VMP 309: Breaking the Corporate Mold: How Small Vet Practices Can Win Big with Authentic Marketing

Brandon 00:00:01  Consolidation is eating the veterinary industry. But here's the thing. A funded corporate group size is actually its biggest weakness. And in today's episode, we talk about how local level vets and independent practices have no idea how much unique opportunity that they're sitting on right now. Today I have a guest. His name is Cebron Walker and he is the owner of Walker Creative. It's Walker with the K. I'm sorry, creative with the K. Walker obviously is okay, but he's an agency owner and he's got a lot of really cool experience, especially within corporate PR background before he got into marketing. He's got a new book that's dropping on July 31st, so it's just coming out in a couple weeks. But he's one of the people I've been interested in speaking to, especially with his background in PR. Today, we get into why corporates become so generic and why marketing director Turnover every single year is harming their marketing strategy. But the benefit that you have. As an independent practice, we dive into how to exploit that and grow.

Brandon 00:01:11  And we also talk a lot about differentiation. And that's what his book that's coming out here is all about. So this episode is especially powerful for independent practices who feel like they are trying to compete and keep up with corporate groups. And so I think you're going to find a lot of value in this. So without further ado, here is Sam Walker. Well, thank you so much for being on the podcast. I'm excited to have you here. Can you tell everybody who you are and how you got started in veterinary medicine?

Cebron 00:01:42  For sure. Well. So name's Cebron Walker. Walker creative is my agency. And, I was in corporate public relations and then was hired as the VP marketing, at a corporate education technology company. 12, 13 years ago. And and I guess it was sort of like a midlife crisis kind of situation where I rapidly realized, you know what, at this point in my life, I could help so many more people than I'm helping this one business owner or company. And I thought the only way to do it is to open my own marketing agency.

Cebron 00:02:20  And so created Walker Creative. I really went out on a limb to do it. You know, it was very much classically one of those get with your wife and go, you know, new kid. And can we make enough money to do it? Like, can we bet on ourselves? And we did it. And it was a good bet. I've enjoyed it ever since. And how veterinary, the whole veterinary world came into it was pretty quick. you know, having an agency that helped small businesses. I got a veterinary practice that wanted help to get new clients and so helped them. And then it just sort of over time, in the last 10 or 11 years, we've gotten more and more veterinary clients than I joined vet partners and sort of got into that network of helping the whole industry. And it's been wonderful. And I can I can definitely tell you that, because my other dental clients and so forth are pay me not watching this that, veterinarians are my favorite clients. They are wonderful people.

Brandon 00:03:28  Oh, that's that's really interesting. I think there's so much to learn from outside of that med with respect to marketing. for sure. And I do think, too, that especially the dental space that is, I don't I don't think veterinarians know how good they have it when it comes to marketing services and marketing practices. Like, I know for sure that dental is like crazy cost per clicks, crazy cost per conversions. and I'm sure that the organic side is very, very competitive too. They just seem like they put ten times the amount of marketing budget into a dental practice then like an average veterinary hospital. So I'm sure there's a lot of things that you learn. Yeah, I would.

Cebron 00:04:07  I would agree with you that, especially in the, in the big markets, you know, the bigger cities, I mean, small towns where you have a couple dentists is one thing. But when you get into, you know, Sacramento and bigger Salt Lake City, Chicago, LA, New York, San Francisco or Miami and Tampa Bay and all the bigger markets, insane ad spend and marketing spend to just compete at all and cost of the team itself.

Cebron 00:04:33  there's just so much more involved in that in veterinarians. along with being wonderful people and, I think, because you're helping animals, there's something about the emotion of that that lends itself to being a wonderful industry. it's maybe has its. It has its own stresses of course. And of course, our pets are part of our family, but they're not, you know, a son or a daughter or someone, a family member that's dying or having extreme pain. I mean, that that that could be it can cause like a whole different world of of challenge.

Brandon 00:05:14  Yeah, definitely. Definitely. That totally makes sense. Yeah. I think, I had some family friends who were doing the dental practice in Orange County, and I think they were spending about 300,000 a month in Google ads. but they had a lot of dentists that worked at their practice. And so pretty crazy stuff. So that's very cool. Well, with respect to the, the clients and things that you're working with in veterinary medicine right now, I think the market, the economy, there's a lot of things that are going on that are pretty difficult kind of before we dive into some specific stuff.

Brandon 00:05:51  So where do you see the market at right now for most hospitals. And what are you kind of seeing when it comes to the state of like client acquisition and, and things in general?

Cebron 00:06:02  I'm, I'm very optimistic to be to right off the bat because there is, you know, corporate purchasing of practices. And I've had some of my practices that I've been helping for years, like five or 6 or 7 years. And then they call me and go, Cebron. You know, we hate to say this, but the offer was so good from I won't name the the corporate buyout people, the companies, but it was just like I couldn't pass it up, you know, eight figures and and so they said, you know, we've demanded you stay on as our marketer, but we never know what's really going to happen. And in each of those cases, I think it's three I've gone through, one just recently where we did stay on as the marketing partner, for about a year And then as that relationship goes, over time, the corporation has gets more power and takes over.

Cebron 00:06:59  And then what happens and why? I'm optimistic about the independent veterinary practice owner, is that you have all the power to make decisions and do great marketing and have a great business. when the corporation takes over, it becomes like McDonald's. It's like everything has to feel the same. And it's, you know, you're tending to get decisions that are going to apply to, you know, 50 or 100 or more practices. Right? And they're not built for that community market, the families you're serving and those relationships you've built over time and they're it's you can do so much with that to make yourself unique so that if you're the independent practice or there's a few in your town, but then you have some corporate practices, you can blow them away. You're the way you present yourself can blow them away with so many points. And I cover that, you know, in the book I'll be releasing in July on July 31st, actually all about this exact subject.

Brandon 00:08:01  Definitely. I see the same thing and the thing that happens consistently.

Brandon 00:08:08  So even if even if corporate group says, yeah, you're your team, you're, you know, everything can stay the same. There's just so much turnover in these large corporate groups that they'll hire a new marketing director. It happens about once a year, and then the new marketing director brings in all of their new initiatives, typically. And so it's just a constant churning inside of those groups that is then pushing out former relationships that you've had, have had the same thing where stay on for at most about a year. But it's interesting to get like an inside look in those big groups as far as what they're doing, and.

Cebron 00:08:42  How often they'll often make decisions that are not necessarily based on, numbers. They're not based on the math. They'll bring a friend in like a good old boy they went to college with that had a marketing company, and they'll go, hey, come on in and do our marketing. It doesn't mean they're good at marketing, you know. And I've, I've seen some disasters where that they weren't.

Cebron 00:09:05  And it was just because they the the two, the two bosses knew each other.

Brandon 00:09:10  Yeah. 100%. And totally, totally agree. But I think that the a big trap that a lot of practices fall into is that they try to match or they think they can't match the big budgets, which in my opinion is just kind of like there's there's two types of marketing. You have scale marketing. And then if you have to be tactical and you don't have endless budgets, you have to do different strategies for sure. So I think one one of the things that we were talking about specifically that you cover a lot in your book is how to compete against these big corporate groups. So what's what's your favorite way? Because I'm, I'm 100% with you. The big groups take a long time to make decisions. They're making decisions at scale. They're looking at numbers that are not specific to each practice location, just kind of general trends and things. So they're trying to scale and cast as wide as possible. What's what's your favorite things to be doing that helps to really make a big impact?

Cebron 00:10:08  Yeah, that's a perfect point to to discuss.

Cebron 00:10:11  And the whole beginning of my book. and we can show it, you know, like this, this is it, this I'll be honest with all of our viewers. and, Brandon, we didn't talk about, when you were going to publish it, the podcast. but this is going to release on July 31st. So, this is a completely fake copy. This this is a cover I printed out and stuck on a book that's approximately the size of the book. It's about 210 pages. But, the whole beginning of the book is about how to differentiate, differentiate yourself, you know, pick your target audience. What makes your target audience special? Is it dogs? Cats? Or is it dogs and cats? Or is there exotics involved, or is it equine practice? Do you do farm animals? And the book goes over actual exercises of how to develop out and really spot your best client. Right. And then the next step is then how to message, how to how to develop your messaging and branding to communicate perfectly to that exact target audience.

Cebron 00:11:23  It might make your audience a little bit less, but it makes it so much more powerful. So you get all of them, and then they stay with you for a lifetime. And we all know you want all those new clients and then but you want them to stay for a long time. And it lends itself with all the different veterinary practices I've worked with and I'm still working with over these years. By doing that process, They constantly say, well, Cebron, let's do. We're making good money. We don't want to be any more busy. Don't you know? Cut down on advertising? We don't want to be as busy. We're plenty busy. But because we understand your philosophy. Let's do a new video shoot this summer. Let's improve the way our social media presents our our practice. Right? Let's really show off our new doctors and our staff and how awesome our team is, how it's family oriented. And so we get to go there and we get to create, get to create products at a deeper level that really show off that practice.

Cebron 00:12:25  And that is a completely changes the game for their positioning in their community. And that is how they blow away the corporate, the corporate offices that might be trying to spend $5,000 a month or more on advertising that drives. And Brandon, you and I have talked about this. You can spend a ton of money on ads. That's a lot. A lot of it gets wasted if you don't drive them to a great. Whether it's a landing page or a website or some kind of a funnel that then shares the human aspect of that practice and how you're going to treat those animals with a background of great social media and a great, you know, Google business profile and all that so that it's a real human entity. The practice itself has that humanized aspect to it. the combination of that with great advertising that you do makes a perfect world.

Brandon 00:13:21  Definitely. What are some of the things that you do to make things more human and and different? Because I think different is easy to spot, right? If you see something that's out of line or, or out of place and it's just different, you're naturally is designed to find differences and things.

Brandon 00:13:38  Do you find all the different ones than all the same ones? Right. So how how do you specifically go after trying to highlight differences. And what are some of the biggest differences you think practices should be trying to highlight?

Cebron 00:13:50  Yeah, well, I think if you were to go to pick randomly, go to 5 or 6 veterinary websites, you'll tend to see stock video or stock pictures of really great families with kittens and puppies, or if it's good, or if you're a horse doctor of equine sites, with this beautiful galloping horse. Right. But the difference maker is if you shoot video of your actual practice of your staff working with, you know, horses or cats and dogs or exotics or whatever, your, your, you know, your niche is, and you have video, photos, those kinds of things that help to tell your story as soon as you arrive to your website and the different service pages, you know, if you do dental on dogs and cats or dental on horses, or if you do, you know, a puppy package or a kitten package, and it's like when you have a new cat coming into your household, here's what you do.

Cebron 00:14:58  And it's like it's a little step by step photo montage of what we do with your cat when you come in. Right. or you do a symptom checker for sick animals. And you describe each of the types of symptoms and then pictures of what this might look like. Like we do this with our clients and we either coach the client, you know, because we all have either an iPhone or a or a Samson Android phone. And they got great cameras on them. And so certainly we can come out there with a professional camera and we can get photos and video to do this for you. But before that happens, if we want to get it fixed right now. We can coach you with a phone just like this. And we go around and we shoot. We shoot video like with with being just a real stable hand with panning, you know, shots pushing in, pulling away from, you know, being inside a treatment room, shooting a close up of a doggy dental and then pulling out and walking out the door doing that kind of stuff, taking photos this way.

Cebron 00:16:07  This is all good for video or pictures for the website, then social media, of course. You turn your phone vertically and you get a doctor describing what they're doing with a with a patient, or one of the staff is taking care of a sick dog that's just had surgery. And they're being really caring with the animal and it's showing it. It's not just that that AI text on a hero banner of a website that says caring, compassionate veterinary care, right. Like it's on every website. No, we show caring and compassionate. And then when we. The language we use is real language, not just the same language on every other veterinary website.

Brandon 00:16:48  Yeah, 100%. I see. I think that's the biggest problem for most practices is that, especially in today's market, there's just a few like really large. The corporatization isn't just limited to practice ownership. It's like every industry, right. And so you have massive corporations that are also doing marketing at scale. And so everything is just incredibly templated.

Brandon 00:17:13  And so as a result, you can just swap websites and change a logo. And it would basically be the same thing, you know, change out, change out the team members names and you'd be you wouldn't be able to tell the difference honestly. And so I think that's that's a big thing.

Cebron 00:17:27  100%. And as you go through this book, the it's it's ten chapters with five appendices. Right. And so it has introductory information of like getting you started in the first chapter alone, you will be given tools, exercises and actual direction to immediately change your marketing, but it through the ten chapters. It gives you the exact seven steps of the formula to make your marketing great. Now there. I'm not saying this is the only formula, but this is my formula that has been developed from experience in the last ten years that works with every practice we've worked with. It's a seven step formula. It takes you through that. And then the five appendices are actual doing work, you know, exercises to do in your practice as you're reading the book.

Cebron 00:18:18  you know, the owner certainly should read it, office manager, practice manager. Or if you have someone that's got the marketing hat that's been assigned to them for a few hours every week, they're going to be the marketing person in the practice. Maybe they're taking care of social media. It's a perfect book to hand them. I can't wait for it to release on July 31st on Amazon. certainly there'll be a landing page of my own to talk all about it, and then you'll be able to buy it on Amazon. Very cool.

Brandon 00:18:46  So, a quick question about video that I think would be interesting to get your take on. But a lot of the big brands these days, one that comes to mind readily is like master class, which they have these very, very highly produced, incredible production videos, with like Werner Herzog and, you know, all of these big names that are on, on their platform teaching these really high level courses. When you look at both the ads that they're doing and the social, they have their you can tell they're actively trying to create more authentic UGC style video when it comes to practice, and specifically with video on the site and things, what line of professionalism and like production quality do you think works best for both social and then also for like website assets and things like that.

Cebron 00:19:42  I think on website assets nothing has to be like overly Hollywood produced. You know, there was a time when especially now in related not that's like a plastic surgery or dental. You had very expensive video shoots that we've been part of that were extraordinarily, detailed, like five a five person crew comes to the they've got wardrobe changes, a makeup artist, you know, three cameras going tons of lights. And it's, you know, I would never in a million years recommend something of that level for a veterinary clinic. It's just too much. And it's. And no one expects that. I would say that there's a foundational level of great video that you should do for your website where you should have a video team. Come. Shoot. You know your welcome video. Your tour video. basic service videos about, you know, laser therapy, dental. If you do some like if you do acupuncture or something like that, you know, kitten, kitten handling, puppies. You know, some of your basic videos for your service pages in your home page and your About Us page, where it does a bit of a tour of the practice.

Cebron 00:21:05  I would say those could be great professionally done videos, but not overly Hollywood. But that's a basic level. And that of course also goes on your YouTube channel to establish an optimized YouTube channel, which Google owns YouTube, and so they work together. If you have a great website, great Google Business profile, and a good YouTube channel, that's all been optimized for search optimization. And today as well AI optimization, and we probably want to touch on AI a little bit as well today. but getting all those set up for talking about video in your YouTube channel, getting all that set up professionally at a foundational level, and most of all of our clients, we've done that. But but that completed now your sort of day to day, week to week activity should be very UCG or user generated content style, meaning that stuff that you shoot with your phone, that's very feeling off the cuff and conversational because that builds trust. It is a trust signal because you're signaling to the the viewer, the audience in your community that's going to see that video, that you're real.

Cebron 00:22:16  You're not AI. There's too much AI garbage out there that is trying to sell you something. And if you just watch it for a second and you're like, that's not reality. Like it's it's it almost looks silly. If you start to pay attention to how many ounces are in the video. Like I just saw one last night, my wife started laughing because it was like selling, a sprayer, a power washer, and it was a wood fence that the guy was power washing. And when he went down the fence and was almost done, the fence was a brick wall. Yeah.

Brandon 00:22:48  Definitely. Yeah, yeah, I totally agree with that. I think to what you mentioned about like the, the high level plastic surgeons, right, where if you're spending $50,000 on the procedure, you probably need production that's going to match that. So there might be instances in vet med, like if you're a neurologist and you're doing, you know, crazy expensive $16,000 surgeries, you don't want them just shooting on a phone and being, you know, sloppy and stuff.

Brandon 00:23:15  So it probably needs to match the audience that you're talking to. Also, with certain respect, but I, I think authenticity and things that are real are becoming more and more valuable just because people don't know what they can believe. And especially as AI video is improving, I mean, the last two years video has gotten so good that it will fool most. Most people these days you can't really believe what you're seeing. So if you can have that authenticity, authenticity and consistency also, I think that's going to that's going to definitely do stuff. And you mentioned YouTube, and I think YouTube is such an underused platform to have local business tools inside of YouTube that pulls and especially with the AI search that's coming out. So it will just announced last week or the week before their new IO update that they're going to switch everybody over to AI search, which is interesting. what in your opinion? So I think that makes YouTube a lot more valuable there. Not especially with Google my business. They're not going to be just pulling from reviews, but they're going to be pulling from from everywhere.

Brandon 00:24:21  And so.

Cebron 00:24:22  Yeah.

Brandon 00:24:23  It's have more are going to be better. What's your what's your take on the updates that came out last week.

Cebron 00:24:28  Yeah. Well a you know, if we start to look at what AI is going to do and change related to search ability, because you have Google, which isn't going away, an SEO work or search engine optimization that practices are doing still needs to happen for Google. And it's also that work is going to help the find ability when someone is talking to ChatGPT or grok or Clod or whatever that AI bot they might have on their phone. The SEO work you've done is going to help that still. But we also. But so now we have to optimize for AI. We have exact tools to do that in Walker Creative and Brandon, I don't know if you've got stuff you're using AI wise to optimize your ads, or.

Brandon 00:25:14  You definitely are using it all the time. I thought it was going to take. It's just there's more work than ever before is what it feels like on our side.

Brandon 00:25:23  And like we have all these new tools that we're using and it's just making things just ten times better. And it feels like we have more. More work than ever to do before because of all these new tools that are out there.

Cebron 00:25:35  I know it's funny that people keep complaining. They're talking about this scary part of like, AI is going to take everybody's jobs, and I find I'm working harder than ever, but I'm using AI to do better work. But it doesn't take my work away, that's for sure.

Brandon 00:25:49  100%. I think it makes data analysis so much better, but I see people and I see this happen from clients, and I can tell that they just pasted my response from my emails into AI, and then they send something back to me. And it's just not good strategy. I think AI right now is good for data analysis, but if you're going to use it for strategy and like just follow what it says, I think you'll have marginally good results. Better than if you're doing nothing.

Brandon 00:26:17  But it's just it's always so general. And I think the experience of knowing this is going to work, let's give it this data insights and then we can use it and collaborate with it. But if you just let it take the wheel, it's going to. I've seen it go really bad. Examples.

Cebron 00:26:34  You know, what's funny is I had to educate a client about this too, because my client had an opinion about the way something was being done. Right. So I gave her advice about how to go forward with the project. And she took just like what you're talking about. She took that my email. She put it into AI and she says into the AI. She goes, I don't really know if I want to do it this way. I was thinking of doing it that way. And so the AI said, that's a great idea. Martha, your idea probably is a fantastic approach to handling this, blah, blah, blah. And so she sent that back to me and said, look, your idea wasn't as good as mine.

Cebron 00:27:15  Yeah.

Brandon 00:27:16  And I said, like, an emperor has no clothes, right? Like right. AI is your yes man in your corner telling you? Yep. Especially ChatGPT. I think, Carlotta, actually, I've been arguing with cloud a lot because I know something is going to work well, and it's like pushing back, which is interesting. Yeah.

Cebron 00:27:30  But I find Claude to be the best.

Brandon 00:27:32  Yeah, I agree that he constantly is like, you're like, I want to start a sock vending machine business. Be like, that's a great idea. Let's, you know.

Cebron 00:27:42  I asked her, I had to I had to to directly ask the client. I said, look. Did you say that you liked your idea better than mine? Did you educate the AI that your idea was the one you wanted? And she said, well, yeah, of course I did. Well, I said, well, the AI is especially just like you said with ChatGPT. It's a yes man. It's going to agree with you.

Brandon 00:28:04  Yeah, 100%. Yeah. I've had the client send me. They wanted to set up ten campaigns at $1 a day. They I told them it was the best idea. It's not going to serve or get enough traffic to give. You know, there's just so many examples that we see pretty consistently that it sounds like it's trying to give you a response that you're going to like. So it's going to typically have a positive bias in it.

Cebron 00:28:26  Totally.

Brandon 00:28:27  Definitely.

Cebron 00:28:28  I'm glad we covered that. That's funny. That's a funny point. But it's as an agency, as someone trying to help a client. It can. It can get in the way.

Brandon 00:28:36  Sometimes I'm sure that the perception is different. On the vet med side, because and I would like to get some comments on this, but, I'm sure that veterinarians are seeing clients come in with, you know, a lot of ideas or knowledge about what's going on with their pet. And so they're probably facing the same thing too. So I would love to see some examples of what that looks like with with comments here.

Brandon 00:29:01  If anybody's been seeing that, I'm sure it's happened a lot. one of my friends, Cody Gillman, posted, he's like, hey, I actually think AI is great. Here's a suggestion prompt for before you come in, if you like. Need to consult AI so that you're going to get better results out of it. so.

Cebron 00:29:17  He was a doctor that actually gave a prompt to use.

Brandon 00:29:21  That. It did. That post did really, really well on Facebook and LinkedIn.

Cebron 00:29:25  And that's so great because he acknowledges AI, but he's getting on the cause side of it by offering the prompt. And it actually, that's a great trust signal because he's telling clients like, I'm going to help you use AI.

Brandon 00:29:41  Yeah, exactly. Because I'm sure that they face the same thing where somebody comes in and they're like, oh, my dog has sepsis. I don't know what to say. I'm sorry, you know? But like, you know, it's not that for sure. 100%. But that's that's really interesting.

Brandon 00:29:55  So with respect to what what you're seeing, especially with AI, have you been noticing AI taking larger market shares specifically around organic side of things? Like what? What are you seeing? from the organic side?

Cebron 00:30:13  I'm not seeing. I'm. What I'm seeing is that we're using AI as a tool for, like you say, for market research and for developing content so we can Developing better. What I love about it is used well and not just asking it to agree with you, but giving it really good prompts. And it does take, trial and error to give it a really good prompt to, let's say, develop a monthly content calendar. Yeah, because it has to really, really know you as a clinic, like all about your community, your environment, the demographics, the age, the young families. Is it seniors? What kind of pets and animals is in the areas at rural? Is it a city? But once you've really developed the prompt it and it understands you, then it can really help you to develop different things in your marketing.

Cebron 00:31:10  And I see it helping us right now. We don't have a lot of clients that are taking advantage of it in a first person perspective, like we're they're doing it, we are a full service agency, so we do most of the work for clients, but there is a couple clients that they do their social, which I appreciate, and I love that when I, when I practice like has a person that they can lean on, that every week is putting a few hours into social media. That's a great, great. That's the biggest thing of independent vet practice can do because they don't they can't necessarily handle their website and all the details with that or video work and different stuff with that, or let's say advertising campaigns that you like, you do. But what they can do is social media, especially if they have a young. And I don't mean this is sound weird, but if they have a young woman on on their staff, they're the best I've ever seen. Always on social media. Right.

Cebron 00:32:05  And and then what we can do is we can guide them with, with a good prompt to say, look, let's get a content calendar and we'll work it out with you ahead of time before every month of the 15 posts you can do this month. So you have 2 or 3 posts a week. They love that help, and then they can just roll with it to create those posts. And, we find that being a very valuable way of using AI, right?

Brandon 00:32:34  Yeah, definitely. I think a lot of people are using it just to generate calendars or posts and things like that. an interesting thing. I think it was back in November of 2025. more than half of the content on the internet at that time was, AI generated. And so it's like training itself. And I think it's not getting better because the inputs, well, I'm better is subjective for sure. But, I think that most content now that's being created consistently is just AI slop that's going out. And I actually think that hurts from an SEO perspective.

Cebron 00:33:15  Totally.

Brandon 00:33:17  You know, I think it's something like 86% of top ranking content is human created. So like the vast majority of content on the internet now, is AI created. But the stuff that ranks well, there's a few case studies that I've seen, within industries, but most of the content that's top ranking is written by an actual person because they want expertise and experience and authority and trust, you know, so those those things I actually think it hurts just to put like ChatGPT write me ten blog posts for my my website to rank, you know, that gets nothing.

Cebron 00:33:55  It gets nothing done for you to use AI to write blog posts gets you nowhere. It does not help your SEO because the algorithms behind Google and any other search engine they already know. They have ways of knowing if it's AI, and they're not going to give you any ranking power as soon as they see it. So yeah, and same with I mean, I had a client that was I guess it's grok or there's a few of the AI Pro accounts that you can generate, the videos and pictures that are AI, and he would just give it a prompt to, generate an AI video, like, you know, no one involved about a subject and post it.

Cebron 00:34:38  And I was like, oh my God, I was holding my head. I'm like, doctor, you have to stop. Like it was getting no engagement and it was destroying trust because no real pet parent wants to see a fake AI picture or video. They want the doctor or a team member at your clinic to tell you how to help your pets.

Brandon 00:35:00  Yeah, exactly. And I think too, if, if, if AI can. Right. And manage this for you and you're not actually providing any value or context within the content, it doesn't. You're just basically skipping the step of them going to AI and and getting the same information that they can do, which is just generic and and not helpful. And I think that really goes back to positioning and trying to be an expert telling stories about clients, what happened, giving actual examples and really building in the right messaging for the types of clients that you're looking to attract rather than just, you know, putting putting more AI out there, which I think is going to be the difficult thing.

Brandon 00:35:43  One one thing that I see with respect to AI, and specifically it seems like a lot of the signals for organic, for local business is built around not just pulling from your website and your Google business profile, but also what people are saying about you. And I think that's an interesting angle, because I don't actually know anybody who's worked in PR, but when it comes to PR and generating, I guess is, would you say PR is mostly about getting people to talk about your business that is outside of it? Is that like how you would describe PR in general?

Cebron 00:36:20  Partially, yes. the, the concept about, let's say, PR and marketing, because I've done my whole first career, as I mentioned, was PR and then it became marketing and as tools. PR comes before marketing. So imagine if you are a new doctor in a town, you bought a clinic, you got out of school and you bought a clinic, and it was your dream to have a new clinic in. Let's just pick Boise, Idaho.

Cebron 00:36:47  Okay. And so you arrived to that town, but no one knows you. Right. And imagine just starting out going. I'm going to spend $2,000 a month on meta ads into Boise, but yet no one knows who you are. You have no credibility. There's no trust established, and you're just running ads. A lot of that ad money is going to be wasted. you know, you might get some emergency clients and some people that just didn't care any. Beyond that, you could help their pet. They just came in. The proper way to do it is to use PR first. You know, go shake hands, go to some Chamber of Commerce events, go to a farmers market, go visit the local kennel, meet people. That's the first step, right? Then maybe get a story on the local newspaper or whatever kind of publications there are. That you're a new vet practice in town. What are your specialties? What kind of animals do you like taking care of most? Maybe get on the local news, do a bunch of videos.

Cebron 00:37:46  Get them onto YouTube that talks about your new clinic. Why? It's what your clinic has that's special, you know. Do a tour through the clinic, you know, do these kind of things and then get some social media going and then post on Facebook, post on Instagram, even post on LinkedIn. I, you know, I do find a lot of veterinarians. you know, I don't know exactly why, but there is a lot of veterinary activity on LinkedIn. So so you could post on these channels Just organic posts about who you are, your background, why you came to Boise where you liked it. I mean, it's it's not it's not rocket science. Like where you like to go get coffee. What community coffee shop do you go to? Photos of yourself there, introducing yourself to that local business person? I don't I don't care even where you go shopping, like, you know, as far as your grocery store in Boise because you're new there, right? So put all that out.

Cebron 00:38:44  Now, people that maybe see an ad are going to go, well, let me check out his socials or her socials and see, oh, you're a real person. You're a human that lives in our community. That goes maybe to the same coffee shop I go to, and then they're going to go, you know, look at your website, look at your reviews do and they're going to do these checks to build trust for you before they're going to go in. That one Facebook ad is not going to do all that work. You need that PR first. if you're a national, a national business because we do have national clients. And so we may do a press release about an event you did, or that you opened a new office and send it out on the National wire service and get a couple hundred stories out there in different magazines and newspapers. and that's another type of PR work, media relations. Right. And, and not only does that get you attention, you can put as seen as on your website, but it also has SEO value because those are links back from those publications to your website.

Cebron 00:39:47  Right. And you can you can do that in a regional area like in a statewide press release. Let's say you open a new practice. We could do a press release for you like that. And that's great PR, but PR is a really powerful tool to use ahead of your advertising, and I always recommend it. And again, heavily covered here like PR, the whole subject of how marketing works, including PR and actually, I don't know if you can read that, but it covers exactly how to use AI correctly to to to have it benefit your veterinary practice. So I really feel like I've touched on in the book everything in the last ten years that I've learned and and bringing it all the way to the summer of 2026. Like what's working right now and how to use it in the best way, right?

Brandon 00:40:42  Yeah, I think I think that's really smart. And what you just mentioned of people doing and going out and looking at these different sources. AI is a lot more efficient at going through, and we know that AI searches and access is like everything possible when it comes to press releases and Reddit threads that people are talking about you and different, different platforms where other people are talking about you.

Brandon 00:41:08  And those signals are generally very, very helpful to you. So I think that all makes a lot of sense.

Cebron 00:41:13  It does. And that's why those like press release stories and stuff like that, it could even be a new doctor. Join the practice. Those could be the that could be the subject of a press release. And you're right. Those signals, are picked up by AI, you know. So if you're asking ChatGPT of, like, recommendations for the best vet clinic near me for. And it's way more specific than Google, right? You're asking for like, my dog is throwing up, and doing this and that. And what's a clinic that's best for that in my area? Like it's going to be much more specific and then.

Brandon 00:41:50  Yeah, exactly. And if you have a new doctor and they really like working on internal medicine. Right. And you mentioned that in their bio and who the AI will see. Okay. They have a doctor who specializes and it's not going to be a boarded person, but like with a special interest.

Brandon 00:42:05  Right. So I totally agree. So yeah that's really really interesting. Well, I want to be respectful of your time here. last question that I like to ask is if you could have people stop doing one thing when it comes to marketing their practices, what would that be today? Just stop.

Cebron 00:42:25  Stop using, stop using Canva to create graphic posts on your social feed, like for for Facebook or Instagram. Canva has a lot of cool uses to make cards or banners or a poster or a QR code thing to get reviews, you know, for a little sign for your reception desk. But it is not a tool for social media. Be authentic and human on your social media and stop doing graphics. we have helped so many vet clinics that we work with to stop paying for some cheap AI service, to generate a social post every day of some graphic related, quote unquote, to their industry. Yeah, that actually hurts your practice. It doesn't. There's no benefit. There's zero benefit to posting every day of a bad post.

Cebron 00:43:17  The algorithms actually block you from getting any engagement, so that would be the one pet peeve I have that I'd say please stop.

Brandon 00:43:26  If that's really. I wasn't expecting that at all. That's pretty pretty pretty interesting. I agree, if you're going to make something, video is the best right now for sure. that's very cool.

Cebron 00:43:38  If you just just, you know, even if it was twice a week, you know, it doesn't have to be a crazy amount of post. As long as there are good posts a couple times a week, it's going to benefit you.

Brandon 00:43:47  Totally. Yeah. Trying to blend in and do kind of what everybody else is doing I think definitely hurts. And I think that's, that's probably a really good general rule for the most part. So I think that's really solid advice. If you can have people do one thing, what would it be that add one thing to their marketing?

Cebron 00:44:07  You know, it's funny, I would say, the first thing I would do is I would humanize your website is, you may you probably have a website, but really get someone to go in and make your make your clinic unique by humanizing your site with real photos, real video, and get an update done.

Cebron 00:44:29  Or if you need it, get a new website done. But humanize your website as the first foundational point to have a great because that is your business. Today. You know, 70% or more people are going to see your business for the first time by visiting your website.

Brandon 00:44:46  That makes sense. Makes sense. Totally. Well, I really appreciate your time. Tell everybody where they should go to learn more about your book and learn more about you.

Cebron 00:44:56  Yeah. It's been it's been great to spend, you know, close to an hour with you. hopefully some of this insights will immediately help some of your viewers. And then for more information, Of course, my agency is Walker Creative so it's creative with a K. So Walker Creative to get to me and my agency. the book that's coming out on July 31st will actually be marketed through my personal brand, which is Cebron Walker, Seaborn Walker. And that's where I'll have information on the book. It'll have free downloads and tools and cheat codes and stuff that I'm going to give out ahead of time, related to the book and then announce the book, of course, when it's ready to be purchased on Amazon.

Cebron 00:45:44  and more information about me there. So that's Cebron Walker. Com but it's, you know, thanks to you for putting on such a wonderful podcast for this community, that we all love the veterinary community.

Brandon 00:45:56  Definitely appreciate you for taking the time. And, let's see you hope hopefully again soon. Have you back on after the books out. So thanks so much.

Cebron 00:46:06  You're welcome. And thank you.