Finding Local Clients...

It could be worthy just being at some local online directories, Google places is a good place to start, checkout Yell dot com and many others. There are also other cool street marketing strategies like door to door if you learn how to do it properly.

Social Media - Facebook is another great place which should work well for your type of business IMHO, go create a page or/and group and use FB Social Ads to drive traffic to your page or group if you have the budget for it, otherwise engage fans by posting a lot of informative posts and so forth.

Pinterest should be great too, I have a strong feeling Social Media will do very well.

Hi Robin,

What you may want to do is see if you can do a cross promotion with a complementary business. I know you said Pet care, so I'm not sure what they entails, but maybe you can find your local pet supply or veterinarians in your area, and have them to provide your promotional materials to your customer base. You can ask them to send a solo email to their customer base, and tell them you will pay them a referral fee for every customer they refer to you.

You should check out the "offline marketing" section of this forum for help. But i'm sure you can do a joint venture with a non-competitive (but similar) website in your niche. Tried it already?

One of the cool things I just discovered is that my city has there own small version of "craigslist/barter town" on a Facebook group. There is a good chance your city may the same type of group. Also, I promote my local computer business on Craigslist and although there are some crazies on there, I've actually gotten some great clients off there. So don't rule it out!

Hey Robin - great advice here from those suggesting a J/V with a complimentary business in town. I think the best thing any new business can do is ask yourself "who already does business with my ideal client?" and then work out some kind of deal to get those companies to help spread the word about you.

If you were more established I'd say you could promote them to your clients in exchange for their promoting you to their clients, but when you're just starting out, I think offering to pay a certain percentage or dollar amount per sale they send your way is great.

In addition to targeting vets and pet food stores which are great ideas, any animal shelters or dog groomers would be good places to have promoting your services too.

HTH, and check your PMs as I sent you something that may help too.

Steve

P.S. FYI...The Facebook link in your profile here seems to be broken.

Hey Robin - I find cross-promotions and events relating to your niche to work well along with what you are doing now. They give you opportunities to network with that type of clients. Fllowup is also important.

Robin, out of all of the marketing you've done. What has been the most effective? And most importantly of all - are you MEASURING your efforts?

Did the brochures and etc work for you? Did they bring you new customers? you can always start the social marketing like google+ and facebook and later on when you have an amount of email addresses you can use an email marketing company to promote your offers and keep your customers up-to date ...

Robin,
I can offer some insight. I helped my wife kick off her pet care business 2 years ago. Strong, strong web presence. In her area, the major "players" for website positions 1-10 on Google weren't very strong at all. Didn't take long to do a bunch of onsite and offsite seo to beat those people. Brochures do work, but it's all percentage based. She did a mailing 4 months ago targetting vacation people and got 1 client out of it.

Now, the good thing is that $250 dollar spend on marketing turned into a $600+ job PLUS that client is now a word of mouth referral. Priceless if you ask me.

I'd target the web first. Get a strong social media presence, good website and get ranked. Also make sure you follow up with a Google Places account and get on there as well.

Most of the people will either come to you as word of mouth (referral) or someone typing into google/bing/yahoo "your city pet sitter" or "pet sitter your city".

One last word of advice and one that has garnered a TON of business for her: order a rear window vinyl sticker from this person:

http://www.etsy.com/shop/glassden

We've ordered ours through her and it came out awesome. Cheap too.

Hey Robin, I just noticed this appears to be a franchise business you own?

Surely they have marketing systems in place for you to follow - or have those things not been working for you?

Hi Robin,

Great to hear you started your own pet care business! A few things I would suggest is to definitely get your webpage presence up on Google. Being the top 3 lists on Google will help new customers search your website and hopefully inquire about your services.

I also like your wrapped vehicle..it is sure to turn some heads!

Another thing you can do on your flyers is incorporate a text marketing campaign on it. It is by far 75x more effective than emails. On your flyers, have your potential clients text petcare to 96362 to receive a promotion directly to their cell phone. Whether they do honor the promotion or not, you will have their mobile number to send special promotions at a later date to entice them. This text campaign can be applied to any type of marketing material..even your vehicle!

WOW, quite a new question. Anyways, I would suggest putting those flyers in other pet care businesses in the area.

If you have funds to invest try:

• Sending out a press release announcing your business along with a discount.
• Paid advertising with Facebook/Google Adwords/Bing.
• Placing a coupon in a coupon package that is distributed with local newspapers (or however they're distributed in your neck of the woods). Start small with a narrow geographic base (an upscale community) to limit the cost.
• Paying a small fee to sponsor a magazine rack (or pay for the magazines) in a local vet's office (and other related professionals, if any). Encase the magazines in a nice clear cover with your business info.

A top ranking site in the search engines targeting buying keywords can do wonders for any local business. In my area, towns with 140,000 to 400,000 pet grooming businesses have very little SEO competition. I can't imagine it would be terribly hard to rank well in the search engines.

A top ranking Google Places listing can also do wonders. Again, unless you live in a large urban center, I don't think it would be too hard to do.

Start a pet care blog on your site. I know it's a lot of work, but I did this when I owned an offline business and it worked really well.

Offer referral incentives to your current customers such as free care sessions/services if they refer you business.

Write a pet care guide for a particular type of pet or pets and ask local pet stores whether they will place it on their counter (even if for a fee or you must include flyers promoting the store in the guide). I'd inquire to the pet stores first. However, any guide you write can be used in many ways ... to attract leads on your site, as a Kindle book, a straight download with your business info in the book, etc.

Good luck.

yes i will also sayin that google places is best