VMP 252: 4 Marketing Easy To Implement Marketing Tips You Need Today

Brandon (00:00:00) - Welcome to the Vendor Marketing podcast, where it's all about how to attract, engage and retain clients to your vendor hospital using digital marketing. My name is Brandon Breshears. Thank you so much for taking the time to listen. In today's episode, we're going to be talking about four very simple but very effective marketing, marketing ideas and tips that are going to help deliver massive results. These are things that you absolutely need to be doing that you should be doing that are going to help you to get more out of your marketing 100% and the incremental increases that you can get in conversion rates from using these things is going to help no matter what you're doing. If you're doing organic, social, if you're doing paid advertising, whatever it is you're doing, if you have better conversion rates on the bottom end, it will make every single click and visit your website or marketing engagement even more effective and even more valuable. So before we begin, I want to mention just a couple things. First, if you haven't done so already, please subscribe in iTunes, Spotify, Google Play and wherever you get your podcast from.

Brandon (00:01:00) - The second thing is this episode is being sponsored by two websites by Brad Haven. We have used that equipment and new vet equipment for over nine years now. Used vet equipment has been helping vets to buy and sell used equipment. You can save money when you buy used veteran equipment, everything from cages, kennels, pumps, X-ray equipment, lasers, ultrasounds, dental equipment, surgery equipment, lab equipment from a backside and Hezekiah tables, tubs and sinks, vet trucks and vet boxes. What do you have to sell at used vet equipment? We bring the buyer and seller together. Also, if you're looking for new veteran equipment with amazing warranties, check out new vet equipment where we show you the price up front. You get digital x ray equipment, dental X-ray equipment, ultrasound equipment, led surgery, lighting, surgery, tables, autoclaves. When you go to new vet equipment, you'll clearly see the price on every item for sale. You'll also be able to check out that warranty so that you can buy without regret.

Brandon (00:01:54) - At new vet equipment, we show you the price up front and give you a great warranty. All right. Let's jump into today's episode. So four things that you can do to dramatically improve your practice's marketing, get better results. I'm going to list them out for you. We're going to dive into them and then we're going to recap here. Okay. So the first thing that I think that everybody needs to do is have a call to action on every single marketing piece that you're going to be doing. We're going to dive more into that. What that means, the calls to action are incredibly important and they're so often forgotten. The next thing that I think is incredibly important and overlooked and this week I've been listening to calls from a practice using call rail. It is frustrating to say the least. You need to be reviewing the performance of your front desk staff when it comes to calls. And we're going to talk about, I think, three major things that you can do when it comes to reviewing calls.

Brandon (00:02:51) - Calls are so important. It's part of marketing and people often overlook it. And I don't very much talk about it because I have not worked in a practice. I'm going to give you some tips that are going to really help you, though. I've done a lot of sales, phone sales in the past and I know some things that are going to work and they're going to help you to get better results. The second thing, there's the third thing rather, is you need to be doing email and text message marketing. You have to. Text message marketing is so powerful you need a system for it. Twilio is fantastic. There's tons of great tools. I'll talk more about that. How often you should be doing that. Then I think there's a minimum that you need to be doing, especially as we go into a recession. You can't just all of a sudden start. You need to do it before you need it. Okay? The next thing. And the last thing that I think we're going to talk about here today is that you need to make it yours.

Brandon (00:03:43) - You have to give your marketing, your content, your website, your own field, and it needs to be yours. I'll tell you what I mean by that and how that's going to help to avoid commoditization and help you to charge whatever you want to and attract better clients. All right. So let's talk about calls to action on everything. Calls to action on everything is the most self obvious one in the list of four that we're going to be talking to today. But what is the best call to action For every piece of marketing that you're doing, you need to be asking yourself this every single time you are creating content for your veterinary hospital. Every single time you are doing an email, sending a text message, anything that you have and have created needs to have a call to action. So what is the relevant offer or service that you want to be referring people to based on this? So. Every single site on your on your website needs to have a call to action If it doesn't help the person that's looking at this website and web page, make the decision that they want to come in and that they want to be a client.

Brandon (00:04:47) - It probably doesn't need to be there. And so if it if it doesn't actually help to get people to come into your practice, it doesn't need to be there is what I'm going to say. And then if it does help people decide that they want to come to your practice, then they need to understand how to do that. What is the best way? What makes the most sense? Is it online booking? Is it text us? Is it phone call? What is it that's going to get people coming in the door based on what they're looking at? Because it's essentially, I think, really, really, really important. There's going to be some exceptions here from like a direct call to action. I think one example of that is if you're doing TikTok content that's just for awareness or Instagram reels, that's just for awareness, and you don't want to necessarily use it to drive people in the call to action. There would not be to get people to book an appointment or call us on the phone, but the call to action would then be follow us on social and get people to engage with your social channels.

Brandon (00:05:51) - So even though it's not a direct call to action that's going to result in return on investment, it is a call to action that is giving people the next step in the relationship. Every single thing that you do in marketing needs to help to establish either relationship, communicate and engage with current clients, which is then going to have a relevant call to action. But you have to think about it like that. What is it that we're trying to get? What is the purpose of this? And if it's just to have fun, then great. The call to action is get people to engage and comment and have fun. If it is to get a followers, it's to follow. Right. But there has to be a purpose to it. Otherwise it's just a waste of time. So call to action on everything. The next of the four is always review calls and scripts. You need to have a strict script for or framework for your customer service people that are answering the phone. And I know people don't like scripts.

Brandon (00:06:45) - I've worked in call centers doing sales and you think, I don't want to have a script, I want to be able to do what I want and I want to just kind of freewheel Until you've done literally years of calling people, you're not ready to do that. And I know that there are some people that are extremely skilled on the phone that is not most people. So if you are not confident, if you're nervous, if you have any employees that are nervous on the phone, don't just let him go. I was listening to calls this week that were recorded and they were so frustrating because we got qualified people calling in. And so the marketing, it takes just so much effort to refine your marketing to get to the point where they call and this was how the call went on the phone. It was, you know, hey, there, I'm new to the area. First off, they called immediately a phone tree with three choices. They call it rings five times, no joke, five rings.

Brandon (00:07:45) - It felt like forever after being on the phone for one minute and I timed it. It was a minute and four seconds. They finally got hold of somebody. The lady said, Hey, I'm new to the area and I was looking for a vet. My dog needs some vaccines and stuff. Just wanted to call and see what we could do. The person said, Yeah, absolutely. That sounds great. And from there it just went downhill. First off, she said, we don't have packages for vaccines. But actually, could you hold on for a second is what she said. And then she put her on hold and the lady was on hold for 40s and then hung up. So first off, you need to tell people that are in your practice what are buying signals. So anytime you're selling something and you're selling your practice, when you're on the phone, you're selling appointments, you are selling 100%, and it needs to be approached from the position that you are a sales person, because that is that's ultimately what it is.

Brandon (00:08:43) - That buying signal that she should have picked up on was, I'm new to the area. I've just moved here. I'm looking for a vet. I don't have anybody yet. That was something I'm trying to establish a relationship. If you think about the lifetime value potential for that client, who knows how much money that front desk person lost, that practice, it could have been like $10,000. I'm not even joking. Right. Could could be 10,000 bucks and of revenue. And also it's wasted ad spend now and they're not going to call back. They felt like they were completely just not worth their time. So first off, it was difficult, impersonal and not worth their time. And it's so frustrating because on the marketing side, where I'm driving traffic to these people, we're doing everything right. And then we get to this point and it's just the balls dropped. So. This can't happen and you can't let this happen. The way to avoid this is to make sure that there are scripts, that there are procedures, and that every single thing is nailed down here.

Brandon (00:09:44) - Some things that will tell you that we had for rules when I was in phone sales and I've done literally thousands of phone sales calls, I, I would love to maybe I'll do an estimate of how many have done, but it was a lot. The things that I think are incredibly important is, number one, I don't think phone trees on the front end is a good look. It makes people feel like they're calling a bank. You're not a bank. You're a private practice. You want to distinguish yourself typically from being in corporate practice. You want to make people feel like their family. When you call your friends and family, you don't go through a phone tree. When you call a faceless corporation, you go through a phone tree that don't do that, in my opinion. The second thing we had a rule it only rings twice. That's the most it's allowed to ring. You pick it up by the second ring or else. That's what the rule was. And I think it's a good rule to five rings took seriously 30s and it felt like that lady was very, very patient.

Brandon (00:10:44) - I don't think I would have let it ring for five, five times. Most people won't. It needs to be picked up by the second ring every single time. The next thing there has to be a script, script, script, script. Every single thing is scripted That is going to help with a lot of things. One of the biggest problems when you have somebody. That is the front desk staff, especially if they're new, Right? You have all kinds of different people. When I was in sales on the phone, one of the things that we would have is we'd bring our own judgments to the conversations. And what I mean by that is a lot of times people that don't realize they're in sales positions will make judgments for other people, like, Oh, it's too expensive, you're not going to want to do that. It's too expensive. They're not going to be able to afford it. You have no idea what they can and they can't afford. Don't make that judgment for people. They're going to think, oh, they probably don't want to drive that far.

Brandon (00:11:36) - And that was one of the calls that happened to it said the person said it was on a Sunday they called. Right. So they were the only practice that was open. And they have five locations that they. That they are able to refer to. And so the person that was on the phone said, Oh, yeah, the the other location that we have open, we do have availability, but it's like 25 minutes away. So here's another practice that's in the same area. Try and give them a call. They're probably open today and that's how they ended it. The person actually said, Well, that's okay as long as they're open today, they have availability. And they said, Well, it's like 25 minutes away. That's like too far. Literally, that's what they said. So they were driving people away from their practice to competitors because they made that judgment call of, Oh, they don't want to drive 25 minutes. They don't know if they get an appointment and they value having a distinct appointment time that they can come in and be seen right away.

Brandon (00:12:28) - That's valuable to people. Don't judge what would be valuable for other people. So the way that you avoid all of these problems specifically is by having a script and not letting people go off script work to close the appointment. Because you're in control of the processes that you have at your practice. You hope that other practices are going to perform to the level that they should. But the thing that you can control is that if they come here, they're going to have a great experience and they're going to really love our practice and become a client for life. So that needs to be instilled. You want to get as many people as possible. We want to fill up the schedule. And the only way that we can control how good of care they get is if they come to us. That needs to be a core belief that you help your sales team, which is your front desk staff. They need to be your sales team. They need to believe that belief is so important when it comes to sales. Okay, let's review really quick.

Brandon (00:13:23) - And then one thing I think, too, if you're doing a lot of advertising and marketing and you're getting a lot of new clients calling in, maybe you have a separate phone number that doesn't have a phone tree. If you are really, really big about having options for your current clients to call and look up prescriptions or, you know, who knows what. And you hate having somebody answer the phone and talk, then have a number that doesn't go to a phone tree for new clients and then have your your normal phone number go to, you know, whatever we used to call it the bat line when a marketing call would come in and lead would come in, you would have to answer the bat line before two rings. So maybe have a different number that doesn't go there and that needs to be picked up immediately. Okay. The next thing that is very easy, very simple that you need to be doing, it's going to deliver massive results. Is email and text message marketing. If you're not doing text message marketing, you need to you need to do 1 to 1 and one to many.

Brandon (00:14:22) - So you need to be able to text back and forth, have a CRM that allows you to do that. The one that I recommend is go high level. If you're interested in what that looks like, send me a message. Brandon At Vendor Marketing Podcast, I can show you what it looks like. It's really, really effective, but open rates on text message is incredibly high. Any kind of marketing that you're doing, if you have the ability to text, you're going to get people at all times a day. You can set up automations with text message marketing, just like email. It is something that you need to do. It is 2023. People text. You need to be texting to figure it out because it needs to be done. I know that sounds a little harsh, but you need to do it. You like to text your friends and family and you want clients to act like friends and family. Text them to the other thing that you need to be doing is emailing. So I think you need to be emailing and texting two times a month at minimum.

Brandon (00:15:14) - If you're the kind of person that just sends out offers and just sends out promotions and you don't follow up, you don't provide value, you're not going to have as good of results. You're just going to be the person. That's like, the analogy that I give is you're like the person who just asks for help when they have to move. You only call your friends to help. Hey, can I borrow your truck and can you help me move stuff? That's not what you want. You want to show up regularly, you want to provide value and you want to begin to communicate with them. Now, I think two times a month is ideal. One time a week, once a week would be even better. The more that you email, the more that you're going to get. So it depends on your schedule, but two times a month would be the way to go, I think, And every single every single month. Two times a week. Sorry, Two times a month. Every single month.

Brandon (00:16:02) - Okay. The last thing that's very simple and highly effective, it's going to help you to deliver massive results. Is you need to make it yours. What do I mean by that? Most hospitals, and I've been looking at this in depth here most practices you could copy and paste the every single section on their website and put it on their competitor's website. You could take their competitor's website and paste it on yours and it would be basically the same thing. There wouldn't be any major changes. Maybe the about section is a little bit different, but still the about section is really not written in a way that has any practical value to the potential client. So make it yours. If you're doing a wellness exam, name it your practice wellness exam, name it something different to differentiate it from other things. The only measure of difference that a consumer has from your wellness exam versus the one down the street is price. Because number one, you don't list what the ingredients that you have in there are. You don't tell them what how it's how you put it together.

Brandon (00:17:04) - There's really nothing in there that's going to be enticing to them that's going to make them want to come in. It's just a wellness exam. And you have a book now appointment called Action button, right. And there's no discussion about your philosophy on care, the time that you spend with clients. Are you somebody that goes through quickly? You take a lot more time. Do you come up with nutrition plans? You you know, what is it that you do and what are the ingredients that go into making your wellness exam actually yours, right? What's the difference between your spay and neuter process versus other hospitals? What is it about your vaccination process that's different? What is it about your dental care that's different if you have no communicated difference, the only thing that makes a difference is going to be the price, right? If you had two cars that were exactly the same, you wouldn't want to pay more for the car. That's exactly same as the other one that's cheaper. You can't expect people to behave irrationally if you don't give them a reason and value to behave in a different way.

Brandon (00:18:07) - I'm not saying it's irrational to pay more. I'm saying it's rational to expect them to pay more without providing value, and that value comes from making it yours because that's ultimately how you make this not commoditized and you produce better results for your clients. So when it comes to making things not commoditized, we need to list out all of the features of your products and services. So features of services are all of the checkpoints that go into wellness exam, for example. That would be things like we use human quality and human grade instruments with our dental procedures. We monitor with anesthesia. We have technicians that have special training, we have special equipment. Those are features. But benefits that you have are the years of experience that's going to allow you to get a better result, shorter recovery time, right? Whatever it is, those are benefits. So features and benefits need to be laid out in a way that's going to be unique for your practice, because at the end of the day, you need to be different, otherwise it's just going to be based on price.

Brandon (00:19:15) - So I hope that that gave you some ideas, some simple marketing ideas. These are the basics. They're simple, but I don't see many practices doing them. And if you do these things, I know you're going to get massive results. So let's real quick just do a recap. First off, call to action everything. Make sure that you have calls to action on all of the marketing that you're doing. The second thing that you need to do is make sure that your call process and inbound call process is set up, make it as frictionless as possible and use scripts. That's so important. Next thing is. Email and text message. You need to have 1 to 1 and one to many for both of those things. And then the last thing is you need to make it yours. So make everything named. Make sure that not only is it unique to you, but it also lists out specific benefits and lays out the actual value for your potential clients. So I hope this was helpful. I hope that it made sense.

Brandon (00:20:14) - If you need help with anything, please don't hesitate to reach out. I'll see you on the next episode and have a great day everyone.