VMP 270.5: What Products & Services Should You Use To Market Your Veterinary Practice?

Brandon (00:00:00) - Welcome to the Veterinary Marketing Podcast, where it's all about how to attract, engage and retain clients to your veterinary hospital using digital marketing. In today's episode, I'm going to give you three tips on how to vet a service product agency. Anything that is in that med that you can use to either track clients or market your practice. Because I was just having a client call today and it's just by the way, in between episode and she was like, I don't know how I can vet these products or services. I don't know what to do. There's so many things out there that we can do. What should we do? So I'm going to give you some tips. It's going to be very helpful. It's going to be short and quick. So before we get into it please, if you like this podcast enjoy it and receive benefit from it. Could you please be sure to share this with somebody that you think would benefit? It would mean the world to me, and it would be awesome to help other veterinary practices grow using digital marketing.

Brandon (00:00:53) - All right, so let's jump into today's episode. I think there's a few criteria that you need to think about before you decide to work with any software product or tool or, you know, marketing guru, any anything that you're trying to do. And I was actually listening to a podcast with another marketing company, and I just kind of got me thinking, you know, how what are the criteria that you should use for vetting a product, service or person that you're going to work with? And I think number one. The most important thing is that before they diagnose any type of product or service, that they actually take the time to understand what your goals are, what your problems are, and what you're facing. If somebody comes out and right out the gate, they're saying you need this tactic or strategy or tool., and I mean, sometimes there are things that can be universal. You do need to have, like you need a practice management software, right? Definitely. But saying you need to do geofencing or you need to be doing, you know, this specific type of SEO or it all depends on your bandwidth, your goals, what you have set up, what you're established at.

Brandon (00:02:06) - And so if somebody is giving you blank recommendations for specific tactics, they're probably not somebody that you want to work with because they're most likely selling you something related to those tactics. So. That should be, I think, a red flag. It doesn't mean you shouldn't work with them. Sometimes there's people who are bad salespeople. Maybe they make good recommendations in a bad way. But typically, I think you need to make sure that the person who's giving you understands the full picture, because we all have limited time resources, and so it just is impossible. So beware of people that are just telling you to do tactics blindly without really getting an understanding of your goals. The second thing that I think is important to talk about is when you're going through a sales presentation or sales process with somebody, they are good at selling all of the benefits. Then you might not know what questions you need to ask. And so making sure that you have a full picture of here's like there's nothing is a perfect solution, right? There's always opportunity cost.

Brandon (00:03:06) - And so you need to understand what the potential drawbacks are. So you know depending on like I'd say booking software is a perfect example. The salespeople make every solution that you're looking at like a perfect solution. There's no problems. Everything's great. But you don't realize that it's not really a booking solution because it doesn't actually book in your practice management software and you have to call to it's just basically a glorified web form. That's an appointment request and you have to confirm it. Right. So they don't tell you necessarily the drawbacks. So. Number one. Be sure that you're getting an understanding of the process and what you want the outcome to be, but just ask a lot of questions and as much as possible, you want to be able to control your data. You want to be able to track your data, and you need to understand what that flow and process looks like. So make sure that you have all of those things really understood. And I think the last thing that you should consider is when you're working with a product or service, they are.

Brandon (00:04:16) - Salespeople. And so a lot of times, too, I see this in marketing all the time. There's people that own marketing companies and they don't do any of the work. And so they're just basically regurgitating what they hear from the people that they speak to, doing the work. And it's not to say that they can't understand it, but I was listening to a podcast today, and they were saying that they can understand exactly how much market share is going on in each location. It's, you know, there's just things that that are not necessarily true. And if you're disconnected from doing the work, and it's not to say that you have people that that do it for you, but if you don't have a good understanding of like the process and you're in it, a lot of times you're going to receive a sales pitch. It's like somebody that is selling a drug as a rep versus a doctor who's prescribing it and understands like medicine. And so,, the rep is selling all of the benefits. They don't necessarily know how everything works, but, you know, the doctor is the one that's in there diagnosing prescribing, right, if that makes sense in that analogy.

Brandon (00:05:23) - So a lot of times people that are selling products or services are more like the rep and less like the practitioner who kind of understands holistically how things work. So as often as possible, try to work with companies that are. I'd say there's a good level. There's probably three different levels, right? You have small sized businesses that maybe offer more boutique solutions. It's more hands on. It's typically a little bit more expensive. Then you have medium sized companies who they have a team in support, but everybody is still really relatively well connected to all the processes and all of the moving pieces. And then you have larger size companies who are efficient at, you know, specific processes, and usually their prices are lower, but it's pretty disjointed from sales. People don't really have connection to the people that are implementing and things like that. So just a word of warning. And just like in vendor medicine where there's corporate consolidation of everything, this also exists within the marketing companies and products and services around that med.

Brandon (00:06:29) - So if it's important to you to support small business, then be sure that that is part of your your process as well, because this consolidation is happening in every single industry. And, my, my commitment, by the way, is to not sell out to a VC or large group., I just love working with veterinary practices. I love providing information to everybody in the audience, and it's my goal to help you grow your veterinary practice. So just a quick note there. I really appreciate everybody so much in this audience. It really means the world to me that you're listening and have a great day. I hope you,, see you on the next episode.