Online Marketing Strategies for Veterinarians

Online marketing encompasses a huge area and I will attempt to touch upon a few areas that we have tried in our practices to increase and cultivate our client base. First, let's start with cultivating your client base. If you are not doing so already, you need to start collecting your client's email addresses. Do it right now before even learning how to use them.

We use a service by Constant Contact to market to our new and existing clients. With Constant Contact, you can send professional email newsletters to your clients on various topics (flea control, allergies, heartworm, dentals, etc). You can also set up a series of "autoresponder" emails to clients as they sign up. This series is simply a set of emails that are set up to go out to an individual client at particular periods of time after their sign-up date. In other words, when a new client comes in, you enter their email address into constant contact. They are then automatically sent an email welcoming them to the practice within 24 hours. At 7 days, they are sent an email informing them of all the services that you offer at your practice. At 30 days, they are sent an email discussing dental cleanings. At 60 days, they are sent an email about your doctors. And so on. Thus, with constant contact, you can send an email to all of your clients at the same time, as well as setting up a series of autoresponder emails that go out at set intervals to all of your new clients. Constant Contact also has the ability to show you how many clients actually opened the email and whether they clicked on any links in the newsletter.

What about attracting new clients? Google is now the new yellow pages. If you have not done so already, you need to go to Google's Local Business Center. From there after signing up, you search for your hospital and "claim" it. Another way is to go to Google and type in "veterinarian" followed by your zip code. Then click on the words "place page" by your hospital's listing. This will take you to your hospital's Google Map place page. Look in the upper right of this page for the words "Business Owner?" and click on them. This will bring you to a sign up page for Google's Local Business Center. Follow the directions to claim your hospital's listing. Once claimed, you can add your hours, coupons, info about your practice, etc. This is your new "yellow page" listing and it's free! You can also do this on Yahoo!, Bing, Citysearch and many other directories.

What is SEO? Before we go any further, a discussion about SEO or search engine optimization is in order. SEO is a multi-billion dollar industry and involves optimizing your website so it shows up high on search engine rankings when certain words (like "veterinarian", "animal hospital", "sick pet", etc) are searched for. Showing up high on these rankings means that you are optimized for "organic" searches - organic meaning that you rank high without paying Google anything. You can learn SEO yourself or hire someone else to do it for you. It can mean a world of difference to your practice.

There a couple of things that you can do - without having any technical expertise - for SEO. First, get your website listed on as many relevant directories as possible and talk to any local boarding kennels, groomers, etc about putting a link to your site from theirs. Second, encourage your satisfied clients to post reviews on your hospital at popular review sites (citysearch, yelp, google, etc). See my earlier post on online reviews. Google ranks you higher on the organic search results if you have more reviews.

What about Adwords? Next go to Google Adwords and set up an account for yourself. On Google Adwords, you pay for advertising spots on Google web searches. When you search for anything on Google, ads show up on the right hand side of the page and sometimes just under the search bar. Through Adwords, you can advertise as well. You place bids to put your ad higher up on the the right hand list of ads for particular keywords that people are searching for. For example, you can start a "campaign" for the keyword "veterinarian"; if you bid high enough, you get higher on the list. You set the maximum bid that you will pay and Google places you as high as it can based on all the other bids for that same keyword. A key feature is that you can even specify that you only want to bid on Adwords when the searcher is located within a certain radius of your hospital location. (This is vital; make sure you set this specification because you don't need to advertise to people in New York if you practice in Texas).

No discussion about online marketing would be complete without talking about social media. Your most important options right now are Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare. These media outlets give you as a business owner a way to interact with your clients.

On Facebook, you can set up a Business Facebook page where you are the administrator. Periodically, post interesting bits of info on veterinary related information, your staff, and your clients. Make sure that you make a badge to put on your website; a badge is a graphic link that gives your clients a quick link to your facebook page so that they can be a fan or friend of your site. Remember this is social media and the more "likes" you have, the more new clients will be apt to come to your hospital.

Twitter is still evolving and it is hard to know exactly how to use the service. In a nutshell, you set up a twitter account, follow people, get followers and tweet. Tweets are small 140 or less character long text messages that are sent out to whoever is "following" you. You can tweet about an interesting link, about a special you are having, about pet dental month, or whatever. So how does this help you? Well, for one thing, tweets are now picked up by Google so you generate one more possibility of people finding you on the internet. For another thing, you can actually search twitter for certain words and then reply to people about their tweets. If your practice is in Dallas, then search for "moving to Dallas". Reply to any tweet about "moving to Dallas" about a free tour of your veterinary practice.

Foursquare is a very interesting site which I believe will be the best social media site for businesses. People sign up for Foursquare and then "check-in" on their cell phones when they arrive at a business. They get badges for being a frequent customer and are "elected" the mayor of the business if they are the most frequent customer. You can automatically award a free nail trim for a customer's 20th check-in or come up with a whole series of benefits based on how many times people visit your practice. You would be amazed at how people enjoy this kind of thing!

We have touched on just a few thoughts on online marketing strategies for veterinarians. Please comment below if you have any ideas or suggestions or on what works for your practice.

Using the Cloud

What exactly is the Cloud? In web terms, the Cloud refers to using the web to store and process information. At our My Pet's Animal Hospitals, we use the Cloud in a number of ways.

First, we use Google docs for several tasks. Google docs is an area on Google that allows you to store documents. The great thing about Google docs is that you get to share documents and invite your staff to edit or add to them. So what documents would be useful to share?

My favourite one is our Sam's Club list. It's a simple text document that any of our staff can access. Anytime we start to run out of something (toilet paper, paper towels, floor cleaner, etc), a staff member can add it to the list. Then if I happen to be going to Sam's Club, I can access the list from my mobile phone and have an up-to-date list to work from. Brilliant!

Another Google doc that we use is our medical supplies order list and log. Again, any staff member can access the list and add needed supplies to the list. Then our designated orderers can place an order to one of our vendors or distributors. The orderers note on the log when an item is ordered as well as when it is received so everyone knows what a particular item's status is in the ordering process. Now one of our employees who recently had a baby can place orders from home and still be productive.

As you can see, there are an infinite number of uses for Google docs. And with using this free service, you are now using the Cloud.

The other Cloud service that we use is Whentowork.com. Whentowork.com is an online staff scheduling service that creates customizable staff schedules. We also use it as a way to communicate with one another. A designated manager can send a message to all staff members at the same time, and of course individual messages among staff members are also possible. Staff members can request time off and trade shifts with this site. Click here for more info.

We use paycycle.com as our payroll service online. With all our staff required to use direct deposit, payroll dates don't have to interfere with vacation plans - although they still may interfere with your vacation. Believe me, I didn't mind too much taking 30 minutes out from the pool on my Jamaica vacation to do payroll.

All of our veterinary staff education is run online with a service that I offer to other veterinary animal hospitals through eVetU.com. EVetU.com offers a free basic 2 hour course for veterinary staff members on heartworm disease, basic vaccinations, dental cleanings, fecals and safety.

The best thing about eVetU, however, is that eVetU can set up your own veterinary staff training website in the same format that an online university would offer courses. EVetU sets up the platform and then you provide the course content. The course content could include text, readings, videos that you have made, videos from youtube, pictures,etc. At My Pet's Animal Hospital, we use this platform to set up our 8-hr employee orientation. Our orientation course has links to the IRS w4 form, our employee handbook and a quiz on it, our team training manual and a quiz on it too, a welcome video from me - the "boss" - telling new employees about our hospital and what I expect of them, the basic veterinary assistant course from eVetU, an introduction to our practice software, and a training checklist which provides the basis of their ongoing training once they are through orientation. Each course has a designated teacher who can monitor the employee's progress. We set you up as the teacher and you set up your own course.

Hopefully, in the future, we'll have veterinary practice software that is web-based. There are a few programs out there right now but with poor support. Once we have a full-fledged veterinary software program on the web, we will finally be able to be completely cloud-based.

Online Reviews - Aaaaaah!

Online reviews are here to stay and you as a practice owner have to figure out what to do about them. First of all, what are they good for? If you have good reviews, they can serve to bring in new clients (if they are read). Even better, they raise your practice website's ranking on search engines like Google. The more in-links that you have, the better your website will rank.

Bad reviews, on the other hand, can be disastrous. If you are one of those practice owners who have just been quietly going about your daily activities without checking review sites, you may be vulnerable to attack from a bad reviewer. If you have been thinking that everything will work out fine simply by providing great service, watch out. You and I both know that in practice, even when we do our best, we occasionally come across that one client that does not connect with us or one of our associates. In today's times, this does not result in a simple parting of ways. It often results in a bad online review.

Step One. Open Your Eyes.

"Your customers are talking about you - and the whole world is listening." writes Kermit Pattison in the NY Times. He recommends monitoring your online reputation at various review sites like yelp and citysearch. You can also set up a Google Alert to alert you everytime your practice name is mentioned on the web.

Step Two. Take Defensive Steps.

Take care of every dissatisfied customer; train your staff to notify you within 2 hours or less when they have an interaction with a customer who is not happy. A quick phone call from you or someone designated by you may head off a bad review. Remember that most online reviews are either made by extremely satisfied customers or extremely dissatisfied customers. So if all you do is call the unhappy client and just listen to them, you may move them into the more complacent although "still dissatisfied" category from the really angry "I'm so dissatisfied that I'm gonna trash you all over the web" category.

Step Three. Be Proactive.

Yes, if you provide really great service, you create clients who want to help you succeed and who would be willing to write great reviews of your hospital based on the experience that they have had with you. You still, however, can not sit back and wait for this to happen. You need to encourage your clients to write reviews. You can do this by including links to various review sites on your website or on a handout that you give to clients as they leave your hospital.

Let me back up and give you my philosophy on the whole online review system. As I said before, the clients who write reviews are not a genuinely representative sample of your client base's opinion of you; they usually represent the extremes. This may change in the future but at the moment, that is the way it is. So I pose the question: should you play fair in an inherently unfair system? You decide where you should go from here but I personally believe that until we get a more fair system, it is okay to encourage only your "happy" clients to give you a review. And perhaps a little reward for the review is in order as well (a free nail trim, etc). In our hospitals, we do not ask our "happy" clients to write a "five star" review, we ask them to write a review. BUT we only ask our "happy" clients to do so. And if they bring a printed copy of the review, they get a $10 gift certificate. (This would be a good thing to comment on below this blog post; I promise I won't delete the negative comments).

Also, even if you choose to ask every client - happy or unhappy - to write a review and offer an incentive to do so, at the very least you will dilute out the extremely negative reviews and generate a more representative opinion of your practice. By all means, however, encourage your clients to write reviews!

What not to do.

Do not "astroturf" review sites. This means do not have your employees write false reviews of your hospital to make you look good.

Do not get on the review sites and make "defensive" or "offensive" replies or posts to negative reviews. Be respectful if you are allowed to reply to a comment, identify who you are and give out facts only.

Do not keep your head in the sand and hope you won't be a victim of a bad review.

What kind of people do you look for when you hire?

Warren Buffet - CEO of Berkshire-Hathaway and investor who avoided the internet bubble bursting - stated in a lecture to MBA students that the three characteristics that he looked for in people were energy, intellect and integrity. When you look at your top team members, you will probably find that they possess these attributes and it is these attributes that set them off from the others. Energetic people have initiative and find things to do; they are motivated about their job and energize others. Obviously, one has to have the appropriate intellect for the job or success just will not happen. Integrity, however, is the toughest to determine. And what is integrity anyway?

Stephen Covey of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People fame defines integrity as having that unique combination of character and competency. He illustrates this point by asking would you rather have a competent but greedy surgeon perform a knee surgery on you that you did not need or an honest but incompetent surgeon perform a knee surgery that you did need - or neither.

Integrity implies competency; it implies that one gets the job done and finish tasks, and that one does it well. Someone can ask a person of integrity to do something and not worry about checking up on that person later. But that's just half the picture. Possessing good character is essential as well. Persons with good character do the "right thing" and are honest, trustworthy and make good choices.

So how does one screen for people with energy, intellect and integrity? Generally, people with energy show it during the interview process. They are interested in what you have to say, excited about the chance to work for you, and have questions. People who are slightly introverted, however, may not show their enthusiasm until they have been on the job for a few weeks. So be careful you don't exclude a person from your roster just because they were a little shy.

Intellect is easy to screen for. If you are not testing applicants for basic skills like reading, writing and arithmetic, then you should be. You can devise your own screening tests or use an IQ testing company like the Wonderlic Corporation . For reading and writing skills, have them read a passage from literature and then ask them to answer a few short answer essay questions on the passage.

Integrity, on the other hand, is the hardest to screen for. Here you can also "outsource" integrity screening to third parties or try to develop some questions of your own to ask an applicant during an interview. Here are some relevant questions:

Tell me about your last boss?
I would strongly urge you to consider another candidate if the person disparages a former employer. This has more to do with how they will act in your hospital and whether they will disrupt the work place by complaining about you without your knowledge. See Stephen Covey's article on Be Loyal to those Absent. Warning: don't expect your prospective applicants to behave better than you.

If a client comes in with a very ill pet and can not afford the medication to treat it, do you think that you should give it to them anyway if it means saving the pets life?
There isn't necessarily a correct answer on this one. You are the owner or manager of the hospital. How do you want them to act? Should they act on their own and give the medications away or should they ask you about it? Consider how many of your employees fit in the same profile where they can't always afford the medications either. It's about trade-offs and about moral trade-offs in particular. How the candidate presents the trade-off to you says a lot about how they would behave in the future.

If you saw a fellow employee smoking marijuana outside of work and it was a long enough time from their next shift as to not interfere with work, what would you do?
This gets at the heart of attitudes towards illegal drugs period. Again, the answer depends on you and how you feel. Be careful, if you don't mind your employees having relaxed attitudes against drugs for recreational use then expect them to have some relaxed attitudes against stealing if they have a good reason to do so (ie like "I couldn't afford the Heartgard").

Describe a product you were able to sell in a previous job position that you didn't believe in yourself. What techniques did you use to overcome this?
This is sort of a trick question. I would be looking for the "deer in the headlights" look. If they can't come up with anything then that's good. If they do come up with something, then examine it carefully. Obviously, in order to sell something that they didn't believe in, they had to make some sort of trade-off (ie dishonesty vs a paycheck, or dishonesty vs feeding my family). This question is from personal experience. I had a receptionist who was my best "seller" of pre-anesthetic bloodwork and pain medications (before we made them both mandatory). When I asked whether she believed in them, she replied, "Heck no. But I can sell anything." She later became a very disruptive force in the clinic as soon as she no longer believed in me.

These are just some thoughts on the hiring process. Indeed, it can be very tough. Also, please be mindful of staying well within the law with your interview questions.

Is Staff Turnover Really a Bad Thing?

“How much employee turnover do you have at your veterinary hospital?” I squirmed down into my seat as I reflected on the high turnover that we had last year. It was late January and I had just finished printing out W2 forms the week before. For those of you outside the United States, W2s are a tax form that you have to send to each employee – current or former - that worked for you that year at the end of the year . The number of forms that were to be sent to former employees was quite significant. And now the veterinary associate candidate posing the question was expecting an answer.

I dug in my heels and vowing not to sound too defensive, I replied to her question with the following analysis. First of all, I divide turnover into two categories: “good” turnover and “bad” turnover - sort of like “good” cholesterol and “bad” cholesterol. Good turnover counts those employees who did not fit in with the hospital and have now left – either voluntarily or involuntarily. Bad turnover, of course, counts those employees who you really wished would have stayed.

Every year after printing my W2s, I sort through them and divide them into the following piles: current employees, fired employees, those who left and we were happy about it, and those who left and we were sad about it. I then take the number in the first pile (current employees) and divide it by the total number of employees minus the number in the two middle piles. That is my true “retention rate”. In other words, I am most interested in what percentage of employees who succeeded at the hospital did I actually keep.

This brings one to an important statistic; how many employees were actually encouraged to leave or were terminated? A competent practice manager will not be afraid to make tough decisions where necessary. There are many practices where no one is ever terminated; either the hiring process is so fine-tuned that only great employees are hired or someone at the top cannot terminate anyone. Usually, the latter is true. And in these practices, great employees tend to stagnate as they see co-workers get away with subpar performance.

When I do lose a great staff member, I usually have to hire up to 7 employees before I find a suitable replacement. You can imagine what that does to your turnover rate if you only looked at it in the traditional sense.

So the next time someone asks you about your employee turnover, be proud if you have made tough decisions that year in order to cultivate a great staff.

Unfortunately no matter how you classify it, turnover has costs. With each new hire, you incur the cost of time and money spent looking for him or her, the cost of training, and the cost of incompetency. Your time is valuable and time spent placing advertisements, going through applications and interviewing must be factored in. The cost of training includes the hours paid for training the new hire before they are even exposed to their work environment, the cost of slowing down your other employees as they mentor the new hire, and the cost of the new hire as you double them up with one of your current employees shifts until they are ready to handle the shift on their own. The cost of incompetency includes the charges a new hire will potentially miss, the services the new hire will potentially not sell, and the potential clients the new hire will turn away. As you may note, these costs can convert to quite a significant monetary amount. As such, preventing “bad” turnover - losing valued employees - and limiting the cost of “good” turnover – replacing incompetent employees - becomes imperative.

To avoid losing valued employees, many factors come into play. Employees leave for a variety of reasons which include but are not limited to the following: poor work atmosphere and inadequate compensation. These reasons are not mutually exclusive. For example, employees will work at a hospital with a poor work environment if the compensation is high enough and vice versa.

Enhancing the work environment is a whole topic onto itself. One should start with an assessment of your hospital’s work environment by surveying your employees. At SurveyMonkey.com, a free basic membership allows you to conduct an online survey with up to 10 questions for up to 100 employees. The survey should be done anonymously. To make sure that an employee does not submit more than one survey, have everyone pick fictitious names or numbers out of a hat which they can use to identify themselves on their surveys. Include questions about their feelings on their current compensation, the amount of recognition they receive, whether or not they are currently seeking employment elsewhere, how they feel about their co-workers in a general way, whether or not they enjoy coming to work every day, etc. Include a suggestion area at the end. Be prepared for some interesting answers. Revealing these answers to your employees may be helpful (make sure that you edit out anything that might reveal an individual’s identity). You now have a good foundation to start from to enhance your employee’s work environment.

Enhancing compensation may not be that simple. Generally, twenty percent of hospital revenues are budgeted for overall non-veterinarian employee compensation. The only way to increase this budgeted amount relative to the amount of employees is to increase prices. The immediate effect of increasing prices is either to increase revenues allowing you to pay your employees more or to decrease the relative amount of services performed freeing up your employees time or a little of both. As an aside, the best way to immediately improve the quality of care in any hospital is to raise prices to the point that clients begin to opt for fewer services per patient; your employees now have more time available to deliver these chosen services. Many veterinarians would then argue that you are compromising your patient’s care by doing this. On the contrary, you have made an ethical decision that you will not undervalue your services to the extent that your employees can not spend the needed amount of time on them. Curiously, as your employees are paid more and have more time to communicate the value of needed services to your clients, revenues now increase due to more services being sold.

Obviously once prices are set, the budget limits overall compensation. Individual compensation, however, is only limited by an individual’s productivity. Three very talented employees may produce as much as four or more not so talented employees and as a group deserve the same overall compensation. Being willing to terminate incompetent employees – “good” turnover – allows one the opportunity to find these very talented employees. Cultivating these talented employees depends on having both an excellent training program and an encouraging work environment.