You have done all the required courses, have obtained the necessary licensing, and want more and more pet and cattle owners to arrive at your veterinary clinic/hospital. However, the competition is growing in this field and your dream of growing your veterinary practice will be successful only if you adopt the necessary marketing techniques. This is why we have listed these veterinary marketing ideas so that you can implement them and can see tremendous growth in the number of cases handled by you every month. The methods are:
1) Enrich Your Online Hospital i.e. Website
For any problems related to pets or cattle, most people will start searching for veterinary doctors online. As a website is the locus of all your online marketing strategies, having a website followed by effectively using it will help in growing your veterinary practice. If you are satisfied by having a good-looking website alone, you are leaving money on the table. You can make certain adjustments to your website and can see significant changes in the number of customers you are getting presently. Take note of these adjustments for your website and use them if not present already
a) To secure more visitors into customers, all you need to do is to have an appointment booking option enabled on your website so that you can confirm many new customers right from the interface of your website.
b) Showcase a few examples of how your veterinary service has resolved problems related to pets/cattle etc. To leave a better impact, display before/after photos of the animal.
c) Mention all licensing, accreditations, awards, and achievements you have got to your name. You must also mention media coverage of your business if any.
d) Very few business owners are aware of the fact that site loading time and mobile-device responsiveness of a website can impact the number of visitors. So check both these factors for your website and make it fast-loading and mobile-friendly.
e) Put a video on your site homepage to create a much bigger and better impression of your veterinary practice.
2) Improve Your Site Discovery on Google
One of the largest sources for providing leads/customers to millions of businesses all around the world is organic search engine traffic from Google. Further, only those businesses and services benefit from organic traffic of Google that rank high in Google (on the top 10 results). The secret to a high ranking of a website on Google and all other search engines is the level of “search engine optimization” (SEO) done for your website. If the term “SEO” sounds unfamiliar to you, you can very easily discover 100’s of articles and guides written on this topic online. As many factors need to be taken care of for a good SEO, you can have the SEO done for your website by any expert SEO agency in case you find it hard to manage on your own.
3) Increase Your Customers with Google Business Page
By making a Google Business Profile page (GBP) for your veterinary clinic, your business website, image, phone number, directions, etc can get shown on Google search results within the special listings. However, it is worth noting that creating a GBP is just one requirement and will not guarantee the placement of your GBP page on the local results displayed by Google. To get shown in the local results, you have to carry on optimization of your GBP profile by managing things like reviews, business mentions, etc. You can have this optimization of your GBP delegated to any agency in case you find the process difficult to manage from your side.
4) Send PR and Build Reputation and Traffic
When you send out a press release for your veterinary clinic using a well-syndicated distribution provider, your press release will get posted on hundreds of sites including big and prestigious brands like Yahoo, Associated Press, etc. This big news syndication of your press release will add a big brand value to your business. Other than the branding advantage, the links that you get from such PR distribution will help to improve the backlink profile of your website which will, in turn, aid in ranking your site better in search engines.
5) Run Ads to Get Faster Visibility and Leads
While getting organic search engine traffic is the best thing that can happen for your veterinary practice, the process of getting a site ranked is a time-taking process. On the other hand, running ads for your veterinary practice is a much faster process and you can have your veterinary practice ads shown within 24-48 hours of ad creation. You just have to keep paying for the display of ads to keep getting new leads. The level of your ad optimization skills can have a direct impact on the level of success you see from paid advertising of your veterinary practice. For the best results, stick to reputed ad platforms like Google Ads and Facebook ads. You can learn ad-making and optimization steps using many articles, videos, and podcasts on this topic. Optionally, get ads run through a digital marketing company.
6) Get on LinkedIn for Opening Big Possibilities
LinkedIn is a network to make professional contacts. By having your presence on LinkedIn, you can connect with owners of big dairy owners, animal shelter houses, etc from your city/town. Such connections can land you long-term and big revenue deals. Depending on the kind of engagement you create on LinkedIn, it can take your veterinary practice business revenues to new heights.
7) Utilize Local Talent Through Influencer Marketing
On the major social networks, start searching for big influencers from your region in the pet industry. You can do business deals with these influencers to promote your veterinary practice to their followers. Promotional messages coming through these influencers will carry more weight for their followers and will hence help to get more pet owners to your veterinary practice.
8) Make Use of Catchy Custom Merchandise
Get relevant and low-cost merchandise printed with your business name in bulk quantity and give them for free to your customers. These items can include things like pet collar belts, plastic pet feeding bowls, etc. As these items have some monetary value, people will use them and these items will in turn help in making a connection with your customers along with doing promotion of your veterinary practice.
9) Start Posting Content to Diversify Your Traffic Funnel
The number of posts that keep on growing on your website will accordingly grow the number of visitors to your website. This is why it is important to add more posts routinely on your veterinary practice website. To get visitors relevant to your business, post articles that are locally relevant like “where to get a dog vaccinated in [city/town]”, “best veterinary care for cats in [city/town]”, etc. Having a good number of articles on your website will also help to position your website as an authoritative source on veterinary care.
10) Better Connect Locally with Social Media Promotion
Among the newer generation, it is hard to find people who would not have any social media profiles. This is why the promotion of businesses and services on social media is increasingly being preferred nowadays. The only catch here is that you will not notice any significant benefits from social media marketing of your veterinary practice if you cannot sustain a few months of consistent promotion on these sites. By having a daily routine of creating/sharing new posts, hashtag utilization, group joins and interaction, etc, you can slowly find more followers from your city/town following your profile. After reaching a few thousand followers, your social media profiles can start getting more followers on autopilot without much effort from your end. So stick to social media for a few months to see the difference.
11) Remarket and Convert More Using Email Marketing
Collecting emails of website visitors gives an added advantage of making a long-term link with customers and potential customers. This further helps you in making repeat sales because your business can easily send new offers and announcements anytime to all your email subscribers. The process to collect emails from your website visitors is straightforward, you just have to place an opt-in form provided by your email service provider on your website along with some good offers that can you give in exchange for the email addresses entered by people. Email marketing will help to increase your business revenue by at least 10 to 20 percent.
12) Use Already Established Sources
If you type “veterinary clinics near me”, “veterinary doctors in [city/town]” and similar search terms, you will find that third-party directory listing sites like Yelp do appear within the first page results of Google and other search engines. Listing your veterinary clinic on all such sites will provide you with extra customers every month without having to invest in the ranking of these sites because such big directory sites have already carried out the necessary SEO to rank higher in search engines.
13) Get More Customers Using Video Promotions
On Google search results, apart from the traditional website listings, videos posted on YouTube also rank in many instances. This indicates how you can capture Google search traffic using videos posted on YouTube. Apart from this, YouTube has its own share of direct traffic in billions. Another good thing with videos is that when you post videos on social media, they get much more shares and interaction as compared to text content. With these all benefits of videos, you must definitely start creating and publishing videos on Youtube followed by sharing them on your social media profiles.
14) Get Customers Referred to You
A very simple and old-time marketing for promoting a business/service is by asking your customers to refer your business/service to others. While this process is successful in bringing some additional customers, an upgrade to this method is by handing over coupons/discount offers to your customers so that these coupons/discounts can become a more powerful incentive to bring new customers.
15) Go Beyond Online Marketing
Online marketing is growing by leaps and bounds but the relevance of offline marketing still holds for growing businesses around the globe. To advertise your veterinary clinic offline, you can use methods like using billboard ads, flyers, brochures, vehicle branding, ads in newspapers, etc.
16) Do Maintain Favorable Ratings of Your Practice Online
Health and finance are two such sectors where people take extra caution in dealing with businesses and services. While searching for online reviews before getting a product/service is becoming common, niches like veterinary service command a more pre-review. So to ascertain that people feel your veterinary practice is trustworthy, you must aim to have plenty of good feedback and review about your business online. To get this advantage, ask your customers to leave ratings for your veterinary service or incentivize them to do so.
17) Utilize Special Days and Special Occasions
There are many special days for pets and animals like “International Dog Day”, “International Cat Day”, etc. You can utilize such days with offers and discounts to garner more attention as well as to get new customers. For such days, you can also hold contests on social media where people would share the photos of their pets so as to become eligible for some rewards. Apart from animal days, you can also make use of special occasions like fathers day, independence day, etc.
18) Use Contests to Draw in New Customers
Contests are popular on social media and they gain much engagement. A great thing about contests is that now there are many apps available using which anyone can set the criteria for contests as well as selecting the winner. By using contests as the medium, your veterinary clinic promotion message can reach thousands of profiles which can give you an enormous advantage in getting more customers.
19) Make Your Reach in Local Community
Local events, charities, fairs, etc are a great way to get your veterinary practice known to the local crowd. Some ways to make use of such events, fairs are by booking your stalls at such events/fairs, by sponsoring or co-sponsoring such events, and by getting your marketing leaflets distributed to the attendees in such gatherings.
20) Advertise on the Most Relevant Places
Places like veterinary medical stores, pet supply stores, pet breeding centers, pet selling shops, etc are locations where you can advertise your veterinary practice through banner advertising. You can also distribute custom-printed carry bags to the owners of these centers so that they can give their products using these bags. This way the carry bags with your business name printed on them can advertise your veterinary clinic/hospital to people purchasing products at these places.
21) Host and Sponsor Pet Events
You can host pet events or can sponsor or co-sponsor such events so that a very targeted audience of pet owners can get introduced to your veterinary practice. To announce such pet events, you can put ads in local newspapers regarding the same. You can also distribute free merchandise, with your business name printed on such events, for better promotion of your veterinary clinic.
22) Form Partnership Deals and Collaborations
For every business/service that is related to pets and animals, you can either form a partnership or can offer good rewards for introducing new customers to you. Some of the good partnership entities that can send you quality referrals are pet-selling businesses, pet breeders, dog walkers, pet trainers, veterinary medical supplies, pet supply stores, pet sitters, etc.
23) Support Pets and Animal Related Organizations
Find all the pet and animal-related organizations and charities in your area and introduce your veterinary service to them along with asking them for providing advertising space for your business in their marketing materials. This way you can capitalize on the reach and influence of these organizations to grow your veterinary clinic/hospital.
24) Start Using a Reminder Mechanism for Marketing
Be it reminding pet owners of their next appointment or be it establishing long-term contact with pet owners, you can use an automated email/SMS mechanism to send out emails/SMS on the important dates set automatically. There are many software and applications using which you can get this set up installed for your veterinary practice.
25) Start Utilizing the Power of Local Press
Contact all the leading local newspapers from your city/town and offer free writing on pet-related topics. Since the press welcomes expert write up on various subjects, they can get free expert content and you can get the free privilege of making your veterinary practice known to the readers of these newspapers. This will be a win-win situation for both sides along with providing you with the identity of an expert in pet-related matters.
26) Start Making More Money with Add-on Merchandise
On your website and on your social media profiles, you can additionally sell pet and animal-related merchandise so as to get extra revenue from your customers. You can also hand over discount shopping codes for such merchandise so that they can buy such products from your offline and/or online store.
27) Make Use of Free CheckUps
Announce free basic checkups for pets and animals through your website, social profiles, and newspaper ads. Once people reach with their pets/animals at your clinic/hospital, you can get their contact details (email/mobile number) collected so that you can sell your services to them over and over for a long period of time.
28) Offer Free Pick Up and Delivery Service
By providing the facility of free pick up and drop off of pets and animals, you can incentivize many pet and cattle owners to use your veterinary service. Most people value comfort and they can even pay an extra price for this service.
These veterinary marketing ideas can positively impact the number of cases you are getting every month. If you have more ideas to contribute or if you are stuck/unclear on any point, you can comment below.
