Marketing your local pet cremation service is different than marketing, say, a technology service nationwide. There are marketing and business plan considerations, digital marketing considerations, advertising considerations, and local review sites that can make or break your pet cremation marketing efforts. In this guide we break down the key elements and show you precisely how to take full advantage of each.
Many pet cremation owners have been taught this idea of a target market. So often where that target market or that targeting ends is with people who have a pet. What we want to suggest is that if you go much deeper than that, decide who has the right problem, who has the right motivation, and who has the right budget? You don’t want to be working with people that can’t afford or value what you do. Just because somebody has teeth, and you’re a dentist, doesn’t mean they’re motivated to take care of, fix, or repair that. You have to understand who’s motivated, who has the problem that you’re suited to solve, and who has the budget.
Finding a way to stand out in the mind of your ideal pet owner, something that differentiates your pet cremation business from every other business that seems to provide the same products and services as you, is hard work, but it might be the most important work. Finding a difference for your pet cremation business is not an easy project. Many owners struggle to come up with a differentiator and often settle on one that doesn’t really differentiate them at all, even worst isn’t valued by an ideal pet owner client. Being different for different’s sake is not enough. The difference you find, claim, and communicate must be of value and speak specifically to your ideal pet owner clients.
Part of your marketing has to be an understanding of how you are going to guide pet owners through the customer journey. The way pet owners shop and research pet cremation services today has changed so dramatically that you have to understand that it’s your job get in the pathway that they are buying. Years ago, we developed a customer focused journey which involves taking people through five stages: Awareness, Education, Sample, Purchase, and Refer. The idea behind that is that if somebody doesn’t know who we are, then we want to move them logically through these stages. Very few people see an ad by a company they’ve never heard of and buy. But they might go to the website and read reviews. This develops a level of awareness, but also some level of trust.
If your website doesn’t show up on the first page of search results on Google, Bing or Yahoo, your potential pet owners might not even know you exist. Pre-internet days, it didn’t take a lot for pet cremation businesses to notify a pet owner that they are located in the same city. Times have changed. Search engines are one of the primary ways that pet owners find nearby products and services. In this digital era, it’s not always so obvious where your business is located or who it is that you serve, and this can be a real challenge for local pet cremation business owners.
Indispensable Marketing takes a process approach to developing and installing your small business marketing.