Have you ever wondered how social media could help in promoting your animal shelters and welfare programs?
Social media is a fast-growing technology, and for many good reasons. It helps in improving your engagements for forging maximum adoptions and donations. Many animal shelters are leveraging social media to grow their brand reach, and if you also want to get the hang of this incredible marketing strategy, follow this guide to create a solid social media marketing campaign.
What Is Social Media Marketing for Animal Shelters?
With around 6.5 million animal pets entering shelter homes annually, it is crucial to put your animal shelter in the limelight. Social media marketing for animal shelters is the best way to reach your potential clients and offer them valuable offers to adopt adorable little pets.
Gone are the days when people rely on word-of-mouth or conventional marketing methods to share their word with their target audience. Now, businesses are actively seeking opportunities to promote their brand through various social media platforms.
In fact, it has been researched that around 3.2 million animals are adopted every year through shelter houses. With this great number of animals being adopted, it emphasizes the importance of marketing your animal shelter homes to reach prospective adopters.
Social media for animal shelters works as a way to catch the attention of your potential clients and encourage them to adopt and help animals from your rescue homes. It means that when more than half of the world’s population is on social media, you will be able to share your word and catapult your animal pets in front of your target audience, irrespective of the location.
Why Social Media Is Important for Animal Shelters?
According to the survey conducted by edge research in 2018, It has been found out that around 86% of animal shelter organizations managed to create solid brand awareness, while 66% experienced a significant increase in adoption rate through the correct usage of social media.
It means that social media is not only helpful in promoting and creating your brand awareness but also helps in achieving your overall business goals. For example, an average person spends about 145 minutes per day on social media; it gives you the opportunity to craft compelling content and feature in their feeds to encourage them to visit your animal shelter’ profile.
Moreover, social media allows you to connect directly with your customers, identifying their needs and aligning your social media strategies to their best interests.
In fact, one of the recognized digital marketers, Neil Patel, is in awe of the positive impact of social media on customer relationships by saying, “Social media marketing gives you the chance to ‘humanize’ your brand. Social media is powerful because it gives you the chance to connect with people in a personal way.”
Since social media is now in the rage, it is the peak time for animal shelters to harness its ultimate power to strengthen their business reputation and achieve higher adoption and donation rates for the sake of animals.
How to Do Social Media Marketing for Animal Shelters?
There is nothing more satisfying than helping a stray dog find a new home. That’s what makes animal shelter homes an important part of society. But it’s not only about rescuing animals but finding potential adopters and donators to help find or create a comforting place for them.
But how could social media help in achieving these goals? The proper planning and execution of social media strategies could help your animal shelter in the long run. Therefore, we have curated this guide to provide you with six excellent tips to market your animal shelter on social media for ultimate reach and engagement.
1. Plan Your Social Media Marketing Strategy
Planning your social media strategy at the beginning of your efforts could help you yield preferred outcomes. You must plan before starting your social media journey to align your marketing strategies with your dedicated goals and objectives.
You can begin by determining your goals, such as whether you want to promote your animal shelter to increase adoptions or you just need to drive a donation campaign for your rescued animals. No matter what you might want to achieve, identifying your goals would help you in achieving measurable results.
Moreover, you must also consider knowing your target audience. Although everyone loves animals, In fact, 66% of U.S. household owns a pet. But you still need to figure out what your audience prefers to see on your social media profiles. It helps in connecting with your audience in a more effective way.
2. Know the Right Platform
When it comes to knowing the best social media marketing platform for animal shelters, Tiktok and Instagram stand tall. With 2 million monthly active users, Instagram is the perfect way to post exhilarating posts about your animal shelters evoking people’s emotions. While TikTok videos can help you reach new audiences to raise awareness about animal adoptions and donations.
However, it depends on your marketing goals and target audience to say which social media platforms work best for you. But you need to make sure to build a solid strategy to post effective content on whatever platform you are using. You can simply post short videos on Facebook to generate a great response from a wider audience, while you can even use Twitter to post pictures of lovely pets in your shelter.
Moreover, you can also leverage Facebook to create virtual events and run targeted ads to reach your audience, allowing them to register for your events or pet shows. You might be needed to spend a few dollars on paid advertising methods, but you can get amazing responses from them.
2. Create Influential Content
Influencing your audience and encouraging them to take the coveted action requires optimizing your social media content. Start by brainstorming ideas to write captivating captions, ad copies and designing appealing posts.
Make sure to remain transparent and post original and unique content. You can always add humor to your posts but make sure to preserve the sensitivity of the topic or post. Maintain the balance between posting sad and happy posts by showing the journey of rescued animals.
Moreover, make sure to be clear in your message, meaning that don’t hesitate while asking for donations or adoptions. Capture attractive photos of animals having fun at your shelters and post them with a stunning caption since many people often like and share animal pictures.
While creating content for your social media profiles, make sure to focus on the layout and user experience to avoid any errors and bugs while loading your images and videos.
3. Engage with Potential Customers
Once you’ve posted content on your social media pages, be sure to focus on engagements to boost your posts’ visibility and reach. Reply to comments and answer your audience’s queries timely to avoid frustrating your audience and making them leave with a negative impression.
Create polls and ask your audience’s remarks and opinions on different topics and posts to drive better engagement and foster good customer relationships. Make sure to maintain the essence of your posts by delivering emotional and engaging insights about animal shelters and rescue homes.
Moreover, ensure adding relevant and trending hashtags under your posts to make them reach customers seeking animals for adoption. It will help you attract new clients while retaining the existing ones.
4. Maintain Overall Consistency
Social media requires consistency throughout your marketing campaign. It means that it’s not only about posting all the content at once and then leaving your social handles for months. Doing this create a lack of interest in your content from your users.
You must remain consistent in your postings on social media platforms. You can leverage various content management tools and calendars to schedule your posts according to your profile theme. Always prefer to post on the optimal timings and days on which you can get higher responses and engagements instead of posting on odd timings.
Moreover, you can even create different content for different social media handles and can post them on alternative timings and days to ensure more views, likes, and shares.
5. Monitor and Optimize
Social media is ever-evolving and demands continuous optimization to stand ahead of your competitors. Therefore, it’s essential to monitor your social media marketing strategy’s performance and optimize the efforts whenever needed.
There are a plethora of tools available online that help in tracking the key metrics for your posts, such as clicks, shares, likes, and comments, to help you analyze the quality of your content and strategize further to attain better results. Remember that you need to update and improve your social media marketing strategy continuously in order to drive qualified traffic to your profiles.
Final Words:
In a nutshell, social media marketing for animal shelters is one of the remarkable ways to reach your target customers to seek maximum adoptions and donations. We hope this blog helped you in crafting your own social media strategy for your animal shelter.
However, if you still have any queries or need our help, you can contact us through our website or book your consultation today to make your animal shelters a name to remember.
