5 Ways to Build Credibility as a Pet Store Owner

Just how important is credibility? It’s hard to understate it. Credibility is what pushes buyers over the line. Credibility is what turns a $10 sale into a $50 sale based on your suggestions as a pet store owner. Credibility is what brings new customers into your store instead of your local competitors. Credibility is what gives you confidence, authority, and magnetism within your industry and your audience. Without it, you’re just a store.

There is an untold number of ways to improve your pet store’s credibility and authority. Simply having a storefront and educated staff provides credibility, as it comes with the territory. There are also a number of ways to gradually improve your pet store’s credibility:

• Ranked highly when it comes to your pet store’s SEO

• Having a professional pet store website

• Utilizing a branded, engaging pet store social media feed

If you’re doing all of those things already, GREAT! You’re on the right track. And if you’re not, then it’s imperative that you take ownership of and improve your pet store marketing strategy. If you’re looking for a pet store marketing agency to help you grow your business, schedule a free 30-minute consultation and marketing audit with our team at Pet Engine Marketing. Contact us today to get started.

You can also take advantage of the great people in THE Group for Marketing Help for Pet Businesses, a growing community of pet business owners that can provide inspiration, feedback, assistance, and more when it comes to marketing your pet business.

5 Ways to Build Credibility
as a Pet Store Owner

This Insider post is going to provide 5 ways for you to build credibility as a pet store owner - explosively. We’re not talking about small, small growth here. These are big steps that take time, commitment, energy, resources, and determination to get off the ground. They aren’t for small-timers!

1. Teach a course

The benefits of teaching a course, either online or in-person, are massive. You can make the course free or paid, but you’ll gain some credibility either way. Courses can provide:

• Credibility: even if you don’t have a degree, a professional course on pet store ownership, dog walking, kitten training, or other topics will help you establish authority, credibility, and expertise.

• Passive income: if your course is available online, once it’s made and uploaded, you scarcely have to touch it except for customer-service based issues. This is assuming that your course has a price, but if it doesn’t…

• Lead generation: bring more interested parties, customers, or referral connectors into your network by providing it for free and collecting some standard data like name and email.

The main idea here is to teach. Put yourself out there and educate others on content and topics that are important to them within your space or industry. This doesn’t have to take the form of a fancy online course, you don’t need professional videographers or photographers. An iPhone and a dry-erase board could suffice - so could going Live on Facebook or Instagram every Tuesday for 5 minutes! Get creative.

2. Conduct and publish Industry Research

Dig up some meaningful data and present it in an interesting way to build authority on the subject. Many pet store owners don’t understand how much data is available within their POS systems, their pet store websites, or their pet store social media platforms. And oftentimes they don’t know what to do with it.

A good way to get started is to survey your customers. The value of learning directly from your customers is infinite - you might have to bribe them with giveaways, coupons, or raffles to get their input, but the data and learning opportunities are huge.

Once you have this data, you can find other parties (like other pet store owners?) that could benefit from it.

3. Start a podcast

22% of Americans listen to a podcast each week (Source: Edison Research). With an infinite number of topics available, it’s all up for grabs, and those who podcast about their business, industry, and niches bring people together and inherently become credible ambassadors of their brand and industry. It’s a win-win-win.

Podcasts have a more human touch than written blog content and helps to create a bond with your audience. They learn more about you as a pet store owner, your experiences and motives, the “why” behind the “what,” and the human side of your business. That connection and trust is built by leaps and bounds, and your audience may be more inclined to listen to your podcast than they are to read your content because they can listen while they do other things.

There’s no way around it: creating a podcast is a big commitment. It’s not a one-time thing. It takes ongoing effort to plan, record, edit, and promote. But it’s also a great method to meet new people and build connections and relationships within your industry, cross-promote businesses, and build authority. It can also be quite fun and rewarding.

4. Get On Stage

People invest their time and money to attend conferences, tradeshows, and events for the networking and learning opportunities that they provide. Tradeshow organizers choose speakers based on subject-matter expertise and getting in front of your audience to share your wins, losses, and learning is a great way to build authority and credibility in what you do.

There's no doubt that speaking positions you as an expert, but it’s important to know that speaking, like the other ways to build credibility as a pet store owner, requires effort and time and practice. If public speaking is truly one of the ways that you wish to build authority, it might be worth investing in additional practice or coaching. It’s also a good idea to start small - give presentations at a local networking group, local Chamber, or with a webinar before working your way up to the Global’s and SuperZoo’s of the world.

5. Write

We’ve mentioning teaching and speaking, can’t forget about writing. And we’re not talking about the standard blog posts - go bigger! Write a book.

Writing a book is probably the best way to carve out some credibility in your niche. But don’t just write a book - write a great book. When it comes to writing a book, the days of massive barriers to entry are over. Anybody can self-publish, and eBooks can trim down significantly on the costs if that’s a concern. Don’t worry or stress too much over the fact that your book may not be the only book for that niche - it would be absurd to think that your experiences, learning, and voice have been 100% covered by the work of another writer.

And lastly, your book doesn’t need to be a 350-page tome. If you can say something in fewer words, you should, and oftentimes simplicity is an indicator of deep understanding and knowledge. The 100-page modern books like Drift Marketing’s This Won’t Scale is an easy, compact, thoughtful, and educational book that all marketers can benefit from in some way. The fact that it’s less than 100 pages makes it an appealing read to those who aren’t natural readers or choose to spend their leisure time doing other things.

5 Ways to Build Credibility
as a Pet Store Owner
Conclusion

Don’t forget that even with these 5 ways to build credibility as a pet store owner, your endeavors into one can result in knowledge, learning, and opportunity pathways to the others. Your book might contain research that can be revisualized and republished. Your foray into public speaking can give you the confidence and connections to begin a podcast. Going big on credibility can scale and multiply you beyond the confines of your pet store.

How have you gained credibility within your industry? Share with us and others in our Facebook group or leave us some content below. Building credibility as a pet store owner will help build credibility and authority in your pet store, which will bring you more customers and more revenue. We can help you achieve these pet store marketing goals at Pet Engine Marketing. Contact us to get started.