Pet Industry Marketing: Proven Strategies to Maximize Your Efforts

Over the last decade, the pet care industry has featured an unprecedented growth of more than 65% as compared to an overall expansion of the global economy of 43%. 

Two in three households in the United States own a pet. This fact alone explains why the domestic pet industry is booming. A countrywide adoration of pets signals lucrative perspectives for market players.

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Applying Strategic Marketing to Pet Care

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Despite promising numbers of pet industry growth, playing in the pet care market assumes a fierce dog-eat-dog rivalry. At Promodo, we have featured the top league of the US pet care providers and while you’re probably not there, we suggest applying strategic marketing approaches to keep up with the competition. 

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Approaching a pet care niche with a holistic marketing strategy will help you reach your strategic business goals, grow and expand beyond local. 

To embrace the most frequent questions underway, our experts outlined five research areas that will help you shape your strategic marketing vision:

A synergy of strategic pet care marketing approaches will empower you with actionable insights into your business performance. 

By researching your target customers, their behavioral patterns, and pet care preferences, you’ll be able to shape your unique pet industry marketing stance. 

‍A sound pet business marketing strategy will help you define unique selling points (USPs) that will conveniently distinguish you from the crowd. We suggest emphasizing the most popular pet dietary items as a starting point in developing a sound pet food marketing strategy.

To stand out from the competition, strategic marketing analysis will help you build awareness through positive associations with your brand name. 

By niching down and diversifying the assortment of pet care products and services, you’ll determine your local market share.

A holistic pet product marketing approach is also about forming a consistent price policy and winning more customers with up-sales, cross-sales, and additional offers like first-time bonuses, pet birthday presents, and seasonal discounts.

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Essentially, a sound pet industry marketing strategy will help you go viral, engage followers, generate leads, and win more customers across multiple communication channels. 

Spotting Your Target Audience

With the booming trend of pet parenting, we primarily suggest betting on Millennials. 

This generation of 26-42-year-old pet owners is most emphatic to their furry companions. 

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Enjoying a stable income, though without their own families and children by far, the younger generation of Millennials treats pets as their family members. 

By far, Millennials have firmly established themselves as the generation of pet parents. With daily purchasing power of $200, they are ready to spend up to $1500 a year on essential pet care needs and additional services. Your primary priority here is to strategically bet on a sufficient pet food marketing strategy.

High on demand among pet parents are: 

• Organic and eco foods
• Luxury items 
• Pet toys
• Tech-savvy pet care stuff
• Pet insurance 
• Premium vet care. 

Pet parents are also the major consumers of the finest doggy daycare, grooming, boarding, and wellness services. 

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Primarily, Millennials opt for convenience and instant solutions. Therefore, pet care market leaders are those players who provide mobile-friendly solutions that match the immediate needs of pet owners 24/7. 

People are getting to you through various stages of the sales funnel, known as the customer journey. Close monitoring of people’s actions and reactions to your ad campaigns will help you dive into their best pet care interests.

Your strategic task here is to track pet owners through accurate attributions. Essentially, you should define pet business marketing channels pet parents use at every stage of the funnel. Even more important, you should know what marketing action on your end caused them to move forward. 

Millennials foremost need your professional advice. As part of effective attribution, they need to get in touch with you to discuss their utmost pet care needs, as well as industry news and relevant suggestions by peers. Mostly, they are interested in being helpful to other pet owners, especially those from their neighborhoods and local communities. 

With that, they expect live chats with your representatives, so be sure to track customer data from phone calls.

Personalization 

Your strategic task in pet industry marketing is to continuously explore the customer persona. With every single sale, your team should follow customer behaviors. With that, you’ll soon highlight your top-selling pet care products and services. 

Identifying individual customer profiles among the pet-parenting population of Millennials will help you optimize your marketing budget on SEO and PPC campaigns. 

Furthermore, being aware of individual customer needs is about targeting the right audiences during your ad campaigns and promotions. Drill down through the deeper needs of pet owners and their furry friends:‍

• What is the number of cat vs. dog owners among your customers?
• What is the percentage of kittens and puppies owned by your targets?
• What is the number of other pet owners by category?
• How many long-fur pets need grooming? 
• What is the number of pets with easily manageable short coats? 
• How many pets? 
• How many pets are living in flats vs. private estates?
• What about the needs shared by the owners of exotic animals?

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As we mentioned above, Millennials are ready to share their personalized pet care experiences with you, so take this opportunity to diversify your selling points per individual needs of their furry friends. 

Pet life cycle

Individual pet needs are changing over time. With growth, pets are getting prone to different diets and toys to play with. While someone's dog may need training, one’s cat may need scratching stuff to flex its claws. With age, the major concern of owners shifts to healthcare and the well-being of their senior companions. This means that you should shift your selling proposition toward relaxation and pain-free solutions.

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Diversification in pet industry marketing is about acknowledging supplementary factors like the pet life cycle. While puppies and kittens are growing fast, you should diversify your pet business marketing effort to further stages of pet development and growth. It is strategically important not to miss core market segments captured by your competitors.

While vet care services are crucial at all stages of the pet life cycle, make sure you align your pet care venture with one of the local vet clinics. The strategic partnership will leverage a competitive local advantage over other pet care stores while pet owners will also associate your brand name with pet health and well-being.

Generating Organic Traffic

Search engine optimization (SEO) is your finest strategy to get on page one in Google search results and generate more sales. An ultimate strategic goal here is to rank your website high on SERPs. 

‍A holistic SEO strategy is about analyzing your competitors, researching keywords, and advancing user experience (UX) on your site.

To enhance your SEO effort organically, be sure to start pet care blogging. As part of strategic content planning, make your content full of friendly advice and practical tips that will best resonate with the actual pain points and immediate needs of your target audience.

Beyond user engagement, fill your content with calls to action (CTA) and lead your targets through the lead funnel. With that, get rid of pages that are not driving conversions. Make sure, your site content is user-friendly and encourages people to read more and buy from you.

Pursuing Genuine Connections 

Share your attitude by showing a genuine interest in major problems experienced by pet owners. Through online communications and social media networking, engage them in solving similar pet care problems faced by their peers. 

By generating live connections with your target audience, you’ll soon capture your digital market share. Unlike other resources, visitors will associate your site with useful and actual content, live chats, and social sharing. 

In this vein, Millennials are rather sensitive to making their voices heard. They take social media networking as a convenient mode to share their pet care experiences with others. More than that, they want to help other pet owners with useful tips and personal advice. We suggest initiating closer communication on pet diets with your consumers as part of your pet food marketing strategy. 

And remember people like stories. We suggest highly engaging and memorable storytelling as the best-fit approach to resonate with the real-to-life experiences of pet owners. Make sure you generate feedback from customers to know what pet care issues are the most trending and best resonate with actual people’s needs.

Managing your website as a live communication platform will soon create a sense of emotional connectedness between your brand name and a diverse audience of pet owners. 

Your strategic task here is to maintain live interest and make people actively contribute to the process.

Advancing E-E-A-T

Digital PR is essential to solidify your pet brand awareness with Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T). 

On December 15, 2022, Google updated E-E-A-T parameters with the additional component ‘Experience’ to make sure users spot only those websites that correspond to the guidelines of Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). 

The new component is about your first-hand pet care experience as the finest way to empower your content with the evidence-based effect. 

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Our expert says: Nonetheless, while among core Google metrics, E-E-A-T assumes subjective assessment by humans. The results provided by assessors do not directly impact your site rankings set by Google algorithms. Vladyslav Trishkin, Team Lead SEO at Promodo.

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As yet, more than 16K Google assessors permanently evaluate the quality of individual websites and their overall performance in line with page quality requirements. 

There are two critical issues to consider: 

(1) How far your site content matches user search queries and how far can your pages satisfy user intent; and 

(2) How far does your site content match SERPs guidelines?

Additionally, we encourage you to add authors' and reviewers’ pages on your site to enhance its authority among search engines and Google assessors. 

With that, the E-E-A-T criteria are about quality content that best resonates with actual user searches. 

Playing with Link Building

With quality content writing, post your expertise on external resources and acquire backlinks to your site. The practice will prove your E-E-A-T through informative and useful content that will help you engage wider audiences among pet owners.

Through external link building you’ll soon establish your brand authority among readers and search engines. This is how you build brand awareness organically. 

While approaching publishers, be sure not to sell your pet care products or services. Rather than targeting sales promotions, show that your genuine intent is to help pet owners with the best-fit solutions. Also, be sure to resonate with the shared interests and expectations of a publisher’s readership. 

Targeting Pet Lovers with PPC Advertising

Make sure you are aware of essential metrics like search volume for Millenials as your target pet owner audience, their search intent, and the most popular keywords and phrases they use in search queries. With available tools like Google Analytics and Ahrefs among others, it is vital to explore popular user searches among pet lovers. 

Knowing what people are looking for and the search terms they use is crucial for developing your pay-per-click strategy (PPC). Finally, you should make your products and services relevant to the most popular search terms. Pay special attention to pet food search queries as an essential component of your pet food marketing strategy. 

Investing in strategic Google Ad campaigns will generate the highest possible return on ad spend (ROAS) unlike any other marketing strategy.

Among other metaverse platforms, Millennials are socializing on Facebook. Therefore, it is strategically important to market your pet products and services through this particular social media network. Arranging PPC campaigns through social media advertising will help you outreach and capitalize on the Millennials as your core target market.

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Betting on Retention Marketing

Another marketing option you should apply is customer retention. That is where you’ll maximize your revenue most. 

Retention marketing is about enhancing customer lifetime value (LTV). After bringing leads to your website, make sure to sustain them through an email subscription to your newsletter or blog.

With a generated user base, you’ll further drive more customers with email marketing. The email marketing strategy holds the power of engaging your potential and existing audiences. Keeping in touch with your target audience and educating people about your products and services will generate sales over time.

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In one of our recent cases, our experts applied email triggers to boost engagement on a client’s site. We developed an email marketing lead magnet to welcome new customers with free subscriptions and follow-up emails. For a while, we sent additional emails to site visitors who did not take any action to remind them about the client’s recommended products and services.

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To those visitors who added pet care item(s) to the cart, though did not purchase them for some reason, we sent emailed reminders about the abandoned items and repeated the intended call-to-action (CTA) to complete the purchase.

Pursuing consumer re-activation, we sent automatic emails to the client’s customers who had already purchased some pet care items though were inactive for over six months.

Owing to personalized email triggers, we managed to increase the percentage of opened emails and boost email conversions that helped our client grow their monthly income by some 30%.

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Also, upsell your pet care stuff through loyalty programs. Anything from welcome emails and free pet-care guides to email birthday greetings and pet calendars will surge sales. 

In the same case, we sent personalized emails through which our client achieved higher brand loyalty among its subscribers. With every new email, the company expressed its genuine interest in the needs and pains shared by its consumers.

Sending personalized post-purchase emails to pet owners will soon turn into close-knit relationships and will make customers loyal to your brand.

Building Brand Awareness

Your social media brand awareness strategy is through creative pet visualizations. Be creative while generating your pet store marketing ideas as far as possible to highlight the very best about animals to the vast audience of pet owners. 

Multiple social media networks will serve you as effective digital marketing channels. In their turn, user-friendly social media management tools will help you track your site performance and view engagement rates (ER) across multiple platforms. 

Your further area of expansion is influencer marketing. Pet product marketing strategy is about cooperating with pet influencers and trending bloggers who will help you promote your selling propositions. 

Part of a strategic partnership, pet influencers are ready to share their vast audiences of followers with you. In this pursuit, many pet care businesses use promo codes to encourage followers to buy their pet care products.

Finally, guest posting exchanges will help you raise brand awareness through backlinking to your site. 

Getting to the Next Level

With an array of multiple strategic marketing approaches, focus your effort on the priorities shared by pet owners and their furry friends. 

Your strategic marketing journey will take a while and you should go the extra mile to pass through the milestones. Not to be alone on your path to pet care marketing success, we offer you a variety of pet industry marketing solutions ranging from SEO audit to PPC and targeting services. 

Our pet industry marketing experts suggest a 360-degree marketing approach as a full-funnel strategy for your pet care business growth and expansion. Our in-house strategy department is a trusted provider of strategic marketing solutions that will best match your custom business needs.

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