A Marketing Transformation Case Study
Going from a tiny bit of PR around a new business launch into international marketing success is quite an in-depth endeavor. We are proud to have worked with one international plastic surgery clinic to kick-start website traffic from zero to 4,500 visits in month one, and get it to over 15,000 visits and 250 leads a month less than a year later.
Our work with this plastic surgery clinic was multi-faceted, and the unique context of regulations and culture brought an interesting challenge. Among it all, we helped this international aesthetic surgery center and medical spa to really get started with inbound marketing, social media content, and PPC advertising.
The Client
This enterprise is a cosmetic and plastic surgery practice in a high-end city with loads of medical tourism. While the clinic offers the same range of procedures you might expect from any similar practice, their business model is unique. Managed by the founding surgeons, the practice comprises two dozen of the world’s leading cosmetic and plastic surgeons – all as highly regarded by their peers as they are by their A-list patients.
The surgeons rotate, offering their specialties to local residents and tourists who normally would never be able to access such sought-after surgeons in that area of the world. The marketing needed to focus on the high profile doctors and their specialty surgeries, but there were challenges to overcome in order to get the practice’s advertising, social media, and inbound marketing running like a well-oiled machine.
The Challenge
Starting from Scratch
The practice initially focused on soft opening tactics for the first couple of months, using a PR firm to acquire strong local press coverage. When the client needed to go beyond that initial phase, they needed a full marketing plan. We were brought in to start from scratch when the clinic’s leadership found us through our own SEO efforts (see, it works!). Our published content and successful track record working with cosmetic and plastic surgery practices caught their attention, so they brought in ClearPivot to handle all digital marketing for the new practice, to build awareness and attract patients worldwide.
Industry-Specific Regulations
As you may already know, Google Ad network policies for medical procedures have large amounts of restrictions and regulations that other types of industries don’t have to deal with. The network policies apply not only to the Google Ads themselves but also to the landing pages and even to the content of the entire website of the medical company trying to run advertising. If a company doesn’t know how to navigate this thicket of regulations, their ad campaigns will be dead in the water.
Facebook and Instagram advertising can sometimes be even more restrictive than Google Ads in this subject matter, given their visual nature. There are medical advertising regulations, body display regulations, psychological and self-esteem regulations, trademark regulations, and more. Trying to flout any one of these regulations will lead to swift disapproval of a company’s ad campaign.
Cultural Expectations
Beyond medical regulations, we also had to be extremely careful about how marketing campaigns, ad content and even website copy were written and presented in order to remain respectful of local culture and norms. Though we were promoting mostly Western doctors who perform these procedures regularly in their home countries, local expectations prohibited mention of particular words and phrases. ClearPivot’s marketing strategists and copywriters nevertheless had to develop a quick understanding of the nuances of language around particular surgeries and procedures.
Even visually, we faced the challenge of customs and expectations around what is appropriate to reveal versus what would need to be hidden. For example, photos and videos depicting results of particular procedures had to either be extensively cropped, or not shown at all.
The ClearPivot Solution
To start, our team developed a clear and comprehensive marketing plan for the client, rooted in best practices for inbound marketing and effective outbound strategies. We implemented HubSpot to manage contacts, email and social media campaigns, migrated their website to HubSpot CMS, and spent the first month ensuring every detail was set up properly.
The Website
We migrated the practice’s entire website from WordPress to HubSpot CMS Hub, along with a partial redesign. The site also needed an Arabic translation in order to truly meet the needs of both local and traveling patients. The client procured a translator, and ClearPivot implemented second-language page templates, and manually built and published multi-language options for each page.
We also provided a solid foundation for following SEO best practices within the website, implementing HubSpot’s content marketing tools and conducting fundamental keyword research and topic cluster planning.
Content Marketing
Organized within the topic clusters identified in the strategy, we implemented a carefully-crafted content marketing plan. Using blogs, procedure pages, organic social media, pay-per-click ads, and paid social, we grew the client’s list of qualified contacts from zero to nearly 1,600 in year one.
One of the most important things to share in the context of plastic surgery is the visuals. You need imagery of the facilities, doctors, staff, and most importantly the results. One unique approach for this particular account was working with visiting doctors and their teams, as well as the local staff in-clinic, to procure video and still images for use in edited promotional videos. These before and after videos and featured interviews with visiting physicians produced great results in both organic and paid social media endeavors.
Pay-per-Click Advertising
One of the most successful pieces of our work with the plastic surgery hospital was a complementary outbound effort with Google Ads as well as Social Media Advertising. As the relationship matured, we handled a monthly spend of $23,000, managing ad groups across Google Search as well as additional budget for paid participation on Facebook and Instagram.
Our Google Ads strategy relied on strong keyword research, allowing us to write ads tailored to relevant searches, and pull in a steady flow of qualified traffic. For Social Media Advertising, we focused on promoting the larger-than-life personalities of visiting doctors and showing beautiful before and after photos and videos.
The Results
The client was at near-zero before we started working with them. They were getting only a few hundred website visits and a handful of website leads per month. Although we began implementing the technical groundwork in February 2019, we didn’t turn on analytics until April when marketing implementation really got underway. Results were dramatic, right from the start.
In the first month:
- 4,500 website visits
- 120 new leads (form submissions only, not including phone calls)
By January 2020:
- Nearly 16,000 website visits per month (more than triple what it was in month one)
- 253 new leads (from form submissions only)
- Plus 70-100 average monthly phone call leads (in addition to the form submission leads)
Here's the analytics screenshots to back up these stats:
Total Marketing performance over 12 months:
January 2020 analytics detail:
For this client, a mix of smart strategy, the right tools, and creative execution around multiple participants turned out to be successful. Our implementation of HubSpot provided the foundational structure, and the marketing campaigns that we rolled out built a thriving marketing funnel for its international cosmetic surgery practice.
