Owning your own Veterinarian practice is hard. Running your own business means taking on many different roles. You have to create marketing, generate new business, and understand taxes; all of this at the same time as providing care and medical treatment to your clients pets. Running your own business involves having to interact with the good and bad of customers and employees on a daily basis. Yes, owning and running a business is hard, but growing and scaling your business is even harder.
If you’re struggling to grow your practice, you are not alone but if you take the right steps now, you can easily identify ways you can grow your business and make more money. While there are hundreds of growth strategies out there for small businesses, these 6 tips will take your business to the next level quickly and efficiently.
- Research the competition.
When going to market you need to research the competition. Using a digital platform to provide competitive intelligence is essential. A digital platform allows you to closely examine landing pages, ad copy, and other stages of the funnel. These types of applications allow you to look at various competitors online strategies. You should find the ads that have been running for the longest and emulate those; this is the quickest way to scale any business. If it’s a proven strategy and works for your competitors, it’ll likely work for you too. - Utilize a customer management system.
No one wants to manually track transactions; it is difficult and becomes too cumbersome as the business grows. If you want to scale quickly, use a customer management system. There are plenty of these to choose from. A cloud-based software like SalesForce is a great and affordable option. Quickbooks can help you with the accounting. InfusionSoft can also assist with sales and marketing. There are plenty of CMS systems out there and most of them are capable of integrating with other cloud-based services. Look around for what works the best for you, demo different products and choose the best option for your business. - Create a customer loyalty program.
Loyalty programs are great ways to increase sales. It costs up to three times more money to acquire new customers than it does to sell something to an existing customer. Building a customer loyalty program will help you retain customers and might help you attract new ones as well. Give your existing customers a clear incentive to spend more money with you by building an attractive loyalty program and it will pay off quickly. - Build an email list.
Now let’s tie all of this information back together, one of the best and most effective ways to grow a business quickly is to build an email list. In order to build an email list you need to have a lead magnet. A lead magnet is an incentive that marketers offer to potential buyers in exchange for their email address, why else would people subscribe to your list? Of course, with a lead magnet, and incoming leads comes the necessity for a Customer Management System. - Form strategic partnerships.
Strategic partnerships with the right groups of people can make a world of difference. These partnerships will allow you to reach a much larger group of customers far more quickly than doing it on your own. Of course, identifying the most productive and best fit partnerships is not particularly easy. One important factor to look for is other businesses that are complementary to your own. Contact them and propose opportunities and benefits of working together. - Use an Answering Service.
An answering service is different from a call center because the focus is on answering after-hours and emergency phone calls for small businesses. While a call center may take orders from shoppers and supply basic information about a large corporation, professional answering services often answer calls for emergency situations. Think about the pet owner whose dog is having seizures in the middle of the night or the post-op patient that is experiencing complications once they have gone home. If you’re interested in providing exceptional service to each of your customers without personally fielding every call around the clock and only taking emergency calls, you can minimize overhead cost, spark business growth and enjoy increased profitability by working with an experienced Veterinarian Answering Service.
Like anything in life you have to put in the time and effort in order to enjoy the benefits and rewards of a successful business. One should not focus on the short-term outcome of your efforts but instead look ahead to the long term. Try to build sincere value in your business and make it a point to genuinely help your customers; this should be the foundation of your business anyway. After that, it’s simply a matter of taking action and hard work.