As many of you know, the APL pack is strongly supportive of privately owned practices – they just seem to work better when the ‘alpha dog’ actually knows something about the business that they are running. That rule seems to hold true for everything except one aspect of running the business which is marketing.
Just like a smaller dog, a smaller business relies heavily on its relationships to survive and sometimes becomes oversensitive to ‘selling’ to their customers or contacting them more frequently with promotions for fear of getting some negative feedback. Larger publicly held practices do not have this fear, so marketing is the one area in veterinary business where larger corporate practices seem to be more decisive and effective.
Because of the potential economic downturn, the APL pack has been doing some extensive research on marketing and what works for smaller practices – after all, it’s out job to sniff out the risks and scent out the solution! We have been highlighting a requirement for more direct marketing for over 18 months now because this very important for small practices right now.
We have assisted in developing solutions that re-activate dropped off clients, recover missed vaccinations and even text out dental promotions to all older pets with potential dental issues 2 weeks after a consultation – all affordable and all completely automated so that small businesses don’t have to allocate additional staff. Furthermore, like little dogs with a bone, we have obsessively watched in over 40 practices how these automations have generated tens of thousands in additional sales over the last year.
Yet we still find that a significant number of smaller veterinary practices overanalyze and hold off using direct marketing systems in spite of the fact that a return on the cost is virtually guaranteed. And the reason is simply because they are afraid that marketing of this nature might ‘upset a few clients’. Or that ‘we can probably do it in house manually and save a few dollars’.
Well here is a newsflash as clear as peeing on a post is to a dog – you can’t market and promote services directly to clients without one or 2 of them spitting the dummy with an unnecessary rant to a text message or email – like a reactive dog, some humans are just wired that way, and you probably don’t want them as clients if they are that volatile.
Secondly, although smaller business owners like doing things themselves in house, wages have become by far the most expensive resource to your business. You don’t need to be a border collie (canine equivalent of a rocket scientist) to work out that condemning your clinically skilled team to repetitive marketing tasks is doomed for failure – they simply stop doing them as soon as there is a bit of real work coming in through the door. We have seen this happen so often that its made us chase our tails.
So we are giving you a clear and confident bark right now because its important that you do something about directly marketing to your existing client list. And we have dug up an extremely effective and guaranteed solution: Profitdiagnostix Revive!
This is a bone that you need to dig at – if you don’t a bigger dog is going to get it!
