Google Ads offers tremendous benefits for veterinarians trying to reach pet parents locally. Whether you’ve just opened a new clinic or have been caring for our best pals for decades, a Google Ads Strategy for Veterinarians can help you generate more brand awareness, reach new customers, increase your digital footprint, and maximize your ROI.
Yet, many pet clinics are unsure of how to get started with Google Ads or do it effectively. You may be afraid of wasting money without getting results or finding the time to implement tactics that work. So read on to find out how you can get started with Google Ads today and start filling out your appointment calendar.
Advertising Trends and Insights
Getting your target audience’s attention online is getting harder by the day. The pet parents you’re trying to reach see more than 5K ads daily. And the bitter truth is, they’re all competing for your audience’s time. When you engage in digital advertising, you’re no longer just competing with the veterinary hospital down the street.
No wonder so many ad campaigns fail to get results.
So what do you do to get attention in this atmosphere? You narrow your competition. Get hyperfocused and hyperlocal in the right place, at the right time, with the right message for the buyer persona.
Right Place
You have seemingly endless channels on which to connect with customers: Google search (paid and organic), various social media sites, your website, influencers, business pages, review sites, email, and more.
Google Ads is one critical tool to achieve this right place. Even if you have organic visibility in the search results, a well-placed ad can help you earn trust and a new patient.
Right Time
While you have a lot of places to reach and connect with your future patient’s attentive parents, they need to see the right ad at the right time. To accomplish this, you need to understand their buying journey. They go through distinct stages:
- Awareness. Your ideal pet parent isn’t ready to make an appointment. They may have just taken on the responsibility of taking care of their pet. Or if their pet is already sick, they may be looking up symptoms, home remedies, and treatments. Leverage this searching to insert yourself into the conversation in a non-salesy way.
- Interest. Now this person is aware of you and interested in learning more. They may seek you out or be easily guided back to your website.
- Research. The customer is back on your site, and they’re moving from page to page learning more about your company, online reputation, services, and prices.
- Purchase. At this stage, they’re making an appointment, and you need to ensure that process is as easy as possible.
- Experience. You want to build a long-term trusting relationship with this person and their beloved furry friend, so you’ll focus on staying top of mind and re-engaging them online, creating an experience they want to be a part of.
Your Google Ads Strategy for Veterinarians should recognize and account for the fact that you could lose this person at any time. Keep them moving through this journey with the right message at each stage.
Right Message
To deliver the right message, understand your target audience’s motivations at each stage. How can you solve the problem they have right now to get them to continue this journey with you? Our guide to crafting a Google Ads Strategy for Veterinarians will largely focus on how to do this and how local marketing software can make it so much easier to maximize your ROI.
Digital Advertising Options + Benefits
Digital advertising can help you:
- Get more leads. Increase the number of people who schedule with you next time their furry friend needs to see the vet.
- Increase brand awareness. More people know who you are, understand what you offer, and think positively about you.
- Target precisely. Target locally, demographically, behaviorally and more to reach people who are actually likely to schedule an appointment.
- Easy to track and adapt. Local marketing tools and analytics help you track everything to optimize the experience and results.
Ultimately, search advertising is #1 for achieving this right place, right time, right message goal because your target sees the ad when they are actively searching for whatever triggered the ad — and you choose that trigger. For this reason, search advertising is amazing for immediate leads and new appointments.
But you do have other options we’d like to mention briefly because all of them can amplify your overall veterinary marketing effectiveness. And it’s important to note that you can target locally with all these options.
Microsoft and Google Search
You target specific searches for your text ads. If your ad appears to deliver the best answer to that search, you earn that click. Google has a greater share of searches but Microsoft users tend to be older and have higher incomes plus there’s less competition, so you may want to consider both for your search ads strategy.
Social Media Ads
Social media ads help you reach specific audiences with a winning message, but timing isn’t always on point. Ads can appear natively in the feed or as an ad on social media and partner sites. These are good for building brand awareness, generating leads, and remarketing (nurturing ads that redirect people who already know you to your website).
Display Ads
Your visual ads appear on Google’s partner sites and YouTube. It’s important to note that with social ads, Google Display Network, YouTube ads, etc., the intent to make a veterinary appointment may not be there, but they can be powerful for building awareness and staying top of mind.
Strategies + Top Tips for Veterinarians
There are many elements of an effective Google Ads Strategy, and it’s true that the exact strategy will differ from business to business and audience to audience, but let these essentials guide you in crafting a winning strategy.
Set Goals
Without goals, you can waste a ton of money on Google Ads. Understanding your goals and objectives will help you make the most informed decisions about how to build your Google Ads Strategy, what to measure, how to spend your money, and how to build a campaign structure you can optimize to maximize ROI.
Targeting
Google Ads gives you 14 targeting options to help you narrow down your audience. Doing so reduces the competition while increasing effectiveness. Some of these include keywords, devices, demographics, and, of course, location. So consider what characteristics your ideal pet parents have so you can reach the right people.
Messaging
Once you know who you want to reach and what you plan to accomplish, it’s time to craft the right message. It doesn’t matter who your target is if you approach them in the wrong way. So refer back to the buying journey. Consider the intent of this person when they see your ad. Align your ad message and landing page with that intent.
Track
Tracking and reporting will tell you how well you’re doing at setting goals, targeting, and messaging. They can reveal gaps in your Google Ads Strategy for Veterinarians and your execution of that strategy.
You should clearly look at macro conversions like the number of qualified leads you’re generating. But also consider how you’re performing with those micro-conversions. These help you engage people earlier in the journey. Advertising is effective throughout the buying cycle — even when it’s not directly generating a lead.
Tracking items like click-through rate, page visits, and returning visitors helps you establish the connection between early micro-conversion and real-world appointments down the line.
Optimize
Launching a campaign is not the end. Look at the data you’re collecting. What does it tell you about your targeting and message? What do you need to improve up-funnel (awareness, interest) to impact what happens in the lower funnel (scheduling appointments, becoming a regular, sharing with others)?
Optimize at every stage to continually increase the effectiveness of the next step in the buying cycle. Not only does optimizing Google Ads improve effectiveness. It reduces how much you have to spend on ads because Google rewards high-performing ads. Your ad costs go down as your revenues from those ads go up.
That’s how a Google Ads Strategy for Veterinarians maximizes ROI!
Expand
Take what you’ve learned and scale it up. Now that you know how to effectively leverage a Google Ads strategy to keep your appointment book full, you can apply the same strategies to fill more appointment books and possibly more clinics as you grow your practice.
You might also decide you want to take what you learned and expand into other advertising, like social media ads and display advertising. The basic principles we’ve outlined apply to those as well, so you can use them together to amplify your online presence and your results.
But it’s important to realize that competitors catch on and digital advertising trends can change. Google Ads is never a set it and forget it proposition. As you expand, you’ll continue to track, analyze and adapt to succeed. Here, having the right small business marketing software is critical and worth the investment.
Demo Surefire Local’s Business Intelligence Marketing Software
At Surefire Local, we understand how critical it is to create an effective Google Ads Strategy for Veterinarians. We’re committed to helping you develop that winning hyperlocal strategy to generate awareness, leads, and full appointment books. Achieve Local Dominance. Unlimited Growth. Request a demo to get your questions answered about maximizing your ROI on digital advertising.