What Makes Marketing for Cosmetic Surgery Different from Plastic Surgery?

Summary: Cosmetic surgery practices looking for digital marketing partners need to find agencies that:

• Have specialized industry knowledge
• An ability to cultivate an audience of repeat customers with social media and email marketing
• Have the ability to find knowledge gaps in the community and create engaging content that educates potential customers

Blog: 

You wouldn’t go to a plastic surgeon for a facelift or another procedure that a cosmetic surgeon could do better. So why would you go to a marketing agency that specializes in serving plastic surgeons when you have a cosmetic surgery practice?

You may be asking yourself, “Does it really make a difference?” and to that we say, “Absolutely.” 

In this blog, we’ll explore some of the reasons your cosmetic surgery practice needs a marketing team behind it that specializes in your unique and very specific industry.

Table of Contents:

• Marketing for Cosmetic Surgery Requires Specialized Industry Knowledge

• Marketing to a different audience

• Different Approaches to How Cosmetic Surgery Practices Build a Prospect Base

• Different Skill Sets Require Different Marketing Approaches

Marketing for Cosmetic Surgery Requires Specialized Industry Knowledge

Cosmetic surgery is generally thought of as a subset of plastic surgery, but this does an incredible disservice to the amount of specialized knowledge cosmetic surgeons have when it comes to the procedures they perform. 

When looking for a digital marketing agency, your practice deserves a partner that respects your strengths and has experience promoting them to audiences that are valuable to you.

Our Sales Consulting Strategist, Ken Field, here at Cosmetic Surgery Marketers, was formerly the Chief Operations Officer of LifeStyle Lift, and helped it expand to 85 offices across the country and earn over $200 million in sales. 

If you’re looking for a digital marketing agency of any kind, make sure they have results that are specific to your niche. If they don’t even know there is a difference between plastic surgery and cosmetic surgery, consider that a huge red flag. 

Cosmetic Surgeons Actually Serve a Very Different Audience than Plastic Surgeons

One of the greatest misconceptions about plastic surgery and cosmetic surgery is that they both serve the exact same audience. 

While in general, women are the most likely to seek a plastic or cosmetic procedure, those women are often at very different stages of their lives, and a digital marketer needs to understand how to appeal to the right target at the right time. 

Women seeking cosmetic surgery procedures tend to trend slightly older, and the reasons they go to see cosmetic surgeons are very different from those of people seeking plastic surgery. Cosmetic procedures are generally elective, so the mindset that should guide marketing must be very different. 

People looking for cosmetic surgery do it to enhance their lives. Not generally because they need the procedure to fulfill a health need. So the most important message marketing needs to send is that a procedure is safe, affordable and absolutely will enhance a patient’s life. In other words, a prospect will often need to be convinced to follow through with a procedure. 

For agencies that market plastic surgery, the job is much easier. Many people looking for plastic surgery are doing so because they have sustained serious damage to their face, are suffering breathing issues from an injured nose or have suffered some kind of catastrophic damage to their body. For them, marketing can sometimes boil down to just making sure people are aware that their clients exist. 

For an agency like ours, we need to show that not only do you exist but you have the ability to make people’s lives drastically better.

Different Approaches to How Cosmetic Surgery Practices Build a Prospect Base

One of the other key differences between marketing for plastic surgeons and cosmetic surgeons is how each builds a patient base. 

For cosmetic surgery practices, there is actually more of an opportunity to have repeat customers. That’s why cultivating a relationship with clients is so much more important. A Botox appointment today could turn into a breast lift tomorrow, and paving the road for that relationship is essential for building a base of repeat customers. On the other hand, a person seeking reconstruction for their nose will likely see a plastic surgeon one time ever in their life.

A digital marketing agency that specializes in serving cosmetic practices can help you build a funnel of repeat customers effectively with social media and email. 

With regards to social media, the Aesthetic Surgery Journal claims 48.5% of respondents to a survey they distributed reported social media as influencing their decision to move forward with a cosmetic procedure. 

You can motivate prospects who are on the fence about calling your practice to pick up the phone by sharing the results your practice produces for patients. An agency can help you by bringing a professional photography setup to your practice, taking pictures and videos that can help practices grow massively through websites like Facebook, TikTok and Instagram. 

Having an email marketing process setup is important as well for keeping in contact with prospects with more targeted messaging, whereas social media is much more general. A marketing agency can help you craft email funnels that progressively turn interest into booked procedures. 

For example, if a patient came in for a facelift but mentioned offhand that they were considering a breast lift as well, they could be placed in a drip campaign focused on informing them about breast lift procedures, nurturing them over time to become a repeat customer one day.

Different Skill Sets Require Different Marketing Approaches

As competition for paid advertising keywords and spots in Google search results grows, it’s vital for cosmetic surgery practices to partner with agencies that have a deep understanding of their skills, which translates into more efficient targeting of search keywords.

In the context of search, the big opportunities right now lie in targeting query fan outs, which are the searches that large language models carry out to gain a better idea of the context around a user’s search, and targeting patient intent with highly specific landing pages built to drive conversion.

With respect to Google and Meta advertising, the approach to keyword and location targeting still requires a great deal of care. There are a lot of opportunities that exist for cosmetic practices to take patients away from plastic surgeons. 

Many potential patients for your practice do not understand the difference between cosmetic surgery and plastic surgery, and that certain procedures they are interested in could be more affordable or higher quality if they go to a cosmetic surgery practice. Landing pages for ads need to be as strong at educating as they are at generating conversions in order to find success.

Need help developing your search strategy, social media portfolio or even your sales consulting process? We can help.

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