Marketing plan
At PetLovers, we aim to deliver the right products to the right customers and their lovely pets at the right time.
In an environment where consumers multitask by using several media at once in order to increase total media exposure, PetLovers is developing a multi-channel marketing program that can take advantage of the strengths of various media, and reinforce branding messages across media. However assessing things post-pandemic, we will lean towards online marketing incorporating certain offline tactics.
Online advertising in its various forms has been shown to boost brand awareness and brand recall, create positive brand perceptions, and increase intent to purchase. It is typically less costly than traditional mass media marketing. Also, online sales can generally be directly correlated with online marketing efforts, unlike traditional marketing communications tactics. Below are PetLovers initial marketing plan:
Strategies
WEBSITE DEVELOPMENT
A website helps to establish brand identity and consumer expectations, inform and educate the consumer, shape the customer experience, and anchor the brand in an ocean of marketing messages coming from different sources. PetLovers will prioritize building its website to a fully-functional and interactive platform for its potential customers. This is our goal before April 2022, right after PetLovers' launch our MVP to the world on social media. During the first year, Sabrina as the communications marketing manager, will work with Yingquan, who has a technical and programming background, to carefully select keywords used on the web pages, update content frequently, and design the site so it can be easily read by search engine programs. We aim to improve the impact and return on investment in PetLovers' web marketing programs in the coming future.
BLOGS
Meanwhile, blogs will be played as a vital role in PetLovers' online marketing to increase customer engagement and loyalty. Blog readers tend to be more educated, have higher incomes, value pets' lifestyles, and eat diets, who are PetLovers aims to cater to. PetLovers will constantly update its blogs with high equality guidance on how to raise pets and pick up the correct gift sets for the pets and for the pets of our customers' friends. PetLovers aims to build a customer-attached community, where they could share their love and joy with our gift sets. Mengyi, who is a veterinary practitioner and food animal veterinarians, will be working with Angela in creating blogs and constantly interacting with our customers.
Furthermore, PetLovers desires to maximize the efficiency of each dollar on the marketing to make our products personalized but as e-commerce is a trade-off between privacy and efficiency, we will lay major emphasis on protecting our users' privacy so that PetLovers trusted and long-lasting development is undergoing with our users. Once a profile of a customer is established, we value each file and we will protect our users' data as much as we can.
Programmatic advertising, at the same time, is also being considered to be deployed, to target a more precise group of potential PetLovers' customers in the future, if this technology is developed, enabling PetLovers to gain the control over and their our ads will appear on the web.
At the same time, as online traffic is driven by offline brands and shopping and offline marketing media heavily influence online behavior including sales, PetLovers will use traditional print media and television to reach and engage consumers about new products and direct them to our website.
PetLovers is also considering hosting pet gathering events at local parks on a seasonal basis, like "We were born On the Same Day!" or "We were born At the Same Place!" or "Let's run for the Goody Bags!".
analysis
Target Customer
PetLovers aims to serve domestic and international pet owners, who desire the best-quality pet gifting sets and who fosters a healthy living style for their pets.
We plan to focus on either individuals or families, both young and mature, to create a dynamic pet lovers community to engage and share our love for pets with each other.
Opportunities
In US, the pet industry is steadily growing, year by year. It grew from $97.5 billion in 2019 to $99 billion in 2020. That’s $1.5 billion in only one year! Pet owners splurged on everything from pet food and treats to pet sitting, toys, and travel. Pet industry statistics from 2020 predict a compound annual growth rate of 6%.
Not only in the U.S., the Asian and European markets also witnessed steady growth because of the pandemic. 70% of pet owners spent more time with their pets during the lockdown and social distancing and 64% of them spent the same amount of money as before the pandemic while 21% of pet owners splurged even more on their pets than pre-pandemic.
Competitors
Direct competitors (pet gifting): Mutts & Mousers (USA), Canada Pooch (Canada), etc.
Indirect competitors: pet shops and pet food companies, online shopping platforms (Amazon).
PetLovers directly competes with its direct competitors with service and products while also desires cooperation with strong and mature pet shops, pet traveling, and pet insurance markets by adding new products and extensions.
Threats
The biggest threat to PetLovers today is market saturation, either in pet shops or other pet services. It comes from mass and Internet retailers, whose business model are similar to ours. It remains to be seen how that will go.
Another issue that concerns us is that we are not seeing the level of innovation. There are plenty of pet gifting choices but there really aren't major differences and the innovation does not seem to be forthcoming.
Furthermore, PetLovers is new in the market with the ongoing costs.
Competitors
Source: PET INDUSTRY JOINT ADVISORY COUNCIL, ANIMAL WELFARE FOUNDATION OF CANADA, PET FAIR ASIA 2022, BUSINESSWARE.
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ADVISORS
"Customer experience” is broader than the traditional concept of “customer satisfaction” in that a much broader range of impacts is considered, including the customer’s cognitive, affective, emotional, social, and physical relationship to the firm and its products. Therefore, PetLovers will take differentiated marketing strategies on various markets: America, Asia, and Europe. In year 2 and year 3, when PetLovers launch its products to other markets, we will continue to seek advisors to refines its business planning.
MARKETING ANALYTICS
PetLovers will use wix plugin to track the view and behavior of consumers across myriad devices and media channels. Currently, there are a number of software programs available to automatically calculate activities of customers. However, PetLovers aims to use Wix free plugin first for analysis during the first year of launching as the marketing budget is limited. However, PetLovers would consider purchasing powerful analytics firms and software, like Google Analytic if the user is growing exponentially to support further and detailed business marketing analysis.
CHANNELS
- Video content marketing: TikTok, YouTube
-Social Media: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Line, Weibo, Wechat.
- Partnership in-store marketing
-Outdoor advertising
-Ads on PetSitting or Pet Walking Mobile apps.
*Currently, the social media links floating on the right side on the "Home" page belong to Wix. PetLovers will add our social media link once we finish building our social media channel in the coming year.
RETENTION TECHNIQUES
PetLovers will utilize mutiple customer retention techniques to strengthen customer relationships include personalization, one-to-one marketing, interest-based advertising, customization, and customer co-production. Customers could add their initials or names to our products, like matching pajamas; We could also design our products by asking our customers to fill in customer form to get the idea if their pets are allergy sensitive or other information, In this way, we could further bond with our customers.
LONG TAIL
Apart from using the “traditional” online marketing and advertising tools mentioned above, such as search engine, display, and e-mail marketing, and the newer social, mobile, and local marketing and advertising tools, PetLovers will also try to utilize online "long tail" marketing strategies once it dominates the pet gifting market. However, for the moment, PetLovers will focus on other strategies first.
PetLovers will try our best to deliver the right products to YOU and to your pets.
♡