In 2023, the global pet-care market drew in $246.66 billion, and it’s expected to grow to $259.37 billion in 2024. Pet food items dominate the market, but other services and products related to wellness, grooming, and health are also growing.

For smaller, local pet-care businesses to get their piece of this pie, they must differentiate themselves, stand out, and engage their target audience through compelling marketing campaigns. This will require you to identify the unique ways your dog grooming, daycare, boarding, or training business is better than larger conglomerates and effectively communicate those reasons to your customers.

In this guide, we’ll explore how you can do this to create a compelling dog marketing campaign, covering topics like:

To kick off, let's start with defining pet marketing and its benefits.

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What is pet marketing?

Pet marketing is a niche area of marketing focused on promoting pet-care products, services, and accessories to pet owners. This type of marketing stands out because the products are services are for both the owners and their pets.

For example, a leash may benefit both an owner and their dog. While the owner may appreciate a stylish leash with a comfortable handle, the dog benefits from the enhanced safety and behavior management the leash offers.

4 Key Benefits of Dog Marketing

Marketing is essential to any business—it’s how you attract new customers and scale up your business. Investing in dog marketing can benefit your business by:

The four key benefits of dog marketing, detailed in the text below.

  • Boosting your visibility and brand awareness. Marketing introduces those outside your current customer base and network to your business. This extends your reach, boosting the number of people who are aware of (and willing to recommend) your company. Plus, you’ll stand out in the crowded, competitive pet market.

  • Increasing customer engagement. In addition to attracting new customers, marketing helps you engage current customers, helping you retain them and boost loyalty. When they regularly see your marketing messages, they’ll be more likely to think of your business when the need for your offerings arises.

  • Effectively targeting your niche. Identify and target those who have a specific need or desire for your offerings. For example, maybe you offer dog daycare and boarding services for senior dogs or those with separation anxiety.

  • Improving customer education. Your business has a passion for the health and well-being of animals, and marketing can help educate customers on the best ways to care for their pets. For example, FreshPet, a pet food brand, often discusses ingredient quality and the impact nutrition has on pets. The company also promotes educational resources like its blog and recipe quiz.

A well-crafted marketing strategy will help you effectively communicate what makes your business the best option by laying out your unique offerings, products, success stories, and more. Up next, we’ll explore the steps you’ll need to take to build out this strategy.

What are the steps for getting started?

The five steps to starting a dog marketing campaign, detailed in text below.

1. Define your niche and unique value proposition (UVP).

In order to communicate the right message to the right audience, you’ll need to understand what makes your business special. 

To do so, you should:

  • Study your competitors and make note of their current offerings, strengths, what they are known for, and gaps in their product or service lists. Then, compare each of these items to your own business.

  • Identify the ways your business differs from its competitors in its offerings, values, and even customer service. Something as small as having excellent, responsive customer service could be an impactful differentiator.

  • Summarize your unique strengths in a list. This gives you a convenient reference point for the next steps in the process.

Now, you’re prepared to identify a specific niche and create your unique value proposition (UVP), or a clear statement describing what makes your product or service special and better than what competitors offer.

To define your niche, focus on what you are most passionate about and already do well. Care about pet nutrition and ingredients above all else? Focus on your pet food’s impeccable ingredient sourcing and quality in your marketing. Known for effectively grooming curly- or double-coated dogs like huskies and poodles? Market to individuals who own those dogs.

From there, create a UVP that addresses that niche audience’s unique pain points and your unique ability to help them. Returning to the grooming example, your UVP might be, “Our expert groomers excel in handling challenging coats with precision and care to ensure your dog feels happy, clean, and comfortable.”

2. Identify and research your audience.

Next, you’ll need to identify the audience you’ll be targeting and learn as much as you can about them. As mentioned, the audience you target goes hand-in-hand with your niche and UVP.

In dog marketing, you’ll want to research and understand these core audience qualities:

  • Demographic details: Understand customers’ age, income level, and lifestyle so you can tailor your message to their needs and preferences.

  • Pet ownership information: What animals and breeds do your customers own? How many pets do they have? Are they new or experienced owners? Consider these factors and how your offerings fit in.

  • Spending power: Income level is valuable, but you also need to understand what portion of their budget customers are able and willing to spend on their pets. Is your product or service affordable, mid-level, or high-end? Are you targeting the people with corresponding spending abilities?

  • Needs and pain points: Understand the specific needs or challenges these pet owners are facing, and show them how your business can help.

  • Communication preferences: Identify which communication channels the audience engages with most and their preferences regarding format, length, and timing of communications.

Make note of what you think their service expectations are likely to be. For example, what is the standard set of offerings they might expect a dog groomer to offer? Do they need fast, convenient morning drop-off from a dog daycare? Would they expect frequent updates and photos of their dog from a boarding facility?

Your business should address these expectations in its daily operations and highlight them in its marketing, showing that you understand your audience.

3. Create campaign content.

Now it’s time for the fun part of the campaign: developing the content. To get started, you’ll need to create a central theme that each individual message hearkens back to—ideally, this should align with your UVP and any smaller goals you have for the campaign.

Next, begin drafting content and developing creative assets like:

  • High-quality photos and videos of your staff, clients, products, and services

  • Graphics related to your offerings and the theme of the campaign

  • Social media content, including ready-to-launch photos, videos, and captions

  • Promotional materials such as flyers, brochures, or digital ads

  • Client testimonials in written or video form

  • Email campaign copy

  • Website content such as blog posts, new landing pages, and graphics

As you collect and create these assets, keep two things in mind. First, ensure that all copy and visuals are representative of your business’s overarching brand identity. This means using your brand logo and colors in visual media and your brand voice in written content.

Second, ensure each message clearly conveys what makes your business unique and tells customers what the next step is, whether that’s booking an appointment or purchasing a product from your eCommerce store.

4. Select marketing channels.

Once you’ve developed a compelling message and engaging, creative content for the campaign, you can move forward with sharing it! The marketing channels you choose should:

  • Reflect your audience’s communication preferences to ensure they will see and engage with your campaign.

  • To extend your reach, include both owned (your properties, such as your website and social media profiles) and paid (external sources you must pay to advertise on, like display ads) media. 

  • Leverage spaces relevant to your niche and the pet industry in general (e.g., ads on pet-care apps and websites).

  • Include organic marketing opportunities like search engine optimization (SEO), blogging, and affiliate programs.

Additionally, remember to emphasize local media that will allow you to reach customers in your area. Advertise in channels like your local newspaper, radio stations, and TV channels.

5. Track results, iterate, and improve.

During the campaign’s run, actively track and monitor your progress. Is everything functioning properly? Does it seem like your messages are steering customers to the right webpages or to take the right actions? Are you on track to meet your goals, or do you need to tweak your approach?

To answer these questions, follow metrics like conversion rate, traffic to your website and specific landing pages, time spent on your site, booking rate, sales, social media engagement, and any other specific success metrics related to your goal. Tracking this data during the campaign will help you improve your efforts in real-time, boosting its impact and ROI.

Once your campaign wraps up, create a final report with all of the relevant metrics and totals. Commit to strong data hygiene practices to ensure these reports are accurate. Evaluate whether you hit your goal, and even if you did, iterate on ways to make future campaigns even better.

Are there recommended dog marketing strategies?

Invest in the right technology.

Marketing campaigns are complex, and they have many moving parts you’ll need to manage. For small shops, this can quickly become overwhelming. This is why it’s essential to have the right technology to oversee and execute your marketing efforts—ideally, tools that are built right into your business management software!

Gingr offers all of the tools you need to manage your everyday operations, along with dedicated marketing features. Our marketing capabilities include:

  • Customer segmentation 

  • Automated updates and appointment reminders

  • Custom email marketing templates

  • SMS marketing tools

You may also need a few additional tools to fill specific needs. For example, many organizations use social media calendars to manage posting across various social media platforms. Start small, and ramp up your marketing tech investments as needed.

Use local SEO.

As we mentioned earlier, leveraging local media is a great way to engage customers in your immediate area. If you offer a service or product that can’t be delivered virtually, these will be your most important customers. 

Another way to engage these customers is through local search engine optimization (SEO). Essentially, this means optimizing your website so that your business appears in the search results for users near your location. Here’s what this might look like:

A flow chart depicting how local SEO works, explained in the text below.

  1. Your local dog grooming business registers with Google by setting up a Business Profile, and you create optimized content with location-specific keywords.

  2. A potential customer notices that their golden retriever has been shedding like crazy lately, so they Google a reputable groomer.

  3. The owner searches “dog groomers near me” and browses the top results.

  4. They spot your businesses in the featured local businesses snippet on the results page.

  5. They skim over your hours, customer reviews, and services before making the decision to book an appointment!

Search engines are how many people find local businesses, so it’s key to make sure any information listed on search engines is accurate and up to date. Frequently check in to ensure your business address, phone number, and hours are correct.

Form local connections.

Another way to attract local customers is to foster connections with other local organizations and institutions. Visibility in your community builds trust and credibility, cements your business as a contributing member of the community, attracts more customers, and strengthens relationships you can rely on later.

Consider forming connections with organizations like:

  • Local businesses in different verticals (e.g., a coffee shop) or in the pet industry but not direct competitors (e.g., a veterinary practice)

  • Institutions like schools, libraries, parks, and community centers

  • Nonprofit organizations related to your cause, like animal shelters, through CSR initiatives like corporate partnerships

Working with these organizations can also expose you to new audiences and offer new consumer insights. For example, working with a vet’s office could give you a more well-rounded view of pet nutrition and people’s attitudes toward feeding their dogs quality food.

Create a pet care blog.

If your website doesn’t already have one, consider starting a blog. If you have a few posts already, it might be time to reevaluate your strategy and get serious about creating useful, compelling content. This will encourage your posts to rank on Google, drawing in more readers and potential customers.

 

Additional Resources

Marketing drives new customers to your pet-care business, and appealing to your niche with a dog marketing campaign will attract the most qualified leads. In other words, you’ll catch the attention of passionate pet parents who will want, need, and value your services, earning you long-term customers. 

To effectively manage your marketing efforts along with your many other business management tasks, make sure you invest in software designed for pet-care businesses like Gingr.

To get more tips and tricks for your business, check out some of our additional resources:

Is your technology setting you up for success? Enhance revenue, efficiency, and customer relationships—all with Gingr. Book a demo!