The pet food business may be dominated by the largest pet food companies, but there’s plenty of room in this growing market if you know how to draw in the right customers.
Pet food retail sales topped $90 billion worldwide in 2018, and Grandview Research expects they’ll hit $113 billion by 2025.
In 2020 alone, pet ownership rose and in turn, pet food and treat sales increased 9.7% in the U.S.
This huge explosion in business has led to a lot of pet company success stories. From Blue Buffalo to Chewy, the pet food industry is booming!
If you want to take advantage of the thriving market and sell more pet food, marketing is the best way to do that.
These four pet food marketing ideas will help you get started on your pet food marketing strategy, or adjust your current one to be more effective.
1. Use Social Media Tools and Influencers To Build Brand Awareness
Social media is the key to brand awareness. That’s especially true for pet product companies who have such photogenic customers.
Still, managing all your social media accounts can be a pain. From Pinterest and Instagram to Facebook and LinkedIn, you’re going to need every social platform you can use.
Consider Social Media Management Tools
Managing all those accounts is time-consuming, especially for small or family-run businesses. Thankfully, tools like Buffer and Hootsuite can help you manage multiple social media accounts and schedule posts in advance, all from one platform.
Additionally, you can see all your social media engagement data at the touch of a button. Using aggregated social media data is the best way to make informed decisions about when and what to post.
Create Marketing Partnerships with Pet Influencers
Once you have your social media properly managed, you can begin implementing some common social media tactics to build your follower counts.
One great way to draw in social media traffic is to partner with “pet influencers.” It may sound crazy, but it’s not just fashion influencers who can market clothing, food, and accessories — pets can too.
In fact, some pet influencers have thousands of followers and a partnership with them or even just a sponsored post here and there can help grow your business.
Partner with a pet influencer and have them post about your high-quality pet food products in return for free samples and a discount. It’s also a smart pet food marketing strategy to share a special promo code for the pet influencer’s followers to use when purchasing dog or cat food from you. This will encourage their followers to buy from your pet food company.
2. Get Published on Blogs and Industry Sites
Getting published on blogs and industry sites helps build brand awareness and authority, while also getting backlinks to boost your website’s domain authority. And the higher your domain authority, the higher chance you have of ranking better on search engine results pages (SERPs).
Remember, your posts shouldn’t be ads. Instead, they should inform readers and position your business as an industry authority. So avoid any sales pitch language and make these pieces valuable for the pet owner community.
Leverage Pet Blogging Influencers
So, it turns out those social media influencers we were talking about earlier have blogs too. And these blogs can be an invaluable piece of a pet food marketing strategy.
Here’s an example pet influencer you might reach out to for a guest post.
Ella Bean, the dog, has over 126,000 followers and a thriving blog.
Blogs like these are a great place to publish a guest post if you can build a relationship with the site owner. They have established organic traffic from their social media page and strong domain ratings, which are perfect for guest posts. Doing a guest post that links back to your website will pass link authority while promoting your products to your target market. Use this pet food marketing strategy to drive traffic and conversions to your site.
3. Improve Your Website’s Position in SERPs.
Did you know only 0.78% of all search traffic clicks on a result from the second page of Google?
The fact is if you aren’t on the first page of results for your desired keywords, you’re missing out on a lot of business.
Still, getting to those top results is easier said than done. So how do you get your brand’s wet food page to rank on the first page of Google?
Search engine optimization (SEO).
SEO is your only option unless you want to pay for ads. SEO is the process of increasing a website’s organic search traffic by moving up in search engine results pages to those coveted first page spots we talked about.
Getting started on SEO takes an in-depth SEO strategy backed by industry research, competitor analysis, and keyword research. After that, it involves a labor-intensive process that includes all of the following and more:
- Creating and optimizing Google My Business profiles for pet product companies with physical locations.
- Enhancing user experience and fixing site speed issues with technical SEO.
- Content marketing based on keyword research to draw in organic traffic.
- Creating value-packed content with relevant keywords.
- Building your backlink profile with relevant, authoritative inbound links.
4. Create and Maintain a Blog To Draw in Organic Traffic
Content marketing is a key aspect of pet product SEO, one of the most successful pet food marketing strategies — and it all starts with a blog.
All the most successful pet food companies have well-maintained blogs. Here’s an example from Blue Buffalo, a company that grew from the side project of Bill Bishop and his sons in honor of their dog, Blue, who died of cancer, to an $8 billion company in 2018 when General Mills bought it out.
The blog posts for pet product companies can be very simple and still rank well as long as they target the right topics, keywords, and audience with quality content. Keyword research and competitor analysis play a huge role in determining what topics to write about. Writing about any random pet-related topic isn’t going to bring your website traffic. You have to be strategic in planning content that is relevant and valuable.
Here’s an example from Nylabone, a pet product company:
It’s amazing that this simple article about types of dog food has seen strong monthly organic traffic since 2018 and ranks for over 443 organic keywords for Nylabone.
Creating and maintaining a blog is one of the easiest and best ways to sell more of your company’s pet food and gain brand awareness.
And if you need blog topics to help get you started, check out our article on 5 Pet Blog Topics for More Pet Product Sales.
Don’t Have the Time? Call In the Experts.
A well-built pet food marketing strategy can work wonders for your business if you’re willing to put in the time. From maintaining blogs and social media accounts to fixing technical website issues that are hurting your results in SERPs, there is lots to do if you want all your marketing efforts to work.
With all this said, we understand that creating and executing a strong pet food marketing strategy is complicated and time-consuming. It may not be something your company has the capacity to do on its own.
Thankfully, there are experts like Markitors out there to help. If you’re thinking of getting started on a pet food marketing strategy, or if you’re rethinking your current one, contact us for more information.
Also, if you’re looking for more cool pet product blogs, check out our post on Pet Industry Marketing Statistics To Consider.
Markitors is a digital marketing agency specializing in small business SEO. We help small businesses rank higher on Google, get more traffic to their websites, and increase revenue. Explore what’s in our SEO toolbox: audits and keyword research, digital PR, technical SEO, and local SEO.
