Six Steps to a Successful Pet Store Marketing Campaign
“Failure to plan is planning to fail.”
How many times have you heard that one? How many times has it held true for you? A successful pet store marketing campaign begins with planning, followed by execution, and then comes the optimization and learning and results. However, even pet store marketers that have been doing this for decades are plagued by the thought “did we forget something?”
With this quick checklist of six steps, we’ll set you up with a resource for planning out your next pet store marketing campaign and ensure you don’t miss anything, skip a step, or get off track. We hope you find it useful, and if you’re looking for other useful resources, tips, checklists, advice, tutorials, and more, check out our Blog for more pet store marketing content.
Step 1: IDENTIFY THE CAMPAIGN’S PURPOSE
All pet store marketing campaigns should have a purpose. Without a purpose or a goal, things get jumbled, parties get disagreeable, and results get derailed. Without a goal, there’s no reason in going any further and deciding on important factors like messaging, tactics, platforms, and budget.
So, let’s set a goal. Goals are broad, simple, and straightforward. Here are a few examples:
Generate more sales of a specific product or type of product.
Build your subscriber list.
Get more responses to an event.
See? Starting off small and simple, you got this!
Step 2: SET YOUR OBJECTIVES
Objectives are similar to goals, but they are more granular and should be more specific and sometimes data- or metric-driven. Objectives help set parameters, timelines, and deliverables for your campaign.
Most business owners have heard of SMART objectives: smart, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely. When you set your objectives, strive to include these requirements to fit the goal. We’ll continue with the same examples as above:
Sell 20 more bags of dog food this month than the previous month.
Increase our newsletter subscriber list by 100 people by the end of the quarter.
Get 25 RSVPs to your pet photoshoot before the holiday event.
With your SMART objectives set, we’re on the right track to ensuring that our marketing campaign is successful.
Step 3: BUDGET
Nobody loves talking about it, but it’s something that has to be talked about and approved by all parties to avoid confusion and further difficulty down the road.
Picking the right budget is tied to a number of factors: campaign goals, campaign objectives, campaign tactics, and ultimately ROI.
Understanding which tactics are available to you and where you’ll get the most ROI is critical for a successful marketing campaign. For instance, you usually wouldn’t want to run Google Ads for an event or newsletter that doesn’t have a lot of search volume.
Step 4: TARGETING AND AUDIENCE
Here’s the fun part for many marketers, and where many pet store marketing agencies cover themselves in glory or tumble in despair: target the right audience and generate meaningful results, or target the wrong audience and generate useless results.
Understanding your ideal customer for the event, newsletter, or product is important. Being able to target them with your available assets (pet store social media, pet store events, pet store email marketing, etc.) is also important. Ideally, you want to reduce wasted ad spend and narrow your target audience down into the niche that will bring the best results at the cheapest cost. So, who’s the ideal target audience for your campaign? Let’s pretend we are trying to sell discounted cans of cat food from a pet store eCommerce store:
Cat lovers? Too broad.
Cat lovers in your city? Getting better.
Cat lovers in your city that have visited your website in the last 90 days? Much better.
Cat lovers aged 21-45 in your city that have visited your website in the last 90 days and have purchased products online in the past month? Looking good.
Step 5: GETTING TACTICAL
Too often we see pet store owners jumping ahead to this step and forgetting to organize the previous steps. Sometimes they jump to this step because they’re disorganized, or don’t have a professional pet store marketing agency to do it for them (*cough* contact us *cough*), or they ran out of time.
You need to take the previous four steps before this one so that you can make an informed decision about which tactics to choose. Understanding your pet store marketing campaign goals, objectives, budget, and audience will help you know which tactics are the best fit for this campaign.
Step 6: CREATING CONTENT CREATIVELY
Another step that everybody wants to jump to right away - and with certain people, and at certain times, you have to let them! When the iron is hot, you have to strike, and when the ideas are flowing, you can’t turn off the faucet. It’s exceedingly difficult to turn on and off the creative side of the brain on a whim, and it can take time to reach peak creative performance, even for those that practice it regularly.
Once you’ve got your tactics decided, you’ll know what deliverables are necessary:
Long-form pet store SEO post
Graphic design for Facebook ad
Pet store email marketing blast
Understanding your audience will help you with your messaging, CTAs, creative subjects, and design elements. Spending time perfecting your written copy is time well-spent, as it is a hugely important factor in what makes an ad persuasive or forgettable. What are you trying to communicate?
Conclusion
Next time you’re planning your pet store marketing campaign, be sure to use these six steps for success. Once you’ve done that, you’re ready to go into launch mode, and then it’s all about seeing the results come in and optimizing from there!
If you found this resource useful, then you would love our Facebook group! We would like to invite YOU to join our growing community of pet store owners interested in improving their marketing: THE Group for Marketing Help for Pet Businesses. Take advantage of this to get assistance on campaigns, feedback, share wins and losses, and build your skills at marketing your pet business.
