Hosting a pet show is no walk in the park, but with the right promotional strategies, you can get a huge crowd and excited contestants. In this blog, you’ll learn the top tips and tricks to promote your upcoming pet show.
Once you’ve set up the stage and made all the arrangements for your upcoming pet show, it’s time to think about what you can do to encourage contestants to participate and the general audience to show up and enjoy the show. Here are our five highly effective promotional strategies to get a larger crowd and make your pet show the talk of the town.
Flyers and banners will do the trick
Since your pet show is an event primarily focused on residents of your area, you must focus on physical marketing. This could be going door-to-door or sending out invitation cards to the entire neighborhood. But that’s going to cost you money unnecessarily.
Instead, we recommend posting pet flyers throughout your neighborhood, especially in high-traffic areas like street junctions. Do this well in advance so that you can attract as many eyeballs as possible. Make sure you specify the date, time, and venue of the pet show, as well as your contact number in case anyone needs to register as a contestant.
Designing posters doesn’t have to be difficult. You can use an online poster maker like PosterMyWall, which hosts dozens of pet flyer templates for you to craft dynamic and catchy banners promoting your pet show, or learn how to make a poster in no time using other online tools.
Create a dynamic website
Physical marketing efforts can only take you so far. That’s why you need to have an online presence so you can promote your pet show beyond your residential area or neighborhood. Start with creating a user-friendly and dynamic website. Since you’re not selling any product or service, this could be a one-page website with a registration form for participants.
You could also have a website blog post where you post announcements about any upcoming events. Alternatively, you could write articles on how to train your pet in 3 weeks or how to potty-train them if they’re adult pets. You get the gist — make sure the content you produce adds tangible value to your readers.
Content is everything
In today’s day and age of digital marketing, content is king. Content helps you build a loyal following and drives engagement. The more you engage your audience, the more chances you’ll have of attracting a big crowd to your pet show. We already discussed that you must churn out content that’s valuable, but that’s not all — you need to be consistent with it.
Whether it’s posting articles on your website blog, uploading a new video on your YouTube channel, or posting a tweet, be consistent with your content. If you’re posting one article every week, one YouTube video every 1.5 weeks, and four social media posts every week, then stick with that schedule.
Market on Facebook and Instagram
If you want your pet show to have an audience well beyond your residential area, you must promote it on your social media channels, particularly Facebook and Instagram. The key to marketing on social media is to avoid walls of text (save that for your website blog) and insert catchy images and banners wherever possible.
You could also post snippets of your last pet show and show how much fun that was. This would provide a live demonstration to the audience of what your upcoming pet show is going to be like. Just make sure you thoroughly edit your videos, make them dynamic, add some music, and shorten them to make them snackable. If you have already started building traction, you could run paid ads on Facebook to accelerate your promotion.
Pair up with an influencer
You could run paid ads on social media, but I would rather you pair up with a local social media influencer on Instagram or Facebook who has a substantial following. Influencers have a loyal following, and if you can get them excited about your pet show, you can get a significant portion of their audience excited too. Some top influencers you can get a hold of are Nala Cat (4.3 million followers) and Doug the Pug (3.9 million followers). Apart from them, there are plenty of other pet lover influencers out there on Facebook and Instagram.
But picking out the right influencer isn’t easy. You must choose someone who you think would be genuinely interested in not only promoting your pet show but also being a part of it. If you do this right, you can have a significantly larger crowd than you would expect, so make sure you have arrangements for all the people.
Some final thoughts
While the above promotional tips are tried and tested, you must remember that not every pet show is the same or works the same way. It very much depends on how inclined your audience is to attend a pet show near or far from their residential area. So, make sure you experiment with a bunch of strategies to identify which ones work best for you.