The Veterinary Marketing Podcast

Success in your veterinary practice's digital marketing comes down largely to one single skill. Can you create offers that your clients want and need, and can you drive your clients and prospective clients into your practice? If you've been having trouble trying to determine whether or not your veterinary practice's marketing is getting ROI, it is probably because you don't have clearly defined offers. What action are you looking for your audiences to take? How do you get your social audiences to take action from being a spectator to a client?  In today's episode, I go into how to create offers for your veterinary practice that your clients actually want.  It is pretty amazing, the one thing that really defines who is successful and who struggles with their marketing is that the businesses who have established offers that convert.  What do your clients actually want? What are they wanting you to deliver? How can you create offers that don't include only discounting? These are all things I dive into, and I go over a bunch of tips and tricks for creating offers that your clients will want.  Drive your clients into your practice, and start getting better ROI on your marketing.

In today's episode, we have an awesome guest, Danielle Lambert. We dive into how to build a personal and business brand in the veterinary industry and this episode is full of gold! If you have been hiding under a rock and don't know Danielle yet, she is the Snout School founder, an international speaker, and social media addict working to empower veterinary businesses and brands to succeed online. Danielle has built social media campaigns for accounts ranging from DrAndyRoark.com to the Companion Animal Parasite Council, but she is most well-known for being a dog mom to Archer, the Brussels Griffon. This episode is full of awesome info, we talk about practical tips on how to build a brand, including defining your audience and coming out to choose and communicate with your ideal audience. I think that the work that she is doing to help educate veterinary professionals on how to build personal brands will have a huge impact on helping the veterinary industry find its voice and reach more pet owners. This is incredibly important if the industry wants to drive the conversation inside of non-veterinary voices producing sensationalist content (who needs a vet when you have coconut oil). Not only do we cover branding, but we talk about websites, and how that relates to building a brand presence too.  I think you'll love the interview and find it very helpful in your marketing.  Be sure to check out http://www.snoutschool.com

Most of the client communication tools these days are done by sending out mass messages. Email marketing, Facebook posts, Instagram posts, and on and on. These are great platforms for reaching clients at scale, but it is tough to create a message for everyone, by default you have to leave people out.  The benefit of marketing to large audiences all at once is you can cast a wide net and get your message out to all your clients and potential clients, I'm a huge fan of it. The problem is that this is what everyone is doing, and if you want to stand out in the noisy marketplace, that often times takes doing things that not everyone else is doing. In my opinion, one of the easiest ways to stand out and to bond your client to your practice is by taking some extra time to add personal messaging to your practice's marketing, which can be difficult.  If you're like every person in the industry that I know, you're probably insanely busy, so how do you make time add personal messaging to your practice's marketing? That is what today's episode is all about.  I cover 4 tools that help you improve your practice's marketing by giving people a personalized message.  Imagine being able to follow up with every single client who comes into your practice by sending them a custom created, personalized message? That is what the Bonjoro app does, and I go into detail on how to use it to make sure that you're getting good reviews, and that people come back.  I even dive into a tool that lets you send... SNAIL MAIL. There I said it. Delivering handwritten notes that look like you sent them is a pretty old-fashioned strategy, but there's a web interface for you to use, so I think it is worth sticking in the podcast.  If you can use tools to take out the time-intensive nature of personally following up you'll be able to make your clients feel like you actually care. Remember the famous saying, People will often forget what you said but remember how you made them feel. Make them feel like they matter. 

Your best clients and prospects are the ones who actually come into your practice right? I know, it is a really groundbreaking concept but it is true.  We talk about how to attract new clients all the time on the podcast, but sometimes we forget to focus on working on in-practice marketing. In today's episode, we cover a new project that I've been working on that is called Vet Wifi.  VetWifi is a tool that helps you connect with and collect marketing data on the clients who come into your practice.  Here's a few of the ways that VetWifi helps you that we cover in today's episode:  How to grow your veterinary practice's pixel list How to automatically collect contact data of clients How to create marketing automation to help your practice  How to get reviews for your practice automatically after a set time And much more I also discuss several ways to increase your VetWifi usage inside your practice so that you can get as many clients contact data as possible.  Today, more than ever it is extremely important that you're able to communicate with clients on media that you actually own. Marketing platforms continue to lose organic reach so pixel audiences, custom audiences, and other assets are more valuable than ever.  If you have any questions about how to use VetWifi or see what it would look like in your practice send me an email at brandonbreshears@gmail.com or go to VetWifi.com

In today's episode, we cover some often overlooked targeting options for Google Adwords. I also explain Youtube's onsite director, where you can get a free 30-second commercial that is professionally made, Click Here For This. I've spoken tons about custom audiences and retargeting audiences on Facebook, but haven't spoken much about Adwords.  Many of the things I talk about in today's episode aren't new to Adwords, but I haven't spoken about hem yet.  Adwords is very different from Facebook and other social ad platforms because you have many different ad types. The two primary ad types are display network and search network. So you have people who are consuming content (video, written content, news etc) or you have people who are actively searching, and sometimes a combination of both (a person who searches for a youtube video and you show up in their pre-roll ad.) The way that clients and potential clients are very different based on what action they are taking and what ad type you are using. Even within search network, when people are googling they can be searching for brand info, transactional searches or informational searches. That being said, make sure you are creating ads so that they engage in the correct way based on what activity their activity is. For any ad, choosing the correct ad type is only the first step, you then have to choose the correct audience, and this is what we dive into today. Adwords has custom audiences and remarketing audiences that you can use to create really detailed customer lists to show your ads to.  The audiences that we cover are: -Affinity audiences -Website Re-targeting Audiences -Customer Lists -Youtube Enagement Lists -and similar audiences as well If you are actively working to drive traffic to your veterinary practice's offers you should be comparing traffic costs and cost per results. You might be surprised that Google is cheaper and has a better ROI than what you're currently testing. 

Chatbots are back!!! Everyone stop what you're doing and go to Manychat.com and authorize the app for your veterinary practice now! Seriously, go and do it, it is free to sign up.  Earlier this year, Facebook froze the chatbots for new users, so unless you had already signed up for Manychat or a similar program you were locked out. Luckily, Facebook just opened ManyChat back up for everyone.  So what are messenger bots? Why Should you care? In the simplest terms, messenger bots are like fancy email responders, if emails got 90% open rates and were easy to use to create logic based responses. Messenger is seriously one of the most amazing mediums to market and engage on. You can create tools to create subscribers that are super frictionless, you can engage with multiple content types and you can talk to your clients at scale.  In today's episode, I cover some best practices for messenger, why you should care about messenger, some marketing ideas, and best practices. I also walk through all of the Manychat features and explain their functionality. Consumers are wanting to get answers to their questions immediately. We are in the era of one click to buy your same day delivered items, and it is only going to get faster and faster. Just because you're a veterinary practice doesn't mean that the way you engage with clients and customers will be any different. You've got to adapt to the times and ways that your clients want to engage or you're going to be left behind.  Chat bots let you do that by creating systems that can do most of the leg work and segment people into the right buckets. Once someone has gone through the proper channels and identified themselves as someone who needs to be spoken to, then you can take your time to engage, but it will have positive ROI for you and your practice.  Get on the chat bot bandwagon before it gets crowded, there is so much opportunity here!

In the previous two episodes of the podcast we talked about first if you should start a podcast for your veterinary practice and then we talked about the technical nuts and bolts how to start a podcast. In today's episode, I talk about the best ways to get your podcast out there. Podcasts work great as a top of funnel content and because that is the case, it is important to consider how you'll engage your audience. You'll likely want to use the recorded audio to create blog posts around because it can be used for social media, email newsletters as well as give you organic traffic benefits as well. Since you'll be using this content to engage and bring awareness and education to your clients, you'll want to re-market heavily to your audience based on what they're interested in. Use the content as a means to segment your audience and create retargeting lists. One of the drawbacks of podcasting is that you don't get too much data from hosting services about downloads, how long your audience listens and what your subscriber numbers are. As we covered last week, iTunes and Google play are just really feeds that pull data from your hosting, so they don't provide insights. That being said, putting your content on your own channels or turning them into video clips as well can give you more meaningful data.  A quick tip for creating your data on your website is to use naming conventions so that you can topically sort your content and create retargeting lists automatically. If you put certain words in the URL that are always related to a certain topic you can have your re-targeting list automatically add that topic, this is done by setting rules within your audiences section in Facebook's ads manager.  Along with talking about different ways to partner with brands who can help grow your audience, I cover some of the best ways to target potential subscribers and talk about strategies for growing your subscribers through iTunes and Google Play. I also go into what you should do when trying to take your subscribers through your funnel.  If you have any questions or comments let me know!  

So you've decided that podcasting would help your veterinary practice, or maybe you haven't, in that case, it is important you listen to part 1 of this podcasting series, you can listen here: Should You Start A Podcast For A Veterinary Practice. Once you figure out what your podcast is about and that you're going to create one the next step is to start the content production.  I'd like to mention that technical part of starting a podcast isn't the hard part, it is coming up with the details of your show I describe in part 1 of the series. Make sure you've figured out those important details before you move on.  Podcasting really comes down to a few parts: Come up with your idea Record the content Edit your content  Master your files Upload and publish your content Promote and distribute Recording your content needs to be as easy as possible based on your show goals. Are you looking to have a really polished, finished product or are you looking for an informal Q&A show? The answer to that question determines the level of equipment you'll need to invest in. My suggestion for 99% of the people listening here is to get started with a simple usb setup like a Blue Yeti or Snowball or an Audiotechnica ATR-2100. You don't want to have to mess with a mixer because that adds layers of complexity. If you're on the go when creating your podcast a Rhode lavalier mic or a Zoom H4N recorder is a great option. Recording and editing can happen on the device if it is recorded on a mobile device or if you're using a USB mic, then you'll want to use a program like Audacity, a free audio editing software.  PRO-Tip: Make sure you're consistently the same distance from your mic when you're recording, this will give you a more consistent sound.  Once you export your media, you can then upload it to a mastering software like Auphonic. Auphonic helps you to create consistent volume levels throughout the podcast so people don't have to have very loud or quiet sections.  After mastering your media, you have a finished product! Great work, now you need to upload it to your podcasting hosting. You'll want to use hosting because if you have any level of downloads, the bandwidth requirements could really slow down your production. Next week we'll talk about distribution and promotion, which includes how to get your podcast on iTunes and Google play.  If you have any questions be sure to reach out and send me a message!

Have you ever thought about starting a podcast? I've spoken to a lot of veterinarians who have said they've been thinking about starting one for a while, so I figured I'd help them out.  This episode is the first in a series on how to create a podcast for your veterinary practice. In this episode, we cover the general items you should consider before starting a podcast.  First, why should you even care about podcasting? I think that it has a bunch of advantages as a content type(obviously). First, I like podcasting because there is a HUGE number of users who consistently search out and engage with content. It is a medium that gives more context to the audience because they hear your voice. You're a voice that is showing up consistently and as a result, the audience bonds well with you. Some of the biggest benefits of podcasting are:  You gain credibility and clients will be better educated You can create content around offers and use the podcast episodes to segment your audience If you like speaking more than writing of being on video it helps Your content can be short or long form and it doesn't have to have tons of production It is a different medium and if you have a list of subscribers it helps to diversify your audience and traffic I think podcasting really comes down to 4 steps. First, you need your show idea, and how you're going to run your episodes. I really suggest that if you're going to start that you commit to 10 episodes. Once you've figured out what you're going to do you have to create the content (this is going to be next episode) and then publish the content and distribute it.  Podcasting is still one medium that has room for significant growth, so we're still "early" in my opinion. That combined with the importance of voice search and content in the future, I really think there is tons of upside.

Today's episode is very important if you use Facebook for your veterinary practice's marketing efforts. Back in January, the massive drop off in organic reach happened but that is only the beginning. There have been massive changes that have been happening in the paid ads department as well with Facebook.  If you have been noticing recently, Facebook has been in the news a bunch because of the 2016 election and the run-up to the election, and as a result, there are a ton of policy changes that have been coming out. I think that we're only seeing the beginning of the end of the "wild west" that Facebook's ad platform has been. Even though Facebook is taking away data and insights that have been available in the past, I think that we still have an amazing opportunity to reach and educate clients like we've never had before( and likely won't get again).  With all that being said I think it is extremely important that as marketers on Facebook, we approach our ads and marketing from the position that the rules could change at any time and it could go away at any time. The truth is, if you don't own the media, it could go away.  To help ease your worries about this potentially scary truth, I cover what is working now, how to approach your marketing and ways to mitigate having all of your eggs in the "Facebook" basket. Ultimately, I think that these changes will be helpful because it will make the platform as a whole better. As long as people keep using Facebook to the scale that they do I think it will continue to be a great way to reach your clients.