Starting a medical aesthetics practice is one thing, but growing it consistently? That’s where most practice owners hit a wall. You’ve invested hundreds of thousands in equipment, training, and staff, yet your appointment book has more gaps than you’d like to admit. Sound familiar?
The problem isn’t your clinical skills or your beautiful facility. The issue is treating marketing like a random collection of tasks instead of a strategic system. Today, we’re breaking down the key marketing strategies that transform struggling practices into thriving businesses, and we’re keeping it plain and simple while tying everything back to ROI.
Why Strategy Always Beats Tactics
Before diving into the strategies, let’s address the elephant in the room. Most aesthetic practices are making the same costly mistakes: randomly posting on social media, hitting that “boost post” button hoping for miracles, and copying competitors instead of developing their unique voice.
Here’s the brutal truth: showing your content to “as many people as possible” isn’t going to bring you clients. Those random $10, $20, or $50 boosts? They’re just feeding the algorithm without any strategic purpose. And copying your competitors? You’re always going to be one step behind instead of leading your market.
Let’s be real – if you’re not the one out there showing off who you are, you won’t grow. You are your unique value proposition. Yes, it can take time to get comfortable being who you are on camera, and even getting to the stage of going on camera can be a huge piece. I’m with you. I was there. I know it’s not easy.
Marketing isn’t about posting pretty pictures and hoping for the best. It’s a system that turns visibility into appointments.
The Three Pillars of Marketing for Your Practice
Think of your marketing as having three key pillars. Each pillar serves a specific purpose in your growth strategy:
Pillar 1: Attract – We need to attract people to our practice. We want to create visibility, drive traffic and awareness to our practice. People need to be aware that you exist outside of referral traffic. Yes, referral traffic is great, but you cannot scale referral traffic.
Pillar 2: Convert – We have the traffic, we are attracting people, how do we convert them? How are we going to nurture our prospects and sell to them? I’m not talking about just selling to them when they come in for the consultation. I’m talking about selling to them with marketing automations and by just letting people sell to themselves and buy online.
Pillar 3: Retain – This is key because you can see the ads everywhere – “we’ll get you 20 new clients this month and you don’t pay us if we don’t get you to 20 clients.” Sounds amazing, but then a lot of the time you’re on the hamster wheel because those 20 people come in for a treatment and they’re just onto the next offer. Yes, they’re getting you 20 patients coming in, but they come in, they go and you’re eating the cost. When those things sound too good to be true, they generally are. That’s why we need retention to increase our lifetime value.
Marketing isn’t just about posting, it’s a system that turns visibility into appointments.
Social Media Strategy for Growth – Why Posting Isn’t a Strategy
This is something that irks me, and it’s why I actually created the Marketing Vault where you get content with a purpose and not just posting when you want what you want with no purpose. A lot of people say, “I want to grow” and they know they can grow on social media, but you have people who don’t want to get on camera. They don’t know what to post. They post something just to post something. They take a random Canva template and they’re just going to add it on. They post very sales-like content.
When you’re posting something just to post something, a lot of the time I’ll say, I’d rather post nothing than post something that’s crap. And that’s the reality of it. Posting without a whole process to it for what the outcome is going to be is just going to be post and pray. You’re never going to post and get the outcome that you want.
What to Post Instead – Education is Your Biggest Conversion Tool
You need to post content that’s going to educate your audience. Education is the biggest conversion post you will ever see. When people start to learn – how many people walk into your practice now and know more? If you were in practice 10 years ago, what is the difference of people walking into your practice now compared to 10 years ago?
The lack of education you have to do to somebody at a consultation is so minute compared to what it used to be because people are educating themselves in advance. If you are the one educating them, what’s gonna happen to the conversion rate of your consultations? They’re going to go through the roof because you’ve done all the hard work already. People know, “Hey, this is what I need. I trust this person. This is the practitioner for me. I’ve looked at their social media, website, all that good stuff, and this is what I want.”
You’re building your own authority and trust at the same time. But it all comes down to, yes, you have to put yourself out there and show off your personality, and it takes practice.
The Hook That Makes or Breaks Your Content
What I see as the biggest mistake that people make – they actually might have a good video, but they start off with, “Hi, I’m Dr. Jones and I am a board certified…” or “I’m a whatever you happen to be,” and people have swiped on by. If you have the best content after that, you’re going to lose out.
The most important part of a video to go viral or a video just to get going is the first three seconds. If your first three seconds is you introducing yourself, nobody has seen any of the rest of the video. If you go into Instagram or TikTok and look at those retention videos, you’re never going to see – you look at TikTok, two seconds. Two seconds is the most that people have seen and then they moved on.
Make sure you have a good hook because if you don’t have a good hook, whatever else you’ve done in that video is not going to make a blind bit of difference.
Why Short-Form Video is Key to Building Trust
Short-form video is key to building trust. Yes, you can use content like carousels to do the same content, but it’s not going to convert as much as showing off and showing up and being yourself. Make sure you have your video content, and don’t pass it off to a team member. Yes, let’s get the team member involved, but if you don’t have yourself on video, what do you think is going to happen? You are not gonna get the results of being on video. While you still might do okay-ish, you’re never going to see the true potential of actually showing up on video.
The Power of Humor in Aesthetic Marketing
I love a good meme and humor. Look at Dr. Miami in this instance – that man’s TikTok (I don’t actually follow him on Instagram, but his TikTok) is all fun and humor. When he goes live on TikTok, the amount of people looking for consultations and to work with him. He very rarely, I’d say twice a month, he might do, “Oh, by the way, I am an actual plastic surgeon and here’s a before and after.” It doesn’t even come into the mix.
Having humor in there is definitely something you need to boost engagement. Generally speaking, say like the couple meme, so everybody was posting, hopping on the bandwagon for the couple meme. Your reach went up in that post. And guess what happens? The post after that is naturally going to have a higher reach because your post performed really well before it.
There definitely is room for humor. If you don’t think there’s room for humor, just test it out. But you have to make sure you actually got a good post and not just posting something that is kind of funny, but not really funny, and you’d have to know you to get the joke.
The Goals of Your Social Media Strategy
While we’re posting our content and getting engagement (it is a good metric for our engagement), we want to have our high performing posts so we can use them in ads. We want to increase our bookings that come through our DMs, and we want to improve our search. You have to remember, all these social media channels are search engines. People will look on social media for search before they will go to your website.
Social media is key for conversion. You’ve got to do social media, can’t skip it. You already know because it’s so common in the industry. Everybody knows you need to do social media for growth, and I’ve seen others do it with great success.
If you want help with this, you can sign up for the Marketing Vault membership where you get 50 pieces of content. You have enough to post every day, and there’s a video hook guide in there that will help you do this because nothing’s worse than sitting there thinking “What do I need to post? What do I need to do? What do I need to say?” If you want to post with a purpose and actually post content that generates engagement and conversion, you can go to theaestheticsjunkie.com/vault
Email Marketing – The Highest ROI Channel You’re Probably Ignoring
I am going to beat the drum for email marketing till I am blue in the face. This is the highest ROI channel. Every dollar you put in, you get $42 out. Would you take that? Yes, I would take that all day. No matter what level you are at, you need to have this in place. Especially if you’re one that wears all the hats. Wearing all the hats is so super stressful, it’s overwhelming. Email does the marketing for you when you cannot.
The Power of Email – Your Automated Salesperson
You’ve got two key pieces to email marketing. One, it’s going to nurture leads and prospects, and two, it’s gonna reactivate old clients. The bonus of all of this is it’s your salesperson. If you don’t have online bookings on your website, it’s not going to be as effective to be your online salesperson without having to have somebody on the other end of the phone or adding in an extra step that is friction to the process.
Key piece: we want to nurture and we want to reactivate people. Every flow a clinic should have – these are the basics that you should just have in your practice. No matter whether you’re bootstrapping and you’re starting, or you’re a million dollar practice, you need to have these.
Essential Email Flows Every Practice Needs
Welcome Nurture Sequence: If you get somebody’s email, you need to have an automation that kicks off and says, “Hey, welcome to XYZ practice. My name is this,” and you tell them all about your practice. It’s a nice welcome sequence that nurtures them towards making a booking, a consultation upon entry into your database. This could be a skincare guide for somebody who just fills out a form wanting to know more information. It’s how somebody would get into your world.
You want to segment them. If you’re not segmenting them to say, “Okay, what’s your biggest concern?” or even just your age range, you’re not gonna be able to market to them the way you want to. Say your practice offers multiple services, or you have a core key set of services, you cannot talk to everybody in the same way. If you’re talking to everybody the same way, it’s not going to be effective.
If I’m getting emails that are talking about “I’m in my sixties and I need this type of facelift” or “we’re talking about mommy makeovers,” that’s not gonna be relevant to me. If you’re sending me emails around this stuff, you’re gonna end up eventually in my spam folder because I’m not engaging with the content, and then you’re only hurting yourself.
Consultation Follow Up: People may or may not book in at the consultation, but even if they do, you can have two versions of the consultation follow up. You can have one that’s nurturing them to book and the other that’s thanking them for coming and you’re so excited to see them and you’re thrilled that they’re now a client or patient of yours.
Monthly Promotional Email: This is just like a broadcast email that you’re going to send out, letting people know of your special offers, what treatments you have going on, and any seasonal information that will tie in to it.
Reactivate Old Clients: If you haven’t seen clients in so long, you’re going to send them a certain type of campaign that nurtures them to come back into your world.
Why Email is Your Secret Weapon
I know it sounds daunting. It is daunting. Things are getting so much easier now that we have AI. We need to make sure we’re not sending out full-on AI emails. But the difference in using AI – before you would’ve had to hire somebody to do all your copywriting for you, go spend thousands of dollars, and still end up with a system that probably doesn’t speak and talk like you.
Every email that you send is a chance to turn your list into booked appointments without spending any more money on ads or any more money on trying to attract the client. You already have them in your database, and this is the difference. When you get people into your world, you’re going to be able to consistently sell to them. When I say selling, I don’t mean anything that’s salesy. It’s the opportunity to help them and get their appointment booked.
Remember, that’s the whole reason why you’re here, is to actually help people. And when you’re helping people, you’re not selling to people.
Paid Traffic That Doesn’t Waste Your Money
This is for all levels and it’s not easy to come and do all these things. I’m totally aware of that, but it is something that’s necessary. If you’re a beginner, Instagram (TikTok, well, not as much TikTok, but Instagram and Facebook) are absolutely pay to play. It’s very, very hard to grow an account from scratch without putting any money into it. And that’s just the reality of where we are.
You can pay like $4 a day. That’s enough to get you going. This is when we’re gonna turn our organic traffic into growth. So we’re taking the content that already is performing on our feeds and putting some money behind it with a purpose. What I’m talking about here is like $4 a day, and you’re going to do retargeting ads with that money.
Retargeting – Following Your Warm Audience
This is not boosting, this is using Facebook’s or Meta ads – Ads Manager to do this, and we’re just following around people who already are aware of you. People who visited your Instagram page, people who visited your Facebook page, people who have visited your website, people who have sent you DMs, people who watched your videos.
We are just following those people around, so you are boosting how much they’re going to see you in their feed, but the content is so organic and it doesn’t smell like an ad. When it doesn’t smell like an ad, and we have already picked our top performers, it’s going to perform like an organic post, and we’re not going to fall into the trap of boosting our post.
We’re creating our content, we know and can identify the content that has performed well, and then we turn it into an ad. Note to self: you cannot turn an ad that is a before and after. If you’ve got this great post about before and after, that’s never going to be an ad because that’s against terms of service when it comes to advertising.
You’re going to be able to improve your awareness and your attraction model by using the content that you’re already creating.
Advanced Paid Strategy for Growing Practices
Obviously this is just for beginner to intermediate. Advanced people will already be retargeting their prospects and using the ads for going out to bring in new customers. When you are going to bring in new customers, like if you listen to the last episode with Dr. Johnny Franco, we went through this a lot – using landing pages, using paid traffic to bring in new prospects.
When we get to that stage, we’re measuring how much did the lead cost, how much did the booking cost? What are our conversion rates? If your ads aren’t converting, it’s not always your ads. It could be your landing page. It could be your offer. It could be where you’re sending them to. There’s a multitude of things why your offer isn’t working.
If it performed well organically, the chances are if it doesn’t perform well, it could be any of those things, but it could also be your measurement. Are we actually measuring? Do we have a way to measure what we are doing?
Stop Guessing – The Measurement That Actually Matters
If you’re guessing what is working, you’re probably missing the biggest thing of what is working. You need to start measuring, you need to start measuring your website conversion rate. What do I mean by this? How many people visit your website to actually book or to call or to fill in a form? How many people viewed your contact us page and actually contacted you?
You need to know all those numbers so you can do more. Then you need to be able to look at, okay, which traffic source is bringing me the most conversions? Yes, this might sound overwhelming. You can look at somebody who can help you with Google Analytics to help get this in place. But you need to make sure you know all these details just on the website, even if you don’t have online booking.
The next step from there is looking at our leads. What is a lead to consult conversion rate or our lead to booking, depending on the system. If you’re a plastic surgeon, you’re gonna be lead to consult. If you’re a med spa, it could be lead to booking, depending on the levels of what you do – you know best for your practice. But either way, you should have both of those conversion rates. How many leads did I need to get to get a consultation booked? And how many leads did I get to in order to get a booking booked? What is that conversion rate?
Then obviously when you’ve got your consultation, the consultation to treatment conversion rate. If you’ve got paid consultations or you’ve got free consultations, you will need to look at them differently. But you need to look at, okay, what is the conversion rate here?
The big one, which is the backbone of the practice, is the rebook rate and the lifetime value. How to ensure your lifetime value and people are rebooking. If you’re not tracking it, you’re just saying to yourself, “Oh, I haven’t seen such and such in a while,” or “Haven’t seen this,” or “Why does nobody come back?” That kind of stuff. If you don’t look at your rebooking rate or your lifetime value, you’re never going to find out the answer.
Yes, I know you might use Google Analytics for the website. It definitely is key to know, but the rest can all be done on a spreadsheet. You do not need fancy tools. You have ChatGPT, you have Google Analytics, you have the pixels and the basic CRM or spreadsheet will do the trick for you.
Where to Focus Based on Your Practice Stage
If you’re new or early stage, you want to be focusing on organic content, retargeting and email. If you’re a growing clinic, you want to layer in the paid traffic, look at people for cold traffic (so we’re not just retargeting, we’re actually going out looking for them) and systems. You want email flows and funnels.
If you’re an established clinic, you want to make sure you’re scaling with an omnichannel strategy approach and optimization so you can do stuff essentially while you sleep and everything is working and you’re doing everything based on data.
You don’t need to do everything. You just need a strategy that works for you where you’re at. We’re going to dive into organic social media and how you can turn followers into paying clients next week, and we’ll dive into all the different aspects. I just wanted to come today with a high level approach of the key pieces that are needed for every practice, no matter what stage you are at.
Take Action: Your Next Steps
You don’t need to implement everything at once. Choose the strategy that makes the most sense for your current situation and master it before moving on. However, remember that all three pillars work together – neglecting any one of them creates gaps in your growth strategy.
If you want help and guidance, go ahead and check out theaestheticsjunkie.com/vault, and you will get guidance that will help you get a system in place so then you can go and scale it and possibly hire yourself a social media manager because you’re doing it so well.
The aesthetic industry is competitive, but practices that implement systematic marketing consistently outperform those that rely on random tactics or word-of-mouth alone. Your clinical skills got you into this business, but your marketing skills will determine how far you go.
Start with one strategy, measure your results, and build from there. Your future self (and your bank account) will thank you for taking a strategic approach to practice growth instead of hoping the next post goes viral.
