The job nobody has:
Why practice marketing keeps falling down the list
I spend most of my week listening to practice owners.
Client calls, our WhatsApp community where our clients thrash out the issues of the day, corridors at SPVS and London Vet Show, a lecture theatre at the RVC once a year.
Over time you start to notice something: the same handful of problems come up over and over, described in almost the same words, by people who have never met each other.
What strikes me most is what I never hear. Nobody tells me marketing doesn't matter. Nobody argues that their practice would be fine without it. The will is there in every conversation I have.
The problem isn't attitude. It's structure. In most practices, marketing is a job nobody actually has.
Marketing is never urgent
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This is the root of it, and I think it's worth being sympathetic about rather than critical.
A practice manager's day is full of things with deadlines. A rota gap at eight tomorrow morning. A drug order that needs placing today. A complaint that needs answering before it escalates. A vet off sick. Every one of those has a consequence attached to a specific hour.
Marketing has no such consequence. Nothing breaks this afternoon if the Google Business Profile doesn't get updated.
Nobody rings up angry because the website photos are three years old. So it slides – not once, but every single day, and always for a defensible reason.
That isn't negligence. It's rational triage by someone whose day is already on fire.
But repeat that decision five days a week for a year and you have a practice with no marketing.
What tends to fill the gap is worse than nothing.
The work gets picked up by whoever is willing rather than whoever is best placed. It happens in half hours between other jobs. Nobody involved has had any training on the platforms they're using or on what actually works.
And then we wonder why the output feels inconsistent.
I've been on the other side of this. When I joined White Cross Vets we had nine sites and around 85 people, a structure was in place, the will was there, but we were missing a dedicated daily commitment to internal and external marketing.
By the time I left we had 22 locations and 250 team members. The thing that made the difference wasn't a big budget or a clever campaign.
It was starting with a weekly team email and building from there. Starting small beats waiting until you can start properly.
Too many ideas is the same problem as none
The second thing I hear constantly is about creativity, and it comes in two apparently opposite forms.
Sometimes it's a blank page. Nobody knows what to post, the ideas have dried up and there's a quiet fear of publishing something that isn't good enough.
Just as often it's the reverse – everyone has ideas, everyone has a view on what should go out and the result is a stalemate.
One partner wants clinical content. Another wants the practice cat. Somebody thinks the tone is too jokey and somebody else thinks it's too dry.
Both are the same failure. There's no filter for making the decision.
The instinct is to reach for more creativity – I'd argue you need less creativity and more clarity.
Read our blog on how to do more with less on social media while running a busy practice.
If a practice has genuinely settled what makes it different – not warm intangibles about caring for pets, but something concrete that a competitor down the road couldn't claim – then most content decisions answer themselves.
You stop asking what would be good to post and start asking what proves the thing we say we are.
The consistency complaints tend to melt away once that's in place, and the mechanical side is easy from there – a brand kit, a set of templates for recurring content, fonts and colours saved once so nobody has to make the same decision twice.
Fika has written about how to set that up in Canva, and it takes an afternoon.
On the fear of publishing something imperfect, I'll be blunt. Published and slightly rough beats polished and never finished, every time.
Why
outsourcing
so often disappoints
The obvious answer to a job nobody has is to give it to somebody else. It's the right instinct, and it goes wrong often enough that I understand the wariness.
Generalist agencies don't know our sector.
They don't understand what a health plan is, why a consult room photo matters more than a stock image, or what a practice manager's week actually looks like.
So the work needs endless correcting, which costs more time than doing it yourself.
Content comes back inflexible – a fixed monthly package that can't respond to what's happening in the practice this week. And for a single site, the numbers frequently don't stack up at all.
Waiting room screens are the example I always come back to. Practices spend years getting their brand right, then accept screen content pulled from a generic library by a supplier who has never set foot in a veterinary practice.
That's not a bad decision by the practice, it's the only option they were offered. But it’s a bad option.
The two things that
worry me most
The first is the fear of bombarding clients – of ending up looking like the big corporates.
This is exactly the right instinct pointed at the wrong conclusion.
Thin, under-resourced marketing defaults to generic, because generic is what you produce when there's no time to be specific. And generic is precisely what makes an independent practice read as corporate.
The answer isn't less marketing. It's marketing specific enough that nobody could mistake you for anyone else.
Don't tell people you care – tell them about the three-legged terrier whose owner couldn't afford the surgery until you found a way.
The second is not knowing what works.
Here's the encouraging part: most practices are measuring nothing at all, so almost any measurement is progress.
Start by mapping the journey a client actually takes from first hearing your name to their second appointment, then pick two or three numbers on it and watch them.
When we set Malthouse Vets a 90-day target, the thing that changed the team's appetite wasn't the campaign. It was seeing more Google reviews arrive in three months than they'd gathered in the previous five years.
Visible progress is its own fuel.
None of this is a failing
I don't think any of these problems reflect badly on the people describing them to me.
They're the predictable result of asking one very busy person to absorb an entire professional discipline on top of a full job, without training, budget or time.
That's the gap we exist to fill.
If any of this sounds like your practice, I'm always happy to talk it through – no agenda, just a conversation.
Vet practice marketing
To us it's personal
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