Your Patients Have a Pinterest Board. Do You?

Somewhere on your patient’s phone is probably a photo of someone else’s face. Maybe it’s a celebrity, someone they follow on TikTok, their best friend or even a photo of themselves from six years ago. They might have a literal Pinterest board full of inspiration or 47 screenshots buried somewhere in their camera roll. They may never show you any of it, but those images are already shaping the conversation before they ever walk through your door.

We talk a lot about the patient journey in healthcare marketing. Search, social, website, consultation, appointment. It’s nice and tidy, but I’m not sure that’s where the aesthetic patient journey actually starts.

It probably starts while someone is scrolling Instagram and notices a jawline. Or watching a TikTok about preventative Botox. Or seeing a celebrity suddenly look a little different while the entire internet debates what she did or didn’t have done.

Long before someone Googles “med spa near me,” they’re collecting information about what beauty is supposed to look like. They’re learning treatment names, developing opinions about filler and deciding what looks “done” versus what looks “natural.” By the time they’re ready to choose a provider, they’ve already been marketed to quite a bit.

Just not necessarily by you.

Your competition isn’t just the practice down the street

Aesthetic practices spend a lot of time thinking about their competitors. They look at who ranks above them on Google, who has more followers, who opened a new location and who seems to be running a promotion every other Tuesday.

Those things matter, but there is another kind of competition happening. Your practice is competing with every other voice shaping your patient’s expectations about their appearance. Influencers, celebrities, beauty brands, filters, friends and whatever the algorithm decided to serve them that day are all part of the conversation.

That’s a lot of noise to compete with. Posting another before-and-after probably isn’t going to drown it out.

I don’t think the opportunity is to be louder. It’s to become one of the voices patients actually trust within all that noise.

Have an opinion about what’s trending

Aesthetic trends move FAST.

One minute everyone wants more volume. The next we’re talking about dissolving filler. A treatment becomes the thing everyone suddenly needs and six months later something else has taken its place.

For practices, those trends are an easy source of content. Something is getting attention, so you talk about it too. There’s nothing wrong with that, but simply explaining what’s trending doesn’t tell me much about your practice.

Your provider’s perspective does.

Maybe there’s a treatment getting a ton of attention that your providers think is fantastic for a very specific patient and completely unnecessary for everyone else. Maybe patients keep coming into consultations with the same misconception they picked up online. Maybe there’s something your provider refuses to do even though people regularly ask for it.

That’s the interesting part.

Anyone can tell me what treatment is trending. Your provider can tell me what years of actually treating patients have taught them about it.

Please don’t turn every provider into an influencer

I think healthcare marketing has developed a slight obsession with putting providers in front of cameras.

And yes, I get it. Aesthetic care is incredibly personal. Patients want to see and hear from the person who may eventually treat them. That doesn’t mean every physician or injector needs a ring light and a trending audio.

Some providers are naturally great on camera. Some are funny. Some are quiet. Some could talk for an hour about one tiny detail of their specialty because they completely nerd out about it. That’s good. Use that.

The goal shouldn’t be to manufacture a content personality for a provider. It should be to figure out what’s already interesting about them and give people access to it.

A provider talking about why they told a patient “no” can tell me more about their philosophy than ten polished treatment videos. The same goes for explaining why a technically perfect result may not be the right result for a particular patient, or why they disagree with an aesthetic trend everyone else seems to love.

That experience and perspective is incredibly difficult for another practice to copy.

Educational content can do more than educate me about Botox

There will always be a place for answering the basics. People want to know how long filler lasts, what recovery looks like after a laser treatment and what they can expect from their first appointment.

But patients can also Google those things.

A practice has an opportunity to go one step further and teach people how to think about aesthetics, not just how a treatment works.

Help someone understand why the treatment their friend loves might not make sense for them. Talk about what a good consultation should actually feel like. Explain how you evaluate a new trend before bringing it into your practice. Show patients how you think about balance, aging, proportion or whatever guides your particular approach.

Now the content isn’t just educating someone about something you sell. It’s helping them make a better decision.

And that builds a very different kind of trust.

Back to the Pinterest board

No, I don’t actually think every aesthetic practice needs to make a Pinterest board.

What I do think is worth understanding is what’s on your patient’s version of one. There is an entire world shaping their expectations before they ever sit down for a consultation, and your marketing is entering a conversation that has already been going on for quite some time.

Aesthetic practices have an opportunity to be more than another source of treatment information. They can help translate what’s happening online into what’s actually appropriate for the person sitting in the chair.

So the next time a patient pulls out their phone during a consultation and starts telling you about something they saw on TikTok, pay attention.

They may have just handed you your next piece of content.