your social media lead generation tactics to expand your plastic surgery office’s reach.
• Some means of generating leads on a platform like YouTube are free and quick, such as replying to comments and otherwise engaging with your audience.

Keep in mind these downsides as well:

• For some people, getting in front of a camera to make YouTube videos can be difficult. Plus, producing videos consistently will be time-consuming.
• Paying for Google advertising on top of social media advertising to get more leads can be quite costly. 

Organic Media

That brings us to organic lead generation. You have a multitude of options at your disposal, so let’s take a closer look now.  

1. Website Traffic

Your website should be one of your main avenues for converting plastic surgery leads, but that means you have to generate website traffic first. Although there are nearly endless means of boosting traffic to your site, the two preferred organic methods are blogging and search engine optimization or SEO.

a. Blogs

Every website worth its salt must have a blog, including your plastic surgery office. Blogging can increase trust among your audience, establish your firm as an authority in your industry, help you cement your brand, and build your audience.

For blogging to be a successful way to find plastic surgery leads, you must commit to creating and sticking to an editorial schedule. Perhaps you post weekly or biweekly, but frequent posts will keep you top-of-mind.

Once your blog post goes live, share it! You can cross-post on your social media accounts and post links in your monthly newsletter. Encourage your audience to share the post if they find it interesting as well.

The key to writing good blog content is understanding your audience and selecting topics that they care about. You must also do keyword research to determine how saturated a topic is.

If you find other respected medical professionals, suggest a guest blogging arrangement. You’d write a post for their blog, and they’d do the same for yours. That’s a guaranteed way to get a new set of eyes on your content. 

Pros and Cons

Here are some advantages of blogging for plastic surgery leads:

• Blogging is free, and the other benefits of blogging mentioned above are like the cherry on top of a sundae.
• Maintaining a blog gives you another opportunity to connect with leads and customers as you respond to comments.

The following blogging downsides should not be glossed over:

• If you don’t do the blog writing yourself, then you’ll have to hire a freelance writer or a team of freelancers, which is yet another additional expense. 
• Blogging is an ongoing commitment.

b. SEO

Search engine optimization or SEO determines where your site ranks on a search engine results page. Every company wants to be the first search result, but that takes understanding Google’s algorithms and your website meeting certain requirements.

Factors like the keywords you use, the quality of your copy, and your page loading speed can help propel your plastic surgery website higher up in the ranks.

Pros and Cons

These are the pros of SEO for plastic surgery leads:

• SEO is something a company must pay attention to, so your plastic surgery office might already have a solid understanding of SEO best practices. 
• Leads and customers alike will trust your services more if your plastic surgery website has good SEO.
• Practicing SEO tactics should improve the user experience of your website. 

It’s not all positive; these cons are important as well:

• SEO is complicated, and if you know nothing about it, understanding it can take time.
• Google changes its algorithms often, so what SEO practices you followed last year can be obsolete this year. 

2. Content Marketing

The next organic plastic surgery lead tactic is content marketing. The rule that content is king still applies, but you have to use a broad definition of content. Everything from video to text, photos, and audio counts as content today.  

A. Social Media 

Social media is a great place to post all nature of content, especially videos. 

Video resource Lemonlight found that most viewers–95 percent of them–retain messages better by watching content rather than engaging in content in other ways. That’s powerful stuff.

Although YouTube is the best-known video social media platform, other social media sites have video features as well. You can upload bite-size clips to Instagram, post videos on Facebook, or share videos on various social media platforms via livestreams or stories.

For sharing the written word, LinkedIn is still a highly recommended social platform, as is Facebook. If your content is more the visual kind but isn’t video, then use Twitter, Instagram, or Pinterest. 

Pros and Cons

Here are some pros of content marketing on social media:

• Social media affords you a variety of content types to post.
• The collective audience of social media platforms encompasses billions and billions of people; that’s quite a lot of plastic surgery lead potential.
• Posting on social media and engaging with your audience doesn’t cost a cent. 

Before you begin posting content, keep these downsides in mind:

• Many social media campaigns are most effective when they include an advertising proponent, and that will cost you money.
• It takes a lot of time and effort to keep up with your social media channels and all the comments that come in. 

B. Email Marketing

The second form of content marketing for plastic surgery leads is email marketing. As leads sign up to your email list, you engage them with content. This content can run the gamut from special offers and discounts to birthday and holiday greetings, exclusive news, and newsletters. 

Pros and Cons

The pros of email marketing are as follows:

• WordPress hosting resource Kinsta states that 4.03 billion people use email globally. Like social media, your reach here is huge.
• Automation allows you to send emails anytime, anywhere, to anyone even if you don’t manually hit the send button. 
• You can tailor email marketing content to the needs or pain points of your audience, which can make even stubborn leads more receptive.

Watch out for these email marketing issues:

• Your emails can get caught in the spam filter, where they’re never seen by their recipient.
• Lots of other businesses are trying to compete for your lead’s time and money, so your emails must always stand out.

C. Podcasts

Podcasts are on the rise, and the upward trend shows no signs of stopping. Rather than writing a whitepaper or a multi-part blog post about a topic, why not record it in audio format instead? You can use the podcast as a lead magnet to encourage more signups to your email list. 

Pros and Cons

Are you thinking of starting a podcast for more plastic surgery leads? Here are the advantages of doing so:

• Your leads and customers can listen to your podcast on the go so your plastic surgery office is top-of-mind.
• For those who don’t want to be in front of a camera, podcasting is a nice compromise. 
• It’s inexpensive to put together a podcast.

There are indeed some downsides associated with podcasting, such as:

• Writing, producing, and editing a podcast can take up a lot of time, and you’re expected to release podcasts in a timely way.
• Low-quality audio will turn potential listeners away. 

Landing Pages – Critical for Obtaining Leads

As we said we would, we must discuss landing pages. A landing page is a page on your website that’s dedicated to a service your plastic surgery office offers. Your site should have a landing page for every product or service in your roster.

As you put together your first landing pages, here are our best practices for obtaining more plastic surgery leads. 

High-Quality Design

Landing pages were once exclusively text, but today, you can jazz them up with videos, product/service images, and more. We recommend some before and after photos to tantalize your readers and encourage them to call or sign up for a free consultation.

When writing copy, short and punchy paragraphs are best. Use bullet points to break down ideas. If you feel like you’re writing too much copy, an explainer video can supplement the material and free up more of the landing page. 

Strong Call to Action

The point of a landing page is to educate and incentivize a lead to act. You must have strong, clear CTAs on your landing page. One CTA should be above the fold, such as a button or a link. You can also include a CTA at the bottom of the page.  

Simple and Clear Form

When a lead decides to give you their contact information, what are they getting in return? What are you doing with that information? What information are they expected to provide? Keep your forms clear and concise and you could see more signups, which means you have access to more plastic surgery leads. 

Helpful Testimonials

When past or current customers gush over a service, people become curious. Testimonials and reviews can also build trustworthiness, encouraging a reluctant lead to give you a chance. 

Contact customers who have recently had a procedure done and ask if they would be interested in producing a testimonial for your landing page. Sweeten the deal with discounts or exclusive sales.  

Highlighted Benefits

This is the part of the landing page that leads are looking for. If they spend the money on a cosmetic procedure, what’s in it for them? Will they look younger? Feel more confident? List your service benefits in bullet points for easy, quick reading. 

Limited-Time Offer

Maybe your lead has resisted the testimonials, and the benefits of your service didn’t quite sway them either. You know what could get them to change their mind? Present a limited-time offer with a generous discount. 

A/B Tested

From your landing pages to your website and your blog, everything has to be split-tested, aka A/B tested. To A/B test means to compare headlines, CTA button placement, video placement, copy, background color, and more to determine which version of your landing page will resonate most with your audience. 

Conclusion

Your plastic surgery office must have an influx of leads to convert to customers. The best way to generate plastic surgery leads is using a mix of paid and organic lead gen tactics. 

If you find that you’re struggling to get your lead gen underway, you can always trust in Mediaboom. Our digital marketing agency specializes in qualified lead generation. We can also assist you in improving brand awareness and growing website traffic. Give us a call today!