As a business owner, you invest time and money into growing your practice in order to add more value to your patients and improve revenue. While the services you offer might feel like an essential part of your success, that in itself won’t lead to a steady flow of patients walking through your door.
The growth of your practice will depend on your ability to attract the right people successfully. This means being able to identify the people who are interested in the benefits of your services and who you can encourage to move further down the funnel – eventually to purchase.
Learning how to run an effective lead generation strategy is a great way to acquire new clients and optimize acquisition campaigns to improve revenue.
In this blog, we will outline common lead generation mistakes we have seen in the aesthetics industry, as well as Plastix’s proven growth strategy.
What is Lead Generation and Why Do You Need It?
In order to understand exactly what lead generation is, let’s first understand the definition of a lead. A lead is any person who actively expresses interest in your services. There are various ways they can do this, but the most common ways are by downloading an ebook, subscribing to a newsletter, and submitting an inquiry on your website. Simply put, the lead is the one who is initiating contact with your practice.
Lead generation is the process of attracting leads to your practice and nurturing them into becoming paying customers.
But why is this even important? An effective lead-generation strategy will build a strong foundation for future sales so you can grow your client base and revenue. Without it, you rely on the whims of the people who are willing to pay for your services, making it hard to maximize growth.
Common Mistakes With Lead Generation In The Aesthetics Industry
By now, it should be clear that lead generation is an essential part of sustaining growth. But over the years, we have seen a few common mistakes that have prohibited practices from reaping the rewards of an effective strategy. Let’s review them in more detail:
1. Adopting Quantity Over Quality Mentality
Oftentimes, we come across practices that struggle to convert leads into patients. Even though they are generating a high volume of leads, most of these leads are unqualified.
Lead qualification is an important part of the sales funnel because it enables you to determine the characteristics of the customers that are most likely to convert. Understanding how to qualify your leads will help your sales team be more efficient at identifying the contacts they should prioritize, saving you time and money.
You can even find ways to use the lead qualification to draft better follow-ups in order to help you move the prospects further down the funnel.
2. Failing To Nurture Leads
Generating new leads is one of the biggest challenges for many businesses. That is why once you have a few leads in your pipeline, you should focus on establishing a strong relationship with the prospect so they don’t fall through the cracks.
Lead nurturing is a great way to build a relationship and slowly nudge your leads further down the funnel. When prospects visit your website or make an inquiry, they may not be ready to book a consultation right away. By using various marketing channels like email marketing, content marketing, and social media marketing, you can continue to strengthen your relationship with the prospect to make sure your service stays top of mind until they are ready to take the next step.
3. No Personalization
Every person in your funnel is different. To avoid your content getting marked as spam or being seen as irrelevant, you should focus on adding some personalization.
When focusing on follow-ups, your messages should be tailored toward your lead’s actions and their current stage in the funnel. With an automation tool, you can create personalized emails based on specific characteristics. This can include focusing on things like their behaviors, the lead magnet they opted for, or even the segment you have added them under.
Including well-planned personalization in your follow-ups is what will help strengthen your relationship with the prospect.
Plastix Marketing Proven Lead Generation Strategy
At Plastix, our focus is on building a comprehensive content marketing strategy to help practices convert more visitors into qualified leads. In order to do this, we have adopted Hubspot’s inbound marketing methodology to help the practices we work with build meaningful relationships with customers and grow revenue.
1. Attract
Attract is the very first step of creating a successful lead generation strategy. This is when you focus on drawing in your target audience by creating valuable content that will position you as an expert.
At Plastix, we focus on growing organic traffic by implementing a content pillar strategy around procedures and treatments.
To add more context, a pillar page is a great way to include all the information about a specific topic in one single place. This allows website visitors to get all of their answers in a quick and efficient manner.
In order to create pillar pages for your practice, we identify the keywords that you should rank for on search engines. We do this by looking at keywords that have the most traffic, are the least competitive, and have snippet opportunities. Keyword research is important because it will help us determine the content, subtopics, and blogs we need to explore in order to create comprehensive guides around your treatments and services.
2. Convert
Once you have grown organic traffic to your website, the Convert stage will focus on turning website visitors into leads.
At Plastix, we use pillar pages to create a funnel that encourages visitors to take the next step by engaging with the call to action to download an eBook. By downloading an eBook, visitors utilize lead forms that enable us to generate more top-of-the-funnel leads. These leads are usually people who are in the research process and are still evaluating their options for specific treatments.
The eBook we develop helps highlight the prospect’s specific surgical interests. By combining the eBook with the landing pages, call to action, and thank you pages, we are able to provide a better user experience and generate more qualified leads.
For a short-term solution, our team also focuses on increasing brand awareness by running paid ads for popular treatments. Through these paid campaigns, we are able to direct traffic to these content-specific landing pages in order to nurture more people down the funnel and closer to the Close stage.
3. Close
At the Close stage, your leads will see you as an expert within your niche and recognize that your practice is the best choice to help solve their problems.
Once they have downloaded the eBook, the contact will get sent to a CRM system which will subscribe the lead to a series of emails over a 3-week period. Using email marketing, we can encourage the buying process by using the knowledge that we have on that lead to send content and calls to action that perfectly aligns with their needs and interests.
Simultaneously, we work with the sales team to ensure that sales consultants are able to properly assist the clients who are calling for specific services. Aligning a prospect with the right sales consultant is the best way to help increase the chances of conversion.
4. Delight
If you think your work is done once you have converted a lead to a customer, think again. The Delight stage focuses on turning your customers into promoters.
You want to focus on building a relationship with your customers to help further develop their loyalty to your practice. Happy customers will recommend your services to friends and family, helping you generate even more leads.
At Plastix, we focus on doing this by generating reviews by patients on platforms like Real Self, My Patient Rating, and Google.
Monitoring Lead Generation Results
Monitoring your lead generation strategy is a crucial step in gauging your success. In order to maximize your efforts and improve your results, you need to clearly define your metrics and goals, so you are not wasting resources on areas that are not impacting your bottom line.
At Plastix, we have created a lead generation dashboard to provide more visibility into our client’s performance. We use this dashboard to highlight the results from every stage of the inbound marketing methodology.
Here is a breakdown of each of the metrics we track on this dashboard:
- Total Leads (This Year)
- We add all lead sources together to calculate the total leads for the year and compare that against the previous year. This is an important metric to help our clients keep an eye on the bigger picture when leads may go down one month.
- Total eBook Downloads (This Year)
- We add all ebook downloads together to calculate this metric for the year. Again, it’s important for the client to realize how many new top of the funnel leads we are generating and adding to their email list.
- Conversion Rate (This Year)
- We always explain to client upfront that 2% is the benchmark lead conversion rate in the industry. We calculate this metric by taking all leads and dividing it by the number of website visits utilizing Google Analytics data.
- Total eBook Downloads (This Month)
- We want our data to look at both yearly and monthly so the client has a full picture of what’s happening now and what’s been happening this year.
- Facebook Ads Leads (This Month)
- We want to showcase to clients exactly how many leads are coming from FB ads in this dashboard. We have more comprehensive FB ad data in a separate dashboard.
- Google Ads Leads (This Month)
- We want to showcase to clients exactly how many leads are coming from Google ads in this dashboard. We have more comprehensive Google ad data in a separate dashboard.
- Leads By Source:
- This is an important metric because it answers a question that we get from clients a lot, “Where are my leads coming from?” We can easily showcase to clients that most of their leads come from organic search, not social media.
In order to automate our reporting process we have partnered with Databox, a business analytics platform that enables us to combine data from multiple platforms into a single dashboard. This allowed us to constantly measure what we are doing and gave us the ability to easily showcase our results to clients.
In Databox, we have also created multiple dashboards to highlight performance across every channel we use. In order to tell a more comprehensive story with our data, we can group dashboards to create a presentation that quickly communicates performance and helps highlight key insights.
We have even created Scheduled Snapshots to ensure our clients receive their dashboards every month, automatically. The Scheduled Snapshots feature allows us to send up-to-date dashboards to any email at regular time intervals.
With a platform like Databox, we have been able to improve transparency with our clients, so there are no smoke and mirrors at the end of the month. Our client’s data is always accessible to them, and our team can proactively monitor performance to maximize growth and revenue.
Grow Your Medical Aesthetics Practice With Plastix
By now, you are probably thinking that lead generation is no easy task. But, if you are serious about increasing your client base, it’s an investment you are going to have to make.
To ensure you built a strong foundation for future sales and are able to maintain sustained growth, you need to be successful at generating new qualified leads for your practice. Lead generation has many moving parts. From lead quality, to lead nurturing, to monitoring results, it’s no surprise that many businesses struggle to create a strategy that successfully translates into revenue.
Luckily, Plastix Marketing specializes in helping you thrive. Visit our website to schedule a consultation and see how we can help you generate and convert more leads at your practice. https://plastixmarketing.com/lead-generation/
