4 Pawsitively Perfect Marketing Strategies for Your Veterinary Practice

Part of owning a veterinary practice is knowing how to market your business, as well as equipping existing clients with important pet care information while attracting new ones. Staying on top of your marketing plan can have many positive effects on your practice.

For your practice to grow, you need to reach as many pet owners as possible and foster a good relationship with existing clients. 

A marketing plan for your veterinary practice is a documented plan where you lay out a strategy that you want to put in place in order to achieve a certain business goal. 

Marketing your clinic involves keeping your business relevant in the online space, creating an online identity for your clinic, and learning what marketing tools you can use to further your clinic’s growth. Reaching your clients can happen through social media, email newsletters, and maintaining an updated website.

Follow along as we list the veterinary practice marketing strategies you can implement to attract more pet patients.

1. Your Website: The Most Important Marketing Tool You Have

A custom website is the most visible online presence your practice can have. Most marketing tactics are now executed online and not keeping your business up to date with digital marketing can negatively impact your growth. Establishing a solid website is just the beginning of creating an effective marketing plan.

Your veterinary website’s main goal is to allow you to market your clinic on the online sphere, but it also helps to promote your services and increase your credibility. Having a good website can create a connection between you and your clients by providing a visual aid to your practice’s offers, services, and contact information.

Building your online presence should be a huge part of your veterinary marketing efforts. As with any business, creating a reliable and informative website is a good step toward an effective marketing strategy. By creating a website for your veterinary practice, you are creating a brand for yourself, allowing clients to seek out your services, and make informed decisions for themselves.

Learn More: Common Mistakes to Avoid on Your Veterinary Website

What Features Should Your Website Have?

If you have spent some time on the internet, then you might have a good idea of what type of features users look for on a website. Any user will want to find the information they are looking for in the shortest time possible. In short, users will look for an easy to navigate, efficient, eye-catching, and informative website.

Adults can spend an average of up to six hours on the internet, but with the influx of content available on the internet, they are picky with what they choose to spend their time-consuming. You need to catch the attention of users within a few short seconds, which is where figuring out the most essential aspects of webpage design comes in.

These are some of the most common essential features of any website:

Easy to Navigate

Clear, uncluttered navigation with buttons and sliders that do not blend into your background is a must for any business webpage. Calls-to-action, or CTAs, are also non-negotiable for the navigation of your website. CTAs provide actionable directions for users to follow and find what they are looking for. 

A few examples of CTAs that you can include on your site are: 

• Get a complimentary vet office visit
• Schedule an appointment
• Subscribe to our monthly newsletter
• Learn about our services

User Experience and Design

Take care that your design elements do not hinder usability for your clients. The text on your site should be readable and stand out from the background color scheme. If you have a large banner with pets on it, make sure it clearly contrasts with the buttons or text you may have on top of it. Consider the wide range of people that may use your site.

Appealing Visuals

Adding a visual aid to your content is a must. Most users will have their attention held by images, infographics, and videos more than just plain text. You can use stock images of pets or you can photograph some of your own at your practice while you and your staff service your patients. In this regard, vets have the upper hand. 

Links to Social Media Pages

Adding social media links has become a necessity in modern digital marketing. Most of your new clients may be more interested in discovering your business through accounts on social media networks.

Optimized for Different Devices

Most users will browse through platforms outside of desktop computers or laptops. Make sure to create a mobile version of your site for clients using their phones or other handheld devices.

Contact Information

A very important part of a website is your practice’s contact information. New clients cannot reach your clinic without accurate and updated contact information. This is especially critical if you run an emergency veterinary practice.

Those are just some of the basic aspects of effective webpage design. Add more features to your site as you go along: a blog, a page for useful pet care information, tips and tutorials for grooming or pet nutrition, and much more.

2. Get Active and Begin Engaging on Social Media

Social media has become a huge part of digital marketing. Your new clients and existing ones will be on social media, which is by far one of the best ways to stay connected to an audience.

Being active on social sites like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter helps you stay connected to your followers, your clients, and people interested in your services. Most marketing can be done by more conventional means, but social media marketing is unique in that it allows you to interact with your audience even outside of office hours. 

Using social media to market your practice also allows you to share a variety of content. You can choose to share images of pets, informative videos, interesting facts about your veterinary practice, and more.

Fun and Creative Social Media Posts That Will Interest Clients

After learning about social media and how to use it to your advantage to promote your veterinary clinic, you might be wondering exactly what kinds of posts an audience will want to see. Try to add the following:

• Guess the breed game –  Post a type of cat or dog and have your audience guess the breed. People are sure to get some joy out of a simple game on a regular basis.
• Adoption boost posts –  Helping to get a pet adopted is a cause anyone can get behind. As a vet clinic, you should commit to the creed of no animal left behind.
• Viral pet videos –  There is never a shortage of adorable animal videos on the internet. Post them to your social pages to share a bit of joy with your audience.
• Shared content –  It’s not uncommon for social accounts of businesses to share things from other pages with their followers. If you think the information is relevant and will be interesting to your followers, then don’t hesitate to share it.

3. What is Pay Per Click Advertising?

PPC is a digital marketing acronym that stands for pay-per-click. When using a PPC model of advertising, the advertiser will pay a fee every time their placed ads are clicked by users. That means you are essentially buying visits to your site, setting PPC apart from organic ways of gaining traction, like search engine optimization or social media marketing.

Search engine advertising is a great way to expose your practice to more potential clients. Search engine advertising is a service that allows advertisers to buy placements for their ads in search sponsored links, where their ads can appear once a user looks for a related keyword. If you were to search “vet clinic,” a practice that will have paid to appear when this keyword is searched for by a user in their area will show up as part of the top results on a Google search page.

An easy way to dive into pay-per-click advertising is by using Google Ads. This is a pay-per-click service offered by Google that targets specific keywords related to your business and will help it reach the top of the search results. 

This way, you pay every time a user clicks on your ad or interacts with the link to your business. An advantage to this model of marketing is that you get to control how much you spend on your marketing, as well as adjust the keywords you want to associate with your vet clinic.

To get started with PPC, here are a few ideas for ad copy:

• 20% Off Your First Vet Visit at Anderson Pet Hospital
• Free Dental Cleaning on Your First Visit

Read On: 5 of the Best PPC Tips We’ve Ever Heard

4. Increase Interest in Your Vet Content

After getting the fundamentals down, you’ll need to know how to increase interest in the content you are publishing. This is a crucial step in your veterinary marketing plan.

There are several ways to do this: 

• Direct marketing like using social accounts
• Use email to send out a newsletter to your client’s inbox on a set schedule
• Utilize content marketing

Content Marketing: What It Can Do to Help Raise Your Brand Awareness

As digital promotion overtakes the marketing landscape, adapting to newer forms of keeping your clinic in front of clients has become a necessary aspect of marketing your practice. This is where content marketing comes in.

This is a more strategic approach to marketing, which focuses on creating and sending out as much reliable and valuable content to your target audience. This, in turn, should then drive pet owners to your clinic.

It doesn’t just help drive business though, it can help establish brand awareness too. This means more than just your clients and audience recognizing your practice by name. It also determines how the content you put out is understood as a part of your unique online presence. Like anything on the internet, you need to stand out from the rest.

Brand awareness built from distinct content marketing helps create awareness among your customers and sets you above other veterinary clinics.

Where Can You Start?

Brainstorming content ideas for your practice can sometimes be challenging, so here are some ideas to help you get started. Feel free to try and modify or mix and match these ideas.

• Share photos of unusual patients. Not every pet that will visit your practice is a cat or dog. If you ever get a chance to help out a different kind of pet, snap a photo and share it.
• Take videos around your practice and feature a pet or two (with permission from their owner) to show off your clinic services, your staff, and a patient. Give your audience a first-hand look at your best services.
• Create a schedule for live broadcasts through either Facebook or Instagram. You can entertain pet owners’ questions and share pet care tips and relevant information while maintaining a more direct line of communication with your audience.

Work With VetMatrix to Generate the Marketing Results You Want For Your Practice

Now that you’ve learned about the positive impact that effective veterinary marketing ideas can bring your business, let VetMatrix help you reach your goals. We can help you market your practice with an optimized website tailored to your industry, and fully track your website’s performance with several tracking options.

Give us a call today at 800.792.8384 or click here and get started today.