Advertising to Pet Owners
As an employed groomer, you are free of the many responsibilities of marketing and advertising. You are however dependent upon the business owner to develop and maintain the clientele. As a business owner, you are at the helm of continually developing a clientele. Even a pet groomer with maximum clientele needs some customers to replace those that move away, pass away, or suffer pet loss. Self-employment means you are not only a groomer, but also a marketing expert in the making. Marketing and advertising pet care are very unique. It’s not like selling retail goods. You are selling confidence and safety as much as you are grooming. The world’s largest pet care businesses understand that pet care is only the beginning of marketing attributes and that it’s the pet parents, the clients, paying the bills you present, not the animals. That may seem obvious but most pet grooming businesses do not market their client services. Check it out. We actually just gave you a major insider secret.
Working with new grooming business owners for so long has given us some insight into the most common problem they have. They set up a business and assume that advertising will do the magic. To them, marketing is simply making up some coupons, placing some ads and a sign and the business comes running. Some groomers have experienced that fortune. Most groomers without an established following endure the stress of a startup where in the beginning they may only groom one or two pets a day.
Sometimes the slow growth expands for many weeks. Long before you open your business you should be studying the unique nature of marketing and advertising pet grooming services, and studying your local demographics as well. You need a written marketing plan. Normally that would be in your business plan or part of its backup. If you don’t create at minimum a marketing and advertising plan weeks before you open, you are certainly at the whims of Fate. Quite a few new owners have shared their plights in our GroomerTALK™ Community and a lack of advanced planning in detail is always the source of problems.
Fortunately, you can rely on plenty of assistance to help you today. It wasn’t always that way. There we no major management books for groomers until our book, From Problems to Profits: The Madson Management System for Pet Grooming Businesses was published. We know. For 25 years we didn’t have a single business book devoted to pet grooming management to help us. That’s why we wrote it. We felt having so little business knowledge shared amongst groomers was holding our industry back, and to some degree that is still true today. Most groomers would rather go consistently to how-to groom seminars rather than grooming management, and yet is their management that delivers the pets to groom to even have the business let alone afford continuing education. The priorities are mixed up.
We also host a website called Find A Groomer Directory™ for pet owners. You can list your business there at no charge. We suggest you look for other grooming websites with directories as well.
At this point we want you to know that plenty of marketing and advertising information is available when you are ready. Many groomers that have never owned a business get anxious when it comes to suddenly being responsible for advertising. No need to worry. We have the resources to get you started and you can interact with others on our message board. You’ve got friends at GroomerTALK™ Community that desire your success. ♦
