March is filled with multiple opportunities for you to use in your marketing content, but where do you even start? Let those creative juices flow and consider some of the ideas we’ve listed below.

Title Ideas for the Vet Clinic Blog:

• Five Top Garden Pet Dangers
• Educate on the importance of spaying and neutering
• Give five tips on potty training puppies
• For International Ear Care day, you could give five sign of an ear infection in pets

Video:

• Video Idea #1: For a spring video, ask each staff member what they are looking forward to this spring. It doesn’t have to be related to the clinic. Record short clips and then put them together to make a longer video.
• Video Idea #2: Use spring-related filters on Instagram or Snapchat to make a video of your staff either doing their daily routine, saying hi, or holding a pet.

Facebook Post Ideas:

• Post Idea #1: K9 Veterans Day – Highlight the K9 heroes in your community by saying, “Thank You!” Call your local city police, county sheriff’s department, and/or highway patrol and ask for photos of the K9 officers. The community will love to thank the K9 heroes in your area, and it brings awareness to how much they do for the community.
• Post Idea #2: If you have nice weather where you are during spring, take some outdoor photos of your patients! Talk about how everyone is enjoying the amazing weather. Then ask for engagement, ask your followers to post photos of their pets enjoying the spring weather.
• Post Idea #3: Ask your followers, “if your pet got a basket from the Easter Bunny, what would they want in it?” This is a great engagement post! You can also turn this into a quick PHOTO CONTEST! Have your followers comment with a photo of their pet in their Easter best, in return, and they will be featured in Easter-related posts.
• Post Idea #4: Any bunnies in the house? If you treat rabbits at your clinic…do, I need to say any more? POST THOSE BUNNIES! Say the Easter Bunny gave your clinic a visit for his health check before Easter.

Facebook Banner Ideas

Here are some examples of banners you can use to spruce up your Facebook Page.
 

• Banner Idea #1: You hit the JACKPOT! Show off your patients and get some engagement at the same time. Create a fun banner with empty frames. Ask your followers to comment with a photo of their pet and say you’ll pick five or whatever number photos at random to be featured in your LUCKY banner. This is fun and gets a lot of attention and engagement.

• Banner Idea #2: It’s springtime! So, just like the Jackpot Banner, use the same idea with spring. Set up an engagement post where you ask your followers for photos of their pets to use in your new banner. Your followers will love it!

Instagram Post Ideas:

• Post idea #1: Why is your clinic the luckiest clinic around? Show off your staff and your favorite things about your veterinary clinic in a series of posts called, “We are so lucky…” The examples here are from Facebook, but you can totally do the same thing on Instagram! With the use of hashtags and awesome photos, you’ll get some fantastic engagement from your Instagram audience. Title the post: We are so lucky…” and then go into why you are so lucky to have “blah blah blah” as your receptionist, or Joe Smith as your veterinarian, or your clinic cat as your clinic cat. Have fun with it!

• Post idea #2: Do you have some funny photos of your patients or team that are blooper worthy? Turn them in social media gold by sharing the photo on Instagram and ask your audience to share their best caption for the photo. This post typically can bring in a lot of engagement, so be prepared!
• Post idea #3: Celebrate National Peanut Butter Day and Pet Poison Awareness Month by sharing a picture of a patient receiving peanut butter as a treat or the ingredients label of the jar and educate on the importance of checking for and avoiding xylitol in consumable products given to pets.

Instagram or Facebook Stories Ideas:

• Story Idea #1: Post a picture of an Irish dog breed and quiz your followers and test their knowledge with a “poll sticker” and give them multiple choices to choose from.
• Story Idea #2: Take the “We are so lucky…” post idea and adapt it to fit your stories. Get creative with story stickers and use them to get the audience to interact. The “emoji slider” sticker would be a great one to try out.
• Story Idea #3: On World Sleep Day, share a picture of a patient or clinic pet, taking a nice nap, and share how comfy your team makes each patient during their stay.

Poison Pet Awareness Month Marketing Ideas

Blog Idea:

• Educate on springtime poisons
• “Household Toxins That Can Harm Your Pet”
• “5 Most Common Poison Pet Emergencies”

Post idea #1: Highlight a patient that has ingested a poison, share what happened, how they recovered, and what your followers should learn. Remember, use a story with a happy ending, unless your client is ok sharing their story. If you don’t have photos of the patient through the hospitalization, take a photo of the pet currently.

Post idea #2: Get creative and make educating your client a memorable moment. Post a picture of a staff member posing with a toxic item awkwardly and briefly inform your followers on why their pet should avoid that item. Add a call-to-action to encourage them to click the link in your bio for more info from your blog.

• Post idea #3: Take three of the most common toxic or poisonous food items to pet, but safe for humans to eat. Turn on your camera and ask some of your team members to do a blind taste test and share their answers. Then share how dangerous that item can be to pets if ingested. You could break this video up into short clips focusing on one food at a time to make your content stretch and easy for your audience to consume.
• Post idea #4: Do your clients know what to do if their pet ingests a poisonous or toxic item? Either through a social media post, a blog, or in a video, explain the steps pet owners should take to ensure their pet gets the appropriate medical care promptly when a crisis hits.
• Story Idea #1: Pick the top five or ten pet poisons, then highlight one each day or each week. Show graphics of what the poison is, what it can do to a pet, and always end with how your followers can contact an emergency service or you in an emergency.
• Story Idea #2: Use the stickers to host a poll asking your audience if an item is safe or not, then follow up with the truth and share a fact about the featured item
• Story Idea #3: Play guess that poison! Give two or three hints on a common poison for people to try to guess the answer. Try pixelating or blurring a picture of the item and include it with the hint in each slide.

Cheyanne’s Bonus Biscuit of the Month

Are you overwhelmed with all the possibilities for social media content from holidays to cute patients to promos? I encourage you to take a step back and focus your practice’s goal for marketing. Once you figure out your goals, you can plan out content that will help you achieve your overall marketing goal.

Social media is a great tool, but plays into only a part of your marketing, but supports other avenues to help you attract new clients and retain your loyal ones. If you need help planning out actionable steps to reach your marketing goals, then I highly recommend you check out the 12 new Snout School pdf planners.

Janel’s Bonus Biscuit of the Month

You are working so hard on your clinic’s social media, but why do you have to keep trying to get engagement!? Wouldn’t it be just easier to reshare educational information, articles, etc.? NO!

This is why you want engagement on your social media pages:

For Facebook and Instagram to know what you want to see in your personal newsfeed, Facebook keeps track of what pages and people you engage with. This is as simple as a like, comment, or share. And guess what, even if you stop to look at a post for a matter of seconds, the Facebook and Instagram’s algorithm records it.

Facebook and Instagram want to make your newsfeed as personal as it can get. Why? Because if you see posts and ads that YOU LIKE, you’ll be on social media more.

As a business page, Facebook wants YOU to have top-notch content because better content is a better Facebook overall. So Facebook will reward you for having quality content, but how does Facebook know you have quality content? By the amount of engagement a post receives.

Only a fraction of posts made from a Facebook business page are seen by followers who are active with your page. So we have to get your followers to show Facebook and Instagram; they want to see your content. So let’s produce content that urges your followers to engage with. The more a person engages with your pages, the more they will see your posts, even the not so fun stuff, such as virus outbreaks, prevention, education, etc.

The more engagement you get from your followers, the higher the reach you will achieve with your posts. This is why you should always have a CTA (aka “Call To Action”) to get your followers to contact your practice, like visiting your website and converting to business.

So, yes, it can be complicated, who said social media was easy, right? But, if you understand the system and how your followers interact with social media, you will gain more attention that can potentially bring in new clients into your practice.

This is where winning the popularity contest is a GOOD THING!

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