The Veterinary Marketing Podcast

Do you ever have trouble writing emails, email newsletters and getting your emails read? Lots of veterinary professionals have trouble with how to write emails, how often they should write emails how much content they should put in there. If you're like me you have probably heard everything from emails don't work to emails are a great tool. Well I happen to think emails are a great tool and they are something you can use to really boost engagement and business at your practice. In today's interview with Dr. Mike LoSasso, we go over all of the important things to consider when writing email marketing campaigns for your veterinary practice. Dr. Mike LoSasso is an expert copywriter and owner of Newslettersforvets.com, a service that writes your practice's monthly newsletters. Dr. LoSasso has a tremendous amount of experience having owned and run a veterinary practice and is currently an emergency veterinarian at Emergency Animal Hospital of Collin County, and he shares his wealth of knowledge in this episode. I feel that email is extremely important for your veterinary practice because this is a list that you actually own. With other marketing, like social media or search engine optimization, you have no control. You are essentially renting your lists as long as the platform lets you. Changes in SEO algorithms or policy changes within social media can make it difficult, especially if you aren't keeping up with everything. With email you get consistency and reliability(as long as you are consistent and reliable), the only issue is you have to get the emails opened to be effective. Not only did Dr. LoSasso share great info with us, he also created a special for Veterinary Marketing Podcast listeners where you can get two free months of newsletters created for you by visiting NewslettersForVets.com/VMP Items mentioned in this episode: Aweber.com Mailchimp.com NewslettersForVets.com/VMP

If you talk about paid digital ads, most times you'll be talking about Facebook ads, Facebook Dark Posts or Google Adwords. Of course all of these ad platforms have great potential, but are you overlooking something by not testing out Twitter ads? I think that twitter is seriously underestimated when it comes to their ad platform and it has the potential for veterinary practices to interact with and attract lots of clients. Twitter has 5 types of ad objectives that you can create, and I go over each ad type as well as the what the possible veterinary marketing ideas for each ad could be for each. Out of the five ad objectives that I go over, I think two have some really big potential for veterinary marketing. As apps become more popular ways for veterinary practices to market themselves, I think the app ad types will become really powerful tools for marketing. I also think that the twitter lead generation cards are really awesome because it lets you convert traffic natively instead of having to drive someone to a landing page and could prove to have higher conversion and lower cost.

Email is so important for your veterinary practice because it is a list that you actually own, and in this episode we'll be going over 3 major email marketing service providers and then some tips and tricks as to how you can build your email list faster. This is becoming increasingly important because social media, organic traffic and other sources of traffic and ways to connect with your clients can be changed based on the platform that you are using . When things like algorithm changes the ways clients can find and interact with your practice that could mean trouble! I know practices who have become increasingly frustrated with their inability to reach their clients on Facebook because their organic reach has dropped a ton in the past year. I think Facebook provides some pretty big insight into what the new normal will look like for social media platforms. When social media platforms begin to acquire users on a mass scale, in most cases that is what they are most interested in, building as many users as possible. Once these platforms mature however, they also begin to develop their ad platforms as well, and when this happens I think it will be inevitable for organic reach to drop pretty severely pretty quickly. Why is this all really important to a practice and their email list though? Well, when you own your list, and can communicate whenever you would like, then you have the ability to be in control. Not only will building a solid email list give you better control, but it also allows you to build marketing lists for sites like Linkedin and Facebook. This means that email could be a really consistent source of business for your veterinary practice and one of the first steps to building a healthy email list is figuring out how to build the list and which email service provider to use.

In this episode we talk all about Google Analytics for your veterinary practice. Everything from how to install it to what data you should be looking at, how often and how to look at it. Measuring your marketing is one of the most important things you can do and I would go so far as to say that if you can't measure your marketing you're just guessing and that it probably. Without proper measurement, your marketing is just guessing, and not even educated guessing. The truth is, that most marketing results in failure (leasons) and because of this, when you end up with a winner, you'll want to know it! I'll also be showing you how to automate this as much as possible so that you don't have to think about it. One of the things Google Analytics does really well is it shows you if there are any serious problems or opportunities that you wouldn't have know about otherwise. You'll also be able to see if certain types of traffic are doing better than others, like mobile vs tablet vs desk top or if social media traffic converts better than SEO Traffic. I also talk about how automate Analytics report by email so that you don't have to spend time constantly logging in to check.

In this episode I interview Dr. Braden Collins, from Bunbury Veterinary Clinic in Western Australia about his social media and content marketing. I initially met Dr. Collins from the podcast, when I mentioned I was doing a Facebook case study to get new clients. Dr. Collins was kind enough to let me try some new client acquisition strategies and we've been keeping in touch ever since. Since I was able to run tests in his market I discovered a few things, first his target market on Facebook was around 30,000 people, which isn't that large of an area, and he is consistently reaching a large number of those people and has around 1,500 likes on his page. That is impressive, 5% of his market likes his page! Each post he gets out reaches between 5-10% of his market consistently with a small marketing budget as we discuss on this episode. We talk about everything from content creation, to contests at holidays to reaching out and get his stories covered by local news. Dr. Collins shares a bunch of really great and practical insights that will absolutely help you market your veterinary practice. Be sure to listen to this entire episode!

One of the most important questions you can ask yourself for your veterinary practice is, "What does my ideal client look like?". Finding common elements between your best clients can really help you to grow and build your practice. Most businesses don't have a way to track this, but almost every veterinary practice is building a database that is a goldmine inside their practice software. Don't overlook how important and powerful this can be for you. The data that you already have could translate into better demographic targeting on your facebook advertising to knowing where to send direct mail campaigns.

Your domain name is like the real estate that your website sits on and it is extremely important for both search engine traffic as well as type in traffic. In this episode I show you how to potentially find new domain names that you can use to forward passive traffic and generate steady streams of new potential clients. Not only that I go over if you should ever buy a domain name, what I think about extensions other than .com like .net .org .info .blog and on. Some people think that the .com isn't that imporant but I know that it absolutely is! You're missing out on traffic if you aren't using a .com. One thing I will say is that I can't comment on extensions in other countries like the .com.au. I haven't had enough first hand experience to comment. I have been getting questions about what do do if you are rebranding a practice, like in instances of practices being sold and then the name changed, so I go over that.

You've probably heard about Snapchat, and unless you're under 25 chances are you aren't using it, not yet anyways. As is with most mobile apps or social networks younger demographics tend to flock to places before they become mainstream. What I think sets Snapchat apart from other apps and social media platforms is that large sized companies like CNN, Discovery Channel, VICE, ESPN and others are all creating native content and paying lots of money to show up in the discover section. 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, Instagram, Snapchat (creelmancody), Vine, or YouTube…… he is active on them all! We go over Snapchat, Instagram and Twitter's new native video platform.

Want to make email easier, less annoying and a tool to help you grow your veterinary practice? In this episode I go over 3 email marketing tools that help you do just that. This episode we talk about ways to better engage and communicate with clients while taking less time to do it. Want to know how to schedule emails so that you can set it and forget it with personalized emails, or how about see what your clients are up to on their social media accounts without having to go into a new tab and search. I discuss all this and more so be sure to listen!

Amazon is a monster. You're probably frustrated if you've ever tried to sell anything to compete with Amazon, but they don't have to be competition. In this episode I go over three ways to use Amazon to help attract, engage and retain your clients. I'll show you how to self publish a book using Createspace.com, Amazon's self publishing platform, as well as Amazon Giveaways and lastly fulfillment by Amazon or their FBA program.