The Veterinary Marketing Podcast

SEO is one of those terms that is thrown around all the time, but most people do't actually know what it is or what goes into it. In today's episode we have Adam Greenbaum as a guest, the Founder and Owner of WhiskerCloud.com a custom website developer, among other digital marketing services, that builds beautiful sites for veterinary practices. Talking to someone who builds sites might seem like a weird idea if you're trying to find out about SEO, but it is actually the exact person you would want to speak with if you are trying to get organic search engine traffic.  In today's episode we cover a 500 website case study that Adam and his team completed. They dove in head first and went through 500 veterinary practices' websites to see what the state of the average practice's website was. The results that they discovered showed that most practices are way way behind where they should be. Not only do we talk about the most common problems that practices websites have when it comes to SEO we also dive into what SEO actually is. Right now most people have misconceptions of what SEO is, and here is the thing, search engines are getting more and more sophisticated. The search engines know when someone is trying to game the system and un-naturally affect the rankings, so setting up your site the right way the first time is one of the best ways to create good rankings for your site. Not only that, the content strategies that help to build your long tail keyword results aren't the ones that will help to provide you with the large traffic volumes you would get from getting the keywords that are shorter and more commonly searched.  Be sure to check out WhiskerCloud.com and if you reach out to Adam, tell him you heard about him through the podcast. 

In today's episode we have a very special guest that I am really excited about, Dr Brett Beckman! Today we cover all kinds of topics related to growing your practice. Today's episode is definitely different from other episodes because we dive into not only marketing concepts but business concepts as well.  If you haven't heard of Dr. Brett Beckman, he is a well renowned international speaker and operates the Veterinary Dental Education Center in Orlando, (Lake Mary) Florida.This state of the art training facility is one of only a few in the country dedicated to advancing the educational needs of veterinarians and veterinary technicians around the world in the field of dentistry and oral surgery. Dr. Brett Beckman, DVM is a veterinary dental thought leader in your area and sees patients by appointment, Atlanta Georgia, Orlando, Sarasota, Naples, Fort Myers & Punta Gorda, Florida.   He is a 1987 graduate of the College of Veterinary Medicine at Mississippi State University. We jump right into to covering what standard of care is, and how current veterinary dentistry standards aren't cutting it. There are so many opportunities today where you can create a situation where you are considered a thought leader and a thought leader in your area. Your practice should have a unique selling proposition, what makes you different, what makes you better or innovative and we cover how you can create that through  better service and more services in veterinary dentistry.  There are effectively two ways to make more revenue in your practice. You can either sell to more people (IE selling a product to 100 new people) or sell more products to your current clients (IE selling 100 dollars more per client who comes in). Having the skills and resources to be first, better and different when it comes to veterinary dentistry is a great way to stand out from the rest of the practices around you.  Be sure to check out the image library that Dr. Beckman is giving away to listeners of the podcast at http://www.veterinarydentistry.net/brandon Today we also cover how Dr. Beckman is able to run his own marketing so well. I am a huge fan of his marketing and he has some amazing advice for anyone who is doing marketing in a practice.  Be sure to let me know what you think about today's episode, and as always if you need any help in your practice's marketing, send me a message!

How much are you spending on your veterinary practice's advertising a week. As crazy as it sounds, I know a lot of practices whose digital marketing budget and spend is $0 right now! In today's episode I cover the specific plan that I would implement if someone asked me how I would spend $100 to market their practice. This episode has all the nitty gritty that you would definitely want to know about.  One of the major distinctions I think you need to make in your marketing that you might not be aware of is setting your advertising into 3 specific categories. You have awareness, lead generation and then actual sales. Going in straight for the sale on cold traffic(people who haven't heard of you before) is usually a recipe for disaster unless you're giving away a huge value. Often times, that is the reason why people say "social media doesn't work." You're trying to close on the first exposure and you have no context or connection with your potential clients.  It might surprise you to know that I advocate the a good portion of your marketing budget simply for distribution on the awareness. On awareness type marketing I cover some specific ideas and examples that I would use. When you're doing awareness marketing it is important to be creating or distributing content that furthers your objective(connecting with pet owners in your area) that will get easy reach. This should definitely be relevant to your  audience but not heavy educational material. You're trying to cast a net that is as wide as possible here.  The next level of marketing is for lead generation and list building. Building your email list and taking the relationship with your social followers to the next step is so important to growth in your veterinary practice. In order to do this I cover ways you can retarget those who engage with your content that you spent time and energy identifying with your awareness marketing.  Finally, once you have some context built up, and relationships established, it is much easier to turn those people into customers who walk through your practice's doors. I talk about ways to turn followers into clients. I also cover how to create a minimum viable product. Web sales can get complicated with creating shopping carts, setting up payment processors and on and on. Getting someone to take action, and get in to your practice doesn't have to be so complicated, but you need to have a process set up before you start running your ads.  Social media is the best way to create segmented lists of attention and turn that segmented attention into action. Please let me know if there is anything I can do to help you get more clients!

Today's episode is all about marketing opportunities that arise on a daily basis. The idea in today's episode is that there is always something great going on around you to create awesome, relevant, entertaining and engaging content and offers.  What brought on this episode is a lot of practice have been doing a great job at using Pokemon Go as something to drive engagement on Facebook and other social media. There are tons of times you can use Opportunity marketing to gain new clients and grow your veterinary practice's brand.  A key consideration before you begin is to stay up to date with what is going on in the world. World events, new technology, news stories are all great examples of opportunities to create marketing campaigns that are relevant. You need to keep in front of your clients as much as possible and by using opportunity you're being relevant and timely so that you don't seem annoying. If you had someone knocking on your door every day asking if you wanted to buy something you'ld probably grow annoyed of them, and in the same way you can promote your veterinary hospital's brand without having to directly be in their face.  Sometimes opportunity marketing can go wrong too though. If it is too much of a stretch then it could go very wrong. I saw a real estate company who was using Pokemon Go as a reason why someone should buy a house. The comments were terrible because they were just trying to hop on the bandwagon and use the momentum from the app's popularity. Often times there is so much noise out there, especially with trending items that simply adding to the noise doesn't help at all. Make sure that you have the right intent, to server and provide value to clients and you won't have to worry about being perceived as salesy.  I cover many examples of what you can do to create opportunity marketing and what stages of the client funnel you should use each example for.  As always, be sure to let me know if you have any questions or comments!

This week's episode is a special one for two reasons, first we have Dr. Sue The Cancer Vet on the podcast. Dr. Sue Ettinger is a veterinary cancer specialist, speaker, author & radio co-host focused on early detection & helping pets live longer & live well. You can see her on Facebook and on www.DrSueCancerVet.com and we talk about tons of great marketing tips for both veterinary practices as well as for veterinary professionals looking to build their own personal brand. This episode also marks the 2nd anniversary for the podcast!  I've seen Dr. Sue's marketing and I've been wanting to have her on the podcast for a while. In marketing there are 3 groups of people you can target for your potential audience. The first group is those who need something and are actively searching out the solution, this is by far the easiest group to market to. The second group are those who know they need a product or service but aren't actively looking (think people who know their pets need updated vaccines but don't have it on their mind to do it) and then there are people who have no idea that there is a product or service or anything they need done. I think most people in the world don't know that pets can have cancer treatment done, so Dr. Sue has a large task at getting out and educating pet owners.  In this podcast we cover everything from how and why she got started to what she has learned along the way. She's been able to build a great community of pet owners and veterinary professionals on her Facebook page, which has almost 30,000 likes. The content and stores she posts are both happy and sad, and one thing I go over with her is how she handles the sad posts, which can be incredibly tough to get out there. I know many times veterinary hospitals don't want to post difficult topics, so we cover how she handles sensitive posts. We also get to cover the topic of hashtags, which Dr. Sue uses in her marketing message.  I really enjoyed this interview and I know there are many great insights for anyone who does marketing in their practice.  Thank you to everyone who listens to the podcast, and thank you for a great 2 years. Please let me know if I can do anything to help!

Conversion can be especially tricky for veterinary practices. When you have a practice website and mesh it together with all the social media, it can be difficult to turn that attention and traffic into actual clients. In this episode I cover some best practices that will help you to increase conversion. Anytime that you can increase your veterinary practice's conversion any marketing you do will have a better return on investment. Your website is pretty much a multi-tool, kinda like a swiss army knife. It needs to do lots of different things based on what the person using the site is looking to do. Increasing conversion often times simply means making the website or marketing you are doing more user friendly and easier to navigate. Any time that you can make it easier for clients to find information quickly, or reduce the number of steps that a client needs to take you'll be able to see an increase in those actions. An important item to consider when you're looking at your website, or any marketing piece for that matter, should be to think what the purpose or goal you're trying to achieve. Simplifying your pages and marketing pieces so that are trying to achieve just one objective. When you go to the dentist, you're just looking for the dentist to do dental work, if they mentioned you can get an oil change at the same time, you would probably be alarmed. Web pages are the same way and so are marketing campaigns.  If you're sending traffic that is trying to convert visitors into clients, sending them to your home page doesn't cut it. Once a person gets to your home page, they have to evaluate your services, your reviews and then figure out how to book an appointment if they have the time to go through the whole process of figuring out if they want to do business with you. A better way is sending a specific targeted flow of traffic to a specific offer that is easy to understand and evaluate and then gives a specific way for your client to opt in.  The good and bad part of conversion is that you're never finished! Testing has to continue on and there is always room for improvement. Let me know if you test any of the tips that I cover and how they work for you!

This week, I'm extremely excited to have Dr. Jessica Vogelsang as a guest on the podcast. I am a huge fan of Dr. Jessica Vogelsangs content. Not only does she create great content, but she does it consistently. Today we talk about how she got started creating content, how she started on social media and what she has learned along the way.  Dr. Jessica Vogelsang is an author, mother, practicing veterinarian, and medical communicator. After graduating with honors from the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine, Dr. V started her award winning website pawcurious.com in 2009 while continuing to work in small animal practice. Currently, she is the Editorial Manager for DrAndyRoark.com, and is also the Author of All Dogs Go To Kevin.  In today's episode we go over how Jessica got started with digital marketing and what she has learned since she got started. Originally when she started the web was very different and she was using Typepad to create content. Since then, the tools have come a long way to make it far easier to create and distribute content.  Dr. Vogelsang shares her insight in what she thinks veterinary professionals should be doing in content creation, distribution as well as some of her thoughts on new platforms. One of the best pieces of advice I think she gives is finding what you're good at and investing into that. So many people say "Be Everywhere" but sometimes that can be a recipe for disaster.  Be sure to listen to the entire episode because there is so much good info. I even talk to her about instant articles on Facebook. The Dr Andy Roark facebook page is the only publisher I know personally who is using instant articles. I've tried setting it up(I think you need a computer science degree) and I've been really really curious to talk about how it has worked for them.

Want your social media marketing to be more effective? This episode is for you and it is on a topic that is near and dear to my heart. Social media is amazing today because it gives you the same tools that Billion dollar corporations have at their disposal. So how do you use social media to reach and convert more of your audience or content consumers into actual clients, that is what we talk about in today's episode.  Native advertising or native content refers to advertising or content that is specifically built for a social media platform or a content platform. Whether you're using Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, Twitter or any other platform that comes along, each places has its own vibe and way people engage with content. Observing and understanding how people use the platforms differently is what helps you to create effective native content and advertising. To understand how to use social platforms you have to be a user and a tester constantly and observe how friends and family use the platforms as well.  Once you've understood how platforms work and function differently, you need to identify your target market to create the right market/message match. Different tech skills and demographics make the way people engage with content very different, so keep this in mind. Adding the who and where you create the content allows you to figure out what you create and I cover real life examples of the kind of native content you can create that would bring clients to your practice.  Now in the past, traditional marketing would say capture attention and drive traffic to a landing page, but with the tools available you don't have to necessarily do that. That is where native conversion comes into play. Use the tools available to create calls to action that happen within the social media platforms. This takes more work but your conversion should go through the roof! Let me know what you think and if you need any help!

In this episode I cover some of the biggest lessons I've learned in starting and launching a podcast for almost two years. I want to take some time and just say thank you. Thank you for listening, thanks for the great feedback, and thanks for letting an outsider become a part of your industry.  When I started I had no experience podcasting, and I have learned so much about marketing and launching consistent content. In fact I think that being in marketing every week has forced me to learn so much than I would have had I not otherwise been doing the podcast.  One of the biggest benefits I've gotten from doing the podcast is constantly testing new ideas and tactics. Staying up to date on all the changes that come out from ad platforms and social media can be overwhelming, but if once you have down some basic principles you can figure out how to test all the new ways to attract attention. Digital marketing has come so far in the past two years it is really amazing. What the most effective marketers do is take attention, segment it and deliver up relevant offers. Another big lesson I've learned is how important it is to be patient. Learning marketing takes time and effort and you'll fail a lot, but if you stick with it, you'll learn what works and what doesn't and soon you'll instinctively know what the best ways to reach your ideal client.  One of the biggest take aways that I've gotten from the podcast is that you can find your ideal target market and grow that audience if you are consistent and have good intentions. Finding strategic interviews have also been very beneficial in building an audience and I think it is really under utilized as a strategy for veterinary practices. Find people to build your business who can benefit from you and your distribution as well.  Again thank you so much for listening and please let me know if I can do anything for you. Getting feedback from listeners is what keeps me going on the podcast, so thank you if you've ever reached out. Again thanks to everyone who has contributed as guests and I'll see you on the next episode!

This is going to sound crazy, but I seriously believe that livestreaming is the most effective marketing strategy that you can do right now for your veterinary hospital. Live streaming has been around for quite a while, initially Meerkat and Periscope were the only options, but Facebook has rolled it out to everyone. In today's episode I show you everything you need to know about how to be a live streming pro!  One of the first things I think we should think about before we begin livestreaming is that it is an amazing way to create native content. If you create your streams properly, you'll be able to create content that segments your audience so that you can show them ads and offers around things they want and will be interested in. The benefit of livestreaming right now is that it is EXTREMELY cheap to get paid distribution, and the way that facebook ads work, you can create custom audiences of people who have watched your videos. In fact, you can create audiences segmented by people who have watched at least 10 seconds, 25% 50% or 75%. You can also create look alike audiences based on people who have watched your videos as well. This is an amazing way to identify people who have interest in the content that you're putting out.  So before you begin, here are a couple tips. First, make sure you have the pages app. you need the facebook pages app installed on an Apple or Android device which can be a tablet or phone. One thing I highly suggest too is having a clip on wide angle lense. Wide angle lenses will help you to get all the action into your frame, especially if you're in a small exam room. A tripod also helps too. Once you have the equipment you need, make sure to put your phone in do not disturb mode because you won't want your stream interrupted by phone calls. When you're setting up the stream on your device make sure to check in to your location, this will help you to get more relevance when you're doing ad boosts. These live streams help increase engagement right now. Make sure you ave your topic picked out before you start, I like to have 3 parts to my streams an intro, a body and a closing. Please don't forget the calls to action and as much as possible keep your calls to action native. Ask people to engage within the app and figure out how people like to engage and watch your content. Try this out, you won't be sorry you did!