How to Сontrol Marketing Plan Implementation

Growing your vet practice takes more than offering good treatment for furry friends. You’ll need a solid marketing strategy if you want to see genuine growth. Writing your plan is often the easy part. But marketing plan implementation and control, well, that’s another story. You’ll need to track the most important marketing KPIs to maximize your results.

Ever heard of KPIs?

Don’t worry. You’ve come to the right place. We’ll dive into KPIs in a bit. First, let’s talk about why marketing plan implementation and control are important and see how KPIs and online tools can help.

Your vet practice marketing plan is a detailed collection of your ideas. It explains what you plan to do but it might not explain how you’re going to do it. Proper implementation of your marketing plan is key to your plan’s (and your vet practice’s) success.

Without controls in place, you might make marketing decisions based on gut instinct.

That can be bad news.

You might double down on a campaign that isn’t driving leads or getting you traffic. You need to stick with the data instead.

Let’s talk about key performance indicators. These helpful signals help you determine when your veterinary marketing is working and which elements of it are the most valuable. 

KPIs cover everything from overall sales revenue to whether your blog is being read by a large audience. They help veterinary groups determine which marketing tactics are leading to growth and which are simply wasteful spending. For B2C veterinary groups, KPIs will prove invaluable when gauging the success of your digital marketing strategy.

To use KPIs effectively, follow this process for each KPI:

• Set a target value
• Determine a tolerance range
• Track the values
• Compare planned values to actuals
• Adjust the plan to eliminate deviations

1. Sales Revenue

Often, the most important KPI is sales revenue.

Owners and managers usually want to see some kind of financial return on their marketing. 75% of marketers use these reports to show how campaigns directly impact revenue. After all, revenue is what keeps your vet practice open to treat those pets. Take a look at total revenue versus the revenue from customers who came in via your marketing efforts.

2. Cost Per Lead

Some marketing plans perform better than others. The cost per lead metric helps you determine how your campaign shapes up against the competition. 

Your goal is to have a lower cost per lead. This means your veterinary group is getting more prospective clients for every dollar you allocate to vet clinic marketing. You want your ad campaign to have a high conversion rate, which means that many leads are converted into actual clients who direct revenue into your coffers. 

3. Inbound Link Building

Other websites linking to your web pages are critically important in the modern marketplace. Inbound links will bolster the authority of your website in the eyes of readers and algorithms alike. Marketing for veterinary practices should always include efforts to secure links on other popular websites in related sectors that will drive traffic your way. 

Keeping track of high quality inbound links from well-ranking websites is a necessary part of any successful marketing plan. Pursue links from high traffic websites, and your overall marketing efforts will soon enjoy redoubled success.

4. Customer Lifetime Value

That brings us to customer lifetime value.

CLTV tracks how much revenue clients bring in during their entire time as a customer.

You can calculate customer lifetime value with this formula:

Average Order Value x Purchase Frequency x Average Customer Lifetime (in years) = CLTV

5. Inbound Marketing ROI

Investing money into a marketing campaign that doesn’t work is bad business. Calculating ROI will help you see which campaigns are adding to your practice’s growth. And you’ll learn which campaigns are draining your cash. Build flexibility into your plan so you can shift cash to the campaigns that are working.

Remember that inbound marketing requires a multi-faceted approach; you’re attempting to grow your website by directing traffic from across the internet toward your web pages. A high inbound marketing ROI indicates that your marketing strategy implementation and control is going well. 

6. Traffic-to-Lead Ratio (New Contact Rate)

With any new marketing plan that directs an audience to your website, you’ll see an increase in your web traffic. But not all traffic converts into leads at the same rate. Your traffic-to-lead ratio will help you see if all that traffic is worth it.

If your new contact rate goes down, assess your web copy and check to see if the campaign is generating well-qualified traffic. You’ll know the traffic coming into your website is well-qualified when the users seeing your brand for the first time have already expressed an interest in your industry or sector in the past. Using the right key words and having excellent content marketing are the only surefire ways to secure well-qualified traffic on a consistent basis. 

7. Lead-to-Customer Ratio

Leads that convert into customers are obviously the most important to your practice. There are two categories to track; sales qualified leads and sales accepted leads. Sales qualified leads are pet owners who filled out a form on your site to book an appointment. Sales accepted leads are potential opportunities. Your team likely would have initiated the contact.

Ask yourself the following questions to determine if your campaign is effective. If it’s not, cut it in favour of other marketing ideas for your vet practice.

• Is my campaign generating leads regularly?
• Are we receiving qualified leads to sales at the right time?
• Do we have a high close rate?

8. Organic Traffic (for websites)

Your marketing plan likely includes a strategy to grow organic traffic to your site. Higher search traffic means more users are finding your vet practice’s website on their own. This traffic is often cheap compared to other channels. You can use tools like Google Search Console to track your web traffic.

If your organic traffic isn’t increasing, it might be time to find a marketing agency that can help.

9. Blog Post Visits

Well-written blog posts are foundational to the success of any SEO and marketing strategy. 

Veterinary groups hoping to lure in new contents should be focused on producing informative and authoritative content which can be consumed online. Excellent blog posts also help you recruit talented professionals by bolstering your industry credibility. Keep careful track of your blog posts and how they’re performing, and take note of which topics are the most popular.

If a particular blog is getting lots of hits, consider turning it into a recurring series where you delve deeper into the topic. Your blog traffic data will prove indispensable to the overall growth of your digital presence. 

10. Social Media Traffic (and Conversion Rates)

Many practice owners have questioned if putting effort into social media is worth it. But the numbers show that social media is a key component of your digital marketing strategy. Social media has a 100% higher lead-to-close rate than outbound marketing.
But not all social media platforms will be the right fit for you. Trying to manage Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Instagram might be too much. Track social media to figure out where to focus your social media activity.

• Number of lead conversions from each social media channel
• Number of customer conversions from each social media channel
• Percentage of traffic from each social media channel

You can collect and record KPI data using whatever method works best for you. Here are some of the tools that digital marketers find useful.

Google Data Studio. This tool from Google is a custom solution for high-level monitoring of your website. Collect data from Google Analytics. Save time over pulling manual reports. Build a marketing KPI dashboard to get a concise overview of your site’s performance at any time.

CRM. Use a tool like Hubspot to automate your marketing processes. Your CRM lets you easily store and maintain client information. You can automate and track correspondence with leads and customers. You can even use it to track financials and link them to your marketing.

Google Drive. Google’s file storage solution, as well as Google Sheets, can help you keep track of your marketing KPI data. Get access to your KPI data anywhere you have an internet connection to make sure you stay up-to-date.

Task Tracker. Use a tool like Trello or Asana to plan and track your marketing tasks. Consistency is important when it comes to collecting accurate data. Missing a social media post or delaying the start of an ad can skew the numbers. Stick to a schedule!

You put a lot of time and energy into your marketing plan. By having a marketing plan, you’re already ahead of 50% of small businesses that don’t. Don’t waste your momentum by not using marketing KPIs for marketing plan implementation and control. Use the KPIs listed here to keep track of the results of your vet practice marketing.

With free tools like Google Data Studio, Hubspot, Google Drive, and Asana, you’ll be a marketing pro!

Just think of all the dogs, cats, and other pets you’ll be able to help as a result of your marketing plan’s success!