Beacon View Vets Case Study
FOREWORD BY JUSTIN
In over 10 years in the veterinary industry, I’ve learned so much about how marketing principles can be applied to help practices do what they do best: care for patients and look after their team members. Now as the founder of Practice Made Purrfect, I have an opportunity to share this knowledge with as many of the fantastic people who give their time and energy to keeping pets as healthy as possible. In this new series of blogs, I’ll be casting my eye over the industry and highlighting trends and techniques that excite me. Here I kick things off with a look back at the Veterinary Marketing Association awards – which I helped to judge – and a deep dive on Beacon View Vets, winners of the Practice Marketing Award, and a shining example of how successful marketing can boost a practice.
THE VMA AWARDS: CATNIP TO VETERINARY MARKETING NERDS!
I love being involved in the VMA awards, and I look forward to the main event every year.
Being a judge can be really challenging because you get a huge spectrum of entries into every category – and alongside that diversity, the quality is so high, with so many of the entries having done such a great job.
What struck me about Beacon View’s submission is that they have covered so many areas of veterinary marketing, and they’ve done them all really, really well.
Each piece of work that they’ve tackled is at an impressively high standard.
Their website alone could have been good enough to take home the Practice Marketing Award. But then you see their automated client communication emails, their videos, they’re winning at Google reviews, they’ve built a really strong brand.
When I’m trying to judge between such different entries, I consider whether I would have liked to have been part of the team that created each piece of work.
With Beacon View, I would absolutely have been proud to have collaborated in the creation of their work, because they’ve done a really good job. 👏👏👏
WHY BEACON VIEW ARE SO IMPRESSIVE
There’s marketing best practice in play here.
For example, the website is technically excellent, it’s optimised, it’s fast, it has all of the SEO tricks of the trade built in that I use for my own practices.
It does stuff. You can register with the practice, book appointments and sign up to their pet health plan. You can chat with the team on the platform that suits you: Facebook messenger, WhatsApp, email or phone.
But beyond that, when I came into the veterinary industry it took me a long time to learn the nuances. This industry has lots of people who think like vets, who approach every aspect of the industry from a vet’s perspective. What we should be doing is thinking and communicating like a pet owner.
And in the twelve months since they opened, Beacon View has done that straight away.
A great example of this is how they highlight barriers to care and show how they’ve found solutions to them.
You can see this through their cat friendly clinic gold status – which is so hard to achieve by the way – and their fear free certification, both of which are displayed brightly on the home page, showing owners they don’t need to stress about visiting with their pets.
You can see it with their fantastic health plan, which boasts a simple payment structure and unlimited consultations throughout the year – exactly the advice that I’ve been championing for years.
The other thing I’d like to highlight is how they’ve made Claire, their founder, front and centre of their branding.
There are different ways to define a practice’s brand. You can go down the heritage route, how long a practice has been a part of a community. You can focus on the tech side of the service, the quality of equipment you have on offer. You can be high-end, or affordable.
Here, they’re hanging it on the culture in the practice, embodied by their lead vet, the face of the business and key person of influence.
Claire is omnipresent, shown around the practice and the heart of the community in the photography, putting her signature to pledges and promises, showing her genuine, relatable personality over videos.
And then her credibility is backed up by a ton of five star Google reviews and the accreditations the practice has picked up.
It’s a really clever piece of positioning that ties all of the great technical work they’ve done together and gives the practice a strong, easy to understand identity.
WHAT CAN YOUR PRACTICE LEARN FROM BEACON VIEW?
My best advice is that you should always be aware of what’s happening in the industry, what innovations other practices are coming up with.
When you see something new, don’t be disheartened or demotivated, see it as an opportunity to improve your practice’s offering. Reach out to them and give them a big digital high five! You’ll gain even more insight from collaboration and a coffee.
Think about what you like about the way another practice, or another business in a different industry, is doing, and consider how you can best apply it to your specific business needs.
The other important thing to remember is that you don’t have to take your practice’s marketing output from where it is now to perfect in one push.
There’s the old adage: how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.
The last thing you want to do is to recognise that something could help your practice, but feel daunted and pass it up. Actually, the best thing to do is to assess how something can help you, and then to work towards that in realistic steps.
Have you spotted a practice who are really smashing their marketing? Shout out to us and let us know, and we’ll review what makes them inspiring in a future blog.