Trust.

A small word with serious ramifications for your aesthetic medicine practice. It’s this crucial factor that determines the decision to buy. Greater than need or desire; greater than even affordability. Trust.

For a customer to commit to any transaction, they need to trust that what they’re getting is everything it’s made out to be.

Of course this is true in any line of business, but it’s particularly pertinent in age management medicine, where the customer is trusting their practitioner with two highly prized possessions: their health and their appearance. So building trust has to be an essential part of your marketing strategy.

Recent research from marketing experts McKinsey shows that trust is built via a series of memorable connections or touch points. In other words, you need to make customers aware of your brand via a range of media so that they are familiar with you when they come to weigh up their purchasing options.

This poses three key questions for the aesthetic medicine practitioner wishing to start meaningful conversations with their audiences: What should you say, where should you say it, and given that you’re already working every hour available, who will say it?

What you should say: How to speak to your peers and prospects

The now infamous ‘content is king’ statement by Bill Gates encapsulates the essence of modern marketing. The public want useful information and they want it for free. You can give them what they want by sharing your experiences and expertise. This is content marketing.

In fact, content marketing is nothing new. Companies have been sharing their expertise since time immemorial, via white papers, seminars, handbooks – the difference is that now you can share more easily with more people for less cost, thanks to the internet. You can write a thought leadership article about aesthetic medicine, post it online and share it in an instant with potentially everyone in the world who has access to the internet. Or how about an infographic to get across a complex idea in an easily digestible visual? Or a video? There are endless ways to share content online, but remember that, to effectively market yourself or your organisation, it’s not just important to create content, you have to ensure that what you have created captures the attention of your audience or audiences.

As an aesthetic medicine practitioner, a simple way to do this is to create content that addresses the pain point of your customers. Ask yourself what aesthetic concerns keep them awake at night? What questions do your existing clients always ask you? What do they want to know but feel too embarrassed to ask? You can grab their attention, show your expertise and demonstrate that you are the best practitioner for them by creating content that specifically answers the burning questions they have.

Where you should say it: Using digital marketing touch points

Prior to the growth of the internet, aesthetic medicine practitioners relied on expensive strategies such as leaflet drops, exhibition stands and adverts on TV, radio or in magazines to communicate with prospects and raise brand awareness. Fortunately, digital marketing offers much more cost-effective touch points that target audiences with laser-sharp precision via search engines, blogs, emails, apps and social media.

A new report by data agency Zenith reveals that digital advertising has overtaken television as the biggest advertising medium worldwide. Consumers now spend more than 50% of their total media time online and that figure is set to rise. You can tap into this by taking your marketing online, and a good place to start is with search engines, email marketing and social media platforms.

Search engine optimisation: It’s an undeniable fact that the aesthetic medicine market is crowded. There are an estimated 183,000 aestheticians in the US alone and, according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons’ 2016 Plastic Surgery Statistics Report, 7,000 board-certified cosmetic surgeons. However, the high level of targeting afforded by digital marketing channels enables businesses to cut through the noise and directly reach their target audience in a number of ways.

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is one such way. It describes a number of tactics that combine to affect how search engines rank your content when responding to a search. More than 90% of search traffic (ie, people looking for products and services on search engines like Google and Yahoo) stops at page one – so if you’re an aesthetic medicine practitioner in Dubai, your website and content really need to appear on the first page of results when anyone searches for ‘aesthetic medicine Dubai’ or any other popular search terms.

These keywords are one of the criteria search engines use to rank the websites they list in response to any given search. A digital marketing consultant can help you come up with a list of relevant keywords, which you need to include in your content in a way that is so natural that it doesn’t compromise the readability of the piece, nor fall foul of ‘keyword stuffing’ which Google’s ‘spiders’ can easily pick up (and punish).

Other SEO criteria include the ‘richness’ of the content (pictures and videos help); how fresh it is (post something new on a regular basis, at least once a month); the amount of time people spend reading it (so length and level of interest are important); the amount it is shared (include social media links that make it easy to share at a click); and the number of links back to your content from other sites. Write content that is relevant, engaging and worth sharing, and it will tick all these boxes.

Email marketing: Email marketing allows companies to communicate directly with a database of clients and potential clients whenever they choose. The content of your emails can vary from complete articles to snippets that link back to the full article on your website, where you can then lead prospects to take further actions, such as calling for a free consultation. It relies, however, on that database. Rules on the use of personal data for marketing practices are being tightened, with the effect that businesses are being restricted from marketing to consumers unless they have actively opted in to receive marketing emails. Of course, prospects are much more likely to opt in if they can see they’re going to receive regular, valuable content. Judge the frequency of your posts carefully, though. While regularity is important, you don’t want to become a nuisance.

Social media: A survey by Demi and Cooper Advertising shows that one-third of consumers now use social media to find information about health-related matters, and social media affects the choice of doctor, hospital or medical facility for 41%. Furthermore, more than 90% of 18-24 year-olds trust the information they find on social media, and 56% of those aged between 45 and 64 say they engage with information on social media. The use of social media is spreading fast through the age groups, but the platform you use will affect your targeting. For example, young adults are currently the main users of Instagram, while older adults favour Facebook (two-thirds of online adults aged 65 and older use the platform).

Once you have established the most relevant platforms for your business, the basics of social media marketing involve regularly posting and sharing relevant content – at least once per day – and interacting with followers by answering questions and liking comments left by them. Other strategies include hosting groups and live broadcasts to grow your following, showcase your expertise and nurture your audience further. All platforms also offer paid advertising, starting from as little as a dollar per day, which you can take advantage of to reach highly targeted audiences with offers, services and content.

Who should do it: How a busy practitioner can build a trusting relationship with customers

Digital content marketing serves four main purposes: it engages your customer base by offering answers to their questions; it conveys your authority and expertise; it raises awareness of you and your business; and it increases your SEO ranking. All these factors combine to build that all important trust.

While the language of modern digital technology may create the impression that this is a new-fangled concept, it really amounts to the same principle as a shopkeeper standing outside his shop and chatting to passers-by. It is an exercise in relationship building – developing that all-important familiarity, respect and trust that turns passers-by into customers.

For busy practitioners, however, creating a digital marketing strategy and producing regular content often falls off the to-do list. When do you find the time? You’re not a publisher, after all.

Fortunately, there are digital content publishers out there who can take your expertise and turn it into regular, high quality content for you, post it on the relevant platforms and analyse the response. Another advantage of digital marketing is the ability to make constant adjustments and measure the effects. A skilled marketer will be able to look at the responses to your posted content and report back as to what is engaging readers and compelling them to action and what isn’t.

Whether you engage the services of a content marketing company or you find the time to do it yourself, the opportunities that digital marketing affords for raising your profile and winning business are too good to miss.

In a business that relies on trust, it is your chance to show your credentials to an increasingly selective audience.