Ready to plan a successful pet store marketing campaign? Yes? Well, not until you've gone through this six-step checklist!

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.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been, for many pet retailers, the single biggest challenge in the history of their business. Whether you’ve been in business for one year or thirty years, the impact has been widespread and damaging to retailers everywhere. How can pet store marketing help lead your through to the light?

As a pet store owner, how often are you looking for creativity among your hires to improve the store physically, digitally, atmospherically, culturally, or otherwise?

Pet Engine Marketing founder and CEO Matt Aldrich was asked by Behind the Pages, the PETS+ Podcast, to dish out some info on ways to improve your pet store’s SEO on your website!

Credibility is what gives you confidence, authority, and magnetism within your industry and your audience. Without it, you’re just a store.

As a pet store owner, finding and targeting your ideal audience is the number one way to drive revenue growth year after year. With a specific set of questions and this infographic, we can help you get a better idea of who your ideal customer is, the life they lead outside your store, and the rest of their consumer profile.

Consumer behavior has changed: the where, how, and with whom in particular have undergone drastic shifts. With the impact of the COVID-19 virus, pet retailers have been forced to adapt to new consumer demands and behaviors such as dropshipping and direct-to-consumer pathways.

The new face of Pet Engine Marketing on Facebook will be our Group page: Marketing Help for Pet Businesses. Read on to learn more!

In these uncertain times, it’s understandable to wonder if right now is a good time to spend money on promoting your pet store. What should you promote? Where should you spend money? What does my audience want to hear? We cover all of these questions and more.

With everything going on right now, it is more important than ever that your store stays active, communicative, and responsive online. Our April 2020 Marketing Calendar for Pet Stores is a good way to use your pet store social media feeds to create easy, relevant content for your audience to absorb as online-time skyrockets.

The world is changing, faster and more suddenly than most of us expected. And beyond the fraught health emergencies that so many of us are going through, many of us in the pet industry are being asked to adapt, change, and roll with the punches, uncertain of what the future looks like. At Pet Engine Marketing, we have been encouraging our clients to do a few things:

As pet store marketers in today’s globalized digital age we have to think bigger and stretch past principles and guidelines into a framework that still fits today. That brings us to our 5 Ps of Pet Store Marketing.

Your business won’t succeed without reliable, competent, trustworthy employees. So when you find those A+ pet store employees, what are you as the pet store owner doing to keep them there for longer? Are you providing relevant rewards, more responsibility, less of a task they dislike or aren’t proficient at?

You can’t rest on your laurels once you’ve convinced shoppers of the value of your brand. To retain customers, you have to consistently deliver relevant and personalized content based on their preferences and past behaviors.

How do you turn your pet store’s customers into true brand advocates? The kinds of pet parents that speak to their friends about their excellent experience in your store, the kinds of pet parents that you can’t get enough of. We’ll share some thoughts on it in this Insider series on the pet parent’s journey to loyalty.

Here’s an awesome infographic with seven tips on how mom and pop pet stores can compete against big box retailers.

It’s interesting how marketing needs and trends reflect human desires and growth paths. In our lives, we continue to see an influx of technology, just like the marketing world. We cover some 2020 marketing trends for pet stores, taking the broader, industry-wide marketing trends and focusing them for local, independent, family-owned pet stores.

Use this January 2020 Marketing Calendar to improve your pet store’s marketing strategy and marketing planning. If you ever feel like your planning for marketing or events is rushed or last minute, or you can’t seem to finish everything that needs to be finished in time, then this resource will be helpful for you!

We’ve provided our free community of pet store owners this December marketing calendar for pet stores to help with your marketing planning during the busy holiday month.

Check out this infographic from Yes Marketing on Black Friday and Cyber Monday trends over the past few years. We’ll share a few thoughts and takeaways from this infographic below as it relates to pet stores and pet store marketing.

Here we are, back with part 2 on Holiday Retail Marketing Trends 2019. We’re hoping our community of pet business owners and pet store owners are able to use these trends and key takeaways to improve their pet store’s marketing strategy for the holiday season.

This post is going to be on our thoughts and action items in response to this piece by Pet Business Professor that digs into the spending inside our $78.60bn pet industry. It’s a really great, highly precise, detailed write-up on the numbers and spending broken up by economic and age-based demographics.

When we really think about it, holiday shopping is about finding the perfect gift for the special people (or pets) in our lives. So how do you find that perfect gift? Santa doesn’t deliver it. Elves aren’t building it. Here’s our five holiday retail marketing trends of 2019, and some actionable takeaways for pet store owners and your pet store’s marketing strategy to thrive with these trends.

If you’re feeling like you’re late to the game when it comes to pet store marketing for the holiday season, don’t stress out too much. There’s still a way for you to make an impact on your sales with these last minute holiday campaigns for pet stores.

It’s fall, and it’s holiday season, and all of your competitors are vying for consumer attention. How do you stand out We’ve got 5 holiday marketing tips for pet stores to help pet store owners make a splash in their customer’s minds this November and December.

Our second talk from Pet Connections Expo: We break down some of the key online metrics to track for your pet store, and we’ll briefly dig into ways that you can improve metrics and get better results when marketing your pet store.

Pet Engine Marketing are going to give you a few holiday ideas for pet stores to run with. Seeing as 94% of pet parents intend to purchase a gift for their fur babies this year, these holiday ideas for pet stores are a great way to capitalize on this time of year.

We go over the 3 major types of customer for pet stores and how to go about enhancing customer loyalty for both new and existing customers in this fourth installment!

For those of you that weren’t able to make it to Pet Connections Expo this past year, we’re going to break down one of our popular campfire session topics. This particular topic was focused on 2019 trends for retailers, marketers, and pet store owners, ultimately providing some takeaways and ideas for pet store owners to market their stores in creative ways that will draw the eye and bring in business.

Our philosophy for pet store clients is to maintain a continual focus on attracting new business, but also maximizing business from current existing customers. To do that, we need to enhance their loyalty to their pet store and continue to build loyalty from customers that are not as far along in the customer journey.

Our pet store marketing philosophy is about maximizing customer loyalty and getting the most from the customers that already love your pet store, making their experience there better and increasing visit frequency and purchase size.

Shoppers today are driven by the use of coupons, the ability to customize their shopping experience, and the ability to make purchases digitally. Is your pet store marketing strategy recognizing and building on these trends?

Marketing isn’t just your advertising, your signage, or your logo. It’s everything that happens when pet parents encounter your pet store’s brand, from all of your online or offline advertising to the experience they have speaking with your employees in the store. So it’s everything that goes into their interaction with your brand, and these interactions are what enhance customer loyalty.

We are all about partnership, and these are our guidelines to building the best partnerships with our pet store clients. We are all about helping, and ensuring that pet stores get the most out of their marketing agencies is part of that!

Digital marketing is powerful but can only go so far on its own. We’ve found that our ongoing digital marketing efforts will really showcase their results when they are accompanied by local events as a capture point for the digital community.

Our final piece of the pet store marketing mindset and philosphy miniseries, a look into our brains as modern pet store marketers.

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.

We’ll be tackling big “why” and “how” and “what” questions when it comes to pet store marketing in the digital age.

Running a business, big or small, means weighing the ins and outs. Is the juice worth the squeeze? What’s the return on investment? Is the money I put in going to get me the results I want? These are questions all business owners come up against, especially when it comes to marketing. As a pet store owner, how can you effectively promote your pet store and it’s content without breaking the bank?

We’re going to add to our Freesources post on tradeshows with our six steps to a successful tradeshow, ensuring that you get the most out of your expo experience whether it’s at Global, SuperZoo, PetConnections, or otherwise.

Since we are primarily a pet store marketing agency for brick-and-mortar retailers, we’re going to dig into some tips that are primarily meant for that type of business. Nonetheless, what we give out here can be appropriated and adapted to other pet businesses, whether it’s for exotic birds, livestock and feed, or fish and aquariums, this will help.

Search engine optimization is more important than ever nowadays and it’s critical for (almost) every pet store to understand the true meaning of SEO as well as the potential it creates for every pet business. Of course, we’ll back it up with data!

Using video is a really good idea - using video to market your pet store in the right way on the right platforms is a great idea. We’ve got best practices to help pet store owners starting out or implementing video marketing.

We go over why you should start using video for your pet store’s marketing, and how to use video on major social media platforms to get the best results for your pet store.

For those of you that haven’t heard of Wistia, it is a free software platform that can help pet store owners create, edit, host, promote, and track high quality professional-looking videos.

It’s true, we’re deep into the “visual revolution.” With hundreds or thousands of social posts flooding your customers every day across every platform, you need visual content to help you pop and stand out from the rest of the noise.

What really makes your visual content, your imagery, and your graphic branding important? Today we’ll get into some nitty gritty data-based (always) trends that will get our point across: the internet and it’s users have shifted from “tell” to “show.”

Fresh off our quick write-up of one of Jet’s Favorite Freesources on HubSpot, we’re going to dig a big deeper into the world of inbound marketing. The folks at HubSpot are big proponents of inbound marketing, and nearly all retailers engage in some form of inbound marketing (whether they know it or not), including pet retailers.

Gone are the days where generating audience engagement on social media was primarily a passive process. The always-online audiences of today want to be involved, interact, and co-create.

For this post, we’ve outlined all the major updates and new features for each of the major platforms so you can incorporate them into your pet store’s social media marketing strategy for 2019.

Today we’ll touch on what you as a pet store owner should be tracking on Analytics, what you can learn through it when it comes to marketing your pet store, and how to adjust your pet store marketing strategy with your data analysis.

Today let’s learn a little about Google Analytics. For a brief overview, Google Analytics is a plugin that can be added to your website for free that tracks users across it. The scope of Analytics is impressive, as you can look at your website’s data from a really broad perspective as well as drill into minute details with ease.

After all, brick and mortar pet stores are obviously retailers, and when you’re wondering how best to market your pet store and promote your pet supplies, it’s a good idea to see what’s trending, working, and succeeding in the rest of the industry.

As meat-free diets become more mainstream, an increasing number of owners are interested in adopting the vegan lifestyle for their pets according to a new survey.

One of the best aspects of being a pet shop owner is getting dogs in your store. As far as marketing for pet stores goes, it’s as good as gold: pet photos with your store and logo in the background are tailor-made for social media.

Running a pet store involves a lot more than just playing with cute and cuddly animals all day. You have to actually run a business, and one of the most important aspects is making money. To do that, you need to draw in customers.

According to Michelson Found Animals, an animal welfare nonprofit organization, there are three major trends worth looking out for in the pet industry this coming year. The organization conducted a survey of over a thousand dog and cat owners and analyzed their findings. With the right planning, mindset, and marketing, independent pet stores can capitalize on all of them!