With so many pet spas out there, it’s increasingly important to use everything you can to differentiate yourself from the competition and stand out. That means that branding is no longer a “nice-to-have” or something only for big companies with a giant marketing budget.
Building your brand is, in fact, an ideal way to separate yourself from your competitors and get attention.
But what is branding and how do you build a brand? There is a lot of work involved, at least initially, but we have some suggestions to make it even easier for you, and you can read on to learn our top brand development tips for pet spas to help you get started.
What is branding?
Branding is basically what impression you give, both online and offline. It’s about how people see you and your business, what your values are, and who you are.
Done well, the right branding can steer people into seeing your business how you want to be seen. Obviously, you can’t control what people think and you certainly can’t tell them what to think, but you can consistently put out the right messaging and create a particular look and feel that will attract the right clients.
But if branding is simply how people see you, why do you have to do anything at all? Why create a brand? Because, if you don’t, instead of having one consistent message to guide people to how you want to be seen, everyone will make their own mind up and the impression you give might not be the one you want.
To create your brand, you’re going to need both your brand identity and your brand message.
Always start with your brand message first. You need to know what your values are and how you want to be seen. Although it might sound a little “woo woo,” you need to know the personality of your business.
You’ll notice we’ve not mentioned colors and logos and the other things you might associate with branding. That’s because the brand message is the basis of your branding. You can’t pick colors or create snappy tag lines if you don’t know your business inside out and how you want to present it to people.
For example, if you concentrate on pedigree breeds only and your main job is getting pampered pooches ready for dog shows, you’re not going to want to call your business, “A Shaggy Dog Story” or “Mutts and Makeovers.” Your brand message feeds into everything from your business name and your pricing, to the colors and fonts you use. You have to know who your business is first before you move on to your brand identity.
When you get to looking at your brand identity, that’s where your colors, logo, and taglines come in. But you can now decide on what you want from a more informed position.
You’ll end with a far stronger brand if you start with your brand message.
Why developing a brand matters:
- Great branding differentiates you strongly from the competition. Sometimes, that may be the main, or only, differentiator if you’re close on services, price, and everything else you offer.
- You can attract ideal clients and guide away clients you don’t want with the right branding. Get it right and you’ll quite literally put off the people that you don’t want to work with, saving you precious marketing dollars on marketing to the wrong people.
- You can be clear in your messaging across your business because it’s far easier for your staff to pick up what your branding is and how you want them to present the business both online and offline.
- It’s far easier to write great content that attracts your ideal audience if you know what your brand messaging is.
- Building your brand means building your reputation.
- Ultimately, you’ll get to a point much like far bigger companies, such as the Pedigree brand, where people begin to recognize your logo, your tagline, and your branding and immediately know who you are and what you stand for.
Brand development tips for pet spas
We’re now going to get into detail about building your brand with our brand development tips for pet spas:
1. Define what makes your business unique
No doubt you’ll have written a business plan before and one of the sections in a business plan is all about your Unique Selling Proposition, or USP.
If you’ve done that already and have it to hand, you’re ahead of the game here.
Take a look at your USP if you have it or start coming up with ideas if not. What makes you stand out against all the other pet spas in your area? Why would a customer choose you over the competition? What do you do or provide that others don’t? Can you specialize in some way to differentiate your business?
Really dig into this and make sure you’ve got it before you go ahead.
2. Evaluate your competitors
Next, take a look at your competition and do the same exercise. Why do people go to them and not to you? Why don’t people use them? Can you see any mistakes they are making? What do they do really well? Where do they fall down?
Examine their branding. Does it work for them? Is it clear what their message is? How professional and well-designed is their brand identity? What are they doing that you think appeals to their audience?
Now think about what you do that’s better. Where do you have them beat and where are you different enough that you can get customers over them, even if they’re only located down the street?
3. Identify your ideal client
If you’ve already created buyer personas for your business then, again, you’re ahead of the curve. Take another look at them and see whether they match the work you’ve done so far on your branding. Are you still aiming for the same type of customer? Is everything still the same?
If so, you can move on to step four.
If not, then you need to start at the beginning and get to know your ideal client. Who are they? What price point suits them? What are they concerned about? What makes them buy and choose you over anyone else? What services do they want? How do they speak, and do they use any jargon or particular phrases that you can incorporate into your marketing?
If you already have a following on social media and an email list, then it’s quick and easy to ask them questions or run polls. You could even send out a short survey, perhaps with a prize draw entry for filling it in.
Do whatever you need to really get to know these people.
4. Use compelling messaging
This should be a far easier step now that you’ve got to know your own business, your competitors, and your ideal clients. Now you know who you are aiming at and what you want to say about your business, creating compelling messaging should be far less work.
If you’re already up and running, take a look at your current marketing messages. Does your current marketing work now that you know more about your branding? Does it give the right impression? Does it still appeal to the right clients?
If not, it’s time for a revamp to bring your messaging in line with your newly developing branding.
5. Create a professional logo
It’s only at step five that we get to creating your logo. Hopefully, you can see why you need the above steps before you can have someone design your logo and your brand identity.
When you get to this stage, bring together everything you know about your business, your competitors, and your ideal clients.
You want a logo and color palette that beautifully reflects your brand but doesn’t look anything like your competitors’ branding. You don’t want to cause brand confusion because it won’t do you any good either.
You also need to get the professionals in here. Good designers are worth it. They understand style and color, know which fonts pair well and which don’t, and can generally save you from making a lot of expensive mistakes.
6. Be consistent
There are two aspects to this:
Everywhere you use your branding, including your colors, logo, fonts, designs, graphics, taglines, and more, you must be consistent. You can’t use different fonts in your logo because you’re on a different platform. You can’t use a different logo here, but not there. Everything must match and create a coherent look and feel for your business.
You must be consistent with your use of your brand voice. Every time you post online or take a call in person, your brand voice should be recognizable. It all adds to the consistent messaging that you need and helps you to build a brand that becomes increasingly more recognizable as a whole.
7. Be authentic
You can only be you. It’s actually really hard to pretend to be someone else, especially for any length of time. You need to do so much work on your branding initially because the values you choose for your business have to be your values too. You have to completely believe in those values and put them across when you post. If something doesn’t fit, if it doesn’t feel right and consistent, people will feel it. They might not know exactly what’s wrong, but it will potentially put them off.
Be authentically you in every post, in every call, in every client visit. It’s the one thing your competitors will never have.
8. Engage your community
When you post consistently on social media and stick with your branding and your brand message, over time, you will gather a community around you of people who love to follow your content and engage with you.
As a pet spa, you have a huge advantage in that people online love nothing more than shots of cute furry animals, so it’s relatively straightforward to build engagement by sharing cute animals, funny shots, and the all-important before and after shots. You could post animal pictures and ask people to caption them or say what they’re thinking. There’s so much you can do just with quality photos.
But the most important thing to do is to respond when people comment on your posts and ask questions. Like their posts in return, say “thank you” for compliments, and answer questions. Take the time to chat just as you would in person.
That’s what builds a responsive community, and a responsive, interested community is obviously a great source of potential clients.
9. Create valuable content
Content is always at the heart of any marketing strategy, and you should now find that it’s far easier to write and create now knowing your own business and your target market a lot better than you did at the beginning.
It should now be clear what content people want to see, what questions they want answered, and what types of content they prefer.
We already talked about cute animal images and before and after shots, but you can also share your expertise in pet care by answering questions, creating informational posts, doing live or recorded Q&As, providing product recommendations, how-to posts, and more.
10. Build a reputation
As you build your brand, you are also establishing trust and building your online reputation. Every step we’ve given you doesn’t just build your brand, it also gives you the opportunity to get to know your audience better and to let them get to know you.
From here, it’s a case of being authentic and consistent with your posting schedule and your brand messaging to continue to build and grow as a business and a brand.
Build your pet spa brand with Surefire Local
We said at the start that building your brand is a lot of work, but we also said we had ways to make it easier. Read on to find out how Surefire Local’s all-in-one marketing platform can help you build your brand and your online reputation with far less time and effort:
1. Send review requests via text message and email and post responses
When building your online reputation and trust within your community, great reviews are vital. But it can take work to get them consistently and to reply to them all quickly.
However, with our marketing platform, you can request reviews from our dashboard via text message and email, send reminders, and reply to your reviews without leaving our software.
2. Create and publish content to your blog, social media, and Google Business Profile
There’s no need to log into your blog, each social media platform, and your Google Business Profile every time you want to post. You can jot down content ideas in your dashboard, create your posts, schedule, and publish them straight to each platform, again without leaving our software.
3. Share photos and videos across your online presence
Photos and videos are great for getting attention and providing a great look on every platform, business directory, and more. Again, there’s no need to log into individual sites to do this. You can decide what images and videos you want to use and then post them to social media, your blog, and over 80 business directories, including your Google Business Profile.
4. Maintain consistency when it comes to the information found about your business online
It’s important that your NAP (Name, Address, Phone number) is consistent everywhere online. Not only is it potentially confusing for clients if it isn’t, but it can cause Google to lower you in their rankings if they can’t be sure if it’s all the same business. You can’t afford, for example, to include an area code on some sites but not on others, or to use abbreviations on some directories but full addresses elsewhere.
However, you can fix your online information and provide the latest news and special offers quickly by logging into our platform and updating all of your directories and your Google Business Profile at once.
5. Increase local search rankings with an optimized website
We all know the importance of SEO in becoming visible online and attracting the right audience. You can optimize your website by using your keywords and local keywords in your meta titles and meta descriptions, by including them in your main headings and at least one sub-heading, and by using your main keyword in at least the first paragraph on the page and a couple more times throughout your text, depending on the length. It’s also good to include related keywords to provide context for the search engines, like “doggy daycare” as well as “pet spa” if you provide both services.
It’s not just about your website, though. You need to use your keywords everywhere online, and our software can help you with this by letting you update your GBP and your directories quickly.
6. Measure engagement to determine what your audience is most interested in
With the analytics and reports available on our software, it’s a matter of minutes to gather what you need and look at engagement on any platform or all of the ones you use. You can then find out which are your most popular post types, what subjects people really respond to, and what’s not working.
7. Send targeted email campaigns to foster customer relationships
You can also use our platform to create, schedule, and send targeted email campaigns to get closer to your clients and provide them with the information they want and need. You can send surveys, ask and answer questions, provide special offers, talk about your latest news, and more.
Then you’re building your audience on your email list too so that you can market to them when you want to.
8. Determine brand sentiment with a word-cloud graph revealing frequently used words in your reviews
Our software includes a word-cloud graph where you can see at a glance what language people are using about your pet spa in their reviews. You can see quickly if you have good reviews or not, look for words your audience uses that you can also use in your marketing, and get the unvarnished truth about what people think about your brand.
Attend a Surefire Local Marketing Platform demo
From the points above, we’re sure you can see how much time our local marketing platform can save you when building your brand, but that’s not all it can do. You can manage every important piece of your marketing right from our dashboard.
All you need is one straightforward piece of software to help you save time, manage your budget better, and build your business without having to do everything yourself.
Why not book a demo with our team and see how much time you could save?