Jen Phillips April — July 20, 2017 — July 20, 2017
Susan is a veterinarian with 30 years experience and her specialty is dentistry for dogs and cats. Over the years, she’s spoken at conferences, served on committees and built a solid reputation in her field. Her practice is referral based as other veterinarians recommend their patients to her.
Sounds great right?
Me with Lola the pup.
But there’s a problem.
The problem is business is changing and the traditional relationship buildings methods that Susan has relied on for years aren’t working as well. Veterinarians she’s known for years are either retiring or selling their practices to one of the big vet hospital conglomerates.
Newer veterinarians don’t have a pre-existing relationship with her and may not even know her name. They also don’t attend the same types of networking events Susan built her career on.
Susan knows she needs to incorporate online marketing methods to reach these newer veterinarians but she doesn’t know where to start.
Here’s the good news. As the subject matter expert who has decades of knowledge in her head and probably, on her hard drive, it’s a matter of reorganizing her material and distributing it effectively online where the newer vets will see it.
As Susan provides education online through avenues where the newer vets can see it, they’ll be more apt to think of her when they have a dentistry issue with a patient.
There are multiple ways to do that but for simplicity’s sake let’s focus on the following.
2 Ways to Connect with New Referral Partners Online
Webinars and videos are both good ways to reach them and start building the relationship.
Here’s why. You’re already accustomed to sharing stories about cases you’ve worked on. You may have dozens of before and after pictures to illustrate your stories. You might have slide decks from previous presentations.
These existing content assets may need to be organized in an easy to share location such as Google Drive or Dropbox. That way, they can be reviewed and repurposed for new presentations, blogs, or social media.
You’ll create new content too of course, but you might as well start with what you already have.
You can create a simple spreadsheet that lists the topics, their format and where they can be found.
Within your marketing plan, you’ll create a list of possible distribution platforms for your content. For example, if you can offer online educational seminars on behalf of a professional organization that could be a good avenue. You might find you want to host the videos on a Vimeo or YouTube channel and use online marketing tools like landing pages and email marketing to build your own list of interested professionals.
There’s no “one way” to reach your target market. Rather, it’s a combination of where they are, available resources, and preference. Some professionals would rather host a short monthly webinar on their own platform while others would rather contribute to a thriving professional organization. Others do both.
Within your marketing plan, you’ll want to consider all the factors including your technology needs.
The other good news is, online marketing is education based so once the systems are put into place it can run like clock work.
Do you want to find out more about using online marketing in your professional practice? Download this one-page marketing plan.
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