Back at it today, hope all of our pet store community members and clients are enjoying their Friday and have had a productive, profitable week! Today’s quick insider post is going to be building on our mindset as pet store marketers and our philosophy behind our work here at Pet Engine Marketing. We want to tackle those big questions of what to do, when to do it, and why it works when it comes to building localized communities of loyal pet parents for independent pet stores.

If you didn’t get a chance to check out part 1, you can do that HERE. If you want this stuff delivered straight to your inbox, we highly recommend that you join our growing community of pet store owners and get this info first and fast!

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Pet Store Marketing
Mindset & Philosophy

Part 1 entailed a few major principles: don’t wing it, marketing is food (not medicine), and budget marketing for your entire year and future. Today’s principles might be a bit more radical or out there, a slight step away from what would be considered traditional thought processes regarding marketing. It’s what makes us different, and part of what makes us successful.

Don’t Get Attention - Hold it!

While there are some customers and products that are a match made in heaven (the need is great, the timing is perfect, etc), the goal of our long-term marketing campaigns with our pet store clients is not necessarily to sell a few more items. That’s great, but it’s not what we’re after. We are after the long-term success of the business by finding and holding onto loyal buyers.

Pet store owners understand the lifetime value of a customer - one that shops at their store from puppy food to senior dog food. Finding one of those customers is several times more valuable than selling a few more bags of food or a few more toys at a sale.

So our strategies and tactics are partially based around selling a hot product, pushing sales, and getting coupons into the store, but our major goal is to be consistent, hold the attention of our customers and potential customers, and bring them into our pet stores month after month after month. Then, we get to work on increasing their average purchase size and number of monthly visits incrementally. Small changes in those figures result in massive revenue over time.

If you sold balls to dogs, wouldn’t you advertise at a dog park? Go where you’re wanted.

Don’t Be Everywhere - Be Where You’re Wanted

There are many marketers and companies today that are focused on getting the most eyeballs possible on content. Want to know how much money it cost to run an ad at the Super Bowl this year? According to Bloomberg, a 30-second spot would run you over $5 million.

There are no independent pet stores we work with that have that kind of money, and even if they did, we would never advise them to spend their marketing budget there. Why? Because we are focused on lean marketing, getting the most ROI from our dollars, and eliminating ad waste.

We are not focused on getting the most reach, or the most eyes on our post. We want quality traffic to our website. With our approach being strongly digital, we have great control over who we target. We can reach who we want, where we want to reach them, whenever we want to reach them.

This ability to connect with our customer base and potential customers online has only become really available within the past decade or two. It’s a tool that many pet stores aren’t using for marketing, and our team here at Pet Engine Marketing is seeking to change that.

Conclusion

There are a lot of ways to spend your marketing dollars. Some of them are the right ways, some of them are absolutely the wrong ways. While we feel that, to some extent, every market and every independent pet store is going to have its intricacies and subtle differences, we stand by our pet store marketing mindset and philosophy. The results speak for themselves. Are you ready to join in on the fun and get your pet store profiting long-term, from clicks to bricks?

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