Marketing for Dog Daycare and Boarding Businesses: Start With the Gap, Not the Tactic
If your dog daycare or boarding business needs more customers, where should you spend your marketing time and money? Google Ads? Social media? SEO? Email? Reviews?
The answer could be any of them, but that's usually the wrong question to start with.
I recently joined Eve Molzhon, founder of Dog Handler Academy and owner of three dog daycare and boarding facilities, for a webinar about what growing pet businesses do differently with their marketing. We covered quite a bit over the course of the conversation, but one idea came up again and again: before deciding what marketing tactic to use, figure out where customers are actually getting stuck.
That's important because most pet businesses we work with aren't doing nothing when it comes to marketing. Usually, they're doing quite a lot. They're posting on social media, running ads, updating the website, sending emails, collecting reviews or trying some combination of all of the above.
The problem is that more marketing activity doesn't necessarily mean better marketing.
Watch the full conversation above for our discussion about marketing strategy for dog daycare and boarding businesses, including Google, social media, reviews, email, customer retention and plenty of real-world examples from Eve and the audience.
Follow the Customer Before Choosing the Marketing
One of the frameworks I shared during the webinar was a simple customer journey:
Discover → Trust → Book → Return → Recommend
A pet parent might discover your daycare through Google, check your reviews, visit your website, call the front desk, tour the facility and eventually make a reservation. If they have a great experience, hopefully they come back and eventually recommend you to someone else.
We tend to think of the obvious digital pieces as "marketing," but the customer doesn't experience your business that way. To them, the Google search, website, phone call, booking process and experience at your facility are all part of the same interaction with your business.
That's also why throwing more money at the top of the funnel doesn't always solve the problem.
If a Google Ad gets someone to your website, the website convinces them to call, and nobody answers the phone or returns the message until the next day, the ad actually did its job. Spending more money on Google Ads would just create more opportunities for the same problem to happen.
One of the Most Interesting Numbers From the Webinar
This part of the conversation became especially interesting when Eve shared a number from her own dog daycare and boarding facilities: roughly 70% of her customers book while the business is closed.
When you think about how people actually shop for pet care, it makes sense. They're planning vacations at night, figuring out next week's schedule after work or realizing they need boarding while sitting on the couch at 9 p.m.
Eve uses virtual assistants to help cover some of those after-hours opportunities, which led us into a larger conversation about response time, AI receptionists and where automation can help without removing the human element entirely.
The specific solution is going to look different from one pet care business to another, but the underlying issue is worth paying attention to. You can spend a lot of money generating leads only to lose them because another business responded faster.
I shared an example from my own life during the webinar. My garage door broke on a Saturday, I submitted an inquiry to a local company, and somebody called me about five minutes later. They booked me for Monday morning, and I never contacted another company.
Your customers live in that same world.
Where Is Your Dog Daycare Marketing Actually Breaking?
During the webinar, I walked through five common gaps we see in pet businesses.
Sometimes people simply aren't finding the business, which can point us toward local SEO, Google Business Profile optimization, reviews or paid search.
Other times, people are finding the business but aren't taking the next step. If your website gets traffic but doesn't produce calls, forms or reservations, buying even more traffic probably shouldn't be your first move.
Then there are businesses generating plenty of inquiries but not turning enough of those inquiries into customers. That's when I'd want to know how quickly the team responds, what those phone conversations sound like, whether follow-up is actually happening and whether the booking process works the way everyone assumes it does.
Eve shared a great example from her own operation. A prospective customer asked whether she could tour the facility because she wanted to make sure everything was clean, and a team member responded with, "We don't do that."
That's not a Google Ads problem. It's also not something another month of social media posts is going to fix.
The other two gaps happen after somebody has become a customer: they book once and don't return, or they use one service without ever trying the others.
That second one can be a huge missed opportunity for pet resorts offering daycare, boarding, grooming and training. If one of your longtime daycare customers says, "Wait, you guys offer grooming?" there's probably some revenue hiding inside an audience you've already spent years building.
Your Existing Customers Might Be the Marketing Opportunity
One of my favorite parts of the webinar came from Eve talking about a recent influx of customers around college move-in.
Instead of simply putting those people into the same general email list as everybody else, she can think about why those customers needed pet care in the first place. When is parents' weekend? Homecoming? Oktoberfest? What other university events might bring those same people back to town?
That's where email becomes a lot more useful than simply sending another monthly newsletter to everybody in your database.
The same idea applies to a daycare customer who has never used boarding, a grooming customer who doesn't know you've launched daycare or a customer who hasn't booked anything in six months. These groups don't necessarily need the same message because they don't have the same relationship with your business.
We talked about several examples like this throughout the webinar, including a question from an attendee who had an established grooming business but had recently added daycare and wasn't seeing the bookings she wanted yet.
The challenge wasn't necessarily finding an entirely new audience. She already had customers who trusted her business. Part of the opportunity was helping those people begin to see the company as somewhere they could go for daycare, too.
Do the Thing That's Closest to Revenue
If there's one idea I'd take away from the entire presentation, it's this:
Do the thing that's closest to revenue first.
There will always be another social post you could create, another website page you could tweak or another marketing idea somebody wants to try. That doesn't make those things useless, but when time and money are limited, fixing the part of the customer journey that's already costing you business is usually going to matter more.
If you're getting inquiries and nobody follows up with them, start there. If people are visiting your boarding page but can't figure out how to book, start there. If your daycare customers have no idea that you also offer boarding, you probably don't need a complicated new campaign to begin fixing that.
Growing pet businesses don't necessarily do more marketing. In my experience, they're better at identifying the problem they're trying to solve before deciding which marketing tool to throw at it.
And yes, sometimes that means the most valuable marketing project isn't the most exciting one.
Sometimes you've just got to shovel the poop.
Watch the Full Dog Handler Academy Webinar
We covered much more during the full conversation, including Google Ads, local search, websites, social media, reviews, email marketing, AI, customer follow-up and how dog daycare and boarding businesses can make better use of the data they already have.
If you own or market a dog daycare, boarding facility or pet resort and any of this sounds familiar, watch the full webinar replay above.
A big thank you to Eve Molzhon and Dog Handler Academy for inviting me to join the conversation. Dog Handler Academy provides education and training for pet care professionals who want to improve safety, staff development and operations within their businesses.
Learn more about Dog Handler Academy
If the marketing side of your pet business is where you're getting stuck, Pet Engine Marketing works exclusively in the pet industry, helping independent pet businesses connect the pieces between being found, earning trust and turning that attention into revenue.
