Millennials Are Starting To Hit Cosmetic Medicine

Millennials are now hitting the age where they're looking for cosmetic medical care... but reaching them requires a change in the way you're getting your message out.

Social media is a key factor in engagement. It has opened doors for physicians to update patients with the latest offers in the clinic or with the newest in the health world or by simply educating them about your specialty or practice. The power of social media would help you become an influencer, allowing you to be known across different channels and even through different generations.

Moz, an SEO company, released a series of infographics about generational use and reach of social media.

See them here: https://moz.com/blog/the-generational-content-gap-three-ways-to-reach-multiple-generations

According to some experts, physicians have difficulty reaching Generation Y (millennials). While many millennials are active in social media, physicians may have to step up their game in order to reach this demographic to garner more patients in their practice. Millennials have trust issues, and as physicians who want to reach Gen Y, you may need to build up your online reputation and website. After all, they're looking at everyting online via their smart phone.

If you're a single physician, make your name a brand. According to Forbes, Millennials are able to connect with companies better as a brand, so try to condense your popular procedures into 140 characters on Twitter. Another alternative to wordiness is visuals. So, put your name out there and differentiate yourself from the others.

If you're running a larger clinic, you can do the same thing with your clinic's name.

Reviews will remain important. Forbes also reports that Millennials trust reviews before getting into anything. It helps them discern if the cosmetic procedure is right for them or is too expensive and the risks that follow. Ask returning patients to give you reviews so that Millennials will be able to read about your treatments and the way you and your staff handle patients as well.

Lessen advertising. Advertisements sound the alarms on a Millennial’s head. This causes their trust issues to rise, and they . Don’t target their insecurities, target their possible needs. In addition to what they would need, elaborate further as to how this procedure could be beneificial and risky it could be. In that sense, you could have them consider getting the procedure and look more into it.

So physicians, what should be your 2017 strategy?

Change it up. Don’t stay on Twitter or on Facebook all the time. Try Instagram and Snapchat. According to most SEO experts, Expired Content—posts that last for only a few hours—would keep them curious or wanting more. If you are already established on Twitter or Facebook, go on live video to introduce products and services, show your whole practice, and flaunt your practice or clinic. It allows your audience to see how the clinic looks like and your staff also runs the practice.

Content is always essential. No updates could hinder your conversion strategy. Always have relevant content on your blog and your social media channels. Churn out significant content. Remember, there is a difference between spamming your followers and posting regularly.

Ask returning patients to follow and mention you. This is important, because in this regard you can retweet or like their posts and some of your followers will be able to see that.

Educate and inform. To establish yourself further on the social media front, you will need to post educational content about cosmetic procedures. This way, your patients know what to expect and at the same time see you as their reliable sources.

Strengthening Your Medical Spas Local SEO Strategy

Many say, it’s always best to start small, which is true, because going big could cost you. It is crucial to keep up with the trends, and a solid marketing strategy can help you make your way to Google’s 1st page, without being banned. Thus, it is important to keep marketing at a steady pace while still following the rules. In this case, we advise you to start LOCAL.

Local SEO could help boost your website’s visibility in your city or state.

When you search for Local SEO, Google My Business (GMB) always comes up. This is a great way to be known through the search engine. Google is very much intuitive, knowing one’s location as they search. Thus, it is important as you update or set-up your website, to have a GMB listing underway. Google My Business also added a feature which is schedule appointments.

NAP, NAP, NAP

No don’t take a NAP. NAP means Name, Address, and Phone. All of which should be consistent in all your pages or social media websites. Aside from NAP, you also have to input your times and days of operations.

List on Local Directories

All businesses can start by listing their companies on Google My Business, so should your medical practice. Local directories could also help you put your practice on the map. Here are several directories you can start listing in:

• Google
• Yahoo!
• Yelp
• Facebook

Ask for reviews with Podium's special offer for Medical Spa MD Members.

It’s not bad nor it doesn’t violate HIPAA practices when asking for reviews. After all, most patients look for reviews first prior to scheduling an appointment with the doctor. Ask your patients to include the location of your practice when you encourage them to write their review. If some patients have already submitted their own, you can filter out the bad reviews, if any. Note, never to call out the patients that gave you a bad review.

Increase Patient Visits through Blogging

Marketing has moved digitally, being out of the loop could hurt your clinic or practice. While you may have staff or a service working on marketing, there is one method you could do to help raise your website views (with the right strategy). Blogging is one sure way to do that.

Why you should blog?

Simple. It helps you get known. So, you ask. The main point of having your own blog means people will recognize you, your opinions, your practice, and your services. It gives you an opportunity to reach your current and potential patients. It allows you to speak your mind also. With your blog, you can include links in your entries (do this with care), and increase traffic in your website.

Blogging is another method to raise your SEO game. With the right content and keywords, you can reach the first few pages of Google-- with the right strategy. Decide with your team on what your clinic would like to be known as (e.g. Laser Resurfacing in [insert state here] or Best Botox [insert state here]). Stuffing or loading keywords in your blog post is a no-no. Google themselves warn users not to practice this as it could ruin your chances in ranking.

Once you have started blogging, you should commit, so when people find your blog it won't be empty or outdated. In an event you do not have time to write a post, ask a staff member in the practice as knowledgeable to write. Schedule or regularly update the blog so people could keep coming back for more high quality content. Worried about running out of topics to write? Curate or repurpose, just make sure you do not copy and paste from a previous blog post. Make it relevant with the year, the month, or season. Up to you. 

If you are not up to starting your own blog, (which could make or break you) another option is submitting a guest post. Guest posting is an incredible way to share your thoughts to another website, which allows you to expose yourself in another forum. There are many physician blogs out there that allow guest posting. Follow all the guidelines as stipulated before submitting one entry, and your post is good to go. If you're still not up for this one, you could submit a guest post with us here (So long as it is business or cosmetic medicine-related, you are good).

Why you should not be discouraged to blog.

Many physicians have and run their own blogs because these doctors know they can reach their target patients and audience. In terms of patients, when you blog about the services you offer people can find you. Although, you may need to optimize your keywords so you are one of the top searches. Keywords is key, and you will have to invest on that.

Things to Remember

• Blogging STILL matters
• Never load a blog post with keywords
• When in doubt, guest post (…with us).

Everybody Needs a Marijana – Marketing of Medical Practices in the Information Age

A young doctor asked me the other day how new patients, excluding patients who were referred by other doctors or previous patients, find their way to my practice. We were hanging out in a crowded party in a loud room so I couldn’t elaborate too much, but I managed to belt out one word that would sum it up: Marijana. That is actually the name of the Director of Marketing, Advertising, and Web Presence in my plastic surgery practice – Discreet Plastic Surgery. If you ask her, she’d probably tell you that she NEVER expected to be working for a plastic surgeon. But if you ask me, she’s an integral part of our practice, and should be so for all doctors, especially those in private practice.

As I finished up my training in plastic surgery and went into private practice, I soon realized that free market forces are constantly working to edge me out of the market. Competition is fierce, and people in large markets have many choices in obtaining plastic surgery, as they do in other professional services. A few print ads and radio talk shows later, I further realized that in today’s world, the majority of marketing dollars in a doctor’s practice must be geared towards their internet presence. Even your print ads eventually all end up as PDF files in the “media” section of your website – funny that people still put so much weight on how many times their doctor shows up in “People” magazine. I guess a comment about whether or not Kim Kardashian had a Brazilian butt lift really makes you an expert…

So where do I get started? …you ask. Easy. Just like most questions asked in life these days, the simple answer is: “Google it!” I have no financial disclaimer here so “Bing it” or “Yahoo it” works just as well, and is in fact, recommended as well. Seeing what internet content is out there associated with your name, an old article that you published, a hospital website listing you as a physician, a yellow pages or rate-a-doc style website, or any other peculiar locations, is of paramount paramount. In our office, we started doing our search engine optimization (SEO) by calling each of these websites and online listings and getting all the details right, including linking to our own website. From there, you will soon see how rapidly you’ll be approached from different directions regarding potential help. There’s a huge market for this work, and it rarely goes unnoticed.

As in any rapidly progressing internet-based enterprise, getting someone on your side who knows the tricks of the trade is the key to success. Sure, you can outsource all of these services away, and many do. But, when you add in all the costs of internal office marketing, advertising in a wide gamut of different media, and other costs of brand development, you have a full-time job on your hands. Please beware doctors, stick to doing what you do best. Get an expert on your side. Get yourself a Marijana!

Dr. Daniel Kaufman
Discreet Plastic Surgery

Understanding "Core" Physicians

What is the definition of a 'core' physician?

On April 30th, I conducted a webinar for Palomar Medical, Inc. on the topic of optimizing Local Search Engine Optimization tactics to boost your practice on local internet placement and ranking. Soon after the webinar, I was contacted by many physicians with many questions. I felt confident in answering all of them, except for one. And, that question was "what is the definition of a "core" physician"?

I was stumped.

I've searched the Internet for a documented answer and found none. I then perused quite a few physician's websites where it was clearly stated they were "core" physicians. It was also clearly stated that those medical specialties that were not deemed as being "core" were not qualified to perform certain aesthetic procedures. Not to be accused of being "flippant" by a physician as in one of my previous posts, I had thought that it was experience, training and number of successful procedures performed that made a physician "core" in that particular aesthetic modality?

Even on review and educational websites such as RealSelf, all non-"core" specialties were removed.

The answer I received from RealSelf stated : "RealSelf is no longer hosting profiles for participants who do not meet specialty designation criteria set forth by updated RealSelf policies. We have encountered problems with doctors and other medical personnel answering questions far outside their expertise or specialty and, in some cases, even dispensing inappropriate and dangerous advice to our readers. The aforementioned changes have been implemented in an effort to prevent these situations from arising."

Not to elicit any aggressive comments here, and I mean no disrespect to any medical specialty in particular, I just would like to be enlightened as to where the definition of "core" was derived from and what medical specialties that includes?

Simple Strategies for Local Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Paula Di Marco Young is hosting a local SEO webinar for Palomar.

Wednesday, March 30th, 2011
8:00pm EST / 5:00pm PST

As a business owner and experienced customer relationship manager, Paula Di Marco Young knows the challenges of marketing a small business and has experienced the cost-effective – yet significant – impact of sound Internet marketing practices. In this webinar, Paula will share simple SEO strategies that can help increase your business's visibility in local search engine listings and keep non-local competition from taking advantage of your valuable Internet marketing real-estate.

Paula Di Marco Young, BS, RN is the sole owner of Social Marketing Strategy 101, LLC and co-owner of Young Medical Spa. Paula previously owned a cosmetic national franchise, among other businesses in the aesthetics industry, and worked for Johnson & Johnson for over 10 years where she held senior management positions in customer relationship management. Paula has authored for Medical Spa Report Magazine and is an editorial blogger for Medical Spa MD. She has also authored the Medical Spa Training Manuals that are used at top medspas and cosmetic clinics to train their staffs.

Read Paula's Medical Spa MD posts.

Frontdesk SEO: Medical Spa Marketing & Keyword Selection

Frontdesk has a growing number of full-service website SEO accounts from Medical Spa MD Members and additional do-it-yourself accounts popping in all the time.

Read this review of our SEO software by a Medical Spa MD Member.

Since we've had so many Medical Spa MD Members sign up and begin using our SEO software or outsourcing their SEO to us, I though I'd comment on one of the most common questions that we get from plastic surgeons and medical spas that are just starting; keyword selection.

What are keywords?

Keywords (or key phrases) are what someone who is looking for your clinic types in to the search engine. For many, selecting the right keywords can be of the utmost importance. If you select the right keywords your marketing efforts should see some pretty significant results after just a short time, but select the wrong keywords and you're going to be banging your head against the wall with little to show for it. So, let's talk keywords that are going to be most useful for Medical Spa MD Members.

Most Medspa MD Members are individual physicians who have a single clinic location. As such, you're targeting potential clients based on geographical location; a certain 'radius' around your practice that you typically pull new patients from.

This one single piece of info gives you the ability to be especially effective by using your geography in your SEO efforts. And since 85%+ of your potential clients are now using the web to find local businesses it's more than just a 'nice to have', it's imperative for success if you're looking to grow.

Selecting Your Medical Spas Best Keywords

There's some good news here. If you're offering Botox, Dysport, laser hair removal, or photofacials, or you're using technology that clients might be searching for like Fraxel, Thermage, or IPL treatments, you can just stick your area code or location on the end (which is how people commonly search) and you're set; so 'Fraxel' now becomes 'Fraxel Manhattan', 'Thermage' becomes 'Thermage NYC', and 'laser hair removal' is now 'laser hair removal 90210'.

Of course there's a hitch. Just because you're being ranked for 'Fraxel NYC' doesn't mean that you'll rank for anything else. So, you'll need to keep up your marketing efforts on all the keywords that you're targeting at the same time. (This can be pretty difficult if you don't have a system in place.)

If you've got any website SEO efforts in place, you'll do better with just adding your local city or zip code to your normal process.

Where to start

OK, here's the plug; you should run a free SEO website report on your domain name. We offer this service (and it's a valuable one) so that you can see exactly how your site's performing at any given time.

Hey Jay Calvert MD, What Kind Of Website SEO & SEM Is Best For Your Medical Spa?

SEO is fast becoming a necessity in the plastic surgeon - dermatologist - medical spa - laser clinic space.

The need to get your clinic's site ranked on the search engines (most importantly Google, Yahoo and Bing), has led to a proliferation of vendors, many of which engage in nefarious SEO and SEM tactics that cause a lot of irritation and can actually hurt you in the eyes of the search engines.

A case in point is the 'comment spam' that I regularly have to deal with and remove from Medical Spa MD a couple of times a day. These spam comments used to be the familiar junk websites but there's been an increasing trend towards comment spam from more legitimate physicians and medical spas.

This kind of spam is increasingly an irritation as the amount increases and can cost you dearly as websites start banning the IP address that the comment originates from, removes the comment, and reports your IP address to services that monitor and take action against spammers.

Here's an example of comment spamming that someone represending a cosmetic surgeon in LA, Jay Calvert MD FACS, left on a Medical Spa MD forum thread on marketing and advertising about Solta Medical Thermage and Fraxel.

Jay Calvert MD, FACS

The new name of the company sounds good and much better than before. I've heard of this before and been looking for it. I was planning to have a consultation from them for this anti aging services. I heard they're good on it.

Name = Cosmetic surgeon Los Angeles
Email = Dr.Calvert09@gmail.com
URL = http://www.jaycalvertmd.com

doctors actual email address = info@jaycalvertmd.com and cerissa@roxburysurgery.com

Dr. Thomas McHugh

Liposuction and Smart lipo procedures in Houston, Texas is offered at the plastic surgery practice of Dr. Thomas McHugh.
Ambreen Tariq
<a href="http://www.tpmchugh.com/liposuction.asp"> smart lipo Houston </a>

peter thomas
ambreen_directory@yahoo.com
http://www.tpmchugh.com/liposuction.asp

Dr. Shelton for Botox in NYC

Being in a profession where appearance and first impressions are important, I decided to have some “work" done. I never thought I would undergo such a procedure but in today's competitive world and being in my early 40s, I decided to take a proactive approach to aging, my skin and my overall appearance, and consulted Dr. Shelton for Botox in NYC, http://www.thenyac.com/botox-dysport/index.html. My life has never been the same since the procedure. http://www.thenyac.com/

You can see from the comment above that it's clearly spam. The grammer is poor, the comment is totally irrelevant, and there's a link and fake email address. This is clearly just an attempt to get a link from Medical Spa MD.

These spamming services typically use low wage Third World labor oversees to try to spam sites that already rank highly in the search engines in an attempt to build backlinks and increase their own rankings. It's crass, it wastes everyones time and lowers the quality of the sites that are spammed, and it doesn't even work that well. Since the quality is so low the majority of these links are removed anyway. Worse, if anyone reads this crap they think you're an idiot that can't write or spell. Who would want to be treated by a cosmetic surgeon or medical spa that can't spell or form complete sentences?

If you're going to insult me (and every other Medical Spa MD Member) by wasting my time employing this kind of BS, you can bet that it's not going end in the result you're hoping for.

So what should you do?

If you actually want to get high-quality website SEO and SEM services as either a do-it-yourself user that employs your front desk staff to do it five minutes a day, or you want to outsource your medical spas search engine marketing SEO experts that speak English and know what they're doing, contact Frontdesk SEO after you run a free SEO report on your site.

Effective Link Building Strategies to Increase Your Medical Spa's SEO

If you are new to "link building", it really isn't as hard as it seems.

Basically, link building is just a link from another website back to your own medical spa or laser clinic. The more back links your site has, the higher it will rank on the major search engines.

Link building can be very time consuming, but the FrontDesk SEO tool can really help you go out there and find the sites you should be listed on. This saves you a tremendous amount of time.

Because you will be resubmitting the same text over and over again, make yourself a document that you can keep all of your submission text on. This should include your Page Title, your website's URL address, a brief description of your practice, and important keywords. Website submissions also ask for a name of the submitter and email address. I would suggest setting up a email address with Google or Yahoo, one that you only use for submissions, this way your personal email won't become inundated with confirmation and/or spam emails as a result of your submissions.

View: 5 minute video introduction to linkbuilding and SEO

There are several types of link building methods you can do. Some are just basic data submissions, and some are blog and article submissions. I will describe the differences amongst the major link building methods:

Article Submission

There are directories on the web designed just for submitting articles and some for writing blogs. When you submit something you wrote about your practice or even a particular therapy you offer, you can attach hyperlinks to keywords in your article that direct the reader back to your website. Some quality sites are Squidoo, Hubpages, Blogger, and Wordpress.com. Let me show you how this works with just one line taken from a blog I wrote on my own blogpost:

"It's your body and you do have to be careful of who you choose to perform your laser lipo procedure. While no physician can have a 100% satisfaction rate, don't be afraid to ask questions about how long a physician has been performing these procedures, who they trained with, how many procedures do they perform a month, and also if they have any satisfied patients you can chat with. Also, it's important to ask to see a before and after photo book with their patients, and not someone else's."

By choosing a keyword you think your reader would be interested in, you can immediately direct them right to that page on your website with the hyperlinks.

Google considers a "Yahoo Directory" link as a quality back link. Unfortunately, they charge an annual fee of $300. It may be worth submitting to; however, there is no guarantee from Yahoo Directory that your site will be accepted.

Directory Submission

DMOZ is a directory worth submitting your site to. DMOZ is an Open Directory Project (ODP) mainly known as DMOZ which stands for "directory.mozilla.org" and is owned by Netscape. While DMOZ can substantially increase your SEO ranking, it's tough to receive their approval and the entire process could take months. If you are fortunate enough to receive their approval, many smaller directories use the DMOZ directory categories so if you can become listed with DMOZ this would mean you would also become listed on many other web directories as well.
There are other major directories you can submit to such as the BOTW (Best Of The Web) directory ($99/year or $299/permanent).

Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking is changing in it's effectiveness all the time. In social bookmarking websites, users save links publicly (not personally on their own computers) to web pages that they want to store and/or share with others. Usually, these bookmarks are shared within an individual "group" someone may subscribe to (such as "Laser Hair Removal"). You can add descriptions to your bookmarks in the form of metadata, or meta tags, so that other users can understand what the content is of your bookmark without having to download it beforehand. Different types of "descriptions" can include comments or even reader's votes (favorable or not - like on YouTube or Digg). Again, FrontDesk SEO makes this process relatively easy.

Blog Commenting

MedicalSpaMD is a blog and, like most blogs, it is highly susceptible to spammers like we have all seen and Jeff so diligently tries to eliminate on a daily basis as it can be a true nuisance for people like us who use this site as a valuable tool for your practices.

If you want to find blogs to participate in and comment on, try to find quality blogs that are related to what you do as a profession. Again, FrontDesk SEO can help with this. And when you add your comments, try to make them content-relative because not only do your comments add value to the blogpost in general, they also have greater chance of staying on the blogpost with a link back to your website.

Press Releases

Press Releases have worked well for me, and I'm not too proud to say that I didn't write the ones that really worked. There are a lot of good and bad example press releases out there and I am no exception. Writing a quality press release is an art and, frankly, I don't have the talent for them and pay someone else to do it. Let me give you an example of my own good and bad press release experiences.

While this press release still continues to give my website hits, all it is is words: Paula's Bad Example

Now look at the one I paid Fran Acunzo from Acara Partners to do for us. It includes a photo, links and even video: Paula's Good Example

If writing a good press release including videos and back links is not your forte, then it's worth it to farm it out. Just writing a good press release is half the battle. Submitting it to the right press release agencies that will index it effectively for you is the other half.

Social Media Sites

Social Media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube work very well by providing quality and relevant back links to your site that all the major search engines love.

So, this is back linking in a nutshell and we can really go deeper into the categories, but I fear you will become bored or even glassy-eyed if you're not a geek like me. So if you don't have someone out there performing these activities for you and you really are serious about your web presence, you really might want to take a look at FrontDesk SEO and see what it can do for you. Just remember, building links doesn't increase your website's internet presence overnight. It does take some time, like my good friend Jeff keeps reminding me! In a world of available "instant results", it's hard to be patient sometimes! 

Author: Paula D. Young RN runs internal operations and training at Young Medical Spa and is the author of the Medical Spa Aesthetics Course, Study Guide, and Advanced IPL & Laser Training course for medical estheticians and laser technicians.

Submit a guest post and be heard.

Need A Critique Of Your Medical Spa Website?

OK, I'm ready to throw some rocks at a few of the medical spa and laser clinic web sites that I'm seeing.

If you'd like an expert (me) to take a look at your web site and let you know what I think about what you're doing right, and where you need some improvment, you can request a review from the contact form. (Just include the request in the body of the contact form.)

I'll review your site right here by making and posting a screencast of my thoughs and digging in to your site's structure, design, functionality and SEO attributes.

You'll get some insight about best practices and things you could be doing to drive additional patient traffic an increase your site's visibility, and everyone else will get to watch.

Request a review of your website >

FrontdeskSEO.com

Frontdesk SEO seems to be gaining some momentum with thier front end search engine marketing solution for physicians and medical spas.

If you haven't run a free SEO report on your current website, please do. With something like 98% of potential patients using the web to search for local businesses online, this kind of marketing solution offers the best bang for the buck by far... and it's easy.

Frontdesk offers do-it-yourself SEO software that lets your front desk staff perform marketing functions in just 5 or 10 minutes a day, or you can oursource SEO to experts and have it done for you. And the pricing starts at as little as $59.

Do-It-Yourself & Outsource Search Engine Marketing (SEO)

Frontdesk SEO is Medical Spa MD's newest Select Partner.

View the announcement here.

Frontdesk offers do-it-yourself SEO software that lets you use your front desk staff to market your business. (They offer outsource SEO as well.) You can start for as little as $59 a month which is killer.

If you haven't already, run a free SEO report on your website and see where you rank according to the major search engines.

This is the same system that we use at Medical Spa MD to keep our #1 rankings in all of the major search engines and I can't say enough about the back end and how easy it is to use and works eaqually well for any business or web site. And, if you want to kick it up a notch, the have outsourcing options that use their SEO experts to do the work.

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Medical Spa MD Members get a Podium patient review marketing account and save $1,257

Protect your reputation. Get new patients. Medical Spa MD Members receive a special, full service Podium account that includes: no setup fee (save $300), a 10% discount forever (save $330/year) and on-demand patient review marketing training for your entire staff ($597 value).  This offer is not available anywhere else.

Social Media Marketing: Part 1

Last week we had a webinar on social media marketing and more than 70 Medical Spa MD Members signed up. I'd expected somewhere from 10-15 so having 70+ surprised me somewhat.

Alex Panagiotopoulos of Freelance MD explains basic Twitter functions for physicians running medical spas, laser clinics, and cosmetic medical practices

We had intended to post the entire webcast but, due to some technology issues, the audio wasn't usable. So, Alex was kind enough to recreate the entire presentation in smaller parts.

We'll be posting a number of 'how to' videos as they're available around social media marketing with easy step by step instructions, from how to set up your Twitter account, to advanced techniques on Facebook to attract followers and promote your medical spa.

This video is the first in this series, Social Media Marketing for Medical Spas: Part 1, Alex goes over setting up a Twitter account correctly.

Setting up a Twitter account for your medical spa, laser clinic or plastic surgery practice. of course you'll want to follow Freelance MD and Medical Spa MD on Twitter.

Plastic surgeons, dermatologists, laser clinics, medical spas, skin clinics and laser centers will all benefit from learning about the newest social media marketing tactics and strategies. Social media is growing and your cosmetic medical practice can benefit from it's growth with Twitter, Facebook, Blogging, SEO and do it yourself search engine marketing.