Posts Tagged: Digital Marketing
2023 Is Almost Here! Ideas To Get You to the End of the Year & Beyond
Somehow, 2022 went POOF and 2023 is quickly sneaking up on us. December is a month packed with multiple holidays and end-of-year business needs. Not to mention, the VMX convention occurs right at the beginning of the year. Before this year officially ends, you must start considering your marketing for 2023.
Digital Marketing Struggles
In the fledgling days of the internet, digital marketing used to be very simple. Today, everything has evolved and there are multiple moving parts that each seem to require regular attention. We have seen many veterinarians with their head in their hands wondering why marketing on the internet seems so confusing. The answer is: because it IS CONFUSING. How do you navigate it and come out successful and sane on the other end of the process?
Five Steps to Beef Up Compliance
Compliance is an important issue for veterinary practices, but the past few years have been a whirlwind and time has been in extremely short supply. Many of us have had no chance to take a step back to see the health of our animal population as a whole. How do you get all your clients back into compliance with checkups and vaccinations? To keep it simple (and quick to read), here are five ways to assist in this endeavor:
Know Thy Data
It is almost impossible to accurately know the compliance rate of your pet population without reviewing data. Gut-feeling guesses can only take you so far, but hard data wins the day. There are a few places to collect data–the invoices for the last 12 months, and reports from your PIMs system. Here at Beyond Indigo Pets, we use our Marketing Dashboard powered by VetSuccess to gather data.
VetSuccess excels at standardizing data from a hospital’s PIMS system and making it understandable. We want to be able to see exactly the number of compliant pets by species and compare that data to the benchmark of other hospitals in the area. This gives us a baseline from which we can begin veterinary marketing campaigns. For example, looking at this chart, we can see this hospital has 127 pets vaccinated for Lyme disease, which is 3% of their entire active pet population. Compared to the rest of the veterinary hospitals in the state, they are 8 percentage points lower in vaccinating for this disease. Since spring is upon us, and they are in a state known for Lyme disease, it would be an excellent marketing initiative to encourage people to get their pet’s vaccinations up to date. While the animal is at the hospital, it would be a great time to get a wellness exam, per the data below—two-for-one, so to speak!
Demographics
Because of how targeting works in marketing on social media, Google, and other platforms, it is helpful to define what demographics you want to target before setting up any marketing campaign. Think about which age group your desired client base fits into. Consider the characteristics of your ideal or “best” client. In the new age of practicing medicine, who do you, as a team, want to see? Who adds quality to your day instead of taking it away? I would suggest you and the team write out a description of your ideal client and all the characteristics of said client. That is where you direct your marketing efforts instead of just hoping for the best.
Bandwidth (This is very important!)
Bandwidth is a super duper important consideration when looking at marketing campaigns to increase compliance. The biggest bottlenecks involve the team’s ability to see the pets, budget constraints, and supply chain. For example, taking an inventory of what vaccines you have on hand, or that you can easily obtain, is the first step. It would be a waste to do a marketing push for something that you cannot complete due to supply restrictions. Also, what does the team like doing? Most hospitals do not have a shortage of clients so, instead of randomly pushing any topic, if the team had a choice, which area of compliance would they appreciate doing the most? Finally, set a budget for your marketing push to cover pay-per-click advertising and someone’s time to accomplish it.
Time to Make the Push
Data in hand, demographics known, budget defined, and you are set to go. Now, where, how, and when do you market for compliance? Please be realistic regarding your personal time or staff’s time when marketing. If you have only five minutes to post a blurb/meme about the importance of getting a Lyme vaccination, look toward a post on Facebook and/or Instagram. Throw in Nextdoor too if you have a few extra spare minutes. If you have more time or work with a marketing company, focus on creating a blog about the what, where, and why of Lyme disease. Make sure to include a call to action (CTA) that is easy for people to do—think, “Click here to schedule an appointment.” Then, promote the heck out of that blog on social media, website, and newsletters.
Time to Measure
Regardless of the marketing message and push, it is important to measure the success of the campaign weekly, or when the platforms allow. (Social media gives you marketing success data sooner than Google). Because the first step is to collect data, that is the starting point for your measurement. Compare that point to the new data after the campaign has been running a week or two. Is the needle moving? If not, it is time to switch up the marketing message and/or platform.
Consider using us to move the needle on compliance (or any marketing push). Because we understand the value of your time, we created the Marketing Dashboard powered by VetSuccess, which allows us to see your data without you calling us, sending us reports, or squeezing in conversations. We can identify compliance issues, run them past you for your approval, and then roll up our sleeves and get to work. Reach out to us by clicking here https://www.beyondindigopets.com/#contact.
Celebrating 25 years of Veterinary Marketing Excellence
If you blink, 25 years will pass! That is how we feel at Beyond Indigo Pets! And what a quarter century it has been. When we started in 1997, things looked a little different on the web than they do now—and our product offering was just websites. Our founder and CEO Kelly Baltzell learned to code our very first website in HTML with a book propped up next to her computer. Many people still had servers in their basements, hooked into the phone line through the basement window. Yahoo was coding their websites by hand, and Google was in its infancy after launching in 1998.
Retrospective Results: Beyond Indigo’s Top 10 Blogs of 2017
With 2017 officially on the books, many of us are setting intentions for the year to come. The ceremonial changing of the calendar offers us an opportunity to reflect on the results and revelations of the past year and to use that insight in planning for the year ahead.
In Beyond Indigo’s blogging department those reflections and results manifest as Top 10 lists – both for the company and for those clients who subscribe to our blogging service. Compiling these lists is an interesting task. Not only can I see the readership and growth rates for our blogs, but I can also see which topics resonated with our readers (and which ones didn’t) and use that information to shape the editorial calendar in the months to come. Talk about real results in action.
This year, Beyond Indigo’s company blog (the one you’re reading right now) saw a 98% growth rate in readership and accounted for approximately 30% of our website’s total traffic. So what posts drew you in and kept you coming back for more…?
Google AdWords 101
Updated 3/1/2017 by Melissa Mason
Have you ever wondered about those top Google “hits” with the outlined-in-green “Ad” designation? If so, you’re not alone – and for good reason. Those results are brought to you courtesy of Google AdWords; an incredibly powerful, paid marketing tool that allows businesses of all sizes to places ads on the front page of Google’s search results.
With AdWords’ many tracking tools, analysis, and “funnel options”, this search engine marketing tool has the ability to boost your website’s traffic and drive potential customers to the door of any business.
Give ‘Em What They Want
Founded in October of 2000, AdWords is Google’s primary sources of revenue, earning over $100 million per day, as of 2012. Nearly all of it –$15.5 billion – came from advertising sales. In the first quarter of 2015, Google took in $17.3 billion in revenue, up 12% year over year. With few restrictions, AdWords can be utilized by businesses of nearly any size and budget.