What You Need to Start a New Veterinary Business

Are you a new owner of a startup veterinary practice? Do you need help growing your business? The marketing team at WhiskerCloud has been building custom marketing guides for veterinary startups that put them on the right track for success. Whether you’re a new practice or you’ve just started your own mobile business, having a marketing plan for your services is essential to your growth. WhiskerCloud has curated ten things you need to do to grow your online presence so that you can get ahead of your competitors. The following tips have varying degrees of implementation, but all of these things can be set up immediately if you’re ready to grow your business.

We have partnered with the IAAHPC to help clinics like yours optimize their digital presence, perfect their search engine optimization (SEO), and generate more business. If your digital presence isn’t actively marketing your business to those in need of veterinary care, you are helping send business to your competitors. Marketing plays a massive role in generating revenue and growing clientele. If you don’t develop a marketing strategy (or hire someone to do it for you), your business growth will eventually become stagnant. Below are the exact strategies WhiskerCloud utilizes to provide exceptional results.

It takes works to build a veterinary brand.

Veterinary branding needs to be creative, attractive and authentic in order for you to set yourself apart from competitors. As great as your practice might be, with an excited and driven new staff and a clean and renovated facility, your online presence will be the first thing your potential clients see. Plan ahead with a mission statement, brand colors, a new and modern logo, and a tone of voice that makes you stand out. This is when you begin growing your online presence before a client is able to walk through your doors. If you’re having trouble hiring, a strong brand has a higher chance to attract new employees than a business without a strong online presence.

Budgeting for your marketing needs can be tough for a new business, which is why WhiskerCloud includes branding in their services to make sure your business is unique and personal so that your potential clients know who you are before building a connection with you.

Get started with a custom veterinary website.

Setting up a custom veterinary website is crucial for your practice’s growth. When a potential client comes across your website, they are expecting it to tell your story. To have great credibility, your website should look contemporary and clean, with services, location, hours, contact information, and be able to convert a click to a client within two clicks.

Your website is the main location where your clients can learn who you are, get to know your veterinary team, and easily schedule their next appointment. Create a URL that is easy to recognize, so that current clients remember who you are. Stand out from competitors with spotlight pages for your services, credential pages, digitized forms, and interactive pages that tell your story! Your website will be the first impression for your business, so it’s important to make it the center of your marketing plan. This is the central hub of your business and should be constantly updated with informational blogs, hours, and team members so that your client can trust that you’re a growing business. By being a member of IAAHPC, WhiskerCloud offers you a custom website for 70% off – a price of $300 and your first 60 days free!

Websites can be a hassle to build and expensive through other providers, but WhiskerCloud offers affordable, fast, veterinary-only websites that take the weight off your back. WhiskerCloud knows what your veterinary business needs to be successful. Within a few weeks of signing up with WhiskerCloud, you’ll be looking at your custom-built website.

SEO should be a big part of your veterinary business strategy.

Once you’ve built your new and beautiful website, it’s time to make it seen. Your veterinary SEO plan should begin before you’ve opened your doors. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and is a series of code and processes that helps search engines crawl your website to rank and show up when people search for services you offer. When a potential client is searching for a veterinarian near them, they are most likely not searching past the first page of their Google search results. This means that your new veterinary business should have local SEO as the top priority to your marketing plan, ensuring that you have a list of clients ready to come in before you’ve even opened your doors!

SEO is not something that can be implemented later or added to your existing website. It takes thought and consideration when designing and building a new website. Depending on how it’s done, it will either hurt or help your ranking. To get yourself on track with the best SEO plan, your website must be built with the right metadata, meta descriptions, and relevant keywords. WhiskerCloud uses a special 50-point checklist to be sure that your website is fully optimized for Google with no added cost!

Let social media drive traffic to your business.

Having a presence on social media is the best way to get your brand in front of potential customers. It can help with everything from SEO rankings for search engines to attracting more visitors organically through ads and content shared by your business. A website is a great start to your business, but it must go hand-in-hand with your entire online presence. If you don’t have an online presence on all digital platforms, your business is isolating itself from potential clients. Ninety-five percent of businesses incorporate Facebook and Instagram as a place to promote their brand and bring more conversions to their website.

Stay connected with current clients and potential new ones by continually updating your social media with informational posts, client photos, and updates happening in your business. Your social media platforms give you the chance to share insight into your business and make it a place that your clients want to come back to. Utilizing these spaces will remind your clients to continue using your services every time they engage with a post. Sharing personalized and informational posts can be time-consuming, which is why WhiskerCloud offers complete social media management for veterinary businesses from their team of professionals.

Your custom veterinary website can and should have a blog.

With consistent updates to your website with features like a blog, you will be helping your clients by answering frequently asked questions and building your credibility. Google likes to see that your website is being updated and will continually index your website. With a blog filled with keywords and additional pages and content to your website, you will get better SEO. Blogs are typically about a single topic that someone can be searching for and allow you to strut your stuff and explain your reasoning behind the problem you are trying to solve. When trying to reach your audience with new content, using all potential avenues (Facebook, Instagram, and a blog page) will help you build engagement and get seen.

Not only does a blog page help you build SEO and become searchable on Google, it allows your customers to learn more about your services and drive them back to your business. Maybe you’d like to offer a special discount on teeth cleaning — you would have a post teaching your clients the importance of this service and a call-to-action button for them to book an appointment!

Blogs are tedious work but help provide content across all platforms to engage your clients with your business. WhiskerCloud also creates custom blog pages, and on their Content plan, their team of professionals will create this content for you!

Your veterinary business needs a Google Business profile.

All of your online listings, especially your Google Business listing, should be up to date with your name, address, services, service areas, hours, appointment booking systems, and URL. Google allows you to improve your online rankings by setting these listings up and updating them whenever necessary. This is the time for you to let your new clients leave reviews and support you as you begin your new veterinary business. When someone searches for your business on Google, your listing will appear and become the shortcut to your website and appointment booking platform.

Local SEO is essential for pet businesses, and it’s vital that your online listings are current and in proper working order. This means that the business name, website URL, appointment URL, address, service areas, hours, and services offered are consistent across all online listings. In fact, Google created a page that tells you how to improve your online local rankings, and WhiskerCloud follows all of their rules to help optimize your Google My Business listings.

Your Google My Business profile is a place to list all of your services, online platforms, and stand out as a business. You’re even able to incorporate your DEI plan to your Google listing by adding special attributes to show your customers that you care!

Update your business hours regularly, including when you open and close and special hours for holidays and events. Accurately listed hours let clients know when you’re available and give them confidence that your business will be open when they arrive.

Stay on top of your positive reviews.

Your reviews matter and you should be encouraging your clients to leave them! Having a lot of high-quality reviews from happy customers shows Google that you have authority, expertise, and trust in your industry, making them want to feature your business when someone is looking for the services you offer. Responses to positive reviews are going to show your clients how much you value them and your practice. Potential clients are going to have more trust in going to your business when they see that there is a high volume of reviews. Studies have shown that they are also more likely to come to your business when they see that you have more positive reviews than negative ones and that you are interacting with these reviews online. Communicating with your clients through reviews should be a top priority in your marketing plan!

WhiskerCloud’s veterinary reputation management team oversees hundreds of reviews per day to ensure that fake and spam reviews are getting removed, great reviews are responded to, and everything is customized for your business.

Just starting out? PPC advertising is a solid strategy.

Advertising your veterinary practice is important in order to reach the right clients at just the right time. Through online advertising and targeted marketing, you are able to offer information about what services you provide and how they can benefit people who are searching for them. With a paid advertising strategy, you will boost your visibility online and watch your clientele grow month to month. When investing in Google ads for your veterinary business, you are immediately visible as a top search on Google.

Google ads are pay-per-click, meaning you only pay for the ad when a user clicks on it and visits your site. When you invest money in Google ads, your advertising budget is being used more effectively by only paying for ads that are actually working! This is why it’s important for the company helping you with targeted veterinary ads to focus on high-performing, clickable ads. WhiskerCloud offers advertising for any business, big or small, to help get them noticed and grow their business.

Treat your current and potential customers with specials and offers.

Discounting your services may sound like a pain, but the truth is, it works to attract new customers. As you begin to open, make your clients feel special by offering a free first exam or discount on their first dental cleaning. Incorporating special offers into your marketing plan will help you attract new customers, even if the offer is small. Small actions like this will help build loyalty between your client and your business. So, if you know that a new customer is worth $3,000 over the lifetime of their pet, and you can give away a free first exam or offer half off the first exam, do you feel that the $55 cost per acquisition is worth the $3,000 you’ll get over time? The answer should be yes. The same goes for things like dental cleanings and other big-ticket items. If you typically have 20 dental cleanings booked for Dental Health Month and a 10% discount helps you add 15% more dental cleanings, then you have a winning campaign.

Focus on client retention.

As your business begins to grow, it is important to remain attentive to the clients that continue to come in. Your marketing efforts should be focused on both attracting new clients and caring for your existing clients so they want to keep coming back. When measuring your retention rates, you will know how well your business is doing — which, in turn, will benefit you in the long run!

It’s more expensive to get a new customer than to keep a current customer, and most businesses don’t focus their marketing efforts on existing customers. Suppose you have a strong base of loyal customers for your veterinary business or are slowly growing there. In that case, it’s essential to keep them happy.

As you build your marketing plan, these 10 items should be prioritized to grow your business. As you continue to grow, your customer service and care for your longtime customers should always be your top priority.

WhiskerCloud can help with everything you need to start a new veterinary business!

A strong marketing plan is essential for any veterinary business, so it’s even more crucial for a mobile veterinary business to make it their top priority. A marketing plan will help you reach out to potential clients and make connections, which in turn can increase revenue by attracting new patients who might not otherwise seek treatment at all due to lack of information or accessibility given their location! By having everything offered through your digital presence, current and potential new clients will be able to help drive your traffic and give you the support you need. With no location to walk into, there needs to be a place where your clients can go to communicate and share their interactions with you.

WhiskerCloud is offering IAAHPC members a special discount of 70% off their initial setup fee and their first 60 days free! Learn more about how you can grow your online presence using the link below.