A 9 Step Blueprint for Creating Success by Dr Harry Singh

The questions you should be asking yourself if you are establishing a facial aesthetics business

by Dr Harry Singh

Many dentists are exploring the idea of getting involved in facial aesthetics, and why not? Dentists are perfectly placed to assess patients and have expertise in giving comfortable injections and assessing the face.

However, many dentists will embark on training with no real plan for how they will implement their newly acquired skills. My nine-step blueprint can help you question, answer and prioritise to succeed in a facial aesthetics business.

1 What is your business vision? What do you want from your business of facial aesthetics? Do you want it to complement your dentistry, or do you want to replace your dental income? Are you going to provide it within your dental practice or offer a mobile visiting service? What is your capacity in terms of time and space to offer facial aesthetics? I see many dentists so busy with dentistry that they have no time to see any facial aesthetic patients.

2 Who is your primary target market? Where do they hang out, what are their needs, and what are their wants regarding demographics and psychographics? Who are your secondary markets that you could also target? For example, the primary market for facial aesthetics is people who are worried about fine lines and wrinkles. Secondary markets could be people concerned about excessive sweating underarms (hyperhidrosis).

Without knowing who your market is, you will have a scattergun approach with your advertising. Pinpoint your target market and devise promotions that meet their needs. For example, I had a poster in a local gym with an image of a young couple. After a few months, I hardly got any enquiries from the poster. Upon further investigation I found out that most of the members of the gym were much older and when they saw the poster with the young couple, they could not relate to it.

3 How will you describe your business image and appearance? How do you want the name of your facial aesthetics business to appear? What do you want it to look like? What strap lines or messages do you want to convey to your patients? Do you want to create a spa-like environment with candles, music, aromatherapy, or do you want to be more clinical?

4 What is your unique selling proposition? Why should they choose you? What makes you different from the crowd? What’s your story? The story could either be about the business or yourself. Explain the benefits to patients: What’s in it for them? So you’ve got your features, but what is the advantage? This is going to help you design any promotional material. Don’t worry about the feature. Patients are interested in the benefit or how it’ll affect them.

5 What is your referral system? How are you going to get patients to refer? What are you going to call it? What are the rewards going to be? This is critical to the success to any new venture. We know that patients who have been referred by our existing patients will spend more and stay longer with us, because they already have that built-in trust.

6 Who will be your joint venture partners? Who are you going to work with who can either refer patients to your business, or you could go and work on their site? This strategy has been one of the main reasons why my facial aesthetics business skyrocketed.

Once you know your target market, you will know what hobbies they have, where they spend their money and what clubs they join. As the saying goes, ‘birds of a feather flock together’.

7 What are your packages regarding up-sell, cross-sell or down-sell? Have names for your packages. What treatments are you going to include in each package? What are going to be your up-sells, cross-sells and down-sells that you can advertise?

By grouping individual treatments into packages, the patient saves money and you make more money, but most importantly, you are giving the patients there best results possible.

8 What is your online marketing strategy? Is it going to be separate websites, Facebook fan page, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube videos, pay-per-click or SEO? What are your budgets going to be? What’s your timeframe? How would you know that this is going to be working?

I have found Instagram works well for facial aesthetics. I encourage my patients to post selfies and before/after images on their personal accounts and hashtag my business. This way their friends/followers see it and may be interested in making an enquiry.

9 What are the first three actions you can take immediately now that will make the most significant difference? This could be extra clinical training, marketing, referrals and packages. Choose just three, because there’s no way you can do all of them in one go. Select the ones that will make the most significant impact, most significant increase in turnover, and implement them now. Do not be in a state of overwhelm! Concentrate on the top three items that will make the biggest difference to your business.

Answer the above questions and act on them, and you will be miles ahead of your colleagues who just attend the workshops but then struggle to implement their new knowledge.