The Veterinary Marketing Podcast

People who work inside the veterinary industry are some of the most knowledgeable and passionate people I have ever encountered. They spend years getting trained to do their job, but one area of training that veterinarians don't receive is how to run their veterinary practice from a business standpoint. This industry is unique because the people working in practices have to provide care to several different species and have to treat everything from emergencies to standard preventative care. Often times this causes practice owners to get so tied up being a technician in their business that they don't have time to work on growing an actual business, and this is what the E-Myth tries to help with. This week's episode I have Dr. Peter Weinstein as a guest to talk about his new book, The E-Myth Veterinarian. Dr. Peter Weinstein is the executive director of the SCVMA, a speaker, and consultant.He explains how veterinarians spend so much time in vet school to become a really good practitioner or technician, but what is really lacking is business training. So often I hear people in the industry say, if you provide good care then that's all that matters, but the truth is that along with great service and care you need to spend time running the business and being the business owner. It is true that you have to do good work to retain clients, but the thing is, the practice down the street is likely filled with veterinary professionals who love animals just as much as you do. Caring more than the other practice won't cut it, you need strategies and systems to help grow your practice. In this podcast I usually just cover marketing, but in this episode, Dr. Weinstein shares his insight from years of working in practices that are really powerful. Marketing and branding needs to take place not just in your advertising or social media but you need to have consistency once someone makes it into the practice as well. We also cover how much you should actually know about marketing and advertising to be effective, the benefits of being pro active VS reacting to everything that comes up and how to often you should be thinking about marketing in your practice.

I run across helpful tools every now and then and in this week's episode I share with you my favorite tools that I use in marketing. The tools that I mention in this episode help you to either market more efficiently, engage better or make your life easier. I'm constantly amazed at the really high quality free tools that get put out there that you can use whenever you want, you just need to know what tools are out there! Veterinary Marketing Tools That I talk about in this week's episode: Tool number 1: Follow.net Follow allows you to see a high-level overview about any site, across a variety of sources. Data that you can view quickly includes: Traffic Estimates, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing, Display Advertising, Affiliate Marketing, Contextual Advertising, Twitter Mentions, Web Mentions, Blog Posts, Whois, Reverse IPs. This tool lets you do a bunch of research really quickly and lets you keep tabs on any competitors, especially in paid advertising. Tool number 2: Snip.ly Snip.ly is a URL link shortener that when clicked offers a customized call-to-action snippet at the bottom. What it lets you do is curate content really quickly. Curation is when you find something that would be beneficial to your audience that is from a source that isn't your own. By adding a call to action to this content you can potentially convert clients. Tool number 3 Overvideo App Video is getting increasingly more important because your clients love consuming video. Overvideo is an iPhone app you can use to create visual calls to action when you post video to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. It is very simple to use on your mobile device Tool number 4: Semrush.com This is a great resource that tells you competition levels for keywords, as well as search volumes of keywords, who is ranking for what. I especially like this tool when I'm checking out competition especially for Tool number 5: Lower Third for Hangouts on Air Branding If you ever do hangouts you'll want to check out this tool called Lower Third. Lower Third lets you easily add a graphic banner or overlay anywhere on the screen of your hangout so that you can brand it. It makes it look a lot more professional. I think hangouts are great for educating clients live, plus it drives clients to your Youtube and Google Plus page. Tool number 6: SumoMe.com Sumome.com is a suite of 10 tools created by Noah Kagan and Appsumo.com that help you to convert more of your traffic into opt ins. They have tools that range from opt- in pop ups to heat maps and a bunch of really amazing products. Tool number 7: Portent Idea Generator for Writer's Block If you ever have trouble coming up with ideas to write about this is a great tool. Oh by the way be sure to get my 31 Veterinary Blog Post Ideas (that's free too) Tool number 8: Swayy.co This logs in to your social accounts and sees and suggests things that would be beneficial to post bast on your community. IT is super cool For example it gave me an article that I could post about which was the dog eating festival. This tool combined with Snip.ly is a really great content curation strategy. Tool number 9: Google Analytics This is the staple for measuring marketing at your veterinary practice. If you aren't on Google Analytics please get this on your site. Even if you have an analytics suite through your web developer you need to be tracking what is happening!!! Tool number 10: Mail Chimp I choose this one just because it is free up to 2,000 contacts Tool number 11: Canva for Social Media Image Design Canva is basically like a really easy to use version of photoshop for creating images. If you want to easily create native image sizes for content then this is a great tool! Tool number 12: EMV Headline Analyzer for Headlines Ever wonder if you're writing a good headline? Headlines are so important for your open rates and really help with engagement as well, and this gives you an emotional marketing value, check it out here: http://www.aminstitute.com/headline/ Tool number 13: Quicksprout.com For SEO Analysis If you go here and put your website in, it will give you a SEO overview on things you need to work on and things you are doing well. It is pretty cool because it gives you a really broad overview, so you can use it to see if you have any large problems. Be warned you will be pitched SEO services! Bonus Tool: Google's Mobile Website Tester Is your site mobile friendly? Make sure you aren't being penalized! https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/

In a perfect world your clients would all have large savings so that if they ever had unexpected pet care expenses there would be no problem. As good as this sounds, it simply isn't reality. Things happen in life and most pet owners aren't ready for unexpected problems. The good news is, there is VetBilling.com which offers payment plans to veterinary practices. The crazy part is VetBilling.com doesn't charge veterinary practices anything to use them. In this episode I interview Suzanne Cannon about how VetBilling.com helps veterinary practices add a powerful tool of recurring automatic payments. We talk about how they screen potential installment payment candidates, how they handle setting up installment arrangements and much more. I think that Vetbilling.com is an amazing tool and a definite no-brainer to use at your practice! Having products that help no pet get left behind while maintaining a profitable business is a win-win situation that helps you to communicate that you care for your clients. It is probably pretty likely that you've used some kind of payment plans at some point in your practice, but with VetBilling you don't have to worry about the admin, the collections or any of the headaches. Items mentioned in this episode: VetBilling.com

In past episodes I've talk about using landing pages, but have never really gone over how to create landing pages for your veterinary practice, and this episode changes that! In this episode I discuss what elements your landing pages should have, and the best way to approach landing pages in general. The three types of pages that I go over are: Squeeze Pages-shorter opt in only pages where you are trying to generate new potential clients Long form sales pages- longer written word pages that try and sell a product or service Video Sales Pages Sales pages that try to sell a product or service but use a video instead of written word. There are unique applications for each of these landing pages and I talk about how and when to use each. One thing that practices also overlook is that they try to go to far too fast, so I discuss how to create a lasting relationship with your client so that you can build trust, rapport and then ask for your client to use you for a product or service.

Should your veterinary practice's marketing efforts focus on growing organic traffic or paid traffic? That is a question you may not be asking, but there is a good chance that what you're doing to market your practice is pushing you one way or the other. First what is organic traffic? Well I define organic traffic as people visiting your website who you have no control over, so that means search engine traffic, social media distribution that you don't pay for, direct type in traffic and referral from links in other sites. Paid traffic is what you pay for, so adwords, facebook ads, twitter ads, bing ads, etc. I know that lots of practices want to get as much organic traffic as possible and focus on SEO. While I think SEO is great, I think for most practices it is hard to scale, especially in the ways that they are executing it. So I jump into several topics that you're definitely going to want to consider when you're deciding what type of advertising to focus on and invest in.

Almost every veterinary practice has some type of traffic coming to it already. Just by the nature of being online and being a legitimate local business it is likely you're getting organic traffic to your site and your site may be working alright, but I guarantee it could be doing better! When you make improvements to your conversion it typically makes any marketing that you are doing more effective, so this is definitely something you're going to want to work on. In this episode I cover 5 tools that are tremendously helpful in creating higher conversion for your digital marketing. We talk about tools that help to measure engagement with your site, to things that help you create powerful landing pages and even touch on different means to engage with potential clients. The best thing about improving conversion is that tiny incremental improvements make huge differences over time. Imagine making small tweaks to your marketing that helps you increase your opt ins by 1 or 2 or even 3 each day. This little difference would help you generate anywhere from 365-1,095 new potential clients who you can communicate with. This could make a huge difference for your practice from a financial aspect.

Often times I hear veterinary professionals say how overwhelming learning digital marketing can be, and I totally get it, there is so much to learn and implement. What kind of marketing should you be doing, should you focus on this social media platform, is your website good enough? You could do marketing full time for your practice and still be constantly learning and keeping up with new things and ideas, so if you add managing a practice in there it makes it a lot more difficult. Around 3 and a half months ago, Dr. Karen Metzler from Summerfields Animal Hospital in Fort Worth Texas reached out to me from listening to the podcast. She was just starting to learn about digital marketing and since then has grown a tremendous amount in her knowledge and ability to apply what she learns. I asked her to come onto the podcast because I think we can learn a ton from her. Dr. Metzler graduated from Texas A&M's, College of Veterinary Medicine in 1997. She has experience in emergency medicine as wells as general practice. She has specific interests in surgery, dentistry, internal medicine, exotics and cardiology. If anyone is busy enough to have excuses to not learn or implement new ideas it is definitely Dr. Metzler. The topics I discuss in this interview include how to decide what to test, how much she feels that she needs to know about a subject, and much more. I know you'll find value in this week's episode so be sure to listen to the whole thing!

This week we have Dr. Dave Nicol on the podcast, and we talk about marketing strategies and principles that will help to grow your veterinary practice. Dr. Dave Nicol is a marketing expert who speaks internationally on veterinary marketing, management and staffing. Dr. Nicol has a very unique perspective on marketing because he owned a practice, which he just recently sold for a really nice return, that he grew by using digital marketing. We discuss everything from his ideas on social media and how to properly use social media for your veterinary practice, best practices for collecting emails, as well as a great way to quickly evaluate PPC and SEM agencies. We also dive into several marketing principles that have allowed Dr. Nicol to grow his client email lists so that he can drive clients into the practice and create paying clients.

In today's episode we get into the nuts and bolts of what actually makes good SEO for your website. We talk about best practices, things you should be doing and things you definitely need to avoid. If you want more organic traffic coming to your site then this is the episode for you. In last week's episode, we were able to set the foundation of how SEO works, what search engines do and what kind of expectations you should have in regards to SEO. Contrary to popular belief of many Veterinary Professionals, SEO isn't a magic wand that suddenly sends streams of traffic to your website on command. You need to wokr at SEO because it is constantly changing in order to try and give better results to people who are searching. With veterinary practices, local SEO is extremely important, and so when we talk about SEO in this week's episode, it is all about how to drive local searchers into your practice. There are 2 parts to SEO that we cover, on site SEO and off site SEO. First I cover on site SEO, or how to format and adjust your website so that it is optimized for search engines to identify your site and the content on it so that it can deliver it in relevant searches to potential clients. Off site SEO are things you can do that aren't on your website, but are things like link building, submiting site maps to webmaster tools and evaluating current links that you have pointing toward your site. Both are important and we cover the basics to make sure you're on the right track.

Almost everyone these days knows about SEO because SEO (or search engine optimization for those of you living under a rock) is an extremely important part of your veterinary practice's traffic. Online search through Google, Bing or Yahoo has become a part of life and has completely changed the way that people make purchases. In fact, now over 85% of people use online search to help make a buying decision in most of their purchases. So in this series about Search Engine Optimization, I'm trying to make SEO less mysterious and remove the misconceptions about what makes for good SEO and what you need to be avoiding. In this episode, part 1, I'll be covering more conceptual items. I'll tell you everything from how search engines work to how to get started and figure out what kind of keywords you want to be targeting. I also cover the different types of search queries people make and which ones are the most important for you to focus on for your practice. Everyone who does marketing for their practice will one time or another need to know how to speak the SEO language and at least have a basic understanding of how SEO works. I can't tell you how many times I've heard practice managers say "I need to call my web development company, they promised I would be in the first spot with my site" and think to myself, they have no idea what SEO actually is! After this series you should be able to either create a SEO plan for yourself, or if DIY SEO isn't for you, be able to speak intelligently with a SEO company to know what is possible and realistic.