Online marketing has become an indispensable tool for reaching, educating, and engaging with weight loss patients. Staying at the forefront of digital advancements, while integrating proven principles, is critical to ensure a competitive edge for your weight loss practice.

Now is an exciting time with regards to online marketing trends, tools, and strategies. This has prompted many businesses — especially within the weight loss industry — to search for an easier solution to attract new leads and convert them to established patients. Some practitioners navigate these trends and new technologies on their own, while others outsource their marketing efforts. All too often, both may experience less than stellar results. This can result in frustrations that take a toll on you, your team and your bottom line.

To minimize frustration, it starts with understanding marketing trends and then determining if they are something that can enhance — and possibly simplify — your marketing efforts. After that, strategic planning, consistent action, and metric measurement helps you determine where to go from there.

As we continue through 2023 and venture into the future, there are three particular medical and surgical weight loss marketing trends that can positively impact how you connect with your ideal patients.

Balancing Artificial Intelligence (AI) with Personalized Human Connection

Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all marketing campaigns. You are now able to understand your patients’ preferences, behavior, and weight loss nutrition product purchase patterns at a granular level due to AI-driven personalization. With this data-driven approach and machine learning algorithms, you can create hyper-targeted advertising messages and campaigns that resonate with your patients. This increases engagement, conversion rates and loyalty. In addition, chatbots are also becoming more sophisticated resulting in enhanced customer service and communication through real-time responses and assistance.¹

While AI can possibly ease your workload and scale your business growth, it is essential to also include human intelligence and connection. This is important for a number of reasons. First, human connection provides the capacity to have meaningful personalized interaction and foster trust. This is especially important in health care and particularly in an overcrowded and emotion-driven market such as weight loss. Second, human intelligence is essential for complex decision making that requires ethical and social factors not captured with data alone. Third, human intelligence and connection reassures your patients that their questions, concerns, and feedback are being heard and understood. Fourth, innovation and problem-solving requires creativity and innovation. AI is based on data and is limited when it comes to thinking beyond data in rapidly changing situations. Fifth, relationships are built on human interactions with an understanding of cultural nuances and various communication styles.

Bottom line, while automation creates convenience in so many ways, your patients desire personal connection and guidance when making complex health care decisions. In a world of automation, you can stand out by complementing convenience with personalized empathy and communication.

Implementing Back to the Future Marketing Strategies

Just as change can propel you forward, leveraging successful and timeless online marketing principles can help you and your message resonate with your patients. This improves brand loyalty and overall product and program sales.

In a crowded environment such as weight loss, it is important to remember that the whole purpose of online marketing is to take your prospective and current patients off of social media and bring them into your weight loss practice. While you may begin the conversation online, you want to gather their information and make your ongoing offline conversations meaningful. You want to answer their specific questions, let them know you care, and personally guide them to the next step to becoming an established patient in your practice.

A few of these ‘back to the future’ marketing strategies include:

• Marketing Funnels: Marketing funnels have been around for over 100 years.² They have been around so long because they are very effective. They are a way to increase awareness about you and your practice, help potential patients get to know you and what you offer, determine if you are a good fit for the transformation they desire, and ultimately decide whether they want to purchase your services and products. A marketing funnel generally includes a way for prospective patients to share their personal information so you can continue to communicate. Here are a few examples specific to weight loss practices:
  • Webinar Registration
  • Downloadable Resources Such as E-Books, Guides, Infographics or Recipe Book
  • Free Consult
  • Assessment or Questionnaire Results
  • Website Inquiry
• Personalized Messaging (phone, text, e-mail, audio and video)
• Story Telling Through Online Patient Testimonial Post or Video
• Prompt Person to Person Follow-Up with Interested Patients
• Personalized Thank You Notes

When it is overcrowded in one location (such as online), combining your online efforts with offline conversations is a great way to stand out, build a relationship and grow your practice.

Developing Your Authentic Online Niche Authority

Developing your authentic online niche authority refers to positioning yourself as a trusted expert, thought leader and resource for your current and prospective patients. This is not a form of bragging. Rather, it is a genuine way for you to share your expertise and unique perspectives regarding medical and/or surgical weight loss. In a crowded market, you need to share your unique views, shatter some myths, always provide value and easy to understand information that your patients want and/or need to know. You can accomplish this goal in the following ways:

• Content Creation: Develop valuable content in the format that you enjoy most in short, easy to digest formats. Formats can include written, video, graphic or audio. In fact, you can leverage your efforts by creating a video, transcribing it into a blog and posting both formats on your social media channels and website. Then create graphics to promote your content with a link to your website and a clear call to action such as request a consult, take a quiz, ask a question or get started. The more direct, the better.
• Host a Live or Evergreen Webinar: Online training sessions for weight loss specific information highlighting your view and the products/services you offer is a great way to help potential patients get to know you and take the next step. You can showcase your expertise, answer questions, and provide actionable insights.
• Get on Other People’s Platforms for Added Exposure: It has never been as easy as it is today to host a podcast, be a guest on a podcast, be selected for a local news interview, and publish articles/blogs/columns on current weight loss trends/topics. You can automatically share this on your social media channels and be highlighted/promoted to new audiences through their social media channels.
• Maximize Social Proof Marketing for Added Authority and Authenticity: Social proof marketing demonstrates compelling evidence that your services are effective. It can include showcasing positive online customer reviews or a video testimonial. Even more compelling is user-generated content such as your patients sharing a photo or video on their own social media promoting the transformation they achieved with you and your team.

As you develop your online niche authority, take into consideration that in 2022, internet users spent an average of 19 hours per week watching videos online.³  Videos with closed captions helps increase your reach across all platforms and increases your ability to leverage your created content in many ways to increase your reach.

No doubt, the online marketing landscape is evolving rapidly. If you are able to stay ahead of the curve by embracing these trends, you will be better positioned for success now and well into the future. These trends are reshaping ways to connect with your ideal patients and stand out in a crowded market.

Source(s):

¹ https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesagencycouncil/2023/03/31/5-digital-marketing-trends-to-expect-in-2023/

² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchase_funnel

³ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1292983/weekly-time-spent-us-users-online-activities/