The thought of marketing your veterinary clinic may seem overwhelming, but there are a few simple ways you can start improving your marketing and communications without causing a headache.
There’s an old saying that goes something like this;
Q: How do you eat a whale?
A: In many small bites!
In retrospect, this is not the best adage for veterinarians, but we highly doubt many of you are treating whales on the regular! But the saying stands, especially when applied to the marketing of your veterinary clinic.
The thought of marketing your clinic or drafting regular communications to your clients seems like a mammoth task. And, of course, vets are some of the busiest professionals we know. So, it becomes habitual to do nothing because it feels like an all-or-nothing proposition. You can either throw all your resources and energy at marketing and become exhausted, or you can save yourself some headaches and do nothing, but reap none of the benefits for your business.
It doesn’t have to be all or nothing
But honestly, it doesn’t have to be that way. If you want to start improving your marketing and communications, there are many simple ways to enhance what you’re already doing – and they won’t take up much of your time.
1. Make sure that potential clients can easily contact you on your website
A best practice way to do this is to include your clinic booking link or a phone number in your website’s header. Your phone number should be clickable – this not only makes it easier for users on their phone to contact you (over 60% of website traffic comes from mobiles), but it allows Google to recognise you as a reputable site and helps in getting your website to appear higher when people are searching for a vet. Making a phone number clickable can be as simple as adding tel: in the website code before the phone number. It’s also a good idea to put this in the footer of your website should people browse your site before deciding to call you.
2. Respond to all Google reviews, good or bad.
You may not want to give airtime to people who have left you a cruel review, but engaging with them and encouraging them to contact you via email or phone to resolve their issue will go a long way toward showing the professional nature of your clinic and may help them calm down.
Asking clients for new reviews is also crucial, as good reviews will help boost your ranking on Google and will appear when users search for your practice. One way to make it easy for your clients to leave a Google review is to provide a QR Code in your clinic, which is simple to do by following these steps:
- Generate a link from your Google Business Profile under ‘Share Review Form/Copy Link’,
- Use a free online QR code generator to create a QR code
- Add the QR code to a flyer that you can print and display in your clinic. This will make it easy for your clients to scan when they’ve had a good experience.
3. Introduce your team
Introducing your team on social media or via your newsletter helps to recognise your brilliant team. It also creates a relationship where clients can trust you more once they learn about your team and what skills they bring. It also has the bonus of providing extra content for your social or email schedule when it feels hard to fill in gaps.
These are, of course, very simple methods, and there is certainly a lot more to the marketing pie! But they are easy ways to get you started on breaking that whale up into bite-size pieces.
And if you decide to invest more resources in your marketing…
PetPack can help with websites, Google, Facebook, newsletters, and more. Just ask us!
