Introduction
The UK public are pet lovers and the same applies to Londoners specifically.
The most common pets owned in London are cats followed closely by dogs. You can find some detailed statistics on pet ownership on the PDSA website.
If you run a veterinary clinic in London, it is likely that you will have to focus a good amount of effort on advertising. Marketing a veterinary clinic in London, however, comes with some unique challenges.
One of the most important things about advertising your services as a vet is to convey a high level of professionalism and expertise.
If you are advertising a hair salon, a good quality photo of your work can be enough. If you are marketing a restaurant, a great picture of your food can do the same.
For a veterinary clinic, the techniques to ensure your potential clients of your expertise will be slightly different.
We will discuss the unique challenges that come with veterinary clinic advertising and mainly how they relate to leaflet distribution in London in this article.
We also going to discuss some examples of well-designed flyer delivery campaigns that any veterinary clinic can use.
To make sure we provide a full picture we are also going to touch on some online advertising options.
What to include on your flyers
You have two options with your leaflets. You can either make them more general to inform your potential clients of your location, website address and include a list of the most important services you offer.
This is a good idea if you want to create one leaflet, print a good number of this one design and run a few repeated deliveries.
On the other hand, you can also choose to focus your flyers on one specific service.
If you offer a monthly plan for people’s pets that includes annual dental checks, vaccinations, flea checks and de-worming services, you can focus one side of your flyer on this one idea.
If you have a particularly well-equipped emergency unit, you can devote a whole side of your leaflet to it.
These more targeted leaflets can often yield great results and can be used in more sophisticated ways. We will discuss more about how this can be done below.
You want to make sure to source some quality photographs for your flyers as well. Whether you are going to use one of the online stock photo websites or whether you are getting custom photographs done doesn’t matter.
Make sure you have quality photographs that represent your veterinary clinic well ready to use on your flyers.
You should also include the relevant qualifications of your vets on your flyer together with all your accreditations and the relevant industry bodies you have relationships with.
Making sure that your potential customers understand your level of expertise and that they can trust you should be one of the main goals of your flyer.
Leaflets for a veterinary practice
One of the best things about flyers is that you can reach absolutely everyone with them.
Leaflets have no bias in terms of demographics as they can be put through every single letterbox in your target area.
This makes leaflets a fantastic tool to develop local mind share. You can have multiple deliveries a year reaching out to every household in your target area regularly reminding people of your services and the location of your practice.
As most veterinary clinics offer emergency treatments, being at the forefront of people’s minds should be a real focus in your advertising.
Similar to a dental surgery, people will often need your services quickly. If everyone close to your location is aware of your practice they are likely to come to you first in the time of need.
In general, it is a good practice to do multiple deliveries throughout the year while mixing up the more general and specific types of flyers we’ve discussed above.
Specific ideas for veterinary clinic flyer tactics
Now let’s talk about how some of these campaigns can look in practice.
Emergency services
Even though we generally recommend our clients use the simplest flyer formats possible (most often a single page A5 flyer), veterinary clinics might have a good reason to experiment in this domain.
Since emergency services can form a large proportion of new business for some veterinary practices, it can be helpful if people keep your flyers on hand for reference or just in case situations.
People already do keep flyers quite regularly but if you can use particularly interesting or easy to keep formats you might want to do so. (You can have a look at more flyer delivery statistics on our blog here)
You can use folding formats, business cards that can be torn out of the flyer and more.
Have a conversation with your leaflet distributor about which options you have and when these more exotic formats are worth investing in.
Pet passports
If you offer services related to pet passports, you might want to create a flyer particularly focused on this.
When you do so, you can start focusing your deliveries on parts of London with a high proportion of people that often travel with their pets.
There are areas that, for example, have high numbers of people that come spend their summers in London. These are places like Knighstbridge, Notting Hill, Chelsea and others.
Any reputable flyer delivery company will be able to help you target these areas specifically. You can have a look at how our mapping system works on our tracking page.
When you combine this kind of service with at-home visits, you might be hitting a very lucrative market.
Use one side of the leaflet for pet tips
You can also choose to focus one side of your leaflet on providing helpful tips on subjects relevant to pets. You can talk about how to brush your dog’s teeth, how to give your cat eye drops, tips for pet nutrition, training and more.
This is another great way to attract attention to your flyers and potentially incentivise people to keep them at hand.
The other side of your flyer should be a traditional leaflet. You want to include all the elements we’ve discussed above. A quality photograph, your website address, your location, phone number, list of relevant services your offer and your qualifications.
This type of campaign can also benefit from repeated deliveries. This means that you can deliver your flyers to the same area and therefore households multiple times.
With modern stock management and delivery techniques you can do so with precise rest intervals between each delivery and use a different flyer for each drop.
This way, you can delivery a series of flyers to the same households sharing a series of tips for how to care for their pets. This way you can build mind-share in a way that would be difficult to replicate in any other way.
One-off events at your premises
If you are looking to get people through the door to your practice, you can organise events at your premises.
These could be free seminars on pet nutrition, pet socialisation classes and more.
You can collaborate with a local dog trainer or dog walker to do these. As this kind of event provides great exposure for them also, they might be happy to do this with you for free.
Flyers are excellent at advertising these kinds of events. Music venues, festivals, art galleries and theatres have been using leaflets to advertise their events with leaflet for decades if not centuries.
The physical format of the leaflet, the size of it and the ability to time the delivery carefully together build a great tool for event marketing.
Getting a physical piece of advertising into every pet lover’s home in your area and inviting them to a free event at your location can help kickstart a new veterinary practice in a way that’s hard to compete with.
You can read more on this on page dedicated to event marketing with leaflets.
Combine flyers with other marketing methods
The fact that you are using flyers to advertise your veterinary clinic doesn’t mean that you can’t use other marketing techniques as well.
Online advertising in the form of social media or search engine ads can also work very well. However, to get the most out of your advertising you want to try to synergise your efforts.
For example, you can time your flyer campaigns to run at the same time and in the same areas as your social media campaign.
This way, your target demographic will see you both in the offline and online worlds.
Being seen in both of these domains can create a real sense of familiarity with your brand and there is not much more a marketer could ask for than that.
