Designing a social media marketing strategy and platform to expand new customers of Lai Mei Plastic Surgery Hospital in China

Abstract

China's aesthetic medicine industry is in a step of rapidly development compared with the global market, especially since the number of small and medium-sized plastic hospitals has grown rapidly in recent years. Due to the increase of competitors, malicious price war poses great challenges for those hospitals to acquire customers. In addition, the COVID-19 outbreak poses a threat even worse than the cut-throat competition to plastic hospitals. The outbreak of the epidemic and fierce competition makes the plastic surgery hospitals, which mainly acquire customers offline, face great challenges. China's Internet user base is huge and social media use has become a daily habit. Although almost all small and medium-sized plastic hospitals use social media as an important channel to contact customers, few hospitals integrate social media into their existing business activities. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to plan its own social media strategy for those hospitals to acquire more customers through this way, thus reducing their dependence on traditional offline customer acquisition. A qualitative research method was adopted in this study, and six managers from the marketing department of the target company were interviewed. The social media strategyg based on expert interviews is combined with the business model of the target company to explore the update and change of the existing business model brought by the application of social media strategy. The integration of multi business model makes the social media strategy more diver sified. Research has found that the value delivered by social media must match the goals of social media. The value delivered by social media strategy to users also comes from analyzing users’ needs. At the same time, the results also showed the importance of setting clear goals, choosing appropriate social media platforms, and paying more attention to human resources and so on. It also allows the company to focus on certain points when designing social media strategy.