Pets play an important role in people’s lives. Most pet owners treat their four-legged friend as a family member. They give them the best of everything: food, toys, and healthcare. Pet stores like yours help people provide their cats, dogs or other kind of pets with everything they need, from healthy food to comfortable clothing for the cold season.
This would apparently mean that you have customers lining up to walk into your pet store and buy your products. In reality, you have to struggle like every other business owner to find customers and keep them loyal. The pet care industry has become extremely developed and there are offers literally at every corner.
Stop Wasting Time and Money on Inefficient Marketing Strategies
The truth is that you tried everything from printed flyers to Google Adword ads. The results were nowhere close to your expectations, yet you cannot think of any other way of finding good leads for your pet store.
The problem is that your ads do not reach out to pet owners in a place where they spend a lot of time and where they frequently inquire about new products for their pets. This place is Facebook™.
Facebook™ Ads – An Efficient Tool for Lead Generation
The social media platform with the largest number of active users is one of the best places for marketers and business owners. The advertising platform developed by Facebook™ harnesses the number one strength of this network: the very detailed information it has on its users.
In other words, there is no other online advertising platform where you can apply as many detailed audience selection filters to reach the exact people who are most likely to buy your products.
Here is how you can reach these people and turn them into qualified leads using Facebook™ ads.
1. Install the Facebook™ Pixel on Your Website
This is a preliminary step, but it is important to discuss it. The Facebook™ Pixel is a bit of code added to your website. It tracks your site visitors’ activity and then, in the Ad Creator platform on Facebook™, matches them to user accounts.
This is a very helpful detail, because your can target people who recently visited your website with a Facebook™ ads. This procedure is called remarketing and is extremely effective, especially in cases of cart abandonment (people put products in the online cart but did not complete the purchase).
2. Take Advantage of the Various Types of Audiences You Can Use on Facebook™
The Facebook™ advertising platform allows you to target very specific types of audiences. You can create a Custom Audience by uploading your mailing list. The platform will match them to user accounts and create an ad audience. Next, based on this Custom Audience, you can also create a Lookalike Audience – different Facebook™ users with similar demographic profiles, interests and behaviours to the Custom Audience.
In this way, you can advertise to your subscribers’ list on Facebook™ and you can find new leads based on your buyer persona profile.
3. Master the Art of Targeting
As we said previously, Facebook™ offers you the chance to segment the audience who will be shown your ads based on very detailed criteria. You can create separate ad campaigns for cat owners and dog owners. You can build audiences based on location, on various behaviours (recently became pet owner, has a new litter of puppies/kitties, etc.).
This helps you create very targeted and personalised ads that are a good match to the Facebook™ users’ needs, interests and pain points. Good targeting is the number one factor for effective lead generation.
4. A/B Test Your Ad Copy and Visuals
There is no secret formula for an effective and highly converting ad. You will have to try, compare, optimise and refine until you get to a finished product (ad) that brings a lot of qualified leads on your website.
A/B testing is the way to do it: you run in parallel two different types of ads to the same audience or the same ad to different audience groups for a few days. You note which of the ads performs better and you go from there.
5. Take Advantage of Local Ads
If your pet store is a local business (brick and mortar store) it makes sense to advertise to people in your community. Local ads were added by Facebook™ to its ad mix to help local businesses get more qualified leads.
With a local ad, you can reach actionable objectives such as: give people directions to your store, get them to give you a call, send you a message or learn more about your business. This geo-targeted type of ad is very cost effective, because you can set the exact radius around your business and include only people living in this area, thus, more likely to come to your store.