10 Great Ways to Get More Veterinary Clients at Your Vet Practice

Think about why you chose a career working with animals. Was it because you love business management and marketing? Probably not. It’s much more likely you were inspired by a great love for biology, medicine and, of course, pets. Yet veterinary marketing is an essential part of attracting new clients to your practice and keeping the regulars coming back.

The ultimate goal of any veterinary practice is to build a business recognized by pet owners as the best place to go for pet expertise and superior animal care services. That’s why veterinary marketing strategies are important. Without consistent veterinary practice marketing, how will pet owners know you’re there?

A little effort goes a long way when it comes to veterinary marketing ideas and veterinary practice marketing. It doesn’t need to cost a ton of time or money to stand out from your competition online—and we’ve got a few tips to help.

We’ve created a list of simple yet effective ways that can help you attract pet owners to your veterinary clinic and keep them coming back. With the right tools and strategies, you can build your way to a better business not just for yourself, but for pets and pet parents too.

Prioritize Great Client Service

This might seem like a given, but it’s all too easy to get absorbed in caring for pets and forget that human clients are there too. Pet owners are the ones footing the bill for their pets, so it’s important to keep their needs top of mind.

Providing excellent, efficient, and friendly service to pet parents and pet owners alike is not just good for business. It’s also great veterinary practice marketing. When a client walks out of your clinic feeling satisfied, or even wowed by their veterinary experience, they’re more likely to share the news with friends and family. Good client service speaks for itself, and it saves loads on the veterinary practice marketing budget!

Showcase the People Behind your Practice

Providing exceptional client service is a great way to improve veterinary marketing for your clinic, but what about reaching pet owners who may not yet be clients?

Most veterinary practices know they need to build a strong online presence through veterinary practice marketing, but it can be hard to stand out against the competition. Showing who you are as a business can help.

The trick is to find the balance between running a business and maintaining a personal touch to pet care.

Pet owners want to know their veterinarian, and they want to connect with practice staff on a personal, friendly level to build trust. How is this done as part of veterinary practice marketing?

A key part is to have a great team page on your practice website, but make sure you’re optimizing it for the greatest chance of success. Go beyond the basics and share your personal story of what brought you into veterinary medicine. Show some character and cultivate a likeable bio that pet owners will be drawn to. You can include humor, heart-warming anecdotes, or fun facts. Just remember to keep it friendly and professional.

If pet owners can get to know and like the people behind your practice, they’ll want to engage with your services, and perhaps recommend you to others.

Start a Veterinary Blog and Post Often

Writing a veterinary blog for your practice can seem time-consuming, but the payoff is well worth the investment. A blog is the ideal place to educate and entertain clients even after they leave the exam room. Plus, it’s a golden opportunity to engage new pet owners.

When you develop a loyal following online, your online presence through veterinarian marketing becomes more defined. You can showcase yourself as an expert in your field, setting your clinic up as a go-to source for pet health information. A blog is also a great way to add value to the lives of pet owners, for the overall improvement of their pet’s health.

So, if you want to improve client education and compliance, starting a blog as part of your veterinary practice marketing and keeping blogs updated is a great way to do it.

Need a home for your blog? WebDVM websites come with an easy-to-edit blog platform built right in.

Reward Clients with Perks

Everyone loves free stuff. Investing in some affordable promotional merchandise may not be a new veterinary marketing strategy, but it holds up. Giving out free merch bearing your veterinary practice’s name, logo, and contact information serves veterinary marketing strategies and goals that can enhance your veterinarian marketing and improve brand recognition for your clinic.

Client rewards don’t have to be big. They can be as simple as packing up some treats into individual bags with your business card attached, or having pens with your logo on them at the front desk for when someone inevitably forgets one.

This has two benefits:

You get to thank pet owners for their business.
Clients help promote your practice wherever they go.

The key is to find that sweet spot between how much you spend on promotions and the quality of the product. While you want to avoid overspending on something frivolous, try not to go too cheap on your veterinary marketing ideas. This could reflect poorly on your practice and defeat the purpose of veterinary practice marketing.

Get on Board with Videos

Many practices think about using video as part of their veterinary marketing strategies. Yet many stop short of producing a video because they don’t know what kind of video to create or they don’t feel like they have enough time.

If this sounds familiar, the clinic walkthrough video is one of the simplest and quickest videos to make, and the format boils down to five simple statements (or parts):

This is who I am.
This is what I do.
Please join me as I show you around.
Here’s our clinic and what we do here.
Thank you for coming. Hope to see you soon.

For a deeper dive (including examples of practice walkthrough videos), read Attract More Pet Owners with a Simple Clinic Walkthrough Video.

Provide Client Testimonials on Your Website

Showing something to someone has a greater impact than telling someone about something. You can tell pet owners that you provide the best quality pet care but claims alone (however true) are not evidence. Claims require people to take your word for it and make a leap of faith, and the accompanying sense of risk often stops people from taking an action, such as booking an appointment with your practice.

When you evidence claims with accompanying client testimonials as part of your veterinary practice marketing, you reduce the sense of risk and encourage a high level of trust, which encourages action. According to BrightLocal, 88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. This helps attract new clients and improves engagement with existing clients by reminding them of why they originally chose your practice.

So how do you go about getting testimonials?

Offer rewards to people to incentivize feedback.
Add a comments section to your website and ask clients for feedback.
Ask for feedback through email, along with permission to use any feedback on your website.
If you receive a particularly good review on social, drop the person a message and ask them if you can use their testimonial on your website.
Don’t be shy. If people are happy with your practice, they’re usually happy to share their experience so that other pet owners (and their pets) can benefit from your practice.

Review the Curb Appeal of Your Practice

Real estate agents know the importance of a home’s curb appeal—the attractiveness of a property when viewed from the street. When a home looks clean, fresh, and well-tended from the outside, prospective buyers are more apt to put the home on their shortlist of possibilities based on the expectation that the interior of the home will be as appealing as the outside. When a home looks dingy, outdated and in need of repairs, they’re more apt to keep right on driving, and the same applies to veterinary practice marketing.

You may have the most immaculate, warm, and inviting of reception areas to welcome both walk-ins and repeat clients. Yet those walk-ins may decide not to walk in if your practice exterior lacks curb appeal. So, make a careful and honest review of your practice’s exterior aesthetics.

Is your signage clean, fresh-looking, and in good repair? Do the colors jump out or do they look faded and tired?
Are there exterior materials like cracked boards, damaged bricks, or broken metal that need repair?
Do landscaping elements like trees, shrubs, and grass look healthy and inviting, or are they forgotten and dying as a dry implication to pet owners of what may await inside in terms of pet care?
Are the windows facing the street clean and open to minimize the mystery of what awaits pet owners once they step through your door, or are they dingy and off-putting?
Is there a trash bin sitting by your door or nearby curb to give foot traffic a reason to keep on walking, or is your trash stowed neatly out of sight?

Overall, the exterior of your practice is like another room in your practice. The more inviting you can make it for pet owners to walk in, the more they will walk in.

Use Your Waiting Area to Full Advantage

(Image courtesy of BDA Architecture)

Clients in your waiting room are an important part of veterinary marketing strategies because they’re a captive audience for reading materials, videos, electronic presentations, and other media to educate them about pet care and incentivize them to book a repeat appointment. So, use your waiting room to your full veterinary marketing advantage.

During tick season, for example, set educational handouts on tables and place tick prevention posters on your walls and inside exterior-facing windows, and focus on immediately grabbing the attention of pet owners.

An example headline: “Don’t wait until summer to start your flea and tick prevention.” The implied urgency generally causes pet owners to ask, “Why?” Then quickly inform pet owners about the dangers of Lyme disease and other tick-borne diseases before encouraging pet owners to speak with your practice right away about tick protection for their pets.

>> To simplify client education and parasite prevention, download our free Parasite Prevention Mega Bundle. No hunting around for client education material. You’ve got it all in one place, including DVM-approved client education handouts, printable disease-prevention posters for your clinic, a customizable client email, and much more.

Utilize Free Marketing Tools for Veterinary Marketing

These tools make your veterinary marketing more effective and easier, and they’re all free, so you don’t have to write them into your veterinary practice marketing budget, pitch them to your boss, or look at them longingly from afar. Just follow the links and get started right away.

General Marketing

Bit.ly URL shorteners are pretty unexciting but they actually do play an important role in your marketing. Use bit.ly as your URL shortener and get analytics about how many people are clicking on your links around the web.
SimilarWeb Want to check in on the competition? Use this awesome tool to see how much traffic your competitors are getting.
Mobile-Friendly Test Google’s Mobile-Friendly and Speed Test Tool can tell you if your site passes muster on mobile devices. If Google approves your site, it could give you an SEO boost in mobile searches.
Free Stock Images There are too many sites to list them all here, so check out our complete list of free image sources to find stock photos you can use on your website, social media marketing, or wherever you need them.
Typeform Create beautiful forms and questionnaires to share on your website. For free, you get 100 responses per month and 10 questions per form.

Analytics

Google Analytics Get comprehensive analytics at who’s looking at what on your website with Google Analytics. The interface can be a little intimidating when you first get started, but the numbers are invaluable!
Hot Jar This tool also offers analytics on your website, including heat maps so you can see where people look on your site and conversion funnels to help you figure out how to optimize your website. If you have under 2,000 pageviews per day, you can get a limited version of Hot Jar free forever.

Email Marketing

If pet owners don’t open your emails, the time and effort spent creating the content inside goes to waste. So, creating compelling email subject lines in imperative to veterinary practice marketing.

Luckily, there are a wealth of free online tools to help you assess email subject lines, including:

Sharethrough – Just enter your email subject line and it will instantly give you a score.
Headline Analyzer – This tool by the Advanced Marketing Institute works much the same as Sharethrough.

Social Media Marketing

Viralyft This simple tool will analyze your Facebook page and let you know what you can do to improve. Just enter your Facebook URL and it will assess and rank your page for you, including recommendations for improvement. It’s quick and effective.
The 2018 Pet Holiday Calendar There are too many social media pet holidays to keep track. So we did the work for you! Download our pet holiday calendar so you’ll never miss a holiday again!

Blogging

Hubspot Blog Topic Generator This blog topic generator is by no means perfect, but it can be a fun way to try and generate ideas for your next topic. Just put in three nouns you want to write about, and it will come up with potential headlines.
LifeLearn’s list of 100+ blog topics for veterinary practices Blog topic generators don’t cater to the veterinary industry. So we came up with a huge list of veterinary-specific blog ideas for every month of the year, so you’re never stumped again!
Readability Test Tool We always emphasize readability in your blogs. Keeping things simple can help you connect better with your clients, who don’t know nearly as much about pet health as you do. Test out your blog posts for readability with this simple tool.

Design

Piktochart Create attractive infographics for free using Piktochart’s easy-to-use tools.
Canva We know, we love Canva and we talk about it often. But that’s because we use it every day ourselves! Create amazing designs with this free design tool that anyone can use – even complete design beginners.
Powtoon This is too cool! Create an animated video, for free. The free version includes a watermark and outro, but it might be worth it, to create an attention grabbing video for your website or social media accounts.

Maximize Your Appointment Reminders

Practices often don’t think of appointment reminders as part of veterinary practice marketing. Many view appointment reminders as an administrative task that happens after marketing efforts have been completed to acquire a client. Yet companies of all types devote significant and ongoing marketing efforts and resources to track existing clients and keep them engaged because repeat business is a significant driver of profitability, and that’s where many appointment-tracking systems fail.

Whether through appointment-tracking systems designed by companies that are less than optimal, or appointment reminders lost to manual email systems, veterinary practices on average have over 1,091 active clients who are missing reminders, and 19 chances per day to schedule additional appointments.

In other words, many veterinary practices (whether they’re aware of it or not) do not have the tools in place to optimize one of their most important veterinary marketing assets. All that’s missing is the right system to fully track daily appointment opportunities and make it easy for staff to send out reminders, and that’s exactly what AllyDVM is designed to do.

Featuring automated appointment reminders, mass communication templates, and two-way texting so your team can tailor communication based on data from your practice software to ensure you’re reaching the right people with the right information with as little administrative effort as possible, AllyDVM is one of the veterinary industry’s most powerful and customizable software solutions for improved client communications, engagement, and profitability.

AllyDVM’s industry-leading Retention Calendar automatically tracks appointment opportunities, and built-in system prompts make it simple for your staff to send out appointment reminders with automated email, text, and postcard communications.

Trusted by organizations like Zoetis, Elanco, and Merck Animal Health, the ALLYDVM Communication + Retention System is one of the veterinary industry’s most powerful and customizable software solutions for improved client communications, engagement, and profitability.

ALLYDVM’s industry-leading Retention Calendar automatically tracks appointment opportunities, and built-in system prompts make it simple for your staff to send out appointment reminders with automated email, text, and postcard communications.

What are some of the ways that you attract pet owners to your veterinary practice? Connect with us on Facebook or Twitter to share your favorites!