6 Advertising Strategies to Get More Doggie Daycare Customers

If you're the owner of a pet daycare and boarding facility, you're well aware of how difficult it can be to get customers in your door, especially if you're a new doggie daycare and you're entering into a saturated market.

However, don't think that it's impossible. Even in small cities, there are still ways that you can find new customers and increase your business's revenue. That said, if you're looking for some advertising tips for your dog kennel, you're in the right place.

Below you'll find six simple advertising tips that should get more people into your pet boarding facility.

Take Out an Ad in your Local Newspaper

This might seem like the most basic form of advertising, but that’s because…it is! However, local newspapers, like Denver’s WestWord or the Miami New Times are a great way to focus in on the younger demographic. Pay a graphic designer to make you an attractive banner advertisement, and run it for a few weeks in your local paper. Make sure to track your results so you know if your ROI is good. As a dog daycare owner, I'm sure you're quite familiar with getting phone calls from SEO companies trying to sell you their snake oil. Don't listen to them. You’d be surprised how well old fashion advertising can still work. As a dog daycare or boarding kennel, you don't really need to advertise on a huge scale. You're looking for people in the area. What better than a local newspaper. You can hyper-focus your advertising because the geographic area of your clients is quite small.

Use Google AdWords to Do Location-Specific Advertising in your City

Google AdWords is a great way to advertise your doggie daycare business. With the location-based advertising that AdWords lets you do, you’ll be able to have your advertisements show only in the city where your business is located. You will most likely have to pay about $1 every time someone clicks on your Google advertising, but if every 30 clicks produces a new client, that’s a $30 cost per acquisition. When it comes to Google advertising, it takes money to make money. You're going to have to pay to play, but the results can be very good. If you can get your cost per acquisition down to $30, you're doing great! It's also not a bad idea of use a thing called Remarketing. This is where if someone visits your website, they will then see ads for your website around the internet. It works great to build brand identity because people will continue to see your banner ads.

Sponsor a Local Sports Team of Young Adults

This is one of the oldest tricks in the book to get cheap advertising for your doggie daycare. Go find your local 20-something sports league and offer to sponsor a team. You’ll be required to pay for their jersies(which will have your logo and website URL), and you’ll most likely need to pay their entrance fee into the league. However, every single week, your brand will get in front of hundreds of new eyes. With many young adult couples deciding to get a pet instead of have children, these are exactly the kind of people you want to be seeing your business. Plus, you'll generate quite a bit more word-of-mouth advertising. People playing in the league or watching are sure to notice your logo on the shirts of the athletes. They might even take their phone out at the game and look up your website, who knows?

Use Facebook Geo-Targeting and Like-Focusing to Find Pet Owners

As much as Facebook can be a money-suck for small businesses, it also serves a great purpose. If lets you focus on people with very specific interests. Using a very small marketing budget at the start, go some geo-located advertising in your city. Focus on users that have dogs and are located within a certain radius of your zip code. With some testing, you’ll be able to hone in and target the exact users that you’re looking for. One of the beautiful things about online marketing these days is that you can focus your advertising much more tightly than you ever could before. Take advantage of this when you start marketing your doggie daycare and focus on your exact target market.

Find Bring-Your-Dog-to-Work-Companies and Offer Them a Deal

Many newer tech companies offer their employees the ability to bring their dogs/cats to work. This is a great perk to employees and a great business opportunity for you. Contact the HR department, and tell them you’d like to partner with them as their official doggie daycare and boarding facility. When employees head out of town, you can offer them a discount on their service(and have their employer pick up the difference.) Imagine you usually charge $40/night at your facility. You can charge the employees of Company X only $20 and have their employer pick up the remaining $20. This is a great benefit they can offer their employees and you’ll get a ton of new business. Tech companies are flush with money, so you might be able to work with a company like Zestful and get your business listed as one of their business perks. This will help you drive new revenue and give businesses a great new perk for employees.

Offer Dog Pickup and Delivery and Wrap Your Vehicle in Advertising

This advertising strategy might be better for dog boarding facilities than for doggie daycare facilities, but since DoggieDashboard works with both types of businesses, we thought we should mention it. Many pet owners are busy in the morning. The last thing they want to do is drive out of the way to your pet boarding facility. By employing a pickup and delivery driver (a pet taxi), you can schedule to have pets picked up and dropped off at a particular hour of the day (for a fee of course). You’ll be able to offer needed service to your clients, and they will appreciate it with giving you long-term business and maybe even some referral business. If you have the disposable income, think about wrapping your pickup vehicle in marketing materials. This can be a great way to get your brand in front of hundreds of eyes every day. If someone with a dog sees your van at a stoplight and sees “Pickup and Delivery”, they just might remember your name and call you in the future.

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