Halloween Marketing Tips: For Veterinary Practices
Our 8 Halloween Marketing tips for veterinary practices will help turn social media scrollers into page likers and followers. Help you gain client loyalty. Assist you in finding new clients by capturing their attention.
Halloween offers up a great marketing opportunity. It allows your veterinary practice to launch some fun and interesting social media and marketing strategies.
Trick or Treat Destination
You want to get potential clients in your door to see your facility and meet you and your staff. It’s one of the many steps to relationship marketing. Halloween gives you the perfect opportunity by being a Trick or Treat destination. Announce on social media and let your clients know now after their appointments, to spread the word that you’ll be providing some amazing treats for human and pet kids.
I like to make up treat bags (one for humans and one for pets very clearly noted on the outside) for the practices I work with to hand out as part of a halloween marketing strategy. Inside each treat bag, they find yummy treats but also business cards, a magnet and a coupon for a free pet nail trim which will keep you top of mind for the future.
#HalloweenHashtags
Get creative with your hashtags for Halloween fun. You could even create dedicated hashtags for your clinic so your clients or potential clients can hashtag you in their related Halloween festivities.
Some great hashtags to consider: #pupkins #halloweenfun #petcostume #catdorable #pettrickortreating #Halloweenvet.
Use amazing hashtags (plus come up with a clinic branded one #abcvetclinichalloween) across all your social media channels. Hashtags are really designed to work best on Instagram and Twitter, but for special occasions you can pop them into Facebook and Pinterest posts as well for a bit of increased reach.
Creepy Crawly Cases
I’m all about creepy crawly all year long to help you stand out on social media when every other clinic is posting puppy kisses and kitten whiskers. However, there’s no better time to dust off those cases that make even your hair stand on end and share them to your social media channels.
Fleas, ticks, wiggling parasites as seen through a microscope, vomiting dogs after being given activated charcoal, gastrointestinal obstructions via xrays … you get the point. Be sure to take advantage of your icky posting by making it a teachable moment as well. This is the ideal time to talk about prevention. Since Halloween is on a Monday this year (2016), announce that you’re dedicating the weekend to #ickyhalloweenpetposts to get everyone in the mood for Halloween on Monday!
Halloween Decor
Never ever, ever underestimate the power of fantastic seasonal decorating. Draw the eye to your clinic with the spookiest halloween decor you find and get festive! Don’t forget to let your staff dress up. Give them a break from their daily hohum scrubs to boost staff morale. Have the neighbourhood talking about your community spirit.
Costume Contests
I’m not a fan because just about EVERY clinic uses this social media marketing strategy. At Vets and Pets Marketing Solutions we like unique marketing strategies that make you stand out from your competition. However, costume contests are a backup marketing strategy you can use if you’re not comfortable with other suggestions.
The easiest way to run this is simply ask pet parents to post a picture of their pet in costume on a specific contest post (pet parents LOVE showing off their pets) and whoever gets the most “likes” on their picture comment wins. As a sidenote: there will always be people that believe it’s cruel to put pets in costumes, so be aware you may have them jumping on this post to share their negative opinion.
Be Camera Ready
Get our your IPhone or Blackberry (I’m a proud Blackberry Priv gal!) and create a short video. Video is so important to really connect with clients and potential clients. Don’t leave pet education to Dr. Google. Talk about things like keeping your pet safe at Halloween, advocating for black cat love, promoting microchips, or dangers of chocolate and pets. Or better yet … GO FACEBOOK LIVE!!
Dress-Up for a Discount
On the days leading up to Halloween let clients or potential clients test run their costumes by offering discounts on a service or product. Take pictures of these costumed clients, with their permission of course, and share it on social media. This is a great way to bring attention to your clinic and a great incentive for your clients to come in and make purchases sooner rather than later.
Create Shareable Content
Visual content still garners high engagement on Facebook. Pictures for Instagram are what it’s all about. There are some terrific picture creating apps such as Canva that will help you create shareable Halloween content. For pictures as well as slideshows, and videos turn to Adobe Spark (my personal favourite). When you really want to impress and stand out above the crowd make your first choice Visme. It’s a simple tool that translates your ideas into engaging content; presentations, infographics, reports, presentations and more!
Utilize apps allowing you to have fun content that will attract people to it and inspires them to share.
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