By Cheyanne Flerx and Janel Hutton
October marks the beginning of the holiday season, so naturally veterinary hospitals everywhere are looking for ways to create content that reflects this jam-packed time of year.
While educating clients on harmful substances and situations that pets could encounter is important, no one is coming to social media hoping to learn.
Here are our top tips for creating educational content pet owners will actually engage with this October:
For the Clinic Blog:
Here are some ideas of titles for blog posts for your website.
- 7 Deadly Things Your Pet Should Avoid In October
- 6 Ways To Protect Your Pet On Halloween Night
- The Creepy Crawlers That May Live In Your Pet
- A Day In the Life of a Vet Tech – Ask one of your techs to write a blog on what happens during her shift.
- Trick or Treat? 5 Surprising Foods You Shouldn’t Feed Your Pet
Video:
- Go live with your vet techs and talk about the dangers pets face in October. Have props of each item, like candy and glow sticks to use a visual for clients.
- National Dog Walk Week is October 1-7. Make a video with your staff members showing proper walking techniques and equipment that will keep pets and their owners safe on walks.
Facebook Ideas
- With Halloween on the horizon, you have a great opportunity to run a fun photo contest. With Danielle’s proven system for running a successful photo contest, you can create a custom Facebook cover photo with the winners of the contest!
Like this banner? Well, you can create this same banner! Click here to access the template and make it your own.
- October 9th is National Pet Obesity Awareness Day. There are so many ways you can bring awareness to your clients and followers. You can do a simple post about how obesity affects your pet, start a healthy weight contest, or you can visit https://petobesityprevention.org to participate in a nationwide survey. You can have your entire staff participate and help bring awareness to pet obesity. There are so many resources, so make a week of it!
- For Black Cat Appreciation Day, share an interesting fact or statistic about black cats and ask your audience to share pictures of their black cats.
- Feature your techs for Tech Week while reminding clients that chocolate is toxic to pets with a fun and engaging post. Try taking a picture of your techs enjoying chocolate while one tech is holding a puppy and shaking her head. In the caption, talk about how the staff can safely enjoy chocolate, but it is not safe for dogs and explain why. This is a great way to educate pet owners, incorporate staff, and increase engagement with a fun picture.
Instagram Ideas:
- With Global Cat Day (October 16th) and National Cat Day (October 29th), you have two chances to highlight the needs of your feline patients. Showcase your feline specific accommodations, such as “cat-only” room or stress-free tips and tricks for cats. Whatever you choose, make sure you focus on feline specific products/services your clinic offers. Make the picture and post focused on patient care and how your tools or techniques improved a patient’s visit.
- Highlight your technicians during National Vet Tech Week and show a behind the scene look of your technicians caring for patients (snuggling with patients, monitoring during surgery, running labs, etc.)
- October is Adopt A Shelter Dog Month. Highlight your patients that have been adopted. Share their stories on Instagram with a picture of them in your clinic. You could also visit your local shelter or humane society and showcase any dogs up for adoption.
- Does your staff dress up for Halloween? Show them off on Instagram! You can fill up your Instagram Story on Halloween with all the Halloween fun your team is having!
Cheyanne’s Bonus Biscuit of the Month
It can be time-consuming recreating a design for a post over and over again while trying to keep a consistent theme (aka your branding) present in your content. If you use Canva to create your posts, I’ve got a tip that will save you time and energy while ensuring you keep your branding consistent!
In Canva Pro, you can save templates of your designs and edit them as needed. Once you have created your design and ready to make it a template, follow these steps:
- Hover over the image you want to make a template
- Click the “…”
- Click “Move to Folder”
- Click the “Template” folder
Your design will now be the “Template” folder. You can return to your new template at any time to create new posts and make edits. You may need to create a folder for your templates ahead of time, but I believe Canva has one premade.
Janel’s Bonus Biscuit of the Month
Ever hear, “A picture is worth a thousand words”? Well, it’s true, especially in visual marketing! Did you know that our brain processes images 60,000 times faster than reading text?! Social media, especially Instagram, is a very visual medium, and followers will most likely react to an image that they like.
Of course, we write our captions to give our followers the information we want them to see, but a caption alone won’t grab the audience’s attention. You need to have an eye-catching photo or graphic to entice people to view your content. Help your followers recognize your posts faster by creating a color and font palette that gets your follower’s attention. You don’t have to get all crazy with tons of fonts, graphics, and colors, make sure you use a similar style each time you have a post to create.
To create the look of your branding, look at your logo. What colors are expressed in your logo? We need to find out the color code (HTML code) for those colors. This is the code that you can put into a color palette to ensure you use the same color every time.
Find a site like https://html-color-codes.info and upload your clinic’s logo. You can click on an area of the logo that shows color and reveals the color’s HTML color code.
The next part is to find a font that compliments goes well with the font in your logo. My recommendation is to view the font options in Canva and find a font that is easy to read and goes well with your logo.
Pro Tip: Use Canva Pro to save your colors, logos, and fonts for your brand for easy access within your designs. Then you don’t have to write everything down or find it every time you make a graphic.
Remember, have fun and play around with colors and ideas! Make your visuals interesting and eye-catching!
About The Authors
Cheyanne Flerx
Cheyanne Flerx is the owner and founder of Hey Cheyanne, LLC and a former Veterinary Assistant now turned Veterinary Social Media Marketing Coach. Cheyanne is on a mission to use her experience and knowledge to uplift and empower fellow Veterinary Social Media Marketers and train them to do their jobs more effectively and efficiently. Follow her for more social media post ideas, marketing trainings, and guidance on her website.
