VMP 304: Marketing That Will Make Your Practice Grow In 2026

Brandon Breshears 00:00:00  I want 2026 to be the best year for your practice ever. And in so today's episode, we are going to be talking about how to make sure that your marketing is one less thing that you have to worry about, that it actually works for you the way that you want it to. And so this is the first part of a six part series. And I'm going to tell you some of the, I think, really important marketing concepts that you need to be considering. And this year I think is going to be uniquely challenging. So we're going to cover a lot of the challenges that you're going to see in your practice. But hopefully at the end of this podcast series, you're going to have a really clear picture of knowing exactly what to do. Most of the practices that I work with, they know about all of the tactics, about all of the strategies, but they don't really know what they should do. And I think more importantly, they don't know what sequence they should do things in.

Brandon Breshears 00:00:55  If you put certain pieces before other pieces, you're missing the sequence that it takes. It's just like baking a cake. If you put the ingredients in before you mix them, you're not going to end up with the right product. And so I think it's very similar in terms of marketing. The problem is, again, there's just so much information out there. And I think with the ease of access when it comes to information, you can basically Google anything or ChatGPT anything that you want to. I might have to start seeing ChatGPT instead of Google and get really quick, helpful answers. But the question is, is it going to be right for you? And so my hope with this series is that you take this information, and it's going to be things that you probably know to some extent, but we're going to simplify it and put things in the correct order so that you can maximize your growth. So my name is Brandon Breshears, and if you're not familiar with me, this is the Veterinary Marketing Podcast.

Brandon Breshears 00:01:54  And I help hundreds of veterinary practices each month grow their practice. And so today we're going to be talking about how to attract, engage, retain more of your clients in your practice so that you can finally get control of growth and really create the practice that you want. So the first thing that I think we need to think about is going to be the sequencing. And I've thought a lot about this because again, it's like a recipe. If you follow this recipe, I think it's going to be beneficial. The first thing that you need to do is really consider what your goals are. and this isn't necessarily in the additional six pieces that we're going to be talking about. But I think it's very, very important. You need to number one, in order to set goals, you have to have a clear picture of where you are today so that you can then figure out what you either want to improve or what you want to cut away, what's working, what's not working. And so when you're creating any type of marketing, we always start with goals.

Brandon Breshears 00:02:53  So I think for practices when it comes to marketing, there's really only two Specific things that you're trying to achieve. You're either trying to get your current clients to engage more, right? So reengage, resell, and get more of your existing clients to be compliant. Or we're looking to attract new clients in the door. That's really the bottom two pieces for most practices. Maybe there's a practice who wants to do more content and like build a broader audience base. But I think those are generally outliers. But really it comes down to those two things. Get more of your existing clients to come in more frequently or get more new clients who also come in frequently. And so I think for most practices, you need to be really clear about how many new clients you need coming in the door. the way that I like to think about this for a lot of my current clients is what is your current utilization rate across all of your schedules? And I think this is an easy metric to see. And you can look at how many appointment slots are empty versus filled.

Brandon Breshears 00:03:57  And then also take a look at things like, you know, how many days out are you booking? And ask yourself, what am I actually comfortable with? And what does it feel less stressful to have? Like, do I need to have two days booked out? Is that comfortable? Do we need to be a couple weeks booked out? Is that comfortable? Really think about what you would ideally like. And I think there's a really strong balance, especially in today's market where most practices that I'm talking to are not fully booked out. And so finding the sweet spot of where you feel comfortable, how many clients you need to have, how many new clients you need to have coming in the door. Looking back at the past 12 months and looking at the average spend of different clients and cohorts, what types of procedures you want to be doing, how many of those procedures you want to be doing each month? And if we have that starting point, then we can back into how are we going to achieve that? But if you don't know what you want and let's say you're like, I want more clients and you're then I'm as vague as that.

Brandon Breshears 00:04:54  It's going to be very difficult to achieve that goal because do you need like five clients a month? Or do you need 40 clients a month? Like, what is the number that you actually need? If you have a bigger goal, you're going to have to do more work to achieve that goal, obviously. And you know, with especially strategies that are more specifically scalable and measurable things like paid ads, you need to understand all of your core metrics. So along with new clients that are coming in, how many you want to be coming in, you also need to know, I think, three metrics when it comes to client value, you need to know what your first client visit is worth. You need to know what your annual value of a client is worth, and then you need to know what the lifetime value of a client is worth. And that can inform how much you could spend based on what makes sense profitably for your practice. So having those three numbers, along with what your utilization is right now and then, also if there's any room for improvement in that.

Brandon Breshears 00:05:57  So like let's say for example, with your existing client base and you do your total number of clients versus the total number of visits, and you find that your clients come in on an average of 1.2 times per year, right. And that's going to be averaged across all of them. If you can bump that up to two times a year without doing any additional paid advertising, maybe just doing outreach and, you know, adjusting your booking sequence and things like that, then you'll be able to increase your revenue, increase the annual value of clients. And any time we can increase the value of existing clients, we're going to be able to spend more to acquire them, which is, I think, a good thing. Most of the time when people think about marketing, they think about how can we spend as little as possible to acquire clients. And I think that's that's a good place to be aspiring towards. But the problem is that if you are focused on my business is going to succeed. If I can generate a new client for, let's say, $5 if that was the case.

Brandon Breshears 00:07:00  And it's it's possible you're just gonna have to create an incredible offer. But if that was the case, then you're setting yourself up for failure because advertising prices attention is getting more expensive. Basically, it's also getting harder to break through where you could, you know, let's say seven years ago, do a really good job of attracting clients organically on Facebook. Now, it's much more difficult to get distribution organically on Facebook. And, same thing with Instagram and TikTok. As these platforms become more mature. Instagram is very mature right now, but as TikTok becomes more mature, it's getting more and more difficult to stand out, and the platforms typically are looking to monetize the value of the attention that's on their platform. And so as that happens, organic reach goes down and it becomes necessary to start running ads. And that's on most platforms. So we see that the more attention is more valuable, the more difficult it is to. Number one, get organic leads coming in. And then number two, the cost for that attention is going up.

Brandon Breshears 00:08:09  There's more demand for attention than there is supply. So we need to be thinking how can we spend as much as possible to acquire clients? And that makes you think more about the value of your existing clients. How can we maximize the value of our clients, rather than how can we cut the costs on acquisition? Because I can guarantee you acquisition is only going to continue to go up. ad prices and cost per click is only going to continue to go up. And so it's really important that you think we need to figure out how we're going to maximize the client value. It's okay to think about to what can we do to adjust and decrease our cost per lead. That's what we're doing all the time when we're running ads for clients. But if your business depends on cheap traffic, you're probably setting yourself up for failure. And so you need to be able to maximize the value of your clients. So if we have those key pieces of data, what's your client worth? How many clients do you need? What's your current utilization? you can kind of get a feel for how your practice is doing.

Brandon Breshears 00:09:12  And if you ever have any questions or you need help with this, please don't hesitate to reach out. My calendar link is in the show notes of this episode, and if you have questions need to meet, I'm happy to meet with you and go over strategy too. So what I want you to think about though, when it comes to marketing for 2026 and I think it's it's really, really interesting. A lot of the practices that I work with that are really, really successful at client acquisition. It's not necessarily because their their practice is so much better. And although the ones that are successful do have really good cultures and they have, you know, really great staff, I think the thing that makes the biggest difference though is, is really mindset. And that sounds really, really weird. We'll get clients that are really positive. They're fun to talk to. They're fun to work with. They you can tell that that they're fun people. And, I think that openness and they're trying to find ways to make things work versus in the past, I'm sure you've had clients like this in your practice where sometimes it just feels negative all the time.

Brandon Breshears 00:10:22  and I've had clients like this, too, in the past where they're like, I'm sure this isn't going to work, but let's try it. And that's the mindset they come into this with, and they find every single reason why this isn't working. And instead of trying to say, okay, we're we're getting, you know, 150 new phone calls from new clients, from Google Ads. Why are we not converting? Right. Maybe it's because the practice has some bad attitudes about it. Right. And that's a really broad statement. But having the mindset that we're going to figure out how to make this work rather than I don't think this is going to work and it's never worked in the past. This isn't a good thing, right? That mindset is going to make you set up for failure, for sure. I also want you to start thinking about marketing as a system of your business. Systems are the key to growth, to scaling, to creating value in your practice. And so we can't consider marketing as something that we're just doing randomly, that we're not thinking about what our end goal is.

Brandon Breshears 00:11:26  It's okay to try things. It's okay to test things, but you need to use a systematic approach for when you're trying and testing things. I'll give you an example. If you think back in the past year, you probably did some type of a promotion. You probably did some type of a post that like on Instagram, where you created an offer, maybe you boosted some content. And if I was to say, did that work for you? And you could probably think back and say, no, it didn't really work, but we don't really know. If you go back and you think about your marketing and you're just not sure if something actually worked or if it didn't work. That's not approaching marketing from a systematic approach. And so the random just tests and one off things that you're doing, especially if you're not noting the results and analyzing what worked and what didn't, you're not going to probably have success if you take that approach. Just like if I said to you, what did you have for breakfast last Tuesday? Like you probably don't remember.

Brandon Breshears 00:12:28  And that's the thing, when you have so much other stuff going on, if you're not being systematic with this, it's going to be random and you're not going to learn from your successes or from your failures, most likely. So it's not really helpful. You're just going to have to continue to get lucky. Marketing is really a system that compounds when it is aligned. So when you figure out one piece, it increases in value as you figure out the next pieces. And that's also with respect to the sequencing that we're going to talk about. All of these elements build on top of each other. And so if you skip any of these steps, you probably can find some success. But if you do things in sequence, you're going to see that each of these pieces compounds on each other. So if we have the goal of having our best year ever when it comes to practice growth, there's really six marketing pillars that I think are incredibly important. And here's a high level overview. And obviously there's a million other things that you can do to.

Brandon Breshears 00:13:30  But I think breaking these down into six simple steps is going to be really, really helpful. So the first pillar of marketing that I think is really, really important to nail down and to get is positioning and message. And this is a thing that most practices completely overlook. And I think it really hurts them. Most practices start their businesses. They look at the services that all of their other competitors are offering, and then they typically will price themselves somewhere in the middle and they'll offer similar services, they'll create similar checkout processes and similar client experiences. And that doesn't really distinguish you from any other practice. And in the eyes of a client, there's really only one way to convey value when you're just like everyone else. And that's going to be price. And most practices that I know do not like to compete on price. They don't want to be discounting. They want to get clients that are higher value. The problem is, if you don't have something that actually makes your product or service different, even if it is better and different, but you're not communicating that to clients, you can't expect that they're going to know it.

Brandon Breshears 00:14:35  And the only way for them to come and experience that is going to be by taking a chance and coming in. And so you will build slowly over time. But if you can nail down your positioning and your messaging before you start doing any kind of marketing, whether it's email marketing or social media marketing or SEO or paid ads. Doesn't matter what it is. If the positioning and the messaging is good, the rest is going to be much, much easier. So in the next episode, we're going to be covering all in depth how to really nail your positioning, your messaging, how to create offers that align with that, how to create customer experiences that align with that. And it's going to help you to make everything more simple. It's also going to take a lot of guesswork away. So I think that's going to be a really important episode. But honestly, all of these episodes are important because they build on top of each other. Once we have that positioning and messaging down, we need people to see it.

Brandon Breshears 00:15:35  If people don't know about you, they're not going to be able to come into your practice. And so we have to build systems that generate traffic and attention. This is one of my favorite things because I do paid ads for practices. And so part of when we're working with new clients, we talk about positioning, messaging and offers so that we can effectively send the right types of clients. So this is not just about getting as many eyeballs on your marketing pieces, whether it's social or emails as possible. It's about attracting the right people and getting the right traffic and the right attention. The next piece after that is once we have somebody see your marketing, we need them to then convert. And so we're going to talk about conversion systems. How do we maximise conversions and make it as easy as possible for the clients that you actually want. Coming in the door to come in the door after we have conversion systems, we have follow up and nurture sequences, and we have some really cool new tools, strategies and tactics that we're going to be diving into this.

Brandon Breshears 00:16:39  Most practices completely drop the ball here when it comes to conversion and then also follow up and nurture. there are some good tools in the marketplace, but most people aren't using them to their full potential. And it's also really, really generic. And so going back into the positioning, positioning and messaging, we're going to use that same consistent brand positioning and brand message to make sure that all of the follow up and all of the nurture doesn't feel like it's off brand. So many practices are afraid of being car salesman and being overly salesy, and so they go completely in the other direction. But the problem with that is that if you're not guiding people to the right outcome, the likelihood that they're going to get them get there on their own is very, very low. So we want to make sure that the follow up and the nurture is in place and it is strong. After that we have retention and expansion. Most practices are pretty good about retaining clients. If somebody comes in and has a good experience, there's a high likelihood that they're going to come back again, but they're probably not maximizing that.

Brandon Breshears 00:17:48  And so some really small but powerful changes can be made to make sure that you're getting more attention, more compliance. Increasing that annual and lifetime value of your clients, especially the types that you're looking for, that you love working with, so that you can increase what you can actually spend on acquiring those clients, and then expanding and getting referrals and doing all of the stuff that helps to bring even more people like your favorite clients into your practice. And then lastly, we have measurement and optimization. We're going to be talking about measurement throughout this. How are we measuring and managing success across this system. But I think making sure that you have these pieces in place that you are measuring, you know, all of the KPIs that are going to be important here to see if you're being successful or not. And that goes back to goal setting, like, what are what are we actually after here? but then once we have data coming in, how do we optimize that? How do we improve that? How do we reduce our cost per lead? Every single one of the marketing problems that you have is inside of one of these six pillars.

Brandon Breshears 00:18:55  And so, again, sequencing is really, really important. But I think most practices don't need more tactics. They don't need more strategies. They just need to actually build out marketing in their practice as a system. So I want to invite you, if you are a fan or I'm sorry, a member of the Veterinary Marketing Nerds Facebook group. I'm going to be posting weekly prompts in here. And the goal of these weekly prompts is going to give you one thing that you can do that is really simple. You can be interactive and I'll give you my feedback on it. I can help you if you have any questions, but it's going to help you along this process of defining and creating all of these different marketing systems in your practice that will actually help you to grow and meet your goals. So be sure to join. It's at facebook.com. Groups Ford Splash, the veterinary marketing nerds, all one word and we'll have posts and props starting there after New Year's. So if you're in the future, you can go back and look at all of these prompts as well that are inside of there that'll help you to grow your practice.

Brandon Breshears 00:20:09  If you need help with anything, please don't hesitate to reach out. I also wanted to say real quick, thank you so much for listening. It has been a great year in 2025. We've had a lot of fun, inside of our company and working with all of our clients. It's been amazing and I feel incredibly blessed that you're listening, that, we have amazing clients who I love working with. So if there's anything that we can do, please don't hesitate to reach out. Let me know and we'll see you on the next episode. We are going to be talking all about messaging and positioning, and this is going to I love talking about this. This is going to be a really, really valuable episode. So don't miss it and I'll see you there. Have a great one.