With the approach of the spring season, many owners look to their local retailer for recommendations on faster and more effective ways to keep fleas and ticks off their animals.
Natural products, in particular, are getting drastically more popular because they offer a non-toxic way to prevent against unwanted bugs, in addition to having a lower cost. This desire for more natural small business products gives local pet stores the marketing advantage. Here are some tips on how you can market your new preventative products online and offline.
Promote In-Store
The first step to promoting your flea and tick products this season is to physically organize them in-store. Be sure to isolate your preventative products so that they are on display in the entrance of your business, grouped with similar repellent brands. This may seem obvious, but grouping items together that have the same intended purpose makes it easier for customers to skim over descriptions and compare products.
Another thing that could help your customers understand which product they want to buy is by creating and posting informative signs throughout the store. Make sure each of these has a clear and concise explanation for each brand’s year-round effectiveness, safety, quality and affordability. Highlight what makes the product unique and teach your employees about active ingredients so that they can explain how beneficial they are to keeping fleas & ticks away from pets. For an added bonus, use employee recommendation cards to persuade customers to speak with sales clerks and ask them about how they use your products on their own pets.
Promote Online
As for online marketing, many consumers do their research on the web before even stepping foot into a store. Make sure to catch these customers’ eyes by frequently updating your online inventory. Write blog posts about your new flea and tick products, with great images and facts that link to the preventative section of your online store. Consumers interpret visuals 60,000 times faster than text, so be sure to share many info-graphics and videos that explain the flea life cycle as well as the consumer benefits of certain products. This will also make your content more shareable on your social media profiles and increase the likelihood of it getting noticed by Facebook pages, fans, and bloggers with similar interests.
Creating flea and tick promotional emails will also be able to notify your current customers on your new products. Design these emails with high quality and attractive photos that link to the flea and tick tag of your online shop. Like with in-store signs, fill the text of the email with small snippets of stories from your employees experience, application tips, and brand mantras. At the end of the email, invite people to come see the new products in person at the shop. This will help to increase purchases online in addition to foot traffic in-store!
Following these basic tasks before the upcoming flea and tick season could significantly increase your sales and online presence. Be sure to check out our other articles for more information on successful online and offline marketing for brick and mortars: