It’s true, we’re deep into the “visual revolution.” With hundreds of thousands of social posts flooding your customers every day across every platform, you need visual content to help you pop and stand out from the rest of the noise.

If you haven’t had the chance to check out our latest Freesource post on how Canva can transform your graphic branding abilities for free, you can do that HERE. We also recommend brushing up on our supplemental piece on why it’s time you joined this visual revolution, shifting your pet store from “tell” to “show.” Today we’ll go as deep as we’ll get on creating content to optimize your pet store’s Facebook and Instagram accounts.

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Going to use a quick analogy here - Apple. Have you ever heard the quote that Apple isn’t a tech company, they’re a marketing company with a tech product? Think about it: there are a handful of smartphones out there with technological capabilities that are equally or more powerful than the iPhone… but the iPhone is such a powerful force in the market due to its marketing, its aesthetic, and its style.

Let’s apply the same principle to your pet store’s marketing strategy - you need to make the most of every interaction with your potential customers. And these interactions are happening on social media.

Social media posts are branding opportunities for your products and company. Not only will customers decide whether they like your company based on what they see, but they’ll also consume content by the same logic. In other words, having great visual content on social media means more views, engagement, traffic, and ultimately, money.

Creating Visual Content for Facebook

We mentioned in previous Freesource and supplemental posts that every social platform is different - it has a different vibe, a different type of user, a different type of communication. This requires a different type of use. 9 times out of 10, it doesn’t make sense to copy and paste your tweet onto Facebook.

We’ll give you some ways you can utilize a tool like Canva to create some basic pieces that draw potential customers toward your page and into your funnel.

Page Cover Photo

At Pet Engine, we see a lot of pet store Facebook pages that aren’t optimized. Part of optimizing means a unified presentation of your store and brand online. A great idea for a cover photo is your storefront, possibly with your logo overlaid. How about an item or display rack that’s on sale for the month? Again, use that logo overlay along with some text or filter through Canva to make it pop. What about your slogan, purpose, or a powerful call to action?

Our point is that the cover photo is an attention-grabber and shouldn’t be wasted, used frivolously, or neglected. It is a powerful, graphic piece of your Facebook branding.

Page Profile Picture

It might seem redundant to mention this, but this shows up everywhere you interact. It ought to be your logo. It can be a good idea to change it for an event, or a holiday, or in relation to another relevant occurrence, but your pet store’s social media profile picture should be pretty standard with small deviations. Keep a fallback.

Some tips you might not know

Due to Facebook’s own blue-tinted branding, users get a constant splash of blue coloring pretty much everywhere. For this reason, visual posts with red tints, red text, or red subject matter tend to stand out more. If your logo is red, take advantage of it!

Video content gets the highest engagement, followed by… questions? Yup, not photos. Questions are quick, easy, and beg for interaction. There’s a reason why Facebook updated basic status updates to include text over generic randomized backgrounds. You can also use Canva and other free tools to improve how these look.

Lastly, we’ve heard of other pet store marketers saying not to fall into the trap of simply posting fur content. We disagree 🤷‍♂️ Post about your furry customers! They’re cute, and they get great engagement. Ensure that it’s part of a balanced social content calendar, but at Pet Engine we feel it should definitely be included. After all, pet content is powerful online. You only need to look at the data on the right to understand. It’s user-generated, personalized content that’s also cute.

Creating Visual Content for Instagram

Even at Pet Engine, we lean on a tool like Canva to create some of our content. If you check out our page, you can see a growing list of “highlights” that are made entirely on Canva. See, we’re practicing what we preach.

Highlights

Cover photos and content photos for highlights are a great opportunity to use Canva. Instagram can be a little finicky when adding these highlights, but there are a few tutorials online that can help you get the hang of it.

Match your pet store’s branding and coloring with Canva and use some of their free graphics, boom you have an aesthetically pleasing highlight that can cover your events, foods, supplements, customers, and more.

Filtering

It’s easy to get carried away. Try not to. Unless they truly add to the photo, our team here at Pet Engine generally prefers to post unfiltered. For our pet store subject matter, we like the real thing.

Get photo help

Use a tool like Canva or Overlay to put your logo on professional photos. Resources like Unsplash, Pexels, and Google have great photos that can be used in a billion different ways, but here are a few that we use them for:

Product photos
Holidays
National ________ Day
Sales

Some tips you might not know

Try posting photos on a single filter for an entire month. Then take a step back and look at your page - you’ll notice your photos are all popping in the same way, have the same overall atmosphere, and give your page a more complete feel. This is not an accident, and an important lesson can be learned here - stick to a few things and do them better than anybody else. A simpler, unified color scheme and feel will be more pleasing to the eye than a chaotic colorstorm.

Conclusion

The notion that your text-only post on Facebook will stand out because everybody else is using imagery is, to be blunt, wrong. Hope you’ve gotten something out of our deep dive into the power of visual imagery on social media platforms. We’d love to hear from you with some feedback, requests, suggestions, etc! Leave us a comment, or bark at us.

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