VetNetwork Blog

Your veterinary hospital’s internet marketing plan isn’t just bringing new clients into your hospital—it’s also helping drive economic activity in the U.S. That’s according to a new study by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), a group of more than 375 media and technology companies. According to IAB’s study, interactive online advertising (which includes websites, blogs and email newsletters), is responsible for more than $300 billion worth of economic activity in the United States. You can read the full study here, or check out the highlights below.

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Having a professional website for your veterinary hospital is a must, but what’s the best way to track your hospital website’s effectiveness? How many people are visiting your website each week? How do they find your veterinary hospital website and, once they start browsing, what sort of information are they looking for? Google Analytics is an extremely useful tool that tracks a number of different statistics about your website and outputs these stats in easy to understand reports.

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Social networking websites are a vital part of your veterinary hospital’s website marketing strategy—and a fun way to connect with your clients and employees as well. But not all of them are harmless. As your veterinary hospital expands its presence on the internet, exercise caution when it comes to social networking sites.

Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn are among the most popular social networking sites, but there are hundreds of other sites out there vying for users. Some use very aggressive tactics to attract new members—methods that are similar to those used by spammers and hackers looking to spread viruses.

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Your veterinary hospital’s website is a great marketing tool for your practice, but it can also function as an educational tool as well.

Pet owners always want information about their pet’s health - usually, the more information, the better. And as much as you’d like to answer every client’s question, your busy schedule, your client’s busy schedule, and the hectic pace of daily life means  you might not be able to share with clients all the important information you’d like.

Your veterinary hospital’s website, hospital blog and social networking websites can all help address that problem, though. When they’re not at your hospital, pet owners most often turn to the internet for veterinary information. However, as a quick trip around the web will show, there’s plenty of dubious and downright wrong information out there. This is where your website comes in - by providing pet health information on your veterinary hospital website, you’re giving clients a trusted source they can go to when they need answers to pet health questions.

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You’ve got a great website for your veterinary hospital and you’ve set up a Facebook page and a Twitter account to go along with it - that’s excellent news! But as your veterinary practice starts using social networking to connect with clients and market your hospital, you need to start thinking about how your veterinary hospital’s staff fits in with that strategy.

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What can social networking do for your veterinary hospital’s website? Plenty! Just ask Dr. Brian Hurley at Gardner Animal Care Center in Gardner, MA. Earlier this year, Dr. Hurley created a hospital blog using Blogger and joined the millions of users on Facebook and Twitter. VetNetwork has redesigned GACC’s homepage and has added a new Online Community page , with links to the hospital’s Twitter and Facebook pages and the hospital blog.

In addition to directing current and potential clients to the veterinary hospital’s website, networks like Facebook and Twitter add an extra level of engagement between the veterinary hospital staff and clients. On the GACC Facebook page, Dr. Hurley posts announcements about upcoming hospital staff birthdays and anniversaries, events as well as links to new blog posts.

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If you don’t have a small, custom shopping cart on your website, you should think about getting one. You certainly don’t need an elaborate commercial shopping cart just to sell a few medications online.

VetNetwork can add a personalized e-Pharmacy page to any veterinary hospital website for a very reasonable fee. Along with flea and heartworm products, we can include several of your most popular over-the-counter products on your shopping page.

Many online veterinary Internet pharmacies take 20% and even up to 30% of your profits. They also use your clients’ email addresses to solicit them to purchase additional products and services. Is this what you want them doing with your clients’ email addresses?

Heartworm and flea products comprise 95% of the medications that pet owners purchase online. There is no reason why you can’t have a simple shopping page for selling these items directly to your clients and website visitors.

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Not all pets are cute and cuddly and sit in your lap, but pet owners love them just the same. Snakes, iguanas, birds, hamsters, fish and others are all popular pet choices, even though they can’t go for a walk in the park or come when you call. However, exotic pets may soon be scarce in the United States if Congress passes a proposed piece of legislation that would prevent “non-native” species from coming in to the U.S. and ban the sale, breeding and transporting of exotic pets in the country.

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No matter what you do, you can’t make all of your clients happy. It’s a hard lesson to swallow, especially when you know you’re doing your best to meet the needs of clients and their pets, but some clients just aren’t satisfied. It’s how they express that dissatisfaction, though, that has a bearing on your online marketing plan. If you’re finding your practice’s listing in online directories like Yelp and Citysearch has some bad reviews attached, it may be time to engage in some online reputation management.

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Earlier this week, Facebook announced it reached a momentous milestone: the 200 millionth user signed up for the popular social-networking site. It was only a few short months ago that Facebook reached the 150 million and 175 million users milestones, and there are no signs that the legion of Facebook users will stop growing.

With so many users on Facebook, it’s almost a certainty that some of your clients are already on Facebook themselves—along with dozens of other potential clients who are looking for a new veterinarian. Creating a Facebook page for your veterinary practice is a great way to reach out to both current and potential clients and build your website marketing campaign. You can share videos, photos, event invitations, medical information and so much more with your clients, employees and potential clients by using Facebook.

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