Fortune 500 Strategies for Pet Care Pros

By Caroline Shin

There's no reason for small businesses to think small. The same strategies that enable Fortune 500 companies to grow can work just as well for firms of every size. If anything, small firms need to be even more mindful of their brand and marketing plans than big companies do, since each relationship with a customer is so much more crucial and intimate.

Identify Your Brand

All businesses have a brand, whether or not they are conscious of it. How do your customers identify and perceive you? Take coffee, for example. It's really nothing more than flavored water, but whether you buy yours at 7-Eleven or Starbucks says quite a bit about both you and the kind of retail establishments you favor.

Because it says so much, your brand shouldn't be the product of accident. To think like a big company, start by writing a mission statement that describes your purpose: who you are as a company. For example, Wal-Mart's mission statement is to help people save money so they can live better. For a groomer, a mission statement might be this: We provide compassionate, affordable, and expert grooming care.

Here is another example: Your pet's well-being is our first priority. A regular grooming routine can be just as important to your pet's health as a visit to the vet, and we make it easy to maintain your pet's vitality.

This could be a third approach: A distinctive and relaxing retreat, providing pet grooming and supplies for discerning owners and their stylish companions.

Determine Your Target Customer

Defining your purpose helps you identify your target customer, which will help focus your marketing efforts on people who are most likely to use your services. You can't be everything to everyone, and you shouldn't try; that approach can reduce the effectiveness of your marketing.

The next step is to make sure that every aspect of your business supports how you want your customers to perceive you. Your name, your pricing, your interior design, your advertising - are they convincing to your target customer?

Develop a Marketing Plan

Once your business aligns with your brand, it's time to develop a marketing plan. Your brand and mission don't change, but your marketing plan evolves constantly to address your current needs, gaps, and market conditions.

What are your goals? Are you trying to attract more customers? Increase margins using your existing customer base? Enhance your reputation? Numbers and analysis are your best friends during this exercise.

Let's say you want to add clients. First take a snapshot: how many pets do you groom in a week? What is your goal? Now forecast how each marketing initiative will affect those numbers. A Yellow Pages ad might bring in one more customer per week; a customer referral discount program might attract three.

Then look at your budget. Again, it's essential to crunch the numbers and track from where the numbers - the customers - are coming. If it costs $100 for a Yellow Pages ad that brings in five new customers, is your cost per acquisition ($20) lower than the amount of profit a new customer will bring in over a specific time period? You might calculate that at $50 per service, yielding a profit of $12.50 after accounting for overhead and commission expenses, a new customer would have to come in twice to cover the money you invested to attract him or her.

In this way, you can predict how many customers you'll attract for the amount you are able to invest and determine whether there are marketing tactics available that cost less and will bring in more volume.

Data equals knowledge, which leads to earnings. Let's say you need to increase your profits but can't adjust other factors such as the number of pets your groomers can handle or the number of people on your staff. You might consider raising your fees. All it takes is a simple computation to determine whether the amount you'd net after a price increase will compensate for the number of customers you might lose.

Take your best guess at the number of grooms you could lose in a week after a price increase. Then calculate last year's total revenue adjusted for your new rates. Subtract the number of grooms you might lose. Would you make more money or less in the new paradigm?

The way to get the kind of data that allows you to make these calculations and run your business smarter is to use software to track every customer and every service, every day. Technology will also enable you to reach out to new customers and take better advantage of praise from satisfied ones.

Design Effective Promotions

Your technology presence begins with a website that offers content and applications useful to your customer base. Facebook and emails help you reach customers directly and, better yet, retain them. It's much less expensive to keep an existing customer than to acquire one. It's also less expensive to book appointments, even with promotional discounts, than to leave large blocks of time unused, and it's been proven that reminder emails can nearly eliminate no-shows.

Through email services, like Constant Contact or MailChimp, pet grooming software, and Facebook, you can use promotions to increase grooming frequency, up-selling and cross-selling, not to mention prompting happy customers to refer their friends and rewarding them for referrals - automatically. Again, the impact of such marketing tactics is easy to measure. There's no doubt where a customer found a given promotional code, for example, and the very ability to measure results helps you to enhance them. Thinking like a Fortune 500 company may not turn your business into a multinational brand, but it can transform it into a well-oiled machine that enhances your life and provides a vital service to the members of your community. And if you decide to go global, what's stopping you?

Caroline Shin is the co-founder of Store Vantage, a cloud-based customer and appointment management software service. Caroline is passionate about customer service and has spent the bulk of her career working for companies, small and large, that embrace technology to deliver excellent customer experience. She is also the owner of Spot Pet Care, a pet grooming store in Northern California.