Social Media & Pets- A Marketing Opportunity
May 11, 2007 by Pablo Palatnik
The pet industry has always been a good market to attack. Why? People spend money on their pets. It’s a growing industry as the population of pets grows; the industry will grow with it.
According to APPMA, 44.8 million households own a dog and 38.4 million households own a cat. That is a large population which grows and grows.
Since 1994, the pet industry has been consistently rising from $17 Billion in sales to $38.5 Billion in 2006. It is estimated that $40.8 will spent in 2007.
How can you take advantage of this? I can’t give you the answer but I can tell you if you do, there is a growing market in Social Media for pets. Dogster.com and Catster.com are the largest sites for pets in Social Media. Myspace is also known for having many pets profile, mostly dogs at this point. People love to involve their pets in the online world as they do in their daily lives.
Dogster hosts about 252,697 dog profiles. The site shows growth and has a very positive reputation as well as Catster.
How can you use these sites for your marketing? If you are in the niche of selling dog products, or cat products, create a profile and develop your brand in these networks. The goal more than selling your product in social media networks is selling your brand.
Comments (2)
Thanks for the great write up Pablo. Your blog is great.
I thought that chart looked a little off until I realized my browser was cutting it off at Jan ’07. We’ve really been taking off lately. Here’s a link to the complete image you uploaded
I wanted to jump in and say that actually, you can’t post product profiles on on Dogster or Catster. Unlike MySpace, every profile is for a real person’s dog or cat. We’ve found it really helps keep the passion and the purpose high to keep the focus of the profile pages undiluted.
However, we do most of our ad sales inside and can do all sort of fun things things to introduce products and services to our members. We can put sponsor-like placement on our homepage, biweekly newsletter, forums, local listings, groups. Everything comes from our voice in a way the members are most receptive to. The ROI compared to banners or the like has been really high and our members appreciate that product awareness campaigns and messages are where they want to see them.
If you do want to simply talk about your favorite products without a formal campaign you can always do so in some of our forums, as parts of your real pet pages, or even start a Group. Also if your pet-service has a physical address you can add it to our local listing anytime (http://www.dogster.com/local).
Thanks again for getting what we’re doing.
I just wanted to say I like your website! I was searching on Yahoo when I found this website. After spending some time on this website I’ve come up with some great ideas for a new website. I just thought I’d let you in on it