Tag: veterinary marketing

Should I Open My Own Veterinary Practice?

by easyDVM

Open for businessOpening your own veterinary practice gives you a lot of control over your career, but some vets are happy to remain associates in existing practices. The right choice for you depends on what you want out of your career. Let’s take a look at the benefits and drawbacks of each option to see which is right for you.

Why Open Your Own Veterinary Practice?

Veterinary practice owners often have more control over their working lives than vets who work as employees in practices owned by other people. When you own the practice, you can determine the opening hours of your practice, as well as choosing the layout and decor of your working environment. Feeling that you have chosen to come into work every morning can make a huge difference to your state of mind, as you will feel in control of your life. You may also feel more invested in the practice and feel as though you are working toward an important goal.

Why Remain as an Associate?

Associate vets often have a better work-life balance than practice owners. Although they may in theory have less control over their working hours, they often work fewer hours in total. Whereas practice owners must do everything it takes to keep their practice running, including solving any crises that occur, employees are only obliged to work their contracted hours. When you go home at the end of the day as an associate, you can stop thinking about work, whereas a practice owner is responsible for planning the long-term future of their business.

Which Is Better for You as a Veterinarian?

Choosing to remain an associate doesn’t mean you aren’t committed to your career. Some veterinarians choose to forgo practice ownership so they can spend more time reading the latest medical journals and developing their medical skills. On the other hand, practice owners get a wider view of pet care, as they interact with pet owners, insurance companies, and the regulations that govern the industry, as well as the animals themselves. Which option is best for your career? It depends whether you want to focus purely on medicine or explore other areas of running a veterinary business. This is a very personal choice, so take some time to think through which aspects of your job you most enjoy before making the jump into practice ownership.

Which Option Is More Financially Rewarding?

Practice owners have a greater potential to increase their earnings than associates, but they also risk losing money. As an associate, you may enjoy the stability of taking home a fixed salary every month, or you may aspire to build a business that provides you with long-term financial security. If you have access to enough capital to start your own practice, you could create a highly profitable business that gives an excellent return on your initial investment.

Should You Open Your Own Veterinary Practice?

Opening a veterinary practice is a great option for many people, but before you jump into this option, it pays to do your homework. Take the time to learn the business skills you’ll need to manage your practice, such as marketing, accounting and managing practice budgets. Think carefully about what you want from your veterinary career. Are you an ambitious entrepreneur who craves control or an associate who simply wants to care for animals while maintaining a healthy work-life balance?

EasyDVM Practice Software is a cloud-based veterinary practice management software system. We pride ourselves in offering a system that is user-friendly, easy to learn for new team members, full-featured and elegant in its simplicity. Best of all, all devices, multiple users, all your clients and patients, always affordable.

Veterinary Practices and Social Media: It’s Not All About the Followers

by Hunter Little

Social media – from Facebook, to Twitter, to Instagram and beyond – can be a complex and seemingly unnavigable landscape. And I’m certainly not going to pretend to know all the answers or possess the keys to unlocking the secrets to social media success; however, particularly within the veterinary industry, there are a few rules[1] of the road that can help guide your practice’s social media experience and make it a more effectual one.

If you haven’t noticed by now, customer service and the client experience are central to creating a great veterinary practice. We always want to make our clients happy, and although that may not happen every time, we still strive to provide that excellent level of care. This approach to customer service can translate to your social media presence, as well. Practices sometimes make the mistake of only generating social media content when they have a sale going on or want their clients to buy something, whether that be a service or new product, etc. Instead, generate content that engages with your clients. Engaging with your clients can mean posting tips on how to prepare their pets for colder weather, or sharing an article from AVMA on a health warning for a certain medication, or even simply sharing a funny pet video. Remember, your clients are human, they always have questions, concerns, or even doubts about their pets every day. And they also love their pets unconditionally. So, when you are generating social media content that engages your followers, you are ultimately engaging their humanity and connecting with them on a personal level that transcends the practice-client relationship. Don’t be afraid to post or share content that you connect with, because chances are your followers will connect with that content, too.

Speaking of followers, DO NOT stress about the number of followers your practice has on Facebook, Twitter, etc. As far back as 2010, the Harvard Business Review was posting articles challenging the impact and importance of follower numbers on Twitter. It is important to keep in mind that, as a veterinary practice, you should ultimately be concerned with reaching your clients first, and potential new clients second. The number of followers you have may not necessarily generate similar levels of engagement and exposure. What is more important in engaging with your existing followers and maximizing the number of likes, comments, and shares you generate from your actual followers. A practice may have 5,000 followers on Facebook, but only generate 1-5 shares and 20-30 likes per post. Another practice may have 450 followers, but is generating 10-20 shares and 100-200 likes per post. The practice with 450 followers is ultimately the more effective of the two, because they are connecting with and engaging more of their followers, and their followers are responding in greater numbers. So, don’t stress if your follower numbers aren’t where you think they should be. The emphasis should be on engaging with your existing followers with the maximum effect, generating likes, comments and shares. Remember, if a client likes, comments, or shares your post, that client’s friends will be able to see your post (and therein you find the very nature of social media).

PRO TIP: Do not be afraid to invest a little extra and ‘Boost’ your posts on Facebook. Practice owners are often wary of spending that extra dollar or two on ‘Boosting’ their post because they don’t feel it will actually work. But, ‘boosting’ your post will help it appear more frequently on your existing followers’ News Feeds and the News Feeds of potential clients in your area, allowing for more views and more frequent engagement with your posts. (This can be especially helpful if you generate a particularly engaging post that you want to have greater viewership to promote your practice. Selectively ‘Boosting’ certain posts is a great way to test the feature and see if helps your social media engagement)

So, if there’s one thing to take away from all of this, it is a message I have been returning to a number of times throughout this blog: customer service. You can never do enough to engage with your clients and strengthen the bond between practitioner and client. Social media, when used correctly, can extend your customer service platform beyond the brick and mortar of your practice and help to connect your with your clients on a more personal and human level. The key, I believe, is not being afraid to give your practice a distinctly human quality when it comes to social media and generating content. Don’t be afraid to celebrate holidays, share laughs, and provide a little extra service or help beyond the confines of a scheduled appointment. Your clients might just love you a little more for it.

Additional Resources:

Here’s that Harvard Business Review article back in 2010, a fascinating read on how to potentially impact your Twitter presence: https://hbr.org/2010/05/influence-and-twitter

[1] I know it says “rules” here, but think of them more as guidelines, rather than steadfast and unbendable truths

Online Reviews – Aaaaaagh!

by Sam D Meisler DVM

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. Note some review sites may frown on this; check the site’s rules to make sure.

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.

Andrew Gruel, owner of the SlapFish restaurant chain, (see the New York Times Article, A Bad Review is Forever: How to Counter Online Complaints, by Constance Gustke) responds to all reviews good and bad. And he begs customers who gave poor reviews to give the restaurant a second chance.

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.