Achieving Your Veterinary Practice’s Goals with Marketing

Do you think about how you can achieve your veterinary business’s goals through targeted marketing? Our friends at Snout School recently asked a question in a private Facebook group (you should join, by the way), and we thought it would be fun to give you examples of what you can do to achieve your goals for all of the options that received votes.

This poll had seven options:

1. Retain current clients
2. Attract new clients
3. Increase sales of a service (laser, dental, etc.)
4. Hire support team member(s)
5. Hire veterinarian(s)
6. Crap…I don’t have a goal. We need a goal?
7. Other

For the purpose of this blog, we’re going to start at number six. YES, it would be best if you had goals in your marketing. Marketing costs time, money, and needs human capital to complete, so you should know why you’re doing it.

Maybe you want to increase the number of new clients to 30 per month. Perhaps you want to book out dental cleanings for the entire month of February. Or maybe you want to showcase your hospital to bring in more applications and hire more people. The point is that these are specific, measurable, attainable/realistic, timely goals that give you a reasonable idea of how you will measure if success is achieved.

Retain veterinary clients through marketing.

Using your website and client communication apps, you’ll be able to create an ecosystem that keeps customers in the know and lets them know about special offers that are specific to their pet’s needs. In our complete veterinary marketing guide for Dental Health Month, we break down all of the ways you can build custom landing pages and messaging right into your website. From there, you can send customized communications through apps like PetDesk to drive them to the landing page and have them convert right there. A study from the e-tailing group found 41% of U.S. consumers buy more from retailers when they receive personalized emails.

Whether it’s dental health month, senior pet wellness, or any other lines of business you are looking to increase, you can have a landing page, banners, and customized messaging promoting it to clients that need those services. In turn, they’ll be happy to know that you care about sending them promotions tailored for their pet.

Attract new veterinary clients with fresh marketing campaigns.

Attracting new clients through marketing efforts is the name of the game, and there are many ways to accomplish this. It’s essential to make sure that your website is modern with great visuals, clients can book appointments online, and that they know you accept new patients. Veterinary marketing isn’t just about billboards and yellow page ads – it’s about creating a community of pet owners that rely on your practice for all their veterinary needs.

Veterinarians need to make sure they aren’t resorting only to traditional means of advertising like television or newspaper ads; these can become expensive and leave the door open for competitors in the area. Veterinary practices need new promotional options such as social media contests and giveaways in which pet parents can spread the word about your clinic and get involved with the community. Plus, a website and social media campaign can be updated daily, while billboards and direct-mail campaigns are locked in after printing.

Think of marketing in veterinary medicine as a pie of equal parts when driving traffic to your business – website, organic search, paid search, social media, word-of-mouth, email marketing, direct mail, and more. Relying on just one or two of these things can help your veterinary business but certainly won’t help you achieve all of your goals.

Should your veterinary business promote special offers like new client specials? The answer is yes! 66% of consumers “made a purchase they weren’t originally planning to make solely based on finding a coupon or discount.”

Increase sales of a service like pet dental care or pet laser treatments.

Many veterinary businesses think posting things like, “we offer laser treatment!” is enough, but it’s not. If you truly want to market something to your clients, make sure they understand the benefits it brings to their pets. Veterinary laser treatments can massively improve pets’ quality of life, but if you’re not highlighting that to your clients, it’s unlikely someone will decide to make the purchase. Proper dental cleaning for your pet can extend their life and protect them from other illnesses that can arise from poor oral care—have you mentioned that in your Dental Health Month marketing? With any marketing campaign, you need to highlight its importance and how it benefits pet owners every single time.

Having custom pages on your website to promote these services, sharing information on how it will impact your pet, and giving people a chance to convert into a paying clients is the best way to increase sales of specialty services.

Hire new veterinary team members with great marketing and a solid careers page.

A custom career page is the foundation of every recruitment marketing strategy. Think of your career page as your company cover letter — you want to use it to differentiate yourself from competitors and showcase your company as a place that future employees will want to work. This is also the place to make applying intuitive and straightforward. That covers the website, but how will you attract new people on social media? Companies like Bond Vet accomplish this through incredible photos and videos, compelling storytelling, and focusing on employee wellness and benefits. Check out their website and social media, they do an excellent job of showing what life is like at their facility for employees and clients, and that’s important. If you are not committed to creating that culture in your clinic and sharing it online, recruiting new team members for your business will be tough.

Something to consider – many businesses inside and outside of veterinary medicine fail at this, so putting in some extra effort can put you way ahead of the competition when it comes to those next few hires. Everyone in veterinary medicine knows how hard it is to hire people, so this is well worth your time.

Final thoughts on reaching your veterinary business goals through marketing.

Marketing is about effort and creativity, period. You have to be willing to put in the time and effort, but you have to work efficiently with that effort. Marketing is also about being creative, working outside of the box, thinking outside of the next customer service “freebie” or what your competition might be thinking. Veterinary clinics are unique businesses, so they need marketing plans designed for them. Your veterinary business goals are only achieved when your marketing plan is full of creativity, ideas, and refinements. WhiskerCloud is here to help you every step of the way.