It’s tempting to use your veterinary nurse to manage your marketing, but marketing is a specialised skill, and secondly, they probably don’t want to!
Every business needs marketing, right? In an age of everything being at our Googled fingertips (and scrolling thumbs), even vet clinics need to have a thorough social media and email presence in order to stand out from the crowd. Whilst it’s somewhat easy to create content (adorable dogs=many likes), a clinic’s socials or emails can quickly turn into a collection of cute patient pictures and not much else. It’s been found that effective communications (read: educational content) can increase animal healthcare by up to a whopping 50% – so it’s crucially important that this type of content features in your messaging.
It’s tempting to use your veterinary nurse to manage your online marketing
It can be very tempting to get one of the vet nurses to manage your marketing, including your social media presence – especially if they seem well-versed in current trends, or speak the language of social media well. So why shouldn’t they just do it?
Well firstly, they probably don’t want to. Or they might want to, but perhaps they have the wrong idea about what’s needed. It might seem rewarding at first to manage a clinic’s social media page – especially when you just get to post cute patient pics all day. But it can quickly become a chore to constantly churn out new content that’s helpful for clients, particularly when clinic days are already filled with animal care and client management.
But mostly, it’s because managing a business social media page is actually quite a specialised skill. ‘Yeah right,’ we hear you say, ‘how hard could it be?!’
How hard could it be to manage your practice’s social media pages?
There’s actually a lot more to managing social content than it appears. Social media algorithms constantly change, meaning it’s hard to know what content your clients see from you or if they even see anything from you at all! Your clients – although they appreciate lots of cute patient pics – also need more than just that in order to remember to come back and visit you more than once a year. They need educational posts about important issues like seasonal parasites, arthritis management during colder months, management of brachycephalic breed needs, and much more.
And what about your practice newsletter?
The same is true of newsletters. Managing an e-newsletter database is a tricky task. You need an email client that is optimised to avoid spam traps, read correctly on all devices and record unsubscribers accurately. Australian spam rules are very strict, so anyone sending out emails to a distribution list needs to be well-versed in spam laws to avoid getting fined.
These are just a couple of reasons why it might be a good idea to employ a veterinary marketing agency like Petpack to do your marketing for you. Petpack is run by vets, with content written by veterinary professionals. Petpack can post to your social pages on your behalf, as well as send emails to your newsletter database that are not only full of great content but also personalised, with space for you to add local content if you want to.
If you’d like an obligation-free chat about how you could improve your social and email services, contact us today! We promise, your vet nurses will thank you for the time back in their day.
