Veterinary

Running a veterinary practice is a noble calling. You get to care for animals and teach pet owners how to better support their four-legged friends. But how are you going to get more pet owners through your door to support your practice?

That’s where digital marketing comes in. While you could perform this task in-house, outsourcing to an experienced marketing agency for veterinarians may be a better option. Here’s why you should consider working with a veterinary marketing agency instead of doing your marketing in-house.

A Solid Marketing Plan

One of the biggest benefits you’ll reap from outsourcing your marketing to an experienced agency is expertise. With experience, resources, and knowledge of the best digital marketing practices, a trustworthy agency will be able to help you develop a solid plan. This includes everything from researching current trends to selecting high-performing keywords, creating relevant content, optimizing your website, and so much more.

Why is a solid plan for digital marketing so important, though? Let’s review.

Time

When you have an experienced team of professionals developing and executing digital marketing strategies, you’ll be able to dedicate more time to other aspects of your veterinary practice. Time is a precious resource, especially in a medical field. Being able to focus on your practice means that you’ll be able to build important relationships and foster success for your growing business. Let your team of digital marketing experts do what they do best so you have time to do what you do best: helping animals!

Audience

With a great marketing plan in place, you’ll be able to expand your audience. This is a key component that you’ll need to master if you want to grow your veterinary practice. Whether you’re looking to expand your service area or simply bring more local customers through your doors, a good digital marketing strategy can help you accomplish those goals without diverting resources away from the core needs of your practice. Building relationships with the pet owners you help is crucial for your practice to grow. A great marketing agency can help get those pet owners through the door so you can do your best work.

Revenue

A digital marketing plan that’s been developed by experienced veterinary marketing professionals will help you maximize your revenue. While it does cost money to develop and execute marketing tactics, the success of those strategies will ultimately help you get back what you invested and then some. Trusting a professional veterinary marketing agency can help you grow your business to higher levels than ever before.

Outside Perspective

Nobody knows your business better than you do. While you must understand the core principles of running your business, a veterinary marketing agency can help you expand your horizons with an outside perspective. This is especially true when it comes to marketing.

Getting an outsider’s perspective on your current marketing plan may open your eyes to blind spots or deficiencies that might exist there. When you can see those issues, then you can begin to work on them and create an even stronger brand for yourself. An experienced digital marketing agency for veterinarians might even already have a few tried and true strategies that can help you strengthen your marketing efforts and grow your business.

It’s okay to not have the answers for your digital marketing plan. That’s why outsourcing to a marketing agency for veterinarians can be such a huge boon for your practice’s growth. They may not know your business right away, but they do know digital marketing. And together, you can create a strong trajectory for business growth because of their new way of looking at things.

A Wealth of Marketing Experience

Experience is key to success in countless fields, and digital marketing is one of them. Nobody expects you to be a veterinarian and an expert marketing professional. When you outsource your practice’s digital marketing efforts, you’ll have access to a whole team of professionals with a wealth of experience in the marketing world. Even better, a marketing agency for veterinarians will specifically have experience working with practices like yours and helping them grow.

Experience means more than just years of practice in the field, though. Working with seasoned marketing professionals also means that they will know how to use important marketing tools like Google Ads to help you expand your practice’s reach even more effectively. If you’ve never branched out into the world of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising or optimizing your Google My Business profile (GMB), these are areas in which your marketing partners already know. Having access to that kind of knowledge can be truly priceless for your practice.

A Cost-Effective Solution

Outsourcing your digital marketing efforts can be a huge cost-saving strategy for your veterinary practice. While having a dedicated marketing professional on your staff might seem convenient, the truth is that it may be more expensive than outsourcing. Not only would you need to pay this employee’s salary, but you would also need to incur the costs of new software, hardware, and other marketing activities.

Outsourcing to a marketing agency for veterinarians is going to be a much more cost-effective option. Not only do you get a team of professionals executing digital marketing strategies, but you also get the added benefit of not paying for new software or other marketing tools. In addition, the success of your digital marketing strategy will help you increase your revenue as you grow.

Don’t Wait to Hire a Great Veterinary Marketing Agency!

Hiring a marketing agency for veterinarians might be the best thing you do for your practice this year. You’ll reap all of the benefits above and so much more because of their experience and knowledge.

If you’re thinking about hiring a veterinary marketing agency, our team is here to help. At ViziSites, our goal is to provide the best digital marketing experience possible so that small businesses like yours can focus on their expertise. Don’t hesitate to reach out to a member of our team today. We can’t wait to work with you.

If you own a veterinary practice, you know how difficult it can be to attract new customers and keep them coming back. Word-of-mouth marketing and billboard advertising can plant the initial seed for a potential customer to know what your business is and what it may offer. However, you need an optimized website with a high-quality design to truly capture the attention of the customers you want.

Website design and SEO are key factors in your veterinary practice’s marketing plan. So, how can you ensure they’re perfect? Keep reading to understand the importance of website design and SEO and how they can make or break your website’s impact.

What Does Good Website Design Look Like?

Your veterinary website design will attract customers if it’s done right. A good website will:

• Be easily navigable
• Be mobile-friendly
• Have simple and clear formatting in terms of both content and pictures
• Be easy to read
• Have quick loading times
• Contain a color scheme that doesn’t take away from the content

Best Practices for Successful Website Design

Now that you know what a good website consists of, let’s break it down into simple tasks.

1. 1. Build a navigation bar that is clear and easy to understand. For example, your navigation bar may consist of the terms Home, About, Contact, Services, Resources, and Blog. Under Services, subcategories for your veterinary practice’s services can be listed, such as Wellness, Vaccinations, Surgery, Emergency Services, and more. When the navigation bar is easy to understand, potential customers won’t have a problem seeing what your vet business offers and navigating to your Contact page to book an appointment!
   2. Make the website accessible and mobile-friendly. People of all ages and abilities have pets that need to be taken to the vet. This is why you need an accessible, mobile-friendly website that anyone can easily access and read. An accessible website will use a distinct color scheme, have easy-to-read fonts and text colors, and be easy to scroll through. Mobile friendliness is key as well because customers should be able to visit your veterinary website on any device they choose.
   3. Format the content on the website. The content on your website should be easy to read. This means that the content needs to be formatted with readers in mind. Use different size text for headings, subheadings, and paragraphs. Headings should be clear so that readers can easily jump to what information is relevant to them. It’s also a good idea to use numbered or bulleted lists when possible, as they’re easy for readers to scan.
   4. Ensure the website has fast loading times. Nobody wants to wait more than a few seconds for a website to load. In fact, most web users will look for a different website than wait for another to load. This is why your veterinary practice’s website must have fast loading times.
   5. Make forms visible and easy to fill out. Many businesses have forms on their websites so interested customers can fill out their contact information for a follow-up. If this is something you’d like to offer potential customers of your veterinary practice, ensure all forms can easily be accessed, filled out, and submitted. You don’t want a potential customer to have a headache trying to fill out a form that doesn’t work because they’ll likely navigate to a different website.
   6. Add fun and personable photos. As a veterinary practice, potential customers want to see that you’re passionate about your work and the animals you work with. This is why adding fun photos of patients can draw in more customers. With customer permission, add photos of current animals you work with on a regular basis (ask us how to easily collect media releases from your clients!). Include some spirited captions so potential customers can see you love the animals you work with!
   7. Add client testimonials throughout the website. Adding customer reviews to your website is a great way for potential clientele to see the kind of work you do. It’s important to have a page on your website dedicated to these testimonials. However, you can also add previews to these reviews on various pages on your website. This way, a potential customer can read a preview of a review and click on a link that takes them to the rest of them. 85% of consumers read online reviews before making a buying decision, making reviews a critical factor in turning website visitors into scheduled clients (Source: BrightLocal).

What Your Website Needs to Include

Web design is more than how it looks. It also has to do with how the website operates. To ensure your veterinary practice’s website reaches its full potential, it should have:

• • Excellent error handling. When an error occurs, you want a message to come up that makes the problem clear to the reader. This improves the web user’s experience on your website.
  • Consistency across all web browsers. The website should look and operate the same whether a person is using Safari, Chrome, or Mozilla Firefox on their laptop, computer, cell phone, or tablet.
  • Clean coding. This makes your website easy to navigate and find online, helps with loading times, responsiveness, and more.
  • Proper URLs. Ensure your website has an SSL Certificate and that you are using HTTPs for your website, as it improves your website’s security and by extension, its ranking in search results.
  • Effective SEO techniques. Let’s dive into SEO and its importance below.

What Is SEO and Why Does Your Website Need It?

Search engine optimization (SEO), when implemented correctly, will improve the quality and quantity of traffic to your veterinary business’s website organically. Organic traffic is unpaid. When you use proper SEO techniques on your website, your website will get more traffic, its search engine rankings will increase, and you’ll get more customers!

SEO is one of the most important aspects of any business’s website. It is a long-term strategy; so, slowly and steadily, it will help your veterinary practice’s website perform better and better. However, it takes the right techniques to improve your website and its rankings.

Best SEO Practices for Your Veterinary Practice’s Website

Here are the most important veterinary SEO practices your veterinary business’s website needs to follow:

1. 1. Research and select the right keywords. A lot of research goes into finding the right keywords for a particular business and its website. For example, if you own a veterinary practice in Rochester, NY, you’d likely look to keywords like “veterinarian Rochester NY,” “animal hospital Rochester NY,” and “best veterinary practice Rochester NY.” For a business that is targeting a particular geographic area, it’s important to research keywords with that location in them. You may also target potential customers in surrounding areas. Essentially, performing proper keyword research can drastically improve your chances of ranking on those keywords. 
   2. Properly map the keywords. Using keywords doesn’t end with research. After the right keywords have been selected for your veterinary practice’s website, they need to be mapped correctly. For example, “veterinarian Rochester NY” would likely be mapped to your website’s home page because it is the broadest keyword, or what we refer to as your “occupational” keyword. A keyword like “emergency vet Rochester NY” would be mapped to the “Emergency Services” services page. A keyword like “veterinary tips” could be mapped to a page on your website that offers care tips for new pet owners. It’s also important to keep in mind that only a few keywords should be mapped to each page, as they’ll be more likely to rank if the quality outweighs the quantity of the keywords.
   3. Optimize for “near me” keywords and voice searches. Technology is constantly evolving, which means more people will be using the voice search option on their smartphones to look up the services they seek. This is why you need to optimize your veterinary practice’s website for “near me” and voice searches, and ensure you are paying attention to your Local SEO as well. Don’t know what “local SEO” is? We can help! 
   4. Naturally integrate the keywords into the website’s copy. Keyword stuffing is an older SEO tactic that results in the distrust of search engines, which will hurt a website’s rankings. This is why keywords need to be naturally integrated into your veterinary practice’s website copy. For example, you don’t want a sentence that drops in a keyword just because it needs to be on the page. You want it to sound natural. For example, if you wanted to integrate the keyword “emergency veterinary services Rochester NY” naturally into the copy on your Emergency Services page, you could write: “Bring in your dog for emergency veterinary services that Rochester, NY pet owners can count on.” This way, the geo within this keyword doesn’t sound awkward. Writing carefully and thoughtfully will ensure the copy on your veterinary practice’s website reads well.
   5. Ensure keywords are used in meta descriptions, title tags, headings, and URLs. Every SEO page on your website should have its own meta description, title tag, major heading, and URL string. Meta descriptions and title tags appear on search engine search results, so it’s important they are written correctly and contain the right information.
      1. A meta description describes the page’s purpose or service and includes a call to action. For example, an Emergency Services page with the “emergency veterinary services Rochester NY” keyword could have a meta description that reads: “Smith Vet offers emergency veterinary services Rochester, NY pet owners can count on. Contact us today to learn more about our trusted services.” Best SEO practice for meta descriptions involves writing between 120 and 160 characters.
      2. Title tags are the words that appear in a tab when you’re on a webpage. Title tags should be under 60 characters. For the same scenario above, a proper title tag would read: “Emergency Veterinary Services Rochester, NY | Smith Vet”. The keyword should be followed with its geo, a spacer, and the name of the business.
      3. Every page on a website should have a major heading that describes the main idea of that particular page. Typically, H1s are used. The H1 for the scenario above could read: “Dependable Emergency Veterinary Services In Rochester, NY”. You want to keep H1s on the shorter side, using an adjective that positively describes the offered service. It’s a good idea to include the geo when possible, too.
      4. Every URL for your website should accurately reflect the page it is associated with. For example, a URL for the scenario above could read: “https://smithvet.com/services/emergency-veterinary-services”. Ensure all pages on your website are nestled in the correct folder. All services should be under a “Services” folder in your navigation bar, and this should be reflected in the URL strings. It’s best practice to keep URL strings short and to the point so web users can easily get a main idea of the page they’re navigating by simpling reading the URL.
   6. Only publish high-quality content. On a similar note, the copy on your website should be well-written. You want every page to have useful information for readers. For example, your home page should welcome visitors to your business. It should provide an overview of your veterinary practice’s services as well as contact information. Each service page should provide a detailed description of what each service entails. Remember that potential customers want to see that you are passionate about providing veterinary care, so ensure all of the copy on your website is well-written and makes sense for your audience.
   7. Include internal links throughout your website. To make navigation easier for potential customers, it is best practice to include internal links throughout your veterinary practice’s website. For example, when you write “Contact us today!” on your website’s home page, this call to action should be linked to your website’s Contact page. The same goes for discussing various services you offer on your home page. It’s a good idea to link each service so that readers can easily click on the service they’re most interested in and learn more about it on the page with the most information about it. Internal links are not only good for customer accessibility. It is also a good SEO technique because they help search engines understand your website and business better and, therefore, rank your website higher.
   8. Include photos and videos on your website. Including photos and videos on your veterinary practice’s website isn’t only good for the website’s visual appearance. It’s also a great way to optimize your website. Images and videos make your website’s content more interesting for web users, which will increase engagement and traffic as well as show search engines that your website is trustworthy. You should also use descriptive image names and include alternative text for each image using the keyword associated with the page the image is on.
   9. Research, research, research. Research is a very important aspect of proper SEO. Apart from researching the best keywords to use for your own veterinary practice’s website, you also need to analyze how those keywords are performing on a regular basis. You may want to compare your keyword rankings to your competitors to see how you can improve your website’s SEO as well. Measuring your results will help your website rank higher over time.
   10. Earn backlinks to your website. A backlink is a link from one website to another. When your business is linked on trustworthy, high-ranking websites, search engines will view your website as trustworthy as well. Earning backlinks takes patience, though. There are many ways to earn backlinks, like offering to write guest posts for other websites and doing link exchanges. It’s important to keep in mind that quality is much more important than quantity when it comes to earning backlinks. Having a bunch of low-quality links to your websites on spammy-looking websites will actually hurt your website’s credibility and search engine rankings. Instead, consider partnering with other businesses in your area that you trust, and adding links to each other’s websites on a resources page.

Invest in High-Quality Website Design and SEO Services for Your Veterinary Practice Today

Your veterinary practice’s website design and SEO are both crucial to your website and your business’s success. When your website is properly designed and optimized, more users will find your website, read through its content, decide you’re a trustworthy business, and become a customer. To learn more about improving your veterinary practice’s website, contact ViziSites. We offer high-quality marketing services for veterinary businesses across the country. Hire us today for excellent marketing services that’ll put your veterinary business on top!

A veterinary practice needs to connect with its clients not only to retain them but also to get rave reviews. Creating a specific tone of voice for your brand will help you build that connection to your customers by helping your audience understand your company’s personality. Here are some of the ways that you can create a tone of voice for your veterinary practice.

Understanding Tone of Voice

Though the phrase “tone of voice” is used frequently, there is a difference between the tone and the voice of your brand. The tone refers to the message you are presenting to your potential and existing clients. It’s also concerned with the delivery of this information. This disparity is often found between serious emails and quick social media posts. When dealing with animals, there will be serious moments, but a marketing agency for veterinarians will try to combine your tones when possible to create a singular brand tone.

Identify Your Audience

Understanding your audience is a key part of defining your brand’s tone of voice. Veterinarian marketing agencies will ask about your target audience when they begin developing your voice for content. They’ll want to know things like your audience’s age, location, and probably species of animal. Set aside time to take a look at your client base, recall your or your staff’s interactions with them, and make notes.

If you are looking to find clients of a new demographic, whether that be people with multiple pets or parents with free time during the day, mention that to your veterinary marketing agency. You may even want to expand your market to the surrounding area. The agency you partner with can keep this information in mind as they start to create posts for social media and your website.

Unify Your Website

One of the most important steps in solidifying a tone of voice is implementing it across all your platforms. If the language and tone used are not consistent across the internet and in your marketing materials, it can confuse customers and make your practice seem impersonal. Starting with a website review is a great way to get going. Your site may even be outdated, have missing biographies for veterinarians, fail to mention services, or have a poor design. These questions will allow your veterinary social media marketing team to create a website that speaks to the people you want to reach. Here are some questions a branding service might ask you when working on social media for veterinarians:

• What is the aim of your home page?
• What services would you most like to promote?
• Do you want to appear serious or playful?
• Do you want to prioritize targeting new customers?
• Do you have staff available to answer questions?

The answers to these questions can also be used to help create color schemes for your brand, too. A website design team may suggest changing the colors on your site to match your desired tone of voice. For example, if your website is mostly black and white, but you want to appear trustworthy, they may suggest adding blue accents to your theme.

Move to Social Media

Any time someone engages with your social media content, they’re interacting with your brand voice. People will base their first impressions on these interactions – before they’ve ever met you in person. These first impressions are why it’s so important to be deliberate with your brand voice. Your veterinary marketing agency might ask you to identify a few adjectives that you can use to describe your practice. Some good examples are:

• Thoughtful
• Friendly
• Experienced
• Professional
• Qualified
• Holistic
• Fun
• Welcoming
• Comfortable

A good marketing service will use these words to help create your social media posts. That might mean using the actual words in posts or just keeping them in mind as points of reference.

Your posts should be crafted as if an actual person is saying the words. Too often, brands sound inauthentic. Try to make the posts seem relatable while also being informational. You might look to improve your friendliness. If you are, your veterinary marketing agency could post a few photos of pets that recently received a new treatment you are offering. This is a good way of engaging with the client and promoting your practice.

Don’t let old posts go unchecked, either. Be sure to scrub your old social media for any posts that go against your current marketing strategy with your marketing partner. This work is another great way to keep your social media feed easy for your clients to use and interact with. Using these small efforts, your practice will already be better at customer relations.

Why You Need a Tone of Voice

The purpose of this work is to improve your brand’s appeal to new and existing clients. Your veterinary marketing agency will specifically analyze the interactions they see on your website and in social media posts. They can use this information to constantly improve your brand’s tone and voice. When clients feel they are being spoken to directly and personally, they will feel happier to speak with you again in the future.

You can look forward to an increased client base after collaborating with a veterinary marketing agency on your tone of voice. They will be able to visualize the practice better when they read about your volunteer efforts or specific services you provide for their pets. When people feel connected, they are more likely to click back. Don’t underestimate the power of brand tone and voice combined.

Tone of Voice Is Everywhere

Once the tone of voice for your website and social media posts has been defined, share it with every member of your veterinarian practice. All staff should learn about the tone of voice and what it aims to do. This will help improve the experience of clients when communicating at the practice.

You might feel the urge to slide back to your old ways of posting on your website when your veterinary marketing agency provides updates for you to approve. It is important to keep an open line of communication with your agency and listen to what they have to say. After all, they have your best interest in mind and are focused on developing a specific voice for your clients.

Choosing a client-approved company like Vizisites to improve your website design is a great way to make sure your website and social media posts are prepared for your audience. They are proven to improve the visibility of your site while promoting your specific services to your target audience.

One of the biggest challenges for veterinarians today is creating an online presence. It’s virtually impossible to run a successful business today without an online presence, but veterinary digital marketing may not be as intuitive as digital marketing is in other fields. Veterinarians usually have a somewhat contained client base, meaning it’s difficult to build your client base after a certain point because your business is stationary. So the key is to ensure that your existing client base keeps coming back consistently, and referring their friends to you.

Much of this comes down to your online presence, and in particular your veterinary blog. Your online presence will keep your business at top of mind and easy to find for pet parents in the area who may have visited your practice once before, and are trying to find you again. A veterinary blog is highly recommended, as it’s an easy way for new clients to find you and old clients to be reminded that they need to schedule that important check-up for their pet. But how do you make your veterinary blog engaging? The last thing you want is for them to become bored with your content. Let’s find out what you should do.

1. Be Informative

In some ways, you may not want to include too much educational information in your veterinary digital marketing. You may feel like it’s counterintuitive to provide your clients with tips on over-the-counter ways to soothe their dog’s itching when you could have them visit your practice for treatment instead. However, if your blog is truly informative it will be more highly regarded by consumers, and they’ll be more likely to share blog posts with each other. This will increase the trust in your brand, and bring in clients.

2. Offer Local Pet Owner Recommendations

Another great way to improve your veterinary digital marketing is by having posts that recommend local opener resources. About 25% of American households own dogs, but your local dog owners may not know the best places to go for supplies or doggy daycare. Even a post about your favorite dog-friendly restaurants in town or the best local dog parks can bring value! They’ll appreciate your advice, and this will build trust.

3. Take A Stance

Make your stances known. If you think that raw dog food is bad, tell your audience! While this may be polarizing and could alienate some potential readers, you could also attract attention by taking a strong stance on debatable topics. Your insight on a debatable topic may help more pet parents trust you as their pet’s care provider.

We understand that it is difficult to make time for a veterinary blog. Talk to our marketing firm about your options – our team work with veterinary practices nationwide to improve their online presence, including with regular blog articles!

It can be incredibly difficult to differentiate your veterinarian’s practice from others in this day and age. Ultimately, all veterinarians offer the same thing on paper: they are doctors for animals, though their individual specialties can vary. Typically, a mid-sized town will have several veterinary practices at least, and it can be difficult for pet owners to differentiate between all of them.

An additional obstacle for veterinary practices is that many of them do not have good branding. They’re fairly straightforward in their presentation, and even if they offer vastly different services for patients, there is often no clear way for patients to know this. With that being said, there are ways that you can increase your vet branding & differentiate your veterinary practice from others – which will ultimately increase your revenue. Here are a few ideas for how to do this:

1. Work to Develop a Distinct Brand

As previously mentioned, one of the biggest issues for veterinary practices is that many of them do not have strong, distinct vet branding. You need to have a voice that represents how you are different from the competition. For example, if you distinctly focus on exotic animals in your practice, this needs to be a part of your branding. You may also want to capitalize on having a more personal approach than other veterinary practices. Another strong differentiation may be extra certifications you have attained (AAHA Accredited, Fear Free Veterinary Practice, CatFriendly Practice, etc.). Working with a professional marketing firm experienced in veterinary marketing will help to strengthen your branding, as we can give you ideas for ways to differentiate your practice from others online.

2. Communicate Your Brand Across Multiple Platforms

It’s not enough to have a strong sense of vet branding. You also need to communicate that branding across multiple platforms — not just print advertising and the visual presentation of your office, but social media as well. According to Small Biz Genius, your business’s revenue can rise by 23% if you consistently present your vet branding across all the platforms you use. In a very real way, this can take your vet practice revenue from $775,000 a year to $1 million a year.

3. Interact With Your Client Base

Poll the clients that you have; ask them about what is working and what isn’t. Incentivize them to spread the word about your brand and practice by offering discounts through a referral program. (Note: do NOT incentivize writing public reviews, as this is against the community guidelines of many platforms such as Google and Yelp. Many clients are happy to write reviews if you simply ask!) While it might be challenging to practice this engagement at first, you can get valuable information and even new clients through it.

You can increase your practice’s revenue by focusing on your veterinary practice’s branding and sharing what it means to you and the community you serve. Contact ViziSites today to get started on amping up your vet branding in more ways than one.

You may not often think about your logo, especially when you have so many pets to take care of. You might not have even updated your logo since first creating it. Yet, as any experienced veterinary marketing agency will tell you, your logo is a visual representation of your business. It’s often the first thing that people see when they search for your business online or visit your location in person. Here are a few reasons why the design of your logo is important to your veterinary practice.

Grabbing the Attention of Clients

If you’re just one in a sea of veterinarians in your area, you need to make sure your logo will get others’ attention. Your logo needs to be eye-catching and quickly relay to your potential clients what your company is about. If possible, you should also incorporate what your company prioritizes into the logo so that customers will have an idea of what you offer before they even walk through your doorway.

For example, if you specialize in treating reptiles in addition to mammals, your logo might include two types of pets to make sure that message is given to new customers. The name of your business should be in a clear font so it can be easily read. Your design team can test the logo on several people to make sure it’s easy to understand.

Creating Your Brand Identity

As mentioned, your logo is often the first thing that people see about your practice. It might be the profile picture on your social media profiles or in the top left corner of your website. It may even be the street sign that people see when driving down the highway. Because it has an impact on the first impression you make, your logo is a big part of your brand. This will affect the way that clients — both potential and returning — view your business. They might take you less seriously if you use elements that may be seen as less professional, like a neon color or a font that is seen as “old”. Talk with your logo design company about the tone that you would like to convey about your business.

This can be done in conjunction with the development of your website. You’ll want to choose something unique and individual, but not so obscure that it’s hard for people to identify. Something identifiable. The veterinary marketing agency you hire will help you develop a design that represents your practice while being effective in encapsulating your brand as a whole.

Choosing Colors and Fonts

Once you have tackled brand identity, think about the elements that make up a logo — the size, shape, font, and color. For a veterinary practice, you may not have to worry too much about size. The font style & size in your logo should be such that it can be read from the road and also easily re-sized for marketing materials. The other few elements are where the tough decisions can come in.

The color of your logo should match with the colors used in your practice if at all possible — i.e. they should match your brand standard. If you use a navy blue for seating and upholstery, you might do well to match those. That way, your clients will connect that particular shade of blue with your office, and you’ll create recognition between your brand online and in person. You’ll also want to think about how colors are applied, making sure your logo is legible in the color selected.

Be mindful when choosing the font. Some fonts can be tricky to resize and translate onto different mediums. Choosing a simple font will allow the rest of the design to do the work. If a font is too curly or sharp, it may make customers feel unwelcome or confused about the services you offer. Talk to your logo design team about what types of fonts elicit what feelings from your audience.

Keep the shape simple, or it will run into the same problems that the font can. Stick with simple, not overly-complicated shapes, to keep the eye focused on the actual content of the logo. More creativity can be put into the design with your team, but the actual shape of the logo should be relatively simple.

Making it Memorable

Having a logo that’s too plain or too similar to others won’t help you create brand recognition online. The goal here is to help customers be able to immediately identify your logo with your practice. People on the street may forget the name of your business, but they will likely remember the look of a memorable, unique logo. 

If they can remember the logo, they’ll be able to reference it to other people. Instead of using your practice name, they can say “that vet with the German Shepherd and the rabbit on their sign.” This is a great example of how word-of-mouth can help your business. A memorable design will help people create a connection with you and something else in their vocabulary. Talk to your logo designing company about what you want people to say about your logo.

Separating From the Competitors

Try not to look at other competitors for ideas. While this might sound counterintuitive, you don’t want to have a logo that is too similar to another veterinarian in your area. Similarities can cause a lot of brand confusion. Your logo needs to represent your brand and your brand only. An experienced logo design team will have a lot of questions about what you want your logo to say. Here are some examples:

• What images represent your practice?
• What is a quick description of your services?
• What is different about your practice?
• What are three adjectives that describe your practice?

These questions can help a logo designing team ascertain what will best represent your practice. They can use this information to then check against competitors to make sure that your design will be unique. 

Using the Five Principles of Logo Design

Now that you have a design in place, it’s time to check it against some general guidelines used in the logo designing process. Make sure your logo design is: 

• Simple: Your logo should not be too complicated for people to understand. You want brand recognition at a glance.
• Timeless: Don’t use anything that references a certain period or location. Your logo should be understood in all contexts.
• Appropriate: Keep the logo focused on your services and practice. Don’t get hung up on one detail that is not necessarily the intent of your practice.
• Versatile: Your logo should fit seamlessly on a website, a social media post, and a sign hanging outside your office. Take a look at it in various forms before giving final approval.
• Memorable: We’ve covered this one, but we’ll talk about it again. Your logo design should be at the forefront of your clients’ brains!

Using these tips will ensure that you come out with a balanced product. Something too simple can also not be memorable. Something too versatile might not be specific enough to your practice. Working with an experienced veterinary marketing company should solve all these little issues.

The design of your logo is what brings customers into your office and onto your website. You should be positive that the design of your logo and website gives potential clients the desire to come back. A positively-reviewed website design company like ViziSites can help you achieve this. Talk to our representatives today about how your logo design can be improved and bring you more clients.