Your blog is more than a repository for informational articles that enhance your search engine listing. When used effectively, blogs can become powerful client tools that attract, engage, educate, and retain pet owners. Follow our Rumpus Writing and Editing team’s strategies to ensure your blog posts reach beyond your website, and perform to their full potential.

#1: Use posts to start pre-visit conversations

Seasonally appropriate and trending content provides clients timely information about current pet safety and health concerns, preventing them from looking to other veterinary care providers. Publish new or repackage old blog posts, and share them to your social media channels. Draw in clients by painting a compelling image or by featuring the article’s top takeaways directly in your social media post as a branded carousel or eye-catching word art. Include the link in the copy, but don’t require your clients to read the post to benefit from its content. 

This strategy may seem counterintuitive. However, sharing key messages upfront is more likely to motivate client action—your ultimate goal—rather than asking them to click away from their social platform, read an 800-word blog post, and then schedule an appointment.

#2: Provide tailored post-visit education with direct links

Pamphlets and printed handouts are great, but custom links to relevant content on your website provides each client with a curated experience, and reinforces your practice’s credibility as a comprehensive educational resource. Branded content that reflects your practice’s stance and mission provides a consistent follow-up to the information your client received in the exam room, and shapes potential clients’ behavior by showing them what’s available on your blog.

Keep the conversation going outside the exam room by emailing or texting clients with direct links to relevant posts during or after their pet’s exam. Some great applications include:

  • Puppy or kitten care
  • Parasite prevention
  • Quality-of-life assessment
  • Pain signs and management
  • Senior pet home modifications 
  • Chronic illness care

Your blog is also a fantastic way for client service representatives (CSRs) and technicians to respond to nonmedical inquiries by providing convenient, accurate, and branded content. Rather than spending 15 minutes on the phone discussing crate training, the team can provide a prepared step-by-step guide, responses to frequently asked questions (FAQs), or a checklist that the client can reference at any time. Once you’ve built up your blog library, increase the information’s value and clients’ reading time by including internal links to relevant posts. For example, embed a link to your safe puppy chew toy guide in your crate training post.

#3: Enhance follow-up communication with handpicked posts

Explaining diagnostic test results over the phone or via email can be time consuming and, despite your team’s best efforts, may leave clients with more questions, unintentionally driving them straight to Dr. Google. Improve your client’s understanding and manage their outlook by sharing links to appropriate blog posts that explain their pet’s diagnosis, helpful care tips, and responses to FAQs. This supplemental information can help clients process concerns about their pet’s condition without feeling rushed or pressured to make a decision, thereby improving their satisfaction and minimizing the need for back-and-forth communication between them and your team members.

#4: Build an audience for your email newsletter

Social media may seem like the best route for connecting with clients, but email marketing is still the only sure way to reach your target audience. Email newsletters are a powerful way to engage clients with special offers and promotions, practice news, and timely pet owner information. Incorporating your blog posts into your email newsletter provides high-value educational content, steers interested clients to your website, and builds practice loyalty by establishing credibility and a commitment to client education.

The key to an effective email newsletter is providing valuable content without overwhelming the reader with text. To accomplish this, feature one relevant blog post per newsletter by highlighting a key quote, calling out the biggest takeaways, or providing an interactive element such as a checklist or quiz. Then, call your readers to action by inviting them to read the full post on your website.

#5: Create engaging and interactive social media content

Generating social media content can feel like an endless hamster wheel of trends and taglines, a chore for which your veterinary team members simply don’t have time. If your practice blog seems uninspiring, bring the post to life by incorporating its content into your everyday workflows, conversations, and marketing. However, if you need to spark your next scroll-stopping post, mine your blog’s evergreen content for topics, series ideas, tips, and fun facts. Don’t be afraid to get creative. Use video, image carousels, and graphics to attract attention, then add a direct link to the blog in your post. Examples include:

  • Refresh last year’s parasite prevention post by creating a simple interactive carousel question and answer, or a You Don’t Know Tick quiz.
  • Reintroduce and recognize longtime team members with a then-and-now photo collage, and a link to the corresponding Meet the Veterinarian/Team Member post. 
  • Reshare a fun but factual post on canine intelligence, and invite your readers to comment with a video of their pet’s best trick or skill.

Need help building your content library? Our Rumpus Writing and Editing team provides industry-leading business-to-business and business-to-client content and marketing materials to help veterinary businesses and practices reach their audience and their goals. Contact our team to discuss your copywriting needs.