by Lee Cottrill
Business Development Director
Wondering how to grow your aesthetics business?
Growing an aesthetics business is hard work! As well as being a skilled and safe practitioner, you need ways to stay one step ahead of the competition and stand out from the crowd.
Lee Cottrill, Business Development Director for SkinViva Training Academy, shares his top 6 tools for helping you grow your aesthetics business based on his own experience of growing a leading North-West injectables clinic and training school for medical professionals.
6 Game-Changing Tools To Grow Your Aesthetics Business
1. Dropbox
When growing your aesthetics clinic, you’re going to accumulate paper. You’ll be writing down ideas, recording clinical notes, getting bills, signing contracts, creating marketing etc.
As time goes on, what do you think happens? That all important piece of paper vanished and you’re wasting time looking for it.
Dropbox makes this a thing of the past. It’s a document library where you can set up folders and store all different kinds of files liked scanned images, photos, spreadsheets etc. There’s even an app for your phone with a function to scan in your paper docs allowing you to bin off all that paper once-and-for-all and keep your documents with you wherever you are in the world. Best of all, up to 2Gb (which is a lot in documents terms), it won’t cost you a penny.
Price: FREE
Link: https://www.dropbox.com/
2. SkinViva Trainee Network
Ok so this one is a bit of a plug BUT genuinely, it’s also an amazing tool to get you growing your aesthetics business way quicker than what you would otherwise.
Trainees of SkinViva Training get automatic and ‘free-forever’ access to an online Facebook community called the ‘SkinViva Trainee Network’. It’s got over 1,300 medical aesthetics practitioners in it who range in experience from those just starting out through to the masters who’ve completed THOUSANDS of treatments. As such, it’s THE place to be for support.
Search for any topic and you’ll find something useful. Got a specific question? Post it and you’ll get supportive answers on the same day. Guaranteed. Got a complication crisis? Upload your patient photos (with permission of course) and the community will rally round to help you out.
The SkinViva Trainee Network can often be the ‘make or break’ factor behind practitioners pushing through those tough times and that’s because of the power of community, my friend!
Not ready to train yet? Well, there’s also a library of complications videos free of charge available on the SkinViva Training website.
Price: FREE (as a trainee of SkinViva Training)
3. Instagram
Social media has truly woven its way into all of our lives with many BIG players out there including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and Pinterest.
What makes Instagram great for building an aesthetics business though is the ease in which you can gain followers without needing to write, well, pretty much anything.
Download the app to your phone and then start snapping engaging and attention-grabbing photos and posting them. Use tags to get your photos found by other people with common interests and add comments to use users Instagram profiles as a means of getting yourself out there.
Price: FREE
Link: https://www.instagram.com/
4. Aesthetic Response
Most practitioners start a BOTOX® business when they’re still working in the NHS. That can often mean the infuriating situation of patients wanting to get hold of you when you’re ‘at work’ – you know, that job that you don’t really enjoy anymore because you desperately want to have the freedom of growing your own business?!
Well, have no fear, there is a solution for this so that you don’t miss any customers when you can’t pick up the phone. Aesthetic Response offer a nationwide call-answering and appointment-booking service. They cover calls for 66 hours a week meaning you won’t ever miss a patient call and better still they specialise in getting customers booked in for you to help fill up your clinic.
Price: Call Answering Starts From £150/mth. Appointment Booking Starts From £225/mth
Link:www.aestheticresponse.co.uk/
5. Trello
Trello takes the headache out of brainstorming and pretty much out of anything at all to do with lists of ‘stuff’.
It’s really important when growing your aesthetics business to be organised – to do lists, marketing ideas, goals for this month and next… it’s a huge help to have an easy tool to do this in. That’s where Trello comes in. Sign up for a free account and you can easily create boards, lists and cards (think of these as the items on your To Do List) that would make any project manager SQUEAL with delight. You can also add labels, due dates for when you want to get stuff done by, and checklists to blow your organisational socks off. Trello comes into its own as a tool to get you focussed on what you need to do to grow.
It’s a place to track your progress, set deadlines and re-prioritise. It’s what every budding entrepreneur needs!
Price: FREE
Link: https://trello.com/
6. Answer The Public
The old rules of marketing where you pay for advertising space or spray a load of leaflets through letterboxes are pretty much dead in the water. The internet age has empowered all of us to SEARCH for what we want to buy and that means all aesthetics business have to find new ways to get found.
In a nutshell, THE way to get found is buy ADDING VALUE. And you’re going to need to add loads of the stuff to succeed in a highly competitive sector like aesthetics but, if you do, the rewards will be more customer enquiries and better patient retention. We add value to prospective customers by writing content that people genuinely want to read and which solves their problems/hopes/dreams etc.
Answer The Public helps you because it tells you what’s in people’s minds…literally! It provides a pictoral representation of the things patients are searching for on a particular topic. So for example, enter the word “Botox” and you’ll see all the common questions your prospective customers are asking Google about Botox e.g. “Can I get Botox whilst taking antibiotics?”.
Your job as a keen marketer to provide amazing answers to these questions through blogs and social media posts and in return, people will discover you. And guess what, from there, those people might see you as actually wanting to HELP them rather than SELL to them. Bingo.
Price: FREE
SkinViva Training Academy Manchester
SkinViva Training Ltd offer a range of professional training courses for cosmetic and medical skin treatments. Their courses in cosmetic treatments directed at suitably qualified medical professionals* who wish to learn and build on their skills in delivering these procedures (*subject to meeting SkinViva Training’s entry criteria).
See our full list of forthcoming training course dates.
SkinViva Training Academy was established in 2013 by Dr Tim Pearce MBChB BSc (Hons) MRCGP – learn more about us. The SkinViva Training Academy team upholds high standards of clinical training providing a combination of fully-supervised practical experience together with essential theory.
For further information, to discuss which course is right for you, to enquire about availability or to book a training course please call 0161 850 2491, or email info@skinvivatraining.com.