PR - What Is It And How Do I Do It For My Aesthetics Clinic?
Public Relations is often considered a dark art. I studied it twenty five years ago at Uni and I have worked in the PR world ever since - and my family still don’t understand what I do!
In a nutshell, PR is a tool used within a marketing strategy. It’s essentially concerned with protecting and enhancing the reputation of your business and at its most basic level, it’s how you achieve free publicity for your business.
Free is misleading (businesses spend thousands of pounds on PR campaigns) but the ‘free’ element is the fact you don’t pay the publisher as you would with traditional advertising.
There are a number of disciplines within PR from press office functions, media relations, community relations, corporate comms, investor relations, marketing PR and nowadays social media. It entwines in other areas of the business such as advertising, SEO and internal comms… but let’s not get tied up in knots about it. You just want to know how you can use PR for your aesthetics clinic, right?
We’ve already discussed in this article how important YOU are to your business. We can’t emphasise enough how your most powerful PR tool is you.
Raise yourself up. Be confident. You are the expert, you have the qualifications and experience. You know what you are doing, you are the best at what you do. Own that.
Embrace Social Media
Facebook and Instagram are incredible tools for your business, to help raise your profile and build your own community. This is the place where you really are your strongest asset. In this business, people buy into people, they don’t buy into logos and branding. They want to know the person behind the clinic, they want to see your face, feel your personality, and hear what you have to say. Buying a cosmetic treatment is as much an emotional decision as it is a rational one, use this.
They also want to see your work, your skill, your craft. Before and after photos are a must. The higher-quality the better. An incredible profile full of glossy before and after photos and comments from existing patients, is your most powerful sales tool.
Litter these with images of your clinic, funny quotes and a few posts about you – and you’re onto a winner! Use the stories functions on Instagram to let people get to know you. It doesn’t matter what you talk about, talk about anything! Aim to post a new photo every day and do a few stories every day if you can. But don’t worry if this is too much, just do what you can. It’s worth looking at all the different tools and software out there which can help you plan and get organised. We use Planoly which is pretty good at helping to plan our social media and get organised for the week ahead and we use Impresso to help design our posts.
A note about Reels. It’s true that Instagram’s algorithm likes a reel and it is more likely to show a reel you’ve created than a static post, to other people. If you’re just starting out in aesthetics, we don’t believe focussing purely on reels is a priority. The goal on instagram is to build a load of followers. The more followers the better, the more engagement the better. But having thousands of followers isn’t the magic ingredient for success. There are easier ways to attract new patients! This one takes time. The goal for you is to show people who come looking for you, who you are and attract new followers along the way.
Potential patients may become aware of you through a number of ways, a Google search, word of mouth or via Glowday. They’ll come to your social media to take a peek through your shop window and see if they want to buy you. Therefore having a presence is more important than having nothing. Even if it’s not reels.
Remember too, while you are very interested in aesthetics and the nitty-gritty of treatments and skincare, your typical patient won’t be. Unless they happen to be a huge skincare enthusiast who spends all of their spare time trying/researching products or a die-hard fan of aesthetic treatments, they’re coming at this from a very top-level perspective - they want pithy, snappy, content. They are less likely to be interested in the difference between Botox brands preferring to see photos of people who have had Botox. They’re going to be less interested in the layers of the skin and more interested in knowing if you can help them get glowy skin. They’re generally here for the results, not the process.
Finally, nobody thinks they’re any good at social media, everyone wonders if it’s worth it and sometimes your time actually could be better spent on other marketing activities and business priorities. It’s a thing, yes, but it’s not everything.
Educate and share.
If you are keen to give it a whirl, use your page to educate people about different treatments – tackle the myths, break down the barriers. Explain how treatments work in ‘everyday’ language. Imagine you’re talking to a Granny and adapt your vocabulary (people switch off from lots of complicated medical jargon).
But try to scatter your content with snippets of your life and you. Your clients are human too, they cook dinner, clean the house, walk the dog (people love pet photos!) , take the kids to school, go on holidays, exercise… so talk about the things you do. We all love a peek inside other’s lives! Even if you’re highly private, you don’t actually have to share that much about your personal life to enable people to get to know you.
Mostly social media is a great way to engage with your patients and get to know them on a more personal level. It’s worth remembering that people can feel inferior and intimated by medical professionals, and by showing that you’re just like everyone else, it will help break down barriers. Showing that you’re friendly, approachable, ordinary and kind will benefit you.
Follow local influencers, comment on their page, offer them free treatments in return for them posting some photos and stories.
Use video where you can, learn how to make reels if you want to but don’t fret you’ll fail if you don’t, do IG lives with other practitioners or patients… basically fully embrace it all – you can’t use it enough!
Make sure you use hashtags in the photos you post to Instagram, so that new people may find you. There are lots of free ‘hashtag generators’ Saves you having to think of 30 different words. You can use the ‘analytics’ tool to see how many people saw your post because of a hashtag you used (although IG is playing down the importance of hashtags, people do use them to find things they’re looking for).
Try to take good quality photos, invest in a decent phone that has ‘portrait’ mode and the like. It makes such a difference. Have a look at software like Impresso and Spark which allows you ‘brand’ your images and make them look really profesh – but authenticity goes a long way and often the best photos that get the most engagement are the ones which haven’t been over-thought. That said, your social media reflects you and at first glance people will follow someone because they like the look of their feed – so do try and keep the overall aesthetics of your profile in mind.
TikTok
Not an easy one to master but if you manage it and can produce content that is shareable and likeable then you’re onto a winner. Have a look at some of the things big-name practitioners are doing there, from explaining Botox in 30 seconds, to showing a ‘day in the life of an injector’ via the medium of dance/music… It's fun and reaches a different audience. Again, it also helps to normalise the industry and show the fun side. What you do is celebratory and positive – it doesn’t have to be stuffy and clinical. Personality is important.
Facebook can be wonderful for engaging with your customers in a deeper more meaningful way. It allows for more discussion and dialogue and new patients should definitely be able to find you on there. You can create groups and use it to talk about new treatments and educate patients. You’ll probably find older clients use facebook more than instagram so definitely don’t discount it!
Traditional PR
Okay, so what you really want is a newspaper or local magazine to feature you. How does that happen?
Get to know the ‘big’ media
Buy all the national newspapers and magazines and go to the beauty/health pages. Get to know who writes about non-surgical cosmetic treatments. Write down their names. You can usually figure out their email addresses by following the convention of the publication (look at the ‘contact us’ page) it’s usually firstname.surname@thenewspaper.co.uk
Drop them an email, or if you’re feeling plucky, pick up the phone to them. Tell them about yourself, and your clinic (keep it brief) and let them know if they’re ever writing about fillers, botox, chemical peels…new treatments.. whatever it may be, you’d love the opportunity to give them a comment or a quote.
If you notice any new trends or a new procedure that’s gaining traction – drop them an email, tell them about it – let them know it’s going to be big and more and more people are requesting it (think Profhilo as an example – ‘move over Botox, there’s a new kid in town’.
Overall just be brave. Be bold. Be confident. The worse they will say is ‘no thank you’. That’s it. Nothing ventured, nothing gained!
Get to know the ‘little’ media
Do the same with your local newspaper and drop the beauty editor (if it has one) or news editor an email introducing yourself and as above what you do and where you do it.
Tell them about who your typical clients from the area are and the most popular treatments, what are the people in your town having!
Let them know you’re available for anything they’re writing about cosmetic treatments.
Think about if you have any interesting patients who have a good story to tell. Have you helped transform someone’s life? Have you treated someone with a medical condition that was negatively impacting them? Do you treat different generations from the same family? These are all human-interest stories that your local newspaper would love to know about.
Share your news. Perhaps you’ve won an award, are the first in your area to offer a new treatment, completed some amazing charity work ? These are all newsworthy and it’s worth telling your local media about them. Don’t worry about making it a ‘press release’, a simple email is fine!
Host events
Open up your clinic for an evening and invite local people in. Perhaps do a lip filler demo, or talk about skincare. Invite local bloggers, the newspaper and local businesses. Make your face known, make your business part of the community! Document it all on social media – content galore!
Stunts
If you have some money to invest in marketing, then eye-catching stunts can be an effective way to get your business noticed. Perhaps you can create a remarkable window display? Or cover your clinic with thousands of inflatable lips. Think about things that get people talking. You want the local Facebook community groups to say ‘Have you seen this?’. Could you hire a band to perform outside, create a mini-event, perform an injection in your window? How outrageous you are will very much depend on your personality and your brand, and what you want people to think about you. But taking a risk often works!
And finally…
One of the benefits of being part of GlowdayPRO is the collective power we have. With hundreds of clinics registered and amazing contacts in the media and a website visited daily by thousands of potential clients, Glowday will do a lot of the PR for you. We are frequently pitching to the national media and offering journalists comment and case studies from our ever-expanding community. We run practitioner spotlights (where we showcase practitioners and their work) and use our social media channels to feature ‘clinic of the week’ and interviews with the experts registered with us. Being part of GlowdayPRO is your first smart PR move!