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As a pet marketing agency, Trone consistently fields inquiries from pet retail marketers asking for help identifying the best ways to grow their audiences and create excitement for their pet brands. While each of these branding projects involves a slightly different set of inputs to create memorable marketing, there are four core components of a pet retail marketing strategy that we make sure are developed for consistent, long-term pet retail brand success.
The first component of a fundamental marketing strategy is to identify ideal pet owner audience segments. The next is to identify your brand’s objectives, including both short- and long-term business goals. Third, and perhaps the most important step, is to craft a compelling brand message for pet owners and retailers that speaks to an authentic need or desire. Finally, pet retail brands must figure out an effective, balanced media mix that includes paid channels, content strategy and partnerships to realize the first three components and complete the marketing strategy. Following this process helps build credibility, trust and relevance.
Read on to learn more about how to set your brand up for success within each component of the pet marketing strategy.
1. Finding Your Pet Owner Audience Segment
Given the sheer number of options available within any given sector of the pet industry, it’s not enough to develop an objectively great pet product or service without identifying how it fits into the lives of pet parents. Identifying a specific need or desire of a subset of pet owners is key to a successful pet retail marketing strategy.
It is a good idea to evaluate any first-party data, including existing sales data, surveys, customer interviews, analytics data, customer feedback or reviews and social media followers to understand the broader aspects of your current customer base and how they may resemble prospective segments. The goal is to understand the key demographics, such as their typical household income, age, likelihood to have children and other pets or even their favorite apparel brands.
Supplementing any first-party data with additional secondary data sources, including syndicated research from APPA or Nielsen, industry blogs and reports from pet industry nonprofits, can identify deeper insights into potential pet parent audience psychographics such as their opinions, habits and personality traits. Identifying brand competitors at a similar price point may indicate which audience segments are worth exploring deeper or which to avoid based on their social media following.
Aligning your product or service’s benefits or points of difference with pet parent segments improves the chances of messaging that resonates and connects to a perceived need and significantly enhances the campaign’s effectiveness.
2. Defining Campaign Success
Establishing a brand’s objectives, such as long-term and short-term business goals, provides a consistent north star to guide a pet brand’s marketing strategy and messaging. These objectives should address business challenges beyond marketing and sales.
Business objective examples include growing brand awareness, fueling interest and driving specific customer actions, each correlating with the classic sales funnel. These objectives should connect your business goals with pet parent needs and pain points—the same ones defined in the previous audience segmentation section.
Newer pet brands and services should be focused on the awareness and interest-related goals before tackling more transactional objectives. Building trust is vital for newer brands lacking reviews. These objectives might include website visits, newsletter signups, social media sharing or blog readership.
Existing or more established pet brands with active communities should place more emphasis on transactional objectives that may include driving purchases and building loyal advocates. The eventual goal of defining brand objectives should be to drive toward a specific action such as a follow, sale or review.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), such as website traffic, email click rates, social media engagement and sales conversion rates, can help establish an inital benchmark for brand objectives and provide clarity on when to stay the course on a particular brand message campaign.
3. Crafting Compelling Brand Messaging
Crafting a compelling pet retail marketing message may be the most challenging component of any pet retail marketing strategy. We find it is the area clients need the most guidance. Crafting compelling brand messaging campaigns to accomplish objectives while getting pet parents engaged with your products or services is no small feat.
It starts with identifying the most remarkable or differentiating parts of your brand or service and how they help solve pet parent needs or desires. This could be the quality of materials, quality of customer service or commitment to a type of pet or lifestyle. Ultimately, storytelling and branded visuals help pet parents rapidly understand who the brand is ideal for or how it benefits their lifestyle.
Building trust and credibility is the other part of creating compelling brand messaging. This may include referencing incorporated technology, partnerships or even customer testimonials to elevate messaging. The more people that love the brand or share it with others, the more likely prospective pet parents will see these positive experiences and place their trust in the brand. This makes the choice to purchase even easier.
Compelling brand messaging is built around an authentic insight into your pet parents’ needs and desires as well as the solution your brand provides. And every word needs to come from your brand’s tone of voice.
4. Building a Balanced Media Mix
All solid pet retail marketing strategies need to identify the best paid and organic media channels to get brand messaging out to prospective pet parents. Content should be considered for both the audience and the objective (e.g., awareness, interest or specific action).
Display ads and videos are great ways to highlight key product differences and benefits. Personalized email, direct mail and text campaigns provide ways to reengage existing customers and maintain brand relationships.
Podcast sponsorship, affiliate marketing and influencer marketing can improve trust for newer pet brands by leveraging prospective audiences in related networks and conversations. Paid and organic social media community engagement, loyalty programs and giveaway events are additional ways to grow organic interactions and support loyal followers.
Audience segments require different media based on the objectives. This may even vary on a per product or service level within the brand. Identifying examples of competitor brands and how they are marketing their products and services can offer valuable insight into what channels they may not be utilizing fully to break through to audiences.
Partner for Pet Brand Consistency
Building a memorable pet retail marketing strategy that can stand up to current and future competitors is not an easy process. Many pet brands overlook one or more of these four steps, making for yet another pet brand without a strong strategic backing. These brands often struggle to connect with pet parents in a meaningful way.
Trone is a full-service pet marketing agency with more than two decades of experience helping pet brands improve the lives of pets. Contact Trone to discuss how our team can help your brand inspire action from your pet parents.
