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Aesthetics Journal
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your data only adds to this and it becomes the most up-to-date information available, offering you an advantage in the field.
Choosing a survey topic
Utilising Surveys for Marketing Sales director and marketing manager Ben Savigar-Jones discusses how you can create a patient survey to improve your marketing Anyone who is vaguely familiar with marketing techniques will be aware of the importance of having interesting content that is relevant to your patients. Useful and relevant content can help with your website’s search engine optimisation (SEO) and social media following, allow you to build authority within your industry and aid brand recognition.1 Surveys are a great way to generate compelling content relatively quickly. Depending on the type of questions you ask, you can use the answers you collect to produce original, unique and interesting data that can be used to create content for your marketing. They may also act as a tool to help you get to know your patients better, so that you can improve your services. This article will explore the benefits of collecting your own clinic data through surveys of your patients and discuss how it can be used for the purpose of marketing and PR coverage. It will also provide advice on how to effectively conduct a survey and will explain how to best utilise this data.
Why collect your own data? In my experience, feedback-style surveys are generally the most common types of surveys utilised by clinics. They can allow you to gain insight into various areas of your practice, allowing you to improve your services such as the ease of booking, customer service at reception, or the quality
of patient care. However, surveys that explore patients’ general attitudes and opinions on aesthetic procedures can also be beneficial, as you will be able to use the statistics gathered to promote your clinic and services in your marketing efforts. For example, if 90% of your patients surveyed said that forehead lines were the aesthetic concern that bothered them the most, you could angle your marketing to demonstrate that you offer treatments specifically for this, which would likely appeal to members of the public with a similar demographic to your current patients. Additionally, there are businesses, agencies and publications everywhere that are looking for new stories to cover. By sending a detailed press release to the right sources (discussed in more detail below), your interesting, original research can create newsworthy statistics that will generate valuable content for publications, while disseminating your own brand or products. If your survey is featured in a publication and attributed to your clinic, this can create great PR coverage for you as readers will identify your clinic as one that is attuned to its patients’ needs and requests. One of the best things about surveys is that the data you gain is 100% original and owned by you. Nobody else will have the same data, even if similar questions have been surveyed before. If you do choose a topic that has been researched before, then
The best way to choose a topic is to consider something that is specifically relevant to your business and patients, such as your treatment offering. Another great place to start is current news topics or subjects that are already in the general public’s mind; for example, if the media is currently talking about weight loss and obesity, then it might be useful to discover what your patients’ perceptions towards these topics are. A staple topic in the medical and aesthetic sector is public awareness – can you ask questions in your survey to gauge public understanding, or lack thereof? A great tool for searching recent content around a particular area is Buzzsumo,10 which is a website that will show recent, popular content on almost any topic. For example, if you search for ‘lip filler’, Buzzsumo will provide you with a long list of popular stories and content that talks about lip filler. You can use the free version to get a taste of what is out there. Keep in mind that if you are going to use survey platforms that you promote over social media and your social media pages are ‘public’, it can be harder to control who responds to your survey, even if it is directed towards your patients. As such, you may want to think of a topic that can also be put to the general public, which will still give you relevant information. Some examples could be: ‘If you could change one thing about your body what would it be?’ or ‘What one factor puts you off visiting a medical aesthetic practitioner the most?’
Question format Best practice is to keep the questions incredibly clear and as short as possible. Avoid technical language and instead use simple vocabulary that everyone can understand. I recommend avoiding asking too many open-ended questions8 – I have found that multiple choice is better as it’s quicker for patients to respond to and allows you to create statistics and percentages easily. However, certain open-ended questions, added to the end of a multiplechoice question, could be useful, as the patient can give you more specific feedback, explaining why they have answered a question a certain way. Below are two examples of questions that you might consider including, as well as an explanation of why the data could be useful.
Reproduced from Aesthetics | Volume 5/Issue 1 - December 2017