How Paid Social Media Revolutionizes Pet Company Marketing

Paid social media advertising—often shortened to simply paid social—refers to the type of online advertising in which your pet business pays a social networking site to have your ads shown on their platform. It’s different from organic social media, which just relies on your own posts organically reaching your own followers.

Your paid social media strategy may include various forms of ads, such as display ads, video ads, and sponsored posts. You can set a budget for your ads and how long they would run on the site.

As a subset of digital marketing, paid social offers a number of benefits to your pet company. One is that it is much more affordable compared to traditional marketing methods (TV commercials, billboards, print ads, etc.). On top of that, social media ads can be seen by a much larger number of people (who meet your set criteria), regardless of where they may be in the world. This is in stark contrast to traditional ads, which are generally seen only by a limited number of people in a specific area where that ad is placed.

However, this doesn’t mean that your paid social media ads will automatically be shown indiscriminately to people on the other side of the globe. This is not the best use of your ad resources if your pet business serves only a specific market, like if you’re a pet grooming salon in Manhattan. One of the greatest advantages of paid social is that you can set your ads to target only certain people. While organic posts are ‘free’ in the sense that you don’t need to pay the social platform for advertising, you simply cannot target your audience since it’s shown to all your page followers—even those who may not be qualified leads for your business.

You need to properly set up your social media ads to reach your target audience, which includes people in your preferred demographics (for example, you may want to target young single adults in NYC) who have certain interests (perhaps those who follow ‘Dog Whisperer’ Cesar Millan on social media) and behaviors (like those who watch shows on Animal Planet).

Traditional ads are seen by everyone who watches the TV channel where your ad is played, by whoever passes by your billboard on the freeway, and by whoever reads the newspaper where you advertised on). On the other hand, with paid social, you can set your ads to be seen only by pet lovers who are more likely to be interested in your pet products or services.

This targeting capability gives you more bang for your buck, leading to a better return on your ad spend.

Paid social also comes with great tracking and analytics. Each social networking site has its own dashboard for advertisers, which allows you to track and measure the effectiveness of your paid social campaigns in real time. Using the data they provide, you can optimize and refine your campaigns anytime you wish. For example, you can experiment with different ad copies and note which one brings the most amount of traffic to your pet company landing page. Making changes to your ad campaign is something that you simply cannot do that quickly (or at all) in traditional ads.

Finally, as a bonus, paid social allows your pet company or store to build relationships with both your prospects and existing customers on your preferred social platform. You can post messages (promotional and not) on your social media page and actively communicate with people by replying to their questions, feedback, complaints, and reviews.

This two-way communication (which is a missing element in traditional ads) is not only effective in raising brand awareness but can also enhance brand loyalty and bring more repeat business to your pet company.