The Veterinary Marketing Podcast

Today's episode is going to be a little bit advanced, but stick with me here, I think it is really worth the effort to at least understand the marketing concepts that we're going to be talking about. In fact, I think that the subject of today's podcast is likely the best opportunity that there is to market your veterinary practice. Today we're talking about Facebook Pixels. So What Are Pixels? Pixels are pieces of javascript code that Facebook provides. You put the Facebook pixel in the head section o your webpage so that when someone visits the site,the piece of javascript runs or "fires" and you are now able to track the person who is visiting that page or the event that just occurred. So pixels allow you to do two main things, one is build lists of audiences who have viewed certain pages or pieces of content that you create and/or they allow you to track and optimize ads for events like newsletter opt ins, form opt ins, purchases, cart abandons and other things. In the past, with Facebook pixels you had to create unique pieces of code every time you wanted to either create a new list to market to or track an event, but Facebook has recently changed the way pixels work. Now you get a base pixel that is standard for, the way you customize them for event tracking is by placing a little identifier that Facebook provides for you to copy and paste into your base code. So once you copy and past your pixel into your veterinary hospitals web pages, what can you do then? This is where some marketing strategy comes into play. By using segmented content built around offers that you have at your veterinary. It is really easy (at least comparatively) to get people to click and consume content instead of getting people to actually opt in to something to build your marketing list, so using pixels allows you to create segmented interest based lists without having people opt in. So I cover several examples that you can test, that will allow you and your practice to actually attract new clients, easily measure ROI and create content that your audience really wants. Facebook video also has a really cool pixel feature within the Power Editor that I cover. I know that this is definitely one of the more complicated episodes, but if you can implement the ideas in today's podcast your veterinary practice will be able to create dependable growth.

One of the most common questions I get from veterinary professionals is, "Is my website good enough?" It can be difficult to know when it is time to redo your site, especially if you don't know anything about programming or building websites. That is what this episode is all about, how do you go about finding the right person or company to help build your veterinary practice's website. This week's episode is pretty cool, because I have my twin brother, who has been a professional web developer, software developer and mobile app developer for a decade now, and he helps us go over exactly what you should think about if you are considering changing up your practice's website. Barrett Breshears, who you can find @barrettbreshear on twitter, currently works as a self employed IOS developer building mobile apps for businesses and start up all around the world. He's also built many websites for large and small sized companies and so I've been wanting to have him on the show for quite a while so that he could share some insight with my audience since I always get questions on how to find a web developer. So how exactly should you know what to get, and once you know what you want, how much should it cost? The whole experience of trying to get a new website can feel a lot like applying for auto financing and buying a car, how do you know if you're getting ripped off or not? We cover things from how to know when you need a new website to how to find the right web developer for your veterinary practice. We also discuss how much typically websites should cost and the best ways to know if your developer will actually be able to perform. One of the most important pieces that we cover in today's episode is making sure that you know what you want done so that you can get an accurate bid. The items that you absolutely need to know are: how many pages you want made, what kind of features you want to have, and how the site should function once it is complete. Having a clear idea of exactly what you need done and getting everyone to have the same scope for the project is a good way to make sure your new site gets done quickly and doesn't go over budget. Although Barrett doesn't build veterinary websites anymore, you can still ask him questions via twitter @barrettbreshear Items mentioned in this weeks episode: Test your site speed: http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/ Google Webmaster Tools: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools

Have you ever really thought about why you are creating a piece of content or specific ad? You likely have a desired end result like having someone read an article, share, comment, like or click but do you sit and actually think about what the person on the other end is experiencing? In this week's episode I talk about the three types of clients there are out there and how to figure out which is the best fit for you and your practice. If I were to ask what was most important in running a business most people would focus on the product, saying having a perfect product is most important. Product is absolutely important, if you or your veterinary hospital performs badly consistently you will go out of business, but on the other side providing amazing care sometimes isn't enough. I am sure you know of times where there were veterinary practices that had amazing staff who deeply cared, but for whatever reason the business side didn't make it. An important factor to have when considering what kind of marketing, whether it be content marketing or direct response ads, is who are you going to target. There are basically three groups of people that all of your potential clients fall into and they are as follows: People who don't know what they don't know. They are ignorant of the problem and the solution. People who are open to a solution and understand the problem but aren't actively looking for a solution People who are actively looking for a solution. Obviously each of these groups of people need to be handled and approached differently because they have different lenses through which they see you and your practice. The first group of people are the most difficult to market to, because not only do you have to prove to someone that they have a problem, you then have to show them you are the best solution to the problem they had no idea they had. The second group of people could be anyone from ma current client to a prospective client, and this group of people is far easier to reach because they are not that hard to convince. Maybe these people have simply forgot that they need to bring their pet in again. The third group of people that I talk about in this week's episode, is by far the most valuable immediately because they want and need what you have and are actively looking for it. Different types of advertising work better for each group and I talk about what kind of marketing works best for each type. If you consider the perspective of the person who is viewing your content you will be able to create more compelling marketing and be able to help more pets receive care!

I'm a huge fan of email marketing, and I hope that you and your practice are collecting emails. If you aren't collecting emails that should absolutely be where you start. A couple of reasons that I absolutely love emails is because for one, you own the list. No one can take away the emails that you've gathered. In some cases, especially with social media platforms, you're basically just renting the lists. You don't own it and if any of the rules change you're pretty much out of luck which can be a big problem. Since you own the list, if you are good at email marketing, you can use it to really influence your current and prospective clients. If you have good emails you can drive behavior and traffic into your practice. Having a slow week or month? Send out an email sequence and get some clients coming in through the door. So obviously since veterinary professionals are some of the most busy people that I've ever encountered, it is really important that you automate as much of this as possible. With automated emails you need to be using an email marketing system and for that I suggest either Mailchimp, Aweber or Infusionsoft, depending on the budget you have and what features you are looking for. Whatever you use it should be relatively easy to use, give you the ability to segment your lists of clients and also have automatic email capabilities. The email sequences that I talk about in today's episode should be able to be set up once and not have to be touched again. Whenever you can set up a marketing system and have a return that pays off for years is a huge win for anyone who is marketing because the return on time that you spend is so high. With email sequences the more you have the better in my opinion because you can create such segmented and relevant campaigns depending on what people like and engage with, but you likely have pets to care for, so I've narrowed it down to 5 that I think every veterinary practice needs. The 5 email sequences that I cover in depth in this week's episode are: a welcome email series a review email series a win back series a current client sales series and an engagement/segmentation series With each of these email series I think you'll see a huge return on investment. Remember that often times people get really busy and they just don't have the time and energy to think about things that they need to do for their pets, so not only will these email sequences help to drive more clients into your practice but they can also help to provide better care to pets as well.

Unless you're a full time marketer, you probably haven't thought too much about where you are getting traffic from, but you should be! There will always be new ad platforms, social media channels and websites to drive relatively cheap traffic from, but which site should you drive traffic from? Where are your best potential clients spending time right now? What are the best places to promote your veterinary practice's content and offers? These are all questions that we answer on this week's episode. For those of you who don't know, traffic is just clicks to your veterinary practice's website. Traffic is mostly looked at as a commodity but the truth is not all traffic is created equal. Putting ads on craigslist will definitely yield different kinds of clients than you would find on places like Linkedin. So where should you be advertising? First of all are you even advertising? I talk to lots of practices who aren't even advertising and I think this is a serious problem for a few reasons. The first reason, is if you want to grow your veterinary practice and create systematic predictable growth, you need a way to drive clients. The other reason you should be doing digital advertising is that if you are solely relying on organic traffic you are allowing someone else to be in control of your business. Organic traffic algorithms change all the and your site could be completely removed from the search results. So now that you know you should be using digital advertising, the next step is to figure out who your best potential client is so you can find the best places to advertise on. Is your ideal potential client a successful business person, who is a college grad and makes 125,000 a year? You might want to consider linkedin. Once you define your potential client use sites like alexa.com to find the demographic data. Now keeping line with the thinking that you don't want to have all of your eggs in one basket it is important to be testing and trying out a couple different traffic sources because even with paid traffic things change. Sure, Facebook marketing is great right now, but what if your ad accounts gets disabled or what if it becomes extremely expensive because competition grows stronger. Always be testing and trying new platforms that you feel would be a good fit for your content and your audience and you'll be able to create as many clients as you would like!

On this week's episode I have a special guest, Dr. Caitlin DeWilde, the founder of TheSocialDVM.com and we cover social media marketing for your veterinary practice. Dr. DeWilde has great insight because she is a DVM as well as a social media expert and so she understands the time and financial constraints that practices face when they are trying to create social media marketing plans. Dr. DeWilde holds her DVM degree from the University of Illinois College of Veterinary Medicine, where she was the president of the Veterinary Business Management Association. Dr. DeWilde also holds a B.S. degree in Agribusiness and Animal Science from Southeast Missouri State University. She currently serves as Vice President for the Greater St. Louis Veterinary Medicine Association. In addition, she is also a member of the Missouri Veterinary Medical Association and the American Veterinary Medical Association. She currently practices part-time at a St. Louis animal hospital. Dr. DeWilde was also recently named as one of just 10 national veterinarians to the AVMA Future Leaders class of 2014-2015. A lot of times I talk about some advanced marketing techniques that sound good in theory but when it comes to application it is difficult to find time to implement, and that is where Dr. DeWilde comes in. She really understands the difficulties that practices face and so she is all about creating creating solutions that are practical for practices. We also cover topics ranging from what the most common mistakes practices are making to what the best social media platform is. She also explains what she thinks about boosting posts and paying for distribution of content. Dr. DeWilde also has a special offer for listeners of the podcast. If you would like to get a free social media consultation visit TheSocialDVM.com and contact her to have her evaluate your social media efforts. Dr. Dewilde also does social media management for veterinary practices, which may be a good idea if you are having trouble managing your practice's social media.

Any time that there is a new way to generate new clients at your veterinary practice is good news! This week, Facebook released their new lead generation ad type and I think this is big news for your veterinary practice's marketing. In this week's episode I break down some new changes that Facebook has released with native lead generation and how to use them in your practice so that you can generate new clients. I'll show you how to set up these new ads, what steps to take to make sure you're collecting the right information and then how to download the leads once they start rolling in through this native lead gen platform. What is native lead generation you ask? Well whenever an app or social media platform allows you to collect information within the app or platform, this is native lead generation. What this does is allow the potential client to interact with your brand and opt in without having to leave the place you're at. Engaging natively is really important because it makes the content or ads that you have far easier to consume. This is why I am SO SO against you using all of your social media channels in the same way. If you have your Twitter account linked to your Facebook account you're going to get really low engagement because people behave and consume content differently in these different places. Each space has its own tone and context, and so if you make it easy and appropriate for people to engage natively you'll have higher conversion rates. So what is really exciting about Facebook's new ad type is that they let you collect your potential clients info without having to leave the Facebook app. I've been testing this ad type and the potential seems really big for these apps. Here is how they work, basically you create the ad in the power editor and then you create a web form to use along with the ad. You can customize the web for to collect as much info as you would like, but remember, the more info you collect, the lower the conversion rate usually. The application of this new ad type will work really well with segmentation and creating specific offers for those segments. I'm really excited to see how veterinary practices use this, but remember that it is important to constantly be testing. A large benefit of this ad type is that it allows you to really easily measure how much a lead costs.

One of my favorite things about Marketing is that you have the ability to choose who you work with and who you attract to your digital marketing pieces. I bet it isn't said too often but you can choose who you work with and what kind of clients come to your practice. I am sure that there will always be some difficult clients, but what if you just focused on attracting clients who were just like your the favorite clients you already have. Now I definitely understand the difficulty that a lot of veterinary professionals have when they try and define who they want coming in to the practice. Obviously they want as many people as possible to bring their pets in and they want to provide high levels of service and care, but if you get to choose who you work with, what would that person look like? In today's episode we cover exactly that, and more by creating your ideal client's avatar. If you think about your favorite clients you probably have a good idea what they look like, but we go way more in depth in creating your ideal client avatar. A client avatar is a marketing term that represents what your client is like, and we go so far as to create a name, demographic data, phrases expression that person uses and much more. Creating your client avatar really gets you to think in terms of your ideal client so that when they read your content or see your marketing they identify with it immediately and are drawn to your practice. When you are thinking about the ideal client, think about several of your favorite clients and try and figure out what are some of the commonalities between them. What makes this person tick, what are some of their fears, what are some of their pain points or what is it that will really make this person feel like they are valued at your practice. Imagine what your practice could be like if the majority of your clients were exactly like your favorite clients. Once you have gone through the process of thinking more about who your client is and what truly motivates them you'll be a far more effective marketer. Everything from the content that you create to the email you send will be created with better positioning and should connect with the potential client. This exercise will also help you to define the demographics you use to create and target your ads as well.

Digital marketing is changing faster than ever! It is crazy, but also really exciting because I feel like we're in the golden age of marketing. Highly sophisticated marketing tools and techniques are available to everyone now, if you are able to keep up to date, which is what this week's episode is for. There have been some really big updates, and so this episode is about whats new and what you need to be keeping your eye out for. The three areas that I'll be covering in today's episode are: Snapchat's update, The Facebook Business Manager and why I think it is time for you and your practice to switch over to that, and lastly Instagram ads! I've been really excited for Instagram ads, and I'll definitely be doing a full episode on Instagram here shortly. The release of Snapchat's new facial recognition animation is a really big deal I think. Even though on the surface it might look pretty silly or not that important I think it is big for a few reasons. First let's talk about something that is important to think about when you're approaching social media, which is when should you start considering a platform/app/social media outlet so that you're not always chasing the next shiny object. Marketing is a pretty predictable pattern now, although it is unlike anything we've ever seen in history so far. Typically in the past, the established older generation would control the distribution of content, IE Radio/TV/Newspaper, but now the youth are driving what is cool and interesting with respect to content creation and consumption. So you'll get a platform like Facebook, where it is adopted by the younger generation, it comes to a point where it is adopted by older generations and finally you have days like for the first time last month there were a billion people logging in. Amazing! Social networks work like that, you get youth going finding new things, they put their attention there, eventually more people adopt and integrate and when you have the attention of a large number of people you get advertisers. So in any social network you have the opportunity to grow your brand before all the advertisers migrate over and hopefully you can really engage and attract clients before advertising becomes really established. Facebook is definitely reaching maturity in its ad platform, but places like Snapchat are still in a way that you can be early to the game. The latest update really shows me that Snapchat is doing a good job at innovating and staying relevant, so you need to be checking this out, even if it just from the standpoint of a consumer so that if your practice decides to start using it you'll know how it works and what works best. Be sure to follow my snapchat @VMPBrandon. The next update that I think everyone needs to get on is the Facebook Business Manager, which you can find at Business.facebook.com. Here you can access a bunch of really cool features and you definitely get a different feel than just using the standard Facebook Ad Manager. The reason why I think it is great to use the business manager is because if you have mulitple people using and posting to the account you'll be able to easily manage them here. You'll also be able to access the custom audiences, the new pixels and most importantly add your Instagram account. If you hadn't heard, Instagram is rolling out ads, and this is HUGE! I've been waiting for Instagram ads forever, and they're finally here! In order to advertise on Instagram you need to add your Instagram account to your business manager. You can do this by going to settings and clicking on Instagram account. Facebook continues to innovate and do an amazing job with their ad product, so it is so so so so so exciting to see the same demographic choices available within the power editor to create Instagram placements. I'll definitely be doing an Instagram episode here in the near future. The definite theme of the episode this week is that you need to be working on becoming a practitioner of these digital marketing platforms. See how people are using the social networks, how they interact with brands,and how they engage and comment on ads. If you can see people who are having success, duplicate what they have and cut down the time on the learning curve. One thing to really take note of is what makes people angry so that you can avoid doing harm when you go to a new platform. If you have any questions or comments be sure to let me know: brandon@veterinarymarketingpodcast.com

Have you ever though about what actually matters when you are doing content marketing, or direct response marketing? I hear practices tell me all the time, "we've tried that (insert marketing platform) and it doesn't work", but what does that actually mean? In this week's episode I try and help you determine what kind of marketing results you should be focusing on and one type of result that you shouldn't be worrying about, which I call Vanity Metrics. Vanity Metrics can be things like, impressions, reach sometimes "likes" or re-tweets, basically anything that on the surface seems impressive, but when you dive deeper you discover that it isn't really producing anything. When the metrics you are following are just activity based rather than results based is when you can get into difficulty with your marketing. A lot of times too, these kinds of results seem impressive or exciting, but they don't help to drive clients in to your practice. I will say that there is always difficulty in trying to figure out what the ROI of your marketing is or should be. I think that a lot of times in social media when you are building community, educating clients or creating engagement that it can be difficult to quantify the result in terms of ROI but you should be able to quantify the engagement and drill down into what meaningful engagement actually looks like. For example posting an educational article that you are doing solely for educational purposes and then to have no one like, comment share and you get a low click through rate would be pretty easy to identify as a loser. Creating marketing with the end goal in mind will help you be a better marketer and allow you to generate better results. Instead of saying "This marketing doesn't work" you'll be able to find out what part isn't working, correct it and create success.