By bill Rebozo
April 3, 2017
The pet industry significantly outpaced the us market over the past 5 years. grooming and boarding services are one of the fastest growing segments in the pet industry, nearly doubling in size over the past 10 years, despite recessions and evolving consumer habits.
Great news…right? Of course it is terrific news! We are witnessing an evolution in the market as more and more pet parents are spending more and more money on their furry babies. The bad news however is, others—including tech savvy startups and deep swiped pet super stores —are extending their reach into this market. Are you prepared?
Technology is obviously a terrific way to optimize your business and connect with customers. Today, your customers possess a greater affinity for technology and expect their preferred businesses to use it. However, technology requires two primary ingredients many small companies lack: time and money.
It turns out that many of these technologies are very simple, and the best part is that many of them are also free. In this article we are going to build an “integrated digital marketing engine” to help manage your social profile, communications, contacts, reputation, and surveys to help you get more customers, delight existing customers, and improve business efficiency.
Advertisements
While all of the software mentioned in this article is free, most have optional upgrades that do cost money but these were chosen because the functionality available in the free packages is plenty to get you going. all of this software is also cloud based so there is nothing to install, any device will work, and everything integrates directly into your digital marketing engine.
Your next question might be: “Wait…I can’t or don’t have time to deal with all this fancy online technology!” All the software mentioned in this article was selected for ease of use. Also, there is usually somebody in the family or business that has an affinity for this stuff. For example, my partner and kids help me mange social media because I’m busy, but more importantly because they are much better at it.
So let’s get started building up our free, integrated digital marketing engine.Social
We will assume you already have a social media presence on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest, because an active social presence is table stakes and it doesn’t cost anything to setup. The real question is, how effectively you are using it?
The most important thing to consider about social media isn’t “where”, “how often”, or “when” to post (but we will cover these) but “what” you post. Sure, that cute puppy video you reposted got a lot of views, but what did it do for your business? the best social media posts are the ones about YOU! here are some simple and free things to consider:
Post pictures of your work, your employees, and your customers.
Publish before & after photos for customers to share with their pals to extend your social community (make sure you get their permission).
Offer discounts and promotions using seasons and pet holidays to keep them fresh and relevant.
Short videos introducing staff members or new products are typically well received.
Feature a “Pet of the Month” or other types of contests and awards.
Like and follow social channels of other regional pet businesses like shelters, veterinarians, pet stores, and trainers.
Participate in and share relevant community events.
It is important to make sure your content is visually appealing. You also need to make sure all of your content is consistent (logos, colors, imagery, taglines, services, etc.). creating this custom content may seem like a daunting task but there are plenty of free and simple tools to create stunning visual material.
First, you need images to start working with. the best images are always the ones you take, however, free professional images are available online at:
FreeImages (www.freeimages.com)
Pixabay (www.pixabay.com)
Freerange stock (www.freerangestock.com)
Always make sure you understand the terms and conditions for the use of each image.
Don’t settle for just posting the raw images, make sure you jazz them up with text, photo enhancements, and your branding elements using online editors like:
Canva (www.canva.com)
Pablo (www.pablo.buffer.com)
Stencil (www.getstencil.com)
LogoGarden.com provides a slick tool to create logos, which are incredibly powerful and reusable. Don’t forget about the native image editors loaded into Windows and Apple machines, which may seem a bit clunky, relative to their online counterparts but are 100% free.
Make sure you spend some time making your content visually compelling, concise and consistent because you will reuse a terrific majority of it throughout your digital marketing engine. Time spent creating and perfecting this content is a sound investment. like my father always used to say, “Measure twice, cut once.”
Now thnullnull
Leave a Reply