What an aesthetic clinic actually sells

The price list is not the product

Open any aesthetic clinic website and you will find a page that lists procedures and, if the clinic is brave, prices. The page is accurate. It is also almost useless, because it answers a question that a patient asks fifth, not first.

The thing on the price list is a procedure with a name, a quantity and a duration. The thing being bought is something else entirely. A patient does not wake up wanting a specific injectable in a specific volume. They wake up disliking something they see, and they want somebody competent to tell them whether anything sensible can be done about it, and then to do that thing without frightening them.

This is not a semantic point. It has direct consequences for what pages you build, what words appear on them, and what a search engine can understand your clinic to be about. Every later module in this course depends on getting this right first, which is why it is Module 1.

Three things are bought at the same time

It helps to separate what the patient is buying into three parts, because each one is bought from a different part of your site.

The procedure

The technical act: the substance, the device, the technique, the number of sessions. This is the part clinics are most comfortable describing, partly because it is the part they were trained in and partly because it is the part with no ambiguity in it. It is also the part a patient can compare across clinics most easily, and therefore the part that generates the least loyalty.

The judgement

Whether the patient should have anything done at all, which thing, in what order, and at what strength. This is the actual expertise, and it is almost invisible on clinic websites. A page that says "we will tell you plainly if we think you do not need this" is worth more than four paragraphs about the mechanism of action, because it addresses the fear that the patient walked in with, which is being sold something they did not need by somebody with an incentive to sell it.

The relationship afterwards

Who they call at eight in the evening when something looks wrong, how quickly that call is answered, whether a review appointment is included, and what happens if they are unhappy. Almost nobody publishes this. The clinics that do stand out immediately, because the patient has been worrying about it since before they searched.

Where search actually happens

Search behaviour maps onto those three parts, and it does so in a specific order. A patient searching a symptom is looking for the judgement. A patient searching a procedure name is looking for the procedure. A patient searching a clinic name, or a procedure with a place attached, has already made most of the judgement and is now assessing the relationship.

Clinic websites are typically built entirely for the middle of that sequence. They have a page for every procedure and nothing at all for the person who does not yet know what the procedure is called, and nothing for the person who has decided and is now trying to work out whether to trust you. Two thirds of the demand is unserved, and it is the two thirds where a small clinic can actually compete, because the procedure pages are contested by everybody.

The sequence is set out in detail in Module 03, The patient journey, from symptom to booking, and the site structure that follows from it is built in Module 09, Information architecture: the site plan. For now the point is simply that the shape of demand is wider than the price list.

The vocabulary problem

Clinics write in product names. Patients search in problems. This gap is the single most common reason a clinically excellent clinic is invisible.

A practitioner thinks in terms of the tool. A patient thinks in terms of the thing they see in the mirror at seven in the morning, and describes it with whatever word they happen to have. Sometimes that word is the clinical term. More often it is a lay term, a brand name that has become generic, a description of the appearance, or a phrase they have heard from a friend. All of these are legitimate ways in, and a site that only carries the clinical term is closed to most of them.

The correct response is not to stuff a page with alternative words. It is to write the page so that the problem is described in the words a patient would use, near the top, before the procedure is named. This is both better writing and better search practice, and Google's own guidance on creating helpful, people-first content says something close to it: write for the person, then check that a search engine can follow.

What you are not permitted to sell

Before you write anything persuasive, you need to know the boundary. In the United Kingdom a clinic's marketing sits under advertising law and the CAP Code, under the professional standards of whichever regulator its practitioners belong to, and, for prescription-only medicines, under medicines law. Those layers are covered properly in Module 05, The rules that constrain everything you publish. Three consequences matter from the very first page you write.

• You cannot advertise a prescription-only medicine to the public. This changes how you may name certain treatments in your marketing, and it is not a matter of taste.
• You cannot make a claim you cannot substantiate. Superlatives, permanence, guaranteed outcomes and comparative claims about other clinics all need evidence you almost certainly do not have.
• You cannot pressure. Time-limited offers on cosmetic interventions, and anything that trivialises a procedure, are treated seriously by the Advertising Standards Authority.

None of this makes marketing impossible. It makes a certain kind of marketing impossible, and that kind was never the kind that built durable clinics anyway. What is left, describing what you do accurately, in the patient's language, with the limits stated, is what this course teaches.

Writing your own version down

The output of this module is three sentences, written down, that you will use for the rest of the course. They are not marketing copy. They are the material from which marketing copy is later made, and if they are vague every page you build on them will be vague too.

Write them badly first. The first version of the judgement sentence is nearly always a platitude, and the first version of the aftercare sentence is nearly always a description of what you wish were true rather than what a patient would actually experience next Tuesday. Both improve on the second attempt. Neither improves by being thought about rather than written.

When you have them, keep the sheet. Module 06, Writing the clinic's proposition asks you to turn them into a proposition, and Module 07, Choosing the treatments to compete on asks you to test that proposition against the treatments you actually offer.