The Best (& Worst Things) to Show on Veterinary TVs
Veterinary offices and establishments can benefit from having TVs around their building. Firstly, people are often waiting around for their pet to be checked in and for their pet to be taken care of.
So, there is a need for entertainment in veterinary offices. Moreover, depending on what content you put on the TVs around veterinary offices, these TVs can serve great marketing and promotional purposes. In this article, we go over some of the best things to show on veterinary TVs, as well as some of the worst things to show on these TVs.
The Best Things to Show on Veterinary TVs
1. Veterinary Services and Prices
One of the best things to put on veterinary TVs is a list of services that your veterinary business offers. Often, people come to the vet knowing exactly what they want for their pet, such as some specific shots or getting their pet fixed. If you run an emergency veterinary office, then people might not know exactly what they want other than the fact that they want you to help their pet.
For the second group, it may be difficult to put up specific services and prices, since different surgeries and treatments may vary case by case, but for the first group, showing a list of services and prices may lead the customer to add on other services than the specific services they came to the vet for.
Moreover, it is simply good practice to be upfront about the prices that certain services will cost, so that your customers can make fully informed decisions about what types of services they want for their pet or pets.
Having a list of services and prices on the veterinary office’s TV can be much more effective and efficient than having a veterinarian list off all of the potential services that are available.
Having such a list in combination with specific recommendations by the veterinarian is probably the best way to get clients to choose the largest amount of services, and for that reason, this double-pronged approach is a great marketing tactic.
2. Staff Profiles
Putting staff profiles on your veterinary TVs is a great way for people to feel more comfortable with the people they are entrusting to take care of their pet’s health.
Staff profiles can include a picture of a staff member along with text detailing their education and training as well as a small quote about why they got into the veterinary field. By putting staff profiles on your TVs, you will make your business seem a lot more personable and this can really help people relax in a situation that is often anxiety-producing.
3. Client Testimonials
Putting client testimonials on your veterinary TVs is a great way to gain the trust of your customers. People like to know that there are other people who have had a good experience with a business before they enlist that business's services.
This applies to businesses like restaurants just as much as veterinary offices. Customer testimonials are an incredible source of in-store marketing, and for that reason are great content to put on your veterinary TVs.
4. Happy Customers
The customers of a veterinary office are not just humans. They are animals too! While customer testimonials show the human side of the equation, it can also be a very effective (and cute!) way to promote your business to feature pictures and a little bit of information about the pets who have been taken care of by your staff.
Possibly even more than customer testimonials, featuring these “pet testimonials” can be an effective in-store marketing tactic that builds the trust of your customers.
5. Nature Documentaries
People often have to wait around the veterinary office for variable amounts of time. That is why it is a good idea to provide some entertainment for your customers while they are waiting to check in or while they are waiting for the veterinarian to finish taking care of their pet.
One of the best types of entertainment for veterinary TVs is nature documentaries. Nature documentaries are great for all ages and help create the right atmosphere for an establishment that takes care of animals.
6. Educational Children’s Programming
Nature documentaries are a great choice for entertainment, but there are other options when it comes to keeping kids entertained. Often parents will have to bring their kids to veterinary offices, and entrusting a pet to a veterinarian can be a very stressful experience for a kid.
Moreover, if a kid is having a bad time, it is likely that the parents will also be having a hard time making sure that their kid is okay. That is why it can be very beneficial to feature kid’s shows on your veterinary TVs. This will make the kids happy and distract them from worrying about their pets.
When the kid or kids are happy, the parents will also be much happier. Overall, kids programming can greatly benefit the overall customer experience.
7. Business Mission Statement and Branding material
Veterinary TVs are a great platform to get your business message out. You feature text and images that describe the reason for your business and the type of experience that you hope to offer your customers (both the humans and the pets). This is also a place where you can feature other branded content like mottos.
8. Social Media Feeds
A great thing to feature on veterinary TVs is the social media feeds related to your business. Much like customer testimonials, social media posts about your business can help increase customer trust in your business.
People love their pets and they love it when their pets are taken care of in a professional and kind manner, so after a visit to the vet, it is not uncommon to make a post about their experience. Feature these posts on your TVs and let your customers promote your business!
9. Music Videos
Music videos are a great choice of content when it comes to entertaining customers at your veterinary office. Music videos are short and do not require knowledge of plots or characters to find what is on the screen visually appealing and entertaining. Music videos will not be for every office, since some establishments will not want music to be playing in their lobby, while this will be perfectly fine for other establishments.
10. Extreme Sports
Extreme sports are one of the best sources of entertainment for customers at veterinary offices. Unlike more established sports like football or soccer, where someone will likely not care if their favorite team is not playing, extreme sports are often entertaining for their own sake.
Extreme sports can include videos of people snowboarding on powdery mountains or riding motorcycles off of huge jumps. Extreme sports are simply entertaining, and for that reason, they can greatly reduce a customer’s perceived wait time, which will benefit the overall customer experience.
11. Events
Veterinary televisions are an ideal place to highlight any events that might be going on with your veterinary office.
12. Promotions
Using veterinary TVs to spread the word about promotions that you are running at your veterinary office is a great source of in-store marketing. People may come into your office for one thing, but when seeing the promotions on the TV, may choose to add in more services.
13. Animal Related Quotes
It's no secret that pets are incredibly important to the lives of the humans that take care of them. And just as with many other aspects of life that are important, there have been many influential and wise people who have spoken eloquently about the role of pets in human lives.
When you are working on your playlist for your television content, it could be a fun idea to intersperse some of these quotes into other content. This is a great way to set the atmosphere of a veterinary office and show customers that your business recognizes how important their pets are.
14. Advertisements
Veterinary offices are a great place for pet-related companies to advertise their products. A possible alternative source of revenue would be to show advertisements from certain companies on veterinary TVs.
The Worst Things to Show on Veterinary TVs
1. Political News Broadcasts
In the current political climate, people are very opinionated about the type of news that they watch. While it might seem an easy way to provide your customers with some entertainment by simply putting on a news broadcast, by doing this you run the risk of alienating some of your customers who might not approve of the particular news station that you are broadcasting.
Moreover, veterinary offices can already be stressful environments. People are often worried about the health of their pets. It's no secret that the news today can be very stressful for people, so by featuring the news on your veterinary TVs, you risk making an already stressful situation more stressful.
2. TV Dramas
TV dramas are not a good choice of content to put on your veterinary TVs because it's quite possible that the content will not be family-friendly. Moreover, most TV dramas require background knowledge of characters and plot for their entertainment value.
No matter what show you put on, it is likely that many customers simply will not get entertainment from the show because they are not familiar with it. For this reason, it is best to avoid TV dramas.
3. Movies
Just like TV dramas, movies are generally not a good choice for veterinary TVs. Like TV dramas, they might contain content that some people find inappropriate. Moreover, it's unlikely that people will be in the veterinary office from the start of the movie to the end of the movie.
When deciding what entertainment content is best for veterinary TVs, it's best to keep in mind that the content should be accessible and entertaining no matter at which point a customer starts to watch the content.
4. Non-family Friendly Content
This is more of a general rule of thumb rather than a specific example of content that you should not show on your veterinary TVs. A veterinary office absolutely should be a family-friendly environment, and parents should not need to worry about the content that their kids are seeing on veterinary TVs when they are already worried about their pet. Whatever you decide to show on your veterinary TVs, just make sure that it is family-friendly so that your TVs are helping your business rather than detracting from it.
Making the Most of Your Veterinary TVs
Pets are such an important part of people’s lives, and the veterinary office can be extremely stressful, but it can also be a place of joy when a pet is healed. Veterinary offices should strive to create environments that are comforting, entertaining, and stress-reducing.
There are a number of factors a veterinary office should consider when deciding what content to put on their veterinary TVs. Ideally, the content on veterinary TVs should help with marketing, should entertain customers and reduce perceived wait time, and should foster trust and brand awareness.
By following the suggestions in this article, you should be able to make the most out of your veterinary TVs while avoiding content that may not serve your purposes or even hurt your business.
One possible choice for veterinary offices is using Loop TV, a streaming content and digital signage service for businesses. Loop TV offers over 150 channels of curated and full-licenced content, including music videos, funny animal content, stunning drone footage, children's entertainment and much more. Loop's full suite of digital signage options allows veterinary practices to add content to promote events, pricing, specials and much more.
One final point regards the use of TVs in veterinary offices at all. Some vets may decide that they don’t want to use TVs in their offices at all. However, we are of the opinion that TVs can be an integral part of the success of a veterinary office. When considering whether to use TVs in your veterinary office you should recognize that there is so much to gain and very little to lose.