The Dog Marketing Blog

I had an interesting conversation this morning with Andrea Lane, head of the American Kennel Club’s Public Education department.  I recently inherited responsibility for the Progressive Dog Club of Wayne County’s website after the untimely passing of our webmaster.  With all I’ve learned recently about search engine optimization that I’ve been putting into practice on my personal and breed club websites, I think I can greatly improve the performance of this all breed club site as well. I asked Andrea if she could recommend any sites that I could refer to as truly best practice examples. She told me she had looked at a lot of parent club sites recently as she was working on updating the AKC breed identification guide, but had not really done a study of all breed club sites. In general she finds the parent club sites of greater quality, but some of the largest all breed clubs and clusters do an excellent job. I know we had looked at all the Michigan all breed club sites before we launched the Progressive site, and they did vary quite a bit in scope and content freshness. Andrea strongly recommended including some of the AKC’s downloadable education content in the site and focusing on teaching people what to expect at a dog show and stimulating their interest in joining the ranks of dog club supporters and event participants.

As promised, here’s more detail on one of the dog show vendors I interviewed last week, Whitman Sharpening. They have been the sharpening vendor of choice for my all breed club, the Progressive Dog Club of Wayne County, for as long as I can remember.  Their mobile repair shop can sharpen and repair scissors and clippers for exhibitors on-site and keeps their staff busy throughout the show  weekend. The business  started out sharpening drill bits, then they learned about the opportunity to work at horse shows.  Show horses, like show dogs, need a lot of grooming and horse shows also need on-site sharpening vendors. The horse people told them about dog shows, and eventually the business evolved to primarily service dog groomers. Their business is based in Coleman, Michigan, pretty much in the heart of mid-Michigan between Midland and Clare.   They repair equipment from dog grooming salons throughout the state as well as dog and horse show exhibitors that ship equipment in. The only horse show they attend regularly is the Quarter Horse Congress, a three-week long event in Columbus, Ohio.  They’ve also expanded their business to carry some grooming supplies, focusing on products that grant exclusive territories to distributors, like Chris Christensen.  Their primary means of promotion is word of mouth among groomers; their website lists the products and services available and also allows customers to download a work order to send with items being shipped in for repair.

I decided to make use of the time I had free waiting for group competition at the Oakland County Kennel Club show and talk to some of the dog show vendors about their businesses.  My interviews included Gotcha Framed, with artsy magnetic frames, show circuit staple Whitman Sharpening, Glass Garden Engraving with hand painted glassware, Always Special and Personal with scented wax dipped stuffed toys, Diane’s Dream Pet Products, Cedar Creek pet beds, and Pet Fabulous, with high end leather leads and collars. I’ll break the individual interviews out in separate posts, but some general observations. Only one of the people I talked to had ever shown dogs; three had exhibited at craft or art shows first, and heard about the dog show opportunity from other craftspeople.  Others started their business targeting other customer niches and discovered better dog marketing opportunities; two actually started selling pet products.  A quick note re: their web sites – the only one with tracking (Sitemeter) was also the only one claiming to get much  businesss online – cause or effect?  I was also surprised how much people had to share, I thought I could easily get around to all the vendors during my 3 hours of down time, but I wasn’t able to even talk to half of them.  I will admit I might have squeezed a couple more in who were so busy that I didn’t feel comfortable interrupting. The booth selling fleece dog coats on this blustery day was going great guns, not surprising since 4 inches of snow fell during the day and the temperature at my ring time was 9 degrees, but felt like -10!

Having recently been encouraged to use Twitter, I’ve started my usual obsessive learning curve with any new thing of interest. After signing up to follow my friends and some leading lights of the tech world and web analytics, I turned my attention to finding other dog fanciers.  Which led me to the Dog Show Secret site.  This is one of those sites that I can’t quite figure out which probably means it’s a money-making scheme I don’t fully appreciate. There are a number of oddly phrased articles that make me think they were written by someone whose first language is not English, whose real passion is not showing dogs, but who has studied up on search engine marketing.  The advice on dog show outfits isn’t too far off, the one on dog show ribbons is inadvertently hilarious to anyone who’s shown more than one dog to its championship, and the one on show dog shampoo is just plain wrong. That said, the Tweeter dog_supplies which led me to the site has some pretty good tweets on interesting dog products, so I’m a follower . . .

My co-worker Libby tipped me off to a piece in Media Post talking about how Honda decided to take the Element’s top rating on DogCars.com and develop a dog-centric campaign with TV and online elements (no pun intended.) The article refers to 95 Google dog-sites, one of much must be dog show superintendent MB-F’s Infodog, as I noticed a number of both banner and rich media ads on the pages focused on show information.

The Honda Element is actually a pretty popular car among dog show people, I know at least 3 people who show Bull Terriers in my area who own them. I believe you can get two BT sized crates, possibly three, and still have room for all your show equipment and luggage. Add in that it gets better gas mileage than a minivan, has more comfortable seating than a small wagon, and it’s easy to clean, and you’ve got a very attractive vehicle for the owner-handler crowd.