Whether you own a small e-commerce-driven pet business or a larger brand with wholesale across the nation, the fact remains that your business is never not in need of a boost. And while traditional methods of marketing and advertising still work, in today’s competitive pet industry landscape, discovering new ways to drive traffic is essential in the growth of your business.
Let’s take a closer look at 5 ways you can achieve that growth.
Start a value-driven blog
SEO still matters, but content marketing is king, and it’s an unavoidable fact that more brands are diving into content creation to market their business. Those same brands could be your competitors.
We’ve talked about content marketing before here on the StreetDog blog, and have shared helpful tips that will get you started. But the reality is, if you’re not providing some form of free value to your audiences, you could be missing out on potential opportunities to gain customers.
To create a value-driven blog, you need to make your content all about your customer and position your brand or service as the solution to the main pain points you believe your customer has. Blog content is free for your customer and making it impactful and actionable can help nurture a loyal following and customer base.
Incentivize customers to leave reviews
Have you ever ordered something from Etsy or a similar online boutique/marketplace, and found a note in your package that offers a free product or discount code in exchange for a review?
That’s an incentive. And lots of brands use them to drive future sales and entice people to buy with their brand time and again.
Of course, you don’t have to offer something for free – a 10% discount, for example, can be enough incentive for customers. But the objective should be to get something in return, like a review on your site or on Google.
Reviews help establish trust and show potential customers that there’s merit in buying your product, because they see that other customers have benefited from your products or services. It’s also a low-cost way of getting more reviews on your site.
Up your customer service game
Especially true if you’re solely an e-commerce brand, customer service matters so much for customers because they always want a touch-point with your brand. And great customer service can be a huge driver of sales, which includes monitoring social media and responding to inquiries through comments, messages, and DMs.
One easy way to up your customer service game is to use a chatbot on your website, which many brands use today to give customers access to their service teams even after business hours. With direct contact to your brand, customers feel prioritized and important, and if the experience is a positive one, they’re more likely to make future purchases.
If a chatbot seems out of the question, you can use social media as a customer service gateway; Instagram Stories with Questions or Polls can be used to gather more information about your customers’ preferences and needs, while direct messaging on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram can act as your ‘customer service line’.
Optimize your CRM
One of the best tools any brand can use is a CRM.
A CRM is a customer relationship management tool that uses data analysis to inform you about your customers’ history, like their buying habits and the products they purchase most frequently. And this is what allows you to build better relationships with your customers over time.
Your CRM can give you insight into which products sell the most, sell the least, or don’t get any purchasing attention at all, which is important to know from a sales and production perspective.
But more than that, it can help you nurture relationships with active and dormant customers, so you can remarket discount codes, products, and other content to people who used to buy from you but who haven’t made recent purchases.
Reconfigure your sales funnel
Regardless of what kind of pet products you sell, as a business, you have a sales funnel. And sometimes (read: consistently) you need to reconfigure that funnel based on what’s working to drive sales of your products, and what isn’t.
Simply put, a sales funnel is the process customers go through along their buying journey with your brand. The goal of any business is to have their customers successfully move through their sales funnel to completion, which is when marketers talk about ‘high conversion rates’. It means a customer has gone through your whole sales funnel and has made a purchase.
There are 3 main stages of a sales funnel, and what you do to market your brand and pet products depends on the three stages:
1 – Awareness/Discovery: your customer is just discovering your brand or becoming aware of your products (from social media, a social ad, a referral, or a web search, for example)
2- Consideration: they are doing their research, looking into your brand and others to see how your products compare (google reviews, web searches, blog posts and reviews from influencers, for example)
3- Acquisition: now that they know about your brand and are knowledgeable about it, they make an informed and educated buying decision (purchase)
Understanding how your customers behave, and what stages of your sales funnel may be stopping them from completing it in its entirety, can help you better determine what you need to change or how you can optimize your marketing initiatives.
Of course, you could always just give StreetDog Marketing a call, and we’ll do the heavy lifting and all of the fun marketing stuff for you! To learn more about our services and how we can help boost your business, contact us today and check out our other helpful blog articles for tips and advice.
