According to the Content Marketing Institute, as many as 60% of advertisers say that their content marketing efforts successfully generate leads. Social Media Today suggests that up to 77% of web users read blogs, and a content preferences survey report conducted by Demand Gen indicates that 44% of consumers read on average 3 to 5 blog posts before contacting a business.
The numbers make it clear that marketers in every industry should regularly publish high-quality content for their target audience, and pet spas are no exception. But busy groomers often find it challenging to regularly create, post, and market content while also providing services to clients.
One way to plan and organize your content efficiently and effectively is with a content calendar. But what exactly is a content calendar? And how do you go about creating one? Are there any tools that can help? Keep reading to find out.
How to Develop a Content Calendar Strategy for Your Pet Spa
Why Content Is Crucial For Your Pet Spa’s Online Visibility
Creating content is important to your online visibility for multiple reasons, one being that it helps you attract and engage with your target audience, which in turn generates more leads for your business. By consistently producing quality content that is relevant to your pet spa, you can answer important questions, demonstrate authority, attract new customers, and keep existing ones coming back for additional services.
What Is a Content Calendar?
A content calendar helps you plan and track your content marketing efforts over time. By mapping out what you want to publish and when, you can save yourself a lot of time and energy down the line. It can be helpful to think of a content calendar as a roadmap for your content marketing strategy.
Benefits of a Content Calendar
A content calendar can help you to track your progress, measure your success, and adjust your marketing strategy as needed. It can also help to keep you accountable and ensure that you are consistently creating and publishing new content to engage your target audience. Without a content calendar, it can be difficult to keep track of all your pet spa’s past and upcoming content.
Quick Tips For Success
Define your audience
As a pet spa owner, it’s important to understand that not all content will resonate with every single one of your clients. This is why it’s critical to first define who your target audiences are. Once you know who you’re talking to, you can begin to craft messages that will speak directly to their needs and interests.
Take note of your messaging
In addition to defining your audiences, it’s also crucial to take note of the overall messaging you want to communicate through your content. What are the key points you want to make sure everyone remembers about your pet spa? Keep these in mind as you develop each piece of content, and be sure to share them across all platforms for maximum impact.
Share your content across platforms
This is a great way to get your content seen by more people. By sharing your content on multiple platforms, you are increasing your chances of being seen by potential customers or clients. In addition, this can also help to build your brand and reputation. Make sure to tailor your content to each individual platform, as different platforms have different audiences. If you don’t, users are much more likely to ignore or click away from your content.
Plan ahead with a content calendar
Finally, one of the best ways to ensure consistent online visibility for your pet spa is to plan ahead with a content calendar. By taking the time upfront to map out what you’ll be sharing and when, you can save yourself a lot of headaches and potential missed opportunities down the road. This will help keep you organized and on track, while also giving you a chance to brainstorm creative content ideas that will help promote your pet spa.
5 Steps to Make Your Pet Spa’s Monthly Content Calendar
Step 1: Understand your clients — and your competition
To start, you need to understand who your pet spa clients are and who you’re competing with in your area. It’s difficult — if not impossible — to create a successful pet spa business without first understanding your target audience and your competition.
What are your client’s needs and interests? What motivates them? Explore the challenges they face every day and what their pain points look like. A great way to learn more about your target audience is to create buyer personas. A buyer persona is essentially a fictional summary of your ideal client, based on market research and real data about your existing customers.
Once you understand your target audience, it’s time to research your pet spa competitors. What are they doing right? What are they doing wrong? How can you improve upon it? Take the time to understand your competition, what their strengths and weaknesses are, and what you can do better. Then, you can begin to develop a content strategy that will stand out from other pet spas in your area and will resonate with people in your target audience.
Step 2: Determine how often you will publish new content
How frequently you should publish new content will depend on a number of different factors, including what resources you have available and the goals you’re trying to achieve. If you want to maintain a high level of engagement with your audience, you’ll need to publish new content on a regular basis. If you’re just starting out, it’s probably best to start with once a week and then increase the frequency as you build up more content.
Step 3: Identify content categories
Next, you can start to think about the types of content your target market most likely wants to see. This is where understanding your target audience is most important. If you know what interests them, you can develop content categories that align with those interests. While categories related to pet grooming are obvious, you can also venture into pet health and wellness, behavior, and play if you would like. If you’re not sure what interests your audience, consider surveying them or doing some research on popular trends in your industry.
You should also consider the types of posts you can make. Seasonal content, special offers and limited-time promotions, educational posts, business updates, and community events are also important to cover.
Step 4: Brainstorm blog topics
Once you’ve identified some potential content categories, it’s time to brainstorm some specific topics within those categories. This is where a tool like Google Keyword Planner can be helpful. Use keyword research to identify topics that people are searching for related to your content categories.
Then, create titles and outlines for articles or blog posts that address those topics. If you can’t seem to find any good topics, try looking at some of your competitors’ content to see what they’re writing about. Think about ways you can cover the topic more thoroughly or provide additional resources over and beyond what they do. This positions you to eventually rank higher than their page for your chosen keywords.
Step 5: Create your pet spa’s content calendar
Now that you have categories, topics, and maybe even headlines, it’s time to plan out when you will post your content and how it will be shared. There are a number of different ways to do this, but we recommend using a tool like Surefire Local Marketing Platform so that everyone on your team can see what’s coming up and when it’s due. Schedule out each piece of content at least a week in advance so that you have time to write, edit, and promote it before it goes live. After that, it’s time to start writing!
Start Creating Your Killer Content Calendar Today
If you’re looking for ways to improve your pet spa’s web presence, creating a content calendar is a great place to start. If your pet spa doesn’t already have a content calendar, now is the time to make one. A well-thought-out content calendar can help you define your audience, take note of your messaging, share your content across platforms, and plan ahead for future publishing.
Attend a Surefire Local Marketing Platform Demo
Use our advanced business intelligence marketing software to create and schedule all of your content in one place
If you want an easier and more effective way to create and manage your pet spa’s monthly content calendar, attend a demo of the Surefire Local Marketing Platform. With our software, you can use advanced business intelligence marketing software to quickly generate topics and ideas for blog posts, social media updates, email newsletters, and more.
Plus, you can schedule all of your content in one place so you never have to worry about missing a deadline or forgetting to post something. With Surefire Local, you can easily track your progress and ensure that your pet spa’s online visibility is improving month after month.
Contact us today to learn more or to book your live demo by calling (703) 884-8442 or by filling out our quick online form and our team will get back to you as quickly as we can.