Maximise your marketing
Understand your clients and prospects to improve return on investment (ROI)
An important aspect of marketing has always been understanding the people you need to appeal to. This can be influenced both by the local demographic (the characteristics of the pool of people available) and your practice brand and ethos – for instance if you offer a very high-end service, with access to specialists which is charged at a premium, your appeal may be mainly limited to a niche sub-section of the local demographic. Equally, researching a local demographic may suggest that your premium service is not sustainable in that area and does not match the marketing need. Your marketing strategy should be based on a thorough understanding of gap analysis and how you can fill this gap.
There are various ways to develop insights into your current clients and potential clients (prospects).
External data
Internal data
Persona development
By focusing your marketing efforts on a well understood audience you can develop campaigns with specific appeal that are more likely to encourage people to act. Effective targeting can also reduce costs – if you have produced a flyer that you want to put through letterboxes, focusing on the areas of town where your target demographic lives, means you don’t waste money delivering to those who are unlikely to convert into clients.
There are a variety of sources of paid and free data.
The CensusThis contains information on age, sex, marital status, religion, ethnicity and household composition and can be broken down by postcode areas, districts and sectors. Find information for: England and Wales, ScotlandNorthern Ireland
Office of National StatisticsCan offer details on household income. This information can be used to help you establish the right pricing of your services.
Royal Mail paid-for dataThe Royal Mail also provides data as a paid-for service. This includes insights into your current client base specific to your business, helping you develop a clearer profile. This can also help you segment your data further based on lifestyle, socio-economic, financial, interests, and spending habits so that you can consider more specific communications. Home-mover targeting is also available from Royal Mail allowing you to focus on those moving into the area who may be looking to register with a practice.
These sources of data can also be useful if you are considering opening a new branch or practice, identifying whether there is a large enough potential client base and assessing their likely patterns of animal ownership – with cat ownership tending to be higher in urban areas and dog ownership higher in rural areas.
UK PetfoodsUK Petfoods also offers paid reports with regional breakdowns of pet ownership.
Current information on pet ownership can also be viewed here.
PDSA PAW ReportThe PDSA PAW report is also a useful source of information about attitudes toward pet ownership and veterinary care. This information can be useful in establishing benchmarks – for instance, in the 2023 report, 21% said they had not ensured their cat had had a booster and this figure can be compared with the level of cat booster vaccination achieved by the practice. If the level of not having boosters is much higher in the practice this could be because the reminder programme is ineffective or the pricing needs adjusting or it could be an issue around affordability specific to the demographic (eg large-scale redundancies by a large local employer). If there are no obvious explanations affecting the local demographic, a specific awareness campaign of the benefits of booster vaccination may be warranted and could both generate income and improve the health and wellbeing of cats registered with the practice.
Click on the image above to view a PDF version of the report
The data you hold on your PMS and elsewhere is hugely beneficial when it comes to identifying year-on-year and month-on-month trends and comparing them to internal or external benchmarks. Insights into your clients are key – if your client base skews heavily female you may wish to reflect this in your marketing materials. What about age and lifestyle? Are your clients mainly young families and does this suggest there are some large segments of the local demographic that you are just not appealing to? Can you make your marketing materials more inclusive to help reach out to those groups?
Keep in mind that you can also generate important data and insights through polls, quizzes and surveys, to measure factors such as client satisfaction.
After collecting your internal and external data sources, you have an opportunity to develop personas specific to your practice. Make this a collaborative exercise with the whole team to ensure that everyone understands your clients.
Personas provide personalised representations of typical clients – each character is given a name and description of their main motivations and behaviors. These profiles, often derived from data, observations, and educated guesses, serve as a shorthand for understanding specific client types.
By creating detailed personas, your team can more effectively meet clients' needs and enhance their experience. For instance, when introducing new services, such as a nurse clinic for senior pets, you can tailor offerings to match the preferences and expectations of specific personas, ensuring alignment with their willingness to pay, preferred scheduling, and valued benefits.
Carol is 62 years old. She lives alone with her cat, Samson. She works part time in a local supermarket, has a small pension from her previous job in insurance and intends to retire fully within the next two years.
Core needs: Carol needs to know that she is doing all she can to keep Samson healthy and happy but she needs care to be affordable.
Frustrations: Carol finds unexpected bills stressful. She feels her knowledge of pet diseases is insufficient as her cat ages, yet hesitates to call the practice for fear of seeming trivial, especially when the staff appear very busy. Carol is often uncertain about when to schedule a vet visit and values peace of mind but worries about the cost.Our solution: We could develop a service where we charge a small monthly fee giving access to an RVN to talk through any concerns on the telephone. The service is unlimited and any kind of advice can be provided.
Our key message is: Ask us anything – we are happy to guide you or put your mind at ease. We will consider adding this as a benefit to our healthcare plan and making Carol aware that the healthcare plan also helps with budgeting as it is a known amount each month.
#1. Collect raw data – both externally and internally generated.
#2. Create a central place where all relevant stakeholders in your practice can access the information – this makes it easier to ‘connect the dots’.
#3. Analyse the information and appreciate that different people will have different levels of insight.
#4. Develop some meaningful metrics. While Facebook ‘likes’ might be nice to have it may be more meaningful to know how the platform helps you acquire clients - so tracking clicks from Facebook to your appointment booking system or asking ‘how did you hear about us’ when new clients call, might be more important metrics to measure and track.
#5. Don’t forget to test and learn. Small scale campaigns can be used to measure effectiveness before scaling up. Most marketing campaigns can be adjusted and improved at each launch and performance should be tracked against your defined benchmarks or target metrics.
