Using Video for your Pet Store Marketing
Remember a few weeks ago when we mentioned the “visual revolution” that we’re going through? You notice it every time you scroll Facebook, and increasingly on LinkedIn and Twitter (traditionally text-dominant social platforms), while Instagram and Pinterest, and Snapchat are built around imagery. To our team here at Pet Engine Marketing, it seems like social media has taken the “picture is worth a thousand words” phrase to new heights, and it makes sense.
Hopefully, you took a look at our latest Freesource post on Wistia, a free resource for pet stores to improve their marketing strategy by creating their own branded videos, seamless embedding into websites, adding click-through links, and calls-to-action that can increase brand awareness, reach, conversions, and more. So we’ve given you Wistia as a platform and tool to start using video for your pet store’s marketing - now we’ll dig deeper into how you can use video on a variety of these social platforms to promote your pet store properly, and in the following posts, we’ll continue to give more tips and ways to use video to improve your pet store’s marketing. It’d be a good idea to join our free community for pet store owners to get these delivered straight to your inbox!
Why Use Video for Pet Store Marketing?
Video is the most powerful form of marketing you can do for your pet store on social media. And of course, well back that claim up with some data. Video should be part of your pet store’s marketing and content strategy - it can be okay to repost or share viral content, but original content is what your brand will really thrive on. We’ll continue to dig deeper on this stuff in the next few weeks.
48% of people said they’d be most likely to share video content with their friends, ahead of any other type of content. Video came out ahead of social media posts (23%), news articles (16%), blog posts (5%), and product pages (3%). (Source: WyzOwl)
80% of users recall a video ad they’ve viewed in the last month, and 40% of users take some kind of action after viewing a video ad. (Source: Social Media Today)
Video posts get at least 59% more engagement than other post types on Facebook. Although photos are widely accepted by marketers to be one of the most successful post types, video outperformed photos by 73%. (Source: BuzzSumo)
So if that data isn’t enough to get you exploring the idea of using video for your pet store marketing, a simple Google search on social media video statistics 2019 should do the trick. Most of our pet store owners would love original video content, but don’t have the time, money, or expertise to create the videos of their dreams. That’s where we come in! Reach out and let’s see how we fit in.
How to Use Video for Pet Store Marketing
Let’s get into the details of using video for your pet store’s marketing on social media. Feel free to bookmark this page to use as a reference in the future. Don’t feel free to try to tackle all of this at once - explore one area or idea for a few weeks or a month, monitor your results, and optimize your strategy moving forward.
Facebook currently has the largest audience, with over 100 million hours of video watched every day on the platform! People generally come to Facebook to be entertained, but you can also use Facebook videos for your pet store marketing strategy by introducing new products, telling your pet store’s story, or creating tutorials/how-to videos on at-home cat care, or home grooming tips, or keeping a pet-friendly house clean.
Some tips and tidbits to remember:
According to Digiday, 85% of videos are viewed on mute. So, remember to add subtitles, use graphics, and ensure that your thumbnail (the image viewed before video plays) is eye-catching.
Creating playlists of similarly-themed content (like how-to’s, or employee spotlights, or new products) can help users navigate and find your brand through related content.
Pinning an original video to the top of your pet store’s business page is a really good idea. It increases viewership, increases conversions (page likes/contacts), and looks professional.
Uploading videos to Facebook, rather than through another platform and then sharing, will increase organic viewership due to Facebook’s algorithms and preference for native content.
The typical viewer will watch less than 4 seconds of a video - make sure your first few seconds are some of your strongest! More on this in the future.
YouTube
YouTube is the undisputed king of video - not surprising. With over a billion hours of video watched each day and being the world’s second-largest search engine behind Google, it has become quite the crowded place. Nonetheless, for a business that’s reliant on video, its advantages are compelling. You can get away with putting just about anything your pet store would want to market on YouTube. It makes for easy embedding on your website, easy sharing, and easy access to a massive audience.
With such a massive audience, it becomes difficult to ensure that you’re hitting your target if you’re using YouTube as an advertising platform. You have to understand your audience/customer base closely. You can focus on geographic location and standard interest/demographic targeting, but you also want to be sure that your video ad is placed among videos that your audience would be watching. Bumper ads (ads that play before videos) and in-stream ads (ads that play in the middle of longer videos) can be good ways to use video for your pet store’s marketing, increasing basic brand awareness.
Some tips and tidbits to remember:
Get beneath the surface with your audience. We really can’t stress this enough. Pet parents are liable to watch any number of pet-related things, including your own content if it hits the spot - but it has to do that.
Don’t be afraid to experiment with new ideas, new formats, new content. See what your audience responds to, and see what kind of previously untapped or unknown audiences you can begin reaching.
Release your content regularly. Gotta be consistent and persistent.
Don’t skimp on the little details - with so many other videos on YouTube, your video needs a compelling title, a great thumbnail, and metadata that help improve its search ranking.
We love Instagram, but for our team here at Pet Engine, it’s a platform that comes with caveats. It’s typically the platform that gets the most engagement - how easy is it to tap your thumb twice and keep scrolling? So while your post might get great “engagement,” what you’re really looking for is conversions, and conversions on Instagram can be drastically different. Engagement doesn’t tell the entire story alone.
Tips and tidbits for using Instagram video:
Instagram is a visual-dominant platform - don’t waste too much time on text. Playful, beautiful, or touching content will take you further.
Themes and continued branding elements make for powerful accounts on Instagram. Look back at some of our content regarding Canva and using that free tool to improve your graphic design and branding abilities.
Short, sweet, and simple. Don’t try to do too much in a single video. For longer videos, look at Instagram TV.
Using filters on pets creates hilarious results.
Snapchat
While Instagram is playful and sometimes funny, it’s still stylish and polished. On the other hand, Snapchat has this mischievous, light-hearted, raw feel that is all part of the fun. Using video for your pet store marketing strategy doesn’t have to be all serious, all professional, or all polished. The daily life of working inside a pet store has lots of those moments that work really well: cute animals, tedium, messes, laughter, jokes, etc.
Some tips and tidbits for using Snapchat for your pet store’s video marketing:
Keep it timely and relevant. Snapchat content is, by nature, fleeting.
Embrace Snapchat’s weirdness - give users the kind of different content than they’d find on Facebook or Instagram. Get behind the scenes, roll around in the dirt.
Be wary of spending budget on Snapchat advertising - results continue to be mixed and oftentimes unsubstantial. We think a better idea would be using it with an event like a bark in the park, or a customer appreciation event, or a photo shoot, and paying for a cheap branded geofilter for a few hours.
Despite its beginnings as a text-based platform, the effectiveness of video within Twitter is pretty impressive. Video tweets are six times more likely to be retweeted than photo tweets. Like Snapchat, our team here at Pet Engine would spend budget for video in a different area than Twitter, but using organic growth for your content on Twitter is not a bad idea.
Quick tips for using video for your pet store’s marketing on Twitter:
You have about three seconds - make it count and draw in your viewer quickly.
Unlike Instagram, videos with text have higher viewership and completion rates.
Conclusion
Social networks are meant to be about shared experiences. Video communicates more in sight, sound, and feeling than words or images alone. This ended up being a pretty long and (we think) helpful article, so we hope our pet store owners can learn a lot from it and go back to their stores with a lot of great ideas to use video in their pet store’s marketing strategy.
