Branding and marketing your new veterinary clinic

Striking out on your own in veterinary practice is a wonderfully exciting time.

I vividly remember going from employed vet to business owner, creating Meridian Veterinary Practice way back in the late 1990s. I felt excited, scared and exhilarated all at once. It was a very steep learning curve.

Marketing vet practices (especially online) was in its infancy back then, but I’m very proud that the brand, logo and much of the original infrastructure we created are still standing strong today.

Over the past 15 years in full-time marketing, I’ve learned a lot more about launching successful businesses and making sure vets and other professionals see a short and long-term return on investment from marketing spend.

In this article, I cover each area of branding and marketing a new vet practice and offer a downloadable checklist you can use as you work through the process.

In my early days of vet practice marketing wasn’t something vets did.

As a relatively shy and polite profession, we used to simply place an ad in the Yellow Pages and wait for the phone to ring.

And I think even today, a lot of vets still struggle to promote themselves. There’s still some thinking that all vets need to do is build a clinic and provide great care and the waiting room will be full.

But a lot has changed in the last few years.

More and more practices, including large corporates, are aggressively marketing themselves on and offline.  The pet-owning public is generally less loyal and more prone to shopping around on price.

And this is where brand comes in.

You will massively increase the quality of clients you attract, return on marketing investment and ultimately, the value of your practice if you build an attractive and powerful brand for your veterinary practice.

Brand includes

• Your brand identity – name, logo, fonts, colours, tagline, key messaging, images, voice and tone
• Your unique selling proposition (USP) – what stands you apart from the competition eg state of the art equipment, holistic approach and preventative health care
• Experience and reputation – customer service (from first phone call onwards), online presence and reviews, clinic environment
• Digital and traditional marketing – more on this later but think website and socials, leaflets, community involvement and client education programs

Getting your brand foundation right is a vitally important early step in the life of your business.

You’ll need professional help from an experienced veterinary branding agency, but done right, it will be worth every cent both now and for the lifetime of your business.

After your new clinic has launched, you’ll need a marketing plan that you can tweak depending on how effective each element is and how busy you are.

You’ll need a mix of channels and a marketing professional will suggest where to invest on each for the best return.

Key considerations are

• Search optimisation
• Website content creation (articles, case studies news etc)
• Online reputation management (Google reviews etc)
• Social media management
• Newsletters
• Digital advertising
• Reminders

The great thing about the digital world is that all this activity can be tracked and it’s much easier than it used to be to measure the return on each activity. In most cases, you’ll see a better return from Google and the other search engines than you will from social media – more about this here.

Download this veterinary branding and marketing checklist to help you tick all the boxes – and give me a call if you need help.