The Veterinary Marketing Podcast

This is a special episode of the podcast because it is the first anniversary of starting the podcast! I can't believe a year has gone by already! In this episode I talk about what I think has been the most important things that have happened in marketing and where it is going for your veterinary practice. I also answer some questions submitted via email by listeners. Thanks to everyone who responded to my email request last week for questions! It has been an amazing experience developing a podcast and growing it and I want to thank everyone who has listened and contributed along the way! I love connecting with listeners and I love doing the podcast, it has definitely made me a better marketer. When I started I never would have imagined that so many people would listen and that I'd be able to meet so many awesome people through the show. I'm definitely going to continue doing the show so long as I feel I'm able to provide value and create good content. I've been amazed at all the people who have reached out and one of my favorite things to see is when a practice starts trying and testing new marketing at their practice. Most practices and people won't take the time to learn and execute new marketing ideas, so if you're willing to test out new ideas you'll likely be successful because there just isn't that much competition out there. In this episode I cover topics on everything from what you should focus on in the next year and also cover some great questions as well. Topics on the questions ranged from what would be the top 5 things you would do if a practice only had a website and a yellow pages ad to what is the biggest mistake you see veterinary practices making. Thanks again to everyone who listens and be sure to reach out if you ever need anything!

Content creation and consumption continues to change as people and technology change. Remember when people never thought that they would ever purchase something online? Remember when people used to be private and not share every detail of their lives online like they do now with social media? I think that live-streaming is that next step of content consumption and creation that people will be adopting and that is why I'm so excited to have Dr. Cody Creelman on the podcast again to talk about how to take advantage of this new way to engage with clients. Dr. Cody Creelman is a beef cattle veterinarian and practice owner of Veterinary Agri-Health Services in Alberta, Canada. His veterinary interests include bovine pathology, large animal surgery, cow/calf and feedlot production medicine. Cody is also very passionate about veterinary mobile technology. This includes consulting on veterinary application design projects, as well as digital marketing and social media platforms. Check him out on his website, Twitter(you can see him post his live streams here), Instagram, Snapchat (creelmancody), Vine, or YouTube…… he is active on them all! How people interact with brands is pretty interesting to think about and smart marketers are always seeing where the new way to engage and attract attention are. Live streaming is a great utility(for now) that you can use in conjunction with your current social media channels to give you a greater depth of relationship and create content that is hopefully really engaging and educating. Dr. Creelman shares with us the basics on Meerkat and Periscope, the two most popular live-streaming apps, and gives us some best practices for using them. He also shares how he uses live-streaming for his practice as well gives examples on other uses that it could have for in practice marketing. This episode is full of awesome advice from a vet who is actually doing it and using it, so be sure to listen to the entire episode.

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.