The Dog Marketing Blog

I’ve been thinking about launching a website as my own educational playground and have finally landed on a topic – reviewing tough dog toys – and purchased a domain name.  So I’ve been tooling around the web looking at review sites looking for design ideas.  Couldn’t find any dog toy sites that really stuck my fancy so I decided to check out baby toy sites and ended up on a general review site called Viewpoints.  Baby pages featured a classic review/ecommerce site design, then I noticed they had a pet section, so I clicked to look at that (exact same layout, naturally.)  But here I found something interesting – dog owner reviews of  their dog breeds.  The sidebar promised there were 232 reviews, but clicking on it revealed these were spread across just 38 breeds.  What I found interesting was that on a 5 point scale, the lowest score was a  4.0 – for the  “Shitz Tsu” (people who correctly spelled the breed name, Shih Tzu scored it at 4.64) and most were around 4.8.  I guess no one wants to spread a cautionary tale – or kept a dog they’d rate lower than a 4.0.  Actually I noted some of the lower ratings were by people who didn’t own the breed, but knew someone who had one they didn’t like.  The most reviewed dog was the  American “Pitt” Bull Terrier with 37 reviews, for the most part glowing reviews with quite a few pit rescuers represented.

I received an e-direct from Cherrybrook recently promoting the IDTag.com. This is a tag which contains a website and phone number to contact IDTag.com, where the tag owner is supposed to have registered the tag’s unique number with identifying information about their pet. The first year of service is free, followed by a $6.95 annual fee.   When a pet is lost, the owner logs in to the IDtag website and notifications are sent via email to all local shelters, including photos and veterinary information about the pet.  This seems like an idea that is more appealing than practical, as it relies on pet owner compliance to make sure the pet is fully registered and that the alerts are sent out promptly via a web login or phone call (if the tag’s on the lost dog, will the owner have the info?)   I still think a collar or collar tag with the owner’s cell phone is a better bet, and I am a proponent of microchipping as well, but remember – microchips do need to be registered with the chip maker for the concept to work. (BTW I am NOT in favor of registering chips with government agencies, I don’t want Big Brother in my dogs’ business.)

Who should I meet today on Twitter AND Linkedin but Julie King, a fellow Detroit area westsider who also shares an interest in dogs and professional credentials in marketing.  She has launched the Gertie Gear line of dog products with a line of air-filled beds for dogs.  These beds appear to all be of the round or donut style, which allows the dog to curl up in the middle, although some of her live models are exercising their creative license and posing fully awake lying crosswise.  I like the idea, as it solves one of the problems I have with the dog bed that gets the most use in my home, which is that Anna likes to lie on it whilst slobbering on her ball, so it gets a nasty wet spot on one corner.  I can take off the cover and wash it, but underneath it gets stinky after awhile and washing the center is a pain.  The air bed filling won’t absorb moisture like fiberfill so you just wash the cover and you’re done.  So what’s Julie doing for marketing? She tweeted about the product when it got listed on Buy Michigan,  which caught my eye, she’s set up an Etsy store, and she’s got an eye catching website that includes her contact info and a link to the store.

Celebrating its 100th year, Milk-Bone announced the results of its “Milk-Bone Moments” contest to select its first ever spokes-dog.  Dog owners submitted photos or videos and an essay to enter. People were able to vote on the Milk-Bone website (the contest ended in November, but the link is still there.) The winner is a Great Dane named Winston from Wisconsin.  Winston will be used to advocate for Milk-Bone’s  Canine Heroes program which aids personal and professional service dogs. Milk-Bone is a divison of DelMonte.

This past Thursday evening I participated in a Twitter scavenger hunt called Barkhunt (or #Barkhunt, the hashtag in front signifies a common tag to be used to share info on a topic or event.) The event was sponsored by four dog online businesses who tweet (send messages on Twitter), FourLeggedMedia, Best Bully Sticks, Ask Spike Online and Paw Luxury.  Starting at 9 PM EST and lasting for an hour, every five minutes a clue would be given by one of the sponsors related to something on one of the other sponsors’ websites.  All participants were asked to retweet (RT) the clue  and the first one to direct message (DM) the answer to the sponsor relating to the clue won.  It really was fun to participate, although it took me a few rounds to figure out the best strategies for actually finding the answers. HINT: it would help to familiarize oneself with the website structures and where the search box is in advance! I didn’t win anything, but I’m game to try again.  Prizes were what else – dog related items, mostly around $10-$20 in value. In follow up tweets, I learned that Twitter contests are just emerging and have been pretty successful in driving traffic and results for the sponsors. The Barkhunt RT traffic got up to the 3rd or 4th most RT’d post at one point during the contest; pretty impressive!  Especially given that the sponsors tweet about nothing but dog topics – word about the event spread through the sponsors’ dog enthusiast followers who publicized it via RTs to their followers.

MediaPost reports that Pedigree is re-purposing some of the ads shown on the Westminster Kennel Club broadcast through the DogTime media Sparky Media Center widget.  Another Westminster advertiser, Toyota Venza is also participating with Sparky as are other leading pet brands.  Although Pedigree was the sole dog food sponsor of Westminster, apparently the brand is willing to share space with at least one other dog food advertiser, Eukanuba, in the widget.  The widget is an effective way to package a lot of advertising content in a compact space, and according to DogTime, generates engagement in the 3 minute per visitor range.

MediaPost notes a number of moves that Toyota is making to pomote the new Venza to dog owners. Toyota was the sole automotive sponsor of the Westminster Kennel Club dog show and has signed up to sponsor Cesar Milan’s Dog Whisperer in its fifth season. In previous seasons, Cesar drove  Jeeps and other Chrysler products. Toyota plans to promote Vensa at dog-related events and websites and is following in the steps of other manufacturers, like GMC and Saab, in offering dog related vehicle accessories. Kurgo is mentioned as a partner for these products, although dog accessories are not currently mentioned on the Toyota website.  I’ve never seen any of these attempts meet with great success, as the merchandise offered is frequently impractical and overpriced, but I will follow their efforts with interest. Since Honda has been a leader in the dog-friendly vehicle market, it’s interesting to see another Japanese manufacturer take this direction.

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.

Four Legged Media just launched a site called MacroMutt that promotes local dog photographers, targeted at local dog owners.  They pick the photographers, no pay to play, but they will accept sugesstions. I recommended Irene Morden, and I’ll be sending in others as I think of them. It’s fun to browse even if you’re not looking for a photographer, and I’m sure it will only improve as it grows.  FLM also hosts Barkability, a dog merchandise site which features cool dog products.

One really interesting thing about Twitter is checking out my followers.  I’ve been deliberately looking for and tweeting to attract other people interested in dogs, and who should follow me but DogShedding.  DogShedding has only updated their account twice, both times about 12 hours before they started following me.  The Dog Shedding website is pretty intensely focused on – you got it, dog shedding. Non-shedding dogs (in 3 parts) the heaviest shedding dogs (also in 3 parts) how to deal with dog shedding. Everywhere you look, the phrase dog shedding is there.  Browsing the site I saw a number of statements that did not ring true to me, such as that Maltese needed to be bathed daily and you need to brush an Irish Setter “thrice weekly.”  The site was created in WordPress; curiously there’s very little advertising on the home page, but plenty of text ads on the interior pages, some about anti shedding products (I knew I’d see the Furminator!) and also general dog topics like puppies, rescue dogs, and training.