When deciding which treatments to advertise, follow this golden rule…
If you are a hair salon, this is going to (hopefully) be valuable.
If you offer beauty and aesthetic treatments, this blog could be VERY valuable, as the learnings we offer in this blog use examples in working directly with skin clinics.
We are working with more and more skin clinics these days. Some campaigns run slowly, some get good results, some we knock out of the park.
Here's one big thing we’ve learned when running ads for aesthetic and advanced skincare treatments, to give you the best chance of knocking it out of the park.
Advertise the treatments on your menu that are the most popular on the market right now.
I know this sounds like stupidly-simple advice, but truthfully are you doing this?
Don’t mistake this for the treatments that you like providing the most, or that get the best results, or that you make the most money from.
Nope, the most popular treatments that people are talking about right now.
HydraFacial is more than just a popular treatment right now. It’s a buzz word. Due to a tonne of clever marketing and hype, it’s the in thing in beauty right now.
“HydraFacial” is a trade-marked brand name that cannot be copied of course. But hydro facials, the treatment category that “HydraFacial” probably belongs in, are all also very popular because of this.
And most of the market doesn’t seem to know the difference.
Where am I going with this? People who are interested in HydraFacial’s book a hydro facial that doesn’t even use that brand name and happily receive the treatment none-the-wiser.
So if you have a hydro facial of some form on your menu, use it.
Body sculpting is another in-treatment right now. 
The dramatic results people are seeing in skin tightening and fat removal have created a buzz around treatments like body contouring and sculpting.
Case in point: We have just launched promotions for a clinic in Birmingham giving clients 50% off their first hydro facial or body sculpting treatment. Just one single SMS send to their client database and in 3 days they’ve secured 92 hydro facial bookings and 9 body sculpting bookings.
Then there’s our York based client who also ran a 50% off first body-sculpting treatment promotion with further upsell specials on courses. They took £8,000 new revenue in 4 weeks.
As any beauty practitioner knows, the upselling factor for these treatments is high; many of these clients will book further treatments after seeing results. Hence the big first-visit discount is worth it.
Moral of the story: swim with the tide, not against it.
We speak to a lot of clinic owners who want us to promote high-end, niche treatments that only a very small percentage of the skincare market wants.
I can see why you want to promote those things that need exposure, but this is flawed thinking. No advertising campaign or big offer is going to get people booking a treatment if they are not already interested in it. Or it’s at least on their radar as a potential skin problem solver.
Give people what they want. Don’t try to create demand, channel it.
Ask yourself, what are potential clients searching for the most right now? And whatever’s top of your list, that’s what you should be promoting, even if it’s currently winning 50%+ of your bookings already whilst other machines are sat doing nothing.
This is especially true when advertising on social media.
Meta will spray your ads on hundreds of newsfeeds each day. Your chances of running a profitable, client-winning campaign increase dramatically when you’re promoting an offer on treatments that are in.
You’re going to catch the attention of a much higher percentage of your target audience that way.
Now for the skin clinic or beauty salon owner reading this, this may be a frustrating read. You have invested in machines that cost a lot, the results of these treatments are incredible, yet it only gets a handful of bookings each month.
I get it. You want more clients booking this.
But we’ve found the best strategy is to promote your most popular treatments at that moment in time, maximise the number of people coming thru the door and then during your skincare consultation you can expose them to these more niche treatments based on their needs.
Go where the money is fellow business owner.
......Like moths to a flame.....
Scott Dance
Founder
April 2023