Medspa Marketing Ideas and Strategies

As medspas become more popular and the landscape becomes more competitive, marketing your medspa becomes more important – and more difficult. Now more than ever, a strong marketing plan is the best way to separate yourself from the pack and grow your customer base.

To help you build a plan that works for your business, our marketing experts have outlined eight of the best medspa marketing ideas and strategies based on our experience. In the following article, we go over what these practices are, how they work, and how they can benefit your business.

Effective Ideas and Strategies for Marketing Your Medspa

Some marketing tactics will work better for some medspa businesses than others. Every medspa has unique features and so does every market they operate in. However, the marketing ideas and strategies outlined below have shown to yield consistently positive results for a wide range of our medspa clients and are an excellent place to start when building your plan.

1. Create a Referral Program

Referral programs are a tried-and-true way to generate new business and keep current customers. A happy customer that recommends your business to friends and family is your best advertisement because of how much people trust personal recommendations. You can use a referral program to incentivize those referrals.

These work in two ways. Prospective customers get the recommendation of someone they trust for a medspa, making them more likely to choose your business. Current customers get a reward that can only be used on a return visit and that deepens their relationship with your medspa.

You can do this the old-school way by simply offering a discount when people mention the referrer when booking their service or when they pay. Another method is to leave space for a referrer name on your intake forms. But there are also online options that allow people to use a referral code when booking their service that customers and administrative staff typically find much easier to use.

2. Build a Social Media Following

Social media is a necessity for businesses these days. And while you can get by with a minimal account that doesn’t post much and serves mainly to “be there” when customers look around the internet, an active social media presence with a large following is one of the best tools available. It gives people an easy way to share your business, allows you to engage with potential customers, and offers the chance to build and define your brand on your terms.

When it comes to building a following on social media, the two main keys are posting engaging, shareable content and posting it frequently. Engaging content can take many forms. For medspa businesses, it could be posting memes about spa treatments and related topics. It could also be informational posts about at-home self-care. If you have very talented people that work for your business or that you can hire, it could be as involved as funny video skits. It could be a combination of any of these and other types of content.

Whatever content you decide to run with, most social media platforms reward you for posting more frequently (up to a point) by making it more likely that people will see your content. For this reason, it’s a good idea to come up with a content plan to make sure you always have something to post at least once every few days.

3. Collaborate With Other Businesses

Working with other businesses that you aren’t competing with opens many opportunities to win new customers. One easy way to do this is to swap ads in waiting areas. Another way to do it is to feature each other on your social media accounts. You can also work together to offer discounts to each other’s business.

The key is to first identify businesses that have a similar customer base. For a medspa, this could mean hair salons, gyms, or local hotels, among others. This allows you to target people who are most likely to use your business and to associate your brand with a brand people have already chosen. When people have a positive experience with your partner business, they are likely to associate that positive impression with your medspa and take it as a recommendation.

4. Leverage Content Marketing

Content marketing is a favorite tool of marketing professionals around the world, both because it works and because it accomplishes several goals at once. In addition to the primary goal of bringing in search engine results page traffic, blogs and other content provide a branding opportunity, allow a company to position itself as an authority on the topic, and add to the search engine optimization (SEO) value of the site overall.

By targeting relevant keywords, a content marketing professional can help your site appear at or near the top of the search engine results page. This greatly increases the likelihood that searchers click on a link and go to your site. Each blog post represents an opportunity to win search traffic for the keywords you target.

The more quality content you publish on your site, the more opportunities you have to win traffic and, as a result, customers. Blogs have the added bonus of making your business look knowledgeable and trustworthy, increasing the likelihood that people choose your medspa over a competitor.

5. Encourage Positive Online Reviews

Review scores on Google and other sites like Yelp are one of the main ways people evaluate a business. In many cases, they are the only thing people look at. That means that, for better or worse, your score on these sites is critical to winning new business.

You can’t pay for reviews or offer incentives for them. However, there are other ways to encourage people to leave positive reviews for your medspa. One way is to send a follow-up email after a treatment to ask about the service and provide a link to leave a review. You can also post a QR code in several places around your businesses that takes people to a review page. It’s also not a bad idea to ask your desk staff to mention the importance of online reviews to people who had a positive experience and how much a positive rating can help your business.

6. Optimize Your Website

The term SEO tends to get misused, often by marketers who have something to gain from making the practice seem more complex and difficult to understand than it really is. In reality, SEO is simply the practice of making your website more likely to rank highly on search engine results by providing clear, high-quality content and organizing it in a logical way that makes it easily accessible.

There are very technical elements to SEO that are probably best left up to professionals, but there are some simple practices that can greatly improve your site’s performance on Google and other search engines. For example, using headers in blog posts to break up content and describe the next section is a powerful form of SEO. So is using images that strike an ideal balance of quality and file size to ensure a page load quickly.

SEO is not an on/off switch, it is a matter of how well your site and content are optimized for the internet. Hiring a professional to revamp your site and optimize it will likely yield very positive results, but even small incremental improvements can help your site be more visible to people looking for a medspa.

7. Build a Targeted Ad Campaign

One of the biggest advantages of digital marketing is how precisely it allows you to target advertisements. Thanks to tracking technology and, more recently, location-based services, you can now pinpoint exactly the people you want to deliver pay-per-click (PPC) ads to and when and where you want them to receive them.

You can target your ideal customer with demographic information such as age, sex, and income. Another way to target people is through their hobbies and interest that their online activity reveals about them, such as accounts they follow on social media and their search history. You can also target people based on location with what is known as geofencing. This allows you to serve ads to people when they are in a specific location, such as a complimentary business like a gym or even a competing medspa.

8. Offer Attractive Promotions

Promotions such as discounts and giveaways are another old-school marketing technique that has withstood the shift to digital marketing. That is in part because a discount coupon or other incentive gives people a reason to choose your business over another. It also helps people feel better about spending money on “luxury” services like a medspa because it provides an opportunity to get a service they want at a lower price.

The most common type of promotion is a discount for first-time customers. This is a proven incentive that has been a standard in many industries for a reason. However, you can also get creative and use promotions that help you stand out. You may consider giving away branded gifts such as trial-size lotions or soap with your logo on them to first timers. Another option is including a free bonus service for new customers instead of a discount.

9. Host a Contest

Contests and giveaways are an excellent way to generate interest in your business. They can create excitement and position your medspa as fun and engaging. In the age of social media, they’re even easier to conduct and are a good way to gain followers through tags and shares.

You can, for example, post a contest to your Instagram account where you offer a pair of therapy sessions for a randomly selected person who tags a friend in the comments. This encourages people to tag friends who may not yet follow your page to check it out by sending a notification to their phone.

10. Add Online Booking and Billing

Allowing customers to book appointments and pay bills online is a relatively easy way to improve the customer experience for your medspa. While that may not immediately seem like a marketing tactic, it can greatly improve people’s perception of your business and make them more likely to choose you over a competitor who doesn’t offer these services.

More and more people prefer not to pick up the phone and call a business if they have the option to do everything online. Hosting these services online also means people can book appointments and pay bills 24/7.

Another benefit of adding online booking and billing is reducing two of the less-pleasant interactions between customers and a business and moving them online. This frees up your staff to focus on building relationships with customers through friendly, human conversations.

Mespa Marketing Strategies and Ideas: Conclusion

By employing effective marketing strategies and ideas for your medspa, you can stand out from competing spas and grow a reliable customer base. There are many methods for marketing your medspa, but the ones listed above have proven to be effective time and time again for our experts and their clients.