How to Define (and Reach) Your Medical Spa Target Audience

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If you operate a facility that performs cosmetic procedures for those wanting to improve their appearance, it’s in your best interest to define your medical spa target audience rather than trying to promote your services to as many people as possible. 

Why? 

Because in marketing, more is not always better, especially when it involves audience targeting. It may seem like targeting more people will lead to more leads and sales, but this is not the case. You don't need more random people. You need more targeted people. 

Reducing your audience size by segmenting your market so you can focus your targeting is a good move. It seems counterintuitive, but let’s explain a little further…

What You Are Likely Doing Wrong with Your Targeting (and How to Fix It)

If you are a seasoned business owner, you may believe you already know your medical spa target audience. But let’s say we asked you what type of people are interested in your services. If you answer, “Everyone who wants better skin” or “Women from age 20 to 50,” those answers would not be entirely accurate. 

Why can’t you just target everyone in a particular demographic? 

Well, you can, but then you would be doing what the majority of medical spas are doing. Yes, you will generate some leads and may earn some profitable business. But, the more targeted you are with your audience, the more successful your messaging. You will generate more leads and sales and dominate your competition. 

You Can’t Target Everyone 


Here’s the thing… Not everyone will be interested in your medical spa services. And the interested people will fall into several demographics and psychographics. 

So, for example, your audience may include women from the age of 20 to 55+ who live near your establishment. This is a broad representation of your audience and not enough data to formulate a marketing strategy. 

Do women in their twenties have the same needs as women in their fifties? Do they have the same desires, shopping behaviors, incomes, and comfort levels? No, they don’t.

Take a look at your younger clients’ characteristics vs. your more mature clients’ characteristics and notice the similarities and differences. Here are some questions to ask to help you evaluate your customers and spot the differences.  

The point is that each of your audience segments will have different behaviors and desires in addition to age. 

Let’s take this one step further… 

Imagine you wanted to advertise your new microneedling service. Without identifying your medical spa target audience for this particular service, you would simply send out an email to all of your customers, letting them know it’s available. This is okay, but not ideal. Why? Because if most of your customers interested in this procedure are 40 and older, you are bombarding the customers who may not care about this service with emails they have no interest in reading. 

Also, in an email targeting 40+ women, you can use language and images that cater to this age group and their pain points. This will help you make a stronger connection with this segment and increase leads. According to an Experian study, personalized emails generate 6X higher transaction rates. 

Now, you may have services that all age groups can enjoy, such as acne care. Note that even though this service may apply to all customers, you still want to create audience segments because the way you talk to a 20-year-old will differ from how you speak to a 50-year-old. Each has differing needs and desires (psychographics), and they will respond differently to your communication. We will cover psychographics more in the next section.

Demographics vs. Psychographics

Many medical spas will segment customers by a physical demographic—maybe their age, job, income level, or location. This is a good practice, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. 

If you want to separate yourself from the competition, you need to narrowly define your medical spa target audience into psychographic segments as well. Psychographics is driven by behavior and identifies interests and lifestyle factors. For a medical spa target audience, example psychographics may look something like this:


As you may notice, not every behavior relates to your medical spa. That’s because every lifestyle trait plays into the products and services a person purchases.

How to Define a Medical Spa Target Audience

So, we’ve talked about why defining your target audience is essential and what demographics and psychographics are. In this section, we will briefly cover how to use these traits to define your target audience. While these practices are outside of this article’s scope, we will provide an overview of the steps involved and point you to other resources where you can get more information. 

First things first, develop your customer avatars or personas. This is where you can segment different groups of people who are similar in demographics and behavior.


A customer avatar is a detailed profile of either a type of customer you already have or a fictional representation of a person you want to target. If you already have customers, review these customers’ characteristics to come up with your avatars. Even if the avatars are fictional, use competitive and industry research to create them. Never rely on guesses and assumptions; only gather real data. We talk about market research and data gathering in the next section.

An avatar is not just a description of your ideal customers’ age, gender, and location. It also represents the customer’s goals, challenges, values—their psychographics. 

Essentially, a customer avatar tells you…

If you can fill out the above information for around three personas, you are off to a good start. BUT note that having more personas is not always better. 

How to Get Information for Your Customer Avatars

If you are creating customer avatars without having done any research, you might as well throw them in the virtual wastebasket. According to a study, companies that conducted frequent research on their target segments grew 27.9% faster than companies that did not research. 

Don’t leave this step up to guesswork. Consult data to come up with the findings that will form your personas.

The best way to research your medical spa target audience is to perform qualitative and quantitative market research. Let’s briefly define each.

Quantitative Research

Quantitative research gathers and analyzes the numbers. Remember your high school math class? Well, that is kind of how we would define quantitative research. 

But, seriously, don’t let us scare you. Quantitative research is not difficult. It just involves knowing where to find the right data to help you build out your personas.

When conducting quantitative research to learn more about your medical spa target audience, rely on the following metrics:

In addition to the above metrics, you can also run customer surveys to get feedback from your target market. Running customer surveys is an extensive topic. Read more here to learn how to set up an effective customer survey. 

Qualitative Research

Qualitative research, well, tends to be a bit more fun. Qualitative research gathers data from people’s opinions and helps you understand what your customers think, feel, and believe. These powerful findings can help you create more robust personas and effectively market to your medical spa target audience.

Where do you get this data from? Here are some ideas:

Pull the data you gleaned from your qualitative and quantitative research to create three personas that define your target audience. Here are some more articles to help you with this process:


How to Do Market Research: A Guide for Beginners

Market Orientation & Research: Part 1

Market Orientation & Research: Part 2

How to Reach Your Medical Spa Target Audience

You did all of your research and built out some new customer avatars. What's next? Getting in front of the right people using the appropriate tactics. 

Remember that your marketing strategy should determine your tactics—not the other way around. That said, there are a number of ways to reach your medical spa target audience. So, it’s worth highlighting some of them and noting how you should approach them for the best results.   

Targeted Social Media Posts

Instead of just randomly creating content for social media posts, use your personas to connect with your audience.

For example, let’s say you uncovered that one of your persona’s pain points is a concern about postpartum acne as a new mother. She loves her new baby and enjoys being a new mom, but she is hesitant about dealing with this acne since she has never experienced it before.

Instead of just posting a before-and-after shot of a customer who had good results with acne care, post content about a new mother and offer comments/reviews on how the treatment made her feel. The key is to establish a connection with the potential customer. 

Blog Content

As with social media content, you should create blog content that speaks to your personas. Taking the same example of the new mother with postpartum acne, create a blog post that discusses this issue and addresses that new mother and her concerns, beliefs, and problems. 

Note again how much more you will connect with this new mother if you write a targeted blog post than you would if you were addressing every person on the planet with acne. If your competitors are doing this, but you are targeting instead, you will win the business—hands down. 

Personalized Emails

Now that you have audience segments, personalize your emails to hit on each interest. Working again with the new mother example, you can personalize this email by showing pictures of women with infants, advertising products that meet their needs, and tailoring the language to this segment. 

For more information on personalized marketing, read the following article: The Quick-Start Marketing Guide to Launching High-Converting Personalized Strategies (with Examples).

Defining & Reaching Your Medical Spa Target Audience – What You Need to Know

In this article, we talked about why it is essential to define your target audience and how you can use this data to inform your marketing strategy. We covered…

If you’re ready to see better results from your marketing efforts, get to work on defining your medical spa target audience by creating your first customer avatar. You can download a free customer avatar template HERE. And if you need help, don’t hesitate to reach out!

 

At Viral Solutions we are committed to seeing YOU succeed. It is our goal to grow your business with proven digital marketing strategies that will help your business for the long haul.

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