3 Important Factors in Launching a Seasonal Campaign
For veterinary practices and pet owners alike, things tend to sneak up – including seasonal issues that affect pet health, such as flea and tick season. This can cause a problem because it often means that pet owners forget to contact veterinary practices to renew their pets’ preventive care and medications.
This is why launching a seasonal preventive campaign that combines education and communication presents a huge opportunity. You can connect with your client base in meaningful ways that support the health of your patients and your practice.
Throughout my more than 35 years of practice and management consulting, it’s become abundantly clear to me that focusing on seasonal campaigns like this represent a huge opportunity for our profession,” explains Dr David Goodnight, Executive Vice President of Veterinary Affairs and Business Development at LifeLearn. “Taking a proactive promotional approach can dramatically impact pet owner compliance, pet health, and your practice’s bottom line.
However, many practices hold back. Sometimes, they believe that it takes too much valuable staff time to create a seasonal campaign. Sometimes, they just don’t know where to start.
LifeLearn’s WebDVM websites and ClientEd are built to work together to support your practice in rolling out powerful education and communication campaigns – such as one for the upcoming flea and tick season.
There are three key factors that must be considered when developing an integrated campaign:
1. Education
2. Communication
3. Relevance
1. Educating Your Clients – An Opportunity for Growth
Education is the key to prevention, and your staff is knowledgeable enough to give your clients the right advice. Having the right tools on hand can immediately reinforce that expertise with credible, factual, and scientifically sound information that is pivotal to optimizing your practice.
The challenges that most practices will face is that it just takes too much time for a veterinarian or staff member to gather the necessary information to develop additional blog posts and other campaign components.
Keep your staff up to date. With access to the latest scientific information and research, your team can stay current.
Get answers when you need them. Use the in-depth information as a handy reference guide to develop your own blog posts and stories for online communication and campaigns.
Share articles directly with clients. Bring up material on a tablet or mobile device during appointments, or email pet owners a link so they can read more at home.
Evaluate Your Success. Want to know how well your campaign went? Track your social media performance and send out a satisfaction survey to your clients. Follow-up promotions, email newsletters or additional social media posts can help to extend the campaign over a longer duration.
2. Communicating Your Message Opens New Doors
Your clients trust your advice. Consistent communication across a broad range of channels reinforces those recommendations and reaches pet owners wherever they are. And when pet owners are well-informed, they’re much more likely to comply – and your practice’s job becomes much easier.
Communication tips for a successful seasonal campaign:
Create a landing page. Every campaign needs a foundation, and by creating a landing page using your blog, you can give online traffic a place to go. This page should include important information about the seasonal pet health issue (e.g. flea and tick prevention), regional statistics and facts that support your story, and helpful advice such as why a pet owner should take action and what they should do.
Send an email blast. Sending out an email message using a robust email marketing service both gives you a way to communicate your message, and helps you direct clients to your website. Remember to track your links to see how the campaign performs.
Post on social media. Use WebDVM Social to share your posts from one convenient location. To get some extra exposure, try boosting your Facebook post as a paid advertisement, or create a Twitter or Instagram ad. A little money can go a long way.
Promote it on your homepage. Add a promotional block or graphic on your homepage to link visitors directly to your blog post or landing page. Share the news in your clinic. Create a simple branded poster to display or a handout that highlights your promotion to remind and educate visitors to take action regarding this seasonal health issue.
3. Timeliness and Relevance Are Essential
Good campaigns don’t just happen – they need to be strategically tailored to your audience. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean it needs to be more labor-intensive.
The problem is that most veterinary practices don’t have a writer or graphic designer on-site to customize content.
The solution? Make use of ClientEd Online as a foundation for your campaign by creating an email blast or putting up a blog post on your WebDVM website. Here are some easy ways to ensure your campaign is relevant to your audience:
Find the information you need, when you need it. ClientEd Online shows you featured articles based on seasons and timeliness, helping you to find the content you need to back up your seasonal campaign quickly and efficiently.
Tailor your message based on need. With a wide variety of article formats, including how-tos, treatment and care, and various fact sheets, you can get right to the content you need to answer your clients’ questions – without spending time digging through everything else.
Target it to your community. By creating blog posts based on LifeLearn content, you can add details specific to your audience – including special services or offers that your practice has geographic concerns, and even community events.
These are just a few ways that we’re helping veterinary practices to education and communicate with ease.
