DS McGregor & Partners
Looking back on a year in the Highlands!
We’re so lucky to do work we’re proud of, and throughout 2024 our partnership with DS McGregor & Partners really hit those buttons.
We achieved so much together, revamping their website and brand, launching unlimited consults on their health plan, overhauling online booking… the list goes on.
As we’re taking a brief pause from marketing activities while the team tackle lambing season in farms across Caithness and Sutherland, we thought it was a good time to look back on what we’ve done and how we’ve done it.
Hopefully there’ll be some lessons you can take into your own practice from reading this. Maybe we’re just showing off. Either way, we hope you enjoy our look back at a year in the Highlands!
A health plan to be “High”ly proud of
A defining success during our partnership with the DSMcG team was launching a pet health plan with unlimited consults.
In place was a generic Pet Health Club, a vaccination and wormers offering that had limited penetration and little buy in from the team.
We wanted a health plan that chimed with the practice’s vision and values, and that the clinical team could genuinely believe was the best option for their patients.
This meant taking the radical clinical step of introducing unlimited free consultations with their vets and nurses – an increasingly common health plan addition in the industry but still a massive and daunting step into the unknown for any practice who adopts it for the first time.
Next, it needed a better name. But given that the practice star in a tv series called The Highland Vet, we had the answer right there, ready for the taking.
So we could say hello to the Highland Health Plan!
Once we had the name, we needed a brand. The practice traditionally had worked on a palette of blues, so we introduced a striking yellow linked to the Caithness flag as a point of difference.
This allowed us to produce leaflets, posters, tv screen content and social media campaigns to begin pushing the new plan.
It’s always tense to take a product you’ve loved and nurtured and release it into the wild, and the Highland Health Plan was no different – but the reception was fantastic.
Since launch, pets get the care they deserve, owners are guided towards choosing the right options for their pet, team members thrive knowing they can see their patients back without that financial barrier – and the practice finances get a boost from a healthy recurring revenue.
The brand – laying the foundations
By the time we started working on the DSMcG brand, we’d already created our Highland Health Plan, so it was a natural step to extend the yellows and blues across the rest of the practice.
Or so we thought… and here’s where we can humbly hold our hands up and admit we don’t get things right every time!
Because when we mocked up signage for the practices in the same blue and yellow, we realised we were turning a heritage, community veterinary practice into RyanAir.
And, well, the team hated it.
What made things even more complicated is we only discovered after we created the brand that the practice's interiors had recently been decorated in sage green!
However, we turned a negative into a positive by using common sense. After struggling to be the middlemen between practice and designer, we turned facilitator instead and made the two sides talk directly.
The result is a thing of beauty – a heritage brand incorporating Caithness’ air, land and sea.
This has the added benefit of identifying the Highland Health Plan as its own entity, a product which we’re proud of deserving of its own brand and style.
Alongside this is the story, a tale of a practice rooted in its history, proud of its corner of the world and yet passionately forward thinking.
All in all, we’re happy with how things turned out – a distinctive brand for a unique practice.
Tuning in to the voice of our practice
We often talk about finding or creating a brand's voice. Really we just try to write our marketing using the same words and sentiments practice teams use every day with clients.
To do that you need to tune in to the people behind the practice. And with DSMcG that was made easier by this hidden gem – an interview with retired vets Frank Stephen and Sinclair Manson by local podcast Wick Voices, which paints a picture of a practice where the bonds run deep, forged by hard work, good fun and more than a few wee drams!
So, grab yourself a cuppa and discover one of the inspirations behind the brand and story we created!
Building the prettiest shop window in Scotland
DSMcG are in the unusual position of having no competitors within 67 miles, unless you’re counting our friends at Northvet who are a bit closer but have a stretch of the North Sea as a fairly significant barrier.
That means their website doesn’t have to act as a client acquisition tool – the primary purpose of most practice’s sites.
Instead we had a brief to build a website that served as a hub for clients, signposting them to the online help the practice provides and making their interactions with them as seamless as possible.
The Highland Health Plan is the most valuable thing we can direct people to on the website. We set up online sign up to remove barriers and make it as easy as possible for clients to join. And we incorporated a call to action to join the plan in the striking top section of the home page, ensuring it’s one of the first things people see when they visit our website.
Similarly, we wanted to remove friction for people coming to see us – so online booking was the logical next step. We facilitated the practice teaming up with Vetstoria, built the widget into the website and helped the team to communicate the exciting update to clients. We even use the tool to manage repeat prescriptions digitally.
We believe being independent is a key point of difference for the practices we work with, but it's important to explain to our clients what it means for them in practical terms.
With an increasing focus on transparency due to the CMA investigation, publishing our prices is a great opportunity to brag about our ability as independent practices to do what we believe is right and to do it now – we’re nimble, reactive and dedicated to doing right by our clients… so a pricing page was a must for our new website!
We could go on, but importantly it also looks incredible. We were fortunate to have the landscapes of the Highlands to hang it off, and our designers and developers did a fantastic job of creating a stunning website with a real sense of place.
See you again soon
We’ve achieved so much together over the last year – and the exciting thing is there’s so much more we can tackle in the future.
Thank you to the fantastic DSMcG team, and in particular our friends Fiona and Eilidh for all of their hard work. We can’t wait until you’ve finished doing the real work of wrestling sheep, seals and various other Highland animals so we can get back to having fun driving your practice forward!
And if you want to discuss how we can help your practice with any of the above – or anything else marketing related – please do get in touch with Justin. Details below!
Thanks for reading!
Hear from our client
"Practice Made Purrfect has extensive veterinary industry expertise, particularly in technology, marketing, copywriting and practice health plans. Their knowledge makes them the ideal team to help practices grow and succeed financially."
Fiona Sutherland
Director & Veterinary Surgeon, DSMcG
Vet practice marketing
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If you’re eager to improve your practice’s marketing but you’re unsure where to start, I’m taking on new clients for the next quarter! Book an initial discovery below!