Understanding your Veterinary Marketing Return on Investment

 

Do you track your veterinary business’s cost per new client? Often, this seems like an impossible task. With so many variables, how do you know which efforts and expenses actually bring those new clients and patients through your front door? And how do you know how much value to place on the bonded relationships you work to build with them?

For most of your new clients, no single marketing activity is responsible for them becoming a client. When evaluating client acquisition costs, it is critical to understand the concept of “Multi-Touch Point Attribution,” which considers the entire customer journey and all of its touchpoints. The average customer will interact with 5-10 marketing touchpoints before deciding to schedule an appointment. Only considering either the first or last touchpoint in a client acquisition cost analysis will lead you to make bad marketing decisions because eliminating a seemingly ineffective individual marketing tactic can often be highly detrimental to the effectiveness of your entire marketing funnel. Therefore, it is essential to consider all marketing activities in this type of analysis.

 

Start by Identifying Your Marketing Efforts

Before you nail down how marketing affects your new client numbers, you need to specify precisely what that marketing is. These types of business activities should make it onto your list of marketing efforts:

Your Website

Your veterinary practice deserves a mobile-friendly, SEO-optimized website that your team can easily update on your own. Regularly make updates with new information on services, promotions, your team, and anything else that would be relevant to your clients.

 

 

Blogging

Educate local pet owners about health care and your veterinary services. Entertain your community with fun, engaging information. Combat the negative effects of “Dr. Google.” Do all this with regular blog posts posted to your website and shared on social media.

Social Media

If you stay organized, you’ll be able to post routinely to each of the social platforms that are most important to your community of local pet owners. 

Check out our tips for raising awareness among local pet owners through social media

plus...

Social media do's and don'ts for helping prospective clients choose your practice

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) / Digital Advertising

Paid online advertising can increase your website traffic, widen your reach on social media, put your blog content in front of a larger audience, and so much more. Targeting options in different venues let you reach exactly the types of people who could become your clients.

Get an overview of PPC Marketing for veterinary practices here!

Reviews Management

Love them or hate them, online reviews can give local pet owners an impression of your practice that you can’t necessarily control -- but that you certainly can manage. You can be encouraging and grateful when happy clients leave positive reviews. You can openly work to repair relationships when negative reviews come in. The bottom line is that it’s worth the time, effort, and even financial investment to track and respond to online reviews.

Call Tracking

Committing to monitoring call volume and recording all incoming calls gives you information to provide coaching and feedback to your team. The phone is the first line of direct communication for so many prospective clients, so you want to know exactly how these calls are going.

 

 

Marketing Strategy Coaching

GeniusVets clients can opt to have a dedicated Success Coach. In monthly meetings, we work together on reviewing marketing progress and goals and creating simple steps you can take to reach your goals. This helps veterinary practices focus, stay on track, identify potential improvements, and celebrate successes!

The Foundational Cost per New Client Formula

The way to find this number precisely is first to list all of your marketing activities -- from the above list or otherwise -- and their cost. Then, consider how much each marketing activity contributed to new clients versus existing clients, and divide the cost of each marketing activity into either the new client or existing client category. Once you have the total costs attributable to new client acquisition, divide that number by the total new clients acquired during that period.

 

The easier way to do this is to find the total monthly marketing costs and divide that number into New Client and Existing Client categories. This is easy if each marketing touchpoint is being tracked and attributed to each client. If that is not the case, then a safe rule is that 80% of your marketing goes toward new client acquisition and 20% toward maintaining existing client relationships.

Therefore: (Total monthly marketing spend) x (.8) / (total new clients) = Client Acquisition Cost

 

 

The Client Acquisition Formula in Action

Let’s use an example to see this formula in action. 

Genius Veterinary Hospital knows that they average about 170 new clients per month. They also list the following 80/20 monthly marketing costs:

• Payroll (man-hours for marketing-specific tasks): $1,300/mo
• Digital Advertising:  $600.00/mo
• Website and Marketing Company: $1,500.00/mo
• Purchasing Partner Group Membership: $300.00/mo
• Reminder and Advertising Postcards: $1,300.00/mo
• Local and Print Advertising: $1,200.00/mo

Monthly Marketing Cost Total: $6,200

Therefore, for Genius Veterinary Hospital, the math looks like this:

$6,200 x .8 = $4,960 (total monthly cost for new client acquisition marketing)

$4,960 / 170 = $29.18 (rounded cost per acquisition per client)

It costs Genius Veterinary Hospital $29.18 to acquire a new client via marketing. On its face, that seems to be an efficient number! But how can you make sure to get a great return on that initial $29 investment?

Let’s now think about bonding those newly-acquired clients.

 

Calculating the Value of Client Bonds

While acquiring new clients and patients is always a top goal for a veterinary practice, it also takes some effort to maintain client relationships and bond them to your practice. And this work is certainly worth it when you consider the client lifetime value.

Like with new client cost, it can seem that lifetime value includes too many variables to calculate. But if you think about some of the figures you track regularly, you have all the data you need to determine how much value the average client brings to your practice throughout their bonded time with you.

To get this number, you must gather the following info:

• Total Revenue for year / Total Number of Unique Patients = Average Revenue per patient per year
• (Average revenue per patient per year) x (Average number of years patients remain clients) = Client lifetime value

 

 

Let’s take another look at our sample Genius Veterinary Hospital:

• Clients average about $500 in paid invoices each year
• Each client’s bonded relationship lasts, on average, for 10 years

Therefore, their average revenue per patient per year multiplied by the average number of years in a client relationship looks like this:

• $500 x 10 years = $5,000

This example means that each bonded client relationship (average client lifetime value) is worth $5,000 to the business.

Consider that it costs Genius Veterinary Hospital $29.18 to bring a new client on board, and that client can bring $5,000 of total value:

• $5,000 / $29.18 = 171

So one bonded client can bring Genius Veterinary Hospital 171 times the initial investment to acquire them - and that's only an average!

 

 

Ultimately, this shows that effective marketing can make a true, mathematical difference in the growth of your veterinary business. Pun intended, marketing adds up and pays off!

 

What Our Own Bonded Clients are Saying

As you may have guessed, the GeniusVets marketing system can help you manage, track, and boost potentially all of the marketing efforts outlined in this article to take control over your revenue from both new and existing clients. One of our own clients put it this way:

The GeniusVets marketing program has been extremely effective in our overall marketing strategy. Their system is simple, yet comprehensive, and ensures we are getting our brand, messaging, and information out into our local market, positioning us as the leading experts in our area.

 

Interested in learning more about how you can grow your business with GeniusVets? Contact us today to schedule your practice's Marketing Health Exam during a demo!