Planning your pet store marketing campaign with a six-step checklist for success

Whether it’s your first or your hundredth pet store marketing campaign, it always helps to follow a successful framework. The success comes from experience, repetition, and practice, so regardless of what you think of your marketing abilities or your campaigns in the past, here’s a guide you can use to guide and shape your creative process.

It can be tempting to just dive in and get started, and one thing that we see frequently is pet stores starting at the end, and being driven in the wrong direction based on an initial design decision!

Don’t get me wrong, design inspiration is powerful and shouldn’t be ignored, but it has its place in the process and on the totem pole. To plan your next pet store marketing campaign, follow this six-step checklist to set it up for success.

Step 1: What’s your goal?

Pet store event marketing? Not without a plan!

Without a goal, it gets a little too easy to spend money, time, and other resources wastefully. Here at Pet Engine Marketing, we’re no stranger to working on lean budgets and making the most with what we’ve got — it’s rare that we can just throw money at a problem to fix it.

That’s why we need goals. We need goals so that we can, eventually, set a budget and decide on appropriate tactics.

Goals are usually big and simple. Just ask yourself: what do you want to accomplish with this campaign? Try a few examples here:

Get a bunch of people signed up for your next pet store event!
Get your pet store grooming salon booked out a month in advance!
Get more loyalty members for your pet store!

See? These are straightforward, broad, and leave you with room to dig into each to set up your objectives, tactics, budgets, and timelines — everything you’d need to build out a roadmap!

Need help roadmapping your entire pet store? That’s something we cover early on! Set up an introductory call with our team to get the ball rolling.

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Step 2: What are your objectives?

Objectives are taken directly from your goal and should be significantly more specific in nature. You might have multiple objectives for a single goal. When you come up with your objectives, remember the S.M.A.R.T. framework! Objectives should be Smart, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely.

Let’s continue with the previous examples:

Get a bunch of people signed up for your next pet store event!
- Book all 40 slots for the pet store photoshoot event scheduled for Christmas Eve.

Get your pet store grooming salon booked out a month in advance!
- Fill all 720 grooming slots available for the next month by the end of this month.
Get more loyalty members for your pet store!
- Increase loyalty membership by 200 customers by the start of Q3.

You’ll see that each of these objectives fits the S.M.A.R.T. framework. With timelines, metrics, and outcomes identified, it becomes significantly easier to begin thinking strategically when it comes to planning your pet store marketing campaigns.

Step 3: what is your budget?

Well, what do you need to do to achieve this? Fortunately, there are some objectives that can be conquered without adding anything to the marketing budget! But usually, adding a bit of budget for paid advertising, signage, events, influencers, or other tactics can speed up the process.

Setting a budget also means that when this marketing campaign works, you can plan for it again next year. It also means that based on that data, you might not need as much for the next campaign. Or if you’re halfway through your time period and you haven’t gotten half of your results, you might need to add to the budget.

The important thing here is to come to a decision and stick to it. That’s the only way it will be measurable.

Step 4: Who is your target audience?

For many marketers that work among many different industries, this can be a tough one! But for us at Pet Engine Marketing, and among pet stores, it’s a little bit easier.

Chances are, your audience is local pet parents. However, you might want to go broader or narrower, so this step is still worth digging into and not skipping over! This will prevent you from spending some of that valuable budget on people who are unlikely to convert.

Think about making your audience narrower and trimming away some of that waste. Is this event, newsletter, or product only interesting or available for dog owners? Or cat owners? There’s no sense advertising kitty litter to a customer that has two dogs and no cats!

Step 5: Tactics

For us, this is the fun part! Again, it can be really common to skip directly to Step 5 or Step 6 and get ahead of ourselves. Experience can make you think that you’ve been there, done that, seen it all, and already know the best way to achieve your goal — but taking the time to use this checklist to plan your pet store marketing campaign will keep you organized, help you think of things you may have otherwise skipped over, and make your success repeatable.

Let’s continue using our examples from before, except now we’re going to add some tactics!

Get a bunch of people signed up for your next pet store event!
- Book all 40 slots for the pet store photoshoot event scheduled for Christmas Eve.
  - Boost Facebook event for $100 until Christmas Eve
  - Send out 4 marketing emails leading up to the event
  - Create Google Ads campaign for $100 until the photoshoot

Get your pet store grooming salon booked out a month in advance!
- Fill all 720 grooming slots available for the next month by the end of this month.
  - Increase Google Ad Grooming campaign budget by $300
  - Generate referrals by giving friends and family discounts for grooming appointments
  - Contact 5 potential partner businesses to increase reach and build audience
Get more loyalty members for your pet store!
- Increase loyalty membership by 200 customers by the start of Q3.
  - Video marketing production and social promotion campaign for $5,000
  - Local billboard placements displaying brand differentiators and identifiers
  - Direct mailer campaign giving new loyalty signups an exclusive discount

As you can see, each goal, campaign, and tactic has gotten more and more specific. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of tactics available for pet store marketing campaigns! Some of what’s available will be limited to you based on your experience, understanding, assets, and other resources, but there are certainly some tried-and-true tactics that we focus on (check out our Services).

Step 6: Messaging and design

Now that we’ve taken the time to sit down, brainstorm, and get our pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard), we can start flexing the other side of our brains! This is where creativity comes in.

Here’s our advice when it comes to creating content, messaging, and copy:

Be clear
Be persuasive
Be consistent

Stick to your brand’s aesthetic and visual elements, pillars, and styles. Maintaining continuity in these areas will ensure that your audience knows it’s you, or that your potential customers know it’s you before they even know you!

Planning your pet store marketing campaign with a six-step checklist for success
Conclusion

Next time you’re thinking about throwing a pet store event, or working to fill in your grooming salon, or looking to increase that bottom line through loyal customers, think about this pet store marketing campaign checklist! Bookmark it and come back to it until it’s ingrained.

If this isn’t your first time seeing this and you’ve completed all six steps, relax! Take the day off! Walk your dog! Nothing left to do — other than, obviously, monitor daily, optimize, adjust or pivot if needed, and update your team on the progress of the campaign!

Want help with your pet store marketing campaigns? Have a bunch of great ideas for your store, but can’t get them off the ground? Let’s get to work. Set up an introductory call as soon as possible, or reach out to us through our social feeds.

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