How to Market Your Veterinary Practice with Compelling Content

With the veterinary industry in the UK set to grow over 12% in 2022, veterinary practices must compete to take a share of this continued growth. An effective content marketing plan showcases your practice’s unique strengths to potential new customers driving them into your office so you can convert them into loyal clients. But how do you create a content marketing plan and where can you find content?

What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is a form of marketing that involves creating and publishing content that your target audience finds valuable. It can take the shape of infographics posted on social media, tutorial videos on video streaming platforms, a blog, and so much more.

Effective content marketing relies on building brand authority and recognition by exposing your business to potential new clients in an organic way. You can promote word of mouth, organic traffic, and social media exposure with the right content published in the right places for your market.

Does Content Marketing Work for Veterinary Practices?

Veterinary practices can benefit tremendously from content marketing. Every pet owner wants to learn how to best care for their pet and everyone loves videos of animals. This combination makes the veterinary industry a gold mine for value-adding content.

Creating a Content Marketing Plan

To generate results with content marketing, you first need to create an effective content marketing plan. Based on the plan you create, you can monitor progress toward achieving goals, accurately assess content marketing opportunities, and alter your plan alongside changes in the industry.

Analyse Your Business

Before working on a plan, you first need to gather some information. Begin with a focus on your own business. Assess your strengths and weaknesses as well as the effectiveness of any current marketing efforts. This information helps you come up with new content ideas and gather a baseline for your expectations.

After looking inward at your business, start assessing external factors. Create a comprehensive analysis of your competition’s current marketing strategies. The level of investment your competitors place into content marketing can make it more difficult to see results. But, once you do see results, the payout is nearly guaranteed.

You also need a deep understanding of your target market to create an effective content marketing plan. After all, they’re the ones the content will be made for. So, assess your target market’s demographics, related interests, level of education, and how they interact with the internet.

Define a Budget

The capabilities and strategies you use to find success with content marketing largely depend on your available budget. Everything from creating content to distributing your content costs money and time. So, you need to go beyond the money you budget for content marketing initiatives. Also budget for the amount of time you and your staff can set aside for marketing efforts.

Regardless of your available budget, there’s always an opportunity in content marketing to see real results if you pair creativity with a bit of hard work.

Establish Realistic Goals

With a budget in hand, you can start creating realistic goals you can achieve with your content marketing efforts. Of course, more clients are the end goal, but what goals along the way can you set to better track your progress toward securing more clients? This depends on the type of content you create and where you publish it.

Common key performance indicators (KPIs) in the content marketing space involve impressions, reach, the number of content pieces published, and your sales cycle length. You can go beyond these KPIs to create more individualised goals to better fit the needs of your business.

Create an Actionable Plan

Now that you’ve analysed your business, defined a budget, and established realistic goals, you can start creating an actionable content marketing plan. Start with ranking the content formats you want to create for your practice. This can be video content, graphics, written content, or audio content. Depending on the content formats you want to create, you can choose platforms to publish your content on that work well with your strongest formats.

After choosing platforms, you can start recording the actionable steps you can take to reach your goals with your marketing budget. In the steps, determine the amount of content you need to publish, how often content gets published, how the content will be created, and assign responsibilities.

Gather Data and Assess Your Plan

Once you start putting your plan into place, you can begin gathering data to assess its effectiveness in reaching your goals. Track how well your plan works at improving your chosen KPIs. Then, based on the data and your efforts, reassess your content plans. You can make minor changes such as the frequency you post content or major changes such as switching to different platforms.

Where to Find Content for Your Veterinary Practice

Veterinary practices can find valuable content at almost every turn. For written content, veterinary offices can aim to share unique insights into the optimal ways to care for different types of pets. Every pet owner wants to hear a veterinarian’s recommendation on caring for their pet. So, take common questions you receive at your practice and turn them into articles. You can take this same approach for graphics as well by creating infographics.

For visual content, you can look over at the pets coming into your practice daily. Taking pictures and videos of the pets at your practice can help make potential clients feel comfortable knowing they’re bringing their pets to a practice that cares.

Finally, you can also create sales content that drives viewers to schedule an appointment or contact your practice.

Conclusion

Content marketing in the veterinary industry offers opportunities for players at every level. You can leverage local social media accounts that draw in visitors with cute pictures and videos of pets. Or, create an informative blog teaching pet owners how to best care for their pets. Either way, you can leverage content marketing to grow your veterinary office.