Case Study: Using Digital and Social Media Marketing to Increase Client Numbers

Using Facebook and other social platforms to integrate your practice into your client's community is one of the cheapest and most effective ways to increase your profile. This is modern word-of-mouth; the average Facebook user has 234 friends and these are likely to be mainly similar in age, location and demographics. So if you impress one client and they tell Facebook, that's 234 people who are likely to be the ideal demographic for your practice.

We all know it's much more powerful if someone else raves about how good you are; integrate it to your website and you're onto a PR winner. The Zoetis business consultancy team have worked hard to create an innovative new service to help practices with the daunting task of setting a digital marketing plan with some great results already.

For example, Laurie May began working with this practice in May 2013. The practice had never felt the need to invest any time or money in marketing because they had never needed to, but with increasing competition and declining footfall they were worried they might be missing something.

After an initial meeting with the leadership team, Laurie conducted a review of current marketing activities for the practice. This involved a website review, client demographic profiling, practice observations, and key performance indicator (KPI) analysis.

This showed that the website was not popular or well optimized and engagement in social media was poor. In addition, client profiling showed a large potential to attract new clients in the area and highlighted that their communication preferences were internet and email.

During an initial session with Laurie, the practice was introduced to Zoetis's bespoke digital marketing plan with the aim to increase new clients. To begin with, this involved some key actions to increase their search engine optimization (SEO) for the website, further improve their use of Facebook and the creation of an integrated digital campaign via email.

Laurie supported the practice to begin making changes straight away: improving their website and starting to promote the practice through Facebook. The change in trends on their Facebook page can be seen below:

1000 60 900 800 50 700 40 600 likes 500 30 -reviews 400 300 20 check ins 200 10 100 0 0 Sep-11 Apr-12 Oct-12 May-13 Nov-13 Jun-14