Focus on your own game and your own unique selling points

Allocating your budget more efficiently

A huge mistake small businesses on a budget often make is trying to ‘keep up with the Jones’s.’ Know your financial limitations at any given time, and be aware that your marketing strategy needs to be different from that of the larger, more established clinic in your area – in order to get the best results.

If you don’t have the same amount of regular customers as the more established clinics, then you don’t have the same spend either. Our advice in this case would be to focus on your own game and your own unique selling points. You can do this by making the treatments you push different to your rival’s, rather than taking on the other clinic on a like for like basis.

It’s better to be an expert on a smaller number of treatments, than overextend yourself with a vast offering and fail to deliver a quality service because of it. In our experience, if you try to spread whatever marketing budget you’ve got over too many treatments, your budget is lower and you won’t reach the ideal number of potential clients on each platform to deliver a profitable cost per conversion.

If you’d like to become the expert in a particular treatment, have your website reflect that. You can do this through:

• Making the majority of your before and afters of your speciality treatment
• Heavily feature the reviews of your specialty treatment
• Have the slider on your homepage feature your speciality treatment
• Base more content around your speciality treatment
• Run a heavily target marketing campaign on this/these treatments

Using this strategy, you should have more featured content on your speciality treatment than your competitors. The result of this will naturally be that you will be trusted for this particular treatment. You will be seen as an expert in it. Once you have regular customers for this treatment, you’ll be able to promote and educate these clients on other treatments.

Top tips for planning your marketing costs more effectively

• Finding out the prices of the digital marketing platforms before choosing which treatments to advertise on them, and also how the digital marketing companies you work with charge for their fees, will help you to plan your costs more effectively.
• Track any digital marketing that you do to get an insight into what’s working and what isn’t. You need to be analysing the data in order to quickly reach the goal of being on the right platform, promoting the right treatments, and doing it for the best price.
• If you don’t have a huge budget, be careful with how some platforms charge for paid ads. In our own experience we often see the platform spending your allotted budget, but without you getting enquiries as a result. This doesn’t mean you need to up your per day spend, but simply allocate the budget more efficiently. Your marketing expert should advise you on this.

Managing your biggest budget costs

Although your biggest cost is likely to be what the platform charges, the other cost you have to bear in mind is the cost of your marketing agency. Marketing agencies work in different ways. Some will charge a percentage of what you’re spending. Some charge a flat fee. It’s important you understand how your fees are calculated before you go ahead with them.

If you’re on a budget, make sure that any digital marketing team you do decide to work with is measuring their success. Tracking results isn’t 100% accurate and can be fraught with technical issues, but it is a good strong indicator as to the demand out there for your treatments. Measuring results from as early as possible, will allow you to put the brakes on and change strategy when something’s not working. You may need to change platform, or change the treatment you’re advertising, without being tied into a long marketing contract.

Top tips for saving money

Being on a smaller budget doesn’t necessarily put you at a huge disadvantage. It just means you need to spend more time and be more creative in how you reach new clients. Doing so will enable you to avoid making more mistakes and save you from making potential mistakes.

• In order to compete with more established, larger, wealthier clinics in the same location as you, try and position yourself as the expert in fewer treatments. It’s better to be well known for one or two treatments.
• There are a number of things that clinics can do to separate themselves out from the crowd and still succeed in getting results from their marketing efforts. It just means they need to be a little bit more creative. Investing more of your own time in certain areas, while still employing the help of a marketing expert, can help you achieve great results.
• Work closely with your marketing expert to identify what skills they have, so they’re doing the expert tasks you need them to do, while you cover the rest.
• Email marketing is still respected as one of the most effective forms of reaching your clients. Creating your own content for this is actually more authentic and can result in a better number of new enquiries.
• Writing your own blog content is without doubt one of the hardest areas of digital marketing to do and if you’ve got the time and you’re on a budget. this can be a huge saving.
• The best organic social media content is authentic, personal, and personalized to reflect of the owner the team.