How to use Instagram To Promote Your Veterinary Practice

Table of Contents

• Why should your clinic use Instagram?
• Content ideas for your Instagram profile
• Get free marketing assets for Instagram
• Advertising on Instagram
• Direct pet owners to your Vetstoria booking platform
• Get more online bookings with Instagram
• Summary

Glossary

Posts: Short-form type of video or static content with artwork/animations that gets published on social media platforms.

Stories: Allows you to share photos and videos that disappear from your profile and viewer’s feed and messages after 24 hours.

Reels: Allows you to create, discover and share short, entertaining videos on Instagram.

Impressions: The number of times your content is displayed, whether it was clicked or not.

Reach: The total number of people who see your content.

Sponsored posts: Paid advertising used by brands to promote their products or services on social media.

Why should your clinic use Instagram?

Ranked as the 4th most used social media platform, with around 1 billion monthly active users accessing the app daily, Instagram has seen a meteoric rise since its inception in 2010. But how can you use Instagram for your veterinary practice?

Luckily, Instagram marketing is not as complicated as veterinary science. In this post, we will discuss why veterinary clinics like yours need to invest in Instagram marketing. 

More visibility: By creating an Instagram account for your veterinary clinic, you increase your chances of being seen by a wider audience. You can check the performance of your visibility by keeping track of the reach/impressions you get on the content that you publish through stories, reels and posts. By regularly posting content, you can reach new clients and keep your existing clients informed about the latest developments in your clinic. 

Connect with your audience: Instagram allows you to interact with your followers. By responding to comments and messages, you can connect with your audience and build relationships with them. You can even use their questions and comments as inspiration to create more helpful content. This will help you understand the needs of your clients and what they are looking for in a veterinary clinic.

Showcase your expertise: Instagram is a visual platform, making it the perfect platform to show your veterinary clinic’s expertise and give your audience a glimpse into what your clinic is about. You can provide recommendations and share helpful tips. It is also easier to connect with an audience through video content than static images, giving the audience a taste of your clinic’s personality! A few things you can post are pictures and video reels of,

• Your clinic 
• Your staff
• Pets you care for
• Educational content, such as tips on pet care

Not sure how to get started with reels? Click here to get your own video reel template on pet dental health!

Boosts reputation: By regularly posting on Instagram, you can improve the reputation of your veterinary clinic. You can build trust and feel more attached to your pet owners by sharing knowledge, responding to comments/messages, and providing valuable information to your audience. This makes them less inclined to move to a new, unfamiliar clinic that may not have a social presence. 

Now that you know the ways Instagram can help you, let’s look at a few content ideas you can implement to gain visibility for your clinic. 

Instagram marketing ideas

Behind-the-scenes: This is a great way to make your clinic feel more approachable. Behind-the-scenes, such as the staff working with pets, the day-to-day operations of the clinic, or even a tour of the clinic are some ideas to get started with.

Success stories/testimonials: Share success stories of pets you treat at your clinic. By doing this, you show your audiences the positive impact you make. Using photo or video testimonials helps share these stories with your audience.

Tips on pet care: Share your expert advice on how to keep pets healthy and happy. This will establish your clinic as a reliable source of information. You can post tips on nutrition, grooming and exercise, as stories, static posts, videos or reels (for longer-form educational content). 

Click here to get your own video reel template on how to brush your pet’s teeth from our pre-made content packs!  

Pet influencer collaboration: Collaborations can help you reach larger audiences and increase brand awareness. Partnering with a popular pet influencer will help you tap into their following and increase the number of followers on your profile. Sponsored posts, co-created content and even a joint giveaway, are great ways to gain maximum exposure.

Pet owner-generated content: If pet influencer collaborations are too expensive, you can always encourage pet owners to take photos of their pets and tag your clinic’s profile when they visit the clinic. This is a cost-effective way to promote your clinic with the benefit of social proof!  

Giveaways: Run contests and giveaways to increase engagement on your profile. For example, ask your followers to post the cutest pictures of their pets, and the picture with the most likes wins a prize.

You can also run contests that ask followers to answer pet-care related questions or even follow you to win!

For your prize, consider giving away a product/service that you already provide, for e.g. a free check-up. This helps to build awareness of that product or service and increase its value. And have pet owners return to your clinic because they have seen the value of it.

Ask the Vet Q&A session: Host a Q&A session to provide valuable information to your audience. Pet owners can ask questions and get advice from a veterinarian from your clinic. You can host a live Q&A session based on questions you frequently get from pet owners, online or offline. 

Pet adoption campaigns: Partner with local pet shelters and rescues to create pet adoption campaigns on Instagram. Share photos and videos of adoptable pets and encourage your audiences to help them find their forever homes. 

Promote your services: You can use video/static content to promote specific products, your online appointments and share your special offers.

Here are a few clinics that are currently using Vetstoria and showcasing their services on Instagram.

Get free marketing assets for Instagram!

Introducing the Vetstoria content packs, these ready-made marketing packs make it easy to promote your clinic and share helpful tips with pet owners. 

Want to start creating marketing materials for your Instagram profile but don’t have the time to do it? Well, you’re in luck! We designed content packs for those practices that don’t have the time to create marketing materials from scratch. Now you can quickly and easily run promotional campaigns and share important information with pet owners continuously.

Our veterinary content packs include a variety of marketing assets to share with pet owners, such as:

• Instagram posts and suggested captions
• Facebook posts and suggestion captions
• Posters and flyers to print out in the clinic
• Pre-written emails and text messages
• Video reel templates

To start using our content packs for your clinic, visit our content packs page! 

Advertising on Instagram

Within the interface of the Facebook ads manager, you can also manage your Instagram ads by setting up goals, budgets, audiences, targeting, and a call to action to direct traffic to your website and create brand awareness. You can also access detailed analytics and metrics to track your ad’s performance once it is live.

To learn more about advertising with Instagram click here

Direct pet owners to your Vetstoria booking platform

You can direct pet owners to your website to book an appointment with your clinic, by using the “other” link in your Vetstoria platform. You can copy and paste the link onto your Instagram bio or sponsored content as a call-to-action.

You can also label these links to track how many pet owners have booked through the link.

Create Campaigns and get more online bookings with Instagram for veterinary marketing

Although links are not clickable on Instagram when you paste them onto the comments or caption section, you can still add links to either the bio of your Instagram profile, in Instagram stories, or as a CTA (call-to-action) on your sponsored content (posts, videos and stories). With Instagram, you are creating a new channel through which you can reach potential pet owners and instantly direct them to book appointments on your website.

Promotional campaigns are also a great way to drive online bookings; however, if you don’t have an easy solution to run and automate campaigns, it can create more manual work for an already busy front desk.

This is where Vetstoria’s Digital Marketing feature offers an intuitive and powerful way to manage and track veterinary promotions.

Here’s how it works:

1. Name your campaign: choose a unique name that will help you identify the promotion, for example, “Cat Appreciation Day – Free Cat Dental Check – Instagram– 20Jan2019”

2. Set custom rules that determine the specifics of your campaign. These include:

• The dates and duration of the campaign
• Maximum number of appointments you want to offer
• The species the campaign applies to
• The specific vets or technicians/nurses that serve the appointments
• Any time or date exclusions you wish to put in place

3. Generate link: Vetstoria will then generate a Digital Marketing Link, a unique short link for the campaign that you can use across your marketing channels.

4. Paste these links onto your Instagram profile’s bio or use these links on your sponsored ads or stories to direct pet owners to your booking page. 

5. Easily monitor and analyze campaign performance. See how many appointments and new clients that each campaign is generating through the unique links, and learn which channels are most effective. 

Summary

In conclusion, Instagram marketing can provide veterinary clinics numerous benefits, including more visibility, connecting with your audience, showcasing expertise, cost-effective marketing, and boosting reputation. By incorporating these creative ideas into your Instagram marketing plan, your veterinary clinic can stand out and build a strong online presence. If you’re not already using Instagram to market your veterinary clinic, it’s never too late to start.