Campaigns:
How veterinary practices can use campaigns to hit their targets
Broadly speaking, a lot of the best marketing is proactive. You decide what you want to do, you do it, and then you monitor the outcomes as clients follow along.
A perfect example of this in our industry is pet health plans – we bundle together the products and services we believe our patients need and prescribe them as a monthly subscription because we believe it’s the right thing for our patients, our clients and our business.
But the flipside of these are marketing campaigns. And these can be really useful too.
It may be that you’re not doing many dentals, or that you get offered a rebate on Librella, or that active client numbers are down year on year.
You see a problem, or an opportunity, and you want to put it right. And the way to do this is through a marketing campaign.
We’ve got a toolbox of tried and tested campaigns ready to go for our clients, targeting all areas of a veterinary practice’s offering.
We’d love to share them with you – and if you’re interested, click here to get in touch with our team. But in the meantime, here’s some highlights on how to put together a killer marketing campaign to turn an opportunity into a strength.
What do you want your clients to do?
How do you decide what campaign is right for your practice?
You might have a pressing need – if you’ve just invested in new laparoscopy equipment, you want to start making use of the kit.
Or your data will tell you a story. Hopefully you’re tracking your KPIs. Are your active client numbers growing how you’d like? Is the solution to find new clients or to reconnect with people who are registered but you haven’t seen in a while?
It might be even simpler than that – if you’re in your practice every day, you have an idea of what is working and what isn’t.
And think about what your team are comfortable doing too. If your vets hate doing dentals, don’t flood them with cats with crumbling teeth.
We created a focused campaign for pets aged 7+, encouraging early detection of age-related conditions through a thorough wellness check.
With a dedicated landing page, social posts and targeted emails, we helped Thrums Vets promote proactive care and connect with pet owners ready to support their senior pets.
Define your audience
This may go hand in hand with the first point, but it isn’t the same thing.
For example, you may have decided that you want to prescribe more Librella and Solensia, but that doesn’t mean you know who you want to offer it to. It wouldn’t be particularly efficient to be sending the owner of a bouncy two year old spaniel information about arthritis.
This is where we can talk about the fashionable theory of segmenting audiences – of closely defining a group of people most receptive to specific messages.
Using the Librella example, the first place to look would be age, with arthritis being a condition mostly associated with older pets.
But you could also look at things like whether a client is a member of your health plan, especially if those monthly consultations are included in an unlimited plan.
We’re even working with practices who are getting hyper-specific and tailoring campaigns to species prone to conditions, such as arthritis and Labradors, fronting their campaigns with images of that breed.
The more creative you can be in targeting your message, the more receptive your audience is likely to be to hearing it.
Create a commodity
Every campaign needs a call to action – your signal to your clients for what you want them to do next.
Now this can absolutely be for them to book an appointment to come and see you.
But we can take this one step further by commoditising the service you’re trying to sell. We’ll use an example.
One practice we work with wanted to push dentals. But they knew a lot of their clients didn’t need extractions and it isn’t their clinical approach to scale and polish every pet annually.
So they created a “dental health assessment”, a nurse clinic from which the pets that need to see a vet can be referred on, and those that don’t are still in practice, bonding with the team, getting advice on dental care an owner can administer from home and the signs that more treatment could be needed in the future.
Now, it would have worked to ask people to book a consult to chat this through with a vet. But instead, more of the team are involved in providing value, the new service can be priced independently to a consult to drive the offer, and bookings can be tracked accurately to show whether the campaign has worked.
Not only this but the assessment was “added” to the practice’s health plan offering, making this seem even more valuable when in reality all nurse clinics were already a benefit.
And clients can see that theirs is a practice that is always thinking of innovative ways to improve and keep patients healthy and happy.
We worked closely with Stellar Vets Littlehampton to run a series of iRecall campaigns aimed at educating clients and promoting continuous pet care.
Topics covered included arthritis, missed vaccinations, neutering, senior health, dental care, lumps and bumps and re-engaging lapsed clients — all focused on keeping pets healthier and clients more connected.
Make sure you can service demand
Maybe having too much demand seems like a good problem to have – and you’re right, businesses that are oversubscribed rarely go bust.
But fortunately we don’t have to think of this as an either or situation. You’re in control of who you communicate with and when.
Think about how much kennel space you have available – we’ve seen it happen where valuable dentals and ops are put in the back burner because a practice’s kennels are flooded with cats in for blood pressure monitoring!
Similarly, not many vets want to be doing back to back dentals every day of the week, so if you’re drumming up interest in periodontal health, think of how you can spread demand out over weeks and months.
This means segmenting audiences and creating commodities to allow nurses to deliver some of the services you’ve created – all as we discussed above!
“Working with Practice Made Purrfect is like having my own personal sat nav. I know where I am and where I want to get to. But because they’ve travelled the journey many times before, they’re able to give me detailed step by step instructions to tell me exactly how to get there.
And occasionally we even stop off at some interesting places along the way”
Dr Gavin Durston
Director, Thrums Vets
Vet practice marketing
To us it's personal
If you’re eager to improve your practice’s marketing but you’re unsure where to start, I’m taking on new clients for the next quarter! Book an initial discovery below!
