VMP 305: The Ultimate Guide to Positioning Your Veterinary Practice for Success

Brandon 00:00:00  Today's episode might be one of the most important for you in 2026 and beyond, because it comes before everything else that people typically think about when they think about marketing. Today, we're going to be talking all about positioning and messaging. This is incredibly important because it helps you to lay the foundation for driving not just more clients, but the right type of clients that you want coming into your practice. This is the step that I see so many practices skip, and it really hurts them down the line. We're going to talk about what this is and how it's probably going to reset your marketing and how you view marketing in general. And it's going to help you to not only differentiate yourself, but but also be able to step away from any type of discounting. If you don't want to be doing discounting and really refine the types of clients so that not only are you getting more clients in your practice, but you're getting more of the right clients, which is ultimately what you want. My name is Brandon. This is the Veterinary Marketing Podcast, and this is the second part of the make 2026 the Best year Ever for your Veterinary Practice series.

Brandon 00:01:03  And today we're going to be talking all about positioning, positioning and messaging. Excuse me. And this really is kind of stepped over when I talk to most practices I'll say, you know, what are you looking for? What are we trying to get more of? And the typical response is we just want more clients. And I understand that it feels safe to just say we want everybody to come in. But the reality is that if you serve everyone, you're probably not actually doing a great job of serving everyone. Seth Godin, who's one of my favorite marketers of all time, talks about this in his book, This is Marketing. When he talks about the vet that is seeing everything under the sun, and somebody calls up and they have a rabbit and they say, sure, we'll see him. But the truth is that it might not be the best fit for a general practice to take an exotic pet. Is that really serving your practice? Is it going to give an exceptional experience to those clients.

Brandon 00:01:59  And so in today we're going to talk about positioning positioning and messaging. I don't know I'm having a hard time with that, which is going to help you to really give you the best year of marketing ever. I think that most marketing fails before it even starts because people don't do this step. The market doesn't immediately understand why they should care about you. Most practices think, okay, I'm going to go open to practice, open my doors and clients will come flooding in. And especially in today's market, that simply isn't true. The truth is that confusion is truly the number one killer of conversions out there. And so what we want to do with positioning and marketing messaging in your marketing is to really make it simple. Who is it that you're serving? What are you exceptional at? What do you want to be known for? And then how can we communicate that across all of the marketing assets that we produce so that it is incredibly clear, simple, and it makes it feel like a no brainer for the pet parents that are going to be a right fit to come into your practice.

Brandon 00:03:04  Now, that's kind of a really big concept. And so we're going to break down what that's going to practically look like, so that you can take key insights and apply them into your practice today. And my goal for you is that when you're listening to this podcast, you're going to take at least one idea and implement it, and you can come back and go through it again. I do this all the time with books and podcasts that I am getting value out of. I don't want to overwhelm you, but I do want to give you enough so that you can come back over and over again and apply new things. There's the saying no man enters the same stream twice. Either the stream is changed or the man is different. It is the same thing for listening to content. And that's why when I find content that I like, I go back and I review it often. So first let's break down really what positioning actually is. And positioning is a decision about who you're going to help, what the problem is you're going to solve, and then why? You're the logical choice.

Brandon 00:04:01  I think a lot of times when it comes to positioning, that kind of gets merged with branding, right? And it's similar to branding because a brand is known for who they help, what it says about the person, the problems that they solve potentially. But brand is more about the feel of what your company does, where positioning is who you are actually helping, what problems you're actually solving, and why you're the logical choice. I'll give you an example of that. Like if you said, okay, Nike is going to build a hotel, what would that look like? That's an example of branding positioning. Positioning would be more tactical and more specific. And so I think that you should actually write these things down. And if you're interested you can send me an email. I can send you a positioning worksheet that comes with questions that really help you define and narrow down these things. but let's talk about what? It's not positioning. Positioning is not your logo. It's not a color palette. It's not a tagline.

Brandon 00:05:04  It's we do great service. It's what is going to be happening in the prospect's mind. And it's not a brand guideline or a brand outline or a brand template. So I know that most practices think, okay, I'm a veterinary hospital, I help pets, and I see all pets in my area and I'm open these days. That's what most practices think about. But if you want to do more of the types of services that you love doing, and seeing the types of clients that you love seeing, if you spend more time thinking about this and really developing, what is it that we're after? Who are we trying to target? What do these people value? What are they fearing? What are the hopes and aspirations that they have and really dive down into what it is you want to be known for. And I think ultimately that's going to be the key phrase that gets repeated here. If if your practice was known for just one thing, what would you want that to be? And the reason why this comes before anything else in this series is because it's really important to know who it is that you're targeting so that you can create offers, create content, create ads.

Brandon 00:06:16  They're going to target these people and find them in the right places at the right stages of the funnel. So most practices run ads. They get poor results, they tweak the ads, and then they blame the platform. If you've ever run ads on Facebook for yourself and most practices have, it's pretty much a consistent story where you'll run ads. You'll not really get results, you'll not be sure if it works. Maybe it did, maybe it didn't. Maybe we'll make some adjustments. And then I guess Facebook ads don't work. That's not the true problem that's happening here. Same thing if you're posting content regularly, you're going to post content. You're going to get no engagement. If you post more, eventually you kind of burn out. You say, well, I guess it's probably doing something. Let's just keep doing it. Traffic is only going to amplify what already exists. So bad positioning plus more traffic is going to get basically faster failure and faster results. I want you to think about like this.

Brandon 00:07:11  Google ads is just a microphone. If your message is unclear or you don't know what to say, it's just going to amplify the noise. So imagine that you're on a stage and you have all of the people in your hometown, and somebody just hands you a microphone and they say, hey, you can say anything you want to everybody in your town. If you're not prepared, you don't know what you want to say. You don't want to want to. You don't have your elevator pitch kind of nailed down. It's just going to be probably mumbling through, and maybe you're going to get a few people, but it's probably not going to get the reach an end goal that you're looking for. It is the same thing. Why positioning is incredibly important to figure out before you start anything else. So there's going to be, I think, four key questions that you're going to really want to ask yourself before you really launch anything else. And if you're already creating content that's great. You can then apply this to what you're already creating.

Brandon 00:08:06  Same thing goes for ads, or just any type of marketing activity that you do. And the thing that I like best about this is that it really applies to everything. If you're sending out emails, you can change the content of your emails to get more opens and attract more of the calls to action that you're looking to do. If you're doing postcards and sending out direct mail, you can use this for that. Doesn't matter what it is, it is going to help your marketing. So the first question that you need to ask yourself is who is this actually for? We need to be really, really specific here. Are we going to target dog owners. We're going to target cat owners. We're going to target dog and cat owners. We're going to target upper income individuals. Are we going to target people that are really into preventative care? Are we going to target the pet parents that are incredibly obsessed with their pets health? We're going to target pet parents who put their dogs in doggie daycare because they don't want them to be lonely at home when they go to work each day.

Brandon 00:09:02  Like, get really, really specific. And when you're thinking about your clients, I would probably do a client audit and I would probably do this quarterly, where we go through the clients that you're actually love, having to come in. Think about the types of cases that you're seeing, the preventative care that you're doing. And obviously this is going to be different for like a general practice than it would be for an emergency practice. And you could even do this within different columns or categories within your business. So like I know, for example, most general practices are also seeing same day in urgent care. They're going to see certain kinds of surgeries. They're going to see the general wellness kind of appointments. So you might want to do this type of positioning for each of your primary kind of core pillars and business like categories that you're trying to generate more of. So really, really specific. Everybody is not your market though. So what types of clients are they? Where are they in the funnel. Are they new pet owners? Do they just get a puppy? Are they pet owners for senior pets? where are they in their pet ownership journey? How much do they know? Are they really, really educated about all of the most recent studies? Or are they somebody who doesn't consume any information and they really don't know anything? We also need to think about our urgency level.

Brandon 00:10:29  How badly do they need your services, especially with things like emergency? You're going to want to be targeting people that really have a high level of urgency. The next thing that I want to you to think about, though, specifically, is who needs this now? Who needs this now and not someday. Especially if we're trying to get more appointments coming in the door. We want to be targeting people that are lower in the funnel so they're closer to making a buying decision. And so whenever we can, if we target starting at the bottom of the funnel and we refine our conversion processes there at the bottom, anytime we add more traffic to the top, we're going to see the benefits of all the work that we did at the bottom of the funnel. So we're always thinking in terms of who is this that needs this now and not someday. And so in thinking about who is this that needs it now, we really need to be thinking about the pain that we're going to be solving right now. So what are the specific benefits that your practice does? And if you go and I want you to go and look at 2 or 3 of your competitors website, go to their services page.

Brandon 00:11:38  Look at what they're doing. They're probably just commoditized their services. We offer these things. We care a lot. We're open these days and there's really not much differentiation. So we want to be avoiding vague benefits even with practices. And I was just looking at this today. There's practices that are really highlighting that they are fear free certified. I think it is great to be a fear free certified practice, but the problem is that it doesn't actually convey any benefits. Benefits around fear free would be less stressful visits. Peaceful visits. your dog is going to love it here. Like those are the benefits of being a fear free certified practice. Being fear free certified is a feature. It is not a benefit. So we need to really speak to the fears, the frustrations, loss of opportunities, lots of potential positive outcomes. We need to also be playing into their hopes for healthier pet, better quality of life, that they can feel Confident and that they can rest assured that things are going to get better for their pet.

Brandon 00:12:44  They can rest assured that they're doing everything possible to give their pet as much longevity and quality of life as possible. So an example of this would be a bad example of what pain are you solving right now is we help sick pets. Right. It's just really general or urgent care vet open 24 over seven. Like very poor basic level of what you're actually doing and what you're solving for. a very more advanced and developed benefit statement would be we help pet parents provide comprehensive, holistic veterinary care so that you can rest assured your pet has the highest quality of life possible. Right? Something like that. And I'm making this up as I go. So if you can think of something better, Let me know and send me an email. But you get the point. We need to avoid vague benefits. We need to get specific. And to do that, you really have to dive into the mindset of your clients that you're looking to come in. And I think that can't be overstated when you're when you're talking about what your clients actually are looking for, what they want, what resonates, you need to not only be talking to like your clients about it, but also the other team members.

Brandon 00:14:07  You'll notice that in practice, people talk to the doctors a lot differently than they talk to the technicians, and they talk to the technicians a lot differently than they talk to the CSRs. And so getting a comprehensive perspective around what are the clients saying? What's resonating. Asking them to get as much feedback and be as curious as possible is really, really helpful in understanding why people made the decision that they did. Why did they come into you? What was the selling point that really got them to come in? And so taking a multi perspective approach. On on trying to really understand what the clients are saying, the types of language that they continually use, and especially if you can hear phrases that come up over and over again and you're able to communicate that, especially when it comes to problems, if you can describe a problem in depth, people are going to assume that you have the solution. And so if people feel like they're understood that you understand their problem, they're going to think, okay, I have a much better shot of at least getting a positive outcome because they understand really what's going on here.

Brandon 00:15:10  so I it's incredibly valuable to make sure that you're getting the whole picture of what clients are saying. And I would say as often as possible, get feedback, make sure that your staff is aware that they should be looking for these type of patterns and make sure that that's being communicated, especially on team meetings and things. You know, bring up with the question, is there anything that clients are saying that you're hearing more than once? Is are things that they like. Are they having problems? How are they describing these problems? And take note and actually write these things down. So once we figure out what pain these clients are struggling with right now, we need to think about what is the outcome that we deliver. This is one thing that I don't see. I don't see very many practices doing, but we need to really paint the answer. So when people come in, they don't typically know what's going to be included in a wellness exam. They come in and they expect that the doctor is going to spend some time with you and do some things, but you are so close to the industry that you don't realize how unique what you do actually is.

Brandon 00:16:19  And so what I've mentioned this a lot in the past with podcasts, but what is it that you actually do to deliver your outcomes? I like to break this down into a bunch of micro steps. So specifically, what are all of the components that go into either the procedure or the appointment, or the wellness exam, or a membership in your practice? What are all of the things that you get out of it and break it down into the tiniest little pieces possible. So like for example, if somebody comes in, let's say you're doing a wellness exam, you come in, you do a lifestyle and nutrition consultation. You talk about any medications that they go through. You do a physical exam from nose to tail and break that down. What are all of the components that you do there? We do a health screening and say, you know, here's all the advanced diagnostics that we have available. That's something that you can access. And here's all of the types of procedures preventative, and really outlining every single thing that you do.

Brandon 00:17:23  If you had the choice between a comprehensive exam with bullet points of every single thing that you got as a benefit, and then the competitor was just we offer wellness exams. It's going to really help to increase the value and the perceived value of what people are getting, what goes into it. Because again, there's no context for what actually goes into a normal veterinary exam. And so once somebody comes in, let's say it's your ideal prospect, let's say a new puppy owner. And then once they walk out, how are they going to feel? What are they going to see during that exam process? What kind of follow up are they going to get? What kind of confidence are they going to get? Are they going to be building a relationship with you and your practice? They're going to be able to refer back and call often, like, what is it? Every piece that you can think about, what do people get when they leave, and how do you want them to feel when they leave your practice? You need to be able to paint what they're going to look like after.

Brandon 00:18:24  So again, if you can describe their problems, their frustrations, their fears going in, and then show them what the actor is going to look like when you leave. You're going to be confident that you have a professional. Experienced and compassionate veterinary team in your corner to help if anything ever arises with your pet, you know that's a very different feeling from just wellness exam is $75. And so thinking about that and outcomes are going to be features every single time. I like to break down any of the components, by the way into benefit statements. So when you're talking about like let's say the lifestyle review, why do you do this? What is the benefit of going through and, you know, finding out all of these details? What are the benefits of doing that nose to tail exam. Really, really describe every element of the service that you're looking to promote. In terms of benefits. We need to be thinking about benefits. And you have to remember, anytime we're doing marketing, people generally don't care about your practice.

Brandon 00:19:30  No offense. People don't care about this podcast. It's just the reality. It's what can this podcast deliver to you? Same thing goes for your practice. What can you deliver to the pet parent? They have a need there. I'm wondering what's in it for me. And so anytime we're creating marketing, we need to be thinking about what's in it for the client. How can we make this even more valuable? I want to give you a key distinction. Outcome is not the same as the process. So we need to understand what are the steps that get people from point A to point B from the before and then to the after. But we we need to have that outcome defined. And really, if you think about it, outcome is simply a measurable improvement. Pretty simple. How are they going to get better. What is the improvement that they're going to be seeing. And then also how fast will they be able to see that improvement? Typically, anytime you're offering services, the quicker you can get somebody results and also provide people a quick win, they're going to be more likely to become a repeat customer and give you referrals, and you're going to build a relationship for a long time.

Brandon 00:20:45  So the next thing that I think is important is going to be proof and perspective. So why is it you? Why are you the right person to be providing these people care? So things that are proof and perspective we have experience. We have insight some type of unique angle, some type of clear philosophy. If you are just saying, you know, we're going to treat your pet like family, that's not a very compelling you because everybody says that. So differentiation is incredibly important. This step is what actually makes your practice different? If you're not sure, then you know, think about all of the unique things that you have in your practice. What is it that you're really passionate about? What do you stand for? What do you stand against and how can you use that to attract people that also believe those things? If you're not sure how to communicate that differently, you could name it something and naming either a process or a philosophy. It makes it different because now it has a name, it's clearly defined.

Brandon 00:22:00  So let's say truly, you do treat pets like pets like family here, and you do have compassion and you do have experience. It's like name it some type of a guarantee. I have a client who created a guarantee that he said, if you come and try us and you don't love us, we'll refund your first exam. And so it does have the same benefits, but there's a unique angle and a risk reduction to it. So you can do similar things like that with your practice. But if you, for example, made a ABC Animal Hospital promise, we promised that we're going to make sure that you feel like we're in your corner, that we're always going to put your pet's health first. We're going to treat your pet with compassion and dignity, and make sure that you are educated every step along the way. Right. Something like that. You could do that will then give a unique why you and why people should come. So once you have those four questions answered, that's really going to give you a great starting place for your positioning.

Brandon 00:23:12  But once you have that positioning defined, what we then need to do is move into messaging and messaging. Simply put, is turning strategy Into words. Are we going to take these key segments that we've defined and turn it into a specific strategy? So messaging is going to be your positioning that's expressed in language that your clients are already using. So the three rules for messaging are going to be to use their words not yours. An example of that would be if we're talking about radiographs. Clients don't say radiographs they say X-rays. So we want to be sure to be using the language that the clients are already using. And I know that that might be some hot topic. I think I heard once that you always call them radiographs. Don't call them X-rays. I get it, there's professional language, but it's important that we use the right word so that it doesn't create more confusion. Remember in the beginning of the episode, we said confusion kills conversion. We want to make things as simple as possible. And one of the easiest ways to do that is to use their words.

Brandon 00:24:22  We also want to make sure that we're leading with the problem, not the solution. And a lot of times people think, I'm just going to say we do this service and people are going to understand what that entails. I see this a lot of times with dental procedures in particular, like you want to get more dental procedures, hey, we have cleaning and extractions and that, like that's the type of messaging and positioning that practices are offering right now. And that doesn't speak to the problems that they're having. And dentistry in particular is an expensive problem for most pet owners. And so we need to lead with the problem, not the solution. And the third rule for messaging is that simplicity beats cleverness every single time. I know that practices like to get like clever with words that they're saying. They like to say things that like are a little bit, maybe silly. and I've seen this over and over again. I'm going to think of a real quick example. An example that I would probably give would be that I see super, super often is trying to be more clever around things like gentle and compassionate care for your furry family members.

Brandon 00:25:39  Right. That's like giving a warm and fuzzy, but it doesn't say exactly what it is that you're doing something that would be a better alternative. Simple. Strong would be same day veterinary appointments for sick pets in Boise, Idaho. Right. It is better because it says who is for what, the problem is, what the outcome is, and then the high intent match. And this is especially true for things like Google Ads. It's good to incorporate some of those warm fuzzy things to. But it is important that we're very, very clear, especially in spots where you have pet owners that are stressed out, they're frantically searching, and they're already kind of emotionally taxed. And so we want to make sure that we're giving them a simple conversion path that they're going to be able to step through. They're looking for help. They go to the site and they see same day emergency appointments in Boise, Idaho. Right. Here's exactly what it's about versus fear free, gentle and comfort. Care for your furry family members.

Brandon 00:26:40  Okay, now I got to go to the services page and see. Do they see same day appointments? That doesn't really tell me what I want to know. And so that I think, is a simple example of trying to be direct and simple versus kind of trying to be clever and a really quick test that you can do if somebody lands on your site and you do five seconds. Do they know who it's for? Do they know what problems you solve and what to do next? Those are the three things. Who is this for? What problems do they solve? And then how do I sign up? That's the easiest and best test to see. Do we need to improve and looking to. You might look at bounce rates and average times on page for your site. But see quickly if somebody is going to Google Analytics. If somebody is on the website, how quickly do they need to be getting the totality of start to finish being on your site, to then setting up an appointment and make it simple so that somebody could do that.

Brandon 00:27:49  In most practices, that's going to be less than 40s on average. And obviously you can have users that are on longer, but how quickly can we get people in and out of the site performing the end call to action that we're looking for them to do? So I want you to think about a positioning statement, and this is probably going to be for a few different categories, but this is going to be the formula that will help you to get clarity around your positioning. So I help then specific audience who are struggling with urgent problem get a clear outcome without and then common friction or risk. So I help senior pet owners who are struggling with dental care. Get their pets clean teeth without worrying about anesthesia. Right. Things like that. So thinking through that, you can kind of put that in again. We're going to have a worksheet that's available for you so that you can fill this out. But write this down actually actually think about who it is that you're trying to target, what the urgent problem is that they have the clear outcomes and then how you make it easier for them.

Brandon 00:29:04  So without common frustration or risk. So understanding all of this this is going to be your positioning positioning and then your messaging. There's going to be some common problems that I'm going to see regularly when it comes to this. And the most common problems that I see are people trying to sound professional instead of clear. Again, that goes back to radiographs and technical language. they're listing services instead of solving problems. And this is incredibly common, right? A lot of times clients don't know what they actually need. And so Listing Services is good to know like the totality of what your practice does offer. But you need to also break it down in terms of what is this for, what are the benefits of this. And unfortunately, when you're creating content, you need to think about like the least capable pet owners that you encounter. It needs to be so simple that anybody could do it, not just like the highest performers, but if it's simple enough for somebody with a third grade reading level to go through and figure out it's going to be effective for higher reading levels too.

Brandon 00:30:15  The other thing that I see is people copying competitors, and this is just so rampant across the industry. People could, you know, switch out their bios on a competitor website and it would be exactly the same. Copying your competitors is going to make you commoditized. And so putting effort into who it is that we're serving, what we're trying to do, that's really, really not what you want to be going for. The next thing is leading with tools or tactics rather than problems. So again providing the solution right. Like pill endoscopy like you have that. But what's the problem. Why would that be a good instance. Like talking more about diagnostics and the things that you're offering, the types of symptoms people see. So really thinking about the problem more than the tool and tactics is important. And then the other thing is too, is changing your messaging often and typically changing your messaging often comes from not really being clear on what it is that you're trying to achieve, and it's okay to test things.

Brandon 00:31:20  I am a huge fan of testing, but especially over the long term. Marketing takes time, it takes practice, and so we need to get clear on who it is that we're targeting and make it so that it's consistent. Again, if you want to be known for something, you probably have a friend who, like, starts a new business each month. I love these people because they're really optimistic, but at the same time it's like, yeah, what is he even doing now? We're not even going to see him doing this in a month. Like, if you want to be known for something, it's going to take time and it's going to take consistency. And so that's why it's important that we start here and build on it. So for this week I really, really want to challenge you to write your one sentence positioning statement. I would like. If you want to head on over to the Facebook group, The Veterinary Marketing Nerds, maybe we'll be talking about this. We can help each other refine it.

Brandon 00:32:15  If you go to facebook.com, forward slash groups, forward slash Veterinary Marketing Podcast, you can post your position statement there and get some feedback on it. See how we can improve it. I'll be in there commenting and things too. But if you're only going to do one thing, write out what your positioning statement is. Go to the Facebook group, post it in there, and then commit to refining it and getting it better so that you're going to be clear on who it is that you're targeting. Because once you have this figured out and once your clients and and market is basically saying, okay, we want this thing that you're offering, it just becomes adding more traffic to that. And that's something that you can control, something that's scalable. Google ads is my favorite way to do that. Ads Simply create more traffic, but it's not going to create the demand that is going to result from proper positioning and proper messaging match to the market that you're trying to do. So this is the first step.

Brandon 00:33:20  If you get this right, everything else is going to seem a lot easier. It's still challenging, but this is going to make marketing far easier. So head on over to the Facebook group. Veterinary marketing nerds are not Veterinary Marketing Podcast. It's facebook.com, forward slash groups of marketing nerds. I'm going to post and pin this week's episode in there, and then below that we'll have these positioning statements written out. I hope this was helpful. If you enjoyed this podcast, be sure to share it to somebody who thinks you think could also benefit from it as well. If you ever have any feedback, you need help or you'd like to drive more clients into your practice, send me an email. It's Brandon at Maverick Digital Marketing and I'll see you on next week's episode. Have a great one!