Meet the ex-Perts '5-Stars' Practice Building Consortium™

Practice Building Webinar Series

Aesthetics & Business - Start Thinking about Marketing

Good Morning, I am Dr. Gregory Buford and I'm a board-certified plastic surgeon in Denver, Colorado and the author of numerous books and periodicals concerning aesthetics and business. This morning I'm going to be talking very briefly about marketing and most specifically how to succeed marketing-wise in the new age of aesthetic medicine despite this crisis.

Marketing has been changing dramatically over the last 10 years and over the last couple of years, it's changed even more. Digital marketing has really risen. I'm not sure this is a course that you literally could do in a brief webinar or over months and years due to so much information.

I'm going to go over the basics. Why is that? Because quite honestly, I find that in speaking to a lot of physicians, physician extenders, and other medical professionals when you talk about marketing, everyone looks at trying to get the latest plans - in all honesty I've done a lot of the plans.

I've tried a lot of things. I've had some great successes and I've had some utter failures. I can tell you from experience it doesn't always have to be complicated. There's a saying in surgery called “keep it simple-stupid” and the enemy of good is better.

Go and do it and just start your marketing, figure out what you want to accomplish and start it. Without further ado, I'm going to start this presentation and as I pointed out, marketing has changed and will continue to over time how we get the word out, how we educate potential patients, and how we attract potential clients has completely changed. I'm going to say this here, right now, traditional print media is dead.

If you're advertising in the big magazines and so forth, in all honesty you're probably wasting your money. Print media is not where you're going to get the best return on investment. Your best ROI is Digital marketing and is here to stay.

Save your money, emphasize digital marketing and get rid of most of your print media. If you're in certain parts of the country, it may be more helpful but overall, digital marketing is really the King. So why is, why is traditional marketing not as effective as in the past? I'm going to talk about a few things that you probably already know, when you submit your information, for example, to a magazine, by the time it hits the press it's old news.

It's yesterday's news because it takes time and once it's printed it's static and not dynamic with a limited audience reach. If you're publishing in a magazine and if you have an article what have you is not digital - your patients or potential patients have to actually buy that magazine.

With digital marketing, breaking news is breaking news and the news is very, very fresh with an unlimited reach of audience. If someone has bandwidth, they can literally reach it as long as they're on the news platform whether they're on Facebook or Instagram or whatever social media platform there's a potential for viral spread of information right now.

That's probably not the best thing to say, but there's a potential for viral spread of information. Your stories can actually go viral because some read them and they pass them along to 10 or more of their friends.

They can give them to 100,000 of their friends, that's completely different than what you're doing in a magazine. Again, traditional marketing is really not effective anymore. Let's get started and talk about what you need to do first.

Well, when I first started marketing several years ago this was brought to my attention by a publicist I was working with. The thing that she said first off is “who is your customer”? To be honest with you, I didn't know who my customer was and I would challenge a lot of you that you can't tell me exactly who your customer is.

Define your customer and we're going to go into a little bit more depth on this and defining your brand. All of us are brands. What is a brand? Is Nike a brand? Is Starbucks? A brand is defined and it's predictable. Third, identify potential for blue ocean within your space - it's called blue ocean strategy.

We'll talk a little bit about what actually blue ocean should mean. Defining your customer, who actually is your customer? If you're doing injectables, it is probably more of a female target audience. If you're doing hair replacement, it's probably more male.

Is your patient male or female? How old is your patient and why is that important? How you talk to someone that is 19 years old is completely different than how you speak to and market to someone that's 55 years old. What is their degree of education - are they high school educated or are they advanced degreed?

These things sound crazy, but they're really important to know geographic location as well. Are you targeting most of your audience locally? Am I targeting right around the Denver area or am I actually targeting the entire US or outside of the U S as well?

Then anything else as well that you could know about your target audience is really important. If you know who your potential patients are, you know how to speak to them and you know where they will be - you can market much more effectively and spend your dollars more wisely.

The first thing as we discussed is to define your customer. What is the second thing you need to concern yourself with? What's your brand? What is your 15 second elevator pitch? 15 second elevator pitch means that if you got in an elevator with someone and they say Dr. Buford - what do you do and tell me about your practice? I know exactly what my 15 second elevator speeches are and I can recite them because I know exactly what my brand is.

What is the look and feel of your product? Are you an injectable practice? Are you a hormone replacement practice? Are you a body contouring practice? Are you all of those things and know what the look and feel of your product is?

Then ultimately you need to defining your corporate culture which a lot of us just let that happen organically - don't help shape that. Your corporate culture is probably one of the most important things within your organization which is not only how your seen, but how you interact with your clients on a day to day basis.

Corporate Culture defines really literally everything about who you are, what you are, and what you bring to the table and then ultimately what is your brand message? What are you trying to say? For example, Ritz Carlton Hotels, they know and have a real focus on quality, comfort, customer service.

All these things actually form of circle and they all support each other. If one chain is weak are the rest of them - so find your brand. What is blue ocean? If you have an ocean where there's a lot of competition and there's sharks and so forth it's going to be red with blood.

Instead if you're the only competition within this space - there's blue ocean. It's an amalgam of several different approaches. Identify potentially for where your own blue ocean within your space - this is how you can increase your ability to compete.

Ask yourself, what is your competition doing to secure new patients? Why is that important? If you know how they're doing it, you can possibly do it in a similar way but also do it in an entirely different way. What are your competition's blind spots? What are they missing? How can you use these to your advantage? What do you see that they are not seeing?

There is a good chance that if they're not seeing it, you may not be seeing it as well too. Define blind spots and realize that there are new and innovative ways to tell the same story. There are ways to spin what you're doing or should you just throw out the story and create a new one?

These are all important in terms of creating blue ocean within your practice. I'll tell you the best way to compete is to decrease the competition around you. Don't just go in and do what everybody else is doing and think you're suddenly going to do it better. You can use that in part of your strategy, but even more effectively define your blue ocean.