13 Feb 2023
Many more people are “going digital” in all aspects of their lives – especially when it comes to looking after treasured pets. So it pays to know how to use the latest digital tools to ensure your practice stands out in an increasingly crowded market…
Claire Simper
Job Title
Image © d1sk / iStock
With more than 53 million active users in the UK alone1, when it comes to digital marketing, social media is the first tool that springs to mind for most veterinary practices.
However, a handful of other important digital tools and strategies can be implemented straight away to help your practice stand out from the crowd.
In the following article, I’ll explore how you can easily start to use each of these tools in your practice’s digital marketing strategy and how they work seamlessly together to help guide pet owners to be better caregivers and clients by providing a seamless digital experience.
Let us not brush over the fact that social media has its place, and it is imperative for any small business – not just veterinary practices – to have a presence on at least one platform.
With so many practices competing to be noticed by the same audience of pet owners in any one local area, capturing attention from the right pet owner or “ideal client” is reliant on your ability to interact with local pet owners positively in the digital space. This is where social media comes in to its own.
I’m often asked which platforms a practice should focus on and, truthfully, no one size-fits-all answer exists. You should ask yourself: “Where do my ideal clients spend most of their time?”
For example, if your ideal client is a millennial, has a young family and has just welcomed their first pet, you may want to focus on Facebook and Instagram. However, if your ideal client is of an older generation, more experienced in pet ownership and possibly more financially stable, you’ll often find that Facebook will yield the best results.
Most successful businesses should have a clear social media strategy that enables them to nurture a community of loyal followers, and this is no different for veterinary practices.
When developing your strategy, one should remember that social media users are human and do not want to be constantly sold to. In fact, pet owners are more likely to want to follow your practice on social media if you consistently share a variety of short-form, relevant, engaging and educational content that adds something of benefit to their lives.
To help guide your social media and content strategy, get your reception team to collate a list of frequently asked questions. These questions can form a foundation of engaging social media post reels, videos and stories, as well as longer-form content to be posted to your website regularly.
Creating and publishing fresh, optimised, educational content to your website consistently – in the form of blogs and articles that answer pet owners’ questions – will allow you to establish your vet practice as a thought leader in your area and boost your search engine optimisation (SEO; see panel below).
SEO is an integral digital tool that all local businesses can easily leverage. With nine billion Google searches carried out daily worldwide2, I would put money on the probability of more than one pet owner in your geographical area Googling “Vet near me” right now. SEO in its simplest form is the process of making improvements to your website to enhance its visibility and ranking position in a search engine, ultimately increasing the traffic to your website. And no, this doesn’t need any wizardry. Here are a few steps you can implement straight away.
✓ Claim and update your Google My Business listing. Make sure your name, address and phone number (known as NAP data) are all correct and start collecting reviews from your clients.
✓ Ensure your website is mobile optimised. With more than 47%3 of all internet searches carried out on a mobile, it is imperative that your practice website looks great and works properly on a mobile device. In 2018, Google introduced “mobile first indexing”, which means it considers the mobile version of a page for listing (indexing and ranking) in the search engine results.
✓ Add keywords to your meta (and not the Facebook Meta) titles and meta descriptions in your website. Your metadata is one of the most important things search engines look at when determining what a web page is offering in terms of information. Meta title tags and meta descriptions (all classed as metadata) are bits of HTML code in the header of a web page that help search engines understand the content on a page.
✓ Ensure the content and blogs on your website are informative and well written (see about content strategy in the main article). As Google’s AI becomes smarter at reading websites this aspect is going to become increasingly important to your SEO success. Well-written content on your website is not only important for your online visitors, but is also vital for search engines to inform them about what you are offering and the value you can provide to a search query4.
✓ Resize large images on your website. Large images on websites result in a multitude of issues, from user experience to Google not viewing your site favourably in rankings. By reducing the image sizes down to appropriate proportions, your pages will load much faster and search engines will be able to read them more effectively. Online space is competitive and even the smallest increase in SEO results could mark the difference between getting the edge over your local competitor and securing that new pet owner or losing out on revenue.
Taking steps to improve your organic visibility on search engines can help lay solid foundations, but this can be a gradual process and you will not see success overnight. This is when we would suggest introducing paid search.
Paid search is a term used to describe using paid advertising, such as pay per click, across search engines such as Google and Microsoft advertising (Bing). Ads allow your practice to target specific keywords that you know users with the intent to register or engage your services are searching for.
Searches for terms such as “local vets” have a certain level of intent behind them, so it’s not unreasonable to assume that someone searching for those keywords needs to find a vet in their local area as soon as possible.
Paid search allows you to place your practice in front of searchers who are actively looking for businesses like yours. Many options for building these ads are available – not just including a link to your website, but also positioning your contact number in a visible place within the ad to increase the number of enquiries being made.
Unlike social media, SEO and paid search as tools to drive traffic to your website can be quantifiably reported on and easily attributed to financial value, such as the lifetime value of a client, so you can calculate ROI on your search marketing efforts.
So, you’ve started running some paid search, which is having some success in sending traffic to your practice website, but have you considered your client’s digital journey when they get there?
Ask yourself, does the home page tell you clearly how to get in touch, book an appointment or register a pet? Can a pet owner navigate your website easily?
If the answer is no, not only would a pet owner and potential client get frustrated and leave your website, but any search engine bots crawling your site for indexing will also send negative signals back to the search engine.
Encouraging pet owners to help self-serve via your website by clearly setting out how best they can register their pet, book appointments, and get in touch will produce happy and more satisfied clients who don’t need to pick up the phone – therefore easing pressure on your front-of-house teams. Happy teams and happy clients – what more could you ask for?
By embracing modern advances in technology – such as messaging platforms like WhatsApp (30.1 million WhatsApp users in the UK1), apps and web-based chat functionality – you are opening up communication channels that are accessible to all pet owners and meeting increasing expectations for instant answers.
Our latest dataset suggests that if they ask a question on social media, more than a third (35%) of users expect an answer within an hour, and more than half (55%) within four hours5 – not just when it’s convenient to the team to get back to them. This is a stark increase since 2015, when the figures were 15% and 21%, respectively6.
Positive online reviews – whether on social media, Google or an independent directory – aren’t just nice to receive and a much-needed boost for your team.
Your online reviews will get new clients through your door, and getting just one review can lead to getting lots more – if you shout it from the rooftops. Most (59% of) pet owners refer to online reviews in their decision-making when it comes to choosing a vet for their pet5. Ask for reviews and testimonials at every opportunity, and build social proof across the online space. These testimonials can also form part of the content strategy I mentioned earlier.
As you see from my overview, if you’re looking to drive traffic to your website and pet owners to your door, no one tool exists that I would recommend exclusively. The aforementioned key components I have touched on – social media, content, SEO, paid search, website and digital customer journey – all work symbiotically to elevate your practice’s online visibility in the local area.
By taking a holistic approach to your practice’s digital marketing and paying particular attention to a client’s digital touch points across the online space, you’re almost guaranteed to see a considerable return on your investment – whether that is time or money.
