Marketing Your Vet Practice- Find Out How to Increase New Patients!
Your Best Free Marketing Solution
Hi. My name is Wayne Baumgarten and I have been the office manager for a large and busy vet practice. I oversaw all advertising and marketing and in my experience your best advertising will always be word of mouth. In addition to my personal experience as an office manager, I have worked for many years in advertising health practices and every single time I have done a full analysis of an established practice and its marketing, I always find the top source of new business is referrals. In fact this is so true that thousands of practices throughout the United States do not advertise but rely on this one thing alone. Here is how you can take your best source of new patients and make it better.
1. Survey Your Clients: Create a simple customer service satisfaction survery. Get your reception to give it to each person as they check them out and ask them to fill it out. Make sure these completed surveys come to you and the good ones get copied onto your website and the bad ones get contacted and addressed.
2. Address All Complaints: Keep a record of all complaints received and ensure that either yourself or your office manager contacts and speaks to each person. Survey after survey has found that simply contacting a dissatisfied client makes a huge difference in what they say about you later. In fact, one survey showed that a percentage of those contacted would continue to use the same provider even though they were not 100% pleased with the service, just because they were contacted and their complaints listened to!
3. Offer A Referral Incentive: A simple printed card offering a small discount on products for referring a friend can increase your referrals significantly. A card or sign is cheap to produce and can do as much as thousands of dollars of more expensive advertising.
Meet the 800 lb Marketing Gorilla
The Internet Has Muscled Out TV, Radio and Yellow Pages.
Sad but true. A recent study we conducted showed that over 90% of those surveyed looked at the internet first when seeking a service provider.
Yellow Pages: As more and more people get mobile devices, it becomes less and less necessary to lug out that big old yellow book and paw through the pages. A few flicks of the thumb and you have a full directory on your phone, complete with user reviews and maps.
TV& Radio: Yes, people still listen to radio and TV. Problem is that both these have been deeply affected as advertising mediums by new technology. For example there are many “ad free” radio solutions that can be streamed from the web. Also TV now has the “fast forward” button that allows viewers to skip ads entirely. Your $5,000 worth of TV ads over 1 month can go flashing by with no more than a flicker of your face while the viewer fast forwards though 7 minutes of ads in 12 seconds.
But looking at search statistics shows shockingly high numbers of searches. Hold your hat. In most larger cities “find a veterinarian” is searched over 200 times a day!
Getting even a small amount of google advertising running can dramatically affect your visibility and make a big impact on your number of new patients.
Let’s Talk About Your Website and Internet Presence
Let me analyse your website at no charge and give you a free marketing consultation. In this consultation I will tell you three things you can do for FREE that will improve your internet presence.
Your Vet Practice Needs Marketing- But What Is Most Effective?
To Understand Your Marketing You Must Track Where Your New Clients Are Coming From.
Intravet and many other vet software programs allow your receptionist to note how the customer hear about you when setting up the new record. This is an invaluable method of getting an idea of your return on investment. Otherwise you are “flying blind”- a good way to lose money.
Here is how you do it:
1. Make sure that your system has this option and set it up with choices for the various kinds of advertising you are doing.
2. Make sure your receptionist knows how to find this option, and let this person know that you are spending thousands of dollars on advertising, and that their job security depends on helping you find the most effect form of advertising.
3. At the end of 1 month, generate the report showing the new clients and where they came from. You should also be able to print out how much income each category generated.
4. Also run the report of total new clients. You will probably see there are more new clients total than those that your receptionist marked! This tells you how seriously you receptionist is taking the job.
5. Look over the paid advertising categories. Internet, Radio, TV, Yellow pages. You will see very quickly what is pulling and what is not. Also you will know how much you are spending on each so it is easy to see where you are getting value for money and where you are getting ripped off.