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5 Reasons Why Pet Store Owners Should Use Paid Advertising
Like any small business, managing your pet store comes with a lot of unavoidable obligations and time-consuming projects. Keeping track of inventory, hiring new employees, retaining your current customers, and ensuring your store stays organized are just a few of the endless items on your to-do list. And, you also have to be thinking about how you can attract and bring in new customers in this competitive market. That’s where paid advertising comes into play.
If you’re considering getting started with a paid advertising campaign, you may be wondering: “Is it worthwhile for me to invest my time and energy in paid advertising or should I just let sleeping dogs lie?”
Over the past 10 years, our PPC team has seen the advantages of paid media and the real impact it can make on your bottom line. We want to let the cat out of the bag and share our secrets of success with you. To illustrate why paid advertising is a worthwhile investment for every small business, especially pet store owners, we will walk you through five of the key benefits.
1. Target the people most likely to buy when they’re ready to purchase.
Search engines and social media are where online shoppers are most likely to start their purchase journey. For instance, a dog owner may see a cute dog toy in their Instagram feed or in a Google Shopping ad, and then days later make a purchase on your website.
Google is where people go to research pet products, get pricing information, or read customer reviews, with 68 percent of consumers searching for products on Google before they make a purchase. 71 percent of shoppers are more likely to buy from social media referrals. Paid advertising is an easy, effective, and cost-efficient way to reach potential customers when and where they are most likely to make a purchase.
Paid digital advertising also allows you to target the exact customer profile that aligns with your target audience. Here are just a few of the parameters you can target with paid advertising:
- Age
- Gender
- Location (city, state, county, or country)
- Interests (hobbies, lifestyle, motivations and more)
- Current website visitors
This is just a small sample of the vast layers of audience targeting available. Whether you’re looking to target travel-loving cat owners, outdoorsy families with multiple dogs, or adventurous reptile admirers, you can precisely target your audience with paid media. You know your customers better than anyone, and paid advertising can help you build relationships with new customers to take your business to the next level.
2. Easily control your budget and never overspend.
Most online advertising is run on a PPC or Cost Per Click model meaning you only pay for verified clicks. Each click represents a real customer visiting your website, so you know exactly what you’re paying for. And there’s no uncertainty of how many impressions your ad really received, like there is with traditional advertising in billboards, radio or TV.
One of the best benefits of paid media advertising is the ability to control your costs.
You can easily set up daily or monthly budget limits for your campaigns to ensure you never go $1 over your preferred spend. Changing your daily or monthly budget takes minutes so if you have an unexpected budget reduction you can update your campaigns in no time.
It’s also easy to increase or decrease your budget depending on your business’s most in-demand months. If you need to raise your campaign spend for an upcoming holiday season, a new promotion, or an annual sale, you can easily change your budget based on the time of day, the day of the week, or the time of the month.
3. Build brand awareness and reach new customers.
There’s only so many customers you can gain from organic search (people discovering you through Google or Bing), blog traffic, direct traffic (people visiting your website directly), and organic social media (people visiting your website via Facebook or Instagram) or good old-fashioned word of mouth. Organic reach on social media has been in a steep decline over the past decade. Facebook has confessed that only 0.2% of organic posts show up in a user’s News Feed. To build sustainable growth, you need to be reaching out to new audiences and building brand awareness.
Paid advertising is one of the most effective ways to expand your brand’s reach. Advertising on paid search or social channels is a great way to drive tangible impressions. The more a potential customer interacts with your brand or sees your brand online, the more likely they are to make a purchase. Research shows that it takes around eight touchpoints with a brand for someone to feel confident enough to make a purchase.
4. Measure your success and return on investment.
Paid media is incredibly transparent, measurable, and observable when it comes to the results behind your campaigns. Every single one of these metrics can be tracked with paid advertising, and this is just scratching the surface:
- How many times your ad was viewed
- How many new website visitors you gained
- How many phone calls you received
- How many newsletter sign ups you generated
- How many “Contact Us” form submissions were sent in
With paid advertising, you can easily set goals, observe trends, and measure your progress on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. There’s no limit to how many metrics you can track and you can use your findings to inform all of your marketing and branding efforts. For instance, if you discover that most of your website converters come from a certain region, you can focus your marketing efforts on bringing in customers from that city.
5. Retain existing customers.
In addition to building brand awareness, attracting new customers, and giving you actionable insights, paid advertising can help you maintain and retain your existing customers. People are inundated with thousands of distractions and messages on a daily basis. It’s highly likely that someone who visited your website over 5-7 days ago may forget about your brand entirely and never come back to your website. With remarketing or retargeting campaigns, you can target your advertising to current website visitors to ensure they come back to your website and make a purchase. Retaining your existing customers is critical to building brand loyalty, increasing your retention rate, and ensuring your business has a solid foundation of devoted customers for years to come.
Fur-tunately, Intuitive Is Here To Help You Reach Your Full Pet-tential
Diving into the world of paid advertising can be an intimidating and daunting endeavor. But the advantages and benefits you’ll gain far outweigh the downsides. If you’re still on the fence about paid advertising or want to explore what other options are available, we are here to help! Give us a shout and let us know how we can help your pet store become the top dog.
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