VMP 308: How To Convert More Veterinary Website Traffic Without Spending More On Ads

Brandon 00:00:00  In today's episode, we're going to be talking all about what would happen if you could double your clients without spending more or working harder on getting more traffic. Today's episode is all about how to increase conversion rates so that you can increase your clients. In the last two episodes, we talked about positioning and messaging, which is really important. It's how to get the right people to find you and then how do we increase demand and visibility. So if we have people coming to your website, coming to your Google business profile, coming to your social channels, the question that we're going to be answering today is one of the most important ones, and that's what happens when they actually land on your website or your social profiles. What happens when they call your practice, and how can we increase the chances that we're going to actually turn those people into clients who come in the doors in your practice? I want you to think about something that is traffic is number one. It's always going to cost you something. It doesn't matter if it's coming through organic and SEO.

Brandon 00:01:01  That takes work. Doesn't matter if it's pay per click ads. It doesn't matter if it's videos that you're producing for social. If you're driving attention and generating attention, that is going to generate a cost to your practice. And the difference between being successful and then also failing is conversion. Conversion is the leverage that gives you either success or failure. So marketing doesn't fail at the traffic level. And I think that's a really important distinction that most veterinary practices fail to realize. And this happens so often. If you're getting and I have just thinking back to to some clients where we're getting phone calls and we're getting clients who are actively in market for the services that they offer at their practice, but they're not converting those people into actual clients. And that is a huge problem because it fails Not at the traffic level, but at the conversion level. So many times practices get marketing and sales mixed up. They think that if we're driving clicks to the website, that means that they're the clients or potential clients are actually going to be converting themselves.

Brandon 00:02:15  And while there is going to be a small segment of clients who desperately want and need your services, the vast majority of people coming to your site don't already know, like, and trust you, and so they're going to need some persuasion to become clients. If you think about any time people make a purchase decision, it's not because they believe that the value to what you're offering is equal to what they're paying. They actually have to believe that it's worth more than what they're paying. I'll give you a quick example. If I said to you, hey, I have a $20 bill and you have a $20 bill, why don't you drive over to my house and we'll trade $20 with each other? It'll be an equal trade of value. You give me 20, I give me 20. We're both happy. That is not how anybody does business. If you think about anything you buy, the thing that you're buying is actually worth more to you than the value of the money that you're giving. So equal or lesser value is going to be something that somebody like, I'm not going to waste time for that.

Brandon 00:03:14  So whenever we're trying to convert clients, we need to be exceeding the potential value of what the services are. And there's a few ways that we can do that. One of the laziest ways is drop the the cost and start to doing do. Discounts and discounts are very effective, but they're also like a drug. And we're going to talk about that more here in in just a second. Let's review really quick. We have conversion as an important pillar of improving your practices marketing. Pillar number one is positioning. So we need to be attracting the right people. Pillar number two is visibility. That's how people get to see you if they don't know you exist, if they don't see any type of materials, whether it's organic content, email content, blog content, pay per click ads, whatever it is that you're doing, you have to generate visibility and attract attention. And then we need to convert that attention. So if pillars one and two are working, so if we're getting the right positioning, we're getting the right people to land on the site.

Brandon 00:04:18  And we're getting the right people to engage with your social and you're still not growing. Then we have a conversion problem. So the thing that I like to use is the conversion equation. So if you have, let's say $100 in ad spend and you get 100 clicks for those $100, and you get one client from that, you have a 1% conversion rate and it's costing you $100 to get a client. If you can improve the conversion on that page and change nothing else. And let's say you can go from a 1% conversion to a 3% conversion. You now have three clients, and the only thing that has changed is the conversion rate. But profit is going to explode anytime we can do a lift in conversion rates. Everything works better. And so this is really really important to be thinking about. So let's talk about a conversion system and applying that into your practice. A conversion system is going to be a system that moves people through your practice in a consistent and strategic method. Going from being a total stranger into being a client who knows, likes, trusts you, refers people to your practice.

Brandon 00:05:36  So that system includes several pieces. You have websites which I think websites are important to be very broad in that if somebody is doing research about you and you want to have as much SEO coverage as possible, you want it to be pretty broad and websites need to do a good job of conveying what you're about. All the stuff that we talked in, the positioning and positioning and messaging sections, they help to give people a good, high level overview of everything your practice does. Beyond that, we have landing pages, and landing pages are fantastic because they have one goal and one traffic segment in mind for that. So a perfect example is go to your website real quick. Look at the services page. You probably have a dental services page on there. And it just says, you know, we do dental cleanings, we do extractions. And you know, dental health is important to your pet, right? That definitely is helpful for somebody that's looking for general vet and is looking to see if if this vet does everything that I would need possibly.

Brandon 00:06:41  But if you have somebody that's searching for dog teeth cleaning your me, they hit a landing page or they hit your services page and it just says, hey, we do these things. Good luck. Figure it out. That's not going to convert. As well as a page that has one specific goal of trying to attract and engage people that are searching for dog teeth cleaning near me. So landing pages are really, really important. The next thing that's important is calls to action. The the change that you make in terms of calls to action can really affect your conversion rate. And we'll talk about that in greater detail. Then we have booking flow. So many practices are using online booking. But I think it's actually working harder against them than it is working for them when it comes to new clients and new client acquisition. Trust signals are another important element of conversion systems. People are like sheep. They like to move in packs. And the more social proof that you can put behind your practice and what your practice is good at, what other people experience.

Brandon 00:07:38  That is really, really helpful in boosting your conversion. And then finally we have lead handling. So when somebody either books an appointment or is calling your practice, these are the biggest places where practices are dropping the ball. And so that is something that we're going to talk about. We have a lot of really great tools and things for you too that you can get for free. So in going back to building a conversion system into your marketing materials for your practice, we really need to think about what I like to call the veterinary conversion path. So there's really five steps that one of your potential clients has to go through in order to become a client. The first step in this veterinary conversion path is attention. So if somebody doesn't see or know about your practice, it doesn't exist to them. There's so many things that you have no clue exist out there that are really cool, and just simply existing is not going to get people to be attentive to the fact that they exist. So number one, we need to capture attention.

Brandon 00:08:43  Once we capture attention, we have to get interest. If somebody sees something cool like let's say you see a really cool like. exotic fish store that has like fish tanks and cool things, but like, I don't have the need for a fish tank, so I'm not going to go in there. But it's cool that it exists, right? We have to generate interest. Once we generate interest, we have to generate clarity. So what is it that this practice offers? Who is it for? That's all. Going back to that messaging and positioning section that we talked about two episodes ago. Once they see that, they have to have some level of trust okay, these people are making these claims. Here's how we know that it's probably going to work for me too. That's what is a really important thing when it comes to all the content on your site. It needs to be why does this matter to me? That's what the client's thinking. And so in framing the different sections of your website, whether it's the About Us page or the, you know, different services page, we have to generate trust that this is actually going to work out, but more importantly, that it's going to work for me.

Brandon 00:09:49  People a lot of times think that they have very unique problems. And so they're like, okay, great, you do those things, but is it going to work in my instance, in my case. And then we have to give people clear calls to action. And that's action which is the last step. So attention interest clarity trust and action. And with those steps you can lose people at every step of those places. The biggest conversion killers that we see across, whether it's social content websites, emails that are being sent out, whatever it is, any type of marketing, these are the three biggest killers for conversion. the first one. And so many practices are guilty of this is that they try to do too much when we need simplicity. So too many calls to action is the biggest killer of conversion. If we could just get the the client or potential client to do one specific action, what would we want that to be? So if we're posting things on social, are we posting this to get engagement? Are we trying to build our followers? Are we trying to expand our reach and find potential new clients there? What is the goal of that post that you're putting out? And that's going to depend on the stage of the funnel that you're building content for.

Brandon 00:11:07  So I think you need to have a mix of content in general. Right. We're going to have some specific content that's just for awareness, getting more eyeballs on there, more engagement on there. We're going to have some content that's just for evaluation. We want people to follow, like share, comment, those types of engagement. And then we have types of posts that are going to be conversion focused. So it's going to be book and appointment set up, you know opt in for our newsletter. Things that are conversion actions. But if you have too many goals with the posts that you're doing or the emails that you're sending out, or the landing pages or even website pages, you're not going to get people to take the action that you're probably looking for. So we always start at the end and with the end in mind. What is the goal of this thing that we're creating? If we've got a page that's a services page, but it's laid out of more educational, that would be not necessarily aligned with the goal of converting people.

Brandon 00:12:05  So competing goals are just going to create competing outcomes. And typically people are going to be confused about what to do. And confused people don't convert. Confusion is the biggest killer of conversions across the board. So what is if you're looking at any type of marketing collateral that you have, what is the goal of this marketing collateral? A lot of times, people will put out ads on social and they'll say, you know, I didn't get any clients from it. And the reason is there wasn't a clear call to action. You were trying to get views, impressions, likes, follows. And you're hoping that people are also going to book an appointment while at the same time you're trying to educate people, right? So it's trying to do all these things and chances are it's going to do none of them. The next biggest conversion killer is unclear. Next steps. So even with calls to action of Learn More or, you know, general very kind of non-committal language, you're going to get less conversion for booking appointments.

Brandon 00:13:07  So book appointment is a great one. Call now to book an appointment. Call now to speak with our team. Those types of calls to action that are very clear if we're thinking about what is the next step that we want this page to be accomplishing, the calls to action have to line up with the intent that we're trying to to drive here. The other thing is that a lot of times are just no direction, no calls to action, and you're hoping that the client is going to put two and two together and do things on their own. And that really, really kills conversions. People really need to be told what to do next, and not only do they need to be told, it needs to be highlighted and easy to see. So many times. Buttons are hidden, and it just looks like all of the other elements in the page. And a change as small as changing the color of the button so that it stands out more will increase conversion rates. So people need to be very, very clear on what to do next.

Brandon 00:14:04  And then also make that stand out and easy to understand. So simplicity is something that is incredibly helpful. What is the next step that we want them to do? What is the easiest way for us to get them to do that? And a quick note to within that is that you should really try to make this as easy as possible on the client. So what is the way that they actually want to communicate with you? What is the easiest way for them to hit that next step? And so many times I see practices who are pretty choosy about, well, we don't want people reaching out to us this way, even though they try to do that all the time. Right? Like, that's not the way that you should be thinking. We need to make this as easy as possible on the client so that it's easy for them to come into the practice. And the third biggest conversion killer is that there's no risk reduction. a lot of times people don't know, like, and trust you yet.

Brandon 00:15:03  And so why should they? So we want to give as much social proof as possible, highlighting reviews, but also highlighting reviews that are specific to the situation that that person is in as well. So if they're seeing, you know, reviews about emergencies and it's on an emergency services page, or if they're seeing reviews about dental procedures and it's on the dental procedure page, also adding proof as well. So before and after pictures for dental cleanings, also reassurance and things. The thing, especially in today's economy, with all of the craziness going on in the world, We're at war with Iran right now. Fuel prices are crazy. People don't buy because they're convinced. They buy because they feel that they're making a safe decision. And as the economy gets more challenging, which I think it's going to with gas prices are going to continue to go up. The world is feeling pretty unsafe, pretty crazy. There's a lot of noise going on. And so signaling safety for purchasing decisions is going to help you to increase your conversion rate.

Brandon 00:16:09  And using reviews, proof and reassurance that they're making the right decision in coming to your practice is going to help them to feel safe. And I really think that people who can master signaling the types of messages that the market needs to feel safe, to feel certain and feel secure about making their buying decisions, are going to be a lot more successful. So within your pages, there's a practical framework that I like to use for making sure that each of the types of pages or you can use this this framework across social posts that are going to help you to have really high conversion rates. The first thing is going to be a clear headline. So this is a call out whether it's a hook or a call out who is this for? What are we targeting? So if the headline needs to be clear, people will read the headline and then they'll skim the rest. So we need to distill what we're after, what is the benefit to the client and hook them with that headline. So headlines are amazing to test consistently so that you're always working on seeing what is working better, what's giving you better calls to our conversion rates.

Brandon 00:17:24  The next thing that's going to help you to generate more conversion is going to be one clear call to action. So is it book online. Is it call now? basically what is the call to action? What are you hoping for them to do? Is it opt in for a newsletter. Is it like follow comments, share those types of things. So making sure that we have the proper call to action. Fast load speeds. Your website needs to load quickly. And so there's a lot of things that you can do to make sure that that's being done. Making sure that the videos are compressed. If you have videos on your page, make sure that your images are compressed, making sure that your website is fully optimized. If you're sending people to websites that it loads really, really fast. If people have to wait, they're going to just bounce and not stay there. And then the fourth thing is that we have to be mobile first. So that is typically 90% of traffic is mobile across your websites on social.

Brandon 00:18:25  It needs to be mobile first. And, you know, stop designing for desktop, which is a small percentage of your traffic, and think about that too. When it comes to calls to action for mobile, that's going to be things like texting, calling, right? Because they're on their phone. It's super simple just to push the button and then be talking, getting the answers that they need. And so make sure that calls to action are also appropriate. There's so many times I see practices that have online booking, and it's like 7 to 12 steps to confirm an appointment. And then on top of that to you, I see practices that are requesting that they pay for their first visit before to try to reduce snow shows, and I understand why people want to do that. But at the same time, your conversion rate is going to drop. And typically we see about a 20 times reduction in conversion rate from practices that are requiring credit card payment method. So I would really, really suggest that if you can set up better follow up and lead capture systems.

Brandon 00:19:29  So when somebody books an appointment, they get a phone call right away, they get a text message right away. They get another phone call in text message. 24 hours later, they get another phone call in text message 24 hours before they get another phone call or text message an hour before, and have the work be dependent upon the team to make sure that those people are coming in, that they're feeling secure, safe, and that they are communicating with your practice, rather than hoping that you're going to get people to buy online without no liking and trust in you first. If you think about most any appointment system that like you use as a consumer. Very few businesses require that you pay before you have a meeting. And so that just is like a kind of a red flag. And, the other thing too, is if you're in bed and you're using like, let's say you're, you're booking an appointment in the middle of the night, and then you get to the point where you have to get up, walk over, find your wallet, find your credit card, put in your info like that's going to be a big hassle and you're just going to abandon it and say, I'll call tomorrow and then you forget to call, right? So that is a conversion killer that I see, and I've been measuring that with clients a lot in that if they're there setting those appointments with payment collection, your conversion rate is going to plummet.

Brandon 00:20:48  So maybe do a better option if you have to be accepting payments or deposits for appointments. I think doing that on the phone and framing it in a way that you're doing it for the benefit of the client to make sure that we don't have no shows, and that we're making sure our schedule is running on time so we can get quick and prompt, you know, appointments we don't have to overbook and things like that. Some really important trust builders that you need to do and use are going to be reviews, photos, credentials. When it comes to building high converting assets, clarity is going to be design every single time. And it's cool to have beautiful design. And I don't think you should, you know, try to make something that's ugly. But at the same time, clarity is going to be designed every single time, so don't overcomplicate things. Make it simple. Clear. Headline one call to action. Fast load speeds. Design mobile first, and you're going to be light years ahead when it comes to your booking and lead capture.

Brandon 00:21:53  We talked about this just a second ago, but this truly is where money is lost. This is a huge differentiator, and we have clients that are doing as much as 1,900% return on ad spend with their Google ads, and it's because they get this. So things that kill conversion on the booking and lead capture, long forms and difficult processes, especially ones that aren't easy to do on mobile. The thing that I think is great for existing customers is that you can choose the vets that you want to use, but if it's a new client and you're booking and you're asking them to make a decision of which doctor they want to see, that is going to give them more choices. And the more choices that you give somebody, the higher the chance that they're going to be disappointed. It's really weird if you look at the most successful businesses, things like In and Out, for example, or chick fil A like, they have simplicity, you have a few choices and they do one thing, but they do it really, really well.

Brandon 00:22:53  So you're setting up your customer for the potential to be disappointed if if they have to choose the vet. So I really don't like putting that in if possible, especially if you have a big team. And I see this happen all the time where there's like 13 doctors to choose from, if people feel unsure or confused, they're going to just quit. So don't give them the option if it's not incredibly important. The booking systems. Also, I would say please don't put credit card payment required, because that is definitely something that kills conversion. And I see that you have to make a math decision. So figure out, you know, how many potential no shows are you getting versus how many potential new clients are you missing and figure out which one makes the most sense. And I do know that there are situations and outliers in certain markets where the no show rate is super high. So make sure that you're really giving people all the info that they need. But if you can avoid charging at that first booking, I would say avoid that it's going to help to increase your conversion.

Brandon 00:24:02  The next thing that's really simple is missed calls. I am so frustrated sometimes when we have clients that are needing appointments and we know that they need appointments, we're generating calls, we can listen to the voicemails, and people are waiting 2 or 3 hours to get back to highly urgent cases. And by the time they call back, they say, oh, you know what? I already got it taken care of. But if you're missing phone calls, it is definitely costing you money. and then back to that is slow response times. So make sure that you are not missing phone calls, that if somebody does miss you, call them back within 5 to 10 minutes at the greatest. But if your phone isn't answered, you're just donating money to your competitors. The other thing is simple scripts. You have to have a script in place. If you don't have a script in place for your CSRs to be working on, then you don't have any way to know what's working and what's not. I actually like a bad script better than no script at all, because if we have a bad script and we see that it's not converting, we can make changes and improve it.

Brandon 00:25:06  But if you're just hoping that it's going to get taken care of, you're missing out on so much potential revenue. If you look back, I think it's episode 301. I did a CSR training episode. It goes really in-depth on how to develop a script. Be sure to check that out. I have a workbook that accompanies it that you can use and fill out and really, really dial in your scripting. But practices who are good at converting on the phone versus those who aren't are light years ahead of the other practices. So invest in your team. Make sure they know what to say, that they're saying the right things, that they're asking for appointments. But these are the biggest spots that you're are causing your marketing to not work. And if you're getting clicks, if you're getting the right kinds of people to your practice, you're getting people to take action and then you're dropping the ball on those last steps. It's going to dramatically impact the return on investment for any marketing that you're doing. So when should you use a landing page versus when should you use your website? So the website is really good for exploration and a broad understanding of what your practice offers, what you're about, and those types of things where landing pages really make a big difference is if you have a specific segment of traffic and you have one specific problem, one specific solution, And one call to action.

Brandon 00:26:33  You're going to get so much more conversion. If you think about giving people the information that they need, without them having to do all of the work and figuring out what we have to do, what's going to be included, those additional steps that you're asking the client to take is going to cause decision fatigue, and make people either give up or not be certain on what to do. And so they'll just they'll just leave. So websites are, you know, helpful in giving people the information that they need to think. Right. And so I think a lot of times veterinarians because they love learning, obviously they went to all of this schooling and they feel like more information is more valuable. But the average person is looking to make a decision. And so websites are good for information to help people think your landing pages are helpful because they help people to decide. So is this right for me? Is this the solution that I'm looking for? I have this problem I don't need to learn all about, you know, dental disease.

Brandon 00:27:36  And I don't need to learn all about, you know, these additional things. And is it great if it's framed as a benefit? It absolutely is. But people are looking for decisions, not more information. And very rarely, if you just give people more information and you teach them everything that they need to know, that's not going to help them to necessarily make a decision. They might be more informed when they decide, but really what they're looking for is I have this problem. Is this the solution that's going to get me to my goal and provide the value that I'm looking for? I think dental procedures are a great example of that, because if you give somebody, you know, 15 blog posts about dog dental disease, you're not necessarily going to convert them into a client versus if you had a really well structured dental landing page where you talk about the problem, the benefits, everything that's included, how they don't have to worry about it. They're going to be taken care of. And by the end of this, here's the before, here's the after.

Brandon 00:28:38  Here's what you're going to get. It's simple. It's easy book now. Right. That's a very different experience for the client. So I think a lot of times within conversion rates, especially if you're doing some type of paid advertising, Google ads really, really fits into this. So ads are, I think, a really good pressure test because they're going to expose weaknesses quickly. in terms of your competition, especially when it comes to corporate competition that's out there, being sure that you're able to not only survive in your market, but also thrive, being able to apply traffic quickly is going to let you know where there's issues within your funnel and how you can improve those, those issues, so that we're going to increase conversion as quickly as possible. I think a lot of practices are confusing, whether it's pay per click ads on Facebook and Instagram or on Google or any traffic source for that matter. They think that just getting more traffic equals more clients. And I think hopefully we've illustrated that that's not the case because we're injecting a lot of confusion, a lot more steps, and asking the clients to do a lot of work.

Brandon 00:30:03  So if we can really break down those, those five steps and try to target people that are interested and hopefully so they're problem aware and also hopefully solution where they not only want something but they also need it and they know what they need. We can then step down that veterinary conversion path more quickly and give them the clarity, trust and action that they need to take action and become an actual client. So I'm a big fan of paid traffic. Just because it's something that you can scale, you can turn on and off, you can turn it up and down. But the bottom line is Google ads or meta ads or TikTok ads. It's not going to fix your system problems. It's going to reveal if there are problems and where those problems are happening. The easiest way to break that down is to look at all of the steps that need to be taking place within your practice. So step one is we need to show up when somebody's searching for something. Step two is we need to get the click on the ad.

Brandon 00:31:12  Step three is we need to get a conversion either on the website or a call extension or a phone call. And from there we need to then convert that potential person, whether it's through online booking or a phone call. And then once that happens, we need to make sure that the proper follow up and expectations are being set. So across all of those steps, we can easily identify where is the problem if we're getting impressions but not getting clicks? We need to change the ad if we're getting clicks, but we're not getting conversions. Are we getting the right types of clicks? Is it the right expectation of traffic? Okay, we're getting the right calls, but we're not getting conversions. Now we can see that the the conversion problem is happening on the phone. And if you can develop systems for each one of these steps, it's going to be a problem that you don't have to worry about anymore. If you know that you're able to apply traffic and get conversions, it then just becomes a problem of figuring out how do we increase the value on that first visit so that we can keep increasing our return on investment? Or how can we decrease the cost to get somebody there? And so it becomes a math problem that you don't have to worry about, and you can grow your practice as quickly as you would like.

Brandon 00:32:23  So I know that this is a lot to cover. If you think that you might have a conversion problem or issue in your practice. If you'd like for me to review that, I'd be happy to do that. You could just send me an email at Brandon at Maverick Digital Marketing Comm, and I'm happy to do that and let you know what I think. and if you have any questions, comments, need help with anything? Please don't hesitate to reach out. But I will say that this is one of those problems in your practice that is 100% worth focusing on because it's going to give you compounding results. So if you fix your conversion problems, any marketing activity that you do is going to be more effective. So be sure to think about this. Think about it regularly and always work to improve conversion rates across your marketing. I hope this was helpful. If you enjoyed this podcast. Be sure to like it, share, comment, and share it with somebody that you think could also benefit. I'll see you on next week's episode.

Brandon 00:33:24  Have a great one!