A final Freesources post as a kind of catch-all for everything we’ve gone over in the fast few months while building our community. We’ll also go over a few other of our favorite resources that didn’t fall into one of the broader categories but could still be useful for pet store owners and other pet professionals.

We’re going to add to our Freesources post on tradeshows with our six steps to a successful tradeshow, ensuring that you get the most out of your expo experience whether it’s at Global, SuperZoo, PetConnections, or otherwise.

We’re going to sneak this one in here because technically, retailers attend tradeshows for free. They are meant for independent and family-owned businesses to build connections, find new products, get free samples, learn, and build those small, local pet stores that we all love.

We’re excited to offer you as much free actionable advice, ideas, and tips as we can fit into 30 minutes during a free marketing audit at Pet Connections Expo in October!

Since we are primarily a pet store marketing agency for brick-and-mortar retailers, we’re going to dig into some tips that are primarily meant for that type of business. Nonetheless, what we give out here can be appropriated and adapted to other pet businesses, whether it’s for exotic birds, livestock and feed, or fish and aquariums, this will help.

Search engine optimization is more important than ever nowadays and it’s critical for (almost) every pet store to understand the true meaning of SEO as well as the potential it creates for every pet business. Of course, we’ll back it up with data!

Today’s Freesource post will focus on what AnswerThePublic does, and why it’s a huge benefit to you as a pet store owner and your pet store’s marketing strategy when it comes to content creation, understanding your audience, and SEO.

6 reasons why you need to use a social media management tool for your pet store’s marketing strategy. Let’s dive right in - you’ll notice that most of these reasons fall under a few main tenets: it saves you time, it makes your life easier, and it improves your social media marketing capabilities.

The free plan through Hootsuite is perfect for pet store owners who want to start managing multiple social networks, schedule content, and engage with their audience — all in one place.

Our team and founder weigh in on the recent pet industry news that Chewy has gone public and offered up it’s stocks through an IPO. Read more to see what it means for pet industry retailers.

Using video is a really good idea - using video to market your pet store in the right way on the right platforms is a great idea. We’ve got best practices to help pet store owners starting out or implementing video marketing.

We go over why you should start using video for your pet store’s marketing, and how to use video on major social media platforms to get the best results for your pet store.

We are so excited to announce that we’ll be speaking at Pet Connections Expo on October 15-16 at the New Jersey Convention & Expo Center! It’s free for retailers, so we’re hoping to meet a lot of you face-to-face and make the most of our time there.

For those of you that haven’t heard of Wistia, it is a free software platform that can help pet store owners create, edit, host, promote, and track high quality professional-looking videos.

Take the quiz and find out how well you’re actually marketing your pet store online. We’ll be able to give you some recommendations based on the results!

It’s true, we’re deep into the “visual revolution.” With hundreds or thousands of social posts flooding your customers every day across every platform, you need visual content to help you pop and stand out from the rest of the noise.

What really makes your visual content, your imagery, and your graphic branding important? Today we’ll get into some nitty gritty data-based (always) trends that will get our point across: the internet and it’s users have shifted from “tell” to “show.”

“Look good, feel good, play good, paid good.” Deion Sanders said that, but it applies to pet stores, and pet store marketing, as well. Whether you like it or not, potential customers are going to judge your pet store before they ever set foot in it via your Instagram feed, your Facebook page, and your website’s appearance.

Fresh off our quick write-up of one of Jet’s Favorite Freesources on HubSpot, we’re going to dig a big deeper into the world of inbound marketing. The folks at HubSpot are big proponents of inbound marketing, and nearly all retailers engage in some form of inbound marketing (whether they know it or not), including pet retailers.

As a pet store owner, we recommend HubSpot as a place to learn more about marketing, sales, and services that can help build your business. As a small business within the pet industry ourselves, we utilize HubSpot for their free CRM, their free sales platform, their free marketing resources, research, and reports, and their helpful community of generous business owners and marketers.

After more than 20 years of watching PetSmart and Petco enjoy the lion’s share of consumer spending in the pet specialty channel, it appears that independent pet store chains are gaining ground and PetSmart & Petco are going downward dog!

Today we’ll go over some quick tips and tricks to improve your website that maybe you and your team overlooked in the case of not needing a complete website overhaul. Let’s learn about optimizing your pet store’s website.

When it comes to content creation for a newly created website, every pet store is unique and needs something to differentiate itself. However, visitors to your website (your potential customers) have set expectations of your website: what information they expect to find on it and where on your website they expect to find it. So, we’ll advise you on what our experience tells us are the must-have pages that all pet store websites need.

We’re going to go over a few reasons why the modern pet store needs a modern website and how it can be used to build your business. As always, we’ll be using real-time examples, real-time data from one of our clients, and real-time statistics to back up all of our claims.

Part 6 of our Freesource series for pet store marketing is going to focus on the importance of having a beautiful, functional, informative website that draws online visitors toward your pet store rather than repelling them.

Pretty big question right? Maybe an even more pertinent question to our pet store owners is why does it matter for me to know what my time is worth? What’s the point of this question? What’s the point of anything?

Based on our experience in marketing pet stores and in working in and managing pet stores, we bet that the majority of pet store owners are saying “I am pulled all over the place and hardly feel in control of where I spend my time due to the demands of the business.”

Among all demographics, the growing trend is not in calling in, or sending emails, but going to Facebook and Twitter to get answers to questions, get issues resolved, and get on with their lives quickly. Clearly, social media platforms have evolved to become more than emergent platforms for marketing and advertising.

Today’s Insider post will be touching on the importance of gathering, cultivating, and even promoting reviews to benefit your pet store’s marketing aims and business goals.

It’s official: social media is taking over. It might be even safe to say that it already has taken over. As a pet store owner, you see it in your customers (both furry and human), you see it in your daily lives outside your store, and you probably see it at home. It’s pervasive in our lives and in our business.

Gone are the days where generating audience engagement on social media was primarily a passive process. The always-online audiences of today want to be involved, interact, and co-create.

For this post, we’ve outlined all the major updates and new features for each of the major platforms so you can incorporate them into your pet store’s social media marketing strategy for 2019.

We’ll be giving brief overviews of some of the major social media tools that can be applied to your pet store’s marketing strategy, as well as providing some ideas about how to use them that you’ve hopefully never considered before!

Quick update today coming on the back of our recent Freesource post on G Suite regarding the recent G Suite pricing increases.

When we talk about improving the business processes and organizational and marketing strategy for pet stores, GSuite is one of our best friends. As both an employee and a small business owner, we highly highly highly recommend utilizing GSuite for…all of your needs.

Today we’ll touch on what you as a pet store owner should be tracking on Analytics, what you can learn through it when it comes to marketing your pet store, and how to adjust your pet store marketing strategy with your data analysis.

Today let’s learn a little about Google Analytics. For a brief overview, Google Analytics is a plugin that can be added to your website for free that tracks users across it. The scope of Analytics is impressive, as you can look at your website’s data from a really broad perspective as well as drill into minute details with ease.

After all, brick and mortar pet stores are obviously retailers, and when you’re wondering how best to market your pet store and promote your pet supplies, it’s a good idea to see what’s trending, working, and succeeding in the rest of the industry.

We’ve heard a few arguments that email as a marketing tactic for pet stores is dead, or even dying. That spending money sending advertisements to your audience when a 30% open rate is considered exceptional.

As meat-free diets become more mainstream, an increasing number of owners are interested in adopting the vegan lifestyle for their pets according to a new survey.

We figured we could dig in a little bit more to provide some insight on segmentation, a strategy that can help you communicate better with your customers via email.

The first service we want feature is MailChimp. As a pet store owner, email can be one of, if not your most, effective marketing services.

Holistic Hound partnered with Pet Wants, a national delivery service for fresh, natural pet foods, to carry its line of organic, full spectrum hemp and mushroom supplements with CBD.

A new line of pet travel products will begin shipping in March courtesy of Coastal Pet Products called Bergan.

One of the best aspects of being a pet shop owner is getting dogs in your store. As far as marketing for pet stores goes, it’s as good as gold: pet photos with your store and logo in the background are tailor-made for social media.

Running a pet store involves a lot more than just playing with cute and cuddly animals all day. You have to actually run a business, and one of the most important aspects is making money. To do that, you need to draw in customers.

Pet supply retailer Petland Discounts has become the latest victim of the collapse of brick-and-mortar retail. Management said it would need to close a large number of its stores. The retailer was founded in 1965.

Petco and Champion Petfoods today announced a strategic partnership that will bring Champion's award-winning ACANA and ORIJEN dog and cat foods to all Petco stores and petco.com beginning March 4.

Green Coast Pet is offering all U.S. government employees affected by the shutdown its full range of dog and cat products at-cost, plus shipping, until the government reopens.

Jet is the official mascot of Pet Engine, but there’s a lot more to him! Here’s a short bio on him and his antics!

SuperZoo, a pet retail trade show and conference produced by World Pet Association (WPA), has opened registration for the 2019 annual industry event. SuperZoo will be held at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas, August 20–22, with education sessions on August 19–22.

Pet Business and Global Pet Expo officials are now accepting nominations for the eighth-annual Retailer Excellence Awards.

According to Michelson Found Animals, an animal welfare nonprofit organization, there are three major trends worth looking out for in the pet industry this coming year. The organization conducted a survey of over a thousand dog and cat owners and analyzed their findings. With the right planning, mindset, and marketing, independent pet stores can capitalize on all of them!