Social media marketing is an extremely useful way to market your pet spa and reach your ideal customers. You can share posts, videos, images, and more on different platforms to build your audience and reach pet owners who might want your services.
The good thing about social media is that you don’t have to do it all. While videos might get a lot of attention, if you don’t want to make a video, you don’t have to. You can play to your strengths and still build a great community of followers who want what you have to sell.
The benefits of social media marketing are numerous. You can build your brand, establish yourself as an expert in your field, build brand loyalty, interact with customers, encourage user-generated content, such as before and after grooming photos, and so much more. A good social media campaign can send targeted leads to your website, add to your SEO efforts, and grow your network.
The good news for pet spas is that people love to see cute photographs of pets on their feeds. They’ll interact with them, comment, and they might just decide to look at your website and book so they can have a beautifully groomed pet too. You should get plenty of engagement simply from pet photos alone.
Don’t forget though that people expect you to be active and interact with them. They expect you to reply to their comments or at least to like or react to their posts. They may also send you direct messages or use mentions to get your attention, to ask questions, and to book appointments. Social media is very much a two-way street.
However, before you dive straight in, social media marketing works better if you have a plan, so follow our social media strategy for pet spas below and see how you can make the most of it.
Key elements of a social media strategy for your pet spa
It’s always best to start any marketing with your aims and goals in mind and social media marketing is no different. Then you need to know where to post and what to say, along with how to do everything and not spend your whole life on Facebook!
Read on for our best tips on social media for your pet spa.
1. Goals
It’s best to set your goals before you start social media marketing, but the next best time to set them is now if you’re already up and running.
Think about how social media fits in with the rest of your marketing. What do you hope to achieve with it? Are you looking to raise brand awareness? Are you trying to drive leads to your business and gain new clients? Are you hoping to establish your expertise and build a community that relies on you? What else might social media do for your business?
You don’t have to just pick one goal, but it is important that you pick something. You’ll write differently if you’re building your brand awareness than if you’re hoping to show how much of an expert you are.
It’s important to set measurable goals that matter too. While getting likes on your page feels good, it isn’t necessarily the most important metric you want to measure. You likely will want to keep an eye on your reach and engagement, though.
Don’t just set your goals. Make sure you can measure them too so that you can see if what you’re doing is working over time.
2. Platforms
There are so many different social media platforms and you really can’t keep up with them all. You’d never have the time to do your job.
Instead, it’s best to find out where your customers are most active and choose a primary and secondary platform from there. It’s really important to do your research before you pick your platforms, as you don’t want to be posting wonderful things on a platform that your customers simply don’t visit.
The other consideration is your personal preferences and how likely you are to stick to posting regularly. If you know you hate making videos, you may decide to leave TikTok out of your plans even if it’s a good platform for your clients. It’s important to be consistent on social media and not leave long gaps of weeks or months in between posts. If you can’t be consistent because video isn’t your strength, for example, it’s best to choose another platform where you’re more comfortable.
The other platforms will still be there if you change your mind. And you can always experiment and try different platforms and ideas to see what will work best for you.
Social media can be very time-consuming if you let it, so you might want to start with one platform first and get used to how long it takes you and what you need to do before adding a second one.
3. Content
So many business owners get stuck with what they should post on social media. Luckily, as we said above, cute pets are always in demand on the internet, so you shouldn’t run out of photos you can share at least.
But what else can you post?
This question can be answered partly by looking at your goals for social media and what sort of content will help you meet those goals. But you also need to consider what your clients want to see.
We’ve got a whole section below on easy content creation, but here are just some ideas:
- Before and after grooming shots.
- Advice or reviews on pet products related to what you do, such as pet shampoo or flea treatments.
- Day in the life of posts showing behind the scenes.
- Humorous happenings.
- ‘How to’ posts, such as how to properly groom your long-haired cat or how to get the smell out if your dog has been sprayed by a skunk – anything you can talk about to make pet owners’ lives easier and help them look after their pets.
4. Messaging
It’s not just what content you’re creating but how you are communicating it. Every business needs to develop a consistent brand voice and messaging.
You have your own personality. You have values that you stick to no matter what, opinions on the best ways to treat animals, your sense of humor, and all the things that make you who you are. So does your business. If you’re a solopreneur, your business personality may well be a reflection of you.
Think about your business personality and how you want to come across on social media. Is your business personality friendly, sassy, and witty or high class, top of the range, and luxurious? Think about the words you’d like people to use to describe your pet spa.
In your messaging, your business personality needs to come across and you need to engage people’s emotions. This gets them involved with your business and makes them care.
Be consistent with your messaging on social media and you will start to build a strong, recognizable brand for your pet spa.
5. Engagement
What you really want from your social media marketing is engagement. You want people to respond to you, to like and comment on your posts, and to share.
Keep an eye on your social media and, every month, look at your analytics. Look at your reach and engagement and see what your most popular posts are.
Think about your content. Do your posts and the style and tone of your content engage people or are you ignored? Are you responding to people when they comment? Is it really a two-way conversation?
If not, look at what you can do to improve your engagement.
How to easily create compelling social media content
It’s not always easy to keep up consistently posting on social media and coming up with new ideas. The best way to help yourself is to create a content calendar. If you put together a plan for the next three months, you won’t be wondering what to post every time, because you’ll already know. Having a plan also gives you the chance to get ahead of yourself. If you’re having a slow client day, you can take the time to write more posts, create memes, and more, ready for when you need them.
But where do you get ideas from to fill your content calendar? Check out our tips on content creation below:
1. Analytics
We touched on this above, but your analytics can be a great source of content ideas.
Both your social media analytics and your website analytics can show you which are your most popular posts, so that you can create more on those topics. You can also see what types of posts are more popular. You may find that it’s the photos of cute fur babies, or it might be your expert ‘how to’ video guides.
You’ll also be able to see what people searched for when they found your website and your most popular keywords and phrases.
These can all help you generate new content ideas.
2. Brainstorm ideas
Spend time each month brainstorming topic ideas and looking at how you can leverage your expertise and knowledge to stand out.
Check out what your competitors are doing on their blogs and social media. Don’t steal their ideas, of course, but use them for inspiration. Look at both their comments and your comments, too. People often ask questions that you could answer.
Answer the Public is a great site to explore to see what people are asking. We did a quick search for ‘pet care’ and there are 208 alphabetical items to explore. This site is great for finding good keywords as well. Quora is another site that can be useful for finding new content ideas.
What else can you create? Use Canva to create pet-related, humorous, or inspirational quotes to share. Use meme generators to find or create pet-themed memes. Add captions to your own photos or ask your audience to provide them. You could run a competition, like guess the weight of the Maine Coon cat in your photograph, or answer a question on pet care to enter. You could share discount deals or allow people to book a monthly pet care session for less if they book six sessions. You could do bios on your staff, show people around your pet spas, and, of course, talk about your services.
Content doesn’t have to be long or take long to make to be successful.
You can also let your audience create content for you. Do this for two reasons – 1) it’s content you don’t have to create, and 2) user-generated content, as it’s known, is far more convincing to potential clients than your own. Shots of pets after you’ve worked your magic work well or shots of happy pets with you or your staff, for example.
One more really important piece of user-generated content to share is reviews. It’s social proof that you do provide a good service, and people do read reviews to decide whether they’re happy to take their pets to a particular business.
You can write long lists of topic ideas, but don’t forget, you don’t have to use them only once. You could write a great post on giving your dog a bath, but some people much prefer to watch videos rather than read. So, you could film a video of you bathing a dog, showing how not to stress the animal and how to make sure water doesn’t go everywhere. You could also add subtitles. The blog post could become step-by-step numbered Twitter tips, an ebook, a teaser clip to get people to your website to watch the full video, or any other format. The only limits are your imagination and your comfort zone.
Include a bigger portion of your audience by providing your content in different formats. You’ll not only cater to people who prefer to learn in different ways, but also to people with hearing difficulties or visual impairment.
3. Craft impactful campaigns
Get to know your ideal customers and find out what they want to see. You can then craft enticing campaigns that attract more leads and possibly buyers too. To do this, you’ll need great, engaging content to guide people into making a buying decision.
We talked about your messaging above. It’s important that you take into account your messaging when posting anything on social media. You need to be consistent every time.
People like companies they do business with to stand for something. They do business with people they like and relate to. They like environmentally friendly companies that care. They like companies with strong opinions on animal care and well-being. If you run campaigns with strong opinions, you will stand out. You may also put some people off if they don’t agree, but those people are not your people. It’s better to strongly attract the ones you want to work with. You’ll find yourself with more clients that you enjoy working with and fewer of the ones you don’t.
4. Schedule your social media content in advance
Make life easy on yourself by using a scheduler to schedule at least some of your social media posts in advance. It means your social media will tick over without you having to be there all the time.
Here again, you can get ahead of yourself and schedule out for the next few weeks so it’s done and you don’t have to think about it.
It is important that you are still there to interact with your audience, to reply, comment, like comments, and answer any questions, but this can reduce by a lot the amount of time you spend on social media.
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