Marketing to pet owners with “how-to” articles made easy

By David Tomen for PetCopywriter.com

Sheri is a master at marketing to pet owners. She loves animals. Caring for pets since she was a young girl fostered a passion that led to a career as a veterinarian.

Sheri soon found that sharing her know-how was a great way to build her business. Pet owners trusted her and shared their experience with friends. And her veterinary clinic’s revenues grew exponentially every year since she opened her doors.

Sheri taught Lori, her receptionist and resident webmaster, the easiest way to come up with “how-to” articles. During the week, her staff would make note of customer questions and problems. Lori then selected the best of the lot and wrote a “how-to” article for each week’s blog post.

Lori came up with some of her own methods for generating ideas for blog posts, too. You can easily do this for your practice as well.

If you use the pet web content ideas here, you’ll easily be able to write magnetic “how-to” articles that bring in more traffic to your website and business.

Share Your Passion

I imagine you’re in this business because you love animals and helping pet owners care for their pets. Have you ever noticed that when your passion comes through, there’s an instant connection with your customers?

Providing “how-to” articles in your pet web content is a natural because you love it! As a bonus, by solving a problem for your customers, and sharing their success stories, more pet owners like them will want to do business with you.

You’ll find that mastering this skill will give you a leg up on your competition, pull in new customers, and can facilitate a growth in revenues.

Imagine watching your latest blog post shared all over Facebook, and retweeted thousands of times on Twitter!

If you’ve been marketing to pet owners for a while, you know that a great “how-to” article is nearly always the most linked to and shared content online. Pet owners are hungry for useful information and they’ll reward you by sharing it with others.

You’ll see the benefit of not just one potential sale to that pet owner, but possibly even to some of their friends, too!

The Unique Pet Web Content Challenge

As marketers we know how challenging it can be to come up with new ideas for content. This can be particularly frustrating if you’re expected to come up with a new blog post every week, write a couple of web pages, create flyers for your reception area, and generate the broadcast email copy.

What’s the easiest and quickest way to come up with fresh, new copy ideas?

Think for a minute about how you use the Internet. How many times do you type into Google, “What are the recommended vaccinations for my cat?”; “How often should I feed my ferret?”; “How to find the best horse veterinarian”; “How to find safe dog treats.”

Just like you, pet owners use the Internet to search for information every day. If the question they typed into Google, Bing or Yahoo is for content you provided, a couple of scenarios can unfold. You are seen as the authority in this space, and if a product you sell helps solve a problem …

Your article or blog post can pull pet parents into your business so you can make the sale.

Tapping Into the Source for New Article Ideas

Here are some of the ideas Lori came up with for her veterinary clinic’s website:

• Listen to your customers. What kind of questions do pet parents ask you when they’re in your store or clinic, or even on the phone?
• Dig into your product line. Take a look at each item, product category or service you offer. Is there a benefit you can explore? Is a tutorial required to teach a pet parent how to use the product? What can they do for successful follow-up care for a procedure in your veterinary clinic? Your product line can keep you supplied with fresh article ideas for weeks – even months!
• Read or participate in pet owner forums relevant to your business. What questions are forum members asking? What problems seem to keep coming up with some consistency? (Puppy crate training is just one example.)
• Read the comments on your business website. What are people commenting on? Are they asking questions not easily answered in the comments section? Complaints about a product or service that comes from not knowing how to use a product you sell? Are expectations from pet parents indicating they need some education?
• Regularly read the major pet industry websites. For dogs, check out “The Dogington Post” and Google “best dog owner websites.” Do similar searches for “best cat owner websites,” “best horse owner websites,” “best hamster owner websites,” etc. Scan the “how-to” articles and tutorials on each site, plus the comments sections and member forums.

Keep in mind there can be more than one “How to stop your dog from digging up the backyard” article on the World Wide Web! And if your content is well-written, SEO-optimized, location-specific (if you have a bricks-and-mortar location), and you frequently add new content to your website… you will get new visitors, shares and even sales.

In our next post, we’ll get into the nuts and bolts of how-to-article headlines, SEO optimization and content.

David Tomen is a skilled marketing writer in the PetCopywriter.com network. We specialize in content-marketing solutions for the pet and veterinary industries. Contact us for assistance with your marketing communications needs.