[Plastic Surgery Marketing Mistakes] If Your Phone Is NOT Ringing Off The Hook With Consultation Request and You Don’t Have A WAITING-LIST-PRACTICE

If you're losing too much business to your competitors, if you get too many tire-kickers in your office, if you don't enjoy selling, or if you simply want more, then it will definitely pay to read this post.

Fixing just a few of these mistakes will turn a 6 figure practice into a 7 figure practice.

Fixing ALL of these will turn any practice into a multiple 8 figure empire.

You will become the most sought-after plastic surgeon in your area.  High-end prospects who only want the best will literally line up at your doorstep, begging to become your patient, and happily pay premium prices for your expertise.

So read this post very carefully and more important, take massive actions if any of these apply to you.

Fix these mistakes as quickly as you can.

It can and will help you build a multiple 8-figure empire, pretty much on autopilot.

[Mistake #9]  Competing On Price Because You Have No Position

A cosmetic patient makes a buying decision very carefully. The final decision is based on many factors, but the only time price becomes a factor is when you’re viewed as a commodity.

A commodity is defined as: a good for which there is demand, but which is supplied without qualitative differentiation across a market. 

What is the consumer left with when you strip away all aspects of quality and service? She’s left with price. Price, therefore, is the only factor left on which she can make a buying decision. So, the problem is NOT your price — it’s that you’ve allowed the market to strip you of all qualitative aspects on which a consumer can plant her opinion and justify doing business with you.

Neurotoxins are a great example of a cosmetic commodity. These days, everyone from dentists to nurses inject toxins. The large corporations that produce them don’t care if YOU go out of business because the demand is there and they make the same amount of money if you charge $15 a unit or $5 a unit. Their margin is fixed. In fact, because of the rewards and discount programs they offer as incentives to do volume, they actually make more if you sell less and they spread the sales around multiple physicians. Their profit is higher and the demand in the market is no better or worse, no matter how many plastic surgeons and dermatologists go out of business.

The point being that if you want to charge a premium, you have to differentiate your product so it resonates with the consumer you want to attract. If you want problem patients that are just going to haggle you down on price, by all means, put out rock bottom prices. If you want high quality patients that pay a premium, find out what resonates with them and add it to your positioning.

Think about it. What kind of car do you drive? Was it the cheapest on the market? Why isn’t every car on the street the cheapest car available? People don’t buy on price unless they have no other discernible choice.

It’s your solitary duty to ensure that you’re not a commodity, and to give your buyer justification to pay you more for surgery or injectables.  Fixing this one mistake alone helped one of my client raise his fees so it completely paid for our work without doing ANY additional surgeries. It helped another client build an 8 month waiting list where people are paying $1,000 just so they can jump the line for surgery.

Positioning is the cornerstone to helping you attract premium patients.   This will allow you to focus on what you love and do best, treating patients and delivering on your promises.

That’s how you stop complaining about price and start cashing in. Be advantageously different and earn the business.

[Mistake #8]  Copying The Competition

If you do what everyone else is doing, you become just like everyone else, and at best, you become average!

People don’t want to do business with the “also-ran”. They want to do business with the leader. They want to feel special and they want to feel like they’re getting the best. When you copy, you’re not the best. You’re not an innovator and, to put it in layman's terms, you’re just not cool enough.

As a copycat, you’re doing nothing more than following. You’ll never be able to dominate and you risk being put out of business by the next innovation.

The iPhone didn’t gain large market share because it was just another phone; it lead the smartphone category because it changed things. It did something nothing else could do. It brought together your phone, internet, music and photos at a time when most phones could barely make a clear call. It empowered the user and gave her EXACTLY what she wanted, even though she didn’t know she wanted it up to that point. It focused on the psychology of the user and her needs and desires and wrapped them around a phone because that’s what people understood it as. It was a killer product marketed in the right way, in a way that it could be understood, accepted and, most importantly, desired.

If you want to lead, you have to innovate. However, while you should never lose sight of your competition, don't confuse having to watch them with having to copy them. When they zig, you need to zag. And zag strategically.  Which bring us to mistake #7…

[Mistake #7]  Confusing Tactics with Marketing.

By far, one of the biggest mistakes I see doctors make is confusing individual tactics with marketing. I see them jump on all kinds of bandwagons, from search engine optimization to print advertising and social media. They see someone doing something or they attend a seminar at a convention and think that the one tactic they heard about will make the difference to their practice.

If you think doing more of what doesn’t work will get you more business, you really needed to read the rest of my book. If what you’re doing now in terms of your positioning, your writing and your offer isn’t working, you can’t implement any of it and, reasonably, expect it to work.

I once knew a doctor who thought hiring consulting help cost too much and he could do the search engine optimization (SEO)  work himself. He carried a copy of SEO For Dummies, and he was definitely a dummy. As of the time of this writing, he has not been able to dominate online, though he’s had that book for a few years now.

The truth is, even if you can rank #1 on Google, but if you don’t have your conversion pieces taken care of, you’re STILL in trouble.  (I go into great details on the conversion pieces on my Book:  A Cut Above.  Just go to www.Thinkbasis.com/CutAbove/ for your free complimentary copy if you haven’t gotten yours yet.  I’ll ship one over to you ASAP.)

If you don’t understand why something isn’t working, doing more of what isn’t working WON’T get you success, BUT it has little to do with not understanding why something doesn’t work. And there is something which is more important, and needs to be taken care of before you should ever consider getting more leads from the web, or anywhere else.

Properly marketing your company means having a plan and then making sure that everything you’re doing drives that plan forward. Jumping on the latest bandwagon won’t get you where you want to be.

[Mistake #6]  Start-Stop Marketing

I don’t even need to be working with a practice to know if they’re suffering from this. All I have to do is look at their website and social media.

The signs are all over the place. You start a blog. You’re excited about it because some moron told you it’s the way to rank your site and engage your audience. But it isn’t working for you. Your site doesn’t rank better. People are not reading the blog. After a month or two, you decide the expense isn’t worth it and you stop.

Next, you attend a session at one of the annual meetings where another supposed expert has you absolutely convinced that if you’re not on Facebook and Twitter, you’re losing out. You tell your staff to quickly open a Facebook account and set up a page which you then start to spam with your own activities, thinking that people actually give a rat’s ass about what you’re doing. You’re wrong again. It doesn’t engage people or help your practice. You relegate it to the backburner and post once a week, or less, just to make it look like you’re doing something in social media and have that base is covered in your mind. Yet, it does next to nothing in growing your practice. You just assume it’s a dead end.

Keeping thinking this way and you will keep having only one or two consultation requesting a week while my successful clients are having at least one or two consultations every single day.

The net result from all these efforts is that what you were told doesn’t work. It couldn’t be your incompetence in the medium, could it? Of course it’s not you, it can’t be! Your competitors are just lucky. Your prospective clients don’t use Facebook. You think of every excuse under the sun, other than the fact that maybe, just maybe, you’re doing it wrong because you were told WHAT to do, but not HOW to do it.

That’s 4 mistakes so far.

This post is getting long and there are a lot for you to digest already, so I’m going to stop right here for now.  If you want the rest of the 9 habits, let me know in the comments section below, and I’ll post it up here in the next 24-48 hours.

If you’re truly motivated to turn your practice around quickly and start having more consultations and book more surgeries, I suggest the best place to start is to go through my book.  It’s called How To Be A Cut Above Your Competitors and it’s an Amazon # 1 Plastic & Cosmetic Best Seller.  Go to https://www.thinkbasis.com/cutabove/ to get your complimentary copy if you haven’t done so.

Go ahead and leave a comment below if you’d like to know the Top 5 Most Costly Plastic Surgery Marking Mistakes.  I’d really love to hear from you so comment now.