The Beginner’s Guide to Digital Marketing for Veterinarians

The internet has pushed veterinarians to reevaluate how to promote their services and businesses in a new market. Digital marketing may sound intimidating for anyone who isn’t particularly tech-savvy or familiar with where to begin.

So, when it comes to digital marketing for pet companies or veterinary practices, you’ll need to employ some of the latest marketing tactics. Examples of these are search engine optimization (SEO), blogging, buying PPC advertisements, email marketing, and social media marketing. These are all great ways to be able to reach and connect with your clients online. 

To be successful in veterinary digital marketing, you must meet your potential customers where they are – online. Veterinary services are essential to pet owners and animal lovers of all kinds. Having quick access or being able to contact your vet or their clinic easily is very important and being online is a great way of doing this. 

Digital marketing for veterinarians can be helpful in building an online presence that connects you with pet owners looking for a veterinarian, while also generating more revenue for your business. The opportunity to meet new clients, reconnect with older ones, and maintain good relations with your current ones can all be done online.

Here are some of the basic aspects of digital marketing and how you can start using them to use them to help your practice grow online:

Why You Should Try Pay-Per-Click Ads For Your Veterinary Marketing Strategy

When starting out, you have to remember that reaching your business’s target audience, which is the pet owners in your area seeking your services, is the most important way to maximize your money investment. Pay-per-click ads are some of the most efficient types of veterinary ads you can use to begin your digital marketing journey.

So, What are Pay-Per-Click Ads?

PPC (pay-per-click) advertising is a kind of digital marketing where you pay to have your veterinary practice appear at the top of different search engines in front of pet owners searching for your services. For example, your advertisements will include veterinary keywords that will make them appear when people search for pet care services on Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

How Do They Work?

The most common type of PPC ad is a Search Ad, which lets you to bid on keywords to appear at the top of the search engine results page (above the organic listings). Let’s assume you want our ad to appear at the top of Google’s search results whenever someone searches for “veterinarian near me” within a 5-mile radius of your clinic. 

Pay-per-click ads are a simple way to bring your veterinary practice to the top of Google search results nearly instantly. You can set a budget, and whenever someone clicks on your ad, they are directed to your website. You are then charged a small fee.

How Can PPC Help Your Practice?

You may use PPC digital marketing to promote certain services to clients in your area, whether they’re high-dollar operations or high-revenue procedures. You can create an ad to drive consumers to search for these specific services. If you’re having a slow month or want to advertise to improve your conversion rate, PPC is definitely the best option to go.

PPC is one of the few types of advertising that may yield results almost instantly. Unlike Search Engine Optimization (SEO), you won’t have to wait for your website’s rankings to improve before it appears higher on Google’s list.

PPC combined with a well-thought-out SEO strategy is a great way to help propel your veterinary clinic to the top of Google search results! 

Monitor and Understand Your Practice’s Online Reviews

Nowadays, most people do internet searches for local companies before choosing where to spend their money. This includes looking for a vet or veterinary practice. Have you been more likely to use a business after reading a positive review—or avoided it after reading a negative review?

When it comes to selecting a veterinarian, your prospective customers think exactly the same way.

So, How Important are Online Reviews?

According to research, over 90% of customers read internet reviews, and almost as many use those reviews to make purchasing decisions.

The number one element used to assess a business is a star rating, and 72% of buyers make a purchase decision after reading positive reviews about a product or service. On the other hand, with positive reviews being this influential, negative reviews are just as well. It’s been proven that lower ratings or negative reviews may lower search engine rankings and even diminish a client’s trust in your practice. Understanding the power of user-generated reviews is critical for any veterinary practice looking to improve its online presence.

How Do You Get More Reviews From Patients for Your Practice?

First and foremost, you have to be mindful of how people are going to find your veterinary practice. For example, on your practice’s website, you’ll have the best chance of displaying reviews that prospective clients may find useful. 

You can use this opportunity to showcase your best reviews with a built-in widget to show your website visitors a variety of reviews from happy clients.

In addition, there are other significant review sites, such as Google, Yelp, and Bing, as well as your social pages (like Facebook) that you can link on your homepage. This will make it easy for clients to quickly see what others think about your practice.

Next is to inform your existing happy clients that it’s time to sing their praises digitally by sending them review solicitation requests. For simplicity’s sake, you can start by providing business cards printed with your review site links and your practice’s website. This information can also be printed on customers’ invoices.

How Can Reviews Help Your Practice?

Existing clients can basically advertise your practice online and help you recruit new prospects by writing positive web reviews, it’s the new word-of-mouth of the digital age. A good review leads to a strong online presence for your practice and builds trust with other pet owners in your community.

Companies that use Yelp and are able to raise their rating by one star are able to increase revenue by 5-9% according to Michael Luca, Assistant Professor at Harvard Business School. Yelp, which was founded in 2004, now has over 67 million reviews and 139 million monthly visitors globally.

Start a Blog to Boost Your Online Veterinary SEO Rankings

Although generating unique blog material is time-consuming, it is a very effective digital marketing method for veterinarians. This is your chance to be creative, respond to commonly asked questions, and teach pet owners about medications, procedures, daily pet care, and the life cycles of different animal species. In addition, it will allow you to learn more about your field and provide clients with a place to turn to if they have any online inquiries.

When you decide to create a blog, it’s critical to target a regular publishing schedule (weekly or bi-monthly) for you to stay current in your area and provide your visitors with some consistency.

How to Improve Your Vet SEO Rankings Through Blogs

Using a blog to promote frequent, engaging and relevant material in your digital marketing efforts is an excellent way to improve your search engine ranking. Each piece of content must be centered on a certain keyword or phrase that your clients may be looking for. This digital marketing strategy is crucial to picking smart keywords and where you position them in your written content. Make sure to use your keyword in the H1, slug, and text, but don’t go overloading keywords in your content because search engines will not look kindly upon your content.

Related: Veterinary SEO: How to Improve Your Practice’s Local Ranking On Google

Use Social Media to Start Your Vet Marketing Journey

Social media is a fantastic tool for veterinary digital marketing. It can help you keep in touch with your clients and raise awareness of your practice with pet owners in your area. In addition, around 70 percent of individuals use social media monthly, with some popular sites like Facebook having about 66% of its monthly users logging onto the site daily. This gives you access to a massive potential audience. Simply put, social media is the easiest and most accessible way to start marketing your veterinary practice and make your digital marketing strategies top-notch.

How Can You Start Marketing on Social Media?

There are many social media platforms to choose from, so the sites your current and potential prospects utilize will be a major one. To identify the ideal platforms, try surveying your present clients and analyzing the demographics of each platform’s user population.

You’ll also need to think about the types of content you’d like to share, as different sites support different formats. Facebook, for example, has a wide range of content, Instagram is very visual, and YouTube has videos.

Create a social media digital marketing plan when you’ve decided on your channels. Begin by identifying your objectives, and then devise a strategy for achieving them using social media.

Content Ideas to Consider

There are tons of Veterinary Social Media Posts You Should Try At Your Practice.

For instance, visual social media sites like  YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook are great for veterinarians’ digital marketing efforts. People adore posting pictures of their dogs! They’ll probably enjoy it if you post photographs of their dogs, too! People are more likely to connect with and share your posts if you include photographs of pets who come in for a visit (of course, with their owners’ consent). This helps spread the news about your veterinary clinic.

Because social media is supposed to be “social,” actively connecting with your audience can help you achieve better results. Reply to questions on your posts and messages ass soon and as timely as you can. Include a question in your postings to attract others to interact with you.

You may also run social media ads in conjunction with your digital marketing strategy to reach even more clients, even those who haven’t heard of your practice yet.

It’s Time to Take Action

Digital marketing is a wonderful way to interact with your existing and potential clients, and the fun part is that it’s always changing.

Your veterinary clinic can get an increase in traffic to its website, more interaction on social media platforms, and an influx of prospective patients by maintaining a solid and evolving digital marketing strategy.

Use Email Marketing to Promote Services

Another digital marketing strategy veterinary practices should explore is email marketing. It would help if you maximized your email network by sending updates on your practice, sharing your latest promos, educating people on your various services, and connecting with your audience more.

This digital marketing strategy is instrumental in driving more people to your website. You should share your content via an email newsletter once you publish a blog or new video on social media. Overall, email marketing is vital to strengthen business relationships with current and potential clients.

For example, if your clinic offers a seasonal promo, you should promote it by emailing your network. This digital marketing tactic will increase awareness of your offering. Another stellar example is inviting satisfied clients to post a review online. You should send a thank you email and invitation after they leave your practice.

Perform Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) to Boost Digital Marketing for Veterinarians

While enticing people to explore your veterinary website is crucial, you should also exert effort for these visitors to take particular actions once they’re on your website. In digital marketing for veterinarians, those actions may include scheduling an appointment or signing up for your newsletter.

When a website visitor takes action on your veterinary website, it is called a conversion. Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is essentially the process of improving your website to increase its number of conversions.

How to Optimize Your Website to Drive More Conversions

It would help if you analyzed your website’s usability. The more user-friendly a website is, the likelier a person stays on it longer. Improving your website’s speed, eliminating technical errors, and ensuring it works well on desktop and mobile versions would be best.

Another way you can explore is improving your website copies. Your copies should be easily understood, error-free, and helpful to visitors. This will give people a positive experience upon exploring your veterinary website.

Now and then, you should also test elements on your page. CRO involves testing different changes to your website to see how they affect your practice’s conversion rate. For example, you can make the ‘Call Now’ font slightly bigger to see if it seems more enticing to people.

Claim Your Google My Business Listing

Another digital marketing strategy you should adopt is claiming your listing in online directories. Google My Business appears on both search engine results and Google Maps. When people search for veterinary practices in their local area, they get shown a listing of relevant businesses. Claiming your Google My Business listing ensures all information about your practice is updated.

Aside from claiming your business listing, you should make sure that all information regarding your clinic is accurate. In case there are mistakes, you should correct them immediately. You can also upload compelling photos that position your veterinary practice in the best light.

What’s excellent about this digital marketing strategy is it’s completely free. However, it would be best if you made it a point to update your listings every time there is an update on your business. If you change office hours or have a new telephone number, your listing should reflect these details accordingly.

Let VetMatrix Help You Get The Perfect Marketing Strategy for Your Practice

Now that you know the basic steps to effective vet marketing, you’re ready to get started promoting your practice online. VetMatrix can help you with that. While you focus on your clients and their pet care, we can market your practice with an optimized website tailored to your industry, with the ability to fully track your website’s performance, offer engaging social media posts, and so much more.

Book a consultation or call 888.792.8384 to have VetMatrix help you and your practice gain an edge over your competition.