5 Marketing Strategies To Boost Your Pet Care Business On Shopify

It's now a common occurrence when scrolling through Instagram to come across videos showcasing pet groomers and care services sharing their hilarious and interesting experiences with the world. Take @jessronagrooming for example, the account has more than a whopping 200 thousand followers who enjoy watching snippets of grooming sessions that the business caters to throughout the day. If this does not indicate the growing popularity of the pet care business, here's a report which states that the global pet care market size surpassed $232 billion in 2020. Owing to COVID and its restrictions, pet adoption saw a steady increase over the past couple of years. Being a part of the industry, it is time for you to ride the growing wave and leverage every opportunity that this boom offers.

The Petcare industry includes a host of pet products such as pet foods, toys, medicines, etc., and services such as pet boarding, grooming, spa, veterinaries, training, fitness centers, etc. This ecosystem of products and services is often available across most major cities and towns in a variety of combinations. Setting up a Shopify site to enable your pet product sale as well as your services is the easiest way to establish your online presence. Having set up a space and a website, though, is not going to cut it. How will you reach your audience? How do you further your business? 

Let's take a look at some marketing strategies to help boost your pet care business on Shopify:

‍Search engine optimization

Before you jump into promoting your services, ensure that the customer has a smooth, glitch-free, and happy experience when visiting your website. Since your website can prove to be the first touchpoint that a customer has about your business, the first impression needs to be a lasting one. Owing to the nature of the business, the Shopify website can be equipped with an e-commerce section selling pet products and a service section with appointment scheduling facilities. The customer experience from discovering your website to purchasing your product and service must be mapped, executed, and optimized after testing and analysis. Let's focus on the website discovery part. The most common channels of website discovery for most customers would be through word of mouth, physical shop visitation, or through a search engine such as Google. While promoting the shop and encouraging word of mouth is a constant physical effort, search engine optimization or SEO is a strategy that can be executed digitally. 

SEO helps your website rank higher in the search engine results and brings visibility to your website. Some of the activities to enhance your website to rank higher are:

- Improve keyword density - Identify common keywords that your clients would search for such as pet grooming stores near me, pet grooming in <city name>, best pet groomers in the area, etc. Once you have identified the keywords, ensure 2-3% of the words on the website (or the website landing page that you wish to promote) are your keywords.

- Blog - Improve the website's ability to rank for multiple keywords by including a blog site. Blogs help cover multiple keywords and trending topics. Since blogs can be published at frequent intervals, the content stays relevant and updated improving the SEO of the website.

- Title tags and meta descriptions - Every website that is published has a title tag and meta description section that is usually included in the html coding which can be customized and written to highlight the service offering with relevant keywords.

- Image - All the images on your website MUST have either a description or an alternate text that will be showcased instead of the image in case of an error. Optimize the page's SEO by utilizing these sections to include relevant keywords.

- Site load times - The loading time for your website also affects your search engine rank as higher load times lead to a higher number of people abandoning the website. This ultimately affects the site's domain authority, which affects the search engine ranking. Reduce load times by using compressed images, shorter pages, and short form videos or embed links. 

‍Social media presence

Had it not been for the viral Instagram Reels, the world would never know what a pet grooming service includes! From narrated stories in the background of an interesting video, to before after photos of funny dogs and cats, the content generated by the business is often consumed by a huge community of pet lovers. This breaks open an opportunity to share with the world your service's uniqueness and quality. With relative content posted on social media platforms going viral, investing in a professional social media manager for your business would be a great idea. 

If you're starting out new, another way to ensure quality social media content creation is to engage with local influencers with established and relevant following on the platforms.

‍Online advertisement

Apart from social media and search engine rankings, digital marketing also covers search ads and website banner advertisements. Search ads such as Google ads with its unique bidding system is a value-for-money investment to promote your business - whether locally or nationally. These ads depend on keywords and search intents to showcase your ad to the right customer. Another option worth exploring is the online advertisement program by Google. This allows you to re-market and advertise to previous website visitors and relevant audience visiting different sites respectively. These advertisement options help in both - improving revisits and attracting new customers to the website.

‍Loyalty programs

Having covered the major digital marketing channels, here's an offline marketing strategy that has proved to be useful in most service industry businesses. Loyalty programs reward customers for repeat purchases of your services. Some examples of loyalty programs that pet care services can run are as follows:

- A virtual reward card that is marked for every service purchased and after 5 services, the customer receives a free service.

- A membership program that collects points for every dollar spent online or offline which can be collected and spent to purchase products/services from the business.

- Subscription plans for lump-sum amounts that allow unlimited services for a pre-decided time limit which could be monthly, quarterly or annually.

‍Events

Another way for local service-based businesses to generate interest and awareness is through events. Whether they are pet-based events that your business can sponsor or small-scale events that can be hosted at your retail space. You can host workshops on how to train your pet or pet care meet-and-greets with veterinarians in the area or even have simple competitions hosted in a park near you. Such events help the targeted audience engage with your business and help bring awareness about your services. 

Owning and starting a pet-care service business is not an easy task, but as we have established, a Shopify website with its exhaustive features and a large app market with a wide variety of applications such as appointment scheduling applications, customer accounts builder, and SEO tools allows you to acquire new customers and retain them. Buckle-up and get marketing!