What is LASIK marketing?

I’m about to make LASIK marketing clear for the very first time…

Are you ready for it?

The idea of effective marketing (and digital marketing) is simply generating somebody who’s in a before state and transporting them into an after state that they want to be in.

In the before state, they’re pretty unhappy, frustrated and annoyed. It could be for many reasons, but typically when it comes to LASIK marketing, it’s often because they’re wearing glasses, and they hate them! So, where do we want to take this consumer? To a life where glasses are not a problem, where contact lenses are not a concern. They’re happy; they’re empowered; they’re capable of doing whatever it is that they want. That’s what good marketing efforts and specifically LASIK marketing, can achieve.

What is the journey your patients take from problem to solution and beyond?

Let me give you an overview that’s a bit deeper about how we make that transformation possible. We have what we call a customer value journey, and that customer value journey comprises eight boxes. So, please think about these eight boxes as I’m talking about them now. (The image of the customer value journey is below)

The Customer Value Journey

The Awareness Stage

First of all, you start with awareness. You’ve got to make somebody aware of you, just like in dating, you’ve got to be where the action is. You’ve got to be where the potential patients are. You’re not going to meet anybody by staying in your house and keeping to yourself. So you’ve got to be where your people are. And in LASIK marketing, that is typically found by Google searches, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram. So that’s awareness.

The Engage Stage

I am moving over to engage. That’s the second step. Engagement is about turning a glance into a stare. And engagement is all about blog posts and getting people to stay with you, watching videos on your website, spending some time and getting to know you as a trusted and credible source of information so that they can get to the next stage, which is to subscribe.

The Subscribe Stage

Subscribe as the third box and subscribe is where people make a small commitment, typically leaving their name or email address or phone number, in exchange for a very small piece of value that they can consume within five minutes or less.

Typically that takes the form of a self-test. So now the person is starting to engage with you in such a way where they are trading their contact details for some value, and then you’re following up with them through email or SMS.

The Convert Stage

Next, they go to the convert stage, and the convert stage is similar to, for example, the first date. They’ve signed up now for a first appointment, or they’ve made a phone call, and they’re making a micro commitment to enable you to explain what you do and see whether or not they can benefit from that to see whether or not they can get to that after state that they wanted to get to all along.

The Excite Stage

Then comes the excite state, and the excite state is where you have to offer them great value due to that interaction.

If they experience great value and an incredible feeling of excitement, then they’re more likely to ascend to the next stage, which coincidentally is called ascend.

The Ascend Stage

The ascend stage is where they come in, they visit with you for a consultation, they get an ah-ha moment where they feel like, “Wow, this is exactly what I’m looking for.” And then they go to the next stage, which is they become a patient, you treat them.

The Advocacy Stage

After that, they go to what we call the advocacy stage. And the advocacy stage is where they’re telling everybody about you if you ask them to.

The Promotion Stage

Finally, they go to the promotion stage where you don’t even have to ask them because they’re so happy with their outcome that they’re telling the world without anybody even asking them to do so. So that’s how we go about turning people in their before state into their after state using the customer value journey.

What actionable metrics can you monitor for each stage of the Patient Value Journey?

LASIK marketing is all about metrics.

It’s all about looking at how many people are you attracting at each stage of the customer value journey, the patient value journey. It’s a buying process, and you’re probably tracking metrics for different parts of the journey. Still, you may not have it contextualised within this customer value journey that we’ve been discussing.

So what you want to do is have metrics for the Aware stage. So you’re going to want to know how many people are responding to my paid traffic ads, how many people are responding to my organic SEO efforts and track that.

You’re going to want to have a metric for the Engage stage. So you’re going to want to know how many people are responding to the blog posts that I’m putting up, how many people are going to the next stage and taking me up on my offer to Subscribe, which is to turn into a lead magnet inquiry or somebody who’s taking the next step after the engage stage.

After the subscribe stage, you want to start to look at the convert. So how many people are now taking me up on my offer of a free, usually a free consultation or a paid consultation.

So we want to start looking at these metrics. Every practice is different, and every practice in other countries differs, but we can give you some broad metrics for each of these stages. And it’s something that you can use some of the free tools on our website to find these metrics. And we update these metrics all the time, using data that we get from our clinics worldwide. So, I invite you to take a look at our website and find those free tools so that you can understand how you compete and where you fit in?

But the other metric after the convert stage is you’re probably converting anywhere from, say, for example, up to sort of 50, 60% of people that will take you up on the consultation. Is the consultation, the ascend, how many people are after the excite stage and the consultation stage, how many people are going on to become a patient?

So you’re going to want to be taking anywhere from 60 to 80%, if you’re operating at a world-class level, to convert at that level. And then, we move on to the testimonial phases. So, advocacy and promotion. And so, you want to have a metric for each of those phases. And each clinic is quite different around that area, but those phases, advocacy and promote, are all about your experience and your customer service. So you want to watch those metrics for yourself and improve on those month on month.

If you look at the customer value journey and you break it down, and you give yourself a metric (each clinic we work with have metrics for each of those stages). Then you set yourself a task to improve month on month; you’re setting yourself up for constant optimisation and CANI (constant, never-ending improvement).

And that gets you on the path to becoming a world-class clinic marketing at an efficient level, which generally tends to drop down your cost per acquisition and allows you to get more out of your marketing budget every month.

What tools & tactics can you use to move people through the Patient Value Journey?

So now that you’ve got your metrics in place, and you’ve also got your documented journey, there’s one more step in what we call the growth triad that rounds out the table and puts that extra peg into the whole thing, so that it works.

Now, you need tools, and you need tactics. And tools and tactics are what a lot of marketers get excited about, right? In LASIK marketing, we’ve got lots of options for tools and tactics. We’ve got Facebook ads; we’ve got Google ads, we’ve got self-tests, we’ve got phone calls, we’ve got loads and loads of tools and tactics at our disposal.

We’ve identified roughly about 73 specific tools and tactics that you can use to double your business. And that’s wonderful to know, but here’s the thing.

Most people don’t need to know more about tools and tactics. What they have to do is document their journey, establish those key metrics, and then choose the right tools and tactics that will work for their specific situation, calling out to their specific avatars, so that they can get the achievement on those metrics that they’ve set out.

Which marketing tactic should you use first?

So in this sea of confusion, which we might refer to as 73 potential marketing tools and tactics, which one do you go to first?

Well, here’s the thing. You don’t need to know that. That’s why you have experts.

If you identify and document the journey with an expert, and then you identify the metrics with an expert, you can get good advice on which tools and tactics to do first and foremost that will generate the “best bang for your buck” if you will. And when you have that kind of clarity, you’re able to act.

Because there’s no sense in having the journey and just metrics alone, you got to do something too. And when you’ve got those tools and tactics getting started, then you have something to balance it against.

Consider that as your next step. Then, identify your tools and tactics after you’ve documented your customer journey. And after you’ve figured out what your metrics are indeed going to be.

(NOTE: Want to see how your practice marketing measures up against the best in class? Take this 5-minute quiz to see how you stack up in the 9 areas of practice marketing and get specific tips and advice on how you can improve your weak points and better leverage your strengths).

About the author

LiveseySolar

LiveseySolar’s mission is to double the size of 150 cataract and refractive surgery practices. Using our proven marketing frameworks and deep market knowledge, our customers can predictably and sustainably grow their practices so that they can enjoy a healthy balance between both worlds – a successful private practice and a happy life.

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Meet our Founders

We’re passionate about helping leaders of high-quality, growth-minded practice owners double their practice revenue

Rod Solar

Founder & Scalable Business Advisor

Rod Solar is a co-founder of LiveseySolar and a Scalable Business Advisor / fCMO for our customers. Rod mentors and coaches CEOs/Founders and their leadership teams to double their sales, triple their profits, and achieve their “ideal exit”.

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LiveseySolar completely transformed the way we were approaching this… We’ve gone from having just the dream of having a practice to having a practice up and running with people making inquiries and booking for procedures… It’s extremely pleasing. We feel lucky we connected with LiveseySolar.

— Dr Matthew Russell, MBChB, FRANZCO, specialist ophthalmic surgeon and founder of VSON and OKKO

Laura Livesey

Founder & CEO

Laura Livesey is the co-founder & CEO of LiveseySolar. She has developed powerful refractive surgery marketing systems that increase patient volumes and profits for doctors, clinics, and hospitals, since 1997.

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Rod and Laura know as much about marketing surgery to patients as I know about performing it. They are an expert in the field of laser eye surgery marketing. They know this industry inside out. I believe that they could help many companies in a variety of areas including marketing materials, sales training and marketing support for doctors.

— Prof. Dan Reinstein, MD MA FRSC DABO, founder of the London Vision Clinic, UK