VMP 280: Client Acquisition Strategies When Your Veterinary Practice Is Growing, Stagnant or Dying

Brandon 00:00:00  Welcome to the Veterinary Marketing Podcast, where it's all about how to attract, engage and retain clients to your venue. Practice 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 what you should do for marketing your practice. We're going to specifically talk about client acquisition because that's really, really important. If you're in one of three categories, one would be that you need clients really badly. So maybe your business has seen a decrease. Maybe your startup practice, things like that. The other is you're kind of stagnant. You're just kind of moving along sideways and not growing. You're not declining, but you're not where you wish you could be. And then the third category is if you're growing like crazy and you're busy and you don't know what to do. So I think most practices are going to fall under one of those three things. And we're going to talk about exactly what you should be doing. And this is going to be coming from the experience of running paid ads and campaigns and things for practices.

Brandon 00:00:59  In all of these categories. I've helped hundreds of vendors practices in each of these categories. So definitely have a lot of really good, real world, real world experience. And I'll tell you exactly what I tell my clients when they're in any of these three spots. So before we begin, we have a few things. First, we have sponsors for today's episode. Picture this. It's the end of a long day, and as a veterinarian, all you want to do is go home and pour your favorite evening drink. The only thing standing in between you and that Pinot is mountains of medical records. Introducing Happy Doc, a handheld AI assistant designed specifically for veterinarians, happy doc integrates with your PIMs and automates Soap notes with our AI technology so that you can keep your focus on patients and their owners. All you need to do is press, record and let Happy Doc do the rest. The result is happy doctors, happy technicians, happy owners and an overall happier practice. Get more time back in your day and discover the difference Happy Doc can make for you and your practice.

Brandon 00:01:59  By scheduling a time for a demo at Happy Doc. Why that's happy dock y. All right, so the question that people have and people that are either running or own veterinary practices are what should we be doing for our marketing? Now, I think that you really are going to fall into one of three categories. Number one, you need clients. Either you're a startup or you have been seeing a decline in your current client. Number two is you're stagnant. You're not seeing the type of clients that you'd like to be seeing in practice. And then number three is you're growing. And sometimes you're even so busy that you don't want to accept new clients because you're just like, we can't handle this. So let's talk about all three of that, those categories. We're going to start with the first two. And actually the need clients and stagnant are pretty similar because they have some of the same problems. So with any type of marketing that you're doing, and this also is going to include for if you're growing and you're happy with how things are looking, but it is incredibly important to get a handle on your numbers to understand a few things.

Brandon 00:03:07  I think these are the most critical pieces of data that you need to have when it comes to managing your marketing in particular. We have number one, you need to know where your clients are coming from. So and with this you're going to need to have tracking in place. So you need to know referrals referral sources. If you have super referrers, you need to know how many are coming from your Google My business. You need to know how many are coming from paid ads, how many are coming from social, how many are coming from business referrals? I would break those type of categories out so that you know exactly where your clients are coming from. If you have none of those things, it's going to be pretty easy. So you're just going to want to make sure that you have Google Analytics set up. I would suggest call real tracking for every practice. I think this is important enough to make sure that you are growing, especially if you're not growing like you'd like to. It's going to help you to identify the major problems, and also the sources even further, of something that's typically pretty difficult to manage.

Brandon 00:04:11  By the way, call rail. You can get a free two week trial without any credit card required. If you go to veterinarymarketingpodcast.com/callrail, just as a quick shout out there. But it is incredibly important to understand what's working and what's not. If you decide to start doing some type of new marketing activity and it works, if you don't have tracking in place, you're not going to know that it did work or why it worked. And most practices that I see when they start to see slowdown, they typically go out and start doing maybe 2 or 3 things, and they don't have a good handle on which of these things is actually working. And so you want to make sure. So you're going to want to make sure that you know okay this specific activity is working. This is not now about 80% of the things that you do generally don't work. And that's just a rule, the 8020 rule. So 20% of the marketing activities you're going to do are going to attribute the 80% of your client growth.

Brandon 00:05:06  So you need to make sure that you continue to double down on that 20% that is working and cut off the stuff that is not working. And if you don't have tracking in place, you're not going to know. So that is incredibly important. You want to make sure that you have tag manager installed. You want to make sure that your web development company has given you admin access to tag manager. You're going to want to know your webmaster tools data. You're going to want to know your Google Analytics data and have admin access to all of those pieces. I think it's also very valuable to look at your Google business profile and see how that is doing as far as number of impressions, number of interactions, and what search terms you're showing up for primarily. So incredibly important to get all of those baseline numbers. If you start to see decline or things change, having that baseline is also going to be very helpful because you're going to be able to identify exactly where the problem is and where that's coming from.

Brandon 00:06:01  So that being said, have that established. And also if you're growing, you need to know where the growth is coming from so that you can continue to grow. So if you need clients or you're stagnant, it's important that we understand where is the traffic that we are getting coming from. So how many calls are you getting per day? Where are those those calls coming from? How many are new clients versus returning clients? If you have a good amount of phone calls or a good amount of traffic, and you're just not getting the conversion that you think you should, and I think this is probably the biggest problem that I see with most practices. They're getting calls, they're getting call volume, and they're getting leads, but they're not converting them. So we need to have, I think, a few things in place. It's important that you fix the bottom of the funnel because when you start to apply more traffic, you're going to want to make sure that you're capturing as much of it as possible, especially if you start to pay for traffic.

Brandon 00:07:01  So think about a few things. I think for every single practice, you need to have a system in place to train your CSRs. Now, if you are the CSR, that's okay. You can go ahead and record the calls, record the type of engagement that you want to have. but you need to have, I think, at minimum, a script in place and a script needs to give the people that are answering the phone the tools that they need so that they can take control of the conversation. And what do I mean by take control of the conversation when somebody calls, if you're just answering questions and this is 99% of practices after listening to hundreds and hundreds of phone calls, from all different sources and practices, typically across the United States, if you don't give people a way to connect with the potential client calling or, again, guide the conversation, the potential client is just going to drive the phone call and try to get what they think is most important. So I'll give you some examples.

Brandon 00:08:10  Typically when people call, they'll say something like how much is a wellness exam? How much is this procedure. What do you have any appointments available. So just asking questions based on the context that they have. They don't know that there's differences in service. They don't know what makes you special. They have zero context for the experience, the team, the culture. You know, whatever you've done in your practice to make it actually unique. So having some type of a phrase that lets you gather information and establish a conversation in a way that lets you convey that information is incredibly important. So I call these pivot questions. So if somebody calls, for example, and says how much is euthanasia? You could say, oh, definitely, I'm so sorry you're going through that right now, right. You have some type of a way to connect with people. And I think being genuinely concerned about the people you're talking to is going to help you to have better results here. So we're not being fake or phony.

Brandon 00:09:05  We're actually concerned. We want to connect with that potential client and then have some type of pivot, which is, you know, we would love and I wish that I could just give you, an exact answer, but every case is just a little bit different. So if it's okay with you, would it be alright if we gathered just a little bit of information so that I could give you more specific details. And so asking for permission lets you flip it from, I'm going to just take orders and tell you, okay, it's $380 to okay, we're going to make this very custom and tailored to you. And it starts what's called a yes progression. So in sales, typically you want the prospects or people to say yes as much as possible. because it gets them used to saying yes and makes the decision process a little bit easier. But, getting them to separate your service from other services, because the only thing that they have to really compare is going to be price. And so you could go and say something like, you know, our our doctor goes out into your home and it's from the comfort of your home.

Brandon 00:10:18  We take everything you know that we're going to need. We handle the aftercare. And we've done this with hundreds of other patients just like you. So can you tell me a little bit about the dog? Start getting questions answered. How much does the dog weigh? Is the dog aggressive? Like, you know, and really through each of these questions, ask those questions in a way that helps to provide some kind of context for the type of value that you're going to offer. But if you've never gone through this with your clients, like, for example, let's say somebody calls for tea polo and they say, how much is a TPO? And you say it's 3900. They don't know what's included in that. They don't know the aftercare. They don't know that you have rehab, that you have an underwater treadmill, that you have cold laser therapy. So going through and explaining all of these different steps. So if you said something to the effect of, you know, we don't really do, care where we just complete the surgery and then kind of release you out into the world, because that's not going to give you a great result.

Brandon 00:11:16  And in six months you're going to need more surgery. Here's why we do this. Here's what we think about this. Here's why this is all included. And we really come together to build a custom. You know, there's not a one size fits all type of approach to this. And make sure that your dog gets everything that they need. That sounds like something you'd be interested in, right? Those types of things. Most people don't want to be competing on price alone, but they don't have the tools that they need to sell based on value or what actually makes their practice unique. So develop some pivot questions that take the conversation for the common types of phone calls that you get, and take control of that conversation so that you can explain what the real difference in value is between you and the other practice down the street. Because if you don't have anything to actually convey that value, the only way that your clients are going to be able to tell is price. Now, the last thing that I think is really, really important that I don't see anybody doing, but if you implemented, you would get a lot more conversions is if you have phone calls about like there's so many times where I hear people calling and they'll say, you know, my dog has this, and they are, you know, with these symptoms, do you think we should come in? And there's some times where it's like, no, we should wait and see if they're not better by the morning.

Brandon 00:12:42  Let us know and you can come in. If instead of putting that responsibility onto the client for follow up, if with the prospects you just said, would it be all right if we gathered your phone number, we could just call and follow up, make sure everything is good in the morning If you give that little bit of extra compassion and actually follow up and give a good experience, you're going to really pave the way for a client who's going to say, like, these people care about me. We're not even clients. But they called the follow up. So that's an even better care situation. And it's so easy to do that little step. I see that all the time with euthanasia. I see it all the time with kind of urgent care searches that people are calling, and it's maybe not the right time yet. So if you did that little bit of follow up and you had a list of of people to call next day just to see, you know, how things were going, if they needed anything, and then if, let's say everything was great, you know, give them an invite to come where they have a great experience and they're going to want to come to you next time.

Brandon 00:13:45  So setting up and fixing the bottom of the funnel, I think is good for any business because it's going to help you to convert more. and so make sure that when you have people answering the phones, they have the tools that they need so that they can take control of conversations. And, you know, we haven't even talked about any marketing things yet. But if this isn't fixed, this none of the marketing that you're going to do is going to work. Very rarely do you have people who just like they just want to come in. They don't want to talk to you. They just are going to call book an appointment and you know, you're going to have to talk to them. You're going to have to convey value. And, you know, typically, especially if you want them to be good clients, they're going to really care about the type of service that you're providing. Because if people just don't care, they're just the first one available. They're probably not going to be very loyal to your business anyways.

Brandon 00:14:38  the next thing that I think is really important alongside phones is make sure that your online booking actually can confirm appointments and that it's not just a service that is setting up some multiple times, and then it's going to get people to, have to follow up with them. So, I really like checkup for this, by the way, there's a company called Checkup App. and they are fantastic at this. They have a bunch of cool reminders, too. And that leads me to the next thing is make sure that you have the bottom of your funnel, really set up well so that you're getting client reminders. You're, setting up cohorts and different things where people can, you know, get, get reminded that they need to come in so people that you've already converted are the best ones to re-engage as often as possible. And so if you need clients starting at the bottom of the funnel, making sure that you're converting as many as possible and then reengaging your current clients. That's why I think checkup app is a fantastic tool, by the way.

Brandon 00:15:44  So, make sure that all of those types of leaks that you have going on in the funnel are fixed, because when you start to apply traffic, you're going to have those problems kind of just, you know, even even more so along those lines. By the way, I think that you need to consider, do we have a marketing problem or do we have a sales problem If you're getting lots of calls, if you're getting lots of engagements but it's not converting, you have a sales problem. If you're getting all of the people that call converted, but you don't have enough of those people, it's a marketing problem. So first of all, you need to make sure and identify is it a sales problem, is it a marketing problem. And then fix as needed. So with targeting types of clients that you want to do now, this is for for everybody. Not just people that need clients but everybody across the funnel. You have generally two different ways that you can target people, and you can do a variation of both of these mixed together as well.

Brandon 00:16:48  But really you can target people based on behavior, or you can target people based on demographic. And so we need to think about especially if you need clients. So if you're in the bottom two tiers where you have like we need clients now or we're stagnant and we're just not growing like we'd like to, I think starting at urgency and then working your way up is a good way to go about targeting people with marketing. So what do I mean by urgency? You know, things like vomiting, diarrhea, urgent care, emergency visits. If people have a need, they're going to go and and try to get whoever can fit them in. So if you have an open schedule, those types of services are really easy typically to fill. and then going more specific is going to be really helpful. So people that are looking for very specific things like exotic vets, I can't tell you how many markets there are where there's just nobody that will see exotic pets. And so if you start running a campaign targeting people that are looking for, a vet for their, you know, pocket pet, you're going to be able to convert appointments like crazy.

Brandon 00:18:01  Now, I understand that that might not be the right one for everybody. So, I mean, getting specific with allergy problems, ophthalmology problems, specific types of surgeries. You know, you can go down the list, but either doing one of those two things where you target more urgent needs or you target more specific needs. Typically, you're going to be able to convert a lot higher than if you just say, you know, I really want high quality clients that are, you know, tons of money and they just want to do whatever we suggest for their pet. Not to say that those people aren't out there, but you just have to market to them in a different way. So usually for those types of urgent, type searches or specific type searches, using search campaigns on Google are kind of the best practice in my opinion, just because it fills those needs quickly. The funnel is very short, like I need this thing right now, okay, this person says they can do it. Let's call and see.

Brandon 00:18:58  And then they're typically going to have, you know, fewer questions. It's going to be much shorter funnel. So the more somebody needs something the greater the pain point. the shorter the final is. That's why I think, you know, content focused, client acquisition and things like that are better for people that have enough clients, but they're trying to attract more of the ones that they want. Any time that you are running ads or you're going to do marketing, I think it's really important that you get clear on who it is you're trying to target, and then also what it is that makes you a good option, what makes you different and why somebody should actually use you. So saying that we are caring or compassionate, that's not really helpful because everybody is caring and compassionate. And, so make sure that you actually have something that you can communicate that's going to make you different. If you have openings right now and you're available and you know you need clients right now, that's something that can make you different because you have a very open schedule that's very convenient to them.

Brandon 00:20:04  So that's convenience. And the actual value is come in right now. We can see you immediately and get great service immediately. So think about what is actually going to make you different. Are they going to get better service or are they going to be faster? Is it going to be better pricing. is it going to be more transparent pricing? Is it going to be more advanced diagnostics, like whatever it is that you're doing, focus on more of kind of your unique selling proposition. So, you know, going through, with the targeting options that you can do for ads, you know, generally, if you're not targeting people based on behavior, you can target people based on demographic data. So think about what makes up your ideal clients. Now, targeting people solely based on demographic data is typically a little bit less, direct as far as you have to have some kind of an offer, you have to have some kind of a reason that people are going to want to come into your practice. So if you're in the bottom two categories of we need clients now or we're stagnant, you're going to have to create some kind of a very compelling offer that's going to get people to take action.

Brandon 00:21:20  otherwise I would suggest targeting people based by that, behavior, demographics, people that are actively doing searches. If you're in a place right now where you have a lot of clients and you don't necessarily need any, targeting people based on demographic, I think is a good option just because you're going to be able to be really choosy about who the ad chose to. Now, you can apply that demographic detail on top of the search behavior so you can target people that only have, like for example, the top 50% of incomes. Or you could target people that recently added a cat to the house and people that buy pet food and dog beds. and then apply that on top of search. So you can combine these things. But generally if you have a practice where you really need clients now focus on behavior. If you have a practice where you're just trying to get a better quality of client, and you want to continue to keep things growing, target based on demographic, and the type of content and marketing that you're going to be doing is going to be very different.

Brandon 00:22:22  So you need to have, content in place that's going to highlight all of the benefits that you have to really attract people based on, you know, who is the best fit for your practice. Now let's talk about budgets, because that's something that people ask about a ton. If your practice is in desperate need of clients, you're going to need to spend some money to get clients coming in. How much should you be spending? The question is something I get asked all the time. Most of the clients that I work with, I'm seeing appointments being booked for anywhere between, I'd say 20 and and $30 in that price range. And it completely depends. And this is very, very general. But let's say it cost you $25 to get an appointment booked. That would be, in my opinion, a fantastic deal, because if you think about what the first visit value is, what the annual visit value is of a client, and then the lifetime value of a client, you should be able to be very, very profitable with client acquisition costs like that.

Brandon 00:23:23  And most businesses aren't in a place where they can acquire customers for so cheap. So that's one thing that's great about the veterinary industry, is that most private practices aren't doing a huge amount of ads. There's a bunch of corporate people that are doing ads, which is definitely driving up prices. But if you compare this to like an HVAC company or a plumbing company or an attorney or a real estate agent or something like that. They spend hundreds of dollars just to get a lead. So I think the vendor industry is amazingly lucky that cost for client acquisition is so low. but you need to be able to spend. So let's say it does cost $25 per day if you're going to run $20 a day in ads. It's not going to cut it for filling your schedule. So you need to make sure again that all of the systems are in place, that everything's going to work, but you need to be able to apply some budget behind it and kind of back out and work out what you're going to want to do as far as targeting and budget and then test things.

Brandon 00:24:21  Now, I don't think you should go out and spend, you know, $1,000 a day right out the gate. I think you should confirm and test and scale up and then, scale up as quickly as possible as you need as well. So here's the thing. If it doesn't work at, say, $30 a day and you're not getting any phone calls and you're not getting conversion, you know, lifting the budget up to $200 a day is not going to help you. again, you need to go through, troubleshoot your funnel. See, is it truly a traffic problem? Do we need just more volume, or are we losing people here when they make the phone call retargeting the wrong groups of people? Are we targeting the wrong zip codes? You know, there's a bunch of things that you're going to want to test. Now, let's say that you're in the category that we have enough clients or, you know, hopefully if you're you're not at the point yet where you are, hopefully you will be soon.

Brandon 00:25:14  So you have enough clients and you don't necessarily need a bunch of new clients. What should you be doing? I think there's two things that you should be doing. Number one is, you know, you're never just kind of staying stagnant. You're either growing or you're dying. And so you need to have more clients, even if you're in a place of growth. And hopefully at some point you're going to be able to hire more doctors and continue to grow the practice. So having systems in place that will allow you to do that is going to be helpful, but you're able to be a lot more choosy about who you're going to target. You're going to be able to really target people based that are going to be the perfect type of clients for you, or you can target people for the services that you want to be doing. So you know, you only have so many hours every single day. Let's do more dental procedures. Let's do more high end surgeries. You know, focus on the things that you love doing that's going to make practice more fun and more profitable.

Brandon 00:26:09  Because again, you only have so many hours in the day. So that is I think the number one thing that you should be doing is target the type of clients that you love seeing, or the type of procedures that you love doing. and then to keep your current clients engaged, I would say really make sure that you have marketing systems in place for retargeting, referrals and re-engagement so that you're keeping the current client base, especially the ones that you love, engaged, like they feel like they're being seen being serviced. And, you're able to really grow more of those high quality clients. So if your practice is doing fantastic, that's awesome. You need to keep the growth going though, because some are always comes to an end, right? There's seasons to every single business. Growth doesn't go on forever, and you need to make sure that you have systems in place so that when things do slow down a little bit, you can turn on these systems and scale them up rather than sitting around and, you know, wondering, oh geez, what's happened? We used to be busy and now we're not.

Brandon 00:27:13  Don't know what to do. So make make hay while the sun is shining. and make sure that you have these systems in place. I know that this was a very high level and kind of complicated process. So if you need help with anything, please don't hesitate to reach out. If you are wondering what you should be doing, you can always book a time with me to talk about your practices marketing, so be sure to let me know if there's anything I can do. You can go to Vendor Marketing podcast.com and and book a time to speak with me there. If you'd like some help more individually with your practice's marketing. I hope that this was helpful for you and we'll see you on the next episode.