How can the medical beauty industry break through the three major operational difficulties?

As people's living standards rapidly improve, the appearance economy has emerged and the medical beauty industry is moving onto the fast track. Recently, the release of data from iResearch Consulting's "China Medical Beauty Industry Insight White Paper" has sparked heated discussions in the industry.

In 2021, report data showed that due to various chaos in the medical beauty industry , the rate at which medical beauty institutions went bankrupt exceeded the rate at which they were established. The medical beauty industry faces three major operational difficulties: difficulty in acquiring customers, difficulty in retaining customers, and difficulty in management.

The above three problems are mainly caused by the following reasons:

• Industry chaos leads to low user trust, making it difficult to acquire customers through public domain traffic
• Only one-time business, no refined operation for customers, no breakthrough in performance
• Inconsistent team growth, lack of professional skills, and low transaction conversion

Let’s analyze today how the medical beauty industry can rely on content marketing system + private domain user management to break through the above three operational difficulties?

1. Customer acquisition: relying on professionalism to enhance user trust

The current consensus among most medical beauty practitioners is that channel promotion is becoming more and more expensive, customer quality is slowly declining, marketing costs and conversion rates cannot support store operations, and customer acquisition costs are high. There are two reasons for this phenomenon:

First, the domestic medical beauty industry is plagued by unlicensed operations and unlicensed services, and consumers lack basic trust in the industry as a whole, making it more difficult to acquire customers through public domain advertising.

Second, although the public domain platform has large traffic, there are also many competitors, and user awareness has been deeply strengthened. Relying solely on information flow advertising and homogeneous marketing materials cannot impress users and achieve conversion goals.

In the past, medical beauty was in a period of demographic dividend and traffic peak, relying mainly on "packaging projects" and "packaging experts". Few organizations consider word of mouth and customer lifetime value. As Internet information becomes more and more transparent, the previous "heavy gimmick" packaging method is no longer applicable.

Simple transactional relationships are rapidly evolving towards value co-creation, in which institutions act as partners, consultants, mentors, etc. to clients.

Personal doctor entrepreneurial institution: its biggest selling point is its own professional strength. By shaping the doctor's personal IP, professional knowledge can be continuously produced on Xiaohongshu, Zhihu, and major medical beauty apps. Focus on your personal core strengths, on no more than two medical beauty products, and through continuous output of high-quality content, occupy the minds of users and build word of mouth.

In addition, you can also cooperate with content sharing platforms such as Qianliao through platform cooperation. Increase your own endorsements, expand your influence, and constantly "break the circle" to increase traffic.

Brand chain organizations: By building a consultant IP team and providing professional content, they participate in in-depth user relationship management.

Four dimensions to build a consultant IP team:

• "Professionalism" : Although the threshold for medical beauty consultation is low, there is a lot to learn. For knowledge about skin, aesthetics, etc., the more focused each consultant is on their main field, the better;
• "Content power" : The organization should know how to let every consultant and doctor produce professional knowledge in their position. They should not only be able to speak, but also be able to record and write, turn it into pictures and texts, short videos, and make it valuable and useful;
• "Communication power" : Everyone is a KOL or KOC. Cultivate their awareness of multi-platform distribution (video account, Douyin, Zhihu), spread their own experience, and use content to connect with your target audience;
• "Circle power" : It is mainly reflected in the influence of positioning oneself in the field of medical beauty or a more segmented group of people on a certain type of people seeking beauty. This is very important.

2. Retention: Private Domain Construction + Online Classroom

1. Private domain construction

The medical beauty industry is a "naturally addictive" industry because many medical beauty projects have an expiration date, and after a period of time, the drugs will be metabolized. According to reliable data. The repurchase rate of medical beauty users reaches 95%. The attribute of high repurchase rate determines that the main battlefield for retaining medical beauty customers is in the private domain.

The core of private domain building is to reach a value consensus with consumers, so that consumers can feel that the existence of the organization is valuable to them.

The starting point for medical beauty institutions to operate is not to package products and projects, but to manage customers. Build the organization into a warm, emotional, and value-oriented medical beauty expert and good friend around you.

👉Channel acquisition, multi-platform delivery

You can choose medical beauty platforms, vertical platforms, advertising, self-media, kol cooperation and offline promotion. There shouldn’t be too many main customer acquisition channels, usually just one or two. The essence of channel testing is to verify the CAC of the channel, and then obtain the user's retention rate, LTV and other values, from which to screen out channels with room for optimization.

After finding the first few channels for user acquisition, we will immediately carry out channel optimization. Channel testing and channel optimization are often carried out together. The premise of channel optimization is to track and analyze the data of the channel's user acquisition path. The essence of the optimization method is to optimize the funnel of the user acquisition path.

For example, general paid advertising promotion channels. First of all, the selection of advertising creatives is very important. If the selected advertising creatives are very attractive to users, but the advertising creatives do not match the expectations of the product itself, it will easily result in high efficiency in acquiring users and low cost of acquisition, but poor user retention and activity, and extremely poor LTV.

In addition to choosing the right channels, we often encounter the following problems when we are preparing to acquire users:

• The promotion brought in a lot of users, the unit price was very cheap, but the retention rate was too poor, what should we do?
• A group of users have been attracted by the advertising, and the retention rate is very good. The unit price is not high. Should we continue to increase the advertising?
• The user retention rate of a certain channel is very poor and the unit price is very high. Should we stop advertising through this channel immediately?

To answer these questions, we need to judge whether the value brought by these users exceeds the cost of acquiring them. The value here may refer to the user's usage time, or it may refer to the user's activity level, etc., but at the final level of the product we have to consider revenue.

If the benefits gained from users are greater than the costs paid, then we should retain these users even if their retention rate is poor and their acquisition cost is high. On the contrary, we should abandon them even if their retention rate is good and their acquisition cost is low. This involves LTV (the total value contributed by users to the product) and CAC (user acquisition cost) .

👉Low cost old and new

Many enterprise micro-SCRMs can provide one-stop group fission activities. Users can share posters. When enough people scan the QR code on the poster and follow it, the user can get corresponding rewards. Through low-priced popular projects, users are driven to continuously attract new leads.

👉 Case studies stimulate interest

Through the three channels of private chat, group chat and corporate WeChat Moments, the user's interest is aroused, thus playing the role of planting grass.

• Group SOP : used for community operation, posting messages in the group regularly, and interacting with group members. It is suitable for activities such as checking in on products and recording daily changes in medical beauty projects.
• New Friend SOP : Applicable to newly added friends, suitable for promoting products to new friends in the early stage of adding friends, regularly pushing medical beauty knowledge to them, etc.
• Timed reminder SOP : Applicable to the eve of the flash sale and the middle stage of the event, to remind users of the discount strength of the flash sale and create a sense of tension.

👉User stratification, sop follow-up

The precise users of medical beauty tend to be professional white-collar workers. Therefore, user operations should be tilted towards this type of users as much as possible, focusing on the professional white-collar segment, avoiding excessive investment in non-main users, and creating a unique competitive advantage for the company with the least financial investment.

When following up on sop, you can pay attention to the following points:

• Play the rational card (experts, technology, success rate, satisfaction, etc.)
• Focus on packaging aesthetic designers and expert images to make customers feel deep trust and desire to make deals.
• To interact with customers and build stickiness, starting from customer interests is a good way.
• A large proportion of customers choose plastic surgery due to emotional needs. Use storytelling, case studies and other methods to resonate with customers.

👉Post-operative follow-up and Q&A

As long as you do medical beauty, there will be side effects and a recovery period. It’s just a matter of whether the side effects are mild or severe, and whether the recovery period is short or long, which can be as short as 1 hour or as long as 1 month.

Medical cosmetic treatments usually use a “destruction followed by reconstruction” approach to achieve skin renewal, scar removal, freckle removal or wrinkle removal. As a result, the skin’s surface will be damaged, which is when the skin is most vulnerable. Therefore, after-surgery care is really important. It is necessary to follow up with customers in a timely manner after surgery, and prepare complete scripts to answer questions, such as those on moisturizing, repairing, and sun protection, as well as recommending skin care products with anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, and other redness-reducing, soothing, and repairing effects.

Careful and patient postoperative follow-up and answering of questions will help win customers' praise and reputation.

👉Recommendations from loyal users

The foundation of the private domain is sticky traffic , and it is very suitable for old customers to bring in new users, because old customers bring in new users by using sticky users.

Private domain old customers bringing in new customers does not mean fission. Fission is just a means in the system of old customers bringing in new customers. There are two key points in the private domain old-to-new system: content implantation and sharing mechanism, and retaining users to guide and invite new users .

Content embedding sharing mechanism: Embedding a sharing mechanism in the content delivery process can bring in more stable and high-quality traffic. So, what sharing mechanisms are suitable for implementing private domains to help old customers bring in new customers? There are three main types: check-in, group buying and distribution.

Retain users and invite new ones: formulate long-term operation plans to maintain the activity of existing traffic pools (existing traffic pools are traffic pools after fission and after the end of services), and design fission activities for different types of customers with more precise pain points and stronger potential, as a means of activation of "creating new traffic based on old traffic" (turning existing traffic pools into starting pools for new fission activities).

The tools for fission activities can be Qianliao’s task invitation card (set the task of inviting friends in advance, and students can receive rewards after completing the task), and the sharing link. Under the influence of the "psychology of getting a bargain", old customers post to Moments, WeChat groups, and even private messages to attract friends to help. The process of assistance is to attract new customers, accumulate an effective user pool, and provide volume for sales conversion.

After the old user completes the invitation and the new user completes the assistance, it is necessary to complete the conversion of the new user into a registered user (registered user). The conversion method is very simple. After following the official account, a message queue is pushed to new users . Free projects are used as bait to guide new users to sign up, and then they are guided to add personal accounts to achieve a closed loop.

2. Online science classes

Although information is exploding nowadays, there is not much professional content. Every medical beauty institution should hold relevant "knowledge classes" for each project to popularize and educate those seeking beauty. However, nowadays, consultants in institutions usually inform clients directly, and are unable to educate public domain clients in batches.

Knowledge is an additional value-added service that consultants provide, and content education is an indispensable part of future organizations. Medical beauty institutions should play a leading role in "beauty education". The output of these professional contents can attract more attention from those seeking beauty and ultimately achieve the effect of closing deals.

In the early stage, there are many cases of operation, and the popular science knowledge about beauty (pictures, texts, videos) can be deposited on the official account; in the later stage, when the content is saturated enough, it can be deposited in the self-built online classroom.

The content of the beauty knowledge class can be planned from multiple scenarios such as project popularization, expert sharing, face-to-face consultation and answering questions, and postoperative care .

• Project knowledge: You can classify it into major categories such as "Plastic Surgery and Beauty", "Photoelectric Beauty and Micro-plastic Surgery" according to the "Project Topic", and then subdivide it according to the body parts.
• Expert sharing: Inviting external experts and KOLs to share their experiences is a complete chain of operations and customer acquisition. The positioning of knowledge popularization is not limited to "medical beauty", but can be expanded to comprehensive medical care and health.
• Face-to-face consultation and answering questions: It also requires soft facilitation, such as "education before expert consultation".
• Postoperative care: Postoperative education is also indispensable, such as after the operation: what to eat and do, how to care on the first day, the second day, and the third day, try to make a tutorial.

Through classroom attendance data, organizations are driven to optimize business decisions. For example, Qianliao can help you track and monitor various training data and user data, making customer management no longer difficult. All student behaviors (participation in various courses, study time, etc.) can be obtained.

For institutions, they can clearly track the effect of lectures, and through the data they can divide users' needs and preferences for each project. These are meaningful data references for subsequent delivery and node activities. In addition, you can hold public welfare lectures + form collection to accumulate potential customers, and then convert them into orders through multiple methods such as SMS, telemarketing, and private domains.

3. Management: Team building and establishing an internal university

For a successful medical beauty institution, having a skilled doctor is only the first step. More important than having good skills, in addition to attracting and retaining new customers as mentioned above, is the team building of the medical beauty institution.

Team building refers to a series of team optimization behaviors such as structural design and personnel motivation to maximize team performance and output. The purpose of team building is to maximize team performance and output.

Create an internal training system and use online classes to precipitate standardized content, making it convenient for employees/agents to learn anytime and anywhere.

At the same time, the training courses are standardized and systematized. By building a series of courses and classifying courses, the course themes are made more intuitive and clear, and the courses can be managed more efficiently.

In addition, you can also use Qianliao Knowledge Mall to repost courses on related skills with one click, enrich your own training content system, supplement relevant business skills, and enhance the team's comprehensive business capabilities.

IV. Conclusion

Whether it is an emerging industry or a traditional industry, online or offline, it is essentially about managing customer value. Simple transaction relationships are rapidly evolving towards co-creation of value. Without recognition and trust based on the institutional brand, customers will not choose you.

Organizations that can do business well combine products, services, tools, scenarios, brands and other elements to form a complete system for tapping into user value.

Through "consultant IP incubation + private domain refined operation + online classroom establishment", by outputting professional content, we continue to provide customers with professional and warm services. The three major difficulties of medical beauty institutions, "difficulty in customer acquisition, retention, and management", will naturally be solved.

Author: Xiaobing who loves to study

Source: Little Cake by Love Research