What writing for dozens of practices has taught me about veterinary marketing
I didn't set out to be a veterinary copywriter.
Nobody does, really – it's not one that comes up in careers advice sessions at school.
I started out in journalism, and I was pretty good at it, including a stint at the BBC. Then I decided to move into marketing.
For the best part of a decade I’ve been transferring that writing background into marketing for businesses in all kinds of sectors.
Along the way, I fell into the veterinary industry – and realised how many stories you all have to tell. I’ve also realised that you often need to have those stories wrangled out of you!
I’ve written content for dozens of practices, hundreds of campaigns – and thousands of team bios!
Here’s what I’ve learnt along the way – and some hints and tips for how you can use my experience in your practice.
The void between the door and the website
The single most consistent thing I've noticed across the practices I've worked with is the void between what it actually feels like to walk through the door – or to read the Google reviews – and what the website says.
Walk into a well-run practice and you'll find something warm. A receptionist who knows the regulars by name. A vet who crouches down to greet a dog before they've even looked at the owner. A team who talk about their patients like they're old friends, because in many cases, they are.
Then you read the website. "We are a caring and compassionate practice dedicated to the health and wellbeing of your pets."
It's not wrong. It's just not them.
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The problem isn't that practices are bad at marketing. It's that they've defaulted to describing what they do rather than who they are.
And in doing so, they've become interchangeable with every other practice.
The real experience is always so much better than the marketing version.
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The first is clinical confidence. Vets are highly capable, highly trained professionals who are very good at what they do... and deeply uncomfortable saying so.
I've had people in practice casually mention remarkable stories that they saw as mundane.
Taking a diabetic dog home while its owners were on holiday to monitor its blood sugar through the night. Setting up a camp bed in the kennels to keep an eye on poorly inpatients. Giving up bank holidays to save injured wildlife, just because it's the right thing to do.
There are so many anecdotes available to us to showcase to our clients who we are – but it takes a bit of effort to unearth them.
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The second is that veterinary is an industry built on trust – which actually makes differentiation harder, not easier.
Pet owners start from an assumption that their vet is a good person who loves animals. Which is true.
But it means that leading with "we love animals" is roughly as useful as a plumber leading with "we fix pipes”.
The things that actually make a practice stand out – the specific, the unusual, the genuine – tend to be the things we’re most reluctant to shout about.
Why veterinary is a harder copywriting brief than most
Every industry has its quirks. But veterinary has a specific combination of factors that makes writing tricky.
The words that stopped working
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There are words that appear on almost every veterinary practice website in the country:
Caring.
Passionate.
Compassionate.
Dedicated.
These are all great traits to own. But from a marketing perspective, they’re ubiquitous – when every practice uses the same words, they don’t say anything.
Clients have learned to skim past them the same way they skim past small print.
This isn't a veterinary-specific problem, but it's particularly acute here because the underlying values are the baseline for care in our industry.
Most people in veterinary are caring and compassionate. The words are accurate – they're just useless as differentiators because they're accurate for everyone.
What I've found is that the practices who communicate most effectively don't lead with values – they lead with evidence.
Not "we're passionate about pets" but "here's a specific thing that happened last Tuesday that tells you exactly what kind of practice we are”.
The value is still there. You just arrive at it differently.
What AI has done to this problem
I'd be avoiding something obvious if I didn't address this head on.
AI has made the core problem I've described – the sameness of veterinary marketing – significantly worse, and it's done so at speed.
I'm not anti-AI. We use it, we think carefully about how to use it well and there are things it helps with.
But for a lot of practices, what AI has delivered is a faster route to the same generic content they were producing before.
The structural tells are everywhere once you know what you're looking for and it creates a kind of smooth, fluent nothing – content that reads as though it was written by someone who has read a lot about veterinary practices without ever having met one.
The answer isn't to avoid AI entirely. It's to understand what it can't do – which is to pull out and communicate authentic stories.
No AI model has access to that story about the diabetic dog.
It takes a human to understand why that anecdote is so powerful.
How we bring this all together
I've written enough now to have a decent grasp of what I’m looking for when I meet a new practice.
I’m looking for specificity.
I’m looking for a client review that names a vet and describes an exact moment. A piece of copy that puts you on the high street of a particular town and shows you what makes this practice different from the one three doors down. A story that could only be told by this practice, about these people, in this place.
Veterinary practices, almost without exception, are doing more remarkable things than their website suggests.
The gap between the reality and the website is the brief.
Closing it – with honesty, with specificity and without reaching for the same six adjectives everyone else is using – is the work.
And the good news is that if you’re finding it tough, we’re here to help.
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!
