Social media is unquestionably a pivotal tool pet brand marketers should be leveraging to connect with their audience, drive engagement and build loyal consumers. It’s also a communication platform where countless other pet brands are constantly bombarding pet owners with messaging about their own products. To address this, brands must invest in good upfront and on-going social media strategy to help ensure that they stand out from the crowd and deliver relevant content that encourages purchase and ultimately leads to loyalty. In support of that, here are a few tips for putting more punch into your social media efforts for leading more pet parents to your brand and keeping them there.
1. Understand Your Audience
To truly connect with pet parents, brands must first identify what target pet owners value and have insight into the day-to-day challenges they confront in providing good health and happiness for their pet. With this intelligence in hand, brands can then begin to formulate and share purposeful, differentiating content that addresses real needs with real solutions. This strategy is particularly important for connecting with GenZ and Millennial pet owners who place great value on brands that speak ‘to’ as opposed to ‘at’ them by delivering authentic, more personalized messaging that says they care. For example, a pet grooming product brand that speaks to a range of commonplace, problematic skin | coat issues in its social content and explains how easily their product can help resolve them is far more likely to connect with pet parents than a brand that merely touts “helps with dry skin” in its social messaging.
All this said, brands should view each social media post as a unique, valuable opportunity to form relationships with pet owners and leverage it as part of a bigger strategy for building out the brand experience, its personality and for delivering a message that says the brand understands what matters most to them.
2. Make Social Media One with Your Brand Strategy
Not only should every social post have strategic purpose, but social efforts should be one with the overall brand strategy, not to mention be integrated into the heart of brand marketing plans. That said, social media is an ideal resource reinforcing marketing efforts and helping bring the brand experience to life along the path-to-purchase continuum. Not only does it serve as valuable tool for communicating elements such as the functional and lifestyle benefits of the brand, its competitive value, store locations where it can be purchased, new product news, pulse period/seasonal promotions, and more, it helps keep those engaged even more engaged for loyalty building.
Clearly there are countless opportune ways in which social media can be leveraged to draw customers into the brand fold. So, whether you elect to use it to increase brand awareness, drive website traffic, boost sales of specific products, or drive customers to priority retailers supportive of your brand, make the most of the flexibility it offers AND be certain to always use it strategically to elevate the overall performance of your marketing efforts.
3. Determine the Right Platforms for Your Brand
When it comes to engaging pet owners, not all social media platforms are created equal. Take the time to explore them all (facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest) and determine which are best aligned with your brand’s specific target audience and needs – and then test and learn. For example, if you’re a fun and funky pet clothing and costume brand and it’s GenZ pet parents you want to reach, then TikTok and Instagram might be your best bet because not only are they actively used by this pet owning generational group, but these outlets are known for entertaining videos and influencer driven pet-related content ideal for showcasing pet fashion and creative ways for dressing up your pet for the holidays.
Whichever platform(s) you choose, be certain to not only tailor your social content to the strengths of those outlets, but to also maintain consistent brand messaging and voice across all to ensure that pet parents have a clear understanding of what your brand represents wherever they may encounter it.
4. Set Goals
In addition to helping brands determine if their social media strategy and content are working, setting goals for your social media plan is important because it also helps guide the very content of that media. For example, if a brand wishes to increase its social follower count and it happens to actively sponsor local animal shelters, it might consider focusing some of its content on upcoming pet adoption events as a means of reaching and engaging more pet owners.
Similarly, should building brand awareness be an overarching goal, a brand might consider developing a short, animated video showcasing functional, emotional and lifestyle product benefits and brand personality to help familiarize pet parents with what it has to offer.
Whatever your social media goals may be, it is central that they be specific, measurable and actionable, as well as integrated with brand strategy and marketing efforts for greater impact. And as a final step, be certain to actively monitor success against those goals, and always be willing and ready to adjust & refine, test & learn along the pathway to deliver intended results.
5. Keep Content Fun, Fresh and Well Balanced
Although every brand has its own unique social media content needs and requirements for supporting their brand strategy and marketing plan, the 60/25/10/5 rule is something to also consider as a guidepost for ensuring that your social media content stays fun, fresh and well balanced.
- 60% of content should be educational, informative, or entertaining, providing value to your audience without directly promoting aspects of your products.
- 25% can be shared content from other sources, such as industry news, relevant articles, or user-generated content, fostering community engagement.
- 10% can be promotional content directly promoting your products or services.
- 5% should be content that explores “out-of-the-box-thinking.” If successful, move this content into the 60% bucket.
More than just a formula, this rule will help showcase the depth and breadth of your brand’s understanding of pet-related tips and insights that can prove useful to pet parents, helping to position your brand as a trusted resource in the process. Moreover, this balanced approach will help ensure that your feed remains engaging and avoids overwhelming your audience with sales pitches.
6. Build Out a Calendar for Stronger Pay Off
Just as we use calendars to effectively plan out our daily lives, creating a yearly social media calendar plan can help pay dividends in many ways. Aside from the obvious of ensuring that your brand stays prepared to activate purposeful, strategic content, developing a social planning calendar that is overlayed with the overall brand marketing plan can help unveil where ‘dead space’ might exist in brand promotional and event activity – a space that your social media program can readily fill. Closing these gaps with an ‘always on’ social media approach is important for two reasons: first, there are always pet parents out there considering or continuing to buy during those time periods and they are yours to reach and potentially own; second, you want to ensure that you keep existing social brand ‘followers’ loyal to your products and keep them abreast of news and offers that remind them of why your brand is right for them and their pets.
Planning ahead by scheduling themed campaigns (i.e., holidays), product spotlights, and educational posts will also help your brand to stay topical and keep pet parents engaged in relevant ways. You’ll soon find that taking a proactive approach will help sharpen your content and campaign performance. And don’t forget to revisit and update your social media calendar actively to reflect necessary pivots and address new opportunities because as we all know, pet parents and pet marketing are anything but static.
7. Analyze, Test and Refine with Insights
Once you’ve got your social media strategy and calendar wrapped up and are actively posting, it’s then time to start analyzing results. This means identifying the message content, consumer targeting filters, and platforms generating the best results, and leveraging those findings to get more from your social media investment moving forward.
A/B testing of different content, on different platforms, using different target filters, etc. is a simple intelligence gathering approach that can help lead to those very insights and elevate performance more quickly and with confidence. User generated content (UGC) is yet another form of intelligence that can yield insightful understanding of pet parents’ reaction to your brand and the language they use when talking about it – all of which can be used to build better, more relevant content and SEO for driving future engagement.
Conclusion
By adopting a strategic, disciplined approach to social media marketing, pet brands can be more assured of effectively connecting with their audience, fostering brand loyalty, and driving business growth. However, to become a trusted authority in the digital space, it also takes an on-going commitment to analyze, refine, and develop new and engaging content that both resonates with target pet owners and supports brand strategy and marketing efforts. Since the pet marketplace and social media platforms are ever dynamic, it is also important to remember that what works today may not work tomorrow, and that what works today can always be made better. Plan for that success through routine, ‘best practices’ analysis and planning updates, and always remember that in the end, it’s what you do with what you learn that counts.
