Dr. Caitlin DeWilde joins the podcast to discuss modern veterinary marketing, how we communicate with pet owners when our caseloads are overflowing, and what the future of pet owner communications may look like.
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LINKS
Links to Amazon.com are affiliate links and help support the show. (They’re also much smaller than normal links and easier to copy when typing up show notes!)
Caitlin DeWilde: @thesocialdvm
Social Media and Marketing for Veterinary Professionals:
Dr. Andy Roark Exam Room Communication Tool Box Course: https://drandyroark.com/on-demand-staff-training/
Dr. Andy Roark Swag: drandyroark.com/shop
All Links: linktr.ee/DrAndyRoark
ABOUT OUR GUEST
Dr. Caitlin DeWilde is the founder of The Social DVM, a consulting firm devoted to helping veterinary professionals learn how to manage and grow their social media, online reputation and marketing strategies. Working with large industry groups and individual practices alike, Caitlin and her team are passionate about translating the “geek speak” to “veterinary speak,” and helping vets reach more clients and pets.
Caitlin is a graduate of the University of Illinois College of Veterinary Medicine and a recipient of their Outstanding Young Alumni Award, and also an alum of the AVMA’s Future Leaders Program. She served as medical director for a large AAHA/Fear Free/Cat-Friendly certified hospital in St. Louis before stepping back to focus on her marketing passion. Today, she divides her time between practice, consulting, and writing. She is the author of a new book, “Social Media and Marketing for Veterinary Professionals,” and a columnist for Today’s Veterinary Business.
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
This podcast transcript is made possible thanks to a generous gift from Banfield Pet Hospital, which is striving to increase accessibility and inclusivity across the veterinary profession. Click here to learn more about Equity, Inclusion & Diversity at Banfield.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Welcome, everybody, to the Cone of Shame Veterinary Podcast. I am your host, Dr. Andy Roark. Guys, I am here today with the one and only, the social deviant, Caitlin DeWilde. We are talking about her brand new book on Social Media and Marketing for Veterinary Professionals. We talk about the value of marketing today. What’s it look like when we’re completely overwhelmed? I asked some big eye level questions of, what’s the point, and how does this work, and how do we make it simple, and how do we make it work for most practices today? Caitlin has got great answers, and I really enjoyed it. I love marketing, I love talking marketing. But I like to think about it honestly and say, “Where’s the return on investment here? What this does this mean for pet owners and how we communicate with them?” I think this is a really good conversation around those things and about how to make marketing viable and useful for vet professionals.
Anyway, guys, I love this episode. Caitlin DeWilde is amazing, she’s a dear friend of mine, as you’ll tell in the episode, and I love spending time with her. So anyway, without further ado, let’s get into this episode.
Kelsey Beth Carpenter:
(singing) This is your show. We’re glad you’re here. We want to help you in your veterinary career. Welcome to The Cone of Shame with Dr. Andy Roark.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Welcome to the podcast, Dr. Caitlin DeWilde, thanks for being here.
Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
Hey, thanks for having me.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Oh, it is my pleasure. I am here, I am holding your book, Social Media and Marketing for Veterinary Professionals. How’s it feel to have this out in the world where people can pick it up?
Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
Oh, I’m thrilled that it’s out there. I hope it’s helpful to anyone other than me or anything that’s not being used as a door stop, I’m pretty excited about it. I am really, really glad it’s out there and I hope it can help someone.
Dr. Andy Roark:
It’s an excellent book to write on. I use it as a lap desk and so if people are looking for alternate uses on a door stop, lap desk, things like that, it is an excellent book. I really, really like it. I really, really like it. We’re going to talk about it, we’re going to talk about marketing and vet medicine in a moment. I met you, I usually start the podcast by, if I know people, I start with how I met them. It’s just kind of a good refresher for me. I met you, you picked me up at the airport many years ago. Do you have any idea what year it was? I don’t even remember. It was a long time ago.
Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
Probably like 2012, 2013.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah, it was 10 years ago.
Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
It’s been many [inaudible 00:02:33].
Dr. Andy Roark:
There’s been many minutes. You know, you were such a genius. I want to pause here for a second and just say, I talk about mentorship, okay. So, I don’t know if this comes off the right way. So you picked me up and you were like, “I’ll pick Andy up at the airport,” and I didn’t know you and you picked me up and you were like, “Can we get dinner?” And I said, “Sure.” And we went to dinner and you were planning on launching your consultancy and you were practicing full time and you were thinking about making the switch over and doing some speaking and some consulting and things like that. And we went to dinner. And one of the things I always tell people when we talk about mentorship, I said, “You know, the way mentorship really happens is tell somebody what you’re working on and then ask them specific questions.”
Because I think a lot of people are like, I want to mentor. And they look at me and I’m like, “I don’t know how to help you.” Or they look at anybody else. But you came and you were like, “This is the plan that I have and these are the things that I have questions about or that I wonder about or that I’m struggling with. And I would, will you answer my questions?” And the answer, of course, is yes, best I can. But I remember that being a wildly productive dinner and we just banged out a bunch of the logistics of getting your business up and going, and you were hugely successful. Now, you were going to be hugely successful no matter what. But boy, when I think about people who took advantage of a situation in a really great way and said, “I had this opportunity, I’m going to get the most out of this time,” when you and I went to dinner and you were just like, “This is my business play.” And I was like, “This is great. This is the most interesting dinner I’ve had in a long time.”
Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
I think we should point out that I didn’t just pick you randomly at the airport.
Dr. Andy Roark:
I thought you were fine to me. Yeah, no, I didn’t get into a car for a stranger.
Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
Because that could be perceived as a different way to get a new mentor.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah, that’s exactly right.
Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
Maybe not as…
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah…
Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
No, yeah, for sure. No, you were very helpful to me and others. That’s what I needed was somebody to just be like, “That’s a terrible idea.”
Dr. Andy Roark:
I didn’t…
Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
“That’s like you, you’re fine.”
Dr. Andy Roark:
You were fine. You were more than fine from the very beginning. I did not say it was a terrible idea. All right, let’s talk. So since that fateful evening of us having dinner, you have, you’ve done a lot, you run your consultancy, you are an international speaker, you write magazine articles all over the place. You write for today’s veterinary business. I see you in there every other month when it comes out. You’ve written for DVM 360, you’ve come to Unchartered and lectured for us a number of times. I hired you recently when I needed help in my business. I’m just being honest, I needed some help with a significant marketing project that we were running and we just didn’t have the bandwidth inside the team. And somebody said we should bring Caitlin in. She’s amazing and you know she’s incredible. And I did. And I sent you a thank you note because that’s how good you were.
You were amazing. And so anyway, she is, she’s that good. So anyway, you are that good. Let’s talk a bit about your book. I just want to point the elephant in the room. Whenever I start to talk about marketing, I love to talk about marketing and one of the biggest pushbacks to just talking about marketing that I get, is that people say, “Hey look, we are slammed. We are so busy, we can’t do all of this work. Why do we need to be talking about marketing right now?” And so I want to just open up with a question of what’s the point of marketing when we’re completely kind of overwhelmed? How do you look at that?
Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
So it’s a loaded question, I’ll be honest. I look at it differently a little bit every day, right? ‘Cause it changes, unfortunately a lot of times, which makes it harder to answer. And I’m going to be kind of a jerk and answer with a not real answer, which is that it totally depends. And I think that’s what a lot of people are looking for. They want one very clear, obviously you do it because of this one statistic or this fact or this obvious answer. And that’s not the case. So the reason I do marketing for my practice is totally different from why you do marketing as your business, why my best friends practice down the road does marketing, it’s totally different and what it is right now, it’s unlikely to be the reason you’re doing it 3, 6, 9 months, 12 months from now. Which when you answer that, people are like, blah.
Dr. Andy Roark:
No, I think that’s true. I think that’s a great answer. And I think it brings us to the next obvious question, which is, well we need to define terms then. What is marketing? I think a lot of people still think marketing and advertising are synonyms. And they were for a long time, marketing and advertising were the same. And then 10 years ago, 15 years ago, they really started to diverge. And I would say they’re very different things. So when we say marketing for veterinary professionals, what does that mean? What are we talking about?
Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
The way I like to frame it, and I’ve found myself using this term a lot lately, and I don’t know if I made it up or if it’s a real term or what, but I really like to think of it as multi-modal marketing because I think so many people, like you said, are just like, “Oh, marketing, it’s your social media or it’s your website or it’s your, God forbid yellow pages ad or something like that,” but really it’s just like we would handle complex disease. It’s the same thing for our practices. So marketing to me is anything that goes out from your clinic and touches a client and not in a creepy way.
Dr. Andy Roark:
But that’s also marketing. That’s probably not good marketing. But…
Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
Yeah, probably wouldn’t recommend it, put it lower on the list. But I think a lot of people don’t think about, I think reminders are marketing and a lot of people are like, “What are you talking about?” I think it goes so far beyond social media. It’s social, it’s your website, it’s your app, it’s your signage, it’s your client education handouts, it’s your reminders and emails that are going out. So to me, that’s why I say kind of multi-modal to make that transition to our normal way of thinking in that med.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah. Well I think that’s the answer to the first question. When I say, “Well, what’s the point?” It sounds like, to me, to summarize and I’ve thought about this for a long time, I would say that marketing is just, it’s talking to pet owners outside your practice. And you might even say it’s talking to pet owners inside your practice, but just to make it simple, I would say any communication you do with pet owners who are your clients outside of your practice, that’s marketing. And so absolutely, reminders, to me, fall into marketing and I’ll put it forward. I’ve worked with a number of practices and something happens and the reminder system gets shut down and buddy, you’ll see your appointment schedule open wide up really fast. And if that’s not the [inaudible 00:09:51] of effective marketing is when you stop and business stops coming through the door, you know that you were doing something important before you stopped.
And I’ve just seen that with the reminders and stuff. So I think of it a lot as just it’s how we talk to pet owners and you can say, “I know you’re totally slammed.” Communication with pet owners is still vital. And I would say honestly, I think probably effective communication, smart communication is more effect… Is more important when we are really busy than it is when we’re not really busy. I think that if we take it back to communication, you say, what’s your email newsletter? What do your reminders look like? Are you making it possible to book appointments online? I think all those things for me absolutely fall under marketing, text space, communication, anything like that. I go, these things can be efficiencies inside your practice. And I would still put them under the category of marketing or they’re through marketing pathways. Do you agree?
Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
Yeah, 100%. I think, again, a lot of people now are like, “Oh, I’m not accepting new clients or our schedules booked so I can’t want to think about marketing.” But the reality is you could instead be using that marketing to help save your team time or you could be using it, get clients to take more efficient ways, have them book online instead of calling or have them use your refill service instead of showing up at 4:55 wanting their 360 [inaudible 00:11:19] in quarters. There’s other things you can do with those channels.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah, that makes sense to me too. So let’s unpack this a little bit more. Talk to me about marketing for the sake of efficiency. So if we’re talking about pushing this communications outside, I love the refills for medications, that is when I still see people taking phone calls and writing these things down and it’s just adding to the load on the front desk and people are calling multiple times and asking about their stuff and you go, this could all be automated, it could all be moved to a different pathway that would make everything run a lot more smoothly. What are some other sort of communication strategies that you see that make businesses run more efficiently?
Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
Yeah, I think the refills has been a huge one. Online booking, the average appointment takes eight minutes to make on a phone and zero minutes to make online. And even if you don’t have real-time booking, even an appointment request form. So directing people to that URL using app chat or telemedicine at all, if your practice does that, any of the texting based services, those or anything that you can take it to be asynchronous, meaning somebody can batch process these things instead of waiting until they get off the phone I think is really, really important.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Do you think that that marketing is growing as far as how much effort it sort of takes? It used to feel like marketing was this little thing we kind of did on the side, we did some flyers, we got the value pack. And then social media started…
Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
Yeah, yeah.
Dr. Andy Roark:
We’re like, we’re going to have a Facebook page and now it feels like this sprawling thing. I love that you used the word multi-modal. I had actually in prep for the interview, which I’m going to mention because I actually prepped for this interview. And so I’m going to throw that out that prep actually happened. In prep for this interview, as I do, I actually wrote down the word multi-modal because that’s what it seems like. It’s my impression that marketing has gotten more complicated and more, sort of, intertwined across platforms and things like that. And it seems like a much bigger effort than it used to be. Do you think that that’s true? And do you see practices that sort of struggle to be like, “I don’t even know where to get started.” How do I make, what’s the minimum viable product here? What is the most elegant little thing I can do to start to be effective in my marketing?
Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
Yeah, I think, I’ll be honest, I think that it is something that honestly, most practices are getting to a point where they need someone to be their marketing person. And I hate to say marketing, exclusively, because really at what I would call it is our communications person. Because the minimum viable product to me, is making sure that whatever the channels you use, they all say the same thing and they’re all effective. Because that’s what happens, you’re outsourcing your social media to the new kennel assistant because they’re under the age of 40 and that person has no idea what the reminders say and that person doesn’t know what the tech’s are saying in the exam room because your handout says something totally different. So I mean, realistically to me, if you’re more than a one doctor practice, you need somebody doing this and it’s almost becoming a full time position, which is a hard pill for a lot of practices to swallow that idea.
But I think that’s where it’s going and where it’s headed. Now that does not mean you need to be on every stinking platform, and I think that’s the societal pressure that’s happening now. I probably get the question, “Do I need to be on TikTok every week?” And it’s, the answer is, maybe. But I don’t think that, right now, until we get to where practices do have someone or do work with companies or do have a plan in place to handle all of that, it’s impossible to do a good job on every one of them. So I think to me, the one thing that you could do that would make a difference and would give you that minimum product is to talk to your top people and ask them, where do they want to communicate with you?
Dr. Andy Roark:
By top people you mean your A clients?
Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
Yeah, A clients. The people that you see the schedule and you’re like, “Yay.” Instead of like, “Oh God.”
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah, I agree. I feel that. I completely agree with that. Okay, talk to me about interconnectedness of services. So we’re talking about, do we need to be everywhere and I’m going to do this and I’m going to do that. And we talk about marketing, we’re talking about website, we’re talking about, there’s a lot of people encouraging blog content, there is social media, there’s email reminders, there’s newsletters, which is sort of regular ongoing email communication and content. There’s text reminders, all of these sorts of things. It’s been my impression that as things have gotten more complicated, you can’t really pick up one thing and just do it exclusively anymore. And you can push back on that if you want to. But I think that we’re at a place where you need to have a couple of things and they need to be aligned and sort of interconnected so that they support each other.
Can you talk to me a little bit about that? First of all, do you agree with that? And then can start to, let’s paint a picture about what this interconnectedness of different services looks like. Because I want people to not be overwhelmed by all the things out there. ‘Cause I agree with you, I think trying to be everywhere is lunacy. I struggle to get my head around a return on investment for TikTok and there’s a lot of people who give me a hard time about that and they point out that I am not in my 30s anymore or my 20s or in my teens, very much. So anyway, let’s talk about how these things kind of work together, how they should work together, and what sort of an interconnected marketing plan looks like that’s not completely overwhelming, knowing that it’s going to be different for every practice.
Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
So I think the good news is there’s a lot of, I want to say hacks or software that can help you do some of the things and push it out to multiple places. And I think it’s really important to start by knowing why are you doing marketing to begin with and what are our key points of messaging that support that. If you do that, if you have very clear about what those two things are, then it’s much easier to make sure they all say the same. I think when you figure out, with your eight clients and with the things that help your practice that you know have made a difference, I would start there and look at them because I think that’s the mistake that a lot of practices make is that they don’t think about updating. I just worked with someone that still had curbside stuff on their automatic responses because they just hadn’t reevaluated.
And the good news is a lot of the services that we’re talking about, working with your app, working with social media, working with email, a lot of these things you can invest 30 minutes or less and update them, but if you haven’t looked at them in two years, then they’re unlikely to jive. So, I think the first thing you have to do is know your why, know your key messaging. The next thing you have to do is look at what you’re already sending and you might get overwhelmed there because if you’re using Facebook and Instagram and email and app and website, it might get overwhelming. So pick one every month, update it and go through the line. I think that’s a more doable response for a lot of practices.
Dr. Andy Roark:
What is the most important platform for… What’s your most important marketing asset? Let me just give it to you like that. We talk a lot about where we invest in, for you number one, and we talk about what is your objectives, but where do you, Caitlin DeWilde, when you walk in, it’s first day, day one, you’re like, this is the thing we’re going to fix first.
Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
I want to get email addresses.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah. Tell me about that.
Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
And that’s probably a bit of a surprise…
Dr. Andy Roark:
I love it.
Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
To some people, but realistically we don’t own anything. Facebook and it’s… Instagram today is down totally down. We don’t own anything that’s on Facebook. It could get hacked or deleted and we could lose it all in a second and we would have no backup. Email, if they’re actually a good email address, is emails like a gateway drug. You can get into all kinds of different platforms if you have someone’s email and if it’s the right email. So I think when I see practices that don’t ask, that’s a huge missed opportunity because you can build audiences and target people based on their email address in all of the social media platforms. You could yourself email them natively or through an email marketing app, there’s a lot of opportunities there and it’s the one thing that we can own and we can take with us no matter what platform you’re losing or you’re using, not losing.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Guys, I just want to jump in here real quick with one quick announcement. If you’re a practice owner, the Uncharted Practice Owner Summit is coming. It is me and my friend Stephanie Goss, the practice management guru. We are going to be leading that, heading that up. It is in person in Greenville, South Carolina. If you are a practice owner and you’re like, “Man, I want to go to a thing that’s only practice owners and work with other practice owners,” head over to unchartedvet.dot com and check out what we’re doing. Guys, that’s it from me. Let’s get back into the episode.
I’ll tell you a story. I don’t know if I told you this. I lost 40% of my Facebook traffic in one week one time. And so to set the stage, we built this, my team had built up the Dr. Andy Roark Facebook page, which was, it’s got 300 and some thousand followers. But boy, I tell you, we were reaching a million people a week through Facebook just again and again and again. Just count it every week. And then the 2016 election happened and then there were outcries about fake news and then all of a sudden we were not reaching a million people a week. We were nowhere close to it and we never ever got back. And it was just absolutely hammered. It was like us, they turned off the spigot and that was that and I’ve always been, I still am angry about that, it’s been six years, still angry.
How dare you. But I, who cares, the world moves on for sure, but just as an example. But it’ll happen with any other social media platform. Always just remember that you don’t own anything and no one’s there to hear you scream when you have to switch and you can no longer reach your people. Just, and the lesson for me was just count on it. Just count on it happening. Do social media with the full knowledge that they are going to, you are going to get screwed and they’re not going to care. It’s a question of when, as long as you go in with eyes wide open and say this is what I’m doing. There is a return on investment right now and the whole time I am using this to generate clients that I will actually see in my practice that I can build loyalty with and can actually turn into repeat loyal customers who are still going to come if social media just disappears.
I think that that’s really the thing for me. I still think probably the biggest one for me, Caitlin, is the website. And I think a lot of the website maybe doesn’t feel as important as it used to. In the heyday of social media, it really didn’t feel very important to me because you could just be on social and you were so easy to find. But going back today, the way we set up our website, the way it presents our staff, our doctors, the way it humanizes us, presents a face, so the way it gets, hopefully it collect, I’d love for it, collect email addresses, the way it sets up text messaging with my clients, the way it helps book reminders or appointments, things like that. To me it kind of is the bedrock for all of our outreach and I feel like it’s smart to try to continue to keep that up as the face of our practice. But social media can come and go, but you own your website and you own the story that it tells.
Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
Yeah, I think it’s a solid foundation. You can’t… All the other things kind of build the house on top of it? But I think you’re right, that there’s a good solid reason to invest some serious time in that and to make sure, again, that it’s a piece of the puzzle that not just serves as a hub of information but shows your people and what makes you different.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Well, I love that you said emails. I just think that that’s really smart. People respond to emails in a way that they do not respond on social media. And I say this as a guy who’s had a lot of experience with social media and getting people to take action on social media and a pretty good amount of experience with emails. And I can tell you there’s no comparison between the two of them. They really are. And I think that for a lot of small businesses, I think the move to texting has been pretty profound since the pandemic. But I found that the price of texting has gone up since the pandemic hit. And people, I think people are suddenly like, “Oh this is super popular.” The price of being able to text has gone up a lot from what it used to be. But I still think going forward, text messages actually appear on people’s phones and they actually read them. I think a lot of us have really full inboxes and so there could very much be a good return on investment.
Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
And clinics are not great at asking clients. And I’ve noticed that several of the new software programs, practice management softwares will ask, not only can you put this information in, but which is their preference, right? ‘Cause there’s nothing worse than that calling someone for blood work results and they never answer their phone, right? So, to me, it’s still email because I can use that information to target on social media and I can use it as a communication, but if a client only wants to text, that’s totally fine. I just want to know that so I’m not wasting my time. Or to your point, cost, if you’re paying per text message, which a lot of the services are, if the client doesn’t want a text and they prefer an email or they prefer a phone call, then why are we spending our money in time and effort doing it? So I think that’s a second point for that.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Talk to me about paid advertising. So we talk about using email addresses to do targeted advertising. It’s been my impression that social media has very much gone pay to play and I think paid advertising is probably the best use of social media as far as getting a return on investment. How does that sound when you hear me say it? Do you agree? Am I close to right or am I way off the reservation?
Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
No, you’re right. I definitely agree. If you’re not spending any money, you, no matter what you’re doing, it could be the best content in the world. If you’ve not spent money on your page in the past few months, I hope your mom enjoys it, because that’s the only person who’s going to like it, right? Like, it’s just like…
Dr. Andy Roark:
So brutal.
Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
I’m just going to call it…
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah, no, I love it. You’re right. I agree.
Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
It’s frustrating to me because I see some really creative and really emotional effort and heartfelt effort…
Dr. Andy Roark:
Thank you.
Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
Putting out great content, and no one sees it [inaudible 00:27:01]. Oh, it’s so sad, right? But that’s the reality. There are some people that will not spend a single dollar on Facebook or Instagram and I’m like, “What are you doing?” So I think that if you’re not doing that, it’s a mistake. And it’s really the only way, and this is another soapbox of mine, it’s the only way to get targeted. I don’t care if somebody in Arizona or in Germany sees a great, awesome video I made for my practice in St. Louis. If you’re not going to bring your pet in and spend some money and be nice to my team, then I don’t really care about you.
Dr. Andy Roark:
I had…
Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
So again, brutal.
Dr. Andy Roark:
I had this…
Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
I just feel that way.
Dr. Andy Roark:
I had this practice email me years ago and they emailed me and they said, “Hey, we have a problem. Every time we put up an educational picture like radiographs or something, we lose 20 social media subscribers.” And I went and I looked and there’s this little practice and they have 40,000 social medias on Facebook, they had 40,000 Facebook followers. And that one, I think it was one, the owners of the practice was like a photographer. And she was amazing. And she painted these amazing pictures of pets, and I was like, “You, you’re entertaining the world with your beautiful photography, but these people are not here for your veterinary services at all.” And so whenever she put a bot fly, people were like, “Oh my god.” And they’re just fleeing. So I sound down on social media, the truth is, I think social media for your bang buck is still pretty flipping fantastic.
But you have to be smarter about it and it’s a 100% pay to play. I look at social media a lot like the radio, I think. Meaning, it’s pay to play. You better plan on paying money for your promotions to get out into the world. And so I don’t expect my local radio stations to play whatever I have to say to the pet owners. I’m not going to plan for social media to show whatever I made to pet owners in my area. They’ve just made it clear that’s their game is they want to be the radio. They want you to pay to run your content. And if you just accept that, then what you can do with targeting is really amazing. And the truth is, when we’re up against other businesses that are trying to run ads, guys, we have the potential to crush because we’re a vet clinic, everybody wants to see what we’re doing. Can you imagine trying to get your auto mechanic ads to show up or “Hey, I’m Dale from Comcast, look at my YouTube show.” No, Dale.
Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
Yeah. Sweet muffler. Yeah, I like to think about it. I really have had to reframe it with myself and several of my clients. To me, the paying on social media is, it unlocks targeting. So you’re not just paying to boost it, you’re unlocking the ability to make sure your post is seen by the people you care about and that you actually want. And so if you think, I think that reframing has helped a lot of people. So hopefully it helps somebody that’s listening to this now.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah, I want to give people, a lot of people, myself included, the biggest pain point for me was that I used to do social media and never paid anything and it was great and everybody saw it. And it’s just the acceptance of those days are over. It’s almost like if I came into marketing right now, I would look around and go, this is pretty good deal. But I didn’t, I came into it when it was free and I’m like, this is a terrible deal. This is horrible compared to what it used to be and…
Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
How come I didn’t get 400 likes on this post for free?
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah, I know. It’s soul crushing. So, yeah…
Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
You got to let it go, man.
Dr. Andy Roark:
I know.
Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
We already had a Frozen reference. You got to let it go.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Let it go. Yeah. I think that was before, I think it was before we started recording, but yeah.
Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
Oh, sorry.
Dr. Andy Roark:
No, it’s okay. Now people know what we talk about before we record. It’s Frozen.
Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
It’s Frozen.
Dr. Andy Roark:
So let’s talk about return on investment, right? ‘Cause that’s the other question is you go, “Well now they’re talking about paying to target ads and things and how do we know that this makes sense?” I think for a lot of people this is absolutely crucial is that we say, “Hey, you’ve got to look at your return on investment here.” And I think that that can make a lot of sense for people. But I’ve found that this is wildly frustrating to actually do. And so let me stop there and just of say, talk to me a little bit about return on investment. You’ve got a whole chapter in your book on ROI, I love it. I think it’s great. But lay, lay out how you look at this for me please.
Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
It is, it’s a tricky and frustrating topic like you said and it’s a very common question, right? And so I think that some key points to know are, you can track some of it, but you have to put some measures in place. And we could talk about that a little bit more. I think it’s important that when people are spending money and time, the key thing I see a lot of veterinary professionals missing is that they don’t go back to look at it. So I think right now there’s a big, just like with social media in general, I have clients that all the time I’ll say, “Why are you doing social?” And they’ll say, “Because you’re supposed to.” And I don’t want that to be true for spending money. I don’t want you just boosting and spending ads because you’re supposed to. That’s not going to work and that’s going to make it impossible for you to track.
So I think key things are, think about looking at those booths or those posts or those ads that you make. Did it work? If so, spend more money. If not, you can turn it off which is also a good, wonderful thing. But I think we really need to get a handle on what does it cost? What are you comfortable spending to get a new client or to get a booked appointment? In general, I think my third point that I’ll say is I think a lot of people think about this only from a time standpoint. And to me it’s valuable or essential even that you also consider the time and energy you’re putting into this content. So, there’s a labor cost, right? To create content to deploy it, things like that. So those are kind of my soapboxes. And I know we’re don’t have eight hours because I could talk about it for eight hours.
But think about if you just want to track money, that’s fine, that’s easy to do in the software. But that’s only on your Facebook ads and your Facebook boost and Instagram promoted posts, that’s not the whole picture, right? So that’s where it gets tricky. You need to think about, “Well how much time went into that? How many hours did I pay that staff member to do this stuff?” So, that’s number one. Number two, you got to have somebody looking at this stuff and knowing, did it pay off or not? And then you have to be willing to invest that time in tracking. You can do all kinds of nerdy stuff, you can put a pixel on your website, you can have whole other softwares that track your exact down to the cent, how much did this new client cost me? But if you don’t know why you’re doing it, then it’s not going to work out, right? It’s not going to be worth your effort. In even trying to track it. I was a little bit all over the place, but hopefully that gave you a few nuggets.
Dr. Andy Roark:
No, I like it. I like it. Yes, it’s generally, I found this to be very frustrating. I’ll tell you. Well, I’ll tell you a story. So let’s just imagine for a second that we run a vet clinic and Mrs. Jenkins is out with her dog at the dog park and she’s with her best friend. And she says to her best friend, where do you take your pet? And the woman says, Andy and Caitlin’s practice. And then she goes home and she Googles Andy and Caitlin’s practice and she sees all the reviews and she looks around all of our website and she goes, “Oh, next time I need to go to the vet, I might go there.” And then she leaves and she goes somewhere else and she talks to someone else who also says that we’re great. And then she goes home and she logs onto social media and there’s an ad for Andy and Caitlin’s practice.
She’s like, “You know what, let’s go ahead and talk to them.” And she clicks the button and then Facebook is like, we made a sale. Look at we, that’s a Facebook sale. And you’re like, “That is not a Facebook sale, that was six other people that was,” honestly, Mrs. Jenkins’ friend of the dog park is probably the driver there. It just happened to be that there was an ad that says, click here to make an appointment in front of her face. And so then you see this inflated value and this, now it works the other way too, where people see social media content all day long and then they go to your website directly and then make an appointment.
And there’s no obvious tracked return on investment. But you definitely made an impact. I look back at my own career and say, my wife used to be like, “Why are you spending so much time on Facebook for God’s sakes?” And I don’t know how I, you could never track a thing that says, I spent this amount of time and energy on Facebook and as a result, this is what I got to do later in my career. But I’m confident that they are absolutely related, there’s no way they’re not. But I can’t prove that correlation at all.
Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
Right. And most people can’t. Even me, I do a lot of ROI tracking for my practice alone, just for purely experimental reasons, and I won’t say it’s perfect. But I do think a lot of clinics are not even trying, they’ve just assumed that it’s not. And I think the easiest thing is if you’re using marketing to get new clients, then the easiest thing is to ask them when they come in for their first appointment, that’s the one thing that’s like the baby ROI tracking is to say, “Okay, add that to your client referral source tracking and actually run that.” If you do nothing else, that’s the first thing. So you could say, “Oh, this quarter I got seven new clients from Facebook.” And then you know that you spent this much time and this much money on Facebook that costs this much for clients.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah.
Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
Was it worth it?
Dr. Andy Roark:
That is the simple hack that I highly recommend. ‘Cause Facebook will be like, “Look at these insights. It’s a spreadsheet that goes on for miles,” and none of it’s really useful. And the truth is just ask people, “Hey, what would you say the number one reason you came in here was?” And they’re like, “Oh, Facebook.” “Great, thanks bud.” And that’s the actual rubber meeting the road of the person coming into your practice, I think old school af, but still works really, really well.
Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
Agree, agree.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Awesome. Talk to me a little bit about outsourcing for marketing, because I agree with you. I think that in a lot of ways the complexity of, in a lot of ways the complexity of marketing and communication has continued to grow. And I think that you’re right about a position in larger practices, for sure, of someone who just oversees this. I can see in a lot of smaller practices, people saying, “We don’t have that capacity here. I need to get some help.” Can you kind of lay out the landscape a little bit of what does outsourcing marketing look like today when it’s so tied into our PIM system, into our reminders, into how we communicate, give me some advice on how a practice might go about engaging in that.
Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
Yeah, totally. Totally a common, again, common question, common concern. And the reality is that for many, many years, and I think you and I’ve spoken about this before, I have been the hugest proponent of, “No, you should do it in house.” And that’s what I love to do is train people to do it. You have someone that has the interest and has the time. It’s always going to be best done by somebody that’s on the ground, knows the clinic, knows the practice, knows the clients. That is a reality most practices cannot now justify, right?
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah, it’s hard if you, that’s a hard pill to swallow, but it’s true.
Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
But you got to be on the floor. You got to be seeing appointments, right? I need you in surgery. I don’t have time for this. So I think what makes sense for many practices is to do an audit of what it is that they really want to do, what amount of time they can realistically contribute. And from there maybe that person who actually was interested and actually wanted to do it, they work with someone to make sure that it gets done. Because a lot of times the ideas and the why’s and the passion can still come from the practice, but maybe there’s someone else that can take care of actually deploying it. The biggest example I’ll give the for this is video. So everyone knows video is key, video does great on social media. Sometimes we like creating video or capturing it. Let’s not say creating. How many million videos do you have from your practice on your phone that have never left your phone because they need editing?
They need branded with a clinic name. They need a call to action and a caption. And I think you should still get credit for capturing the video because you have that relationship that you were able to capture the video and you knew and recognized that this could be valuable marketing material, but outsourcing it to someone on any number of companies to actually edit it and get it done and posted is a beautiful thing. And you should still get credit for doing that. And I think that’s kind of the hybrid model that a lot of practices need to adopt.
They need to figure out what can they do very easily and still get their mission and their passion and their why accomplished, but how can they hand it off to someone who actually gets it done? I think that hybrid model needs to be promoted a little bit more because realistically, even for us, I outsource all of our video editing, I hate video editing. I’m terrible at it. So it’s totally worth it to me to pay someone on a service to edit it and then it’s done and it can be actually used. So I think the hybrid is where a lot of practices are headed.
Dr. Andy Roark:
I love it. That makes a ton of sense. Caitlin DeWilde, you are the author of the new book, Social Media and Marketing for Veterinary Professionals. I’ll put a link in the show notes for people to pick it up. If you’re a practice manager and your practice is doing a fair amount of marketing or if an area you’re interested in growing in, you should grab a copy and have it on your shelf. Caitlin, where can people find you online? Where can they learn more?
Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
I would love to connect with anyone that is nerdy about this stuff or wants to be nerdy about it. And you can find me at the social DBM on all the social channels, of course, or at thesocialdbm.com or heywhatsup@thesocialdvm.com if you want to send me an email.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Perfect. Awesome. Well, thanks so much for being here. Guys, take care of yourselves.
Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
Bye everyone.
Dr. Andy Roark:
And that’s it, guys. That’s what I got for you. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope it was a fun conversation for you guys. It certainly was for me. Anyway, if this is helpful, if you love it, one, get Caitlin’s book and number two, write me an artist review wherever you get your podcast. Apple, the Apple Podcast app is a huge place where most people find their podcasts, and honestly, if you could leave me a quick review there, it really means the world to me. But anyway, guys, take care of yourselves. Be well. I’ll talk to you later on. All right, bye.
