Whether you’re just starting out in your practice or a veteran to the business, you have spent many years, countless hours and hard earned dollars to get the education and licensing to be able to do what you do today!
Having said this, it’s extremely important to protect your veterinary practice. If you’re not keeping up with your marketing at all levels of your funnel, you could be losing business and damaging your reputation.
The competition is fierce … How loyal are your clients?
There are many reasons why a pet owner might choose to use another vet clinic. Based on what our veterinary practices have reported to us, here are the top reasons they’ve lost a client:
– they couldn’t be found on the first page of Google
– the competition was slightly cheaper
– the competition contacted them and offered an incentive
– it was an emergency and they couldn’t get a hold of or book in with the clinic on time
The Top 3 Ways To Improve Your Veterinary Practice’s Marketing
1. Improve Your Google Ranking
Where do most pet owners go to find a vet clinic? Google …
Google is the #1 way a client finds you and if you’re not showing up on Google Maps and Organic Searches you need to improve your Google Rank ASAP.
SEO is search engine optimization. Your website, if built properly, houses a lot of important SEO strategies. If you have not been able to implement any of the more sophisticated techniques known as “off-site SEO,” this is the place to start.
The hard way:
You can try to do it yourself through an SEO plugin like Yoast, however this will only open up the back end fields that you need to enter keywords into.
Keyword research is a critical part of SEO and deciding what keywords you’d like to rank for as well as the likelihood your choice of keywords will get you ranked is critical.
Keyword research can be complex and not as easy as some people make it out to be. If your practice is busy enough, the last thing you want to do is pour hours into SEO strategy.
The easy way:
Hire a professional SEO company to do the heavy lifting for you! They should be well versed in what it takes to get ranked in the Google Search Engine and not only that, deliver the ROI you need to grow your business. (We have a great program called Results First SEO®. Give us a call for more information or book in a Discovery Session here: https://calendly.com/gordonvanwechel)
2. Improve Your Online Reputation
Your online reputation is extremely important especially when it comes to veterinarian practice.
One of the first things a pet owner will do before bringing their beloved furbaby to the vet is conduct an online search paying attention to how that clinic ranks.
You’ll find the most reviews on Google and Facebook. These two channels should be your primary focus. If you have any bad reviews, it could dramatically hurt your business depending on what is being said.
The key is to stay on top of negative reviews, do your best to make things right, and encourage new reviews strategically when you follow up with your pet clients and their owners.
3. Improve Your Social Media
Your social media channels can be a great way to reach your clients and potential clients while becoming the go-to, top-of-mind veterinary practice for your region.
If you have social media but are doing nothing with it, you’re hurting yourself by not taking advantage of this mostly free marketing method.
Social Media has come a long way since its origin. You can use it to build brand awareness, communicate with your patients and redirect some of those phone calls and emails, share helpful information regarding pets and their health, create and share events, and put out ads (including retargeting ads) with audience targeting and analytics that can track your ROI like no other.
There are many ways to improve your Social Media but here’s a few suggestions to get you started using Facebook as an example:
– make sure that your information is accurate, your about section is filled out properly, and your Page Cover is compelling with polished imagery
– set up your messenger to receive messages and if you don’t have anyone to manage the inquiries as they come in, set up an auto response that fields any contact over to a phone number, your website, or email that gets answered more frequently
– create a social media calendar and post regularly utilizing keywords and hashtags as much as possible
– have someone on your staff (reception would be a great suggestion) stay on top of alerts and field any comments, reviews, etc
– be informative … if you have a blog share your post to your social media pages
How does your veterinary practice hold up?
After reviewing this article, are there areas in your business that need improvement? Let us help! We’ve been doing this for over 18 years and have numerous testimonials plus case studies that demonstrate a proven track record in what we do.
Contact us today at 1-877-978-2110 or, if you are ready to take that step to grow your practice now, get on a Discovery Call with one of our specialists here: https://calendly.com/gordonvanwechel/45min
Trackbacks/Pingbacks