As other businesses have closed down during the spread of COVID-19, pet stores have found themselves labeled as essential businesses, thankfully remaining open to provide pet food, supplies, supplements, and cheer during this difficult period.

Many pet store owners have realized that in order to continue to cater to the demands of their pet parent customers, as well as balance the necessities of social distancing to improve our public health crisis, eCommerce solutions have been rolled out. Pet store eCommerce solutions have taken a number of forms such as online email inboxes, Facebook Messenger orders, Google Forms, or true eCommerce platforms such as eTailpet or Ecwid.

For more information on those “half-measures,” check out our Coronavirus Survival Guide for Pet Stores - lots of great information there on how to set things like that up.

So, let’s say you’ve gone ahead and taken the plunge to help shift some of your business to eCommerce … now what? How does that change things? How does that alter your pet store's social media? How does that affect your pet store marketing strategy? In this insider post, we’ll go over some pet store social media tips for eCommerce that you can use to maximize this opportunity to grow your eCommerce business.

6 Pet Store Social Media
Tips for eCommerce

Many eCommerce industries and categories are struggling right now, or worse - but then there are some who have had their growth plans positively shattered by the future flying towards the present at a rate we couldn't have foreseen: look at the explosive use of Zoom, the blossoming of the telemedicine industry, and rebirth of some toymakers in the sales of puzzles and games. Fortunately, dog food is one of those fastest-growing eCommerce categories in March 2020 compared to March 2019, up 159% (Source: Stackline). Let’s take advantage of that.

1. Grow eCommerce Revenue With SOCIAL MEDIA Discovery

You can utilize your social media feeds to help customers (new or returning) learn about new products that can benefit them at this time. They might be stuck at home with their pets who are excited to have all of this new time with their parents (who are trying to work). So how can you keep that dog occupied, engaged, active, or behaved? Use your social media to promote those products, for those reasons, and stay relevant to right now! Your content should encompass learning about the product and its various applications.

Product discovery continues to grow rapidly on social media, with 58% of consumers saying they’d discovered a product they were interested in buying on social in 2017 to 82% in 2019 (Source: Curalate).

If you want to get something like this going, but you’re so overrun with business right now that you can’t manage it, or you don’t have anybody you can reliably delegate this to, pet store social media management is one of the primary Pet Engine Marketing services. Set up a free consultation and marketing audit to see how we can help.

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2. Spend on Paid Social Advertising

It’s a great time to spend a few dollars promoting your content on social media - in fact, there hasn’t been a better opportunity in recent years as costs per conversion and reach have steadily gone up over time, until now. Less competition for marketing space on social media has created a scenario in which money is spent on these channels is almost twice as effective now (Source: Marketing Profs).

If your pet store is open and still has a marketing budget (it should 100% keep some, if not all!), then take advantage of the times to be ultra-efficient. Put $5 or $10 behind a post that gets strong reach and engagement results organically and watch the eyeballs, clicks, and sales come in.

Unfortunately, it is extraordinarily difficult these days to spread your business’s content organically on social media. Facebook’s algorithms make it tougher for businesses unless you pay for it. When you pay for it, the results can be powerful, so the trade-off is definitely there and can be worth it.

3. Visual Content is More Effective Than Written

If you haven’t taken the chance to dig into all of our social media resources, you can take advantage of that here. As content increases, consumer attention decreases. The faster and easier than your pet store can communicate your content, i.e. video content, the higher your chances of being noticed and remembered is.

At the moment, up to 80% of people prefer consuming video content rather than reading a blog post, and 82% would choose live video over any other type of social post (Source: Neil Patel). While this might not apply to the standard pet store audience, you can bring in new customers from younger generations with these strategies to continue to grow your pet store.

Some examples of ways to use video marketing for your pet store:

Product demonstrations and discovery
How-to instructionals, tutorials, or educational videos
Customer testimonials
Messages from the staff or ownership
Behind-the-scenes content

For more tips on pet store video marketing, check out this Insider post or search our Blog for “pet store video marketing”

Make sure to take full advantage of video product demos, a how-to instructional series, customer testimonials, and messages from the CEO or other leadership members. Easy-to-digest video content can educate the market around your business much more effectively than nearly every other type of content.

4. Maintain Your Voice

Customers everywhere, including pet parents, care about more than the value of the product they’re buying - they care about the people behind that product. That’s why so many of them shop at small local independent pet stores in the first place. Social media provides a great platform to build the human persona behind your pet store’s brand and engage with your customers and prospective customers in a far more personal way than a newspaper ad ever could.

Use the same kind of tone, messaging, and interaction on social media that you would if your customers were there in your pet store with you.

In a slight play on words here, it’s also critical to maintain your voice … as in, post consistently, stay on top of it, build it into your routine, and try not to fall off. So often, marketing is like a broken record. How many ways can you creatively say the same thing to send customers to the same places?

5. Simplify the Purchasing Process

The worst thing that customers can get today is a poor purchasing process. You need to be able to capitalize on impulse right away, allowing customers to complete their purchases quickly, easily, and painfree. Minimizing the number of steps to take or hoops to jump through is critical to convert buyers from the discovery stage to checkout.

Use the built-in call-to-action buttons on social media. With paid ads, you can choose “buy now,” or “shop now,” or “learn more,” and beyond. With just an organic post, you can at least provide a link in the written copy or a “Send message” button to bring buyers in. Some of this depends on what platform you’re on. Pinterest is going to be quite a bit different from Facebook.

6. Take Advantage of Customer Content

If you were selling those boxers the dog had on, how great would this user-generated content be?

User-generated content makes online shoppers 97% more likely to convert (Source: Business Insider). Yes, you read that right, and yes, younger pet parents fall into this category.

It can be difficult to generate true organic content for your brand. It can sometimes take some investment. Here’s an Insider post on 7 powerful ways to promote your pet store social media content organically. Nonetheless, social media provides a perfect platform to collect and showcase content from your existing customers - as well as ask for that content! This can help generate more eCommerce sales for your pet store.

User-generated content provides credibility, that personal touch between humans and brand, additional loyalty and reciprocity from the customers whose content you’re featuring, and more. Use your own hashtag to keep track of things and if your reposted or reshared content is performing well organically, spend a few dollars to spread it with paid advertising.

6 Pet Store Social Media
Tips for eCommerce
Conclusion

Coming to a close here, and if you’ve read or skimmed this far then we applaud you for continuing to work to improve your pet store social media, or your pet store marketing strategy in this time. You can be sure there are many people (including some of your competitors) that aren’t working as hard as you to continue to improve during their downtime.

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Stay home, stay healthy, and stick around! Things will get better.