The Veterinary Marketing Podcast

I was talking with several listeners of the podcast this week and I got some recurring feedback. They were saying how they love the podcast but it has some content that is really advanced and then it dawned on me. I've never done an intro to marketing episode. Having a strong foundation is one of the most important steps when starting your journey on marketing. So better late than never! In this week's episode I cover the principles that don't change over time. When learning marketing it is really important to know how to think about the ways you connect and engage with your clients because the way you approach marketing won't change over time. Tactics will change but principles always stay the same. People for the most part are the same and react the same over time. Sure there are new social networks, new marketing tools like pixels and more advanced targeting demographics, but this doesn't change the way you should approach your marketing. One of my favorite marketing books of all time is called Olgilvy on Advertising by David Olgilvy and this book was originally published in 1983. Knowing how human behavior works and how people will react to certain stories is the real way to Deciding who you are targeting and the right context for targeting your clients is very important, especially with all the content that is being created these days. In fact, more content than ever is being created so if your marketing is created with the right intent you're going to be more a part of the problem and noise than something that your clients will actually listen to. We cover the three main reasons why people are even using the internet so we can break down the best ways to reach each of these categories of people. Once you have the principles down, you can learn some great tactics for reaching your clients and potential clients. Today we cover principles and next week we'll cover an intro to tactics.

Writing can be tricky, especially if you have a veterinary hospital to run. What are you supposed to write about? Thinking about the entire process can be exhausting. Writing is very important, you need it for content, email sequences, ads, web pages and basically any piece of content that your clients and potential clients will consume. Fortunately it doesn't have to be that hard. Whenever I can find shortcuts or systems to put in place for marketing I love to use them, that is why I love writing formulas. Whether you're writing a web page, a blog post, a landing page, an ad or any piece of copy you can apply one of the simple formulas that I cover in today's episode. Before you begin writing it is really important to think about things from your clients perspective. Being inside your own veterinary industry brain can be helpful, but it can also keep you from creating content that will appeal to your clients. Anytime I create content I think about the following: Who am I writing For? What is the context(Medium) that I am creating this conversation or story around? What is the best medium for this content? What is the best and most simple way for me to convey my idea? And lastly, how can I make this as entertaining as possible. When you begin to create something if you are starting off with the wrong intent it can really mess with the entire piece of content so be sure to start with those general questions so that you can hopefully hone in on what your clients want. It is easy to forget but your clients are the ones you're creating for, so it is important that they'll want to consume what you're serving up. These formulas are all pretty basic, but simplicity is wonderful, especially when you're creating content. People are very busy these days so the quickest way to convey the information that you're looking to share is usually idea.

I am always on the lookout for new helpful tools that will allow me to market better. The three tools that I talk about in today's episode will absolutely help simplify and enhance your marketing execution so that you can really grow by leaps and bounds this year. When I talk about marketing I really emphasize measuring and testing. Measuring and testing are really critical components so that you can always be improving your efforts in order to get the lowest cost most effective marketing done. One tool in particular that I talk about in today's episode really helps to do that, it is called AdEspresso.com. With AdEspresso.com you can create literally hundereds of versions of ads all at once so that you can test all kinds of items like headlines, content of the ads, calls to action, images used in the ads, and demographic targeting options/audiences. This really takes the guess work out of knowing what works best and radically saves you time and effort. It would be impossible to do the amount of work that this system does for you even if your only job was to be constantly setting and testing Facebook ads all day. It also gives you easy to understand reporting so that you can clearly see what is working without having to create custom reports in facebook ad reporting and then integrate it with your Google analytics data. I have only recently been testing out AdEspreso.com but so far it is really been an amazing tool in all the marketing that I've done in the past couple months. You can get a free trial at AdEspresso.com for 14 days so be sure to check it out! The Next Item that I talk about is a little bit less glamorous or exciting as AdEspresso.com but I think it could really help and it is the Facebook Pages Manager CRM like features that have recently been updated on the App. If you have to manage your practice's page and use the app you can find this feature by making sure your app is updated and you can click on a specific person who interacts with your fan page. Once you click on the individual it will pull up a page that shows data on who you are talking with. You can see things like how long they've liked your page, where they live and you can add notes. This is a good idea to tag people, especially if they are troublemakers on your page so that any admin can look up notes and know to mute comments & block or even how to respond. The last item I cover in today's podcast is LeadDigits from Leadpages. If you would like to try this out text "veterinary" to 44222 and you'll get a copy of my 31 veterinary blog post ideas. Lead Digits allows you jto collect email information through text messages and best of all it is integrated into leadpages so it is a bonus feature that I didn't realize I already had. There are so many applications for this in your practice and I cover some really cool marketing ideas. If you want to see how leadpages works send me an email and I'll show you the best ways to use leadpages in your veterinary practice.

Dr. Braden Collins from Bunbury Vets in Bunbury, Western Australia is on the show to talk about how he uses Facebook to drive massive amounts of engagement in his veterinary practice. Dr. Collins originally reached out after having listened to the show and I quickly became a fan of his marketing. Braden uses Facebook really effectively to reach large portions of his community. Originally, in this episode I wanted to talk to him about his holiday photo contests because he gets great engagement as well as a very active participation from his clients. We cover how he uses his holiday posts to grow his Likes and how much he spends in promotion. This year Braden also tested some new marketing where he allowed for clients to drop off their pets instead of leaving them in the car. This helped him and his practice get a lot of good PR and goodwill. Last year, Braden made a video that illustrated how serious leaving pets in the car can be during the summer, and so to help curb any pets being lost during Christmas shopping, he made this offer. There also recently was a very large fire that affected a very large portion of the town down the road. Braden offered to help out however he could, and because of his help, his facebook post reached over 160,000 people! We cover the effects of his posts, and what works best for him. I really admire that Braden not only is willing to test all kinds of different marketing ideas, but he really genuinely cares about his community and is marketing like he is in it for the long term. By being a good neighbor and caring about his community he is getting a bunch of good marketing benefit. The key though, is that he is doing it because he cares, not because he just wants to be on the news.

Creating content and ads can be difficult enough without having to go through all the extra work of adding tracking pixels into the equation. Google's new tag manager is going to simplify some of the most important but complicated aspects of digital marketing. One of the things that I fail to do most often that I wish I executed better on was creating enough segmentation for all the tracking pixels that I need to place, but it ads a ton of tedious work to the whole process and often times I forget to do what I know I should be doing. First if you don't know what pixel tracking is, then you are missing out on a huge opportunity for increasing the value of content and marketing pieces you create. Pixels are pieces of javascript code that allow you to track people who visit your site or just very specific parts of your site. This code allows you to create audiences of people to show ads to on specific sites like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and ad platforms like Google Adwords. For example, let's say you're selling dog food and you have people add a bag of dog food to their online cart, but they abandon half way through the process and don't end up buying. You can use retargeting codes to track these people and show them ads of the food they were thinking about buying, except maybe you show a coupon or a limited offer to drive them to purchase. Tag manager makes it so that you can create and place these javascript codes without having to adjust your website code. If you don't know how to edit your website or if you don't manage adjustments then this will help! Now with tag manager all you have to do is create a container, get a single code and have that installed on your website once. Once it is installed you never have to put code on the site again! All you have to do now is create tags that use specific triggers and variables to tell google when to fire a tag(this means run the javascript code and create your remarketing list or event tracking) You can use tag manager to not only remarket, but also to track behavior and engagement on your site. This is probably going to be my favorite marketing tool I use this year!

Today's episode is the last part in the 4 part series on how to give your veterinary hospital a total marketing makeover and how to make this year your veterinary practice's best year ever. Today's episode we specifically cover how to know that your marketing is working and that you are executing well. Creating an advertisement is easy, but making one that actually works well is another thing altogether. I think the first step that most people fail at is taking no action at all. No matter what you learn, you'll get no benefit unless you put what you learn into action and take a first step. So please this year make it a year of taking action and apply what you learn, even it is just a small amount of implementation. Assuming that you are taking action the first real question you should ask yourself in any kind of marketing that you do is, "why am I even creating this piece of content/ad/social media post/etc?"If you don't have a clear objective it will be really easy for your marketing to fail. How do you even know if the marketing you've created is actually doing what it is supposed to in the first place if you don't have a specific objective? Once you can put the pass/fail test on a piece of marketing based on the objective that you've created the next step is to evaluate why something is working or not working. Most of the marketing materials that are created don't actually work, especially if you're not a seasoned marketer, so it is important to be able to evaluate the work that you're doing and pinpoint the areas that need work. The two parts that most marketing campaigns fail are in the advertisement and then in the sales cycle. I go in depth into the most common problems the three components of advertisements face and then where in the sales cycle marketers lose clients. Marketing and advertising doesn't work(over the long term) if your product is terrible though. So make sure that you are providing tremendous value!

Today's podcast is part 3 in my series on how to give your veterinary hospital a total marketing makeover so that you can create systematic growth. If you haven't listened to part 1 or 2 be sure to go back and listen to them because each is very important for having your best year yet! One common question that I get pretty often is, "how much should i spend on marketing?" I think that the answer to that question is pretty simple, but it is also very specific to your veterinary hospital. An answer like 2-5% doesn't answer what your specific goals are, it just makes it so that you throw money out at your best guess of what will create growth at your practice. With direct response digital marketing you can reverse engineer what you need to spend and how often you need to run ads to meet your marketing goals. In today's episode I cover topics ranging from how to figure out what goals you want to achieve based on how much you want to grow this year, to how determine what your average client value is, how to determine what your return on investment is to figuring out what your average ad spend should be. Not only do we cover ads, but we also talk about facebook likes and building email lists as well. Figuring out what you want to achieve this year is one of the most important first steps to creating growth at your practice. Building ads that help to grow your practice and create a positive ROI can be possible, but it definitely doesn't happen by accident. Most times if you're not measuring results and testing you will end up with ads that create negative ROI so it is definitely important that you figure out how to create profitable systematic growth.

Happy New Year Everyone! So in Last week's episode we talked about how to figure out yourself, your veterinary hospitals marketing, set baselines for metrics and more. If you haven't listened to that episode be sure to do that because it is definitely the important first step in seeing improvement in your marketing this year. In today's episode we go in depth on how to evaluate your digital assets so that you can know where to start if you are considering doing any changes or improvements. Digital assets are broken down into four major categories and include your website, your social media channels, your email list and finally your content. I think it is safe to say that for any veterinary hospital you can find things that will provide you the highest return on investment if you go in the order of evaluating your assets in that order. I get the question all the time, "is my website good enough?", and I think it is pretty easy to answer that question if you know the right criteria to check out. First and foremost, in today's mobile heavy user base you absolutely need to make sure your site is mobile friendly, and I talk about how to know if it is mobile friendly or as well as a test that you can run on your site by going to https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/ and see if your site passes the simple test or not. I also cover a bunch of other factors, but having a functional site that allows your clients to easily contact you and find the information that they are looking for should be the number one thing you do. Having social media properties that you engage with frequently and consistently is the next important item in my opinion. I cover the best ways to create consistency so you can increase engagement as well as help with conversion when you create offers. The next item of importance is having an email list that you continue to grow. I feel like email is almost as important as social media, but the reason why social media is slightly more important is because your clients can actually engage back and forth with you. Email is usually one sided, coming from you, which is nice because you can put your message out there. With social media though, clients will be talking to you and so you need to listen and respond. Don't leave clients hanging! The last piece I cover is about your practice's content library. Hopefully you have content at your practice that you are consistently putting out. Creating content helps with SEO, gives you a reason to stay in front of clients and gives them info so that they come to you and your website for answers instead of going to Dr. Google. Creating content doesn't have to be hard, and if you do it in a smart way, you can create content that you can re-purpose and re-use for all kinds of things. If you have any questions or comments with any of the info included in this week's episode please let me know!

The new year is upon us, and today is the last Monday of the year! In honor of the new year, and because people often times want to set new goals and resolutions in the new year I have decided to do a four part series on how to give your veterinary hospital a complete marketing makeover. We'll break down exactly what you need to do to see where you are today, and then figure out what you need to do to get to the place you want to be in. I hope that you like this series because I think it is really important to evaluate what you're doing along the way. I think this series will be good even if you have really successful marketing already. The first part of this series is figuring out where you are in your marketing today. Setting yourself up and actually knowing where you are is a huge step that you need to do before anything else. Let's say you know where you want to go, and you know when you want to get there, but if you don't know where you are today you'll never be able to create directions to get there. The exersize that I use in my business is what we'll be covering today, and is something that I learned from a great marketer named Ryan Deiss at DigitalMarketer.com. I've adapted the process for veterinary hospitals though and I run through a list of really powerful questions and why you need to consider these questions so that you can get a complete picture of where you are today. This is a really important first step in evaluating your veterinary hospital's marketing, so I hope that you follow along in this episode and actually take the time to complete the questions. If you would like a pdf copy of the questions just send me an email at brandon.breshears@gmail.com

This has been an amazing year, and although there is still 1 more episode that will be released I thought it would be a good idea to go back and take a look at some of the best lessons that I learned in marketing as well things that I learned from interview all the amazing guests that I had. I think a lot of times I am the kind of person who is always thinking about cool new ideas and often times after I learn these new strategies sometimes I forget to reflect and take time to think about application. I suspect that lots of people who listen to the podcast are this way too. With this I think that it is a great time to reflect on the best insights that I've learned. One of the favorite things I get out of doing the podcast is that I get to connect with some really smart marketers and I learn a bunch while doing the podcast too. So I hope you enjoy today's episode where I break down the coolest things I've learned this year. I have a few requests for you as we go into the new year. I want to make this podcast the highest quality it can possibly be, so if you ever have anything you want to learn about, guests you think I should have on, or any feedback in general, please let me know! One last thing, if you could leave me an honest review in iTunes I would greatly appreciate it! Please let me know if you ever need any help or have any questions. 2016 is going to be an amazing year!