We are actually lucky in the Veterinary industry and have the upper hand in 2 areas:
- Other industries are doing worse, and the veterinary industry has historically been more recession proof then most others
- We have very accurate data and tools to monitor the industry in real time – most other industries do not.
What the data does not show however is the variance in individual practice performance – don’t just assume that you are performing in line with the industry statistics because these are just averages.
Never before have we seen such a broad spread of performance differences across our hands on customer base with whom we have regular meetings.
Some practices are booming whist others who have been historically strong are declining.
Only when averaged together does all this variable data come to a slowly declining market of 4.5%.
What this tells us is that something can be done to counteract the decline. Yes, it depends very much on how good your closest competitors are and what actions they are taking – so it means you have to be better than your competitors to win the consumer over in a shrinking market.
Our advice here to you is simple – thanks to our ability to predict the market more than 18 months ago, we were able to put things in place to assist pro active business owners who were staring down a recession.
Firstly you have to establish in light of the high variability in performance whether or not your business is declining – we can give every one of you this information and will be doing so with all our regular clients.
Secondly, if you are a declining practice, then you need to know precisely what your attrition (customer loss) is and start doing something about it that is more proactive and aggressive than your competitors. This is why Profitdiagnostix put resources into delivering direct text messaging campaigns to lost clients AND to monitor the feedback from the pet owners receiving them.
Whilst it may seem unusual for an accounting firm to pro-actively start recommending specific marketing strategies to businesses, the economy has dictated to us that this is one of the key areas where we can assist veterinary practices in these times, and it ticks all the boxes:
- Direct marketing to pre-existing customers is about 10X more effective in terms of cost per customer acquisition/re-activation vs less direct strategies like Google advertising and Facebook advertising.
- Direct marketing strategies allow us to monitor whether or not they are directly resulting in clients being re-invoiced out of your practice management system and charged for specific items vs costs per click and telephone calls which seldom result in an actual invoice and cannot easily be traced back to customer and patient records.
- They allow us to monitor what clients are texting back – for example ‘we are going to XYZ vets down the road because we prefer them’, ‘we would love to come in but need to save money’ or ‘thanks for reminding us, we forgot’
So for those of you who are sitting on the fence, we would urge you to contact the team at Profitdiagnostix: https://profitdiagnostix.com/contact/
You may be surprised how easy this is to do and how little it costs vs other types of marketing and also how effective it is – we have seen practices re-activate up to $45,000 of business in 3 months.
