Marketing Shelter Dogs: Taking It to the Next Level
I’ve been semi-marketing the dogs at my local shelter for about a year now. I say semi because it sounds slightly more sophisticated than kind of and because, so far, I have been focusing my efforts solely on content creation without digging into analytics and measuring the success of said content.
Moving forward, I plan on scratching that semi from my strategy and giving the shelter dogs a full digital marketing treatment—to the best of my ability, and time, resources, and decision makers permitting. Pitch to shelter officials pending.
I’m sharing my ideas here to open a conversation and brainstorming session about marketing shelter dogs with those who want to chime in within the comments section, or to, at the very least, give others something to draw from for their own strategies.
The following are the primary social channels around which I would build campaigns, and the tools I would use to maximize effectiveness.
Social channels to use:
- Snapchat
- YouTube
Tools to use:
- Hootsuite, a social media management platform
- Airtable, a collaboration platform
- Mailchimp, a marketing automation platform
- Canva/Adobe Spark, graphic design tools
I would also like to use an editorial calendar and share it with everyone involved, so we can create timely content for seasonal campaigns, important dog (and human) holidays, and shelter events.
With all of the above set up, I would go back to the usual content creation, but the marketing process would be streamlined, saving everyone involved precious time that can be focused elsewhere, the canines could reach a wider audience, and I would be able to easily measure what actually works, so we could make improvements and, ultimately, help more dogs get adopted.
Do you have any other ideas or favorite tools to add to my list? Share your thoughts in the comments!
Marketing Shelter Stories Weatherford Shelter
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Denise View All →
Denise is a marketing translator, specializing in creative marketing translations for websites, social media, and email, and a volunteer marketer and content creator at her local animal shelter. Living in rural Texas, she enjoys the small-town, between-country-and-city life with her husband and two dogs. She’s also a coffee aficionada, a language lover, a travel and nature enthusiast, a fitness and fashion fan, and a keen supporter of the Oxford comma.
Shelter Stories 
Great ideas and the shelter pups are fortunate to have your efforts to help them find fur-ever homes! A couple thoughts I have is to consider cutting back on the number of social platforms, at least at first. As you most likely know, each platform takes dedication to build a following and there are different types of posts that tend to be most effective on each one. The time you’re hoping to save in your streamlined efforts may not come to fruition with too many platforms. Another thing to consider, and I’m sure you may have, is which platforms are the best audiences for your target audience. Also, are the social media platforms ones that the shelter has and you’re going to create content for? This would be the ideal situation and if they are wanting help, could hire you as one of their social media marketers and you could be an administrator on their pages/sites. Best wishes with this new chapter,!
Thanks for the feedback, Krista! You made some great points! For now, I am going to focus on what is already set up (Facebook), but it would be nice to add Instagram over the next few months and then go from there. Snapchat would help the dogs reach a whole new audience and possibly help the shelter get some more volunteers. But you’re right, it’s better to not take on too much at once. There are actually two Facebook pages, the shelter’s official page and the volunteers’ page—I’m helping with the latter. Fortunately, there are several people who create posts, so maintaining new channels wouldn’t just depend on me.
Social media marketer for the shelter—I like the way you think! I’m not sure there is a budget for that, but it would quite possibly be a dream (that I didn’t know I had) come true. Can you believe all of this started with Sylvia’s class?!
Sylvia’s class was amazing and I find myself applying what she taught us any time I write. Looking forward to reading more of your work!