Consumer Profiles: Pet Parents & Pet Product Purchasers
As your pet store marketing team, we are constantly working to dial into and connect with your audience of pet parents. Being able to provide the right content, perfect tone, and correct messaging and timing ensures that your pet store continues to bring in new and old customers (and revenue).
Most pet store owners know many of their customers personally - but being able to build a consumer profile of them, especially online, can be a bit more general and significantly more difficult. A pet store owner interested in pet store marketing or pet store social media content creation should be asking:
How does my ideal customer behave online?
What kinds of content or ads are my ideal customers interested in?
Where is my ideal customer online and how can I reach them?
And last but certainly not least, because it does influence online behavior:
What type of life does my ideal customer lead offline?
Our team of pet store marketing experts at Pet Engine cannot stress enough how important it is to continually think about and probe deeper into these questions. Getting your branding, content, and targeting right for your ideal customer for your pet business (not just pet stores) will be the deciding factors whether you grow or fail in business. It really is that simple. If you haven’t pondered these questions, or want help navigating them, invest in yourself and your pet business with a free consultation with our team at Pet Engine Marketing. It might be the best decision you ever make.
In this Insider post, we’ve got a great infographic from Infogroup on consumer profiles for pet parents and pet product buyers. We’ll provide a few of our insights from it. To join the discussion, join THE GROUP for Marketing Help for Pet Businesses, our free community for pet business owners interested in building their profits through smart pet business marketing.
What Products Do Pet Parents Buy?
Insights into the consumers who drive a 100-billion-dollar industry
Infogroup built this infographic for National Pet Day to 2020 to divulge some of the data they’ve collected on the demographic makeup of pet parents and pet product purchasers. In 2019, the American pet industry cumulatively spent $95.7 billion. There are a handful of interesting correlations worth thinking about further:
Age Demographics
Typically, pet parents and pet product purchasers are older - 77% and 76% being older than 50 and 45, respectively. Given the circumstances and the financial life of most millennials, this isn’t all that surprising. Americans tend to have more disposable income as they get older - but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t market for the younger demographics! They represent a valuable way to gain customers for life from a young age.
Wealth
According to this data from Infogroup, the wealth correlates strongly with age - and this matches exactly with what many pet store owners know. A pet is an investment, and pet parents love to spoil their pets. The best way (but not the only way) to do that is with disposable income.
Purchasing Behavior
Here’s the biggest, and perhaps most surprising, piece of the data. 74% of pet parents and 77% of pet product purchases made an online purchase in the last 12 months, but only 44% and 43% respectively purchased from a catalog in the last 12 months.
What does this mean? Even the older generations, the ones with disposable income and pets, are recognizing the benefits of eCommerce and online shopping methods. Just because your customers are older doesn’t mean they don’t value convenience! The consumer’s world has evolved.
Purchase Categories
In our opinion, this is the most important information in this infographic, tucked away at the bottom! What other products do pet parents and pet product purchases go for? And why is this important?
55% of pet parents and 61% of pet product purchasers are also buying women’s apparel. The next highest category is home decor.
Why should you care? This gives you some valuable insight on ways to pair certain products with additional accessories, what items you can discount, and expect to sell among specific types of customers, other local businesses to effectively partner with in order to gain revenue from crossover customers, and so on. For more pet store marketing ideas from our team, schedule a free consultation and marketing audit, and let’s see where things go.
What Products Do Pet Parents Buy?
Conclusion
If you think this data doesn’t apply to your pet store or your pet business, that’s okay - it might not! Every business and every audience is different, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t get actionable insights and information from data like this from your own customers. Try giving your customers a survey with questions like these to learn more about their purchasing profile.
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