PET STORE
Social Media

Tired of managing your pet store social media yourself? Wondering why that person you hired off Fiverr isn’t getting you any engagement or sales? Ready to take all of that work out of the hands of your niece and into the confident hands of a professional social media manager?

You’re in the right spot! At Pet Engine Marketing, we are able to provide pet store social media management as a standalone service and as part of our Full-Service Pet Store Marketing Partnership. You can always book a free call to get an audit, some quick recommendations, and a meeting with one of our pet store marketing experts absolutely, 100% free. Just contact us to set that up!

Pet Store Social Media

social media for pet stores 101

You can no longer deny that social media is important for pet stores and retailers across the world. You simply must have an identity and a presence online, and to neglect it is to do damage to your own business. The facts (from Sprout Social) back it up:

• Globally, over 3.6 billion people use social media and the number is only projected to increase to 4.41 billion by 2025.

• The top social media networks ranked by active users are Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, Facebok Messenger, and Instagram.

• Internet users spend an average of 144 minutes on social media per day.

Today, the modern pet parent is using social media for a variety of reasons, including but not limited to getting updates from brands and friends, interacting with businesses, solving customer service issues, finding things to do, purchasing products or signing up for services, watch videos, take in information, get news, or simply for mindless fun.

As a business, it’s important to understand who your audience is and where you can best get in front of them. Working with Pet Engine Marketing can bring you insights, analysis, and data by working on your pet store’s social media platforms to help you make decisions when it comes to purchasing, pet store events, branding, design, and other areas of the business.

PET STORE SOCIAL MEDIA - THE PET ENGINE WAY

“I can hire a social media manager anywhere!” Yep, you’re right, but there are no other professional pet store marketing agencies that work solely with independent, local pet retailers.

At Pet Engine Marketing, we make sure we undergo a thorough onboarding process with all of our clients that includes an entire session dedicated solely to branding. There, we build on our own experience with your current knowledge of your online audience, your desired brand voice, and tone, and the needs, likes, dislikes, and preferences for your pet store’s social media.

Getting Your Voice Right

When it comes to interacting with your audience, it comes down to the three C’s:

1. Connect: Connecting comes down to understanding your audience and understanding how we want to make our audience feel. This will help guide our decisions with voice, content, cadence, and vibe moving forward.

2. Communicate: Communication happens in so many different ways, and there are so many different ways to communicate! We’re talking about all of the different colors, fonts, elements, content, content styles, distribution methods, platforms, emotions, tones, and so many other factors that enable your business and your audience to communicate with one another.

3. Convert: This is where the magic happens! When your business connects and communicates the right way, customers convert. It happens both online and offline, and we work to make sure that these two areas are synced up and working together. Ultimately, your pet store’s social media feeds can and should be fun, but if you’re paying for it, you want it to influence the bottom line, and that means converting people into loyal customers.

What else do we use pet store social media for?

Working with Pet Engine Marketing means you have more people on your team (specifically in your marketing department) to manage your inboxes, engage with your customers, and not let any customer or opportunity slip through the cracks.

We are seeing that more and more frequently pet parents are looking to use social media inboxes to solve customer service issues, coordinate pickups and dropoffs, register for grooming appointments or training sessions, ask questions about products, and so on.

In short, your Facebook page manager is also a customer service representative.

As important as it is to provide meaningful, great content on your pet store’s social feeds, it’s equally important to provide the right customer service. Queries and issues in your inbox can’t be allowed to stagnate and your Pet Engine Marketing account manager is there to help answer questions, escalate issues, and be an active voice that your customers can communicate with.

Everything gets responded to, helping customers feel heard online and not ignored. The more engagement you get on your posts and on guest posts improves your reach as the social media algorithms propagate your content to like-minded people.

Social Media Sharing

It can be challenging to come up with fresh, relevant, useful, creative content every day, every week, every month. We understand the struggle (we’re the ones doing it!). So, we do our best to stretch content out in a way that maintains your branding and reaches significantly more people.

Created content can be distributed in so many different ways through so many different platforms, and we know there’s a nearly unlimited number of ways to find or create content:

• Sales and discounts

• Pet store branding and unique identifiers

• Customer photos and features

• Information and education

• Announcements and news

• New shipments and incoming items

• Happy stories or moments

• Recognition of staff or customers

And how should you distribute it?

• Photos

• Videos

• Infographics

• Lists

• Online Games

• Webinars

• Live Videos

• Case Studies

• Newsletters/Emails

• Giveaways

• FAQs

• Blogs (Great for Pet Store SEO!)

• Surveys

• Polls

• Quizzes

• Quotes

The list is endless! Seriously. If you’re struggling to come up with content for your pet store social media platforms every day and every week, then that’s a sign that you’re burnt out from doing it and need some fresh, enthusiastic eyes on it. Contact us to see how we work with local pet stores to start seeing some growth on their Facebook or Instagram pages.

tracking and metrics and reporting

We get questions like “how do you know it’s working?” Or “how can we make sure we’re getting a return on investment?” At Pet Engine Marketing, if we’re not tracking key performance indicators and metrics that are indicative of your success, then we aren’t following our own principles and probably wouldn’t recommend that you invest.

• Subscribers and Followers: While these metrics are often thought of as “vanity metrics” that don’t hold any substance when it comes to revenue, we disagree (but not entirely). Getting 100 new followers is great, but if they aren’t qualified or local followers that will buy from you, then it doesn’t really mean a whole lot. However, getting new local followers does increase your reach, impressions, improves your chances at converting that follower into a customer, and can grow your market share.

• Engagement: Engagement is a good indicator of how well your audience responds to your brand, tone, content, cadence, and overall messaging. Do people like what your store puts out? What do you want to see more of or less of?

• Reach: How many eyeballs are hitting your content every day or every month? This is a top-of-the-funnel metric, but you can’t get more at the bottom (customers or conversions) without more at the top!

• Conversions & Clicks: Again, it comes down to the bottom line. While some of this can be fun, we try to sell products on your pet store website while you sleep! Not much better than that right?

At Pet Engine Marketing, your account manager has their finger on the pulse of these metrics, campaigns, strategies, and knows what to prioritize in order to get the results you want to see from your pet store’s social media platforms.