How focus can make your revenue grow

2 mins

February is Pet Dental Health month, and practices and suppliers across Europe combine efforts on promoting the importance of dental hygiene in pets. This may be less popular in the UK, but even if you haven’t done a dental care campaign in the past, now is a good opportunity to start. Whether it’s special opening hours for dental checks, invitations and reminders sent to customers or social media posts, or discounts on dental treatments, it can be a great reason to get back in contact with customers and improve the quality of care.

Hyper-focus = top of mind

A good campaign makes the theme the ‘talk of the day’ – so as a pet owner, you cannot help but be aware of it due to mentions from the practice and from other sources. For example, social media posts from online pet stores, food suppliers, or perhaps even supermarkets may give away dental information and free samples.

How can hyper-focus work in your practice?

As just one practice, you don’t have the strength of an entire industry including suppliers and pet shops. Yet, you can achieve a lot by focusing on your story. For example, you already know that at certain times of the year, there are themes which are important to a pet owner; summer holidays are about vaccinations and antiparasite treatments, and the end of the year often focuses on firework awareness.

The strength of a themed month lies in a shared focus on the subject. Therefore, talk to your team and consider which topics you would like to draw attention to each month, for example. You can use this exercise for this. Make sure to use whatever is already ‘top of mind’ with the owner – examples of this are the periods and themes we mentioned above. You can strengthen the focus by taking a good look at your communication points, such as appointment confirmations, newsletters, posts on social media, and the posters, leaflets and screens in your practice.

Your secret weapon

We have not yet discussed the secret weapon – the interplay between the reception and the consultation room. Reception plays an important role in the ‘customer journey‘ throughout an owner’s experience at the practice. This is the place where the preliminary interview with the pet owner begins. If you know what your focus is on as a team, you can already broach a topic at the counter and plant the seed, as it were, for the conversation that the pet owner will soon have in the treatment room. This not only motivates and strengthens team spirit but can also make work more satisfying as you’ll find that if you present a topic to the pet owner multiple times and in ways in the customer journey, it resonates and sticks much better. When the owner is back at the counter, you will see that the appointment for the dental treatment has been made in no time or that the owner himself says: “Can you also add deworming treatment too?”.