VMP 296: How to Build a Predictable Client Acquisition System

Brandon Breshears 00:00:01  So I've been working with veterinary practices for more than a decade now, and I've been seeing a lot of changes in trends. But the thing that I'm seeing most recently, which I think is pretty alarming, and most practices that I'm talking to, and I'm having dozens of conversations with practice owners every single week. And one of, I think, the most challenging and difficult things that practice owners are facing are just swings in appointment schedules. It is pretty unpredictable based on economic news, economic factors, and I think that there's a lot of worry and struggle out there when it comes to running a veterinary practice. Running veterinary practices already hard enough in that you have tons of different types of patients coming in. You have tons of people to manage, schedules to manage all of the difficulty of actually running the business. But on top of that, now we're seeing some days are busy, some days are empty, and we're not really sure what to do. A lot of times when I'm talking to people, they just don't know how to get things stabilized.

Brandon Breshears 00:01:05  And I think with all of the economic uncertainty that's been coming out with tariffs. April was pretty tough for most of mid to. Any time that seems like there's a fed update or fed rate update or employment report that comes out. People seem to contract with their spending. I know that for most of my clients, anecdotally just visits and wellness visits are down. Compliance is down in a lot of markets and the market is shifting. We have VC companies out there that are shutting down all of a sudden one day, and it seems like there's a lot of economic uncertainty out there. And so in today's episode, my goal is by the end of this episode, you're going to know exactly how to build a predictable, measurable, and scalable client acquisition system for your practice. And that's really the goal of this episode, is to give you that feeling of stability, to have a way to react to slow days, and also be more proactive in your client acquisitions so that you have a dependable system that generates clients for you.

Brandon Breshears 00:02:09  So let's talk about the reality of running a veterinary practice in 2025. Consumer behavior is changing. pet owners are typically booking closer to the appointment date. They're looking for same day services. Sometimes, sometimes they're waiting for something bad to happen rather than doing preventative care. It seems like compliance is down, generally speaking. So the old method of marketing simply of being open and growing through word of mouth, that doesn't work as well anymore. The old model of build it and they will come has definitely passed. And this is especially true post-Covid where we were really spoiled, which was also a struggle. People were so busy that they couldn't take on new clients anymore and they couldn't hire staff, and they basically were so busy they were bursting at the seams. And so that old model of opened the doors and they will come. Simply doesn't work anymore. And it creates a lot of stress. Just if you haven't spent the time building the marketing systems that you need to actively generate new clients. But beyond that, you don't just want any client coming in.

Brandon Breshears 00:03:19  And this is something that I've been thinking a lot about, and especially with ChatGPT and looking at demographic data for specific markets, we're able to pull so much rich data and, really target exactly who you're looking to target. and I think for a lot of practices that's going to be wanting to target markets and segments of markets that aren't going to be impacted by fluctuations in gas prices, that aren't going to be impacted, and not be able to be compliant with the types of services that you want to be offering and the type of medicine that you want to be practicing in your practice. And so we really need to have a predictable way to go away from this feast or famine type situation that so many practices are being faced with right now. And the landscape of veterinary medicine is that it is highly competitive, especially for private practices. There's more corporate competition than ever before. The corporate groups are also seeing similar trends, and we see shutdowns in their non-profitable practice sectors, but they are also putting more resources into client acquisition.

Brandon Breshears 00:04:32  And so if you're a private practice especially, you're probably behind the ball in terms of being able to generate and attract clients. But there are a lot of things that you can do. They're going to give you tactical advantages. So we really need to analyze what our strengths and our weaknesses are here. But before we do that, I really want to dive into the fix for this. In generating clients, I think that there's really three pillars that you need to focus on that make client acquisition a systematic process in your practice, rather than just hoping and praying that the social post that you're putting out is going to generate clients or, you know, things like that. So the three pillars that we have are, number one, that it is targeted. Number two that is trackable. And number three that it's scalable. So let's dive into each one of those pillars and talk about how that's going to help you to create consistency and less stress in your practice. Ultimately, if you could avoid having to, you know, worry about, you know, are we going to be able to fill the appointments tomorrow? Are the doctors on staff going to have things to do? So let's let's really dive into this.

Brandon Breshears 00:05:49  When we're talking about targeting, you can get incredibly detailed in exactly who your content or your marketing is showing for, and who you're trying to generate into your client. I'm sorry, into your practice as a client. And so knowing first off, who it is that you actually want to come into your practice. And I would really dive through ChatGPT with specifics on the zip codes in your market, along with the surrounding zip codes that you get a typical client from, but really get a clear understanding of who the best pet owners are. So pull that data. Find out which zip codes are coming from. Find out what types of pets they own. Find out their age demographics. Find out if they have children. If they don't have children. Really get granular and detailed on the type of clients that you really like bringing in. I would look at the types of clients that are not only coming in for preventative, but are also doing the additional recommendations that you make for things like dentistry and build out these different segments to understand who it is that you're targeting.

Brandon Breshears 00:06:52  And with ChatGPT, this is easier than ever. So some specific questions that once you have this data. Have it run through as detailed as possible in pulling PIMs data and records, putting it into ChatGPT, and get a clear understanding of what are the most profitable cohort cohorts of my clients in this, what? And then really try to build out avatars for those clients. The content that you create on social, the the emails that you're sending out, it needs to speak to and attract more of these types of clients in there, especially if you're going to be running ads, which is something that I highly suggest doing if you're seeing a slowdown at all or if you're not seeing growth in your practice. but you really need to understand who it is, what their main pain points are, how you solve those pain points in a unique way, and avoid wasting time, effort, and energy on low value clients. And not to say that they're bad people. Again, there's going to be clients that are good fits for you, that are not good fits for other practices.

Brandon Breshears 00:07:56  But really, if we're going to spend time and energy and resources into developing marketing systems, we want to drive the highest quality clients possible, not just anybody who will walk in the door. And I know, especially when things are slow, it feels like I'll take anybody who comes through the door. But if you have the time to really invest in this, to figure out who it is that you want to have coming into your practice, you're going to avoid wasting any time and resources on things that aren't going to be be bringing people in who are actually a really good fit. with ads, for example, you're able to target age, gender, income, all kinds of different demographic properties, all kinds of kinds of different psychographic properties. You can target charitable donors, you can target people who are not bargain hunters. You can target people who buy dog food. You can target people who buy raw dog food. So getting very, very granular on this is helpful in determining exactly who you want coming in the door.

Brandon Breshears 00:08:59  If you have a person who owns a Chihuahua and a person who owns a Great Dane, they're going to have very different kind of concerns, wants and needs, even though they're both dog owners. And so anytime you can get more specific, you're going to be able to. Number one, describe the problem that they're feeling more easily. And if you're able to accurately describe a problem somebody's having, they're going to believe that you naturally have the solution. So the more specific you can get, typically the better you're going to do at attracting those people, solving their pain points. And when you're able to solve pain points for specific sets of people, that has a higher perceived value. Like for example, let's say you own a Honda Civic and somebody is a BMW mechanic. They could be the best BMW mechanic in the world, but the value that they would offer you with the Honda Civic is not going to be as valuable. And so again, it's really figuring out the right types of clients that you're going to want to be focused on.

Brandon Breshears 00:09:58  because that specificity increases value, increases perceived value, and also increases authority, which will help you to increase your conversion rate and reduce the cost per conversion. So I can't tell you enough how important it is to really define and get granular on who it is that you want to be targeting. Otherwise, you're just going to get a bunch of people coming in. It's going to burn out your staff. It's going to create bad reviews for your practice. Because again, if somebody is not a good fit for your practice, they're probably going to leave you a bad review. So this is a helpful way in finding the right people. And I also want you to think this too. There's probably clients that you absolutely love seeing in your practice, and there's probably clients who you don't like seeing as much as just something that's totally honest and open. And that is totally okay. But if you could fill your practice with people who you absolutely loved seeing, and you were excited to see that they were on the schedule.

Brandon Breshears 00:10:54  You love working with their pet. You love working with them. You just vibe really, really well. You would want more of those people. Imagine if your schedule was just full of people that you were excited to see in your practice every day, versus somebody you're like, dreading. And I'm sure you have the clients that you dread like, oh geez, you gotta go in there now. And, you know, figuring out who it is that you want to be targeting, who it is that you want to be serving, that's going to not only give better service to them, but it's also going to help your team to enjoy their time more to you. And so I think really focusing on the types of clients that you want to come in the door that you're excited and ecstatic to serve, that's the type of people that you really need to be focusing on, especially if you're going to be investing time or money and trying to attract those people. The second pillar of generating a client acquisition machine is making sure that it is measurable.

Brandon Breshears 00:11:49  And this is one of the biggest difficulties in marketing for veterinary practices. There's a few reasons for this. Ultimately, the practice softwares don't integrate well. And so we're not able to get source attribution. We're not able to know is it coming from Google Organic. Is it coming from paid ads. Is it coming from social posts? Is it coming from emails? And so we really want to think about how can we most easily make this marketing activity trackable. The way that I think about this is I break down every single step within my funnel or, you know, basically from somebody searching something to then them coming in the door as, as a new client for your practice. So we're tracking every single step here. So break it down into its component pieces. And this will help you to figure out how can we measure this. So for example with let's say we're running a Google ad we could start with a search and that somebody searches vet near me, for example. The ad pops up and they click that ad.

Brandon Breshears 00:12:55  Now there's a few ways that we could track conversions at this click event. For example, if we're using something called a call extension where the phone number and the phone icon pops up directly below on their mobile device, they press that they call, they have a conversation, they come in. You're able to track those phone numbers. So the easiest way typically to track that is to pull a call detail report in Google Ads and then match that against your existing customer list and basically reconcile your customer list with the call detail report and figure out which of these calls actually turned into clients. So that's a very, very simple and effective way of understanding where your clients came from. But I think having tools like CallRail is really, really helpful because there's always going to be a missing data point between the PIMs and the marketing activity. And so with CallRail you can set up unique tracking numbers. And let's say you have one for like for example, for your emails that you're sending out. Or you could have a phone number for your website and it'll tell you the source of the calls.

Brandon Breshears 00:14:03  If somebody clicked on on your website, it'll tell you if it came from direct. You could add UTM code, which is a little string of code that then tells Google Analytics the source and then tells CallRail to source. So for example, when you send out an email, you make sure that if somebody is clicking that email going to your site, it has that UTM code that then tracks the source. By the way, I have a really great UTM builder. That's a Google sheet. If you're interested in using this, I probably will be setting up a UTM tracking, training that'll make free, that you can use then to figure out where our conversions are coming from. But UTM tools are very, very helpful in creating a systematic way to have a naming convention so that you can see very quickly which traffic is coming from email, which traffic is coming from social, which traffic is coming from text messages, etc.. there are some difficulties with UTM tracking that will probably be a little bit more difficult.

Brandon Breshears 00:15:06  in that like iPhones I believe are going to be stripping UTM from clicks with respect to text messages and emails. So it's not perfect, but it's better than nothing. Apple keeps, updating their privacy stuff, and making it difficult for marketers, but there's always a way around it. So I'll keep you up to date on on anything that comes out. But things that you absolutely need to have installed are Google Analytics on your website, so that you can see the traffic that's coming in from your website. You need to have UTM tracking if possible and if you don't know how to do that again, send me a note. I'll send you that UTM tracking training as soon as it's updated. You can send it to Brandon at Maverick Digital Marketing Comm and say, hey, can you send me that UTM training and I'll get that over to you. tools like call rail and call tracking, and then also reconciling your call reports with any type of internal reporting as well. If you're doing Facebook ads, I'd like to do, or any type of ads for that matter, whether it's TikTok, Facebook, Instagram.

Brandon Breshears 00:16:19  I like to do lead ads, typically, and those are the types of ads where a form pops up natively in the app. You're able to get the name, phone number, email, and any additional form fields that you want filled out. And that way, you know the person came from this ad and you see their contact details, and then you're able to call them and follow up and see if they actually turned into a client. So within Google ads, there's a lot of ways to measure it. Within things like Google My Business. If you have that call rail tracking in place, you can measure it. Ideally, we would like to have the phone number of the person who called, because then you can match it up to client records. But if that's not possible, just looking at the total number of conversion events. So whenever you're doing marketing you need to understand what your baselines are. So let's say you have ten people call on average of those ten people. How many people are going to submit? I request an appointment.

Brandon Breshears 00:17:17  It's important to know those types of things. It's going to change by source. So if you have people posting or commenting on your Facebook posts, they look at your Facebook post, they go to your page and then they call. That's going to have a different conversion rate than somebody who's on your website. So understanding typically by source which source converts at what rate you can kind of figure out benchmarks and then apply that data better. it's better than nothing. it's a lot easier to do that and pull averages. I would say generally for most practices, if somebody is on the phone and speaking to a CSR for at least 60s, you're going to have at least a 40% conversion rate if it's a new potential client. If then 40% is kind of a benchmark that I think is an easy benchmark to hit. Most practices are going to be better if they have training in place for their CSRs. Be sure to go back to a couple episodes ago where I did the ultimate CSR training. I think that'll help you to dramatically improve your conversion rate.

Brandon Breshears 00:18:18  But I think if you can have somebody on the phone for 60s or longer, there's a pretty good chance that you're going to turn that person into a new client. So again, understand your benchmarks, and then you can apply conversion rates to large swaths of data. And so for example, if you say, okay, we got 200 calls from our Google, my business there's probably a pretty good chance that at least 50 of those turned into new clients, right? And with Google My business, it's not the same as like Google Ads, where Google my business, you have a lot of branded search, so you have a lot of existing clients using Google to search your practice. Pull up the phone number and then give you a call. So like in all likelihood you'd probably have a higher conversion rate from Google My Business because it's going to be a mix of new clients and existing clients. And the conversion rate for new existing clients are going to be much higher than new clients. But I can't stress enough how important it is for your practice to be reviewing data and at least working to make improvements on it.

Brandon Breshears 00:19:21  So you need to know, as a general rule, how many conversion actions and try to pick the most meaningful and accurate conversion as possible, whether that's a form fill on the website, an appointment request on the website, a phone call from the website, whatever that is, you need to be reviewing that and then comparing it against revenue in practice. New client numbers. And this will help you to really identify the problem points that you're having in creating new clients. There'll be a lot of times where we have practices where we're getting hundreds of calls per month from Google Ads. We can see the phone number, we can see the date, the time, and the phone call duration, but it's not generating new clients. So we know that we don't have a traffic problem. What we have is a CSR problem, or maybe it is the wrong type of traffic. We're getting lots of traffic, but maybe it's the wrong type of calls. So then we can do some additional diagnostics and figure out, okay, what is the reason that these calls are not turning in to new clients? But the most deadly thing that you can do in your practice when it comes to marketing is just go by gut.

Brandon Breshears 00:20:30  If I asked you what did you eat for breakfast two days ago, you probably don't remember unless you eat the same thing for breakfast every day. And so I say that to say that, Do you remember the results from your Facebook campaign that you ran a month ago? Probably not. So you need to have the data in a way that's going to give you meaningful insights, rather than just thinking like, oh, I'm just going to try and recollect. Usually when I'm launching campaigns, there's a book by Ray Dalio that I read, and radio was one of the most successful, hedge fund managers of all time. But one thing that he did that's very unique and different, and I took this away from, from that book, is that every single time he did a trade, he would talk about the trade that he was making. The thought process behind it, the emotion behind it, and then his expected outcome. And then he would go back, review it. How did it actually turn out and then pull insights from that? I started doing that with my ads, too.

Brandon Breshears 00:21:33  Whenever I'm running new campaigns, whenever I'm running existing campaigns, I'll typically go through at least on a quarterly basis, Pull all of my campaign data. Run through it. Think. What was my hypothesis going into this? What was the strategy and foundation behind it? Here's what I expected to happen. Did this happen? Yes. If it did, great. Should we scale this up? No. If it didn't. Okay. What should we do next? To try and test it and figure out why this didn't work. Because here's the thing. Marketing works. If you send out flyers, it works. If you cold call people, it works. If you were just to stand outside and say, hey, do you have a dog? That would work too. It's not a matter of if it works, it matter of if it is effective, if it's worth the time and worth the energy. You've probably sent out flyers. Did it work? You probably don't know. It worked to some extent.

Brandon Breshears 00:22:22  People got flyers, but was that the goal? If the goal was to drive new clients in, how many new clients did it drive in? Was it trackable? Was it measurable? That's really the only way you can assess if it was a good investment or a bad investment, because again, everything works. You could can set up a Google Ads campaign and you could get a thousand clicks this month. But did it work? The question would be is it the right targeting? Is it the right conversion action? Is it the right call to action? Is it the right offer? All of these things will help us to understand the breakage point. And again, that goes back to helping us with understanding each of the steps from somebody not knowing you in your practice to somebody becoming a client. If you break it down by individual steps, you can figure out where that breakage happens and fix it. So, a real quick story here. I was just talking with the client yesterday and we said, how are things going? She said, I don't know, it just feels like we're slow and, you know, not not doing so good.

Brandon Breshears 00:23:24  And I said, okay, let's pull up the numbers. And so pulled up the numbers. Her new client numbers were up 30% month over month. And then her annual growth from this time last year, she had a 30% better month in July of 2025 than she did in July of 2024. So just going by gut and feeling she didn't feel like there was growth. But looking at her revenue and new client numbers, she was doing fantastic. And I think that I definitely fall into this trap too, where like just kind of based on mood, things going on in life, sometimes it can feel like things aren't going great or you're just kind of down on yourself. And I think vet med is really, really prone to happening where like, you don't feel like you're doing enough. You just kind of feel behind all the time. And so understanding what your actual numbers are helps you to take the emotion out of it so that you can say, okay, fantastic, we're actually doing really good. This is exciting.

Brandon Breshears 00:24:21  And, you know, the bank account having more money in it is always helpful to you. so that was just kind of funny. We always I'm just going to say it. I think typically practice managers tend to go this route where they're not super positive and it's not their fault. They have a lot of bad things going on. Typically like dealing with air stuff and staffing and, you know, all of the things that they have piled on top of them. And so just by going off gut, if you ask a practice manager how things are going in practice, usually it's just okay. So like I love practice managers. I love all the practice managers I work with. But I think that's just something to know. Like, it can go both ways though. You can have people who are overly positive when in reality things aren't doing so great. And you can't people who are overly negative when in reality things are amazing. So make sure that you're not leaving it up to your gut feeling and what you can remember, because you're probably not going to remember accurately unless you have a photographic memory, which would be amazing.

Brandon Breshears 00:25:28  So make sure that it is measurable. And the last thing I'll say here is that picking a conversion action, it needs to align with the goal that you have when it comes to your practice growth. And we typically want to get the highest potential conversion measured as possible. whether that is going to be a phone call where we get the phone, just the number and the duration and the time that comes for free within Google, the better data that you can get, though, the better you're going to be able to tailor your ads. So CallRail is a step above that where you have the phone call, the name, the phone number, the duration, the time, and then you can actually listen to the call and see what was the outcome of this. That's really time intensive, but they have a really cool AI tool that'll go through and basically assign an outcome based on what happened in that conversation. So that's really cool. that's probably the highest level. The other level beyond that would be having people who book online where you can see the person that booked and have conversion tracking in place that measures those bookings.

Brandon Breshears 00:26:39  Now, I will say that most of the online booking platforms have terrible, terrible marketing attribution, so we can't put pixel codes on there. We can't do redirects. It says an iframe on the website, which means it's a blind spot. And I don't know why this is. It's just like the same thing with practice management softwares. They don't have great communication with other systems and CRMs and things. So the online booking is that way for most companies out there, which is a bummer. One that I like a lot is check that they have great ability to to do better measurement in general, and that team is consistently developing cool things. So if you're looking for online booking, check out check that it's not a sponsored post. Just just saying they're a great company. and I like those guys over there. So make sure that it is also scalable. So what does the scalable mean? It means that you are in control of how much you spend or how many clicks you're getting. Again, if it's slow and compliance is down and your customers are just not coming in as often and you're looking for like, let's say your primary channel of of client acquisition has been word of mouth and referrals.

Brandon Breshears 00:27:56  You can't make somebody refer you more like you can set up incentives and contests and things like that, but you can't force somebody to do that. you hope that they would. There's a lot of things you can do to encourage it and make it more dependable, but ultimately that's not scalable. With SEO, you can definitely target different key phrases. You can target different search terms, you can create content. This definitely takes time. I think it's worth the investment. things are absolutely changing very quickly. I'm going to be doing a episode on Geo, which is generative, an AI optimization. Because I think that that is really where we need to be looking from an SEO perspective here in the next 6 to 12 months, things are going to change dramatically, and you want to make sure that your practice is being referred by ChatGPT. But if you're if you want to have something that's scalable and dependable, typically the only way to do that is ads. If you put out an ad and your budget is $5, you can spend $5, you can up that budget to $20 if you need it to do more.

Brandon Breshears 00:29:05  and so you can turn it on, you can turn it off, you can turn it up and down. That's truly controllable and scalable. And so. With with scale, not only do you get the ability to turn it on and off, but you can also get proportionately more clients without breaking that system. In my opinion, it's the easiest way to very quickly turn on more clients for your practice. when I say scalable two, I want to make sure that you have automation in place. So I want to make sure you have appointment reminders, you have reactivation campaigns, you have follow up campaigns, you have confirmation sequences. But really having evergreen offers that you develop, which are kind of pillar offers that you can always rely on, that are attractive to that targeted group is incredibly important. And I think it's also important having proven campaigns. So if we're talking about like, what are the things that your clients actually want? If I ask people that when I have new clients coming on board, we're talking to me about doing ads.

Brandon Breshears 00:30:10  Most of them don't really know what to say. So thinking back to the pain points that your segments of market are thinking about, what is it that they're actually worried about? What is it that they're concerned about? What are their fear of loss? What are their potential for gain? Really when you have an ad and a campaign that you're trying to generate new clients with. You're really trying to paint a picture for them of what the before looks like, describing their problems and pain points, and then giving them the after of what it looks like once they become a client. I have been seeing a lot of people. You don't talk about choosing the right vet. and I think people want to help pet owners choose the right vet, but pet owners typically don't want to choose the right vet with an exception. I mean, they typically want to find the right vet, and that's a small distinction. But I think it's really important because people are commitment averse. And, so in helping them find the right vet, it doesn't feel like they're being sold.

Brandon Breshears 00:31:18  It helps them cover all of the major problems that they have. It helps them to address the economic problems which people are concerned about, about price. Now we want to make sure that the price matches with their ability to pay and their comfort level. And they want to make sure that they're getting the right type of care, the right amount of care, the right customer service. All of these things go into creating an offer and solving problems for these different groups of people. Some people want more convenience, some people want more attention and time. Some people want more personalized care. Some people just want better price. So figuring out those types of things is helpful in scaling. So for for systems that are truly scalable I think you need to have Google ads, Facebook ads, Instagram ads, depending on the type of client that you're looking for, TikTok ads, in some case, as soon as ChatGPT releases an ad product, I think that that will be one of the most effective ways I generating clients.

Brandon Breshears 00:32:23  I'm really excited about it. I mean, just thinking about the possibilities with that. Most people talk more honestly to ChatGPT than they do their spouse and their therapists. And so there's just going to be a treasure trove of data that we're going to be able to target. And I'm sure that's going to come out at some point. And it'll be pretty exciting, I think. But making sure that you're able to when things get slow, scale up, ad spend. Maybe you want to spend more money on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday than you do on Mondays and Fridays because Mondays and Fridays are always busy. But Wednesday it's a ghost town, so making sure that you have systems in place to cover that. And that's all possible within Google ads. So that's really why I love paid advertising for something that is scalable. I do think SEO and the more that I've been learning about SEO for the past year, there are ways to generate traffic that is dependable. But you're still at the mercy of Google, and Google can change the algorithm and take away traffic so it's not as dependable as paid ads, which is the primary revenue model for search engines, and then also social channels too.

Brandon Breshears 00:33:40  So that's why I think it's a little bit more dependable in that you can focus on that. Note that they're not going to take away their main revenue stream, and it's going to be a way to consistently get more clients. So I hope that that makes sense. So let's talk real quick how this would look for a veterinary practice. So the first thing we want to do is number one identify the ideal client segment. We'd figure out exactly the type of services that we'd be focusing on, the types of pain points and benefits that we'd be delivering. We'd talk about any of their fears or concerns. We talk about their potential for gain and really work to build a targeted campaign around this group of people, and then in deciding who that person is. We'll also find out the right placement for those ads too. In thinking about targeting ads for practice, you want to figure out are we targeting people because of their characteristics? Or retargeting them because of their behavior? So, for example, if somebody is looking for dog teeth cleaning near me, they're actively in market looking for some a specific service versus if we're trying to target pet owners who are high end pet owners and they want to provide the best care, they want an incredible experience.

Brandon Breshears 00:35:00  Maybe we target on Facebook and Instagram because they're not actively in market, but we know who they are. We know what their pain points are. So Facebook is more of an Instagram is more of a demographic based, platform. And the offer has to be better there to convert those clients and Google. We can target people on behavior and a mix of demographics so that we are targeting based on what their needs are. It's something they need and want right now. So identify the client, build out the target. Direct them to a landing page with a clear offer and a call to action that matches our goals here. So if we're just trying to bring in high end clients, maybe we would generate a type of an offer that's more informational. We're trying to educate, and we're trying to get pet parents who really want to be involved in, you know, driving people. I'm sorry. They really want to be involved in making smart health decisions for their pets. And so that would be a funnel and automation setup that helps to take them from not being aware of your practice to being interested to then hopefully becoming a client.

Brandon Breshears 00:36:15  things that work really well with that are like an email mini course. For example, let's say you create an email mini course and it's the ultimate dog dental care email course, and we'll send you five emails with everything you could possibly want to know about keeping your pets teeth clean, making sure they have a high quality of life, and that you don't have to extract tons of teeth before they get old. Something like that. I just made that up. but you could come up with something that really identifies better with your clients and their needs. So having specific landing pages is helpful if we're sending traffic for people that are searching like vet near me, for example, an appropriate landing page is your services page on your website. It tells the who, what, where, when, why, how? We just really want to make sure that the call to action on the website is clear and easy to find, and we can take action. We don't have to reinvent the wheel every single time. the more specific that you want to get, the better it is.

Brandon Breshears 00:37:11  If you have a specific landing page for that. And so a landing page is a page that has a specific purpose, typically to, to generate a response like a call or an appointment or an opt in, and it has one goal. You're not trying to do everything. Maybe you have a landing page for dental cohorts. Maybe you have a page for TPO. Like it needs to be specific. But again, going back to making it more specific, if somebody is searching for people near me, they land, they see two ads, and when the ad says we're done with that. We do everything under the sun. Bring your guinea pig, lizard, ferret, hamster, dog, cat to us and we'll take care of them. Or if someone ad says looking for TPO, we offer comprehensive packages at fair and transparent pricing and offer rehab included in all our services. Like that's going to be far more relevant and interesting to that TPO searcher. So having a landing page then that is not general practice or exotic related would make a lot more sense.

Brandon Breshears 00:38:19  By the same token, if you were targeting exotic pet owners and you have dogs and cats on your page. Having an exotic landing page would provide better conversion rate for you, and exotics aren't a great example, because usually pet owners that have exotic pets are kind of just looking for whoever will take their pet because most practices won't see them. So from there, we want to track every single call, click and meaningful conversion. And that's set up typically through Google Analytics or within the ad platforms themselves. After somebody opts in, we want to make sure that we have robust automation and follow up so that leads don't fall through the cracks that people are followed up with, and they're able to convert at the highest rates possible. And then you think, okay, great, we've gone through the whole step. We are missing one more step, which is review metrics consistently and scale what works. No matter how long you've been doing marketing, you're going to launch campaigns that are not effective. Happens to me all the time.

Brandon Breshears 00:39:19  I'm constantly learning, constantly improving and so reviewing metrics on an ongoing basis that's consistent. Helps you to do better work, understand where your breakages are happening, and then fix those constraints based on the data that you're seeing. And again, going by gut, it's not going to be as helpful if let's say you have a campaign set up and it's it seems like it's going great, but it's maybe something's breaking and you're not aware of it. And you could triple the conversion rate if you fixed it. so there's always room for improvement. And unless you're measuring it, you just don't know what's working, what's not, and potentially where it's breaking down. So let's talk about the common mistakes that reliably kill client acquisition systems. And this is far, far too common. And it's good news that it's very common because it's easy to beat. and most practices are making this mistake. So number one is that they're not being precise enough about who they want to target. We just want everybody who will walk in the door.

Brandon Breshears 00:40:25  Approach is not a great approach. So you're not going to be able to create marketing that is specific, that cures their problem. And this type of approach just gets the price, shoppers and the types of clients that you don't want coming in. Generally speaking. So not targeting precisely enough. The next most common mistake is not tracking results and just going on a gut feel. And this is 99% of people that are running their own campaigns or doing their own social. They're not looking at the results, not seeing what works, not pulling insights. And I'd go even one step further is make it easy to track results. So whenever possible, use tools like Looker Studio, which can build out dashboards for you so you can see the conversion actions that are happening, but make it so that you don't have to do 50 clicks to get to a report. Because if you have to log into Google Ads, if you have to go to a report editor under campaigns, and then you have to click on the right report, set the date range, add in the meaningful data metrics.

Brandon Breshears 00:41:26  It's just going to be too much work that you're just not going to. Not going to do it most likely. So make it so that you just click a button. You go to the dashboard. You see what data you want to see what's important to you, and track those results regularly. I'd also say regularly look at your Google Analytics. That way you can see if there's problems and trends. You can set benchmarks and bench lines. I'm sorry. Benchmarks for your your data. I think the the most valuable thing for practice owners to do is set up when it comes to marketing, set up like 5 or 6 metrics that help you to give a health snapshot. And as long as these 5 or 6 things are good, you'll know that you know things are generally okay. The types of metrics that I'd make sure to know, and again, just 5 or 6 data points would be total number of visitors on a monthly basis. The traffic breakdown. So where those traffic, are coming from? And here's here's why that's important.

Brandon Breshears 00:42:25  Real quick. Let's say you get a thousand visitors per month and 250 are from Google ads, 500 is from Google Organic, and 250 is from social. For example, and then next month you have 750 visitors and 250 are from Google ads, 250 are from organic and 250 are from Facebook. You can very quickly look at that and say, geez, our practice was really slow last month. Well, look at that. We got half as much organic traffic as typical. It's something to do with our practices SEO. You can immediately see that problem and know how to go about at least asking questions to fix it. Otherwise you'd say, oh geez, we're completely slow. What's going on? Why are our clients not coming in? Like, who knows, maybe some pages are down on your site. Maybe your Google business profile has the wrong phone number on it. Like, it could be a million things. So Understanding where your traffic is coming from with very simple benchmarks. So benchmarks that I like to track our total visitors traffic by source, time on site.

Brandon Breshears 00:43:27  That's a good metric to bounce rate. also the average pages per session and then total number of conversions. Those six pieces of data will help you just to at least get a qualitative understanding of how your website and traffic is performing. The problem number three is overcomplicating the system and not focusing on repeatable, proven campaigns. You don't have to reinvent the wheel every time. If you have something that works, and let's say it stops working because people are seeing it too often, just pause it and say, this is a winner campaign. We're going to run this once a quarter for a month. You don't have to reinvent the wheel every time. You don't have to come up with some new amazing offer. You can rename it something different. So Back to school. Special. New year special. Valentine's day special. Start of summer special. It could be the same offer, but a new name. You don't have to reinvent the wheel. If something works, keep using it. and make sure that you're.

Brandon Breshears 00:44:33  You're not trying to overcomplicate things here. And then the last thing that I see is that people just simply don't have a plan in place. And even if you're doing well right now, I think it's pretty clear that the old paradigm of, you know, just open your doors, people will come in that is just dead. There's just too much competition now. There's too many corporate groups out there that have huge, huge budgets. And so even if you're doing good right now, setting up a system in place as an insurance policy, you have insurance on your building. If it burns down, do you have an insurance policy in place if your your customer acquisition process stops completely. So thinking about this as an insurance policy, if you're busy and if you're slow, it's time to get a move on it. Don't wait or don't hesitate, because you gotta got to get a system to to generate clients. It's very, very important. So for you and the next steps to make this effective, and not just something that's entertaining, even though it's amazing to listen to the podcast and it's super fun.

Brandon Breshears 00:45:38  I'm sorry I didn't put more jokes in here today, but the if you don't put this into practice and if you don't take action, it's not going to work. So recapping we need something that's targeted, measurable and scalable. Please go through and audit your current client acquisition systems. See where most of your clients are coming from, and identify weaknesses in your practice. Traffic systems that you have. Also go through your customer data and find out who are the people that you really want to have coming in. I ask your team members who are your favorite clients and why are they your favorite clients, and then ask them questions about their characteristics. Did you know if they went to college? Did they have. Do they have kids? Do they? What what kind of jobs do they do? What do you think their income levels are? Things like that. next step I would suggest would be to book a time with me. If you're trying to figure out how can we generate more clients. And I'm not pushy whatsoever.

Brandon Breshears 00:46:41  So it's not going to be a high pressure sales call. But just say here's what's going on, Brandon. What do you think we should do? And I'll give you non-biased as possible. I obviously think I'm the best at Google ads and things, but I'll give you some options and solutions, whether it is stuff that you can do in your practice or if it is stuff that I can help with. I'll let you know. But I'm very, very non pushy and non salesy. So if you talk to me, I guarantee you're going to walk away with huge amounts of value and ideas that you can implement right away. That will be helpful to your practice. So if you are interested, go to the show notes and you can also go to Veterinary Marketing Podcast. Com forward slash and book a time with me. Again that's about forward slash call. And we can help come up with some ideas and systems for you to generate more clients. I really hope that you take action in generating predictable client acquisition, because this is going to give you control over your business.

Brandon Breshears 00:47:47  It's going to help you to go from being stressed and worried to at least understanding. We can turn this on, turn it up and make it generate clients for us. And I think this is only going to get more and more important as economic uncertainty pops up. and so be sure to to head on over to veterinary marketing podcast comm forward slash call. And then also want to really mention to you next week is going to be a fantastic episode all about generative results optimization. So how do we show up free practice for AI and how can you dominate that space? It's very early on and so it is a land grab gold rush you don't want to miss out on because it's only getting more and more popular. So be sure to subscribe. And the last thing that I would ask, if you know somebody who you think would benefit from this, I would really appreciate it if you shared it with them. If you've got value from this, please be sure to share this with some of your friends and colleagues.

Brandon Breshears 00:48:44  I would really appreciate it only if they're in veterinary medicine. If they're a mechanic, don't send it to them. But anyways, have a wonderful day and I'll see you on next week's episode.

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