Why Your Practice Needs a Veterinary Clinic Marketing Plan
Digital marketing is a constantly evolving landscape. Mastering the flow in data, trends, and technology is essential in maintaining an effective marketing plan to keep your veterinary practice a cut above the rest. Now, more than ever, it’s important to keep your marketing ideas current and on a platform where you can take advantage of the progressive methods of digital marketing.
To stay ahead of the competition, your marketing strategies need to be optimized, and often. As times change, so do the ways you can keep your loyal clients and secure new clients by the same token. Being productive with your veterinary marketing can help you increase revenue and even save the valuable time you could be using in other ways to improve your business. Effective marketing is also flexible marketing. It should be able to work in any medium, especially online.
If you feel ready to start your vet marketing journey, we’ve created a guide on what you need to begin.
What Exactly is a Veterinary Marketing Plan?
A marketing plan for your veterinary practice is a plan of action where you lay out your strategy that will help you achieve a certain business goal. Like all businesses, a veterinary clinic should have a plan. Promoting your clinic’s services involves reaching existing and potential clients alike, keeping your business relevant in the online space with your website and social media, creating an online identity for your clinic, and learning what tools you can use to further your marketing efficacy.
Your vet clinic’s plan should involve several steps, starting with securing online accounts on platforms like Google and social media sites to establish your digital presence. Continue with newsletters, blog posts, and stay updated with the latest trends in online marketing to maximize your reach to pet owners. It doesn’t stop at just social media though- there are many steps to achieving effective veterinary marketing.
Read On: How to Create a Successful Veterinary Newsletter
The Benefits of Creating a Solid Marketing Strategy for Your Clinic
There are quite a few benefits to establishing and executing marketing strategies for your veterinary practice. Good veterinary marketing allows you to reap the benefits, constantly and steadily.
- You can have more time for other things to help your clinic grow, like nurturing your relationship with your clients through content creation and distribution ( pet health newsletters, email campaigns for monthly specials such as 20 percent off your pet’s next wellness check, social media, or blog posts about general animal care), optimizing your business, etc.
- Being able to focus on online advertising on search engines like Google and increase traffic to your website through these pay-per-click ads
- You can reach a much wider net of potential clients and strengthen your relationship with existing clients
- Maximize your revenue and get back what you invested in advertising your practice
- Having a flexible plan means you can always adapt your practice to the needs of the market and trends in business
Applying an actionable plan will help you enjoy these benefits and even more down the road, as well as keeping your clinic running and pet owners happy!
Learn More: Quick & Simple Vet Social Media Marketing Tactics
Measuring Your Growth Through Goals
Applying your veterinary marketing ideas and seeing changes in your business can take time. But seeing the results of those strategies makes it all the more rewarding. There are a few tangible ways of measuring the efficacy of your marketing design.
Setting a Goal for Increased Sales
One of the most conventional ways to see if your strategy is working is to observe your sales and transactions. Do you see an increase in profit for your vet services or products? If you do, it’s a good sign that your strategy is working. If not, it might be time to adjust your plan.
See a Reduction in Business Expenses
Optimizing your practice and its advertising should help you to see less spending on your business overall and gaining a larger profit margin. Your business expenses take up a large amount of monthly dues, and if you start to see a larger profit over expenses, then you’ll know your strategies are a success.
Ramping Up Your Productivity
Being able to see an increase in productivity is a typical goal for a business, but a good one. Are you seeing more booked appointments for wellness exams? Receiving more phone calls about your veterinary services? Performing more surgical procedures? The increase in productivity is a great way to gauge the effectiveness of your strategies.
Read On: 10 Veterinary Marketing Ideas You Have to Try
Claim Your Google My Business Account
Start by establishing a Google My Business (GMB) account for free. A Google My Business account helps your clinic appear in search results when online. It’s a free service that can be used by both small and big businesses where users can see your online reviews, photos of and at your veterinary clinic, address, phone number, hours of operation, and website.
In the competitive business of treating someone’s beloved pet, it can be invaluable. Pet owners tend to be very selective about who they allow to care for their pets and they will favor the veterinary clinic that appears at the top of the search engines with a GMB profile.
Learn More: How to Claim Your Google My Business Listing
How Does a Google My Business Account Help?
Having an online presence is nothing if you don’t show up in a Google search. Most businesses are now completely digital. All your potential clients and future opportunities are searching online. If someone needs your vet services, typically the first thing they will do is pull up a search engine and look up a service or relevant keywords.
Signing up for a GMB account helps you show up in those search engines. It supports your practice and its search engine optimization (SEO) through Google. It’s important to use services like Google My Business account Google is the default search engine for most people.
Read On: How to Optimize Your Google My Business Listing
Make Sure All Your Information is Correct
Before anything else, ensure that all your relevant information- like your opening and closing hours, address, and contact information is accurate. Inconsistencies and errors will mean a loss in potential clients. If someone cannot find where your veterinary clinic is, then that’s a new client pet you may lose to a competitor that had updated information available online.
Create a Content Creation Calendar
A content calendar is a shareable resource that you can use with your staff to plot all of your content activity to boost your online presence. Using a content calendar will help you visualize your content distribution over a certain period. A calendar-based format is easier to use than a list format as well.
Creating a content calendar from scratch is not too difficult, but it can understandably feel overwhelming to start. To start, you can consider the benefits of setting up a content calendar.
Getting a Macro View of Your Content Plan
Knowing exactly what you plan to include in your future content can help your team keep track of everyone’s contributions and prevent any accidental doubling up or repeats. It can also help you spot gaps in your content.
Alignment Across Staff
Everyone can easily stay in the loop with a content calendar so you can expect all of your staff to know exactly what is being added and to be able to prepare for it accordingly.
Set Goals for Your Content
Having your content plans laid out in a visual format will help you see at which points to set milestones for your practice and for your marketing. It can be anything from reaching a certain number of engagements or followers on social media or starting new forms of content like videos or live broadcasts.
Learn More: Veterinary Video Marketing Ideas for Your Practice
Proper Scheduling
Knowing when you plan to release specific content will help you plan for it as best as you can. You can have your content optimized ready to publish without accounting for delay or a misstep in scheduling.
Email Marketing Calendar
Email marketing is all about staying consistent and keeping your messaging the same across the board in order to stay in touch with your target audience, which is pet owners.
Keeping your emails scheduled and optimized for delivery to meet these same expectations requires an email marketing calendar. This is an essential part of social media marketing, which can help you organize and schedule both your content and stay on track with your goal delivery times.
Learn More: Boost Client Retention Using Email Marketing for Veterinarians
How Can an Email Marketing Calendar Help You?
An email marketing calendar can help you optimize your delivery schedule as well as organize your content for a well-scheduled release to your veterinary practice’s new clients and existing ones. You can keep track of your send list and know which of your clients are staying updated with all things about your veterinary practice.
Lastly, planning your emails ahead of time is a surefire way to help your marketing succeed.
What Can You Send Out to Your Current Clients?
You might be wondering, what information might pet owners want to receive in their inboxes? Here are a few ideas:
- Pet care tips
- Home grooming guides
- Informative health videos about common pet diseases
- Events and seminars your veterinary practice is hosting or promoting
- Promotional offers or special prices
- Accomplishments and awards
- Important updates about your practice, like changes in the contact information
- Various resources, PDFs, eBooks, etc.
Measuring Your Success
How can you track the success of these new vet marketing ideas? While there are ways like creating tangible goals for you and your employees to track, you can also utilize tools like Moz. It is an optimization tool that provides several services including keyword research, rank tracking, site crawl, on-page optimization, link research, and custom reports. Using these functions can help you find suggestions on how to improve your search engine optimization and help you stay on top of your competition.
Moz helps you measure goals in a number of ways. It can help set up geo-specific localized rankings, where you can see where your site’s visitors come from. Moz also has tools to help you track the number of organic visits to your site. To find out more, visit their website at Moz.com and see the results for yourself.
Let VetMatrix Help You Create The Perfect Marketing Strategy for Your Practice
Now that you know all the steps to achieve effective vet marketing, you’re ready to get started. 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 core. Contact us on our website and get started today.
