VMP 255.5: 6 Ways To Generate Clients At Your Veterinary Practice

Brandon (00:00:00) - Hey everybody, welcome to the Veterinary Marketing Podcast, where it's all about how to attract, engage and retain clients to your veteran hospital using digital marketing. My name is Brandon Breshears. Thank you so much for taking the time to listen. In today's episode, we are going to talk about six ways that you can generate clients, and essentially there's only six ways to do it. We're going to talk about how to generate more clients for your vendor hospital, and then I'm going to rank them, in my opinion, on what you need to work on first. Most practices will typically only have 1 or 2 of these. So the more that you have, the more diversity that you have and diversification of those traffic sources, the better, in my opinion, just because you're going to be less susceptible to market conditions and you're going to be able to scale. And there's a ton of benefits. Before we begin, I have just a couple of announcements. All right. If you also want to get any kind of help, a good place to do that is going over to the bed in your Marketing Nerds Facebook page.

Brandon (00:00:55) - It's a group, private group where you can collaborate with people, ask questions, get help with anything that is facebook.com, forward slash groups, forward, slash the vendor marketing nerds. All right. Let's jump into today's episode. So there's really only six ways to generate clients and there's not any kind of magic button to push. I think a lot of times people feel like there is some kind of magic lever to pull that will get you more clients. But let's just do a quick breakdown of the six types in this in between episode. So number one is paid advertising and paid advertising is pretty straightforward. It is anything that you pay dollars for to get eyeballs on. So that includes digital paid advertising, that includes physical mail, billboards, TV ads, radio ads, anything that you pay for to come in contact with either potential clients, current clients or things like that. So paid advertising. Next, we have cold outreach, and that means you could go and stand at a dog park and hand out business cards.

Brandon (00:01:51) - You could go to networking events basically any time that you would go to find people who you don't know, you could send messages on the Internet to strangers. That would be called outreach. And so it's definitely a very effective way, but it's not scalable. All right. The next week is client referrals. Client referrals are my favorite because, number one, it means that your service is good and that you have good quality in terms of service. And not only that, but you're probably going to attract people that are similar to the people that you love doing work with. So when I get client referrals, for example, they are my favorite clients generally because I love working with my current clients. They have friends and they their friends are awesome because they're awesome. So client referrals. Next we have strategic partners. That's other businesses that have the same client type that you do that you can build in referral systems with. And a good thing example would be a boarding facility. If you don't offer boarding or maybe a groomer or maybe a pet store, you know, the strategic partners are just anybody that would have pet owners that come and use them.

Brandon (00:02:57) - It could even be like a realtor, for example, if you wanted to. Right. Most people have pets in general, so it's pretty, pretty easy to set up strategic partnerships. Then we have organic media. So this is anything that you create and you publish on sites that you don't own. So blog posts you do technically on your website, right? But the traffic that it delivers is not owned because SEO Is Google delivering that to you? We have organic social media videos, YouTube podcasts. This podcast that I've created here, for example, is a created media. So that's an option to generate clients. Hopefully you generate awareness and traffic and the types of content that you'd be creating would be attracting the right customers. Then you have owned media and this is any type of list that you own, whether it's text message, email, those kinds of things that you can push it out and immediately talk to somebody with own media to. It might be phone numbers. You could call that's a not a cold call, but it's a warm call where you're calling your client list and going through.

Brandon (00:04:05) - So those are the six ways that you can generate clients. And there's no other way that I can think of beyond that. And in my opinion, I think that the way that you should nail down these traffic sources and I think it's always better to add more because again, that diversification is going to keep you insulated from any potential problem that comes up when it's like market recession, those types of things. But I think that, number one, referrals is the best thing to start at because number one, that means your service is good and you're going to attract people that you like working with. Number two is your own media list. So that's very, very important to not only build but also engage with because if you're not messaging your your list on a regular basis, if you only do it in times that you need appointments, you're just going to be like that friend who is only calling or messaging you to come help move. Right? You're you're actually a pest. So provide value and engage. Next would be partners, strategic partners.

Brandon (00:05:01) - And the reason why I like that is because it's a high leverage event where you can set it up once and it will return for a long time. Then owned media content. I think you should be doing content creation, content marketing. It's going to not only retain your current clients, but also attract the right kinds of clients. Then we have paid ads, and that might surprise you since I do paid advertising for vendor hospitals. And that's my my favorite thing. But I think if you don't have these other things in place, paid ads is a little bit difficult. So just a quick note there. And obviously there's going to be rules and exceptions to every rule. So, for example, if you're launching a practice, paid ads are a lot more effective way to get off the ground without having to do all of those other things. And then last is outbound. And the reason why I don't like outbound cold outbound is because it's just time consuming and not scalable. Right? It might be effective, but most people in the veteran industry are not door knockers or cold callers, and they don't like going out and cold messaging people.

Brandon (00:05:57) - So those are the six things I think that the more you have the better. But if you have any questions, comments or need help with anything, please don't hesitate to reach out and we'll see you on next week's episode.