In the age of TikTok and Instagram Reels, social media is a must-have marketing tool for any business, but especially so for those selling pet products and services. You only need to check out the densely populated feed of pet parents (including yours truly) to see the full potential at play.
However, if you want to generate sustainable revenue and business growth from these efforts, you’ll need to do a lot more than just post some cute dog photos on your brand accounts.
Today, we’ll walk you through seven tactics to help you build a pet business social marketing strategy that generates substantial brand awareness, drives more customers to your website or pet store, and helps you stand out in the crowded social space.
These strategies have led our pet brand clients like Tactipup to stunning results — including seven-figure sales numbers — and they can set the foundation for similar growth for your brand, too.
The video below is hosted on YouTube. If you need assistance with viewing the video, please contact info@goinflow.com.
Keep reading to learn more — or, if you want a comprehensive pet business marketing strategy for your brand, visit us at the Global Pet Expo from March 20–22 or request a free strategy proposal from our team today.
Organic vs. Paid Social
Before we dive too deeply into our recommended tactics for pet brand social media marketing, let’s discuss an important differentiator: the use of organic vs. paid social for your pet product or service-based business.
Many pet brands start their social media marketing journey with organic campaigns. While these efforts are a great way to spread brand awareness at a low (even free) cost, the extent of your success is dictated by Facebook’s algorithm and the rare possibility of going viral.
With social media companies continually shrinking the reach of organic posts, paying for promoted posts (i.e. social media advertising) is often the only way to reach your full audience of followers. It’s also a much more efficient way of expanding your audience to find new prospective customers.
Paid social campaigns require significant investment, but in today’s day and age, they’re the most effective way to scale your pet business’s growth and deliver the most immediate return on your investment (ROI).
Bottom line: As you’re building your pet brand social media marketing strategy, you must include both organic and paid campaigns to find success.
In this guide, we’ll give you a leg up by including our favorite marketing tips and tricks that apply to this combined approach.
7 Strategies for Successful Pet Brand Social Media Marketing
Here at Inflow, we’ve guided both brick-and-mortar and online stores through the complexities of social media marketing to achieve incredible growth results.
From the doubling of overall revenue to seven-figure sales months, our social media management has transformed our pet clients’ businesses through custom, optimized marketing strategies that other agencies overlook.
Below, find seven of our team’s go-to tactics to help you improve your own campaigns and take your pet brand to the next level.
1. Gather an extensive library of creative with in-house and UGC sources.
The pet industry is a highly visual one. The more attractive you can make your products and/or services through video and photo, the more attention you’ll get — and the more potential customers you can engage with.
If you haven’t yet, take the time and money to build an in-house library with high-quality images/videos of your products, your team in action, customers’ pets, and other key visuals. The more you have in your back pocket, the more options you’ll give yourself with your social media campaigns, allowing you to keep up with viral moments, seasonality, and other online trends.

You can (and should) also lean on your customer base to gather authentic, compelling user-generated content. These testimonials and images are powerful tools in convincing pet lovers to give your brand a shot; reliability in advertising is consistently reported to be nearly twice as important as popularity.
Start gathering effective, engaging UGC from your audience by keeping this advice in mind:
- UGC doesn’t have to be of high-production quality. We’ve run dozens of tests here at Inflow, and the result is clear: Your creative doesn’t need to be professional-quality to resonate with consumers. In fact, sometimes average-quality UGC from your customers will perform better than professionally produced videos and images!
- Customer incentives can be incredibly effective. If you’re at a loss for where to find UGC featuring your brand, use your existing customer list. Offer gift cards for leaving photo reviews on your website, or host a giveaway to inspire creative videos and images of your customers’ furry friends.
- Branded hashtags are the way to go. If you don’t already have one, start using a branded hashtag on all of your social posts. Your loyal followers will catch on and use the same one when posting their UGC, making it much easier for you to locate in the future.
2. Target the right audience for your goals.
We’ve already discussed how organic and social media marketing serves two different purposes and, often, two different audiences. But even paid targeting is about more than just serving ads to “customers” at large.
To be effective with your social media campaigns (both organic and promoted), you need to get specific with your creative, copy, and audience segments. Prospective buyers continually move through a purchase funnel, where they first become aware of a product and spend time considering it before pulling the final trigger to purchase.

Therefore, you can’t just blast out discounts and promotions to a wide audience and expect a great return. Remember: Some of those people will have never heard of your product before.
We recommend following our “See, Think, Do” method, which outlines the different stages of this funnel and provides guidance for properly engaging your audience at each stage.
As an example, here’s how we’d put this model into action for a pet food company:
- “See” (Brand Awareness): A “Reach” campaign featuring attractive creative of a pet eating the brand’s product would target a wide audience of pet owners.
- “Think” (Consideration): Using a segmented list of audiences who have engaged with the previous campaign, we’d retarget that audience network with creative that boasts the value proposition of the brand and product.
- “Do” (Conversion): The final campaign would target those highly interested audiences with creative designed to drive conversion, such as a discount code or promotion.
To learn more about Inflow’s unique social targeting, or to see what a similar strategy may look like for your brand, reach out to our digital experts today.
3. Be strategic with affiliate marketing.
Pet brands and influencers go hand in hand. In an industry that relies heavily on organic visibility and attractive creative, it’s no wonder that top brands choose to partner with affiliate marketers to enhance product awareness.
However, as influencer marketing has developed, it’s gotten much more complex. Generating revenue from these partnerships involves more than just paying a pet influencer to show off your product in their latest video. Without the proper research and planning, your brand could just be throwing money away.
Here are a few things to consider:
- How does your target audience align with that of the influencer? Influencers like Doug the Pug may have millions of followers, but not all of those are active pet owners looking to purchase from your brand. In other words, don’t fall into the trap of advertising your product to a bunch of non-pet owners who follow the social media account just to see cute photos.
- Will your placement be authentic or awkward? Consumers value authenticity more than anything else. An obvious ad can bring a social media feed to a screeching halt — and even turn consumers off from your brand entirely. If you can, it’s best to find existing customers for influencer partnerships, which will read more authentically.
- Do nontraditional influencers fit the bill? Lots of pet brands partner with popular dog influencers, but not as many take the route of partnering with veterinarians, groomers, and other industry professionals. This can be an ideal route for pet care or food/health products, considering that these professionals have built a degree of trust with their audiences, simply by the nature of their careers.
4. Avoid oversaturation and audience fatigue.
Developing a library of videos and images doesn’t just give you plenty of media to work with; it also serves a key purpose in keeping your social media advertising campaigns fresh.
Many American consumers are on Facebook every day, making them easy candidates for ad fatigue. The more a user sees the same creative, the less they tend to notice it — or even worse, the ads will become irritating to the viewer, which creates a negative brand association.
Fortunately, you can identify potential ad fatigue by reviewing three important metrics.
- Reach (cumulative): This is the number of people who saw your ads at least once over the lifetime of the campaign. This metric will always be increasing, but it is important to monitor when that growth begins to slow down, as you may see diminishing performance over time.
- First-time impression ratio: This is the percentage of Facebook users who have seen your ad more than once. You can calculate this by taking the number of new people reached each day and dividing it by the total number of impressions. We recommend keeping this metric around 67%. Any lower, and it’s likely time to refresh your campaign or target a new audience.
- Ad frequency: This is the number of times an individual sees your ad. We generally recommend keeping this metric to less than two for a prospecting campaign, although retargeting campaigns may have higher frequencies.
You can find these metrics and more in the “View Charts” button next to each campaign in your Ads Manager.

Read more about preventing ad fatigue and other strategies for crafting an effective Facebook Ad in our complete guide.
5. Consider social media platforms other than Meta and TikTok.
With privacy-related updates restricting audience data on trusted platforms like Meta, diversifying your advertising efforts today will put your brand in a much stronger position and prevent stagnating results from an overreliance on one channel in the future.
We recommend exploring ad channels like Reddit and Pinterest to reach new audiences instead.
For many businesses, these channels are cheaper than expected — and, when managed correctly, hold massive potential (such as the 250% increase in sales generated for one of our eCommerce clients).
Choosing the right advertising platforms can be tricky, but an experienced marketing agency such as Inflow can evaluate your brand strengths and weaknesses to recommend the best for your business.
For example, Pinterest can be a slam dunk for personalized pet supplies like collars, due to their visual appeal. It’s also a space where many major pet stores are failing to advertise, as seen in the screenshot below.

6. Engage with your community.
It’s not enough to blast out your product and messaging across social media. You’ll also need to curate a relationship with your followers by engaging with them consistently.
This doesn’t just mean liking/commenting on posts and resharing any UGC shared with your brand hashtag. It also involves strategic social listening, through which you’ll discover what your audience is talking about — and which opportunities your company has to become part of that conversation.
For this reason, the best social media strategies are run by marketing professionals who can dedicate their day-to-day to monitoring your accounts and engaging with followers. If they have to spend their time on other marketing channels, they may miss crucial opportunities to hop on trends or other important brand touchpoints.
If you’re starting from scratch with your social community, the following tactics can help you kickstart your engagement numbers:
- Product giveaways
- Photo contests
- Polls
- Q&A sessions
- Webinars
7. Don’t forget about your non-social marketing channels.
While social media marketing is a key part of helping your pet brand grow, you can’t rely on this channel alone to keep your business afloat. Sure, many new products are launched through virality on TikTok or Instagram Reels — but without outreach on other channels, those sales can quickly fizzle out.
When you rely on a single marketing channel, your business is at the mercy of that platform’s algorithm, unpredictable virality, and yo-yoing ad performance. By expanding your advertising efforts, you can still maintain results where your audience first found you but also find new audiences where you may least expect them.
Take Tactipup as an example. The online retailer had originally found success with Facebook and Instagram ads — but, as our agency team found in our initial audit, they were neglecting crucial channels like paid search advertising.
When reviewing Tactipup’s customer journey, we discovered that many customers traveled back and forth between paid social and search channels before making their final purchase:

By investing time and money into these PPC campaigns (while still running their social ads), we were able to fill the gaps in that funnel and ensure that interested customers found Tactipup and its products wherever they happened to be searching, resulting in more than $500,000 in sales in one month alone. (Read more about our approach here.)

That said, the channels you choose to spend your time and money on can make or break your brand’s success. For an expert review of your current situation (and recommendations for which channels to expand to next), schedule a free consultation with our marketing team.
Creating an Effective Pet Brand Social Media Marketing Strategy for 2024 and Beyond
With the pet industry set to grow exponentially in the years to come, building the right foundation for your brand will be instrumental in outlasting your competition. And, while any business can post cute dog photos on their social pages, the real marker of successful social media marketing is strategic, long-term planning managed by experts in the field.
That’s where Inflow comes in. As experts in the digital marketing space, our strategies have generated stellar results for brands like Tactipup, Pawstruck, and more — and we can do the same for your business, too.
With our decades of experience in the pet industry, we can craft a personalized approach that achieves your growth goals through smart, sustainable social media campaigns. Learn more by requesting a free consultation and strategy proposal today.
In the meantime, check out our other helpful guides for social media and pet industry marketing below:
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