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Content
6 Success-Driven Pet Food Marketing Ideas
August 25, 2023
20 mins
With a growing shift of the pet care industry from physical retail to eCommerce, there is a growing demand for digital marketing solutions across the market. The share of the pet products eCommerce market is to reach 25% by the end of Q.4 2023.
Along with pet supplies, pet food products are the top category among eCommerce consumer packaged goods (CPG).
Three generations of American pet parents, Baby Boomers, Millennials, and Gen Zers, are particularly interested in premium and organic pet foods to please their furry companions.
The pet food marketing trend has been driven by raising pet humanization across the United States with an emphasis on pet health and quality nutrition.
Among the most popular choices among Americans are natural pet foods free of fillers, and organic pet foods free of chemicals and pesticides. A dynamically growing demand for pet food marks a genuinely booming industry. American pet parents are seeking pet foods with high-quality ingredients and products free of artificial preservatives, colors, or flavors. Furthermore, high on demand are alternative protein sources, vitamins, supplements, and CBD-infused treats.
These trending items will heat the dog food market in 2023 and beyond:
🐾 Premium dry foods
🐾 Organic ingredients
🐾 Grain-free products
🐾 Non-GMO products
🐾 Products free of allergens
🐾 Protein-rich ingredients
🐾 Omega-3 content
🐾 Supplements
🐾 Healthy pet treats
With an increased trend for adoption, we will witness the expansion of dog shops and dog care products across the United States
Also trending among American pet owners are pet product attributes:
🐾 Clean label attributes
🐾 Human-grade attributes
🐾 Plant-based attributes
Essentially, pet parents are environmentally conscious customers who care about sustainable and biodegradable pet products to save their fur babies from toxins and hazardous chemicals.
Effective pet food marketing approaches will help you boost your online presence and gain brand awareness over time beyond your local performance.
As a local pet food retailer, your primary digital marketing task is to ensure a profound online presence. While physical pet owners visit your brick-and-mortar spot daily to purchase quality pet foods, you will leverage competitive performance advantages with digital marketing solutions.
A user-friendly website is about engaging wider audiences of pet lovers far beyond your local community outreach. With a vast array of eCommerce options and a niche pet food website, you will target pet owners across the state and at a nationwide scale.
Fill your website with seamless and mobile-friendly site navigation. This is strategically important while the engagement success across your pages mostly depends on the quality of user experience (UX) on your site.
Once you provide pet owners with an agile online shopping experience, they will buy more from you and recommend your site to their peers. Most importantly, a professionally crafted website ensures vast communication options. Chatting online with pet owners about their immediate pet care needs will put your website above the pack and add up to overall brand awareness.
As part of your organic pet food marketing strategy, you should do your best to appear on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). There is no way someone will spot you on a second page of Google that currently indicates a mere 0.78% of user clicks.
To engage organic traffic on your website, bet on the most popular pet food categories currently searched by pet owners in your area and beyond.
Quality content filled with niche-focused keywords and phrases will best resonate with the search intent of your target audience - pet owners. This means that you should generate original pet food content on your pages that would best resonate with the immediate pet food needs and preferences of your local customers and beyond.
Hot Tip: While customers are considering whether to buy anything from you, you should deliver quality content well in advance that would offer solutions to their pet care problems. That said, the consideration stage is the most crucial in the buyer’s journey. Once your content resonates with the solution to their individual needs, they are far more likely to stay on your site and search for more information.
Our previous pet market studies indicate that American pet parents are mostly concerned about personalized solutions that would ease their pet care routines. This means that customer personalization should be at the core of your pet food marketing strategy.
On your website, be sure to create content compliant with the individual needs of pet parents and their furry companions. Your niche-oriented materials should embrace valuable advice (i.e. unique recipes and ingredients) for the best pet food options, depending on the pet:
🐾 Size
🐾 Breed
🐾 Age
🐾 Health condition.
On this sufficient background, you will customize best-fit pet diets! By exploring the personalized pet care experiences of your target audience, you will soon tailor highly customized pet care offers.
In this regard, our SEO Expert, Olya Zhukovska, claims that the top ranking keywords are those with low keyword difficulty (KD). Bet on them as the finest option to optimize your marketing budget. For organic traffic purposes, rely on the keywords with KD of 30-40.
To give you a better understanding of what American pet owners are browsing online, as of June 2023 the most popular dog & cat food and treats keyword combinations were as follows:
🐾 Canned pet nutrition products - 2.1 m. queries
🐾 Wet pet nutrition products - 1.2 m. queries
🐾 Paté - 1.1 m. queries
🐾 Gravy - 327,000 queries
🐾 Dehydrated/dried - 194,000 queries
🐾 For indoor animals - 181,000 queries
🐾 Grain-free - 100,000 queries
🐾 Refrigerated - 89,000 queries
🐾 Protein - 13,000 queries
🐾 Real meat - 10,000 queries
🐾 Human-grade - 8,000 queries
With that, American pet owners are repeatedly purchasing:
🐾 US-made pet products (43.1%)
'🐾 Natural pet stuff (40.8%)
🐾 Pet products without artificial additives (40.5%)
🐾 Health-beneficial pet products (30.4%)
🐾 Natural pet stuff (40.8%)
🐾 Pet products without artificial additives (40.5%)
🐾 Health-beneficial pet products (30.4%)
We have recently discovered that the most trending are natural claims shared among US pet parents. So, consider these choices while crafting your pet food marketing strategy.
Once you have touched your targets for the first time and led them onto your website, it is high time you retained them as your loyal audience.
Email marketing is your best choice to heat up the general interest in the pet food products you sell.
Part of your online presence is to keep in touch with your audience to turn them into repeat customers on your site.
Among the proven ways to retain a solid base of permanent customers is to apply the subscription to your pet care newsletter as part of a broader email marketing strategy. Free newsletters will help you customize your offers to a wide audience of pet parents. This way, you will offer a useful piece of pet care advice to your target audience in exchange for their emails.
With acknowledged services like Mailchimp, benefit from registered user emails on your site to:
🐾 Keep in touch with your audience
🐾 Ask pet owners for feedback
🐾 Arrange polls and questionnaires
🐾 Offer discounts
🐾 Offer specialty coupons
🐾 Greet pets on their birthdays
🐾 Promote local pet events
🐾 Send promo codes
🐾 Suggest sales offers.
All these and other possible options make up an essential part of your pet food marketing homework to build up and retain a substantial customer base.
Furthermore, email is a sound source for remarketing those consumers who’ve visited your website but failed to buy anything from you. That is to say that emails are a superb means of creating personalized and targeted ads for pet owners who may turn into your customers over time.
Periodical e-mail reminders through newsletters and other feasible means mark your personal touch with the target audience of pet owners. By retaining customers this way, you increase customer lifetime value (CLV). This is an essential revenue-based metric that embraces the customer's initial purchase, further purchases, and overall customer relationship with you.
While your business is more or less known on a wider scale, you’ll strive to further heat your current audience and engage new leads to your site. Over time, they will turn into your consumers and end customers eventually.
Social media marketing (SMM) is a proven way to build brand awareness and get your company known to a wider population of pet owners nationwide and even globally. Pinterest, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook are all sound social media platforms used by pet product companies to expand their online presence and stay in touch with their audience.
With readily available SMM services like Buffer and Hootsuite, you will easily manage multiple SMM accounts and schedule your posts conveniently.
Another feasible SMM option is to partner with pet influencers. The strategy will boost followership to your social media accounts and you’ll stand a better chance to engage leads to your landing pages.
Partnering with influencers and renowned bloggers will certainly boost your popularity as an emerging pet food brand. The finest approach here is to turn the best content from your website into sponsored posts and offer them to platforms with multiple million visits. A wide audience of Interested pet owners will eventually reach up to you through backlinks. Or, you may offer promo codes or discounts for high-quality pet food products on your site in exchange for publications on the pet influencer platforms.
Our top SMM recommendation is to launch your branded YouTube channel. The medium will help you stand out from the pack as an acknowledged expert in the pet care niche. While in a recent decade, video has outpaced other formats, benefit from this free-of-charge option to share expert pet nutrition advice and call your target audience to take action.
While SEO marks a long-play strategy, you may be seduced to opt for paid PPC campaigns
to target potential pet food consumers at the beginning of your digital marketing journey.
By contrast to the free-of-charge options outlined above, every dollar counts in pay-per-click (PPC) marketing. The approach assumes a strategic marketing performance mindset and you will obviously need professional assistance here.
Our expert says: Continuous monitoring of PPC campaigns with Google Analytics will ease your digital marketing endeavors. Most importantly, you can always see how effective is every dollar you invest in dog food marketing PPC campaigns. Using PPC campaigns to drive traffic and conversions is the surest way to dive deeper into the vital needs of pet parents, and resonate with their pet care expectations. Orest Fershtynskyi, PPC Expert at Promodo.
As with search engine optimization (SEO), the success of your PPC campaigns will depend on how well you are aware of user intent. Google Search Ads will help you target those keywords that best resonate with the most popular search queries among pet owners. Eventually, you’ll get a chance to get onto the search engine results page (SERPs).
By targeting the keywords that align with user searches, you will sell pet food products here and now. With that, digital marketing performance services like Ahrefs will help you spot the most frequent queries to save your PPC budget from the highest cost-per-click (CPC). The term is also known as the cost per conversion (CPC). Understandably, the less you spend for a single click that leads a consumer to your sales page the better.
Importantly, your PPC ad copy should tell pet owners more about the best pet food products from your assortment. A concise call-to-action (CTA) will make a difference by leading interested consumers to your site. In this pursuit, make sure your PPC ad complies with the targeted keywords.
Also, stress the unique selling points (USPs) to stand out from the competition by offering the most customized pet foods unavailable at your closest rivals.
Finally, expand your PPC pet food campaigns with ad extensions by inserting location, site links, and CTAs.
While Cause marketing is not a revenue-focused option, it marks your positioning as a socially accountable brand. Partnering with nonprofit organizations across your local area and beyond will add to building trust and loyalty to your brand name.
Pursuing a common benefit through social, environmental, or charitable projects is how you establish your corporate social responsibility (CSR). This part of your activity is often more important than generating a sheer business profit.
While transparency and social impact make the bottom line of business performance, your strategic task is to act as a social change maker through various non-profit initiatives. That way, you increase your brand awareness and loyalty by up to 70%. Mind that, pet parents are foremost socially and environmentally concerned customers. Almost half of your target pet care audience, therefore, will pay close attention to your social commitments.
You may contribute to the common good in all possible ways from sponsoring local events to volunteering, or by making donations to local facilities and promoting free-of-charge pet humanization initiatives across your area. Alternatively, you may donate part of your revenue from selling pet food products to local charities or hospitals.
You may also engage your target audience of pet parents to contribute to charitable work in exchange for discounts and special offers. This is the right way to make your customers associate you with a genuinely accountable brand.
Content Marketing Manager at Promodo
Taras has 16 years of hands-on copywriting experience overseas with 3000+ unique copies.
Accredited with Certificate of Proficiency in English (C2 level) by Cambridge University. Studied at Writing Launch Academy (United States) and owns an Academic Writing Certificate from Oregon University. Author of 12 dictionaries with Apriori Publishers.
PPC Expert at Promodo
Orest has been in contextual advertising for over three years, working with niches such as pet products, a store selling beer and bar equipment, household, garden and garden products, jewelry, designer furniture, a mobile bank, and retailers.
Orest has worked with the following geolocations: Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Ukraine, Sweden, France, Italy, Norway, the UK, the Czech Republic, Belgium, Finland, Portugal, and Uzbekistan.
SEO Specialist at Promodo
Olya has more than 5 years of SEO experience. For the past 2.5 years, she has been part of the Promodo team. Here she has worked with acknowledged brands: DOM.RIA, Vkursi, FlyArystan, and Cloudfresh among other projects. Olya has worked in various international markets: Ukraine, Kazakhstan, the USA, the Czech Republic, and Lithuania.
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