The waiting room is a fantastic marketing opportunity. The benefits of furnishing your client space with a TV screen are multifaceted.
If you’re a current Vet Channel subscriber, you’ll be enjoying the positives already – but is your TV working optimally for you? This post is designed to help you reveal even more of its potential. If you’re not yet a subscriber, that’s great, you can use our helpful tips to ensure any future subscription is used optimally from the outset.
Waiting Room TV – What is the Potential?
Your waiting room TV is a perfect opportunity to share promotional material – you have a captive audience. Reduce your clients’ perceived waiting time while simultaneously tugging on their pet-loving purse strings with talk of designer collars and tasty treats – your content can match your waiting room display cabinets for optimum effect, of course.
But, a well-placed and well-managed TV has the potential to increase turnover by many other means, alongside direct marketing.
Preventative pet healthcare information
TV brings a chance to engage clients with preventative pet healthcare information. Here lies the potential to improve patient welfare through education. A higher standard of pet care is not only ethically desirable, but it also drives more appointment bookings for routine health checks, greater client compliance, and the potential for earlier diagnosis of disease – helping improving case outcomes and boosting morale.
Important practice information
Alongside promotions and educational material, content could include important practice information – waiting times for repeat prescriptions, as an example. Delivering a consistent message to clients can improve staff morale by decreasing complaints, which can help create a more welcoming atmosphere, driving positive reviews and increased footfall. Delivering practice information via TV can free up staff time, increasing efficiency.
Digital integration
Linking together content on your waiting room TV with your website and social media channels brings a harmony of digital integration to your brand. Keep logos, color schemes, and your target demographic congruous throughout – are you high-end or budget pet care? A strong brand is key to a successful marketing strategy.
How to Help Your Waiting Room TV Reach its Full Potential
Your waiting room
Waiting room TV is at its most successful when used in an inviting environment. A waiting room should feel bright, clean, calm, and comfy. Start with the basics – make sure there is plentiful seating with space for pets to feel relaxed. Provide areas for cats to be up high, and rabbits or birds to be sheltered from disturbances. Make sure the floor is swept, the uniforms are smart, and the greeting is warm.
You may consider things like providing a children’s area with toys, a coffee machine or water cooler, and display cabinets of saleable products. What about outside? Is the entrance inviting? Is your signage up to date? Take a walk around – how does your building frontage, reception, and waiting area appear to the public? Once you have these factors in place, your TV can work at its best.
Positioning your TV screen
The best position for your screen is maximum direct viewing with minimum disruption. It will distract clients from watching the screen if it is too close to conversations at reception, or to the cold breeze from the door. If you have a divided waiting area for different species, you may want to consider multiple screens with species-specific content.
What content is well-received?
We take a lot of the thought out of this for you by designing high-quality content on a range of topics, appropriate to the season and relevant to upcoming events and celebrations. However, just as with your social media and web pages, it’s wise to include something a little more personal. If you have a particular promotion in place, we can design content specifically for you.
Meet the team
Of course, you can go even more personal – one of the most viewed veterinary website pages is “Meet the Team” – why? Because people are nosy. What does my veterinarian do in their spare time? When did the veterinary technician I just saw qualify? We recommend having TV content that helps your clients get to know you. A vet practice is for life, not just for puppy vaccinations, so help your clients feel like part of the family.
On a similar theme, giving clients something that feels like inside information is a great plan for inclusivity. When reading the content on waiting room TV, individuals can become quite absorbed, forgetting the information is also available to everyone else around.
Being in the loop spreads good feeling, therefore promoting respect and compliance. As an example, sharing information about your uniforms can break down barriers between clients and staff. Who on the team wears what? If the veterinary technicians are in green stripes, they are training, veterinarians wear blue – that kind of thing.
Light-hearted content
Something a little light-hearted can be appropriate and well-received, but any content we create for you will always be respectful. We must acknowledge our job can be somber, and some clients may be waiting to receive concerning results, or for a euthanasia. The content must suit a range of moods and remain professional.
How many videos or clips should we show, and for how long?
Too many words and people won’t read them. Too much information and people won’t retain it. Too much promotion and people feel pushed. Balance is everything.
A rotation of visuals combining promotions with something more personal is good. Incorporate educational pieces with practice information and promos to provide good variation and maintain interest.
Each clip will vary in how long it lasts – some content will naturally need less time on screen, some more. It’s good to have a variety – some longer videos intermingled with single screen stills. Always be sure you provide enough time for words to be read in full, even by slower readers.
If you consider how long your average waiting times are, this will help you work out the best number of clips and videos to have on rotation. Ideally, your clients will see each clip 2 to 3 times while waiting, to help them absorb and retain the information given.
In Conclusion…
A waiting room television with balanced and engaging content is a boost for turnover, via its power to educate clients, advertise promotions, deliver consistent messages, and reduce demands on staff. All these features are optimized by a well-thought-out waiting room layout and a carefully considered overall digital marketing strategy.
The Vet Channel waiting room TV is available from just £54 per month and includes all the tools and features to enable you to educate and engage with your clients as well as creating ethical selling opportunities. Book your demo today!