In the coming years, every industry around the world is forced to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. The impact will be more profound in non-essential areas of the health-care sector, like plastic surgery and Cosmetic dermatology. These businesses were hitting a pitch over the past decade.

The popularity of cosmetic procedures alone grew by 163% from 2000 to 2018. But after COVID-19, there will be a disrupt in the industry’s innovation, revenue, and popularity. But we can perceive it as beautiful adjusts to fit our new reality. 

Things have changed quickly in the COVID-19 era. Here we have gathered some early predictions as to how the pandemic will impact the world of cosmetic medicine.

OBSERVATIONS ON COSMETIC SURGERY INDUSTRY 

The Rise Of Telemedicine

Almost all doctors have canceled or rescheduled cosmetic procedures for now. And the majority of them have limited their practices to essential visits like facial injuries and lacerations. This helps to ease the burden on emergency rooms. Telemedicine is a commonplace to treat acne and rosacea and check-in with patients who need prescription refills and do consultations. Doctors have to pivot their practice by providing online medical consultations.

An Office Visit Will Feel Totally Different

As the pandemic loosens its grip on the U.S. Businesses like tattoo parlors and hair salons will reopen but with safety measures like face masks and plastic gloves. This will make the artist and client look more like a doctor and patient. Imagine the measures doctor’s offices will need to take to ensure everyone’s health and safety.

This will include new policies like no guests, immediate temperature checks, and gloves and masks are required office updates with touchless everything, sanitizer stations, air filters in every room, and new barriers at check-out desks, and much more. With all these protocols in place, the cosmetic industry is ready for a comeback. 

Demand For Botox & Filler Won’t Decrease

This demand will not decrease. It might increase, but it will become hush-hush again. While some patients will be hesitant to reschedule their canceled appointments, the majority of them will be eager to get back in for a wrinkle-reducing re-up. The estimate says that two-thirds of patients want to be rescheduled immediately, and the rest will be waiting to see what’s going to happen. There will be a pent-up demand for treatment but there is no doubt that overall COVID-19 will change elective procedures for the near future.

A More Natural Look Will Return 

We see the cosmetic dermatologist aesthetic trend like the overfilled lip-and-cheek trend and, most recently, lifted eyebrows falling out of vogue. And the openness around undergoing cosmetic procedures could become more taboo as public opinion shifts over elective medical services.

New Safety Measures Will Make Cosmetic Surgery Less Appealing

Going in for surgery will be a whole new ballgame until a reliable, widespread COVID-19 testing is achieved. And even after that, for some time, surgery might still be unappealing for many who considered it before the pandemic. This will lead to a shift towards non-invasive procedures like injectables, fillers, and threads while people push out surgery a little further down the line. On the other hand, carrying out operations is a tough decision for doctors as well. They will not feel confident that they are putting patients, staff, or themselves at risk for a nonessential service. 

Elective surgeries will resume when the disease is controlled in a given area, the supply chain for hospital resources is back at baseline capacity, and the societal disease curve is under control. This doesn’t seem to be happening in the near future. Therefore, the cosmetic industry has to start with the lowest-risk procedures in the lowest-risk and healthiest patients.

How to Overcome this Current Situation?

Now you need to forget your hard sell and focus more on helping. Before approaching your audience, define how will you support them during this crisis.

• Focus on virtual and online consultations.

• Adjust your website to help patients.

• Use good websites to helps patients find and connect with cosmetic doctors online.

• Create informative content to share on your website.

• Inform patients on opening hours, home visits, change in services, and revised guidelines.

• Add a chatbox to your website for patients to interact easily.

• Use different features for scheduling and rescheduling in-person appointments.

• Reroute office calls to mobile phones.

• Offer more discounted packages.

• Touch base with existing patients through email remarketing.

• Set-up video consultations for patients post-surgery. 

REVISING YOUR PPC STRATEGY

• Expand- expand your keyword selection and add variations of terms like online consultations, virtual consultations, phone consultations among others.

• Implement- implement virtual consultations to your ad copy strategy.

• Establish– try to establish your work as a trusted healthcare service and provider. You can do this with the help of ads on the search page through Google my business and Bing places.

• Increase- increase the engagement with the audience by increasing the use of call extensions, site link extensions, and click to call extensions.

• Modify– bring change in developing events and modify your budget. Take help from budget management. 

• Update– your negative keyword list at both account and campaign level using trending search queries.

SOLUTIONS FOR YOUR BUSINESS

• Google my business- this is a free and very easy to use the tool. This helps many business and organizations to manage their online presence across the Google platform. This will be a great platform for ads for your business and to engage with more audiences.

• Bing places- this tool helps to list your business on Bing maps. This will ensure visibility and it displays content that is useful in time like this.

• SEO- you need to understand that organic traffic is rising fast. Therefore, always make content that is relevant and has trending keywords. This will help it appear on top of SERPs. 

• Yext- it is a search experience cloud tool. It allows you to control online facts that patients are searching across different search engines, maps, voice assistant, and chatboxes.

• Call-only campaigns- this tool helps you contact with patients by simply clicking or tapping your ad. 

• Audience targeting- this tool helps you reach your target audience. It helps you connect with your online patients by narrowing down interests, behavior, demographics, and locations. This is done by ad campaigns.

• Youtube campaigns- video marketing can help you create brand awareness and engage more audience as a lot of audiences is already engaged on YouTube.

• Microsoft advertisements- expand your business or brand with Microsoft advertisements. This helps showcase your brand to an exclusive audience. They are offering a $250 coupon for new accounts and brands that want to engage in Microsoft advertisements.

I hope the above details would be of great use to those who are looking for a healthcare marketing post Corona.

If you are still confused of how to plan for your business, you can email me at [email protected].

I will help you in structuring your healthcare business effectively!