Veterinary Marketing: 5 Easy Ways To Start Promoting Your Practice

Working in a veterinary practice, you may often struggle to find time to promote your services due to your high workload. With that said, veterinary marketing may be of little concern to you. However, between 70 and 80% of people will research a small business online before visiting it in person.

This suggests that by not marketing your services and making yourselves available online, you’re missing out on attracting new clients. This is further supported by Search Engine Land, whose research states that 75% of small & medium-sized businesses convey that online marketing effectively attracts new clients.

Acquiring new clients isn’t the only advantage of marketing your practice services; there are more, such as: 

• Receiving feedback on new services
• Increasing brand awareness
• Saving money

 All of the above eventually lead to revenue expansion and practice growth.

So how do you get started? In this blog, we’ve given you five easy ways that you can use to start marketing your veterinary services right away.

Table of contents

1. Create a Monthly Newsletter
2. Share on Social Media Consistently
3. Optimize Your Site for Search Engines
4. Start Creating Content
5. Turn Employees Into Brand Ambassadors

Create a Monthly Newsletter

Email, along with SMS, is by far the best channel in terms of reaching a mass audience with any promotional material that you may have around your practice and its services. An easy way to put your email list to work is to create a monthly newsletter. It can be a roundup of events, practice news, special offers, or merely a pet care tips collection. Either way, it’s a great way to keep your database engaged and your practice front-of-mind with pet owners when they next need to visit the vet.

When it comes to email newsletters, you need to consider two key things: 

• How will you sign up pet owners?
  
  This may be the easiest part for most veterinary practices. When pet owners sign up, you can take their email address and gain their permission to send marketing emails.
  
  Suppose you plan on using your email newsletters to turn leads into new customers. In that case, you can run competitions on social media to generate newsletter sign-ups and then sell to those leads through email. Additionally, you can make it easy to sign up for your email newsletter via your practice website using a form.

Bonus tip: You can create and add sign up forms to your site using providers like SumoMe and OptinMonster

• How will you design and send the emails?
  
  When it comes to designing and sending emails, you ideally want to use HTML formatting to make it eye-catching for your audience. This requires creating the email template. Not to fear, there are easy-to-use email marketing tools that make this process simple through drag-and-drop editors. Such tools include MailChimp, Sendgrid, and ActiveCampaign. MailChimp has a free plan that includes 2,000 contacts.

Consistency is vital in email marketing; typically, a monthly email newsletter works for veterinary practices. Research by Nielsen Norman Group states that 90% of survey respondents chose to receive company updates via email newsletters, and only 10% voted to receive updates via Facebook.

If you are to build a positive relationship with your subscribers, you need to send emails when they expect you to. Your practice updates need to include content that won’t shock or bore pet owners to the point of disengagement or the dreaded “unsubscribe”.

Share on Social Media Consistently

Social media offers an outstanding way for your veterinary practice to grow online. According to Hubspot, 92% of all marketers specified that their social media efforts had increased exposure for their organizations. Also, 80% of marketers suggested that their social media initiatives increased website traffic. With these figures, the benefits of social media marketing can no longer be ignored.

Kickstart your social media plans by setting clear goals and objectives for each platform. Knowing what you want to achieve with your social media campaigns is critical. Your objective could be increasing brand awareness, generating newsletter subscribers, or booking more appointments online for your practice.

At the planning stage, ask yourself questions like:

• Why is my practice using this social media platform?
• Who will engage in this social media platform?
• What types of posts are most suitable for this social media platform?
• How am I going to make my posts unique on this platform?

So how often should you post on your social media platforms? 

Facebook & Instagram – Arguably, the best channels for veterinary practice customers, as they’re the most popular networks. Our clients have observed the best engagement there. Aim to post at least once a day – it might sound like a lot, but even a cute picture of a furry friend will be enough to put a smile on your followers’ faces.

At Vetstoria, we started posting daily on weekdays on our Facebook page, and over a 28-day period saw a 36% increase in followers and an 80% increase in page engagements, compared with the previous 28-day period.

Twitter – Twitter is more akin to a constant newsfeed. Therefore, it requires you to engage and post multiple times daily to gain the full potential. However, we’d still advise taking advantage where possible to share short and snappy updates and adorable photos of pets in practice!

LinkedIn – LinkedIn is a bit of a wildcard for veterinary marketing, not usually seen as a platform for B2C businesses. However, even business people have pets. You will want to keep your posting to a minimum and take a more professional angle with what you post. Still, your customers are also there, so it could be a great channel to generate brand awareness and position your practice as experts in the field.

Optimize Your Site for Search Engines

You have full control over your practice’s website and the content that sits on it like no other platform or channel. But, what is the point of having a website, creating the content, and investing in veterinary marketing initiatives, if they cannot be found by potential customers looking for it?

This is where Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plays a role in improving your website’s ability to be found online by users searching for specific phrases or words. The importance of SEO is made clear through this Invesp infographic showing that 20% of small businesses say the most effective marketing channels for attracting new clients is SEO.

But why is SEO so effective for veterinary marketing?

• SEO targets quality traffic
• Organic traffic from search engines is free
• SEO helps PR
• You can move ahead of the competition 

For your veterinary practice, it’s best to focus on the SEO basics, which can be done Your veterinary practice should focus on the SEO basics, which can be done free of charge and in little time. More advanced, technical SEO requires large amounts of money or expertise and dedicated time. But, you don’t have to invest big yet!

Suppose your website is functioning on a CMS such as WordPress, as the 26.2% of other businesses do. The first step for you is to install an SEO plugin and, of course, configure it.

Bonus tip: Yoast is a great tool for SEO (it even has a free plan) – we use it on the Vetstoria website.

Here are some ways you can improve SEO on your practice’s website: 

1. Produce suitable and quality content on your website that is valuable for the reader
2. Update your content regularly
3. Ensure your website is mobile-friendly
4. Add page titles and meta descriptions that are relevant to your content and potential search queries
5. Add descriptions to your images and videos in the form of alt tags
6. Resize or compress your website images to optimize them – this will speed up your website (a key ranking factor for search engines)
7. Break up your content with header tags

Start Creating Digital Content

When it comes to veterinary marketing (marketing for most industries), content is king. Coming up with an online content strategy requires planning, followed by creation, delivery, and monitoring of content. Any text, images, and videos on your website or social channels can be considered content. Your content must be appropriately structured and easily found to improve your practice’s website’s user experience.

So what are you waiting for? To get started on your content creation journey, here’s what we advise to do:

1. Consider your audience: Does your practice cater to cats and dogs? How old are the pet owners? By knowing your audience and various personas, you’ll understand their challenges and develop content that helps solve them.

2. List the different content types you wish to produce: 
   • Blogs
   • Videos
   • Infographics
   • Brochures
   • How-to guides

3. Decide on a schedule for producing each of the above content types with timeframes

4. Define the internal resources you would require to develop the content and make sure you have them in place.

5. Write down the most suitable topics: 
   • Research the questions and answers on veterinary groups you may be part of or common social media groups. 
   • Find inquiries related to your practice services, make those questions the title of your blog posts, and then address the post’s problems.
   • As mentioned above, consider your audience and their interests or challenges.

6. Continue to produce content regularly: Consistency is vital for engagement and search engines, which may rank you highly for specific terms that your content relates to. This is particularly important with written content.

1. Monitor the performance of content: How much engagement does the content get on social media? How much traffic does it drive to your website? What is the general feedback?  Does it contribute to revenue? These are all questions you should ask.

Bonus tip: Repurpose old content on your website to derive different assets out of it or publish it again. For example, if you have a blog already, you can use the content in it to create an attractive video for additional reach.

Turn Practice Employees into Brand Ambassadors

Any practice needs to market their services just as much as a regular business does. One of the most efficient ways to do so is by ensuring employee happiness across the practice. In turn, you’ll create internal advocates who drive brand recommendations themselves.

As published by Invesp, consumers spend $6 trillion annually, driven by word of mouth marketing, which equates to 13% of consumer sales. They further confirmed that 90% of people mostly trust a brand that has been recommended by a friend, and in most cases, makes the purchase.

How can you increase employee happiness in your practice?

If you were an employee, think of what would motivate you to talk about your practice outside the workplace and recommend the services. I bet being satisfied with the way you’re treated and feeling appreciated is close to the list’s top. Although employee appreciation and acknowledgment seem unimportant when it comes to marketing, you can easily convert employees into brand promoters if taken seriously.

Conclusion

You now know five easy ways to market your veterinary practice and some methods of execution. Now is the time to ask yourself, “where do I start”. A simple to-do list can mean the difference between wasted time and skyrocketing success for you. It is crucial to get started on marketing your veterinary services, as it further expands brand awareness and is a sure-fire way to grow your business.