YourBreast is comprised of the surgeons from the Melbourne Institute of Plastic Surgery (M.I.P.S.), led by pioneering plastic surgeon, Dr Graeme Southwick. With over 70 years of combined experience in plastic and reconstructive surgery, and with two locations in Melbourne, M.I.P.S. wanted to create a new brand from scratch that would resonate with a younger, more price-conscious group of women that had eluded them in the past. So they contacted us to help them build YourBreast, a distinct and separate brand that leverages the precision of social media to find, engage, and convert a narrowly defined audience of 18-24 year old women seeking breast surgery.
Over 15,000 Australians travel to Thailand every year for discounted plastic surgery. But a growing number of them are returning with serious infections, asymmetry, and botched results. Of that group, the most vulnerable demographic is the 18-24 year old women seeking breast surgery. Armed with little disposable income, misinformation about ethical plastic surgery, and a youthful zeal for enhancing their breasts, unqualified surgeons have welcomed their naivety with open arms.
Motivated by their conviction to offer the highest standards of plastic surgery at affordable prices, and by their desire to offer medical tourists a safer alternative, the team at M.I.P.S. knew they were uniquely qualified to exceed the needs of these vulnerable patients. What they didn’t know was how to reach them in an authentic way.
So our first step was to build a unique brand identity and website that would not only resonate with young women’s interests and needs in an authentic way, but that would also function as the marketing infrastructure for our entire social campaign.
Next, we would have to choose a social channel for attracting new patients that also hosted the largest and most engaged group of 18-24 year old women in Australia. More importantly, because our social strategy relied heavily on the precision of social media advertising to reach our audience, it was important that we worked with platforms that offered granular targeting options so we could tailor our message to a hyper-specific group of women who were ready to buy.
The vision for what would become YourBreast started as an idea, like all successful visions. But that idea didn’t come with a name, a voice, a message, or an identity. So after we gained a thorough understanding of the interests, desires, pain points, and social preferences of our target audience, our first step was to create an identity that supported those characteristics and attributes, starting with a name.
We chose YourBreast for two reasons: first, we wanted to promote autonomy from the first impression-your body, your choice; second, the name typified everything M.I.P.S. hoped to empower in young women, namely strength, confidence, and individuality.
But a name is just a name.
So we supported the name with bold colors, strong typography, a simple logo, and alluring imagery that resonated specifically with young women. To emphasize the marriage of affordability and quality for our price-conscious audience, we anchored our messaging with price transparency, education of standards and accreditation, and proven case studies from real patients.
Our audience goal aimed for quality, not quantity. Rather than add 150K followers from around the world (most of whom would never become patients), we chose to stay small and build an audience comprised of local Melbourne women- one person at a time. And we chose Instagram as our primary social channel because that’s where our target patient frequented most.
Since we wanted to create a close community that advocated authenticity, transparency, participation, and inspiration, and let the surgeons work do the talking for them, we built our organic audience using inspirational posts and before and after case studies, and we championed high standards and YourBreast’s ethos of individuality and confidence.
Then, we caught serendipity on a whim when a few courageous patients took it upon themselves to start a branded campaign on behalf of YourBreast: #BabesofYB.
We started with zero Instagram followers. Today, YourBreast has a modest yet influential Instagram following of 2,700 loyal patients and prospects, and has a conversion rate of 4.5% from organic (non-paid) Instagram visitors.
Since building a quality Instagram following comprised of actual prospects requires a long-term investment, we relied on social media ads to help YourBreast promote their message immediately.
With the precision of Instagram advertising, not only could we confidently predict ad spend and traffic volume, but we could also measure our return on investment down to the dollar.
So we put together a two-pronged ad strategy using lead ads and remarketing ads (example campaigns below) that would both attract a new audience and re-engage website visitors that didn’t convert on their first visit.
As a result of our initial success building an audience of loyal followers on Instagram, and with our continued success using Instagram and Facebook lead ads and remarketing ads, we’ve since added Google PPC advertising to the marketing mix. When M.I.P.S. first came to us, they were performing approximately 100 breast procedures a year. Two years after launching YourBreast, with a heavy focus on social and the recent addition of Google paid advertising, they now perform over 500 breast procedures a year with a projected 800 breast procedures in the coming 12 months. With a total marketing spend of $12,000/month, and with an estimated 800 procedures in the coming 12 months, in 2018 YourBreast will generate an estimated $5.6M in gross revenue with a return on investment of $5,452,000.
