Veterinarian Marketing

Veterinarian marketing used to be a fairly simple deal. You had a practice and you worked very hard to make sure your clients and their pets came back. Slowly, word-of-mouth marketing would work and your clients would recommend their friends.

Additionally, almost all veterinarian marketing strategies included yellow page placement. Here you bought an ad in the yellow pages - usually bigger than the default size - and this brough people into the vet clinic who were shopping for a new vet for their pet. So using word-of-mouth and yellow pages you could have a nice little practice after a few years.

Well a few things have changed that impact veterinarian marketing in 2010. First, there are more vets. So when people shop for a place to care for their pet they are finding more options. In other words, competition per square mile has increased. Second, people don't use the yellow pages like they used to. Third, customers have higher expectations than they once did. Let's explore this in depth.

The biggest change is the move away from yellow page usage. And the big phone companies that own these paper directories know this. They know that the younger people don't even keep a yellow pages in their house. The older generation does, but this is not who most vets are targeting as new customers. The young people use the internet. And therefore the modern veterinarian marketing plan has to have an Internet component.

Second, younger clients have different expectations. They want communication by email. They want fun web-based interaction with their pet and pet care. Some of the forward-thinking vets are offering pet portals as a free service. Some do a good job with marketing via email and keeping in touch with birthday emails and appointment reminders. But many vets are using a veterinarian marketing approach straight out of 1982. Yellow pages and word-of-mouth. They will find out that this does not cut it.

When a vet is ready to explore Internet marketing channels they need to talk to some experts in online marketing who can help them guide the migration of their yellow page dollars to something more appropriate. As scare as this sounds, updating to a modern veterinarian marketing budget will actually bring a number of benefits. Tracking is better and return is higher.