Influencer Marketing: How to Get Others to Exert Your Influence in the Pet Health Arena

The Internet is a vast place and it’s nigh impossible to get comprehensive coverage for any single brand or product. It’s not like the print world, where you can (often at great expense) purchase a tangible piece of a limited space to say what you have to say. These days, even an unlimited budget won’t guarantee that your messages are seen on even a fraction of a fraction of the available space, even in a specific industry like pet health. Traditional ad dollars are, very often, not applicable on the web.

More and more, brands are coming to rely on influencers to meet marketing goals. You may have heard it: “influencer marketing strategy” is a buzzword that has been gaining serious traction, and it isn’t going away soon. It’s more than a buzzword. It’s a movement, and one often directed by passion.

Influencer marketing is the act of using someone outside the company (or agency) to promote the brand and its products. Bloggers, social media heavies, online editors, industry professionals with a platform – getting the right influencers on your side can be one of the fastest ways to gain awareness or attract followers for your brand, especially in an industry that directly impacts consumers’ loved ones. In the pet health industry, these often have passionate views that really matter to their readers, and that passion goes a long way. These people have built-in relationships with the same audiences you’re looking for, and a kind word from the right writer or editor can make their audience your audience.

Building an audience takes time, money, and effort. A brand can spend years building an audience, and more years keeping it. But these days it might be more economical to shift from building an audience to talking to someone else’s. Simple math says that it’s easier to connect with, say, a dozen people who have healthy followings instead of dealing with the whims and moods of hundreds of thousands of individuals. Rather than investing your resources in efforts to build relationships on your own, you can leverage influencers and their audiences to increase awareness and/or adoption of your product or service. It’s an effective way to increase reach quickly.

Three reasons why influencer marketing is perfect for the pet care industry

Pet parents are crazy

Pet parents are crazy. Yeah, we said it. As we’ve recently discussed, with every generation, pets are treated more and more like members of the family. There’s more of them, and they’re getting crazier all the time. As a marketer in the pet care industry, there are unique advantages to using influencers to engage with pet parents.

Knowing that pets are family and that Millennial pet owners especially value brands that they deem “trustworthy,” it makes sense that influencers hold sway over this audience. Pet health and nutrition companies are highly scrutinized by pet parents, so messages coming from “trusted” voices often matter a lot more to pet owners than the ones coming directly from the companies. Pet owners seek transparency, and what is more transparent than an endorsement from someone they already trust who isn’t affiliated with any specific brand.

At Woodruff Sweitzer, we’ve experienced the influencer phenomenon with pet parents firsthand. For the Diamond Naturals brand, Dennis the Dachshund’s social media presence has become a significant part of the brand’s success. Dennis was a severely overweight dachshund dog who was rescued from abusive owners. >His journey to lose more than 40 pounds and get back to a healthy target weight was documented on Facebook, and the Diamond Naturals brand was prominently featured. The popularity carried over to the brand’s Facebook page, and the community there has become its own type of indirect influencer.

The “customer voices” on both the Diamond Pet Foods and Taste of the Wild Facebook pages are loud and proud as well. Every week, each page hosts #FanPhotoFriday, and the post gets shared and discussed among fans of the brand, without any hands-on activity by the brand. Dozens of photos are submitted every week, and photos are often shared again on other outlets like Instagram, even completing the circle and getting shared by other “influencers.” It’s organic, and the audience truly buys in, without a single ad buy or traditional message.

The veterinary community holds sway

While pet parents are the audience, they’re not the only audience. Veterinarians are a small but potent group of influencers, and if you can get their ear, you can gain quite a bit of cachet that could take years to build otherwise. Vets are very close to the ultimate “target” audience, and they understand the needs and challenges of their clients. A veterinarian (who often also acts as a retailer) won’t recommend or speak highly of a product that they are not completely confident in, and, most importantly, they are trusted by pet owners. A good word from a vet who is willing to speak in a public forum is as good as gold. If that dog doc is respected by his or her peers, that gold multiples at an exponential rate.

This is another example where we’ve seen great success by gaining the trust of influencers in the field. When marketing the AlphaTRAK blood glucose monitoring system, Zoetis wanted to support its position as a market leader in pet diabetes and specifically at-home monitoring. To do that without conducting expensive market research yet gain credibility quickly, they looked to expert opinions of veterinarian specialists who had gained the respect of general veterinarians. Woodruff Sweitzer helped the company assemble a roundtable of key opinion leaders to discuss topics covering diagnosing pet diabetes and how at-home monitoring helps pets live healthy lives with a manageable condition. The fact-based thoughts of experts on these topics were enough to create positions, expert experiences and messaging that was captured and spun off into a number of communications about the entire issue as opposed to solely talking about the product.

Through the support of these industry experts, Zoetis was able to establish superior credibility quickly. The goal was to get more practicing veterinarians aware of the need to recommend the AlphaTRAK at-home blood glucose monitor, yet the majority of the efforts didn’t mention the product at all. By organizing one roundtable of experts, a marketing platform was created and used for several months.

A crowded category

The pet care industry has seen rapid growth recently. The American Pet Products Association (APPA) predicted that American pet owners would spend $62.75 billion on pet products in 2016, nearly $2.5 billion more than in 2015, and almost $15 billion more than was spent in 2010. Sales have doubled in less than 15 years.

But with constant growth comes constant noise. New, repositioned and “improved” products are everywhere, and it’s very hard to be heard above the din. Luckily, credible influencers can help a company or brand stand out from the clutter. An influencer has, ahem, influence often because he or she is a filter for their audience. The audience goes to that source because they know that they’ll find what they want and need to know. If your brand can align with an industry expert who has a platform that is consistent with the goals of your product, who speaks to an audience that doesn’t even know they need your products or services, the noise suddenly becomes a focus. The good thing about clutter is that the clean areas stand out even more in the midst of it.

Finding the influence

Well, that’s our job, isn’t it? In a growing field with many voices, a marketing agency that knows how to find the right influencers, those that are heard by your audience, is invaluable. With a deep background in pet care, chances are that we already have the “right” influencers on speed dial.