This month we’re reading about how to leverage competition, creating bingable Instagram stories, what e-commerce can teach us all about marketing, why providers should understand “subculture culture,” and why helpful context is key to helping your content resonate with aesthetic consumers.
Next to the competition
Seth’s Blog/Seth Godin
What’s better: having one hundred percent share of voice where your potential patients are scant, or being positioned among your competition where potential patients are plenty? In one of his recent bite-sized blog posts, marketing guru Seth Godin argues that businesses should embrace and leverage competition.
“Trade show booths work when they’re in close proximity to the other options a buyer has,” Godin wrote by way of example. “Building your trade show booth across town might insulate you from the other choices, but it does little to help establish where you belong and whether or not you’re a smart choice.”
Situating yourself among your competition can be a strategy for winning more visibility and attracting more consideration from your potential patients. Your job when leveraging the power of the marketplace is to stand out so that potential consumers put you on their short list.
How to Create Instagram Stories People Love to Watch
Social Media Examiner/Christian Karasiewicz
It’s 2019. Some social media influencers wield as much influence as long-established publications, some brands have become powerhouse publishers, and some large enterprises are exploring street-level marketing strategies for fresh ideas to promote themselves.
The rules of marketing and branding have been turned on their head, and in the midst of these shifts sit consumers who are exposed to lots and lots of advertising from every angle as a result. Your potential patients are among them, and they are at once inundated with choice and more empowered than ever to turn down the volume on your marketing.
It turns out that the trick to standing out in this marketing ecosystem is pretty simple: avoid the box-checking habit of undertaking marketing activities for the sake of having a presence, and instead create content that adds value and that consumers want to read or watch. Social Media Examiner brought this principle to Instagram Stories, providing six tactics you can apply to creating content for aesthetics consumers that they’ll not only watch, but actively seek out.
Content may be king, but context is queen
Marketing Land/Peter Minnium
While creating interesting and quality content is key for your practice to stand out on marketing and discovery platforms, our current moment of “peak content,” when content is overabundant for consumers, additionally calls for meaningful and quality context.
“Today’s media landscape has turned the old saying ‘beggars can’t be choosers’ on its head and made the converse true – choosers have become beggars, pleading for an easier way to make decisions,” writes Marketing Land’s Peter Minnium.
Making it easy for people to make sense of the content you offer is key, Minnium advises. And we contend that this principle is relevant not just to engagement online, but to consumers’ choice of whether to inquire or book with your practice. It’s not enough for content about your practice to simply be available. Consumers also need to understand context: what the information you provide about your practice telegraphs about the experience they might have with you as a treatment provider. A lot of our product work at RealSelf this year will deal with creating the context to make choices easier for consumers. When that happens, both consumers and providers will win.
Four Things Marketers Should Learn From E-Commerce
Marketing Profs/Inga Romanoff
How to Communicate With the Most Tech-Savvy Generation YetRetail e-commerce is at the tip of the spear in terms of online experience innovation and expectations setting, says Inga Romanoff of Marketing Profs. Your potential patients’ experiences buying things online are shaping their expectations for all of their online interactions, including with your practice.
E-commerce is decidedly mainstream, with Millennials now making the majority of their purchases online. To understand the types of online experiences your consumers will expect from you in the near future, look to the features and amenities that mark their e-commerce experiences right now. “Today, consumers have become accustomed to the type of familiar, easy, and frictionless engagements that e-commerce has come to stand for. Marketers can do well to learn from e-commerce to find ways to provide better service experiences.” (Emphasis added.)
How to Communicate With the Most Tech-Savvy Generation Yet
Marketing Pros/Mark Bradley
Creating an effective longer term marketing strategy for your practice means bracing to serve your consumers to come. While we don’t recommend a time-wasting preoccupation with the habits and expectations of potential consumers who are only marginally old enough to seek your services, we do recommend that you stay mindful and pay attention so that sea changes don’t catch you off guard years from now.
Take Generation Z, for instance. According to Mark Bradley, this generation’s buying habits are markedly different from the generations that preceded them, and will require that you think differently about how to market to them—including rethinking marketing concepts we tout today for your most promising current customers.
One trend you should be aware of for this generation is “subculture culture,” the tendency of Generation Z to be captured by, and identify with, subcultures as part of their personal identities, and buy into brands and services that reflect those subcultures back to them. “Not that there isn’t any fluidity, however,” Bradley cautions. “They can easily move from geek to emo and back again. As a result, there are nodes of subcultures. And if you’re able to tap into them, Gen Z members are much more likely to pay attention to you.” How might subcultures shape this up-and-coming generation’s consideration of aesthetic procedures?
