Unleashing e-Commerce Pet Marketing Strategies
Updated: Oct 24, 2022
How your pet brand defines its target personas, their struggles and your solution will contribute to the success of your business. But ultimately, the determining factor will be your brands ability to connect on an emotional level with pet owners.
In this blog we talk about our experience as a specialist marketing agency in the pet sector and how we've approached this essential objective.
By every metric, the pet industry represents one of the most profitable opportunities for online brands. Every metric… except one - saturation of competition. Despite strong numbers, it’s a dog-eat-dog world with the biggest of the big devouring far more than their fair share. So how do you stand out from such a large (and fluffy) crowd with your pet marketing strategies?
The Pet Food Market
People living in the UK spend around 3.2 billion pounds on pet food each year, and this number is steadily increasing year after year (Pet Keen). Lockdown saw a huge shift from pet shops to e-Commerce markets, responding to the boom of pandemic puppies. With all of these sales moving from person to person sales to online sales, how is your business re-shaping its marketing strategy to nurture the emotional connection?
Chewy.com launched into a charm offensive with their fun #chewychattypets campaigns. It helped to connect on an emotional level with their audience by focusing on the fun 'chats' we can all have with our pets. The inspired campaign saw their audience fly into a frenzy of conversation, UGC video clips and engagement. The Chewy customer base is hooked, they've formed the community, fun, emotive connection that has helped them build a strong e-Commerce engine across a range of pet products.
Content Marketing for the Pet Sector
With such a lucrative market and a huge competition, how do you bark louder than the rest, and execute a marketing strategy within the pet sector? Transform your brand strategy to keep up with the pace of change. The brand strategy includes target personas, value proposition, tone of voice and messaging structure.
Let’s dive into those here:
Target Personas:
The first layer of target is demographic data, this looks at generalist classifications like age, location, gender. But target personas is really what you need to consider - so think about all of the different personalities dog owners come in. There's a lot right?! From the country walker with their hounds and labs, to the inner city digital marketer with a French Bulldog. We all have different reasons for having pets and characteristics to go with it, so who are your personas and what are their challenges, goals, issues, aims, frustrations?
Value Proposition:
Once you understand who your target personas (or avatars) are, then we can build out a stronger value proposition. It makes sense to define these three items in your value prop:
Problem:
Solution:
Goal:
It sounds simple, but your problem shouldn't be one line. We need to consider the cause, the external problem, the internal problem (emotional), and the psychological reason why it's wrong that our pet owners are struggling with this problem. You'll no doubt feel like there are many problems you are solving, but we need to be precise, as the value prop needs to be impactful.
So it's time to get thinking about how your product or service adds value to your customer’s (and their pet’s) life? Whether that’s plant-powered fresh food from Butternut or tempting treats from Lily’s Kitchen - these brands have built a connection with pet owners through their strong value propositions.
Tone of voice:
How do you want to communicate to your audience? Are you fun, colourful and energetic dog supplements or rustic and healthy dry dog food? Creating tone of voice guidelines that align nicely with your target personas and your value proposition is key to bringing the personality of your brand to the world. It should be consistent in all of your communications, from social to email, to web and blogs.
Messaging Structure
We believe in creating a movie like story to surround the brands we work with, and guess who is the movie star? Your customer! Brands that win on e-Commerce place their customers as their number 1 priority in their marketing, it's called customer centric marketing. We take the approach of engaging our clients customers in an epic story of high and lows, engaging, guiding, and elevating customers to drive their excitement and intent. Just like some of the best hero movies you'll be familiar with. If you want to know more about this approach dive into another of our blogs here: https://www.wildtribe.agency/post/holistic-marketing
With a strong brand strategy in place, it’s time to deploy it across a strong digital marketing funnel.
Pet Marketing at Wildtribe
When it comes to digital marketing for the pet sector, the aim is to grow your online community, turn those interested eyes into leads and convert them to customers. We work with pet brands across the sector to support their digital marketing so they can take a chunk out of the competition! Here are our winning pet brands and their marketing challenges…
As a small business, Wolfworthy didn’t have the time to build consistent content and communicate to its audience regularly. We implemented our holistic digital marketing methodologies and supported Wolfworthy in achieving its revenue goals before the end of 2021 - read the full case study:
For Active Chews - a vibrant dog supplement brand - they needed a cohesive digital marketing strategy, new website developed and created on Shopify, and a team to take the lead in delivering digital marketing across social, online ads, email and blogging. Check-out their website to see our progress.
Here's what Wolfworthy had to say:
1. What was the problem you were having before you discovered WildTribe's digital marketing services?
"We were overwhelmed with all the demands of creating, writing and managing digital ad campaigns on Facebook as well as trying to work on our business."
2. What did the frustration feel like as you tried to solve that problem?
"We felt that we were fighting an uphill battle. Facebook was changing all the time and we couldn't keep up with it. Our ad creatives were becoming stale and overused."
3. What was different about WildTribe's digital marketing services?
"Wildtribe immediately understood what direction we wanted to go with our brand. They were so flexible in incorporating our ideas. They feel part of our team"
4. Take us to the moment when you realised WildTribe's digital marketing services were actually working to solve your problem.
"It was the moment when we saw Wildtribes ad creatives proposed for Facebook and Instagram and they were exactly what we wanted (if we had the time and talent)".
5. Tell us what life looks like now that your problem is solved or being solved.
"Our marketing is no longer a pain to organise. We get fresh ideas, proposals and campaigns from Wildtribe. They feel part of the team. This allows us to concentrate on building and working on our business".
Del Folkes - Co Founder of Wolfworthy
Talk to us
A campaign with all the fuss and no bark will struggle to connect with an audience and keep them engaged - that’s where we can help! Our pet marketing strategies are tried and tested, so you can trust us to unleash an e-Commerce pet marketing strategy that wins!
We would love to hear about your pet brand, even if you’re unsure what the next step is.
