Content Planning for your Vet Practice

Your digital content is an important part of the marketing strategy for your business but is also an online representation of your practice. If your content proves popular, it could be seen by not only your existing clients but hundreds of potential ones too. This is why it is essential to put some careful thought into it!

While you may wish to write informative topics for your pet owners, the best content is engaging and will help drive footfall into your building. Content planning for your vet practice is important, as it can help you to really focus on the areas that your business needs to improve, as well as keep you organised in the process.

How to content plan

Content planning for a vet practice should have several major steps. Let’s take a look at each one in turn.

Figure out your content strategy

Are there certain objectives that you have set for your practice this year? Take a look back at your marketing plan for inspiration. Hopefully, you will have identified some things you would like to improve on, for example increasing new client registrations or generating more dental procedures to help pay off your new dental x-ray unit. This will help you to work out the audience you are targeting and what sort of content you should be publishing.

What is your marketing budget?

As part of your marketing plan, you will have established what your budget is. Things like a new practice website, targeted social media adverts, or boosted search engine results will all cost money. By planning out your content in advance you can work out which items you would most like to prioritise your budget on.

Where will your content be posted?

What social media sites does your practice use? Do you want your content to go on your website or perhaps a monthly email newsletter? This is an important part of your planning as different content types lend themselves to different platforms. Social media relies heavily on images and videos, with short amounts of text, whereas your website might allow for more informative factsheets and blog-style pieces.

Make sure your content fits with your brand

Any content you put online represents your business and should fit in with the ethos of your brand. For example, if your brand values are all about providing quality patient care, then make sure that comes across in your posts. Don’t lose sight of this when plugging special offers or trying to generate more ‘likes’. Pay attention to the fonts used, the colour scheme and your grammar when formulating your content as first impressions count.

Hot topics

While addressing the needs identified in your business plan is important, don’t forget your content must be interesting and engaging too. This is why it works well to mix things up! Are there any seasons, holidays or national days that you can post about? Are there any questions that your clients commonly ask you? What about a day in the life of a vet nurse? Is there anything in the news that you could give your take on? Involve your whole team in regular brainstorming sessions, they might give you some great topical suggestions that you can use to interweave with your bigger marketing strategies. You can also check out some of our other veterinary blog post suggestions here.

Think about what has worked well in the past

Reflecting on previous content may help you figure out what goes down well with your clients (and potential clients!). Lots of likes and shares on social media indicate popularity, but key performance indicators are another good measure of content success. For example, you wrote some great pieces on senior health care which as a result saw a rise in elderly pets attending your senior health clinics. This is a clear indicator that this content worked well. Don’t be afraid to repeat the content or write a different angle on it, as it’s clear that the public interest is there.

Lastly… plot it all out on a calendar

Once you’ve got your ideas, put them down on a calendar. This will show you whether you have any gaps that you need to fill and will help to keep you organised. Smaller content posts can fit in as and when needed during the year, but special offers or big marketing campaigns need to be plotted out strategically.

Summary

As you can see, there is a lot to think about when planning the content for your vet practice. Hopefully, we have given you some pointers to give your planning a kick-start, but with so much to think about it can leave very little time for writing it! That’s where we come in. We can help bring your content aspirations to life by writing bespoke pieces for your practice. Whether you need help with regular blog content, social media posts or a one-off project, get in touch today for an informal chat.

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