The Veterinary Marketing Podcast

In today's episode we're going to be covering a really practical way to take your best performing pieces of content and then making it even better. By applying what we talk about today you should be able to take content that is getting organic traffic, optimize it so that it hopefully ranks better, analyze the intent and context of the traffic coming to the site and improve conversion once you have done those things. Best of all, this shouldn't take too much time but it should be able to produce big results for you. This activity of reviewing your best performers and then optimizing it should be done on a pretty regular basis, maybe 1-2 times a year.  The first step, finding your best performing pieces of content can be done by going to google analytics, and sorting by organic traffic. Once you have your organic traffic chosen you can then set your primary dimension to sort by as landing page. This will tell you what pages get the most organic traffic and then you can sort by other factors like what keyword was used to get to the page. Knowing this info will help you to see what people are looking and and how most people are fining you. Updating content helps with your content's freshness and should help your ranking in search engines. Remember, search engines are trying to provide the most relevant results to the searchers because that helps them to make more money, and freshness is a factor in the search algorithm.  Once you've found your best performing content, make sure that you have your on page SEO optimized. This includes the title tag, meta  description, heading/title, body copy and image alt optimized with the keyword that you're targeting. LEAVE THE URL the same, this is important! The search engines have indexed the URL and unless you're going to do a redirect you need to leave it alone. Don't keyword stuff, and make the language functional and readable.  When updating content a good idea is to use stories, update products, give examples and put any new relevant data or info into the post.  The last step in optimizing this content is including a relevant offer for people to go to after consuming the content. This is where figuring out the context of the traffic is really important. Is someone doing comparisons between you're practice and another? If so they are likely ready to make a buying decision relatively soon, so an offer that is a reward for coming in or a one time coupon for first visits would be an appropriate offer. If someone is just doing research or trying to find answers to a specific question more content or driving them to a social media account to connect might be a good relevant offer to send the traffic to. Figure out what step in the process the traffic is in and help them to take the next step in the relationship so that you can hopefully bring them in.  The goal of good digital marketing is to take people from awareness to consideration to then decision. Push them through the funnel by giving them what they are looking for! 

Marketing is both an art and a science. Sometimes you'll put together a piece of content or an ad and you think that it is going to be massively successful, but then once it gets out in front of your clients it bombs. What makes an ad, a piece of content or an email work? If I had the definitive answer I probably would be too busy diving Scrooge McDuck style into piles of gold coins. Since I (and almost ever person on the planet) can't be sure what will work the best testing is necessary.  Running split tests to determine what elements work is an intelligent approach to marketing because there is always something that you can improve upon. How do you decide what you should test first? In today's episode I cover how to pick what item you should test, how to create a list of all the things you think you should test and then how to prioritize those items. Since you're testing things, obviously you should be able to pick a winner. The only way you can pick a winner is if you are actually measuring your traffic, so if you don't have the ability to look at your practice's analytics page, start there! You should be able to choose a goal or an objective that the test should be built around. So having a higher conversion rate, a higher open rate, higher click through rate or maybe increased time on site would be all good examples of a clear goal that you could create a test around. Once you choose what you're going to test, make sure to only test a single element so that once the test is complete you'll be able to say what factor contributed to a higher or lower goal rate.  Sometimes you won't have a clear winner, and in those cases I cover what you should do. Testing can really help you to improve conversion, even on pages that don't get paid traffic. So if you or your practice has any digital assets, this episode will help you to be more effective, which in turn helps you to help more pets!

On this week's episode I was able to interview Dr. Michael Berman from Animal Hospital At Grayhawk, in Scottsdale AZ. Dr. Berman has been able to save over $15,000 a year by removing a couple of expensive marketing services from his practice and doing them on his own. Dr. Berman and his wife Dr. Kitchen just recently acquired their practice and when they took over the practice they got all the services that the former owners had been using as well as the bill for those services.  What makes Dr. Berman different than most veterinarians is that he actually started off thinking he wanted to be a programmer, and had gone to school to get a degree in computer science. After graduating and spending an agonizing month of sitting in a room starring at a screen of computer code made it clear that he didn't want to be a programmer. He decided that he wanted to become a veterinarian after a really good experience that saved his cat's life and went back to school.  The good thing about today's episode is that you can try the things we talk about without taking any risk at all. What Dr. Berman discovered was that his practice was paying 9600 a year for their website, which wasn't performing very well at all and also 8400 a year for postcards. Even though Dr. Berman has a background in computer science, you don't need a programming background to use the amazing WSYWYG(what you see is what you get) HTML5 website creators. Dr. Berman experimented with Squarespace.com, Wix.com and Weebly.com which are all very easy to use and offer free trials. HTML5 editors are just one type of DIY website builders, Wordpress is another example of a DIY website builder, but Wordpress can often be a little more complicated.  We cover how these three platforms differ and what kinds of features that each have and why you may want to try a specific one. We also cover how analytics integrates and how to create a risk free trial to see if building your own site will work for you. Take a look at how great Dr. Berman's website turned out at http://animalhospitalatgrayhawk.com. The site that Dr. Berman created looks like a really nice custom site created by a professional programmer, is mobile friendly and will save him a bundle so that he can deploy those dollars on more productive things. 

On this week's episode, we continue on the two part series of getting back to the basics. Last week we spoke about how to approach marketing and some general principles that will help you to get a really good foundation for what you're doing. In this week we talk more about the tactics and ways to get new clients in your veterinary practice.  When you create content and offers you're going to be targeting these at one of three groups of people, cold traffic, warm traffic and hot traffic. Each of these traffic sources should definitely be handled differently because they have a different relationship with you and your practice. Cold traffic is a group of people who have never heard of you or your practice so asking them to buy something without the right context would not be a good idea. There are times when it is appropriate to make offers to cold traffic, like when they have an emergency and need a vet now.  Moving people from cold to warm and then to hot is just like any relationship that you would build in person. First introduce yourself, provide value through info or entertainment and then move them to becoming a client. I think many times people forget that your marketing and content is targeted to real people and that your clients react in the same way that they would in face to face meetings. If you walked up to someone in a public place who had a dog and you told them that their dogs needed a hip replacement and that the should bring them into surgery that person wouldn't likely believe you.  So we use content to move people up the relationship ladder and once we have identified what the person is interested and we have rapport built up we can then more easily turn that stranger into a client. Having cold traffic driven to your content is essential when you are in business because this group represents new clients. If you don't bring in new clients for long enough, eventually you'll go out of business. 

I was talking with several listeners of the podcast this week and I got some recurring feedback. They were saying how they love the podcast but it has some content that is really advanced and then it dawned on me. I've never done an intro to marketing episode. Having a strong foundation is one of the most important steps when starting your journey on marketing. So better late than never! In this week's episode I cover the principles that don't change over time. When learning marketing it is really important to know how to think about the ways you connect and engage with your clients because the way you approach marketing won't change over time. Tactics will change but principles always stay the same. People for the most part are the same and react the same over time. Sure there are new social networks, new marketing tools like pixels and more advanced targeting demographics, but this doesn't change the way you should approach your marketing. One of my favorite marketing books of all time is called Olgilvy on Advertising by David Olgilvy and this book was originally published in 1983. Knowing how human behavior works and how people will react to certain stories is the real way to  Deciding who you are targeting and the right context for targeting your clients  is very important, especially with all the content that is being created these days. In fact, more content than ever is being created so if your marketing is created with the right intent you're going to be more a part of the problem and noise than something that your clients will actually listen to. We cover the three main reasons why people are even using the internet so we can break down the best ways to reach each of these categories of people.  Once you have the principles down, you can learn some great tactics for reaching your clients and potential clients.  Today we cover principles and next week we'll cover an intro to tactics. 

Writing can be tricky, especially if you have a veterinary hospital to run. What are you supposed to write about? Thinking about the entire process can be exhausting. Writing is very important, you need it for content, email sequences, ads, web pages and basically any piece of content that your clients and potential clients will consume. Fortunately it doesn't have to be that hard.  Whenever I can find shortcuts or systems to put in place for marketing I love to use them, that is why I love writing formulas. Whether you're writing a web page, a blog post, a landing page, an ad or any piece of copy you can apply one of the simple formulas that I cover in today's episode.  Before you begin writing it is really important to think about things from your clients perspective. Being inside your own veterinary industry brain can be helpful, but it can also keep you from creating content that will appeal to your clients. Anytime I create content I think about the following: Who am I writing For? What is the context(Medium) that I am creating this conversation or story around? What is the best medium for this content? What is the best and most simple way for me to convey my idea? And lastly, how can I make this as entertaining as possible.  When you begin to create something if you are starting off with the wrong intent it can really mess with the entire piece of content so be sure to start with those general questions so that you can hopefully hone in on what your clients want. It is easy to forget but your clients are the ones you're creating for, so it is important that they'll want to consume what you're serving up.  These formulas are all pretty basic, but simplicity is wonderful, especially when you're creating content. People are very busy these days so the quickest way to convey the information that you're looking to share is usually idea. 

I am always on the lookout for new helpful tools that will allow me to market better. The three tools that I talk about in today's episode will absolutely help simplify and enhance your marketing execution so that you can really grow by leaps and bounds this year.  When I talk about marketing I really emphasize measuring and testing. Measuring and testing are really critical components so that you can always be improving your efforts in order to get the lowest cost most effective marketing done. One tool in particular that I talk about in today's episode really helps to do that, it is called AdEspresso.com. With AdEspresso.com you can create literally hundereds of versions of ads all at once so that you can test all kinds of items like headlines, content of the ads, calls to action, images used in the ads, and demographic targeting options/audiences. This really takes the guess work out of knowing what works best and radically saves you time and effort. It would be impossible to do the amount of work that this system does for you even if your only job was to be constantly setting and testing Facebook ads all day. It also gives you easy to understand reporting so that you can clearly see what is working without having to create custom reports in facebook ad reporting and then integrate it with your Google analytics data. I have only recently been testing out AdEspreso.com but so far it is really been an amazing tool in all the marketing that I've done in the past couple months. You can get a free trial at AdEspresso.com for 14 days so be sure to check it out! The Next Item that I talk about is a little bit less glamorous or exciting as AdEspresso.com but I think it could really help and it is the Facebook Pages Manager CRM like features that have recently been updated on the App. If you have to manage your practice's page and use the app you can find this feature by making sure your app is updated and you can click on a specific person who interacts with your fan page. Once you click on the individual it will pull up a page that shows data on who you are talking with. You can see things like how long they've liked your page, where they live and you can add notes. This is a good idea to tag people, especially if they are troublemakers on your page so that any admin can look up notes and know to mute comments & block or even how to respond.  The last item I cover in today's podcast is LeadDigits from Leadpages. If you would like to try this out text "veterinary" to 44222 and you'll get a copy of my 31 veterinary blog post ideas. Lead Digits allows you jto collect email information through text messages and best of all it is integrated into leadpages so it is a bonus feature that I didn't realize I already had. There are so many applications for this in your practice and I cover some really cool marketing ideas. If you want to see how leadpages works send me an email and I'll show you the best ways to use leadpages in your veterinary practice. 

Dr. Braden Collins from Bunbury Vets in Bunbury, Western Australia is on the show to talk about how he uses Facebook to drive massive amounts of engagement in his veterinary practice. Dr. Collins originally reached out after having listened to the show and I quickly became a fan of his marketing. Braden uses Facebook really effectively to reach large portions of his community.  Originally, in this episode I wanted to talk to him about his holiday photo contests because he gets great engagement as well as a very active participation from his clients. We cover how he uses his holiday posts to grow his Likes and how much he spends in promotion.  This year Braden also tested some new marketing where he allowed for clients to drop off their pets instead of leaving them in the car. This helped him and his practice get a lot of good PR and goodwill. Last year, Braden made a video that illustrated how serious leaving pets in the car can be during the summer, and so to help curb any pets being lost during Christmas shopping, he made this offer.  There also recently was a very large fire that affected a very large portion of the town down the road. Braden offered to help out however he could, and because of his help, his facebook post reached over 160,000 people! We cover the effects of his posts, and what works best for him.  I really admire that Braden not only is willing to test all kinds of different marketing ideas, but he really genuinely cares about his community and is marketing like he is in it for the long term. By being a good neighbor and caring about his community he is getting a bunch of good marketing benefit. The key though, is that he is doing it because he cares, not because he just wants to be on the news. 

Creating content and ads can be difficult enough without having to go through all the extra work of adding tracking pixels into the equation.  Google's new tag manager is going to simplify some of the most important but complicated aspects of digital marketing. One of the things that I fail to do most often that I wish I executed better on was creating enough segmentation for all the tracking pixels that I need to place, but it ads a ton of tedious work to the whole process and often times I forget to do what I know I should be doing.  First if you don't know what pixel tracking is, then you  are missing out on a huge opportunity for increasing the value of content and marketing pieces you create. Pixels are pieces of javascript code that allow you to track people who visit your site or just very specific parts of your site. This code allows you to create audiences of people to show ads to on specific sites like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and ad platforms like Google Adwords. For example, let's say you're selling dog food and you have people add a bag of dog food to their online cart, but they abandon half way through the process and don't end up buying. You can use retargeting codes to track these people and show them ads of the food they were thinking about buying, except maybe you show a coupon or a limited offer to drive them to purchase.  Tag manager makes it so that you can create and place these javascript codes without having to adjust your website code. If you don't know how to edit your website or if you don't manage adjustments then this will help! Now with tag manager all you have to do is create a container, get a single code and have that installed on your website once. Once it is installed you never have to put code on the site again! All you have to do now is create tags that use specific triggers and variables to tell google when to fire a tag(this means run the javascript code and create your remarketing list or event tracking) You can use tag manager to not only remarket, but also to track behavior and engagement on your site. This is probably going to be my favorite marketing tool I use this year!

Today's episode is the last part in the 4 part series on how to give your veterinary hospital a total marketing makeover and how to make this year your veterinary practice's best year ever. Today's episode we specifically cover how to know that your marketing is working and that you are executing well. Creating an advertisement is easy, but making one that actually works well is another thing altogether.  I think the first step that most people fail at is taking no action at all. No matter what you learn, you'll get no benefit unless you put what you learn into action and take a first step. So please this year make it a year of taking action and apply what you learn, even it is just a small amount of implementation.  Assuming that you are taking action the first real question you should ask yourself in any kind of marketing that you do is, "why am I even creating this piece of content/ad/social media post/etc?"If you don't have a clear objective it will be really easy for your marketing to fail. How do you even know if the marketing you've created is actually doing what it is supposed to in the first place if you don't have a specific objective?  Once you can put the pass/fail test on a piece of marketing based on the objective that you've created the next step is to evaluate why something is working or not working. Most of the marketing materials that are created don't actually work, especially if you're not a seasoned marketer, so it is important to be able to evaluate the work that you're doing and pinpoint the areas that need work.  The two parts that most marketing campaigns fail are in the advertisement and then in the sales cycle. I go in depth into the most common problems the three components of advertisements face and then where in the sales cycle marketers lose clients. Marketing and advertising doesn't work(over the long term) if your product is terrible though. So make sure that you are providing tremendous value!