Digital marketing for referral vet practices

Being a specialist veterinary practice is a marketing and communication challenge. Ensuring your brand and messaging resonate with vets who refer patients and pet owners is a dual strategy that takes expertise to get right.

We speak regularly with specialist vet practices that see the value of brand recognition and the critical importance of having a website that acts as a powerful communication tool.

In this article, I discuss the foundations of digital marketing for specialist veterinary practices. I explain what is important and why, and how we can help you develop a long-term digital marketing strategy that ensures your practice is visible, trusted, and recommended.

Vet clinics are busy, and when they engage with a specialist veterinary practice website, they must be able to navigate the site easily and find what they’re looking for without going through a maze of unhelpful steps. The website must be structured intuitively and work for referring vets and pet owners.

At a minimum, the website must have:

• A home page that clearly articulates the practice as a specialist service and referral only. The content and imagery must reassure veterinarians and other visitors of your expertise and the referral process. The language must be short, comforting, and void of any ambiguity.
• Dedicated pages to the services and specialities. E.g., Orthopedics, cardiology, oncology, etc. These pages must communicate the advanced treatments offered and the expertise, experience, technology, and qualifications that support the specialty. Including up to date FAQs is a valuable strategy.
• A section solely for veterinarians. This can include the referral process, an online referral form, timings, case communication, and other information essential to ensure a professional relationship with general clinics.
• A section for pet owners. This is a reassuring messaging tool that informs pet owners by providing resources such as “What to expect,” “What to bring, ” and ” How it works.” Talk about the vets, staff, and facilities, and refer them to successful case studies. This will help pet owners understand the value of specialist referral services.
• An “About Us” & “Team” page. This is a highly valuable resource for referring vets and pet owners. It is an opportunity to highlight your values, expertise, experience, and qualifications. A profile of each team member with a personal touch promotes confidence and trust.
• Success stories and case studies. Showcasing successful outcomes and heartwarming stories communicates your values and expertise. This is especially important for pet owners who value emotional and empathetic outcomes and can picture their pet as part of the story.
• Testimonials must be evident and spread throughout the website, on the Google business listing, and on social media.
• Contact and location. The easier visitors find your contact information, including your location and emergency contact details, the more credible you look. Embedded Google maps and additional information like 24/7 emergency numbers, if applicable, are especially helpful.
• A resource or news page: Updated regularly with human-written, helpful, and relevant content is a key strategy. It plays a significant role in ensuring search engines like Google and AI generative bots find and reference the practice. It also illustrates a position of care. Regular updates show potential clients that you are invested in your practice and have a deep connection and commitment to service delivery. It also provides a library of content that can be shared directly with newsletter subscribers and social media channels.

The aim is to create a source of truth with high-quality, valuable information that is easy to find and user-friendly. The structure will determine success. A straightforward navigation menu that separates content for pet owners and vets, and regular reviews as content grows are essential.

You will hear marketing professionals talk about brand value. In short, brand value equates to the perceived value your brand has in the minds of your audience, which can include clients, partners, stakeholders, and staff. It includes intangible assets outside of physical assets, such as:

• Reputation and trust – How much confidence generalist vets have in your services.
• Recognition – How well or easily your name, logo, and messaging are remembered.
• Connection – How much loyalty your brand inspires.
• Market differentiation – How you stand out from similar specialty vet practices.
• Impact – The ability of your brand to drive relationships, charge a premium, and attract staff and talent.

With this in mind, digital marketing is a key driver of how your brand is externally perceived. While your service, outcomes, and interactions are major contributors to your reputation, perceived brand value sits in:

• A clear value proposition. Clearly articulating what makes your specialist practice unique and valuable. The communication must resonate with vets and pet owners and speak their language.
• A consistent voice and tone: Your language must be consistent across your website, social media, newsletters, and other marketing channels. Developing a set of communication guidelines is essential, such as referring to vet clinics as “our care partners.”
• Showcase credibility: Building trust is essential. Highlight qualifications, certificates, technology, and experience, and showcase real success stories.
• Be as human as possible: People relate to other people. Though advanced medical expertise is your unique value proposition, don’t be impersonal. Keep the messaging as relatable as possible.
• Align with your referrers: The relationship is critical, and aligning some aspects of your digital marketing with your referral vet clinics will help. Acknowledge their work in case studies, talk about their community impact in your news and resource section, and work on developing a community of care with your referring vet clinics.

The new digital marketing buzzword is visibility. The emergence of AI-generated search is driving this. People are switching from traditional search (Google) to AI bots like ChatGPT to find services and get information. This means your website must be optimised for both Google and AI-generated search to ensure visibility. You can read our article on AI search and other interesting blogs at Deb’s Desk

To cover both bases, your website must:

• Be optimised for keywords and local search.
• Have the necessary technical optimisation, such as schema markup, done in the backend to ensure AI bots understand your content.
• Ensure high-quality, human-produced, and trustworthy content.
• Ensure GEO readiness. This is essential as customer behaviour shifts toward natural language rather than traditional keyboard search. Learn more about this here.

Optimisation is an ongoing process for any website, and methods are changing rapidly. Business owners with a set-and-forget process for their website and digital marketing are quickly losing visibility, and this will only accelerate. Optimising for SEO and GEO goes hand in hand, and if you’re investing in a website, one of the most critical functions of your digital marketing partner is ensuring continued optimisation.

Specialist Vet Marketing is a sister company of Brilliant Digital, which has been successfully building websites, developing marketing strategies, and implementing high-performance digital marketing plans for over 15 years. We have a great deal of experience in the B2B space, which is a real advantage to specialist veterinary practices that rely on a referral client base.

Digital marketing for a referral practice differs from that of a general practice. The audience profile, services, website features, content, SEO, GEO requirements, and demand dynamics require a customised approach. While there is some overlap, the key is tailoring the strategy to your practice’s role in pet care.

Give me a call today for a free and confidential discussion on how Specialist Vet Marketing can future-proof your digital presence and help grow your practice as the trusted specialist in your field.