Medspas, or medical spas, are a specific kind of spa that focuses on the health benefits from various treatments they offer. For obvious reasons, as the world has grown more stressful and the pressures put on any given person increase, the need for medical relief and stress reduction has skyrocketed. This has led to unprecedented growth in the med spa industry.
While growth is excellent for the already established businesses in a position to capitalize on it, it’s much less valuable for those who are struggling to build a foothold or set up a new med spa business. Increased growth and attention also means increased competition, and increased competition means much more difficulty in finding your role.
If you’re looking to start up a new med spa, grow an existing med spa to dominate your region, or cement your position as one of the current top med spas, you need to know how to market a medical spa business effectively. That’s where we come in. Our expertise can help you become the name everyone thinks of when looking for a med spa.
Build and Understand Your Brand and Persona
What sets a brand apart from the competition? Chances are, you and the other local med spas offer more or less the same set of services. You may have a unique selling proposition (such as being the only spa in town to offer acupuncture, hot yoga, or a particular kind of mud bath), but that’s easily taken from you if another spa chooses to roll out such a service.
No, what you really need to do is build a brand and persona, an aesthetic that appeals to your target audience. You want to be inviting yet exclusive. High-end, yet accessible. Luxurious, yet kind and personal.
Developing your brand aesthetic, persona, and presentation is critical to success to market a medical spa. It can take some time and some adjustment to find the perfect balance to reach your target audience and stand out from the competition, but it’s well worth the effort to do so.
Craft a Compelling Website with Individual Service Pages
Your website is your strongest tool for online marketing, no matter what business you run. It’s virtually impossible to run a modern-day business without a website, even if you build a presence on social media and business aggregators. The website anchors and verifies all of them.
Your website should have a professional, compelling, and well-laid-out design. It should also look distinct from the other local spas. One of the biggest mistakes med spa owners make is hiring the same company that makes all the local industry websites. You end up with every site looking virtually identical.
Make sure that your website includes individual pages for each service you provide. While lumping them together might make a single content-rich page, you want multiple pages to be able to rank for different services, and writing longer, more expansive pages for each of them will benefit you more than a single mega-page.
Make Use of Local Keywords and NAP Information
As a med spa, your target audience is made up entirely of people local to you who are able to visit in person. After all, you don’t have the option for telehealth or remote customers unless you’re also selling products for a “home spa experience,” which is another kind of marketing entirely.
As such, you need two things: a focus on NAP and NAP consistency and a robust plan to use local keywords.
NAP is your name/address/phone number, and NAP consistency means that it’s identical every time you use it – both on your page and on other websites. Everything from the business name to the phone number should be formatted the same. For example, if you use the area code, always use the area code.
Local keywords are keywords that make use of the names of your city, state, region, neighborhood, county, street, and any other local identifier that matters. When someone searches for “Greenwood med spa,” they should find pages on your site that talk about your med spa services in Greenwood. Every local business, even those with a single branch, can have dozens of local keywords to use.
Use Schema.org Local Business Markup
Another potential online marketing tool you can use to gain an advantage, especially if your competitors don’t use it, is making use of Schema.org markup. Schema.org is a meta data framework supported by many major online companies, including Google. It aims to provide contextual data to web content, so search engines can more appropriately understand and categorize it.
The LocalBusiness Schema type, with the Day Spa and Medical Service sub-types, will get you 90% of the way there in tagging your content. You can use Schema managers or hire someone to implement Schema across your website for an instant boost to visibility.
Build Citations and Testimonials
Citations and testimonials are the lifeblood of local businesses, and you need to work on building both.
Citations are mentions of your business by name, NAP, or some combination of identifying data. They can also be called “unlinked mentions” by SEO professionals. Citations do not have to include backlinks, though the best citations should.
A large part of building citations is creating, filling out, optimizing, and actively using your profiles on various industry and niche aggregators. These range from major sites like Google’s Business Profile and Yelp, to industry directories like Spavelous, AmSpa, Looking4Spas, and MedicalSpaMD. The key is to identify the ones your audience uses and prioritize using those while growing your presence slowly over time. Note, as well, that citations tend to have a diminishing return after 200 or so, at which point you can focus on other means of marketing.
Testimonials are obvious. You want to solicit as many positive reviews as you can get, providing that those reviews are legitimate and valuable. You can solicit them for Google, for your website, or your primary directories. It’s word-of-mouth marketing, powered by the internet.
Create and Maintain a Blog Regularly
Blogging, and content marketing, more broadly, is a critical part of building up a sufficient web presence to reach and maintain a #1 position in search rankings.
While filling entire blogs with guides can be enough in some cases, we can give you some basic tips to make your blogs more effective and optimized for growth.
- Always write about topics of interest to your customers related to your services. Try to avoid writing solely about yourself or being too self-promotional.
- Use keywords, but don’t over-optimize for them, which can make your writing look and feel unnatural.
- Don’t forget to maintain your brand voice and tone throughout your writing.
- Blogging frequency doesn’t matter as much as consistency; publishing once a week is fine.
Blogging for a med spa is not significantly different from blogging for other kinds of local businesses; it just determines the types of topics you’ll be writing about.
Consider Local Guest Blogging and Outreach
Content marketing can extend beyond your website. Consider that your audience may not be searching for your services but would be interested if they knew about them. So, identify the kinds of publications they read, and try to contribute to those publications via guest posting, sponsored posts, or other forms of outreach. You may also be able to offer an interview with a local journalist to cover your perspective on local happenings for further participation in the community at large.
Develop a Strong Social Media Presence
Social media can be one of your most potent weapons for building a local presence, becoming part of the greater community, and promoting your marketing.
We generally recommend using Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn as your primary platforms. Facebook is great for a general presence and a hub for community engagement. Twitter is excellent for fast-response news and customer service, as well as questions and answers and promoting your blog content. Instagram (and Pinterest, if you choose to use it) is perfect for showcasing your aesthetic, your services in pictures, and producing the kind of grand vision you want users to feel compelled to join. LinkedIn is good for business-side marketing, hiring employees, and networking with professionals.
Other social networks can come and go as you find them relevant, but these are the most important. Be sure to keep them up to date and active, so users searching for you never come across a barren, unused profile.
Build an Email Newsletter
Building and growing an email newsletter is another good way to build up a community of interested people who will become long-term patrons of your med spa. There are many different ways to build and encourage newsletter sign-ups, so be sure to check out guides on the subject. Newsletters are essential, by the way, because they’re one marketing channel that is not beholden to a company like Google or Facebook to distribute your content.
Monitor and Respond to Reviews
You will have an extensive roster of websites, between citation profiles and social media, where users can leave reviews and comments about your med spa in a public space.
Unfortunately, human nature indicates that satisfied users will often not leave reviews, while dissatisfied users will. That means that unless you’re proactive about building positive testimonials, you’ll tend to end up with more negative reviews and a negative perception that isn’t warranted.
You can approach this problem from two angles. The first is to respond to, address, suppress, and get negative reviews removed as much as possible. Fake reviews can get removed, reviews that violate guidelines can get removed, and other reviews can be mitigated through customer service. The second option is mentioned above: solicit more positive testimonials. Encourage anyone who enjoys your services to leave a review. Doing so can help outweigh the negative reviews and build a more accurate representation of your brand.
Monitor Your Reputation
Both of the options mentioned above require one thing: monitoring your reputation. Set up Google Alerts for your brand name and your primary local keywords. Monitor review sites for new reviews. Keep on top of local mentions.
- If you get a positive review, thank the user and engage with them.
- If you get an average review or a casual, non-review mention, thank the user. If it’s a review, ask what you might do to improve their opinion.
- If you get a negative review, take action to mitigate it as best you can.
None of this can be done without actively monitoring your reputation. You may also consider hiring a reputation monitoring service, though how valuable this is depends on the volume of reviews and sites you need to check. Smaller med spas likely don’t need to do this.
Implement Loyalty and Referral Programs
Word-of-mouth is powerful. Returning customers are stability. Your med spa will need to leverage both of them to become one of the top local spa businesses. One excellent way to encourage both is through loyalty and referral programs.
Loyalty programs don’t need to be complex. You can, for example, offer a punch card, which allows repeat customers to accumulate points that can be redeemed for a complimentary session or a free upsell service that they usually wouldn’t buy.
Referral programs, likewise, don’t need to be complex. Offer a way for new customers to mention how they found out about your business, and if that referral source is a customer, compensate them in some way. You can offer free points for their loyalty cards, free upsells, coupons, or even financial compensation as in an affiliate program. The choice is yours, so experiment to find what is most effective.
As you can see, online marketing for a med spa is a lot of work. A ton of effort goes into being the best, and much of that effort is hidden behind the scenes. Chances are, however, that you don’t have the time or the energy to handle it all yourself. After all, you have your medspa to run. That’s why we offer various services to help you achieve your goals. Consider, for example, using LocalSEO to achieve higher Google search rankings, LocalReferrals to encourage more word-of-mouth marketing, and LocalReviews to build those ever-important testimonials. Please feel free to reach out to us today to get started.
