31 Dec 2017
Having a website is no longer enough to cut the mustard. Dave Nicol explains why practices must develop a structured digital strategy to turn those clicks into clients.
Dave Nicol
Job Title
For my final article of the year, I was invited to write about how to “turn client heads with your website on the virtual high street”. But, immediately, I had a problem with two parts of this premise.
The first is the assumption anyone is actively looking for your practice website at all. If you have spent more than two seconds online, you will probably have worked out we get telephone numbers from Google, not websites, and everything else is either entertainment (distraction) or searching for information (and usually getting distracted). In fact, such is the level of distraction, I wonder if anyone is looking for anything intentionally or whether we are all just bumbling around chasing adverts on Facebook or clicking on YouTube videos of kittens (this may, of course, be a sad reflection on my browsing habits).
The second problem was with the linear notion of “the digital high street”, which, I think, is a very unhelpful concept. The notion online people browse their way directly to a website then “pop in” and buy something wasn’t even particularly accurate back in the late 1990s, when the first e-commerce websites appeared. Today, with the proliferation of communication and social platforms available, the smart marketer knows pet owners consume content from a smorgasbord of locations. Blogs, podcasts, audiobooks, ebooks, social sites, news sites, local parks, friends, families, groomers, breeders… the list is long and vexing.
To back up this point, let me get nerdy for a second. For the past decade, I have owned, managed or consulted many vet practices around the world and used digital marketing to help build business. The server log data from the websites of these practices yielded a compelling and consistent observation that only 10 per cent to 25 per cent of online traffic comes to a website directly by typing the web address directly into a browser. This means 75 per cent to 90 per cent of the traffic (potential business) arrives by other means.
So, rather than ask the question of how to turn heads and notice your website, I invite you to think about how to get attention across your “webspace” – that is, the assembled glory of all of your digital assets (website, social sites, local business page and media assets).
Furthermore, when embarking on a digital marketing strategy, it is important not to become fixated with “vanity numbers” such as “followers”, “likes” and “subscribers”. You can have as many of those as you like, but if none buy from you, your strategy has failed. So, the real question I want to help answer is how to use your digital assets to turn the right heads at the right time and get them to spend money (become clients) in your practice.
In 2011, I published my first book, The Yellow Pages Are Dead. Essentially a template for how to build a veterinary business using digital tools, it ushered in a new dawn of marketing opportunity for brave vets who wished to dive into the world of digital engagement.
I wrote about three core principles or activities that your webspace must achieve to have any benefit for your business. These principles are timeless and will outlive Facebook, so I’ll borrow heavily from them here. The principles are the three Cs of digital marketing – create, connect and convert – and, for brevity, I’m going to graft on two other steps to create a formula for digital marketing success.
The five steps to any profitable digital marketing strategy are:
Now, let’s get into some detail.
We all have finite time, so anything we spend this most precious resource on should have a tangible financial return. As such, just posting articles about pets or how you do cruciate repair surgery is not going to help you win new business. Replace the random approach with a proper plan that answers the following questions:
Once we have a plan, we can use it to build our website, or choose a social platform or decide what content we are going to need. Without it, we are directionless.
When we do anything online, our primary objective is to get local pet owners, or potential pet owners, to view engaging and relevant content.
So, the content we create has to connect with our target audience. In this fictitious case, we are targeting young professionals with double income and no human children yet. They are educated and time rich, but attention poor. They want to be amused and entertained; they want the best for their dog or cat, which is really a surrogate child. They also want to use brands and services that reflect their outlooks and attitudes.
So, our content will help them learn to be better pet owners, will shine with personality, and be witty and irreverent. We will create a mix of ebooks, “how to” blog posts, images and video content.
The next step is to get your content in front of the audience, and that is where simply thinking about your website is a problem. Your audience is online in very disparate places. Some will be on Facebook, some on Instagram, others on Reddit or Pinterest.
So, we have to get our content fit for publication in each area.
Let’s say, for example, you write a blog post about dog poop. You write the article and publish it on your blog. Now you have to share it where the dog owners are. So, you may want to think about creating an image to share on Instagram and Facebook alongside your words. You have to think about the short-form words and tags that accompany your posts on social media – without these, your content is invisible.
You are going to link to your blog from the emails you send your email news list, and you will need a Facebook live video you can share on your YouTube channel – all based on the topic of dog poop.
When you start to distribute content across networks regularly, then – and only then – do you earn the attention of your local pet owners. For an instant you are not invisible, heads turn. Do this often and consistently enough, and you start to get your story across.
We can have the best content under the eyeballs of the right people, but if we never offer a way to interact with us further, all the head turning in the world is not going to get us an upswing in sales. After engagement and education or entertainment comes action.
To encourage a client to take the next step in becoming a client, we include calls to action in or alongside our content. This may be something as simple as asking someone to follow us on Facebook so they are exposed to more of our messaging. Or it may be inviting a client to telephone by providing a clickable telephone number link, making it easy to telephone directly from the web page on his or her mobile device. Or it may be something more involved, such as swapping an email address in return for a free ebook or gift.
The type of action you encourage will be entirely linked to the level of need a client has for your services, and this is determined by the type of content.
For example, a client reading our blog post about dog poop may be entertained, but not necessarily need to buy anything from you this moment. So, your call to action is going to be general, perhaps an invite to share the content or sign up to your email list.
On the other hand, a website visitor who downloads your puppy ebook is very likely to want that content because he or she is thinking about getting, or has just got, a puppy. As such, it is an urgent and high-value opportunity to gain a client and, hence, warrant a more proactive approach. In this instance, it would be entirely appropriate to invite him or her to the practice for a puppy visit or advice session with the practice nurse, or schedule a telephone call to ask whether he or she requires any help with his or her puppy.
The final step after launching your website or publishing your content is to check whether it had the desired effect.
Did it meet the objectives you set? If so, great. If not, why not? What can be done to improve the outcome?
By taking a methodical approach to planning and executing your online strategy, you will hugely improve your business outcomes. Over the past six years, I have at least doubled revenue in four separate veterinary businesses using digital marketing alone. It is not easy; it does take time to plan, but, when executed correctly, it works like a dream.
Many will ignore this advice or feel overwhelmed – and, sadly, these practices are going to become gradually invisible in this fast-evolving digital marketing landscape.
Pet owners won’t go away, of course, but their heads will turn in new directions as digital-native challengers enter the market and steal attention.
