Did January slip by before you created your pet marketing strategies to engage prospects with content, such as blog posts, news items, Facebook posts and so on? Well, it’s not too late!
You may be thinking, “Ugh. Something else I have to plan out.” But you can keep it easy with an editorial calendar that helps you schedule your content and avoid writer’s block. All you need to do is this:
This is my last blog post for 2011 because I’ll be traveling cross-country with my faithful companion Louie (the Westie pup) the week between Christmas and New Year’s. We’re spending the winter in the warm and sunny southeast.
I hope you’re doing something fun this winter, too, such as growing your business by leaps and bounds!
I’d like to wrap up the year with 12 ideas to get you blogging in early 2012. Perhaps these ideas will spark a series of blog posts that captivate your audience and even motivate them to share your blog with their friends and colleagues.
Ready? Here are 12 blog topics and categories to help with marketing your pet business in 2012:
1. Provide How-To Tips
People are always searching the Web for tips on pet care. Offer a whole series of how-to- tips related to the solutions you offer, whether you’re marketing pet products or services. For example, if you sell reflective dog collars and leashes (one of my favorite examples), you could offer how-to tips on dog-walking safety at night.
This weekend, I was browsing through some pet retail magazines and came across a new report that might interest you. It’s called Strategies for Effective Facebook Wall Posts for the Retail Industry, and it includes a number of fascinating facts that may well be worth considering for your pet business Facebook page, whether you’re marketing pet products or services.
Posting 1-4 times a week produces 71% higher user engagement than 5 or more posts for retail brands: quality trumps frequency
Posts containing fewer than 80 characters produce 66% higher engagement than longer posts (wow!)
Posts containing questions generate more than double the amount of comments, even if they may get fewer “likes,”
Top retail sales keywords that produced more user engagement: “$ off” and “coupon” worked best (55% higher user engagement rates); while the words “sale” and “percent off” (or % off) produced the lowest; even posts about offers less than $10 off produce 17% higher engagement than percent-off posts
The 2 most effective types of retail brand posts contain a single photo attachment or use only words. Posts containing only words produce 94% higher engagement than avg.
Wednesday is the best day to post, although you obviously shouldn’t post ONLY on Wednesday. 🙂
So — what kinds of topics should you post on your pet business Facebook page?
Today I was on a conference call with Heather Lloyd Martin, SEO Copywriting pioneer, mentor and friend of mine. She was talking about some of the things that are critical to web success today and I immediately thought of how these tips can be applied to your pet marketing strategies or pet SEO success (of … Read more
I was just reading Entrepreneur (October 2011) and came across a fabulous article about Animal General Hospital in Port St. Lucie, FL.
It seems that the owner of this veterinary practice figured out how to engage local-community clients and prospects online, using the practice’s website in combination with free social networking, email and YouTube plus a modest paid-search advertising campaign (Google Adwords and Facebook ads).
The result: instead of spending $27,000 over 18 months for Yellow Pages and getting lame results, his online strategy only cost $3,600 plus staff time, but his business grew with 250 new clients and $75,000 in additional annual revenue. Can you say “WOW”???
Here are 3 ideas your local pet business can take away from this as you plan your fall and winter pet marketing strategies:
Is it true that we must always be very brief on a pet web site because people won’t read lots of content? See what marketing legend Claude Hopkins has to say about this common misconception that I hear a lot in the web content world. Also see how I answer the question, “How much content is too much for a pet business website?”
One of my web clients asked me the other day, “Do I need to remove the wonderful testimonials from my website so I’m compliant with the new FTC Guides?” Well, that’s a good question. Last fall’s release of the updated FTC’s Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising were designed to crack … Read more