Getting the Most of Your Veterinary Practice’s Marketing Spend

If I had a dollar for every time someone asked me how many clients or pet owners I got from a campaign… I’d reinvest those dollars back into it. But to ensure you’re getting a better budget for the upcoming year, you need to be able to prove the return you got for your marketing costs. But let’s break this down.

What is ROI on marketing spend?

Return on investment (ROI) is a percentage of what you earn over your marketing costs or investment. For example, you want to ensure the return that you get on your spending is high, and, in the case of advertising, how many dollars you are earning for every dollar you spend. Converting this to a percentage is your ROI. Ideally, you would want to witness a positive ROI or return on your marketing spend — more dollars per dollar you spend (source).

So, how do you ensure that you’ll get the most out of the marketing promotions you run?

1. Set your marketing goals and the right call to action.

What do you most want to get out of your marketing campaigns? Increased visibility? New clients? McKinsey explains that the better the marketing objectives, the better the metrics. And the more you map this on your customers’ or pet owners’ journeys, the more likely you are to see good results.

To establish your goals and marketing plan, conduct a SWOT analysis and competitor analysis to determine the strength of your practice. Once you do, these goals or key performance indicators (KPIs) can be fed into your marketing activities, ensuring that you conduct the appropriate campaign or promotion. What would be a typical list of KPIs you’d want to look for? You could get started with a list that includes:

● Revenue.

● Growth rate.

● Cost per lead or pet owner.

● Organic traffic.

Once you identify these, Vetstoria’s digital marketing feature helps you determine what kind of campaign you’ll want to run and for what purpose. With all the customizations coming in, you will have a streamlined focus on what to expect from the outcome of your campaign, helping you make the most out of it.

Most importantly, what actions do you want pet owners to take? Usually, you want them to book an appointment. Our campaign link builder helps you create smart links with specific actions (e.g.., “book an appointment”) so that pet owners take that action and decide which practice they want to make an appointment with.

2. Understand how your audience behaves and target the right pet owners.

Without the right audience, you would be shooting in the dark, hoping something catches on. Understanding your target audience of pet owners, the online channels they hang out on, and their general interests are essential to your overall marketing plan. It’s also one of the key ways to ensure you increase your return on marketing spend.

We know that 81% of pet owners prefer booking online, and 79% use mobile devices to do so. If you were to refer to a report like “We are social,” you would understand the various social media pet owners consume. For example, there are 600 million users on Instagram that spend at least an hour on the platform per day.

With Vetstoria’s campaign link builder, you can add rules and customizations to narrow down the promotion period, appointment type, and the species you’re looking to treat. These links then can be placed in the channel(s) of your choice — be it Instagram, Facebook, etc. — and then tracked via Vetstoria’s analytics dashboard to understand how the campaign has performed, i.e., the number of appointments pet owners book via the link. The link builder makes it easy to place these booking links on various channels and get the most out of your campaigns.

Vetstoria also offers integrated booking links in the settings of the Vetstoria dashboard. These can be placed or added as a “Book now” button on each channel to take pet owners directly to the booking widget. This link makes it easier for pet owners to access the booking tool or platform, reducing your practice’s volume of phone calls.

3. Measure, review, and revise.

Analytics plays a significant role in your campaigns.

To measure your campaign’s ROI, you would need to pay attention to such metrics as the number of new users or new pet owners, time spent on each of your practice websites, origins of appointments, cost per click or lead (depending on which you measure), and conversions from each source.

With Vetstoria, most practices discover that 30-40% of their appointments are made outside of office hours. This means that pet owners make appointments during their free time.

Our analytics and reporting capabilities define the best times to run promotions, so you stay at the top of pet owners’ minds. You also get to identify results like the source of your appointments, the device with which they make them, and even which days of the week are most popular for appointment booking. You can leverage all these insights to maximize the outcome of your campaign.

So, what’s next?

Measuring the return of your marketing spend is a tedious process. This complexity is why platforms like Vetstoria offer users an excellent grasp of pet owner behavior via our analytics feature. Learn more about it here.

If you’re getting a start on how digital marketing with Vetstoria works, here’s a good resource for you to get a head start on your campaigns. If you have any other questions about how Vetstoria works, reach out at any time!