Aesthetics is a competitive and booming industry with huge potential for growth, but with that increased demand it becomes more and more important to stand out from the crowd. If you want to thrive in a saturated market, you need to attract and retain patients. This is where effective marketing strategies come in.
This guide will provide you with a detailed roadmap to navigate marketing for your aesthetic practice, integrating key insights to help you stand out, build client loyalty, and support sustainable growth. In this climate, you can’t afford to fall behind with your marketing efforts. Let us show you how to stay ahead of the curve.
Marketing is about persuading customers that they should buy your product or service over your competitors.
The key is identifying your target customer and meeting their needs better than anybody else. Understanding and relating to your audience is crucial to successful marketing and public relations (PR).
It can be all too easy to let your marketing slide when you’re busy juggling the day-to-day running of your business with your clinical work.
But marketing in the aesthetics industry is not just about attracting clients; it’s about establishing credibility, demonstrating professionalism, and building long-term relationships.
As competition intensifies, practitioners need more than clinical expertise; they need to master the art of marketing to differentiate their services. But don’t worry, in the digital world, developing a marketing and PR strategy doesn’t need to cost the earth, but it does need effective planning. Here are our tips for creating a successful aesthetics marketing strategy.
The marketing process starts with market research and analysis. It involves all aspects of your aesthetics business, from the products and procedures you offer to where and when you provide them to how much they cost and how you present and promote them to customers. Thorough market research will help you understand your customers, familiarise yourself with the competition and gain insights into what treatments people are looking for and how they would like to experience them.
The key to successful marketing is understanding who your customers are so that you can craft targeted marketing messages at them effectively. At this stage in your research, buyer personas are a very useful device for helping to make sure that you’re addressing the specific needs of your target customer as you develop your marketing strategy.
The idea of a buyer persona is to create a profile of your ideal customer to help visualise your audience and inform your strategy.
You’ll need to create more than one buyer persona depending on your business, but you can start with a few and build them up. Some key characteristics you should include are personal demographics, educational background, job role, behaviours, goals, pain points and buying patterns.
You’re aiming for your persona to seem like a real person but without being too specific.
For example, you may target:
You can base your personas on market research through online surveys and interviews with a mix of customers and prospects, as well as insights gathered from your existing customer base. Improve your response rate by using incentives such as a gift card and being flexible with the timing of interviews.
Your aim is to understand your customer’s goals and motivations so that you can tailor your marketing to meet their needs more effectively. Once you’ve gathered your customer data, you need to identify patterns and commonalities that customers share so that you can develop your personas. You might, for example, notice that a core customer group of women in their 40s work part-time in professional roles in the city, live in the suburbs, enjoy hobbies like practising Pilates, gardening and dog walking and have two to three children. Rather than listing these characteristics randomly, next, you need to bring your persona to life – give them (and their dog!) a name, a home and a job – make them seem like a real person who represents one segment of your customer base. Thinking about your persona and who they want to be will help you understand and relate to your customer so you can help them meet their aspirations.
Even established practitioners should carry out continual competitor research. Understanding the key players in your local area will help you to identify any gaps in the market, inform your pricing strategy and highlight anything that you could improve upon. What are competitors doing that you could do better? What treatments do they offer? How do they set their prices and promote their services? How can you differentiate yourself? What is your USP?
Stay updated with the latest industry trends, such as regenerative aesthetics, wellness and the growing demand for male-oriented services. Research what your competitors offer and identify gaps or opportunities that resonate with your values.
Your brand is your identity. It should reflect professionalism, quality, and trust.
Develop a cohesive brand, including a logo, colour palette, and voice that resonates with your target audience. Make sure your branding communicates the quality of your services.
Highlight certifications, partnerships, and insurance coverage (e.g. Hamilton Fraser) to reinforce your commitment to client safety and professional standards.
For your marketing strategy to deliver results, it must be linked to your broader business strategy and objectives, which you should have outlined in your business plan. The first step of your marketing strategy is to go back to the bigger picture and identify your business objectives. You can then plan how your marketing and promotional activities will help you achieve them.
Set marketing objectives that will help you achieve the broader business objectives. For example, if your business objective is to maintain or increase market share, your supporting marketing objectives might be:
Make sure that your objectives are SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-based).
Having carried out your research, you should have a clear sense of the dynamics of the aesthetics industry in your geographical area as well as a solid understanding of your competitors and customers, including some distinct customer personas. This should help you to identify your niche and any opportunities to differentiate yourself, for example, by launching a new technique or service into your local market or working with a complementary service provider to your mutual advantage.
In an increasingly crowded market, the quest for creating a USP becomes harder but also more necessary. Ask yourself what you can offer that others don’t. Your USP could relate to any aspect of your business so long as it is compelling to your customer and true to your values. It could be about your innovative products and services, your natural ability to build rapport with patients, your luxurious premises or your presence and reputation on social media as an established leading light in your area. Identify what makes your service special and be sure that this selling point is aligned with your customer needs and is clearly articulated in all your communications and branding.
Armed with your market research, marketing objectives and a clear sense of your USPs, you can now begin mapping out your marketing plan on a monthly basis. The aim of developing a marketing plan is to identify marketing strategies and tactics that will help to achieve your objectives; for example to gain more customers, sell more to existing customers, or perhaps a combination of the two.
These could be based on seasonal trends such as Christmas parties, summer holidays and New Year resolutions, the launch of a new product or treatment, a special promotion or winning an industry award. Timing of campaigns is critical and requires forward planning - for a ‘get summer holiday ready’ campaign, you need to launch in the spring when patients are thinking about preparing for the holiday season.
Bundle ‘essential summer treatments’ together and promote them to your relevant customer personas across multiple channels. Don’t forget to link campaigns back to your broader marketing and business objectives.
It’s important to be clear and consistent with your content, customer communications and PR. Patients may be tempted to drift towards a competitor if they don’t hear from you in a while. So, manage customer expectations proactively by developing a pipeline of content and communications so that they expect to hear from you and look forward to receiving your content. Having identified your key campaigns, you can map out your monthly marketing content across the key channels. It’s best to be consistent across all channels and link your content to as many channels as possible.
When it comes to marketing your aesthetic practice, there are a variety of channels available to help you reach your audience effectively and grow your business. Each channel offers unique opportunities to engage with potential clients, build your brand, and showcase your expertise. From hosting or attending events that foster networking and community building to leveraging the power of a professional website to establish credibility and drive customer engagement, the possibilities are vast. Adding value through educational blog posts, connecting via tailored newsletters, or using the visual appeal of social media platforms can elevate your outreach. Incorporating engaging videos, forming partnerships with complementary providers, and utilising public relations strategies further expand your ability to connect with clients and differentiate your practice in a competitive market. By diversifying your marketing efforts across these channels, you can make sure maximum visibility and impact for your brand.
Other strategies to tap into include:
A professional, user-friendly website is the cornerstone of your online presence. There’s lots of support available online to help with creating a website, or you may enlist the services of a professional. Having an online presence helps establish your credibility and supports your marketing campaigns, customer engagement and brand recognition. Include:
Aesthetics is a very active industry on social media, so make sure that you have a strong and regular presence across a range of platforms. Social platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook are indispensable in aesthetics marketing. Share engaging content such as:
Celebrity culture and social media now influence many of the trends in aesthetic procedures, which often translate into patient demands. You can use this to your advantage by identifying the type of celebrity that appeals to your customers’ personas and keeping them updated with the latest cosmetic treatments that the celebrity has undertaken. You can then link relevant celebrity-endorsed trends to your treatments. You can also aim to generate support for your business by building relationships with social media influencers.
Don’t forget to include video content as well as written blogs – they get the highest engagement on social channels. Thanks to the internet and smartphones, video marketing is now responsible for the majority of all internet traffic. Videos up to two minutes long get the most engagement. Use it for anything from customer testimonials to top tips and infographics.
Blogs are a great way to drive traffic to your website, showcase your knowledge and assert yourself as a thought leader in the aesthetics industry. Make sure your blogs are fully optimised for SEO (Search Engine Optimisation).
A regular newsletter is a useful way to communicate with your customers and provide them with content that resonates with them. You can tailor your newsletter to your customer personas to build loyalty and make sure that the content and any promotions you include meet their specific needs.
Whether you’re hosting an open day or a launch party, events bring people together and offer the opportunity to network, develop relationships and promote the treatments you offer. You may also want to raise your profile and support your marketing efforts by attending industry events to learn about the latest developments in aesthetics. Many of these also include business agendas where you can get advice about boosting your marketing. Read more about the must attend events and how to make the most of them.
Identify opportunities to partner up with local businesses such as gyms or health cafés to promote your services to your mutual advantage.
Effective public relations can help you make the most out of an awards win, a product launch, or the results of a survey. By developing a relationship with industry journalists, you can become one of their ‘go-to’ practitioners for advice on the latest industry developments. Your content must, of course, be relevant to your customers and consistent in terms of branding and tone of voice across all platforms.
A content strategy is a well-structured plan that defines how you will create, manage, and share information to engage your audience effectively. It is a roadmap to make sure your content aligns with your marketing goals and meets the needs of your target audience. In the aesthetics industry, a strong content strategy enables you to educate, inspire, and connect with potential and existing clients without resorting to overly promotional tactics. By delivering valuable educational content, sharing practical advice, and integrating testimonials, your content can establish trust and position your brand as an industry leader. A thoughtful strategy also creates consistency in tone and messaging across various formats—blogs, videos, newsletters, and social media—helping to build a loyal following and convert interest into lasting client relationships.
Content may include:
Tips, advice, and fact sheets will help promote your services without the ‘hard sell’ that can turn people off. For example, you could include articles on themes linking to your seasonal calendar, such as ‘getting Christmas party ready’ and general interest topics, such as ‘top 10 biggest tattoo regrets’ or ‘essential skincare tips’.
Guidelines such as ‘post skin peel care advice’, including inspirational before and after images, case studies, and details of your services, are all useful for customers considering going ahead with a treatment.
Customer feedback is likely to be just as important as price for those deciding whether to undergo cosmetic procedures. Ask your loyal clients to fill out a form in the clinic or send them an email asking them to give you their feedback. Positive testimonials can then be added to your website and will help to enhance and promote your brand. Find out more about how to manage negative online reviews.
This could be tied to specific events or promotions you’re running, such as a live demonstration to promote a new treatment or highlighting that you will be hosting a stand or seminar at an upcoming event. You can also link targeted promotional content to specific customer needs based on your customer personas. This could include:
While marketing needn’t cost the earth, particularly if you focus primarily on digital rather than traditional methods, it does take time. And time is money. You need to understand what is working and what is not by carrying out regular reviews into analytics such as click-through rates from your blog posts, newsletter open rates, the number of social media followers, website traffic, bounce rates and other measures of customer engagement. Ultimately, you need to know whether your marketing is translating into revenue.
Customer satisfaction surveys can also give you a good understanding of what you are doing right and what could be done better.
In today’s fast-moving digital world, fashions come and go within a matter of weeks, often impacting upon trends in the aesthetic treatments customers are seeking. Keep track by paying attention to which procedures are popular online and monitoring your own internal trends. Don’t be afraid to review your plan where required.
It can be difficult to find the time for marketing your business, but invest time planning and following these steps and you’re far more likely to be rewarded further down the line with a loyal patient following.
While the aesthetics industry is currently unregulated from a clinical perspective, there are rules and regulations around advertising and promotion designed to protect consumers and maintain the integrity of the industry that you should consider when developing any marketing strategy.
Adherence to these rules fosters transparency, ethical practices, and the safeguarding of vulnerable audiences. For aesthetic practitioners, understanding and implementing these guidelines is essential for responsible marketing.
1. Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) and the Committee of Advertising Practice (CAP)
The ASA provides detailed guidance to make sure that marketing efforts are honest, non-exploitative, and socially responsible. Key rules include:
In November 2021, the ASA updated its guidance to reflect these concerns, especially in the context of non-surgical procedures such as injectables. A notable addition was the prohibition of marketing cosmetic interventions to minors.
The CAP Code covers many different types of advertising. In 2022, CAP released a series of freely available bitesize videos designed to help businesses “get their ads right the first time.”
The series focussed on non-surgical cosmetic procedures such as injectables, dermaplaning, teeth whitening, and microneedling and is worth viewing.
Broken down into five videos, the series covers the following:
You can view the videos here.
Associations such as The British Association of Medical Aesthetic Nurses (BAMAN) require their members under their code of conduct to: “familiarise themselves on a regular basis with the guidance from ASA & CAP on the marketing of non-surgical cosmetic procedures, and practice accordingly.”
2. General Medical Council (GMC)
The GMC mandates factual and clear marketing, free from misleading claims or guarantees. Marketing must:
3. Joint Council for Cosmetic Procedures (JCCP)
The JCCP emphasises the ethical use of social media and other forms of marketing. Practitioners are encouraged to:
4. Botulinum Toxin and Cosmetic Fillers (Children) Act 2021
Following the introduction in 2021 of the ban on injectables for under 18s, a ban on adverts for cosmetic procedures targeting under 18s came into effect on 25 May 2022. The ban means that it is be illegal to advertise procedures designed to change a person’s physical appearance – including breast augmentation or reduction, ‘tummy tucks’, eyelid surgery, nose reshaping and facelifts. The ban also includes dermal fillers, teeth whitening products and chemical peels.
Social media is a dominant platform for aesthetics marketing but comes with its own set of challenges. Platforms such as Meta (Facebook and Instagram) and Google enforce strict guidelines to prevent misleading or harmful content. For example:
Educational materials, such as Q&A sessions, blogs, and infographics, are particularly effective in this space, helping practitioners engage with audiences responsibly.
Marketing in aesthetics is not just about compliance; it reflects the practitioner’s commitment to patient safety and the broader integrity of the field. Engaging with regulations proactively, keeping updated with guidance from bodies like the ASA and GMC, and crafting responsible marketing campaigns are critical to fostering trust and professionalism in the industry.
You may also want to showcase your professional insurance coverage, such as Hamilton Fraser’s solutions, to reassure clients about safety and reliability. In addition, you may want to use your marketing to let patients know you are registered with the GMC, NMC or GDC or are a member of BAMAN, BAAPS, BCAM, the JCCP or other organisations. This demonstrates your commitment to best practices and distinguishes your clinic as trustworthy and professional.
Success in the aesthetics industry requires a blend of clinical expertise, marketing savvy, and a commitment to client satisfaction. By applying these strategies, aesthetic practitioners can effectively attract, engage, and retain clients while building a strong and reputable brand.
Leverage marketing as a tool to showcase not only your services but also the professionalism and safety protocols that set your practice apart. Let your marketing efforts reflect the care and quality you bring to your clients every day.
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